* Posts by Nick Ryan

3751 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

AWS is fed up with tech that wasn’t built for clouds because it has a big 'blast radius' when things go awry

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Unfortunately it often now feels that the choice too often made is to have a third party cobble things together out of third party components and for support for the system to effectively finish the exact moment of deployment. At which point testing can commence.

FBI confirms Zodiac Killer's 340 cipher solved by trio of amateur math and software codebreakers

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Terminator

Disappointed

There was ample opportunity to mention AI but all we have is here smart humans doing smart things. Such things cannot be allowed and must instead be mis-attributed so some form of magical unicorn fart AI system.

A 1970s magic trick: Take a card, any card, out of the deck and watch the IBM System/370 plunge into a death spiral

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Re: Broken NFS

It's still possible to do the same when using non-American characters in passwords and various online services, such as Google and Microsoft, where being written by Americans with often little knowledge that the rest of the world exists, even passwords are treated as being in American and therefore fail when they aren't.

For example, use the pound symbol: £ as part of your password and enjoy various random Microsoft and Google services being unable to authenticate.

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Re: Broken NFS

For a long time it was relatively easy to do something similar in Windows where filenames could be created that were invalid in many other applications, such as Windows/File Explorer.

The nightmare is real: 'Excel formulas are the world's most widely used programming language,' says Microsoft

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"Excel formulas are the world's most widely used programming language, yet one of the more basic principles in programming has been missing, and that is the ability to use the formula language to define your own re-usable functions,"
Seriously? What would be much better is any form of decent inspection functionality, as in the capacity to inspect and debug the bloody formulas rather than treat them like a black box of doom.

It would also be nice if Microsoft fixed the damn bug that's existed since, I don't know, a couple of decades at least, where Excel randomly decides that a function in a cell is just text rather than a function and it's a dead chicken waving moment to try to convince Excel that the contents of the cell is a function and not text... without wiping out every bit of metadata about the cell.

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Re: Sorry but ...

Yes, it's possible to inflict some disastrous rubbish in VBA... but only if one doesn't want security or maintainability. It would be so much better if most of the junk in VBA was available in vaguely sane built in functions, although that's just a fantasy given the way Excel functionality is implemented and expanded upon.

There are two sides to every story, two ends to every cable

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Re: Idiot Boasting Mob

Infernal Brotherhood of Morons

Salesforce to buy Slack for $28bn in cash, shares – and vows to make it the new face of Customer 360

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Well, there goes the planet. Or a viable alternative to Microsoft Teams anyway.

Slack is now no longer an option for anything other than a money-making machine for Salesforce limitations.

Who knew that hosing a table with copious amounts of cubic metres would trip adult filters?

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Re: monitoring software

The best system I saw was one where the first time a system/user tried to access potentially NSFW content was to inform that the user that they are welcome to proceed but that all such accesses are logged and reviewed and inappropriate access will be dealt with.

It was a sensible, pragmatic approach.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Funny placenames

There's a tiny hamlet in Cornwall called Cocks. I heard from some locals that they removed the sign because they got fed up of it being stolen.

There's a photo of me somewhere standing next to the sign, of course...

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Re: Inside joke?

I worked with a guy who was called Terrence Tester (or Terrence Test, I can't remember now). Nice enough guy but he frequently had problems where his details were spuriously deleted from databases.

Mysterious metal monolith found in 'very remote' part of Utah

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Re: Film set

This is not a coincidence...

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Re: "...the Department won't reveal its location "

Can see why they'd ask people not to go to see it... 20km or so from the nearest road across rocky terrain? Definitely one to avoid.

Also raises questions about how it got there, let alone why

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Re: Simple explanation

Only 42?

I'm surprised that it didn't find multiple corrupt operating systems too.

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Re: It's alien

In which area do monoliths naturally occur?

Just asking in case some of them have grown and need to be harvested. Or something

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It's already been carpetted in lies. We're a bit fed up of this.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

I don't remember the dates, but while it's all to common to think of the North Americas being largely dominated by (largely) nomadic tribes, there were also quite a few cities (of the time) of good size and sophistication. The demise of most of these tends to be put down to environmental causes but some just disappeared almost overnight therefore probably violence was involved.

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Re: The Sheep

That's sarcasm for sheep.

Probably a whole field of study in just that

It's always DNS, especially when a sysadmin makes a hash of their semicolons

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Re: Corporate edicts can be helpful sometimes

I had a junior programmer whose take on compiler warnings was to disable them. Needless to say the quality and stability of his code was appalling.

