Posts by Robert Grant

Accounting expert told judge Autonomy was wrong not to disclose hardware sales

Re: Hardware on the Accounts

I don't really see why - they can just report on the two lines separately if they want to.

Re: Auditors....

Due diligence, and audit in general, seems a bit of a joke. Or do we only hear about it when it doesn't work?

Rockstar dev debate reopens: Hero programmers do exist, do all the work, do chat a lot – and do need love and attention from project leaders

Re: Rockstar Devs?

The assumption most make is a rockstar dev can be parachuted into another project with very little domain knowledge and excel; not going to happen.

Sure, but they will excel much faster. And people who can write good code, spot edge cases, test well, and have a high bar for themselves generally, and do all the same for other team members, will always be a lot more valuable than someone who can't, almost regardless of domain.

Also, most real rockstars devs I have met were rather unassuming not egotists that is implied by the term.

The term exists because these sorts of engineers were so undervalued in businesses.

Principled individuals may reject the notion of software heroes outright because the very concept can be taken as antithetical to the abstract notion of equality. But it's important to distinguish between equality as a civil right – everyone deserves equal treatment under the law – and equality as an assertion that everyone is the same.

How is this even on the table? Don't forget arithmetic equality - we don't mean that one either.

And other principled individuals will say that some people are more valuable to a project than others. That's one of the reasons why we compensate them differently.

South American nations open fire on ICANN for 'illegal and unjust' sale of .amazon to zillionaire Jeff Bezos

A suggestion

How about all region domain names come under the .reg tldn. Then they can have amazon.reg

Then El Reg can use its vast war chest to steal that TLDN and incense all the regions everywhere. Take that Bezos, you amateur!

Re: All of this would have never happened ...

Why would they care? They're still getting the money.

The problem here is the PR failure - if the US government can't be trusted to side against a non-US corporation from time to time, then they can't really be seen to be benevolent DNS dictators for life.

Wave goodbye: DigitalOcean decimates workforce as co-founder reveals lack of profitability, leadership turmoil

Re: Can a company lacking the economies of scale of Amazon, Microsoft or Alibaba

I like that they're thinking quite big; e.g. the fact they offer k8s PAAS.

Register Lecture: Can portable atomic clocks end UK dependence on GNSS?

Re: The European Commission and Galileo

The EC's attitude and complications as regards non-NATO EU members maybe encouraging an increase in the importance/use of 5 Eyes.

This is pretty normal, though. Complications about who helps whom at the national / territory / treaty / bloc / etc level are always going to be a thing. Military types are used to it, and very good at it.

National Lottery Sentry MBA hacker given nine months in jail after swiping just £5

Re: This seems out of proportion to the offense

it cost a charitable organisation £230K to respond to the attacks

This will be nonsense, unless they're paying £230 per minute. In which case their procurement is at fault.

Samsung’s aspirational Galaxy Chromebook: Shell out $1k for a fast beaut (and remember to try Linux if you're into that)

Samsung Galaxy Chromebook is arguably the most aspirational Chrome OS device we've encountered since the original launch of the Chromebook Pixel in 2013

"Aspirational"? Let's say "expensive". That's fine, and doesn't sound like a drone pulled it from the short list of "2019's Advertising Words".

Reusing software 'interfaces' is fine, Google tells Supreme Court, pleads: Think of the devs

Ethical developers and businesses around the world continue to recognize the value of Java and take advantage of our licenses to drive innovation and profit.

And that's why Kotlin...doesn't exist?

Linux in 2020: 27.8 million lines of code in the kernel, 1.3 million in systemd

A config syntax as good as that needs some PowerShell to script it.

Stack Overflow makes peace with ousted moderator, wants to start New Year with 2020 vision on codes of conduct

The article is...not great

I can't believe there's no mention in it of the incredibly bad attitude displayed in "allowing" the moderator to reapply. Reapply for what reason? Why isn't she just reinstated?

Brother, can you spare a dime: Flickr owner sends mass-email begging for subscriptions

Re: The Rubicon has already been crossed

Why would I pay $49/year for them to provide me what amounts to a bit of web hosting?

It depends on the scale, right? If it's 50MB or less, then sure, that sounds a bit like Web hosting, and about 1-5 photos. If you've got multiple terabytes of photos, $9/mo starts to look pretty good.

You likely pay services such as Netflix and Spotify at least $9 per month. I love services like these, and I'm a happy paying customer, but they don't keep your priceless photos safe

Good job he didn't mention Prime here, because it also has free unlimited photo storage.

