Posts by Philip Storry 296 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Nov 2007
US: Now that the EU can do it, why should we pay for this? We're being taken advantage of! Let's end this!
Rest of World: *** facepalms ***
EU: OK, fine. Someone has to do it, after all.
*** EU takes over CVE handling ***
*** Six months later ***
US: Look at all these CVEs for good, honest, American companies! The EU is bullying us by advertising these security faults!
EU: *** facepalms ***
Rest of world *** facepalms ***
On the one hand, kudos for caring about privacy. On the other hand, way to self-own.
Check out their suggested email: "Would you like to play tennis tomorrow at 11:30AM?"
Not only have I never sent or received such a message, but the few people I know that play tennis never have either. It's a ham-fisted, dry, asinine and tone-deaf attempt at mimicking human communication.
"Tennis tomorrow at 11:30?", or "Tennis tomorrow, usual time?" or "Still on for tennis tomorrow?" would be much more... human. WPOR in War Games had a better script than the one that Apple is ascribing to its users.
Seriously, Apple, just make training an opt-in. People that want AI give up their data, and accept that the training has potential privacy implications. But they at least get it trained on data that reflects their circumstances and behaviour.
And people that don't want AI just don't opt in. For whatever reason.
But training on Apple's "FBI Agent pretending to be a cool criminal" text corpus won't get anyone anywhere. So just don't do it.
This is a bad choice because it's simply too short to be usable.
It places a massive burden on IT teams to do the replacement. Not everything can be automated at present - I can't use LetsEncrypt on my switches, or my SSLVPN device, or my firewalls. I have application servers that use Apache Tomcat, which is a much more manual process.
So the end result will be that when this short timescale fails - because someone is off ill at the wrong time - we will end up training our colleagues to ignore the certificate warning so that they can still do their work.
That is a far, far worse outcome than any issues with highjacked certificates. Highjacked certificates may also require DNS access to use effectively, or other access to the target's systems. But this ends up training users to behave in an insecure manner.
I hope that they reverse course on this.
One of the main reasons for the CHIPS act is to ensure a stable and secure supply chain.
At the moment a lot of the processors that the US military and government want are made in foreign countries. Their largest supplier is a country called Taiwan, who China doesn't like being called a country because they'd be quite happy if we could all just agree that it's theirs. China frequently runs military exercises off the coast of Taiwan, and tends to throw a diplomatic hissy fit at countries that recognise Taiwan as a country.
Generally speaking, having an essential part of your supply chain in a disputed territory is thought to be... *checks notes* ... bad.
For many years, the western world has ignored problems like these. The thinking - what little of it that happened - was that the world was stable enough that the bad things could never happen, and that fixing the problem would mean the number would not go up for Wall Street. "Number go up" has been the most important thing for the ruling elites, so nothing was done about it.
The pandemic, followed by a ship being stuck in the Suez canal, focused minds on just how fragile things had become.
The CHIPS act is not supposed to be about quarter to quarter profit. Sure, it would be nice if the fabs made a profit. But it's supposed to be about re-invigorating an industry critical to national security.
Pedant Alert!
There never was an Outlook '95. It first shipped in '97. Prior to that we had to use either the Microsoft Exchange Client or Microsoft Mail and Schedule+, depending on whether you were on Exchange or Mail as your backend. Neither of those supported POP3 - the distinguishing feature of Outlook was that it could support multiple backends.
I think '98 came fairly quickly, as '97 was quite buggy. It was also given away on a lot of cover CDs as Microsoft wanted to keep people in their ecosystem rather than use, say, Netscape's mail client for their POP3 connections.
AI isn't intelligent. These are pattern machines.
Which we see here. Given a pattern, they strive to complete it as best they can. They don't actually think or reason, except in the completion of patterns. Nor do they care if the patterns are good nor bad - thy cannot comprehend that. The closest that they can get to comprehending the correctness of a pattern is merely to produce another pattern containing a commentary.
The big problem is one we don't want to admit to - we're also pattern machines. That's why we're so easily impressed by this technology. And why its failures are so surprising to us. They fit the pattern we've learned of an "intelligent" output, so we ascribe them intelligence.
They are, in fact, not intelligent and never can be. And to assume that they are is dangerous, because there are nasty edge-cases in their patterns that we should really be trying to avoid.
The sooner everyone realises this, the better.
I had to give this very serious thought before finally giving you a downvote.
Back in the 1998-2002 period I worked for a consultancy, and we had a couple of upgrades that had issues. Mostly due to something the client had neglected to mention or spot during the scoping & planning stages. All of them were surmountable, and we got the job done in the end.
Since then I don't think I've had any upgrade that had major issues. Any issues encountered were ones we had planned for, and either directly addressed in the plan or had a contingency plan for. Absolute worst case we had a small delay, but we always made sure our change windows were wide enough to cope with that.
I'm also excluding migrations to other technologies. To the business moving from one mail system to another may be sold as an upgrade, but it's actually a migration, and there are always unexpected issues with those. So those aren't - I'm assuming - what you're asking about.
Some may say I should have upvoted, but I think you're trying to determine if there are unexpected technical issues rather than ones that were created by the business or bad planning, hence a downvote.
Performing upgrades is only a small part of the job.
