Posts by Robert Grant

If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all: El Reg takes Twitter's anti-mean algorithm for a spin

Re: Twitter: Where twits twaddle.

> I do, but I only use it to point out errors, mistkaes, and inconsistencies of 'experts' in the tech field. I've probably made less than 20...

mistkaes, eh? Time to uncast those stones.

There may have been problems with the JEDI deal but you still wouldn't have won, Oracle told by US govt

Re: Getting abused is the point of having a contract with oracle

They're probably separated by 148 miles, and AWS/MS helped create the competitive criteria.

Crane horror Reg reader uses his severed finger to unlock Samsung Galaxy phone

> We understand his wife wanted it buried ASAP.

What would've been 80% of the article in some websites is 8 (11?) words here. Stay British, El Reg :)

Visual Basic 6 returns: You've been a good developer all year. You have social distanced, you have helped your mom. Here's your reward

Re: Too true

I'm reasonably confident that the things built with rocks were not as good as the things built with proper tools.

Stuck in R/3verse: East Sussex County Council struggles to move forward with £25m SAP replacement

Re: Probably not upgradeable

I know this is naive, but.. how custom do these things really need to be, once you strip out all the misplaced assumptions, pet projects and unnecessary tweaks?

Big Tech bankrolling AI ethics research and events seems very familiar. Ah, yes, Big Tobacco all over again

> The analogy "is not perfect," the two brothers acknowledge, but is intended to provide a historical touchstone and "to leverage the negative gut reaction to Big Tobacco’s funding of academia to enable a more critical examination of Big Tech."

This sort of obvious shaming-by-irrelevant-connection reminds me of The Simple Truth (https://www.readthesequences.com/The-Simple-Truth). The relevant excerpt:

> Mark calms himself down. “I suppose I can’t expect any better from mere shepherds. You probably believe that snow is white, don’t you.”

> “Um… yes?” says Autrey.

> “It doesn’t bother you that Joseph Stalin believed that snow is white?”

Mayday! Mayday! Microsoft has settled on a build and Windows 10 21H1 is inbound

> while a humungous patch slithers its way down the internet

This is good. Using this.

JetBrains shoves TeamCity into the cloud, pitches Kotlin for build pipelines because YAML is 'really a pain'

Re: Complexity for it's own sake?

That's why there's a GUI for building pipelines.

NASSCOM shakeup: Accenture's Rehka Menon becomes first woman to chair Indian IT trade org

Re: Hands up those who thought

That would be so interesting! On a Pi, perhaps?

Far-right internet haven Parler to be allowed back onto Apple's App Store with added content moderation

It's just damning by association. As an analogy, guilty people and right-thinking innocent people both want everyone to have a legal defence when accused. Characterising legal defence as a "guilty person protector" would be similar.

Google putting its trust in Rust to weed out memory bugs in Android development

Re: Too bad

Can you be specific about what you mean by "weak typing"? Python is strongly and dynamically typed; I thought Rust was strongly and statically typed.

Jeff Bezos supports US tax rise after not paying it for two years – and paying tiny amount in 2019

Re: There's a simple solution that would never be adopted

The simplest solution would be to tax on a cash basis - you have x dollars coming in and y dollars going out, your tax is based on x-y.

You just described taxing profits.

Think tank report names and shames 'stakeholder capitalist' Salesforce for paying no corporate income tax in the US

Re: Dogma

If you're rolling in it then you paid taxes on it. The article is talking about corporations, not individuals.

X.Org says it's saving a packet with Packet after migrating freedesktop.org off Google Kubernetes Engine

Re: Are the numbers correct?

I suspect if this weren't volunteerism, the $30/day would never be worth saving in exchange for all the k8s creation/maintenance etc etc work that they will now have to do.

'Agile' F-35 fighter software dev techniques failed to speed up supersonic jet deliveries

> Developing software to a moving target is NEVER going to get things done

Keeping the target static may feel like you're getting things done, but they have stopped being useful things.

Re: Agile as a brick

> The “agile crew” at work have burnt two months and produced nothing

Get people who know something about agile if you want regular drops. If you aren't getting them, then no one's holding the "agile crew" to account for not even trying agile.

