* Posts by Robert Grant

2234 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Aug 2006

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

Robert Grant

Some potential causes

- software treated as projects that "resources" are assigned to briefly, instead of having a team of people that that build and maintain them (part/full time)

- software treated as projects where success is measured in dollars spent and deadlines met, rather than working software that can create a lot of value

- software architected by people who don't think in systems

Consultants bag £375m for their role in developing the UK's faltering COVID-19 Test and Trace system

Robert Grant

Re: Don't forget the middlemen

The big consultancies are normally minimum of 40% profit on each person.

Crowdfunded Asahi project aims for 'polished' Linux experience on Apple Silicon

Robert Grant

Re: I don't see why Apple would stand in the way of this

Given they're a luxury good, a single action that grows the number by less than 1% is still pretty useful.

React team observes that running everything on the client can be costly, aims to fix it with Server Components

Robert Grant

Server Components are not the same as server-side rendering and there are no ugly screen refreshes as users navigate a page

Server-side rendering doesn't imply screen refreshes like that. SSR is an initial server-side render of React (or equivalent) code into HTML, with all the events etc attached, but still works like React (or equivalent) once it hits the browser. You're thinking of old-school request/response full page refreshes.

Open-source contributors say they'll pull out of Qt as LTS release goes commercial-only

Robert Grant

Last year Knoll said: "None of these changes should affect how Qt is being developed. There won't be any changes to Open Governance or the open development model."

Cool, so still please contribute for free, you just can't use it now.

Robert Grant

Re: @AC - Open source

Yikes, no.

New York Stock Exchange bins China’s three biggest telcos

Robert Grant

Re: China's awash with capital

Nope. If you check any news or social media source you'll see plenty of vocal opposition to incumbents. It might be different for countries who do not have open elections.

Robert Grant

Re: China's awash with capital

> Huge swings across the board going against the polls. Implausible, unbelievable, unreal.

It's not a swing if it's bad polling. Shy Republicanism is a big thing.

Julian Assange will NOT be extradited to the US over WikiLeaks hacking and spy charges, rules British judge

Robert Grant

"Free speech does not comprise a 'trump card' even where matters of serious public concern are disclosed," said the judge in a passage that will be alien to American readers, whose country's First Amendment reverses that position.

It does not reverse that position. The US want to prosecute him under US law.

Google says it’s the cleanest cloud, also reveals deal with Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company for new cloud region

Robert Grant

Sounds like the article did its job.

North of England NHS buyers name IT consultants who got in on £200m framework deal

Robert Grant

Re: not chickenfeed but hardly whopping

Nowhere did that comment mention that the amounts were insufficient.

Elon Musk says he tried to sell Tesla to Apple, which didn’t bite and wouldn't even meet

Robert Grant

Tesla is driven by Elon Musk's charisma and little else.

I'm pretty sure it takes more than that to launch a line of electric cars. This was ludicrous even only 15 years ago.

Ethical power supplier People's Energy hacked, 250,000 customers' personal info accessed

Robert Grant

Re: And who believes any unsolicited phone callers these days?

I'd suggest making sure you have an app you can push official comms through

Google told BGP to forget its Euro-cloud – after first writing bad access control lists

Robert Grant
Coat

Re: Clouds are great!

> Stick with Einstein's dictum: everything should be as complicated as necessary but not more.

I can't tell if "no more" was the end of the quote or just the web server dying and sending that as its last message.

They were not the cloud you were looking for, insists Amazon Web Services in unsealed JEDI protest

Robert Grant

Re: Things that might have invalidated MS's bid

Exactly my feelings. This also means that US taxpayers pay for software running on that infrastructure that is not going to lock them into the winning cloud vendor indefinitely.

UK union pens letter to data watchdog on icky workplace monitoring systems like Microsoft's Productivity Score

Robert Grant

Re: Templates...

Yeah. It conflates "using Microsoft products" and productivity. This is not accidental.