It is, I'll admit, one of the more visible parts. In many companies the other work sysadmins do is much less noticeable. Monitoring? Capacity management? Availability? Policy work? Risk management? Integration? Many of those are a lot less visible than upgrades.
Security has, thankfully, gotten a much larger presence over the last two decades - so when we're working on that it's often very visible.
I can see how folks would think we should be busy doing upgrades all the time, but that's like thinking that the only thing to running a shop is manning the tills or stacking the shelves.
And of course then there's whether or not the business wants to upgrade. All upgrades have a price, and some are more worthwhile than others. It's not always worth the effort.
I've dealt with a few systems over the years which had to be completely rebuilt rather than upgraded because they'd become so old there was no valid upgrade path anymore - we couldn't get hold of all the install media sets we'd need, and whilst an individual upgrade was quick the amount of time needed to perform about five upgrades with checks in between each one was simply prohibitive. So we built anew.
It's the sysadmin equivalent of developer's technical debt problem, and just as with the developers it's not solely the fault of IT. If the organisation won't prioritise keeping everything up to date, then the costs for moving to a current platform will only go up over time. Sadly, that's often not considered when people are looking at the costs for this year...
This is almost certainly code that was written in the late 90s or early 2000s, and has just sat there ever since.
"It works, so why change it" is fine for code in userland applications that won't hold sensitive data, but not for kernel code like this. (Or for some kinds of userland apps.)
So how do we get companies to audit their old code?
In the case of kernel-mode drivers, I suggest that Microsoft make signing the driver a contract. If the driver has a security flaw, then the cost to Microsoft of investigating and mitigating the flaw will be borne by the supplier. Plus a penalty fine per vulnerability if they're common types (buffer overflow, pointer misuse).
Only by introducing some kind of fiscal penalty will the audit of old code suddenly become fiscally viable, which is what we need.
It's all because of a f***ing Access database, isn't it?
It started out as a spreadsheet which got moved into Access. Then someone made a valiant attempt to put into SQL Server, which both preserved the existing bugs and introduced new ones. It's currently running on Windows Server 2008 R2, a similarly aged version of SQL Server, and can be accessed either by a website which requires Internet Explorer 6.0 or a creaky Access Runtime instance if you can get an ODBC connection. (Which you absolutely should not have, yet far too many people somehow do have.)
Of course, I could be wrong. It could be one of those ancient AS/400s that still turn up occasionally, hiding in the corner, surrounded by the faint glow of arcane magicks which ward away the evils of new technology such as non-token ring networking...
But seriously, what the hell is this thing? It sounds like it's so awful it's going to be kinda awesome in its awfulness!
Huh. My assumption about the nickname was wrong, so I apologise for that, and have a virtual pint!
It still feels like a sixth form band thing though - so it doesn't change my opinion of them.
That being said, I'd see them live if someone else bought the tickets. Based on their reputation I reckon that they'll put a lot of effort into their live performance and it'd be great fun.
Hopefully your dad was forgiving. ;-)
I never thought of U2 as boring. I just didn't think of them much at all, to be honest. Their music was, with a couple of minor exceptions, utterly forgettable for me.
My first impression of them as a kid in the 80's was that they looked like a student band that was trying too hard. Bono was sure he was the coolest cat in the room, when he actually just looked like a tit. Their guitarist called himself "The Edge", but didn't seem to be playing well enough to be worthy of the title. Both of these were good reasons to turn my attention elsewhere.
So I carried on with my mix of pop, hard rock, blues rock, metal and classical. Later I added a little hip hop. (The good stuff. To quote: "Guns, b*tches and bling were never part of the four pillars, and never will be.")
I don't like judging folks based on their music taste, but I struggle not to feel deeply suspicious of anyone who fails to be cheered by Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now", so that would probably be in any selection I made.
The rest would depend on my mood. After all, the idea of planning for a desert island is faintly ridiculous. If it happens by accident then you get what washes up on shore with you. If you're actually planning it ahead of time that rather suggests things have gone very, very badly for you... and perhaps your time could be better spent elsewhere?
Was it PalmGear that did the app store for Palm platforms? I seem to recall that there were two notional app stores, but the names are fuzzy in my memory.
I had a succession of Palm devices, but only the very last one did any kind of wifi, and it caned the battery life, so I kept installing apps on it via the HotSync cradle/cable. But I was aware that I could have downloaded an app that would function as a store and allow me to do the whole purchase on the device if I wanted to. As I was mostly using my Palm devices as an "offline mobile adjunct" to my computing needs, it just didn't quite fit my needs.
I'm curious, did the Treo come with the app store preinstalled as a promotional thing, or did you have to install it later? I only really had Palm devices (IIC, m505, V, Vx, Tungsten|C amongst others) so have no idea what came on the Treos.
I ask because one important criteria for "modern smartphone" would probably be that it has an app store pre-installed. Not that anyone seems to be able to agree on all the criteria!
Pinning down the first modern smartphone is more difficult than most people think. There's a lot of "It has to do this", followed by someone else saying "this phone did that before any iPhone did", and then the goalposts being moved. And the goalposts often move beyond what the original iPhone did at release.
I'd say the first modern smartphone is probably the iPhone 3G which ticks all the criteria "out of the box". But Apple's excellent PR muddies the water considerably, as does the fallibility of human memory.
If my old and frequently failing memory serves, PayPal existed long before the modern smartphone and apps. Well, long in software years, anyway(*).
