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User: Aighearach

Aighearach's activity in the archive.

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  1. My advice is, instead of making sounds and calling them words based on your own personal Authoritay, you crack open some books and actually do what I suggested and learn where words come from.

    When person A asks if something is a word, why are they asking? You've already missed the context implied by your own example. Person C published the word, and Person A didn't know if it is a word, even though it had been published. Person B can only verify that they know it is a word because they've seen it published before, or that they don't have knowledge of it. They would have to be a magical person with knowledge of the whole Universe to claim it wasn't a word.

    Whereas OTOH, Person A could just ask Person C, who had used the potential word, if it was published as intended, or if they had been mistaken. They can tell you with complete certainty, using only the knowledge available to themselves, if it was a word or a mistake.

    In French, words come from a different source, and there are professionals who can indeed provide a negative answer.

  2. Re:IOUT on How Many Computers Does the World Need? (ft.com) · · Score: 2

    What good is a hand adze without blinkenlights and an activity tracker?!

    Next you'll tell me my shoelaces don't need to warn me when they become untied!

  3. Re:ipv4 vs ipv6 on How Many Computers Does the World Need? (ft.com) · · Score: 1

    Uh-oh, with that many hosts you're going to need some routers!

  4. Re:0, 1, or infinity on How Many Computers Does the World Need? (ft.com) · · Score: 1

    As a software developer, I know that infinity is not a number, is it simply a form of NaN compatible with greater than/less than operators.

  5. Re:Five on How Many Computers Does the World Need? (ft.com) · · Score: 1

    "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife

    "I'm telling you, Molotov cocktails work. Anytime I had a problem and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom! Right away, I had a different problem."

    -- Jason Mendoza, The Good Place

    "No matter the problem, solve it with fire!" -- Magical Kyoko

  6. Re:Wrong. on How Many Computers Does the World Need? (ft.com) · · Score: 1

    I agree! 42^H(n)

  7. Re:Protecting the Native Way of Life ... on Native American Tribe Can't Be a 'Sovereign' Shield During Patent Review, Says Court (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    There is a reason that Nice, CA is named after a city in France; it isn't part of a Native American reservation! That's why to hold an event there, you have to be able to comply with local land use rules.

  8. When you admitted that you know the word was already published by another, you gave evidence that you yourself had received evidence that it is indeed a word.

    You don't seem to comprehend what words are, or where they come from in the English language!

  9. Re:Good. on DRAM Industry Likely To Face Oversupply in 2019 (digitimes.com) · · Score: 1

    The summary doesn't really give any reason to believe they have data, they seem to conflate profit margins and market share, where traditionally accepting lower profit margin would allow capturing more market.

    So I'll believe it when I see it. It seems more like just marketing that failed to get a competent technical copywriter assigned.

  10. Re: Languages don't write code, people write code. on Ask Slashdot: Should I Ditch PHP? · · Score: 1

    You're gonna build a hardware project using a Raspberry Pi?

    For one thing, it would cost 20 billion dollars to even make the attempt to prevent side-channel attacks, since it isn't made as an OEM starting point.

    And even still, yes, a $10 raspberry pi costs a LOT more than an ESP-8266. And the 8266 I don't even have to sell my soul to the manufacturer to get the datasheet!

    Some parts of it are FOSS, but it isn't a totally free system that you can actually use that way.

    The reason apr didn't protect you from buffer overflows is that you didn't read the rest of the API documents. Using pointers doesn't cause your buffers to change size on their own or something. No, don't treat your data like a char *, if it is input data use the fucking string functions in the API, jeeze. That's the whole point; you don't just saw "hurr durr char * so go wild!" You actually use the apr API when you're using apr, and that's why it protects you. If you can't do that, don't use C.

  11. Re:Take away lesson: Back your computer up regular on Apple Seemingly Unable To Recover Data From 2018 MacBook Pro With Touch Bar When Logic Board Fails (macrumors.com) · · Score: 1

    I thought the market for Surface was style-conscious Linux users who have a lot of money but are don't want to be associated with Apple's brand?

  12. 1) sync doesn't help the problem I described, that you didn't understand. Just for giggles I tested it and sure enough, the camera complains, "card not formatted."
    2) you can umount from the cli very quickly, even quicker if you have a fstab entry, and quicker still if you make an alias.

    There is no way around the fact that you have to know what you're going to do with it in the future to know if it needs to be properly unmounted, or not. If you know for sure that you're the one using it, and that it works with your devices even if not properly unmounted, then it won't hurt you to do it. But that doesn't mean you know it won't hurt anybody else.

    If somebody listens to your advice, they might find themselves out in the field with data they can't access until they go home, mount the drive, and unmount it again.

  13. As the user you don't get to choose the filesystem type. If you reformat it to NTFS, your device will need to reformat it back to exfat for it to work again.

  14. But how do they discover all the hardware backdoors on the platform to verify the security?

    Just having permission to install stuff on your phone, or having complete control of your OS, that's not enough for them to know what code runs when they try to run their code on it.

  15. Phones don't have some sort of protected hardware keyboard that can be connected to a particular data stream. Anything that the phone can send when you touch the screen, it can send when contacted by the author of an app you installed.