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

Robert Grant

It's kind of a tech company too, but in a good-enough sort of way rather than the "hey, we invented the transistor" sort of way.

Exactly. That's why I use IE11, Azure Service Fabric, Apple Maps and Bing. Because they're just as good as Google's mediocre tech.

Linus Torvalds launches Linux kernel 5.10, warns devs not to send 5.11 code too close to Christmas

Robert Grant
Joke

Re: bye bye 2038->1901, I'll not miss you at all.

1901 was the best year anyway! Everyone knew their place, amirite?

Back to the Fuchsia, part IV: Google's in-development OS now open to community contributions

Robert Grant

Re: "Google is well known for enthusing about projects and later abandoning them."

This is the meat of the issue. Is this going to be another Google playtoy to be abandoned when it grows bored? Their track record certainly discourages me from contributing or buying their products.

I only have an Android because Apple is worse and Microsoft is gone.

I like that you think Microsoft is better having already done what you're worried about Google doing is.

Robert Grant

Re: Whatever.

What sort of applications are you going to run on meshed dust?

Robert Grant

Re: Whatever.

> Is it really competition? I think for "real" computer users, absolutely none of them are viable options. So they can all roll around in the muck together.

Real as in human?

Adios California, Oracle the latest tech firm to leave California for the wide open (low tax) Lone Star State

Robert Grant

I like that you think housing cost isn't about money.

Apple appears to be charging Brits £309 to replace AirPods Max batteries, while Americans need only stump up $79

Robert Grant

Re: Not so.

> Likewise the idiot who bought it from you

Only if that increase is inflation-adjusted :)

OnePlus founder scores $7m from iPod inventor and other investors for audio startup

Robert Grant

Re: Audio Hardware?

Beats? :)

Cisco challenges the tyranny of Outlook with short, self-terminating Webex meetings

Robert Grant

> Noise cancellation has been enhanced so that those working from home in noisy environments or using a blender during a meeting will be heard. The blender is not a rhetorical flourish: Cisco's demo literally showed off a user making a smoothie while collaborating productively.

This actually sounds quite cool. And I say this as a hater of Webex.

Life after proprietary wares: German support biz flees IBM Db2 databases for something more Postgres-shaped

Robert Grant

So they think Postgres is just about good enough for that?

Robert Grant

> It may be for a very good department-size database; just good enough.

What on earth is a department-sized database?

GitHub turns on money tap for corporate open-source donations, turns off the lights with dark mode design

Robert Grant

> "The clean separation between the two buckets is actually really important for productivity," said Schoening.

This sounds real.

Another piece comes to .NET Core: Microsoft will keep the runtime patched automatically

Robert Grant

Docker, people

Docker on K8s, separated from human contact by an API, squirrelled away somewhere on a server only CI (or an audited, temporarily-allowed human) can access. Minimise the chances that an exploit is anywhere near reachable and you're off to a good start.

Happy silver jubilee to JavaScript, king of the web at 25 and still hanging on to its crown, for now

Robert Grant

Re: Good news and bad news

Python won't have ever done that. It's strongly typed. You may only find out in production, if you didn't test it, but it won't mix up types.

Robert Grant

Re: Office 365 is worse than LibreOffice

If you've used the collaboration features in the native apps and seen them crash repeatedly compared to web, you might consider them to not cut it either.

AWS adds a ‘Would you like services with that?’ option to its software Marketplace

Robert Grant

I wonder if contractors could sign up to sell services directly. What's the IR35 view on that?

AWS Babelfish for PostgreSQL: A chance to slip the net of some SQL Server licensing costs?

Robert Grant

Yes. The basic stuff may be the majority, though. It'll be interesting to see if they start encroaching on SSIS and PowerBI next.

UK government puts £750m on the table as it looks to deal directly with cloud providers

Robert Grant

Re: Who has bought a stake in the company that gets the deal?

> The governments' view seems to be that we need to privatize all public money.

What does this mean? Most government spending is on private companies, and it all comes from private money.