Apps on smartphones only came into being in 2008, with the iPhone 3G. (Not, as many mistakenly think, the original iPhone. Everything was supposed to be web-delivered for that, until they realised that a full web experience on 2G was terrible and had to change their strategy.)
I'm pretty sure I paid for some eBay purchases via PayPal as early as 2001. It's quite possible to have a PayPal account that predates the smartphone and has never been used via an app.
--------
(*) Software years are like dog years, in that there's about 7 of them to a standard calendar year. They are unlike dog years in regards to intelligence or loyalty. The jury is still out on comparisons involving fleas and toilet habits.
I love the aesthetic of dark mode. It often looks much better than its light mode equivalent.
I suspect that more time and care might be being taken on colour choices in dark modes - they're not an inverse image, after all.
But I stopped using them because I realised I was spending more time with the screen, which is - ironically - worse for my eyes. So I switched back to light mode, and take breaks more regularly.
"a maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct"
- Or accurate
- Or true
- Or decent
So what we have here is a model trained to the approval of a man who has failed upwards for his whole life, from what was a pretty comfortable start anyway.
All tools reflect something of their maker. Making this tool something of a "tool-ception".
The silver lining is that Twitter has plummeting market share. (Any bounce from political events will wear off once companies find their ads next to neo-nazi garbage.) Hopefully this will see so little use that the costs of running it will just accelerate the death of Twitter.
Remember the old advertising slogan "Is it live, or is it Memorex?"
I feel that IT projects which are late and over-budget should have an equivalent:
"Is it late, or is it Oracle?"
Is anyone aware of project involving Oracle that was delivered on time and within budget?
Anyone?
Anyone?
The lawsuit should never have happened, but as it did happen this is the best possible outcome for ARM.
The current management seems to fail to understand what got ARM into its position today. They offer a decent design with high performance and low power consumption, they have excellent toolchains for them, but they don't tie you to a fab because they don't have one. And their licensing is quite literally pennies per chip.
That's why they're the go-to for embedded devices and small form factors. They were cheaper than their competitors AND more flexible.
The overlooked thing is that there was definitely more money on the table to be taken. Early embedded devices were using old Zilog processors, or Motorola 68000 series ones. In the high performance arena there was a plethora of options, but most notably PowerPC became popular in embedded use for a while. ARM swept them all away because their business model depended on their partner fabs choosing bulk sales over higher margins.
But Softbank want a fast return on their investment, so have decided to throw this away.
In the process they've ruined their reputation AND sent a message that they're not necessarily the reliable partner that they once were.
And they've done this at a time when a viable competitor has arrived - RISC-V. I'd bet pennies to pounds that Apple have a coupe of development boards running their operating systems on RISC-V, just in case this lawsuit succeeded.
ARM won't vanish overnight, but unless they - and their owners - understand what made them big, they're going to go into a slow decline.
Their advantage over RISC-V is a slim one, and it's in those toolchains and their higher end designs. Perhaps they'll have to abandon the lower end of the market to RISC-V eventually, but their ecosystem advantage would make low licensing fees profitable for years to come. Sadly, the greed of their current owners means I'm not sure that they'll be able to take such a long term view, and that they'll continue to do damned foolish things like suing one of their largest customers.
No, I'd agree with your assessment. This is the new management failing to understand how the old management got ARM to where it is today, and the failure of this lawsuit is the best thing that could have happened to them. Especially as there's now a viable competitor in the form of RISC-V.
Whilst folks in Britain are happy to celebrate ARM's success, we're also more than happy to point out their flaws. We have plenty of examples of bad management in our post-war industries, and frankly pointing them out is almost a hobby for some!
I'm on the side of the department on this occasion. Sometimes there are new features which will actually help.
For example, what if I told you that the feature was better connectivity to external sources? Or the version (2007?) which increased the row limit to 1 million rows?
If they can demonstrate that the new feature or change makes a measurable difference, then we should try to get them that version. I'm not here to gatekeep or to play Mr. Nasty, I'm here to help them do their work.
A later version may not be the correct answer - these days I might subtly suggest using R, or Python/Pandas, or perhaps even point them towards tools like Power BI if I thought them appropriate. But those were not an option at this time.
During the pandemic there was an issue with the stats because somewhere in the chain had a version of Excel that was so old it couldn't handle the number of rows! That's not something that should happen, and just rejecting requirements out of hand is one of the ways it can end up happening.
I've come to believe that at a fundamental level a lot of the senior civil service or local government staff simply don't understand the field of computing.
To them it's a support service. So it's just like cleaning, or finance processing, or building maintenance. And those are things that they can safely outsource.
But they overlook the reason that they can safely outsource them - they don't change. The office being cleaned will barely change over the period of a decade. Processing invoices is an understood finance process common across many organisations. Buildings are unlikely to sprout new walls made of new materials simply because the property market changed recently.
But IT changes. It's a rapidly moving field. It's one where a few years can make a huge difference.
Let me demonstrate with a story - I once worked for an NHS funded organisation. (I won't name it.) When I left it was because they were going to outsource their IT and I felt that this would not be good - and I didn't want to work for an outsourcer's profit margins, I wanted to do work that made my colleagues' work easier. (I was young and idealistic...)