It took me a while to have him fix all of his code, listening to all his (stupid) complaints like, for example, whether it matters or not if a variable was initialised before use as long as the code (sort of) works.

European recommendations following Schrems II Privacy Shield ruling cast doubt on cloud encryption practices

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Re: What about Office Suites?

Microsoft are the Data Controller because they are deciding what to do with the data, and dictating the data stored.

It's a standard Data Controller vs Data Processor type issue where many people think that the Data Controller must be the originating entity, they don't have to be.

The data controller determines the purposes for which and the means by which personal data is processed.

For example, if your organisation uses an external accounting organisation for payroll then the external accounting organisation is the Data Controller. While this may seem contrary to how many people read the act (although in troth most people plainly haven't read it), this external accounting organisation is dictating the information that is required and how it will be processed. Your organisation cannot pick and choose the information provided. Ownership of the data and responsibility for the accuracy is usually contractually deferred to your organisation and while this is fair enough, it does not change the fact that both parties are legally resposnible for the data. While many try to take the simplistic route that every client of such an accounting organisation is in fact the Data Controller and the accounting organisation is the Data Processor, this would require that every such relationship would require that every client draws up their own Data Controller agreement that their accountants check through in detail and agree to this. Such a relationship where a service provider is the Data Controller and the client is the Data Processor is quite common and while people are hung up on choice, as the client chooses to use a particular accountancy firm, this does not make the client the Data Controller.

In many ways the hard distinction between Data Controller and Data Processor is quite unhelpful as real interactions do not work that way. It would have been preferable to consider the origin of the data more strongly and the passing on of this data rather than going through the semantics wrangling of Data Controller vs Data Processor where if one is not careful almost everyone is a Data Controller. It's also important that for any given dataset, a single organisation may be both the Data Controller and the Data Processor, often multiple times over.

When even a power-cycle fandango cannot save your Windows desktop

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Re: In defence

Unfortunately they tend to exist. They often wind up with "manager in their job title as well.

(checks own job title)

Nooooooooooooooooo......

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Re: a perfectly understandable error

Ah, the mythical "content cat". They're not contented at all, they just look that way while they are calmly plotting the next way to try and kill you.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Always check everything

Had a similar kind of issue with staff moving their desks around and the CRT monitor stopping working. Sensibly they'd lifted the monitor holding onto the bottom of it (rather than just the stand or pushing it) and had moved the control wheel for the contrast or brightness all the way down. Followed by a panicked call from the user that they'd broken it...

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Re: If only it was just then

I suffered with one of those too. New system was purchased for CEO, so slightly upmarket model compared to the usual workstations. Not a problem, nothing too excessive. Until I got the embarassed call that he couldn't work out how to turn the damn thing on... I turned up and sat in front of it and struggled to find the power switch as well. It was black, with no signage at all, on a black case, designed to look a part of the front styling of the case. When we'd both laughed about the stupidity of the design we found a sticker and stuck it on it to make it obvious in the future.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: a perfectly understandable error

Definitely. It was fairly easy to do for a user who wasn't able to press the mouse button and to not move the mouse at the same time. I think there were settings in win.ini or system.ini (can't remember which, doesn't matter now, could even be control.ini) that allowed one to change the sensitivity to movement of the mouse when clicked. Increase the value in this setting and it made the system much less likely to move icons around.

The more thorough fix was to either write protect the offending file or have a safe copy of this file copied over every time the system (windows) started up.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: a perfectly understandable error

Not just Oxford and Cambridge, it's quite common among academics. One gets used to walking into their offices and having to ignore the bed/clothes

One does not simply shove elephants on a ballet shoe point and call it an acceptable measure of pressure

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Re: Unexpected Reaction?

I'm not sure why it's totally unexpected given that using pressure is one of ways of making diamonds for some time now. The effort to make them has only been matched by the diamond industry (De Beers) in trying to identify manufactured diamonds and to dissuade people from making them in the first place.

Alleged Ponzi mastermind on the run from FBI hid in lake with sea-scooter, collared after he surfaced half-hour later

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Re: Rank amateur...

Much more profitable to make donations to politicians and watch the untendered contracts roll in.

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Using shell companies to transfer and obfuscate debt between them masquerading it as profit while abusing fresh income to obfuscate and cover this up? Sounds like he may be more than reaching out to Trump, he could be his chief accountant.

Microsoft emits Preview 3 of next-gen WinUI framework, says Linux support 'is not off our roadmap'

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Re: Wow what a fuster cluck

Unfortunately this is the response of a lot of developers and is why there are so many appallingly mismatched user interfaces out there. Quite understandable of course.