Robert Grant

Your analogies are off, though. Cloud isn't people renting physical servers and operating them yourself, like a freight company buying or leasing a fleet. It's outsourcing a service to someone else, like hiring a freight company. You take it on trust the company is not looking at or stealing your stuff.

Robert Grant

The difference is that electricity is fungible and has something stronger than assurances and audits to prove it isn't exfiltrating your data.

Uncle Sam sues Facebook for allegedly discriminating against US workers in favor of foreigners on H-1B visas

Robert Grant

Re: Temporary visa holders often have limited job mobility

Being able to work in a country which you couldn't work in before is not a restriction of rights. It's a conditional expansion of them.

Robert Grant

Re: Temporary visa holders often have limited job mobility

It's a form of indentured labour that you sign up to with conditions, and can leave when you want.

Or we could call it what it is, which is "nothing like indentured labour".

'Massive game-changer for UK altnet industry': BT-owned UK comms backbone Openreach hikes prices on FTTP-linked leased line circuits

Robert Grant

Roll on Starlink.

LibreOffice 7.1 beta boasts impressive range of features let down by a lack of polish and poor mobile efforts

Robert Grant

Re: Unit testing

Regression testing is what people called the massive test effort to find any previous bugs. Now we can just run automated tests all the time, we don't need a specific name for regression testing. It's just testing.

Infused with the spirit of Christmas, TalkTalk decides to extend cut-off deadline for Business email domain

Robert Grant

Re: Maybe they could....

Tiscali! We had them. And LineOne.

No idea where the emails went, though.

'We've heard the feedback...' Microsoft 365 axes per-user productivity monitoring after privacy backlash

Robert Grant

Re: I don't understand

I don't think this is a workers' rights issue, nor a cultural issue from the CEO (he will be far too far removed for that). It's the local team and exec over it, I think, who will be the factors.

Robert Grant

I don't understand

How can an organisation make something like this and not predict the backlash? It screams hubristic management and fearful staff.

AWS boss calls for racial justice, slams enterprise rivals, unveils a raft of real and promised services

Robert Grant

Re: BabelFish

Very intriguing. Can't wait to see the code!

Your laptop may have just survived 2020 – but is it ready for 2023?

Robert Grant

I'm confused

Likewise, Intel® Hardware Shield includes security technologies such as Intel® Trusted Execution Technology and Intel® Threat Detection Technology (TDT, which offer protection “below the operating system”. And the Intel® Stable IT Platform Programme smooths transitions by stabilising key systems components for 15 months and validating multiple versions of Windows 10 for any given version of the platform.

Is Intel a registered trademark? I'm not sure.

Marmite of scripting languages PHP emits version 8.0, complete with named arguments and other goodies

Robert Grant

The problem with PHP is "best practice" is stuff to work around the craziness of the language, rather than ways to make your code as well-structured and high-performance as possible.

Python's mutable default arguments are so well known because they're a rare case of the language doing something unexpected, and so require a "best practice" rule. PHP is full of such cases.

Robert Grant

They keep blaming best practice

Best practice is what you need if your tool is terrible. Oblig: https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

Second oblig: https://devhumor.com/media/the-year-is-2038-stackoverflow-has-become-sentient

How the US attacked Huawei: Former CEO of DocuSign and Ariba turned diplomat Keith Krach tells his tale

Robert Grant

Re: Which People ?

Would you mind providing a link?

AWS admits to 'severely impaired' services in US-EAST-1, can't even post updates to Service Health Dashboard

Robert Grant

Re: what a great day

> The last company I was at was spending upwards of $300k/mo on public cloud. I could of built something that could do the handle their workloads for under $1M.

Does that include staffing your solution? And was their cloud solution cost-optimised, or could you have got that cost down as well?

Redis becomes the most popular database on AWS as complex cloud application deployments surge

Robert Grant

Cloud Redis is very expensive. The Azure one requires the top tier price to get persistence.