The organisation signed a three year outsourced IT contract. They were very proud. They must have felt like they'd struck quite the deal - the outsourcer would replace all their desktops and laptops, take over management of the services, do any necessary migrations to the new platforms... and the price was quite the bargain!
About six months into this bargain Microsoft released a new version of Office. Which had a new feature in Excel that one department really wanted.
In the "bad old days" of internal IT we'd just send someone down with the new CD and do the install. (Or later, drop it via the software packaging system.) But now they'd signed a contract stating that they had the same version of Excel for 3 years. But the outsourcer could help, of course. After a study, it was determined that rolling out the new version to 10 machines would cost almost a hundred grand. There was compatibility testing, documentation, licensing - it was a very thorough quote, which extracted every possible penny. Due to automation included in the quote to roll out the change to everyone only added about 15-20 grand to the total!
And I feel that demonstrates the problem. The management assumed that 3 years with the same software would be fine. What could possibly change in 3 years? So sign the contract, and save some money!
But the IT companies are wiser. They know that things will change. They've even adjusted their business models to reflect it - they'll cut their initial offer to the bone, knowing that they'll make fat profits on the changes that "will never be needed" yet are in fact inevitable.
It's frustrating. Every time I meet someone who's worked in the public sector, I hear a variant of this same story. Whether it's outsourcing an existing requirement or purchasing a new platform, it's the changes that rack up the costs. And yet we see the management fail to understand this over and over again.
Public Procurement training should consist of a course that simply has many ways for the Procurement Officer to say "No, you're wrong, it will change." And to resist signing anything that says otherwise.
I'd agree with you if Apple were some scrappy upstart who have limited resources.
But as of last September they had $65 billion in cash (or cash equivalents) available to them. They have a steady source of income, high profitability, and could be described as a "destination employer" who a lot of people would like to have on their CV.
So Apple can do this. It's a solvable problem - it's just about permissions and customer education.
If they were motivated to provide secure access to data on their platforms, they could do so. It probably wouldn't even dent their assets.
Instead they choose not to even try to produce a solution. Mostly so that they can preserve their walled garden.
Simply denying access is not a privacy control, it's just bloody-mindedness.
What if I want to back up my contacts to an external location or service? Or synchronise them into something (maybe a mail service or social network account aggregator)?
I'd absolutely not want Meta to have access to my contacts. Every time they ask I tell them where to go. But to remove the option entirely isn't the solution.
Similar arguments can be made for other services and features, and batted away just as easily.
This is just Apple wanting to keep the wall around their garden as high as they can. On the one hand I don't blame them for that, but on the other hand this is why we can't have nice things outside of walled gardens. Which sucks.
As someone who remembers when the big platforms had APIs that allowed for a choice of clients and for more interoperability, I'm not on Apple's side here. To allow this behaviour is to set a bad precedent in the industry.
When it comes to the infrastructure - and I'd argue that the ISA falls under that - you should never bet against Free.
Free has an insidious appeal that helps it spread remarkably well. Especially if there are software shims available - which there will be in this case.
If you'd told me in 2000 that Linux would be installed on billions of devices and powering much of the modern world,, I'd have looked at you like you'd drunk a bit too much. Whether what you'd drunk was koolaid or beer would be my next concern. Remember, in 2000 IBM was touting running Linux on your mainframe, and it was most successful as a webserver - where it was out of sight and out of mind.
And yet here we are.
ARM has only just started to look at putting a proper Plug & Play infrastructure for desktops in place. I suspect that RISC-V will follow within a couple of years, as it seems to be on an accelerated track that replicates what ARM has done in the past.
So would I bet on RISC-V laptops being shipped by a big name like Dell within the next five years? Hmmm.. probably not.
But would I bet against that happening? Definitely not.
Because I think it's more likely to happen than not happen, and the awkward variable for the bets is simply the timescale involved in the bets.
For those of us in suburbia - or even in city centres - walking is still viable. I'll be off out on a boxing day walk shortly.
Route planning is less essential in the suburbs, but still good.
Have a goal. I like to pick a park that's just a little bit further away, and visit that.
Read the roads. You probably know which areas are or aren't safe anyway, but picking quiet well to do roads can add to the distance and make the walk all that more pleasant. More pleasant than following major arteries, anyway...
Have a small bag on you. You never know what shops you might find open, and if you suddenly find something then being able to pop a bag out can be great.
Hills are good. The first instinct is to avoid them, but they can be a great way to add a little challenge.
Have a backup plan. Know which buses you might be able to catch back, or which pubs you could rest in.
Try not to rest in too many pubs. That's a pub crawl, not a walk.
Apple? Locking customers in to their ecosystem? Shurely shome mishtake?
The demands on El Reg reader's fainting couches will surely be huge this morning! ;-)
On a more serious note although my on-call phone is an iPhone I've never really bothered doing anything about backups.
On my personal Android phone it's a doddle to use other storage systems for backing up photos, videos etc - in fact it's felt at times like every other app wants to do it. I think I currently have both Google Photos and Flickr backing up my photos. I recall OneDrive, Dropbox (when I used it) and others also offering.
Is this a permissions thing where Apple make it difficult - if not impossible - to do? Or is it a guidelines & policy thing where Apple discourage apps from offering the service, like they don't want alternative payment options?
Because I'm actually a little surprised that this could be a genuine complaint. As I said, on Android backing up such things to somewhere else has been the norm for almost as long as I've been using Android. So I'm genuinely curious to hear iOS user's opinions and experiences...