JavaScript survey: Devs love a bit of React, but Angular and Cordova declining. And you're not alone... a chunk of pros also feel JS is 'overly complex'

JavaScript devs are also enjoying graphql more than Redux for the data layer

They aren't equivalents. GraphQL is like REST; i.e. you might replace Axios with a GraphQL client. Redux is state management inside the client Javascript code.

Remember Unrollme, the biz that helped you automatically ditch unwanted emails? Yeah, it was selling your data

Re: This is, of course, not illegal.

which just means that they have to tell you what they want the info for, and ensure that they don't do anything else

And they pass that same condition to their 3rd parties. Along with they and their 3rd parties must be able to provide all their data on you at your request, and you have a right to be forgotten. On pain of much fine.

It's 2019 so, of course, this Wells Fargo employee accused of stealing customer cash posed with wads of dosh on Instagram, Facebook

Business idea

Social media platform dedicated to securely storing incriminating evidence. Criminals will love it.

Hate speech row: Fine or jail anyone who calls people boffins, geeks or eggheads, psychology nerd demands

Re: these terms are "divisive and humiliating,"

when those words are followed up with physical abuse, then their function is that of hate speech

In that case the physical abuse is the problem. Expand hate speech rules if you hate speech.

Google security engineer says she was fired for daring to remind Googlers they do indeed have labor rights

Re: I think the straw man is unemployed

Access to the labour market is a fair exchange for providing workers with particular skills or knowledge oppotunities to be rewarded and sustained without them necessarily needing to have all the skills to run a business themselves.

Not just the skills, but the capital and the risk are taken care of by someone else. And sometimes owners are ruined due to the risk, and sometimes they're not, and the latter are rewarded with people commenting that they've not deserved what they've got.

Re: We cannot let upper management dictate how we use our labor.

Society, meaning the collection of actual real people in the country, allow companies to exist.

I like that you think companies are anything other than people. What a bizarre false dichotomy.

Re: Can someone please explain...

The basic issue is manglement control. With a union, manglement does not have as much control over the indentured servants and they might have to treat servants something approximating a human being.

I can't believe you're saying this about Google. Look at their list of employee benefits, it's insane. "Something approximating a human being"...really?

Admins sigh as Microsoft pushes Teams changes – let everyone play!

Slack does this pretty well

If you want a plugin to be installed, you can click Install and if you don't have permission, it tells you it's been sent to an admin for approval, who can just approve or deny easily, and then you get notified. Very easy, and IT control it as well.

DeepMind founder behind NHS data slurp to be beamed up to Google mothership

Re: I'm sure it's all in our best interests

Your first diagnosis is free. Pay $5 to unlock the second!

If you want an example of how user concerns do not drive software development, check out this Google-backed API

Logic 101

If you want an example of how user concerns do not drive how software gets made, check out this Google-backed API

I think you mean:

If you want an example of when user concerns did not drive how software got made, check out this Google-backed API

An example does not prove a generality.

Internet Society CEO: Most people don't care about the .org sell-off – and nothing short of a court order will stop it

Most people looking for a domain name get it through a company that is overwhelmingly commercial.

This is particularly cynical. Sure, they get it through a for-profit company such as GoDaddy or 123-Reg, but that's completely irrelevant.

After four years, Rust-based Redox OS is nearly self-hosting

Re: It's also a lot more vague. "Everything has a location and a default handler" is pretty generic.

Rather than being explicitly wrong and saying everything's a file?

They could be totally correct and say everything has the empty set of properties, as a minimum.

The balance between usefulness and correctness isn't always "as correct as possible".

courtesy of inferred typing instead of strong typing

What a weird false dichotomy.

Re: I'm tempted...

It's also a lot more vague. "Everything has a location and a default handler" is pretty generic.

Go champion retires after losing to AI, Richard Nixon deepfake gives a different kind of Moon-landing speech...

Re: @ Chris the BeanCounter

But they're certainly guilty of and heavily invested in the technological infrastructure which makes that shit possible. It's already far more intrusive and pervasive than anything dreamed of by the Stasi.

Presence of technology doesn't imply usage. We also have nukes, only dreamt of by the Nazis, which make much worse things possible. Had them for 70 years.

Oracle finally responds to wage discrimination claims… by suing US Department of Labor

That sounds like the title earns the salary, not the job. E.g. Netflix's engineers are all "senior engineer", but they will be paid different amounts, some $250k more than others. Because managers want people with the right skills, and will pay for them, and those skills are often moving too fast for job titles to keep up. And, the competitiveness around individuals is high as well.