Microsoft used to have a very good and well thought out and reasoned user interface style guide for windows applications. Unfortunately it got shredded, set on fire and thrown out around the time they vomitted out Windows Vista as this utterly useless GUI was counter to pretty much every good UI design paradigm out there.

Naturally, some parts of Microsoft adhered to the guide more than others. For example, Microsoft AutoRoute never adhered to anything at all and with Microsoft insisting that every new iteration of Microsoft Office used the GUI of the latest operating system rather than the GUI and look/feel of the installed operating system they recreated huge swathes of the OS UI within their applications. Made more ridiculous because windows XP "skins" were an appalling hack overdrawing previously drawn components. Around this time Microsoft developers also saw the "wasted space" of the title bar and decided to start pissing around adding custom GUI components into this, with other applications following suit because they couldn't be seen to be inefficient with space compared to Microsoft Office. Since then, GUI rendering has been a precarious thing as anyone running multiple monitors tends to find with random ghost parts of the top of the screen becoming unusable... not as frequent as it used to be, but still happens regularly.

Panic in the mailroom: The perils of an operating system too smart for its own good

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Re: That reminds me..

In the past I've just posted the cheque to my bank instructing them to pay it in. Saved a trip however miles in scant weekend time or the impracticality of work lunch times.

Python swallows Java to become second-most popular programming language... according to this index

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Re: Sin tax

Because of its asynchronism it forces you to think about your code in a non-linear way, which is how modern computers work these days, as does a system of any complexity.
Oh, if only this were true. The number of abject horrors that I've come across where supposedly experienced developers don't seem to demonstrate even the first hint of appreciation of concurrency, let alone reducing code exposure to timing issues. Most so-called web application developers still seem to think that a web page is a modal system application and can be abused as such.

On the other hand, not to bash JavaScript, I've seen the same utter lack of comprehension of concurrent processes in C++ and C# applications.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Sin tax

Similarly here... I started with Commodore Basic on a Commodore 64, but was quicky frustrated not so much by the immediate speed but the lack of features. I tried implementing things in Basic but had to switch to assembly code. By the time I'd finished teaching myself I'd pretty much disassembled the Basic ROM and support library chip to see what was there that was interesting and how it was implemented. The how it was implemented part taught me a lot, even down to the storage of Basic statment tokenisations and jump tables.

At first I didn't even have an assembler. I just output the statements using Basic to the screen. I then read these statements using the utterly indispensable Advanced Programming Guide that Commodore sold as this also included the entire 6510 instruction set including the decimal values for each statement. I learnt to write 6510 assembly in decimal!

Later I progressed to a machine code "monitor" and then, finally, to a proper assembler. The assembler saved a lot of sanity.

Microsoft warns against SMS, voice calls for multi-factor authentication: Try something that can't be SIM swapped

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Re: More clueless "password replacements"...

At login time, the secure enclave will not perform an authentication operation using the private key unless you can first convince it that you are you - which might be via a PIN, or a fingerprint, or a facial recognition. Those things never leave the device, and are never stored on or verified by the remote service.

From the point of view of the remote service, the user is logging in using a private key only. From the point of view of the local user, they are logging in "using a fingerprint, face recognition, or a PIN" as Microsoft says. But in reality, they couldn't login with *just* those things; they also need the device which contains the private key.

You're missing the point. In order to unlock the agreed "secret" for use later, a user is unlocking using a non-secret authentication component. In other words, what was secure is no longer secure.

Consider this:

There is a steel door with a very secure lock securing it (the kind that "the lockpicking lawyer" would take more than a minute or two to open). The key for this very secure door is stored in a safe. The safe has a secure permutation (often mis-named a combination) code securing it. This code cannot be changed. The code is written down on a sheet of paper that's hung on the wall near the safe.

In effect how secure is this steel door? The lock itself is still a solid and very secure lock, ufortunately the key is not therefore the door is not secure.

Nick Ryan Silver badge
Stop

More clueless "password replacements"...

His answer: Microsoft Authenticator, a mobile app for Android and iOS that allows users to login using a fingerprint, face recognition, or a PIN in lieu of a password and with an OTP for accounts that support that standard.
Oh FFS, the idiocy never stops, and this from someone at Microsoft who pretends through his job title to have a clue. Fingerprint and face recognition are NOT replacements for a password. They can replace or enhance an identifier, as in a user name or ID, but never a password. It is not feasible to change your fingerprints or face, or to keep them secret from others therefore they can never be a replacement to a secret component of any form of authentication.