I don't see you naming the year in which Sweden joined the Euro.
I see a lot of projection, deflection, idealism and refusal to accept reality. But no year in which Sweden joined the Euro.
Committing to join is different to joining, No shooting down of my argument there. I even described how we can comply with the commitment whilst never joining the Euro. I take a pragmatic view on this, you take an idealist view on it. But that idealist view is flawed because it starts from a misunderstanding of the requirement.
If people want to spend political capital negotiating an opt-out when the opportunity arises later, then we could do that. But to be frank I think that would be a waste of political capital when we could simply just keep saying that the time isn't right - just as Sweden has done. They're not in breach of anything, they're just saying "not yet". Apparently almost indefinitely. So this isn't an issue.
Prove me wrong with just four digits. When did Sweden join the Euro?
Firstly a point of pedantry - we were 1/28 of the EU membership. There were 28 members, there are now 27. You're not even getting the figures right in your own argument. Why should I take heed of what you say when you keep making basic mistakes?
Secondly, reducing a collaborative process to a fraction demeans both yourself and the others involved.
Nobody should look around the table at a meeting and be counting the number of people so that they can quote a fraction before flouncing out of the room. No parent should be saying to their kids "Hey, don't blame me, I'm just 50% of the decision." That's just a crappy attitude to parenting. This continual resorting to a fraction isn't an argument - even if you had the right fraction - it's an attempt to belittle and demean your own country and other countries. It's baffling, odd and irrelevant. What matters is the process - which you've continually denied existed despite me explaining it - not the number of nations involved.
We were rule makers. We were involved in the process, consulted, and our concerns often addressed. Sometimes our own legislation was copied and pasted into EU law. These are facts, and mis-stating fractions cannot change that.
You then go off to quote me saying you're relying on a trope of rubber stamping.. to use as evidence of rubber stamping? I had no idea I was so powerful! I should speak a payrise into being for myself this afternoon... just after I speak World Peace into place, obviously. Seriously codejunky, quoting me summarising your position is not the same as providing evidence for your position. Please do better than this.
You then go on to say that I shot my own argument on moving, which I find odd. Freedom of Movement made movement easier, leaving the EU has made movement harder. At no point did I argue it was impossible, nor did I say that there aren't issues. A good friend of mine has lived in Belgium for years, and even when we were in the EU he had occasional hassles with their tax office despite only working in Belgium. Usually around his UK bank account, which they viewed with deep suspicion despite it being almost empty and just being kept around in case he needed to move back to the UK.
I don't see how I shot my own argument down by saying that moving countries can be difficult. That's a pragmatic acceptance of reality. Just like saying that losing EU membership has made moving to an EU country more difficult. Which, to be clear, was my argument. I apologise if I wasn't clear on that.
I'd love to know which polls you're reading which say we were worse off in the EU. I've not found any. Outside of a poll of Daily Express readers or a viewer poll from GBeebies, such a thing doesn't seem to exist. The polling is clear, and the trend is in favour or the EU and rejoining.
I had a great night last night thanks, but am as baffled by your arguments this morning as I was yesterday afternoon.
I'd just like to address this particular misdirection:
"joining the EU as a full member including joining the Euro"
Nope.
You have to commit to joining the Euro. Which is quite different. And in a pragmatic way, not just a pedantic way.
You're repeating a lie here. Please stop it.
We can test this easily. Sweden joined the EU in September 1995. They have no opt-out for Eurozone membership. So in what year did Sweden join the Euro?
We both know that they've not joined the Euro. They've not even joined the two year alignment mechanism that they'd need to go into to join the Euro. They're committed to joining the Euro, but it's never quite the right time. And the EU isn't pushing them to join or punishing them for their 29 year delay.
29 YEARS. And no sign of joining the Euro. This is why your statement isn't true. Sweden's not likely to join the Euro in my lifetime, which means that when we rejoin we won't be joining the Euro within the lifetime of anyone reading this in 2024.
When we rejoin the EU we'll just resurrect Brown's five tests and tweak them. We'll require interest rate and inflation alignment, cost of conversion for small businesses to be low, and Boris Johnson to go a day without lying.
OK, maybe that last one was a joke. But if you think out civil service can't find a way to build tests that seem very reasonable but make Eurozone membership almost impossible, then you've really not been paying attention to our government. ;-)
Every year we'll go to the EU, say "Oh sorry, the tests say no" and they'll nod politely and schedule a meeting for next year to check the tests again. We'll both know we're not joining the Euro, both be fine about it, and just let it be. Just like they've done with Sweden.
Please stop repeating the lie that we'll have to join the Euro.
Or at least name the year in which Sweden joined it.
It's interesting that in your reply you have to acknowledge that we were rule makers in order to then try to diminish it via the idea of working with 27 other countries being bad.
You then have to rely on the trope of us only having a vote only to approve or reject the rules, despite my having previously pointed out that we were consulted at many levels during the process. (Even news establishments that are openly hostile to the EU acknowledged the consultation and involvement as they mocked the EU - often the consultations themselves were the targets of their mockery.)
This is surely a form of cognitive dissonance. You're trying to deal with it by shifting the goal posts from the discussion of how we were consulted and involved in the rule making towards the idea that we could only rubber stamp them and are somehow lesser when working with others.
