Posts by Charlie Clark

cmd.exe is dead, long live PowerShell: Microsoft leads aged command-line interpreter out into 'maintenance mode'

Strings

We'll leave it to our readers to debate the pros and cons of writing a script that depends on the format of a copyright string in order to keep a production line ticking over.

The world runs on those kind of things quite often because text is all you get from the relevant system and if you've looked at a couple of bash scripts you'll see the same: query something for its version and parse the response. More annoying perhaps, is the lack of flags on command line tools in windows combine this with the prediliction for localisation on Windows and reliably getting system informatin becomes a chore. Though I've just found that systeminfo /FO CSV returns something nearly usable.

Twitter ticks off Trump with new 'Get the facts' alert on pair of fact-challenged tweets

Re: Ooh, fun!

Yes, a culture of accountability should apply to all. Then again, I've yet to see anything from any leading UK politician that comes anywhere near the shit the Trump posts on a daily basis.

In the long run, I don't think it matters that much, because I don't think a lot of people take Twitter that seriously. Trump seems to use the medium to court controversy which ends up shoring up his base.

US cable subscribers are still being 'ripped off' by creeping price increases – and this lot has had enough

Cable and satellite TV are looking less and less like good deals when you compare them against having a Netflix, Disney+ or Amazon Prime Video subscription.

Maybe at the moment, but you do realise that the aim of those companies is to get rid of the "or" by not licensing their content to their competitors?

Competition

to which the only real answer of course, is – if you are able to

And this, from what I understand of the US market, is very often not the case with cable or phone companies guaranteed monopoly access in many states towns thanks to successful lobbying of state lawmakers.

'I wrote Task Manager': Ex-Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer spills the beans

Re: Why wasn't it in by design?

Somewhere on El Reg is a nice story of how Intel got Microsoft to delay versions of NT/2000 for Alpha, which helped kill it.

Re: Why wasn't it in by design?

Cutler has hated UNIX since the year dot. Xenix was never going to get into NT as long as he had anything to do with it.

It wasn't about getting into NT, but NT being able to run other OSes on top, just as Windows was initially. This is where NT borrowed some of the good things from OS/2

Re: Why wasn't it in by design?

In many ways NT was already beyond unix when it started: Xenix was supposed to be able to run on the NT kernel. So, the OS could always do that kind of stuff, it just didn't provide the tools for the users. But it says a lot about Dave Cutler, who many credit with most of the better ideas in Windows NT, that he knew a good thing when he saw it. Sadly, however, we never really got Windows NT on DEC Alpha (yes, it was released…), so Microsoft was forced to cripple NT so it would run faster on Intel's less capable silicon.

Arm goes off road... map: 5nm Cortex-X1 touted for phone, tablet, laptop processors needing Apple-level oomph

Gradual improvements

The A78 is a step up from the A77 introduced last year: nothing spectacularly different, just a whole lot of bandwidth improvements and changes to improve its efficiency.

Without any major new developments in hardware features (clock speeds, new geometries, new hardware acceleration options), this is pretty much what you'd expect. But what is different, in comparison with say Intel, is the speed at which those changes are delivered and presumably how low the overhead is for them.

TCL 10L: Remember the white goods flinger that had a licence to make BlackBerrys? It made a new own-name phone

Updates

One cause for concern is software: although the TCL 10L comes with the latest version of Android, the firm remains somewhat of an unknown quantity when it comes to issuing updates and patches.

It's not an unknown quantity: it's completely shit and won't be any better with its customised UI.

Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC

Re: Minimum spec?

Please define efficient. Modern operating systems are very different beasts from the kind of control systems that were used for, say, early space exploration programs where everything was constrained by the available memory. Even for FORmula TRANslaton (writing the code that let computers do complicated mathematical equations), the advice was to use as much memory as you can. And once we got beyond simple mechanical computations it soon started to make more sense to let compilers and profilers do the optimising. Of course, that doesn't mean there isn't a load of inefficient crap in modern systems, just that it's differently inefficient!

Re: AMD vs. Intel: War Games v3.0

AMD has always been the underdog to Intel, but with a superior product.