Re: How about we just admit that "fast" isn't the end-all.

That's exactly it. Agile isn't faster. Agile is more likely to give you something useful at the end (and also give you more useful things along the way). If you have the luxury of a huge discovery phase, and/or your requirements are already painfully clear, then you will need Agile much less.

But whatever you do, don't assume goalposts will move and design a methodology around that. No sirree. Ride that waterfaaaaaalll!

The silicon supply chain crunch is worrying. Now comes a critical concern: A coffee shortage

This sounds good! Is there a guide you could post a link to?

Google halves Android app fee to 15% for lower-earning devs... who aren't responsible for majority of revenue anyway

Re: "it was a smaller cut than the alternatives"

It's not just payment processing. It's hosting, and virus scanning, and code reviewing, and IDE/language creating and app store app creating and updating hosting and installing as well.

Re: That's odd.

Don't forget the 60% between 100k and 120k.

Can Teradata avoid being grounded by on-prem legacy? Actually it helps in avoiding nasty cloud costs, says CEO

They see that the capabilities that were provided by cloud-native solutions were either locking them into a particular cloud provider

This is a big thing. Postgres all the way!

Google: US antitrust regulator was totally right to let us off the hook nearly 10 years ago

Strangely, Lipscomb failed to mention the stratospheric growth of Google's parent company, Alphabet, which is currently one of the world's largest technology businesses, despite lacking Microsoft's diversified portfolio.

This doesn't seem strange at all.

Starlink's latent China crisis could spark a whole new world of warcraft

> But seriously yet another wish that the US should drop bombs/weapons/hardware

If you have to add random unrelated evil things in your category list - things that were specifically excluded by the OP - you probably don't have much of a point.

Google engineer urges web devs to step up and secure their code in this data-spilling Spectre-haunted world

Re: Irony

Maybe Google isn't a straw man single entity, and is instead a corporation made up of many different types of people.

Shelter for internet outcasts Parler slaps Amazon with fresh lawsuit after abandoning first attempt

Re: "So together, Amazon, AWS, and others attempted to kill Parler."

> Fake news. There's no first amendment issue because AWS is not the government

Not seeing anything about the first amendment here.

House Republicans introduce legislation for outright ban on municipal broadband in the US

This is what you need to do when there is no more progress to be made. New stuff can't compete if current stuff is mandatory.

Microsoft kills broad entry-level IT certifications, replaces them with all-Microsoft curriculum

Re: Microsoft have shot themselves in the foot...Again...

They don't make the world go round. Think of the universe of electronic devices that have operating systems, and they'll barely even feature.

Microsoft tells Biden administration to adopt Australia’s pay-for-news plan

Thank you

Between this article and the Nominet one, today is a good journalism day from our friends across the Pond.

Windows' cloudy future: That Chrome OS advantage is Google's to lose

Fully agree with this article

It does feel like there is a real advantage Google has here that it could prop up in the ways listed, and actually for engineers, having it paired with a nice cloud environment that lets you spin out to a dev/blogging/other playground would be pretty compelling.

Add in education support for schools (already pretty well covered) and universities, and you suddenly have a giant swathe of people who will just use Google stuff, for whom using Word would just be a horribly jarring experience.

If Google could just decide on things like Hangouts, and then get on with it, remove any auth friction that exists within their identity platform and with interop with others, they would have so many things going for them.

Interesting times ahead, perhaps!

My bad! So you're saying that redacting an on-screen PDF with Tipp-Ex won't work?

Re: HMRC still has wrong/internal .pdf version of SA100 tax return posted for year 2017

No doubt asking them to "revert back soonest" also confused them, understandably.

New VS Code release hits stable channel for everyone who's not on Apple Silicon after last-minute bug found

Re: Electron

I can't speak for Slack but generalisation is dangerous.

Well, sometimes.

Incoming Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger reveals he was offered board seat before sudden pitch for top job

"The plan is clear, we just have to execute the plan,” he said.

A classic. If you succeed, it was because of my plan. If you fail, it was your execution.

Missing GOV.UK web link potentially cost taxpayers £50m as civil servants are forced to shuffle paper forms

Over five years that missing GOV.UK link has cost the British taxpayer £51,004,800. For the sake of one single link was a hole punched in the national coffers.