Your position is untenable - the facts simply don't support it.
On my moving to the EU - the thought process is not difficult. The lack of Freedom of Movement - which you apparently happily removed from me and millions of others - makes it difficult. As might other issues. Perhaps I have elderly parents who I'd like to be near to assist? Perhaps I have children for whom such a move would be too disruptive? Moving wasn't necessarily simple even when we were EU members, after all.
But that's not really the point. The point is you were happy to removed my rights, whilst I removed no rights from you. Quite why you're so proud of that situation is a mystery to many...
As to your refusal to accept the trend towards rejoining - sure, I'll keep dreaming.
Dreaming won't change the fact that the voters are moving towards rejoining. Polls show that voters think Brexit is a failure, that we were better off in the EU, that they wouldn't vote to leave if they knew how it would turn out, that the number wanting to rejoin is growing, and most interestingly that people don't feel politicians talk about Brexit enough. That last fact suggests that people feel that their concerns about Brexit are being ignored, which cannot end well.
Again, it's a fact that the figures for rejoin keep growing. I think that the tipping point will be around 45-50%. (Don't forget that there will be Don't Knows, so you don't need 50% support to show a clear majority in these polls.)
At that point politicians and the media will undergo a somewhat rapid shift. Just like the one we had in 2016 after a narrow referendum victory. Except in the referendum the figure for Brexit support was around 38% if we include don't knows (those that didn't vote). That's why I say that the the figure will be 45%-50% - that would show a clear majority for rejoin in any referendum, and make staying out politically untenable.
I await your next shifting of the goalposts, but I'm out drinking with friends this evening so won't be able to reply until tomorrow.
I have thought about it.
Whilst we were in we had a seat on the European Council, and therefore a hand in what regulations would be worked on. We had the ear of the European Commission, and therefore our concerns were heard. The European Commission consulted not only our government but also our businesses and even consumer groups, charities or other groups when appropriate to determine issues when drafting legislation. And finally we had MEPs who voted on the legislation.
I'd say that made us rule makers. Rule makers alongside 27 other countries, but rule making can be a shared activity despite what some people think.
You can assert that we were rule takers all you damned like. That's not true, and no amount of thinking about it will fulfil your wish that it was true.
As to the rest of your comment - well, it barely makes sense. Why should I move to regain the rights that you removed despite my protests? Why should I have to abandon my family and any obligations I may have? Your failure to understand how the EU works and how the UK benefited from membership is not sufficient reason for me to move.
Already we see public sentiment moving towards rejoin, and those numbers only seem to go up. Numbers for staying out only seem to go down. Support for Brexit is evaporating day by day. So we will rejoin - the numbers make it inevitable. We left on a slim referendum majority that cannot be repeated.
Frankly, the UK rejoining will soon be the EU's to refuse more than anything else.
We'll be rule takers until we're back in the EU.
Quite a few people don't like that, but the facts don't care about their feelings. They're just facts.
Those same people tended to complain about the EU whilst we were in it, and still complain now we're out. If we have to listen to them complain, we should at least have the benefits of membership as we do so.
Fine words, but you won't put your name to them?
We are a large economy, but not large enough to sway things on our own. Manufacturers have made that pretty clear. I have no problems with higher standards - I offered an example (later revisions of USB PD), and said that it was about all we could do. I also mentioned that if we do have higher standards then it most likely ends up restricting the choice of goods we'll have. Something you haven't addressed, so that conversation is evidently not one you're seriously addressing.
As to our current high standards - many of those were due to EU membership. The UK often used the EU as an opportunity to put in high standards on the assumption that our businesses would be better able to adapt than other EU members' businesses. Whether that is true or not is debatable, but it's undeniable that the UK was often pushing for higher not lower standards within the EU.
The question now is whether or not we keep those high standards.
It's also undeniable that many of the leaders and funders of the Leave movement are of the "low regulation and and low taxes" view, and have made repeated assaults on our various regulations, to the point where they were pushing for Parliamentary bills to scrap every bit of EU retained regulation regardless of its merit or necessity. Remember that the very first bill that the Conservative government tried to pass after we left the EU was to lower the standards for waterways below that allowed in the EU. Shareholders have to keep getting their value, after all, and if our rivers and beaches are covered in crap it's a small price to pay for the comfort of those portfolio holders...
We are a democracy, and am quite aware of how that works - you have mistaken pragmatism for defeatism. I'm not saying we should accept the EU laws because they're better, I'm saying we should because anything else is likely a waste of our time and money. Something which again you've not really addressed here.
Manufacturers are going to do whatever the EU requires as it's the larger market. Anything manufactured to a standard below what the EU and India require is probably going to be dangerous junk anyway.
Unless we're going to have stricter standards - which would limit the products we get - there's no point to even looking at this. If we do want to go the stricter standard route we could include require later revisions of USB Power Delivery (I think the EU only require revision 1). But as we're dealing with pre-existing standards there's not much flexibility beyond that.
So what is there to discuss here? Thanks to the lies and delusions of Leave we're now rule takers, not rule makers. Just copy and paste the damned regulations, and then spend our tax money on something we can actually affect (food standards) or that we want (healthcare and social services).
But don't waste our tax money by pretending we're somehow able to make rules anyone will care about anymore.
I was seeing more like £1700, but I admit I was doing about three other things at the time - a standard Monday!