Oh! What a lovely pandemic, says Cisco as it sees wave of network refreshes on the horizon

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Re: Far too optimistic

Yep. We had the choice of continuing with installing a fresh network with Cisco kit or not. Given how awful Cisco are becoming, in various ways, it was a pretty easy choice to go for non-Cisco kit.

HP: That print-free-for-life deal we promised you? Well, now it's pay-per-month to continue using your printer ink

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Re: I have no legal training

The operational life of the device.

It's not a question of semantics about a particular object being alive, it's an established and commonly used term.

Cool, cool, cool: Screwdriver-wielders delve into the guts of an Xbox Series X

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Re: Air Conditioner ??

More vacuum cleaner then?

You can forget your fancy ERP customisations because that's not how it works in the cloud, SAP's Oliver Betz tells users

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Re: Experiences with two small businesses

Hybrid cloud with onsite server to fail down to might help those that are in production and don't want to idle the floor if the external network is down though.

This is the aspect that many consultant-lemmings fail to see... use the technology appropriately, not just because it's a current bullshit bingo buzzword top term. By all means move low priority processes and external end point based services online to be hosted on someone else's computers as this can make a lot of sense, although there is usually little in the way of real cost savings. For others, such as business critical databases and/or local processes that need to be available locally it's often nothing but ridiculous to push these online to be operated on someone else's computers and if it weren't for vendor price gouging on non-hosted licenses there would be no question about cost savings through keeping most such systems local.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

For the majority of organisations the majority of their processes are fairly standard and can be bundled into a "one size fits all" approach that the purveyors of forced obsolence and subscriptions for this like.

Unfortunately, the majority of organisations have the odd existing, and often critical, business process that is non-standard, or at best are industry specific. These are the sticking points for the blinkered "push it to the cloud and hope it works" approaches. The old 90/10 rule.

With less than two months left, let's check in on Brexit: All IT systems are up and running and ready to go, says no one

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Re: QR

Couldn't we combine them?

Please, tell us more about how just 60 hydrogen-powered 5G drones could make 400,000 UK base stations redundant

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Re: Interesting but...

and...

6. What devices are going to connect to these amazing, world beating flying overlord base station replacements? Oh phones. Tens of thousands of them. Many from a distance of many kilometres. With their low power antenna not designed to broadcast signals such a distance.

If Gartner are doubtful about this, then it's probably the first thing that Gartner have ever got right (other than fleecing manglement all over the world with paid for "reports")

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Re: Won't work

You cynic.

Either that or you've been paying attention... :)

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Re: Could is another way of saying...

I'm disappointed in the lack of AI. Shirley there should be more mention of this magical technology?

You only live twice: Once to start the installation, and the other time to finish it off

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Setting off the metal detector

I went straight from a job to a gig that I'd booked months before. Completely forgetting that my techie tool bag consisted of a range of screwdrivers, the odd hammer, spanner and so on - but somehow no "sharps". While there was no official bag storage facility the entry staff took pity on me and allowed me to stow it with (near) the roadie's kit.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Gun shells

Last my niece, who shoots air rifles at international competitive level, had a hell of a time trying to explain to UK customs that just because it read the word "rifle" it was not a "gun" (legally defined) and therefore it was fine for her to take it through in secured, checked luggage. She had checked with the airline a few times, including their head office and so on, who all stated that they had never come across this before - until they came across a more useful colleage who had. Returning to Australia they didn't bat an eyelid at the declaration.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Shoulda gone for something simpler...

Wow, I'd forgotten about Soundscape. They were amazing systems for the time.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Not just in exotic places

In a previous life working in the bar and club industry we supplied music and video system PCs to the venues. One venue was installed, testing and worked and signed off. Come Tuesday the PC failed to boot anymore. Turns out that somebody has opened the PC, stolen the memory sticks, taken the hard drive, probably found that it didn't contain what they wanted (our content was encrypted as per the PPL/VPL requirements) so they remounted the hard drive using 1/2" wood screws. Don't know why they bothered to remount it... but the drive never worked afterwards with screws piercing the platters.

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Re: Fairly Frequent Flier

I've been through security with a corkscrew with foil blade in my hand luggage. And separately a two litre bottle of water. Which was, of course, nonsense, because immediately the other side of the checks I could by a 2 litre bottle of water from a vending machine.

Remember when the keyboard was the computer? You can now relive those heady days with the Raspberry Pi 400

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Re: Lame excuse for no full fat HDMI

Micro HDMI connectors are an absolute curse. I wouldn't buy this as a result. Too many broken sockets...