This has often but not always been the case and, as a result, AMD has struggled to raise the capital for investment. Nevertheless, it seems to have got a lot of things right over the last few years, while Intel has made several missteps.

For the price tag, this iPad Pro keyboard better damn well be Magic: It isn't... but it's not completely useless either

You'll get similar results with a good Wacom tablet. But, I agree, if it helps you do your job then it's all good.

Re: boro parmo

Where's the smogmen icon when you need it?

Re: Because ... it’ll just work : Nope

Actually thinking of upgrading to a 2015 15" MBP so I can install the latest OSX without witchcraft

I think the 2015's will be losing support from next year. Not 100 % on that but there was a timeline recently published. So worth checking this before you buy, if access to the newest OS release is important to you, though I'd agree that for many things it isn't.

Re: Because ... it’ll just work : Nope

I've got a 2010 MacBook Pro here that works fine. But Apple in its wisdown won't let it run more recent versions of the magical OS. I did also have to replace the battery because it got so swollen and the same thing has just happened to my 2015 MacBook Pro, Over in the corner is an older ThinkPad, the battery is dead but at least it didn't swell. In any case, don't expect any I-Pad to last that long.

In these days of contract manufacturing, the actual brand doesn't matter as much. Which is probably why the new Huawei notebooks look so suspiciously like the new Apple ones.

PowerShell inventor Jeffrey Snover gets new gig driving ‘modern workforce transformation’

“modern workforce transformation”

The suit to be replaced by romper suits?

SAP proves, yet again, that Excel is utterly unkillable

Re: Excel bugs

Related to the 1900 issue, is the borked epoch so if you format "0" as a date you get 00.01.1900 though the epoch is actually 1899-12-30T00:00 but Excel won't actually display anything before 00.01.1900 which makes it pretty unreliable for dates. Doesn't stop people using it for that, of course.

In fact the ability to mix both data and code is the biggest risk associated with any spreadsheet because you cannot guarantee values won't change the next time you look. Otherwise, bugs aside, it's about as good a report format as we've got, because at least it's typed and supports unicode.

Re: Excel excels

And lack of precision: use text if you want more than 15 digits…

Beer gut-ted: As many as '70 million pints' spoiled during coronavirus pandemic must be destroyed in Britain

And the filtering. But, of course, the beer was also generally weaker than what we now drink.

It wasn't really that long ago when that was pretty common: fresh small beer was a lot safer than much of the water.

Re: i need to get out more

So much beer is kept under pressure (CO2, etc.) now that it can't oxidise naturally nor does it provide a particularly good environment for the few microbes that can tolerate the alcohol.

Unpasteurised milk

France's answer has been to relax safety rules governing the sale of raw milk. Keep your fingers crossed.

It's pretty common in the French countryside anyway. My old landlady used to get it regularly but would also cook it herself, though I couldn't get used to the taste. Once we got a handle on TB and if the cattle are kept properly, there isn't really a lot to worry about, which is why so much French cheese is made with unpasteurised milk. Yes, listeria is a risk, but again, this is down to how the cows are kept.

Re: I wonder

Presumably the government thought about environmental considerations when writing those rules.

You owe me a new keyboard for that!

Re: It's probably not actually "bad".

It's not light in general, it's UV that's causes changes in bottled beers. So the trend for clear glass for "lighter" beers, popular with the wimmin for the same reason that "light" cigarettes are, for taking to picnics is ironic. Then again most of those "light" beers are pretty tasteless anyway.

If you're appy and you know it: The Huawei P40 Pro conclusively proves that top-notch specs aren't everything

Definition of lock-in

I pay for things with Google Pay. When I interview industry folk, the audio is immediately uploaded to Google Drive for safekeeping. I write most of my notes in Google Docs, and use Gmail to access my various email accounts. If I need to drive somewhere unfamiliar, I rely on Google Maps to lead the way.

Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket!

Vint Cerf suggests GDPR could hurt coronavirus vaccine development

Re: Useless

People regularly do die in droves of the flu. Furthermore, considering how quickly it mutates, is difficult to develop lasting immunity against. This is why it is highly recommended that all medical staff have a full and up to date complement of vaccinations: even if it doesn't kill them, it makes them less likely to pass it on to others.