When I have time I'll check which models the UK is getting and do some more research. Those figures do look somewhat better! Thanks for the guidance. I'm glad to know that sensible Arm machines may finally be in reach...
OK, I get it, the Arm platform is new and shiny.
But what I need - what my colleagues need - is a Latitude with an Arm processor in it. Something normal. Something that looks and acts just like their old laptops, has a similar price, but gives them the longer battery life.
I've tried getting an Arm device or two for our senior management and it's been rebuffed by Finance. I want to test this to make sure everything works - I've done my checks and it mostly looks OK - but I don't want to have to buy a "special" device with an odd keyboard and trackpad.
I want it to look like all the others, but be a bit better than them.
Sort it out, Dell.
My understanding is that GPUs scale well because they're only doing vector work.
That is "single instruction multiple data", where one instruction is applied to multiple numbers.
Think of it this way - if in a game you move a little away from a light source, you now need to recalculate the lighting. You could do this in a linear manner across the frame - which is what a CPU would have to do. Or you could stuff all the data into a bunch of GPU cores and ask them to calculate the light levels all at once.
The CPU method can only be faster if you lack the bus bandwidth for the GPU approach. That's why - back in the day - 3D cards were never produced for the slower bus types. They can't be, they need high I/O to keep the cores fed.
This has been a highly contrived and incomplete example, but hopefully serves to demonstrate things.
Why do we still have CPUs? GPUs only compute. They rarely do branch evaluation - IF this THEN that. Looking at the results and deciding which branch to take is still the domain of the CPU in most cases. Good luck running an OS on only a graphics card, it lacks the branching logic to make it worthwhile.
A suitable visualisation would be a factory floor full of people at calculating machines - these are the GPU cores. And a manager - or several if you like - controlling what numbers they will be calculating. The manager is of course the CPU core.
And yes, you get diminishing returns by adding managers, and you need better communications if you're to make use of more calculators - or even more managers. But bad managers everywhere have already taught us this. ;-)
RAM may be somewhat constant, but everything running on the server needs it.
And it needs power.
Adding all those cores implies more RAM. I'm suddenly reminded of a decade ago when I was speccing a machine that needed (according the vendor's recommendations) half a terabyte of RAM. Which is getting to be a mundane figure today, but back then it had to sit on its own dedicated daughterboard. Which required its own PSU.
My manager balked at the cost and halved the PSUs, thinking he was smart. This of course meant that the failure of a single PSU would kill the whole machine. I have no idea if the hardware team let him get away with that - as he wasn't the best boss, I was gone before the machine actually arrived.
But it did teach me that RAM likes power a lot more than you'd think.
And it scales linearly per Mb. CPU power consumption doesn't quite do that per Mhz, nor does GPU. And storage - whether spinning rust or solid state - doesn't quite scale linearly either.
If you're planning on just doubling the cores for your existing VMs, this isn't a problem. But if you want to run more VMs, it may well be a problem...
That's a great question. My employer is a digital marketing company (hey, don't judge me, it pays the bills!)... Obviously these are my own observations and not anything official.
From what I can see there are a few uses people have found:
1. Getting a skeleton for a report by entering a prompt.
2. Generating keyword lists automatically.
3. Analysis of keyword reports or performance data.
4. Generating strategies or similar starting points.
5. Summarising larger reports.
The generation of starting points and skeletons (1,4) could feasibly be reproduced with a good template library, but getting someone to create and maintain that library is the problem. You could make a case that here we'd be outsourcing that maintenance work to the AI tool.
The analysis (3) is harder to replace (but when tested with more advanced data, it was prone to returning absolute bollocks).
Generating keyword lists (2) is almost worthwhile - sometimes it adds things that might be overlooked. But it won't replace the traditional methods of doing this with analytics tools, so it's an additional expense for what might be marginal gain.
Summarising larger texts (5) is something that ChatGPT etc are genuinely good at, but here I do wonder if a human touch might be better at, ahem, "guiding" the customer towards the result we want...
Overall I struggle to make a business case, but maybe they can do a batter job than I can on that front. They do, after all, work in marketing!
I have a pile of requests for access to AI tools. And they're always eager until I ask them who's footing the bill, at which point things go somewhat silent.
Similarly, everyone is glowing about what can be done with these technologies, right up until you ask about ROI, at which point things get somewhat fuzzy.
We seem to be in the land-grab stage of the technology cycle. If (when?) it turns out they're selling it cheap just to get a user base, then any price hikes will probably be fatal.
I do wonder how the conversations with customers will go...
Company: "We'd like to pass the cost for these new tools on to you, they allow us to do more work in less time."
Client: "Last year we paid you X to do this, now you want us to pay more so that you can do the same in fewer hours for us? How about... no? No sounds good. We'll stick with what we've got now, thanks."
One of the great things about software from this period is that just a few years before, the hardware had been barely adequate for most purposes.
These days when we think of "good user experience" we're usually thinking about layout, iconography, and workflow.
Back then the test for a good user experience was "can it keep up with a typist who can do at least 100 words per minute?"
It was surprising just how difficult it seemed to be for some software to do that in the early and mid 1980s.
This is why tools like WordStar and the community around it made much of "being written in assembly" for higher performance. As did many other programs and their communities.
