Posts by Robert Grant

Open source, closed wallets, big profits – nobody wins the OSS rock, paper, scissors game

Started good, but then

seeing their work be exploited

Sigh.

Email blocklisting: A Christmas gift from Microsoft that Linode can't seem to return

I wonder if 365 checks if a spam email IP is one of its sender IPs before adding it to the blocklist. What happens if someone starts sending spam from a 365 account?

Google splurging cash on UK offices to lure staffers back from the kitchen table

which paid £50.4m in taxes for the year ended 30 June 2020

It would be good to know the total tax generated by Google in the UK:

- corporation tax

- income tax paid by employees

- VAT paid directly or indirectly as part of a service

- all of the above for firms Google use in the UK

That would be the correct number to look at. Only reporting one of the ways Google generates tax seems a little disingenuous.

Lawmakers propose TLDR Act because no one reads Terms of Service agreements

This could be a good idea if it were like the creative commons licences: distinct categories, easily summarised.

HMRC tool for measuring IR35 status is so great, employers are ditching it in their droves

Re: And without any employee benefits!

If you read the parent comments you'll see that this situation removes the advantage of being a contractor, so there's no tradeoff. They're classified basically like an employee, but without benefits.

'Admin error': AWS in dead company data centre planning application snafu in Oxfordshire

Re: Set the rules

You're sort of talking as though "tax" isn't already a rule defined.

And the power dynamics are inverted: multinationals only define "rules" because they create enough value to have money. Rules-defining happens constantly by government because if you don't follow them you get locked in a box.

JavaScript dev deliberately screws up own popular npm packages to make a point of some sort

Re: Proof that the industry is mad

That seems irrelevant. I'm saying what happens, not what should happen.

Re: Proof that the industry is mad

Bear in mind every build will pull in the package afresh. There might be hundreds of builds to support a live change.

Also this is faker. Generally used for faking data in nonproduction. Lots of the packages that depend on it probably use it as a test dependency.

Re: "taking control of someone else's property"

This seems a great point that Gitlab could differentiate on.

Re: "sign up for a support contract if it exists"

This is what Tidelift is for. I'm surprised no-one's mentioned it.

Re: "according to popularity."

Youtube does a similar thing with its subscriptions. A portion of the amount you pay every month goes to the creators you use. Similarly a portion of paid-for GitHub accounts' fees could go to open source dependencies.

That should be pretty hard to game, as you can't get back more than you pay for, and the amounts involved will be small.

Google: We disagree with Sonos patent ruling so much, we've changed our code to avoid infringement

Re: Sonos.....

> anything Google buys as it's doomed to expire

Exactly! Remember Android? And Google Maps?

What is this hot, hot thing Magma? An open-source project for building mobile networks, you say

It'd be interesting to hear why this was built as a k8s-alternative, rather than as custom operators built on k8s directly. Timing? Too different a domain? NIH?

Can you get excited about the iPhone 13? We've tried

Fun to see articles with "emotional payoff" and "it doesn't quite meet the moment with a new experience that satisfies" in. Definitely the sort of nonsense parody article that I love El Reg for. Imagine someone really writing that about a telephone.

Diagnosis confirmed: Oracle has a case of healthcare cravings, bought Cerner for $28.3bn as the cure

The finest cloud revenue money can buy

But yes, it does make sense.

I'm hoping that disruption will happen here. There is insane lock-in with these systems and, well. I've been to one of the giant Cerner campuses in Kansas City. They are making a lot of money from healthcare.

Barclays snubs public cloud giants and hardware rivals for HPE GreenLake private cloud

I feel like this thread has more info than the article!

Pen Test Partners: Anyone could view Gumtree users' GPS location by pressing F12

Select * is just as easy to misuse and serialise. Funny how the problem is always the thing you don't like, isn't it?

West Sussex County Council faces two-year delay to replace ageing SAP system for Oracle

ERP is such a disastrous space. And all the good solutions (i.e. the ones that don't rely on a single enormo-vendor) seem to require a lot of effort of the sorts of people who'd rather just ask for more budget.

Bloke breaking his back on 'commute' from bed to desk deemed a workplace accident

Across the Channel, it came to light this week that more than half of UK employees would quit if their company pulled hybrid working options. It is nice to see that, thanks to the pandemic, workers are holding more cards than usual.

We could already quit before the pandemic.

Amazon fined €1.13bn by Italy's antitrust authorities for abusing its power

Re: Hey Amazon!

Numbers are hard?

Leaked footage shows British F-35B falling off HMS Queen Elizabeth and pilot's death-defying ejection

You think it was Major Security-Leake? I knew that chap was trouble.

A Ministry of Defence spokesbeing said in a prepared statement: "We are aware of a video circulating online. It is too soon to comment on the potential causes of this incident."

Of course, the incident they're concerned about is "Who took that video?"

Not only was the UK Financial Ombudsman Service's Workday system months late, 38 IT workers' jobs are at risk

Workday and our implementation partner IBM are helping us to rethink parts of our business and how it operates

Translation: some things we need either Workday can't do, or IBM can't make it do. So we're changing our business to suit the software.

The only thing worse than technocrats is not-technocrats.

Qualcomm doesn't fear custom chips – in a weird way its modems matter more

Re: If you ask me

Payback for what?