    Also, anything that can have new apps installed by the user is not secure, and you can't promise that it does anything the way it is supposed to.

    It isn't enough to have an implementation that would work in a perfect world. If the implementation runs on a phone, you have no idea what it does in the future after one of the manufacturer's backdoors is found by your attacker.

    Plus, because the general software quality on phones is so low, even a well-implemented app is going to need a lot of support. And that need for support causes users to touch stuff they're not supposed to, because they're also not supposed to waste people's time, or look stupid asking basic questions. So a security key that is only a security key gets used only as a security key, and doesn't need support staff to encourage that it get used correctly.

  16. But why does the key work better than authenticating with a mobile phone?

    Both are "something you have" so what's the difference? Of course the phone is "something you already have" while the key is "something you have to buy".

    The phone is not "something you have," it is just a networked host that you believe yourself to control. It is not different than renting a VPS in a datacenter somewhere and running some software on it.

    The dongle is something you have, because it isn't networked, and it isn't a general purpose computing device that could be doing something different than you expect.

  17. Re:Take away lesson: Back your computer up regular on Apple Seemingly Unable To Recover Data From 2018 MacBook Pro With Touch Bar When Logic Board Fails (macrumors.com) · · Score: 1

    I have a newish thinkpad, and I took it when I got it to add memory (lenovo RAM is too expensive) and everything is well built. Everything that could be removable is.

    There is metal reinforcement at the critical points.

    There is even an undocumented extra PCI-e mini slot if you don't have mobile data.

    Did you buy the thinnest one, because you wanted something lighter? That's why you got one that was thinner and not as strong. Buy the business laptop with the traditional thinkpad shape and you'll get the traditional build strength.

  18. Re: Don't care if it is labelled on Weird New Fruits Could Hit Aisles Soon Thanks To Gene Editing (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Believing I have too many choices doesn't tell if you anything about how many choices I have. That's up to me.

  19. Newegg has pci-e sata cards starting at $14.99 though.So there may be more to the pricing than meets the eye.

  20. Re: Languages don't write code, people write code. on Ask Slashdot: Should I Ditch PHP? · · Score: 1

    It might actually be harder than you expect to have buffer bounding problems on the sort of embedded systems that run websites written in C.
    If it happens, it crashes. There is nothing else on the system for them to get control of. And they were probably already given access over wifi or btle.

    But even on the server, you'd be using some sort of library like apache apr to manage the resources, so you wouldn't have buffer problems. And development time would not be problematic at all.

    The main difference between choosing C and Go, assuming the programmer is competent, is that choosing C will require more sysadmins, netadmins, dev-ops, etc., and if you screw up the scaling, you'll have to do a rewrite after those other people explain it to you. Using Go, there are standard idiomatic ways of doing things so that they scale well, and if you follow them then the netadmins never complain to the sysadmins, who therefore don't have to complain to the PHB, causing the dev-ops practitioner to get 20 lashes.

  21. Is this like a cart, or like a horse? on Microsoft Launches Open-Source Quantum Katas Project On GitHub To Teach Q# Programming (betanews.com) · · Score: 1

    Don't they need a use case for the solution before they know what features they need?

    The reason that:

    Quantum computers will be able to do calculations that we can only dream about today, potentially...

    is that we don't know yet what they can do that is useful. Of course we can only dream about it when we don't know what we want it to do!

    Once somebody builds something powerful enough to do something, then it gets more interesting to ask what people can do with it. What exact features does the system have? Don't know, building them is still too hard to say! Presumably the feature-set that works at scale will be a different one than the one that isn't very useful yet.

  22. My wife has never fallen for a phishing email either; she uses two factors. One, she got an email she doesn't understand. Two, she asks me to deal with it.

    Here is the thing, here is why this is huge news for nerds: Google never had to call me and ask. They didn't need to hire 85,000 nerds to protect 85,000 other employees. Their non-nerd employees were able to avoid phishing attacks with this system, on their own.

    And you can have whatever payout you want; I say reward yourself and take yourself outside for an activity.

  23. You don't seem to comprehend that in this part of the field, academics are professionals doing real work. And grants cause that work to move forwards.

    I don't doubt that you "did witness this[] first hands," the question is, do you even comprehend what the "this" in the story is that you're claiming to have seen? I'm assuming from your words that you actually just mean that when you were an assistant coach on the wrassling team in college, and you misdirected funds, you never got caught. If you want it to sound like something different, choose words that communicate it.

    Academic security research is nothing at all like academic OS research. See also: GNU Hurd

    You don't need to "drain" anything, just stop spewing swamp gas out your mouth.

  24. Re:bitlocker has recovery keys that can be set on Apple Seemingly Unable To Recover Data From 2018 MacBook Pro With Touch Bar When Logic Board Fails (macrumors.com) · · Score: 1

    That's the first time I've ever heard choice pronounced with a silent ch-.

    I'm totally going to steal that next time I'm making fun of snobs.

  25. Apple also needs to offer an build in cheaper sata ssd or even say at least one 1 spinner disk as an choice as well In there desktops.

    Just the act of offering such a thing for sale would cause them to lose money.

    You don't get the premium profit margin by addressing the needs of the poor.

    Maximizing the number of units sold is not in their business values.