Covid-19 is a serious illness and in many cases fatal but the media frenzy has served to take people's attention from other equally serious illneses. Referrals for serious illnesses to hospitals are significantly down in many countries as a result of people being more scared of Covid-19 than anything else.

Re: Useless

The importance of a coronavirus vaccine is equal to the importance of any other flu vaccine.

I agree with this.

Never forget that the mortality has been overrated for other purposes.

While there has been some overstatement, particularly in Italy in the early days, there has also been some understatement, particularly in care homes before mass testing became available. With so many patients having other conditions it's also difficult to call in some cases. But, never suspect a conspiracy when incompentence will do.

And "malicious"?

IMHO GDPR was to prevent malicious use of personal data.

Then you should freshen up on the law. Any use of personally identifiable data, apart from a few statutory exceptions, requires the explicit consent of the person involved. Malicious is open to interpretation which is why it's not mentioned in the law.

Re: Other ways the world would be safer....

1) Locking people up at night.

Except that most acccidents happen in the home… Shoot everyone now and that will put a stop to that, and infections!

Re: Run-away techies pipe dreams meet problem-o-phile reasoning

That's how you get messes like the GDPR.

GDPR isn't a mess. It is largely an update of existing laws with new sanctions. You want some examples of sloppy laws where tech had an input? DMCA, Safe Harbour.

Re: Piper paying

Yes, but what he says seems to imply that the EU's GDPR isn't a problem but that other legislation inspired by or derived from it may have unintended consequences. For instance, the German phone networks have been providing anonymised phone location data to the Robert Koch Institute to help their modelling for months now and this is okay within the bounds of GDPR, but this might not be possible in other countries.

Elsewhere it should be noted that Google and the other titans have been lobbying intensely to get hold of patient data. This is, in my opinion, an accident waiting to happen as.

As for off-premise commerce: it's been happening for decades with things like catalogues. Just took a bit longer to happen. And we could have had video conferences since the 1970s except that no one thought they were worth the price. Even now, where they are nearly free, it's hard to argue that the video part really adds much.

'iOS security is f**ked' says exploit broker Zerodium: Prices crash for taking a bite out of Apple's core tech

Re: "Zerodium said for the first time that it would pay more for flaws in Android"

At least, not until someone does a Debian release for it,

You can get at least some form of Debian for Planet's offerings but it won't help you much in locking it down, because you'll make it more or less unusable as a "smartphone" if you do so. Dumb phones were easier to secure because they did less, but it's not as if they were immune to hacks.

Things might improve with hardware that can support the kind of microkernel and containers that should improve security. Though, in a sense that just moves the goalposts because code does repeatedly breakout of containers.

Re: Here's an idea

Bugs traditionally refer to code not doing what it is supposed to do. For a simple example, consider a birthday calculator that does not take leap years into consideration: works well most of the time so not necessarily easy to spot.

Hacks are also known as exploits because they often exploit the side-effects of well-tested code doing what it should. This is very often related to permissions but also underlying flaws (memory, timing, etc.) and is difficult or almost impossible to avoid in modern OS with internet connectivity and multimedia. We're learning all the time how to provide advanced features such as GPU acceleration for video chat without compromising the hardware.

Re: Here's an idea

How about paying people to find the bugs before release?

It's worth noting that not all exploits stem from bugs, quite often they come from finding different ways to use "good" code. This is why pen-testing is a separate discipline from both testing and QA. That said, there's no doubt that Apple's software management could and should be improved: less secrecy and some degree of peer reviewing would be possible. Maybe even their own Project Zero team?

Multi-part Android spyware lurked on Google Play Store for 4 years, posing as a bunch of legit-looking apps

Re: So...

Not with a simple scan, no. But that's true of a lot of malware: scanning the code will not necessarily tell you how it behaves, you can only look for some tell tale signs. You need to run it in a sandbox to see what kind of connections it makes outgoing and incoming.