This assumes every single paper form could've been done digitally.

Stack Overflow 2019 hack was guided by advice from none other than... Stack Overflow

The community noticed a new user with broad privileges and reported it, at which point the Stack Overflow security team took more drastic steps, taking Team City offline and removing privileges and credentials.

SO's community engagement team then banned several members of the community who reported the breach, calling their behaviour "unwelcoming of a new user."

Google's Git commits point to project on pared-back Android for virtualized environments

Android hypervisor, you say?

Can't wait to run Kubernetes on there.

A new take on programming trends: You know what's not a bunch of JS? Devs learning Python and Java ahead of JavaScript

Re: I'm confused

That's partly fair comment, but browser-generated HTML isn't any different to HTML generated anywhere else.

I'm confused

A training site things people should copy and paste code snippets? They think devops is a role instead of a culture?

Loser Trump's last financial disclosure docs reveal Tim Cook gave him $5,999 Mac Pro, the 'first' made in Texas

Re: A HUNDRED AND FORTY QUID!?

Exactly. Such a good episode.

Brave bets on the decentralized web with IPFS browser support for a more peer-to-peer approach

This is a really great point. In a similar vein, although along social group lines rather than temporal ones, is the idea of "context collapse".

Give 'em SSPL, says Elastic. No thanks, say critics: 'Doubling down on open' not open at all

She said she thinks that companies who, like Elastic, are disgruntled with the way cloud providers use their code, are not fully understanding what open source licences mean. “The cloud providers in my experience are using it in a way that’s acceptable within the open source licences,” she said.

Yes, obviously. That's why they're changing the licence.

The hour grows late, the enemy are at the gates... but could Intel's exiled heir apparent ride to the rescue?

> I said earlier that Pat Gelsinger was transparently decent, a point that many godless Brits conflate with his Christianity, something he lives with an openness unusual even for an American. These things are connected but not contingent, he's not the sort who needs to get his morals from a book

There's no need to downplay his faith. Super unlikely you'd do it with any other one.

Hallowed Bugtraq infosec list killed then resurrected over the weekend: We heard your feedback, says Accenture

Re: "Install an ad-blocker, says CISA"

> hippy lefty nonsense like security or efficiency

No one prioritises the importance of individuals and efficiency like a large central bureaucracy.

Euro cloud slingers fight for niches on their own doorstep as AWS, Microsoft and Google inhale market share

Re: What's the definition of a cloud provider?

I love PythonAnywhere.

Vatican absolved of one financial sin after revelation of data discrepancies

“AUSTRAC has subsequently undertaken a detailed review of the data and put immediate additional quality assurance processes in place,” the response adds. The agency is also “… considering what further processes and governance changes should be implemented into the future.”

So, this was manual work, and it's still manual work, we just added another instruction to say AND DON'T MAKE ANY MISTAKES.

Watchdog urges Tesla to recall 158,000 Model S, X cars to fix knackered NAND flash that borks safety features

Re: Ah - the optimism of youth

Young people today eh?

Yeah the original Mini whose glove box would decapitate children in the front seat in an accident, that was definitely designed by young people today.

Netherlands minnow Red Kubes releases open-source Community Edition of its Otomi Kubernetes wrangler

One to watch, for sure. Kubernetes-native services are definitely attractive for the reasons they cite.

Another reason: I can spin up a little equivalent on my laptop and do stuff locally, or in CI and run integration tests. Which is nice.

Buggy code, fragile legacy systems, ill-conceived projects cost US businesses $2 trillion in 2020

Re: The role of management in software quality

they started insisting that all tasks must be estimated in two-day chunks, even the ones that can't be because they involve exploratory work and you only know that they're likely to be large and full of gotchas

Not sure I've seen that bit of the Agile manifesto.

Theranos destroyed crucial subpoenaed SQL blood test database, can't unlock backups, prosecutors say

Re: Why 'science'?

Blood test machine is engineering, not science :)

Extreme Networks misses death-of-Flash deadline, suggests winding back PC clocks to keep its GUI alive

Re: Surely not

The worst of all worlds would actually be if they hadn't done all that other stuff.