Eventually hardware surpassed the minimum requirements for moderate typing (50 words per minute), and responsiveness became regarded as a "solved problem". This idea may be one of the more common lies we tell ourselves as an industry, but has become so pervasive nobody seems to want to challenge it.
I admire the work that went into this, and the ethos behind it.
Personally I was a WordPerfect user and fanboi - as far as I'm concerned WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS is the acknowledged pinnacle of word processing software throughout the civilised universe (and also in Bracknell). WordStar - in any version - never quite gelled with me.
But I could never be so churlish as to take away someone else's cherished and productive tools, especially not from one of the "high eras" in computing history.
Kudos to Mr. Sawyer for providing this service!
There are some things to like in Agile. And some things which make no sense at all.
But that's not really what I'd like to focus on. I've had some thoughts percolating in my mind for a while, and would like to dump them here.
We shouldn't need Agile. It's a sticking plaster. Agile is often brought in because of previous failures to deliver IT projects. When Agile fails it's often not because of anything Agile was doing - any project management system/methodology would have failed in those conditions.
It's an unfortunate truth that people in IT are often bad at explaining the necessities and requirements that their platforms/technologies/infrastructures have.
It's an unfortunate truth that people in Management are often bad at making time to understand their IT requirements and capabilities.
It's an unfortunate truth that people in IT are often bad at making time to understand their organisation's requirements and capabilities.
It's an unfortunate truth that people in Management are often bad at explaining the necessities and requirements that their organisation has.
It's an unfortunate truth that many people are eager to please others, so will give slightly optimistic estimates. (We've all regretted it, right?)
It's an unfortunate truth that some people in Management are grubby little climbers, happy to shave estimates down to make themselves look better.
All of this combines to create significant issues with communication and trust. In many organisations both sides might say they trust and respect each other, but their behaviour says otherwise.
I feel that Agile was created simply as a framework to try and deal with these unfortunate truths. Something we could wheel out and say "Let's start over with this, which will fix it!"
The sad fact is that in doing so, it fails to address the actual problems. It's like putting a splint on a broken arm and then saying "Right, that'll do it. Back to climbing up the north face of the Eiger then..."
Strangely, that's not very likely to end well.
I find it fascinating that our relatively immature industry thinks it needs its own methods of working. Generations of tallest buildings, fastest aircraft, largest ships, longest bridges, and much more were done with fairly traditional project management methods and systems. And yet somehow we can't use those? It's an interesting narcissism - "the problem isn't our industry, the problem is we're using bad tools". Well we all know a phrase related to that attitude...
I don't hate Agile. I don't love traditional project management. I'd just like to see us being honest about the root causes that often drive people to change their management methods. Because surely if more than one method system has failed, then the problem is likely to be somewhere else?
Anyway, sorry if I've offended anyone who's inexplicably wedded to the cause. Hopefully an alternative point of view is useful to you...
I think see the problem...
When they asked "How much?", you told them how much it would cost to do it.
You should have responded with "No idea. How much would it cost us if we couldn't take any orders for two weeks last month?"
(Or whatever is relevant in the situation.)
Giving the cost of the work rather than the cost of the failure the work is trying to save us from is a trap we all fall into.
Sadly even this technique doesn't always work - "It's fine now, let's bet the business that it won't fail. I can always take the bonus this year and then blame the IT guys if it fails next year..."
I was affected, but will stay on SpiderOak for the moment. I was lucky enough that it happened during a couple of very busy weeks at work, so had very little to back up at home.
I use SpiderOak not just for backup but for sync between my laptop and desktop. It does a good job of that, and it's handy having it all in one tool.
I'm not looking to leave right now, but I am looking casually at alternatives. I'm not convinced that SpiderOak are really committed to their One service (it's been moved steadily down their website over the years in favour of other products), so I want to be ready to move my current data if they withdraw it. I have offline versioned backups and am increasingly using git for in-project versioning, so older data is less of a concern and I'm happy to lose a few old versions as part of the move.
I just had a look at rsync.net, but it's quite expensive by comparison. I suspect I may end up with a roll-your-own solution using AWS S3 storage or perhaps Backblaze B2, but I'm open to suggestions. My main requirements are that it's cloud based and automatic (monitors for file changes and then syncs). I really don't want to have to have both machines on at the same time to sync them, that's just not a good workflow for me.
Maybe moving to something else will be a fun project for the Christmas break this year...
I still occasionally miss my Palm devices.
I think my last one was a Tungsten III. A great device.
It was a great platform. It did just enough as an OS, and had a great interface which many seem to have since "been inspired by"... even if they'd never admit it.
But what I miss more was the software. Being mostly disconnected meant that the focus for developers was different. I had entire database systems on my Palm - I think the one I used most was called ThinkDB - so could build my own little solutions. It was superb. Not too expensive either.
With a smartphone that's always on, the incentive is to keep everything online and then get you subscribed to cover the costs of hosting and development. And whilst each individual solution might be a bit slicker and a little bit better, I miss the flexibility. The Palm felt like a perfect halfway mark between only-at-the-desk and access-from-anywhere.
I know it's partly rose-tinted glasses, but the fact that I was doing things on my Palm 15 years ago that I can barely do today says such a lot to me.
But then again, I've changed the way I'd solve those problems, and the world has moved on. I wouldn't go back.
But I would like to see some people be "inspired by" Palm OS a bit more...
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