Co-Operative Bank today 'terminated' Capita's outsourcing contract years before it was due to expire

Re: Ex Mutual?

> because they have a statutory duty to maximise shareholder return - in dividends and the share price

I don't think so. Businesses all have reserves to deal with cashflow problems. Share price is just "the price the last person bought a share at", it's not something that businesses pump money into at the expense of knowing where next month's salary run is coming from.

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me... a coding puzzle and it's a doozy

After using Python, I then solved day 1 using very basic Excel; just line up the columns and sum a cell comparison!

Pension cold-calling financial services biz cops largest ever fine from UK data watchdog

Re: in other

I think you'll find GD holding group are now a subsidiary of HE global.

Rust dust-up as entire moderation team resigns. Why? They won't really say

Re: Maybe

This sounds more reasonable than your original post, but lots of people say things for effect. You even did it in your original post when you created some contrived examples of claims people make about Rust. It's pointless to commentate the commentary.

Re: Maybe

> Maybe someone realised that it's a very bad idea to expect a new language to fix all the software safety problems in the world.

While all languages engender frothy excitement at one time or another, there's no point extrapolating those moments into being everyone's permanent emotional state towards them.

Re: If it's important enough to resign

> From the way all this has been phrased, it's very clear that

Please remember all narrators are unreliable. It's worded in a way that cannot be described as anything but "inviting speculation".

The rocky road to better Linux software installation: Containers, containers, containers

> Naturally, because of the rampant Not Invented Here Syndrome of the Linux industry

It's not NIH when it's just competition between different parties. There's no Linux industry, except in the sense that, say, there are different databases in the database industry. Rampant NIH in everyone not using Oracle!

What do you mean, 'Microsoft doesn't care about Windows on Arm'? Here's a cheap, underpowered test rig

RT?

Windows on Arm has yet to set the world on fire, and developers would have been forgiven for wondering if Microsoft was about to tip the poor thing down the basement stairs to the dingy dungeon where the likes of Media Center, Zune, and Microsoft Bob lurk.

Don't forget Windows RT, which was, of course, Windows on ARM 10 years ago.

Microsoft engineer fixes enterprise-level Chromium bug students could exploit to cheat in online tests

That's one way to look at it, though it dismisses pretty much everyone who has worked for Microsoft, Google, Apple, and every other commercial technology company that has implemented any system that recognizes permission settings and user privileges.

No it doesn't. It ... it just doesn't.

FYI: If the latest Windows 11 really wants to use Edge, it will use Edge no matter what

Re: Not Necessarily Bad?

At that point why not just run edge.exe directly?

System at the heart of scaled-back £30m Sheffield University project runs on end-of-life Oracle database

Re: Other RDBMS are available

EDB will sell you enterprise support, and even massive levels of Oracle compatibility for Postgres. Take a look!

Awkward. At Chrome summit, developer asks: Why should anyone trust Google?

Re: This situation is preferable to Internet Explorer v6.

Go and use or develop a web page for IE6. Then you'll remember.

Re: Technologies

You can have ads that don't track you. And who knows what other reasons people might want to track other people. Consumer behaviour analysis? State surveillance?

Re: Technologies

Privacy is nothing to do with "no ads".

Calendars have gone backwards since the Bronze Age. It's time to evolve

I want my Teams calendar to sync with my Outlook calendar.

Waterfox: A Firefox fork that could teach Mozilla a lesson

> But there's always room at the bottom. Back in 2013, it was already possible to profitably sell a $13 phone. Unfortunately, there are a great many very poor people in the world, and the cheaper tech gets, the more it can help them.

The "unfortunately" sounds as though the poor people counter the $13 phone. Maybe omit it - no one's going to assume you think low income households are a good thing without you saying it.

Microsoft introduces Azure Container Apps with scale to zero

It sounds like the Kubernetes flavour of Fargate.

Don't super-size me – China defines rules for 'super-large' platforms

I was saying the software being chopped up, not the companies.

Cue software being chopped up into smaller "platforms" to be small enough to escape/minimise the impact of this.

A Windows 11 tsunami? No, more of a ripple as Microsoft's latest OS hits 5% PC market

Re: Ha, ha, the bias is showing

What do GDS use?

Since doing anything much in Windows 11 for consumers is tricky without a Microsoft Account nowadays

This is way more awful than the press has reported. Or have I just missed those articles?

Alibaba Cloud drops all-in-one client device, on-prem cloud-native DB

> Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networking capability with a latency as low as 5 microseconds

This sounds like a cool idea, but isn't that (absolute best case time) still an eternity in RAM response time terms?

After more than a decade of development, South Korea has a near miss with Nuri rocket test

Re: We have a green light for launch

Hah.

Google Pixel 6, 6 Pro Android 12 smartphone launch marred by shopping cart crashes

Re: Ruh roh

I'm not quite sure of the point of it.

Youtube and Music Premium: $16/mo

One: $2/mo

Play Pass: $25/year

Pixel 6: $599

Total for 2 years: $1081

Pass total for 2 years: $1080

Is it like an interest-free loan, but only worth it if you use every service Google bundles?

Windows 11 Paint: Oh look – rounded corners. And it is prettier... but slightly worse

Just pay Rick Brewster £5m for Paint.NET

and preinstall that.

It's crazy high quality. So useful.