This is why footballers are not all paid the same, and houses don't all cost the same. This is reality. Same salary bands for job titles is the fiction. It helps with some things for business owners (e.g. keeps wages lower for certain jobs), but stops you hiring the best.

Bad news: 'Unblockable' web trackers emerge. Good news: Firefox with uBlock Origin can stop it. Chrome, not so much

which can unmask CNAME shenanigans

How does this tell the difference between shenanigans and legitimate uses of CNAME?

Also, can't this also be done with an A record to a designated subdomain?

We lose money on repairs, sobs penniless Apple, even though we charge y'all a fortune

Presumably they lose money on everything, if you don't count it against the purchase price

Raw materials, R&D, software, running the App Store, logistics, employees. We lose money on everything!

The lure of Brexit Britain proves too great for DevOps pipeline wrangler CircleCI

Re: Alternatively...

If there's no services agreement set up then it'll be tariff-tastic, if it's allowed at all.

Like a BAT outta hell, Brave browser hits 1.0 with crypto-coin rewards for your fave websites

Re: What's so wrong with just using a donate buttton?

I don't think it mines them.

Thanks, Brexit. Tesla boss Elon Musk reveals Berlin as location for Euro Gigafactory

Everyone approves of Health, Education and Infrastructure, I assume.

Hard to understand this. Of course people approve of those things, but not reallocating a billion quid to it purely for vote-buying. One assumes that billion was going somewhere useful beforehand as well.

Re: No, the UK was never in the running

It's almost as though the world economies hit a ceiling in 2017 and global car sales started to fall.

Almost.

They're building the factory in Europe instead of the UK because global car sales started to fall? It almost makes too much sense.

Beardy biologist's withering takedown of creationism fetches $564,500 at auction

Re: Darwin is still a very naughty boy ...

on the whole the book was reasonably well received and not nearly as controversial as we like to think.

Indeed nonsense like the following is pretty ignorant:

It was a scandalous book in its day because it refuted the creationist doctrine that life in all its diversity was snapped into existence fully formed by God. "Design implies a designer" and all that.

Running on Intel? If you want security, disable hyper-threading, says Linux kernel maintainer

Re: makes sense

security is a lot more than just making sure you have the latest patch

As you correctly imply, it includes having the latest patch

Watch Waymo's totally driverless self-driving car cruise around, how the US military wants to use AI ethically, etc

It might be worth an editor checking this article for its many typos and childlike tone.

When it comes to ML, reports of JavaScript's death are exaggerated

Surely:

rectilinear_chicken_count = max(0, rectilinear_chicken_storage_x * rectilinear_chicken_storage_y)

Re: it allows you to perform a subtraction between a string and an integer without raising an error

Oh, I have no problem with type coercion. It can be a good thing, especially in exploratory/analytical workloads. It's one of the key reasons Python is so popular in this space.

Can you give an example of Python type coercion?

Traffic lights worldwide set to change after Swedish engineer saw red over getting a ticket

Re: Show this to the Mexican police

Might be worth reading the text after the ellipsis.

Not a good look, Google: Pixel 4 mobes can be face-unlocked even if you're asleep... or dead?

Erm

potentially when you're asleep or dead.

And sadly Face Unlock is the the only biometric system the Pixel 4 uses to handle security. Past builds had a fingerprint sensor, and that's missing from the new handset.

Pretty sure your fingerprint can be used if you're asleep.

Nix to the mix: Chrome to block passive HTTP content swirled into HTTPS pages

Re: I thought Chrome already did this, at least sometimes?

They would also pop up a box warning you of https as well, though.

Google security crew sheds light on long-running super-stealthy iOS spyware operation

Re: Email?

Knowing an email address is enough to receive spam. No passwords required.

AI is cool and all – but doctors and patients don't really need it

Re: This is only surprising to the tech industry

The tech industry also creates many, many things that are useful. Not sure what point you thought you made.

Don't read this, Oracle... It's the rise of the open-source data strategies

Re: Another Competitor

As in DB2? I think the same problem exists for this, or worse, in that I've never met anyone in the tech world who's said to me, "We're writing something new - thinking of using DB2 as the database."

Surprise! Wireless brain implants are not secure, and can be hijacked to kill you or steal thoughts

Brainwaves for encryption? Haruki Murakami waves from 1985: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard-Boiled_Wonderland_and_the_End_of_the_World

SAP okays Java EE being Eclipsed, six months after Oracle's announcement

Didn't know SAP did press releases on here!

Hope they paid handsomely.