If you're going to spend $3tn, what's another billion? Congress urged to inject taxpayer dollars into open anti-Huawei 5G radio tech

Or just doing a deal with the Chinese on getting backdoors into the hardware. That's what this is really about not any kind of industrial policy.

Re: Only themselves to blame

This isn't really the US's fault, it's just the way the game is played in standards setting. The 3 main players in 5G aren't US companies after all,

You present the two statements in the wrong order. Because the US did not participate in GSM standard development, it shut itself out of future development. So, yes, it very much is the US' own fault. When Bell Labs and Nortel R&D, et al. were closed to save money the US effectively froze itself out of most of the development. At the same time, China saw the importance of being onboard and consequently through money at R&D.

Sadly, 111 in this story isn't binary. It's decimal. It's the number of security fixes emitted by Microsoft this week

Re: Disappointment

I see no errors!

Fancy some post-weekend reading? How's this for a potboiler: The source code for UK, Australia's coronavirus contact-tracing apps

Maybe a thought experiment will help. A small sample might help you trace contacts in a single classroom in a school but only there. But while you're doing this you will not see the gunmen raging through the rest of the school or that someone is handing out syringes and, as a result, any decisions you take will be based on very partial information.

More draconian, but probably more useful is keeping records of people in places where they spend some time: restaurants, medical practices, etc.

20% is statistically too small to give you any reliable prediction. It will certainly help tracing infection chains but you will be missing so much other data that you're still in the realms of anecdotal evidence when it comes to transmission in the general population.

That is only because of the measures taken to limit contact and reduce the rate of transmission.

As we do with flu: annual vaccination campaigns and residual immunity in the population.

Without these measures, we could expect to see a death rate somewhere between x10~x44 higher.

Based on what particular empirical evidence? Certainly not the case in Sweden, which has some of the least restrictive measures. At the moment we have some assumptions and some correlations.

Breaking virus lockdown rules, suing officials, threatening staff, raging on Twitter. Just Elon Musk things

Re: Suprise

This is just a PR stunt to keep to grab the headlines.

Re: Same as the Nebraska meat packing plants

Hey if you're prepared to keep a meat factory open riddled with Corona Virus

At least in terms of food safety this unlikely to be an issue: the virus cannot multiply in dead cells. The real issue are the working and living conditions of the people who work there.

Wanna be a developer? Your coworkers want to learn Go and like to watch, er, Friends and Big Bang Theory

Re: Hmm

SQL is not Turing complete

I thought more recent revisions of it were? Not that I'd like to try and write anything like that with it…

SQL within your C program and pass the lot through a preprocessor that would convert the SQL into whatever instructions your database system required.

Converting to relational algebra would have been good. Instead the various vendors retrofitted some of their dafter ideas in SQL making it even more unwieldy but also unavaoidable.

There's a world out there with a hexagon vortex over its pole packed with hydrocarbon ice crystals. That planet is Saturn

Re: silly names

Not really: eth, prop, but, et. al. tell you how many carbon atoms you have and -ane, -ene, -yne tells you the ratio of hydrogen atoms to them. Together they tell you a lot about the expected properties.

Re: silly names

Thanks for the correction. I can still do the maths for the alkane (CxH2x+2), alkenes(CxH2x) and alkyne(CxHx-2) chains but do mix them up when converting back from the "old" style names!

Microsoft doc formats are the bane of office suites on Linux, SoftMaker's Office 2021 beta may have a solution

Testing

We copied the torture-test document to an Ubuntu system and tried opening it in both LibreOffice and TextMaker.

Why? Much better to round trip the documents and compare the markup with something like the OOXML Productivity Tool.

Re: Seems like a losing battle, and there's an elephant in the room

Some of LO's problems with OOXML (Office OpenXML) are self-inflicted because it consistently produces files that do not comply with the specification. There is no need for this as the specification is freely available. It's inconsistent and often unclear but there is an ISO working group which maintains it and they are responsive to feedback.

As the specification doesn't cover visual represenation itself directly there are always going to be differences, not least because the file format does not equal the object representation within the applications.

This is why PDF is still so popular as Postscript describes exactly how things should look.