* Posts by The Indomitable Gall

1657 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Security audit finds dev outsourced his job to China to goof off at work

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Award for brilliance

The clue's right their at the top of the article: "critical infrastructure". Bob's job was in the US, and not already outsourced, because of security implications. Bob "outsourced" himself by granting access to a secure network to people not adequately vetted to connect to it. He has not only breached his contract of employment, but he has brought his employer into breach with their clients, a breach which will no doubt lead to a very, very expensive audit of every single line of the codebase.

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Now on to the second best programmer in the company

Almost. Bob isn't Alice -- Bob is Kate.

Toy train company bids for West Coast Mainline

The Indomitable Gall

Re: yeahbutnobutyeahbutnobut

I'm with you on that. If there had been some withering satire in there, I'd have supported the viral thing. eg if they'd quoted figures on failures and inefficiencies in the private rail sector.

What I was expecting was Hornby or someone making a public stand against the prostitution of our cherished industrial heritage, the degradation of rolling stock, the poor maintenance of lines etc. Instead I just got told "there's this toy company you've never heard of, and they're getting cheap publicity by spamming the civil service..."

Guess who'll grab Facebook Sponsored Stories payout? (Hint: Not the victims)

The Indomitable Gall

EPIC FAIL

OK then, go and tell us what material facts are incorrect and what is opinion masquerading as fact, because as far as I can see, Andrew is providing in-depth analysis on a current news story by looking at a very similar case study from recent history.

This is what you call "good journalism", and while Orlowski may have resorted to a little too much editorialising of late, this is the sort of critical insight that made many of us start reading the Register way back when.

I now understand US class action lawsuits infinitely better than I did this morning, and I now also understand why it is prone to abuse.

(Incidentally, what I knew before this morning was mostly based on reporting of the Google Books settlement process here on the Register....)

Mega-res telly demand to boom, say ball-gazers

The Indomitable Gall

More than that...

I had a terrible response from 4OD at my parents house over Christmas -- someone was clearly throttling it somewhere along the line, as multi-megabyte software installs downloades pretty damn quickly, and 4OD was fine at "unsocial hours". And I used to work in an office that became distinctly unproductive after 3:30 when schoolkids got home and choked up the BT bandwidth that we needed to connect to our data centre hundreds of miles away.

There isn't quite enough capacity on the internet as it is, and squeezing extra pixels into the next series of Strictly isn't a good use of what there is.

And besides, while I'd never underestimate the ability of codec writers, I'd never overestimate the intelligence of codec implementers either. MP3 was long derided as a useless music format because (as I understand it) the most popular encoders in commercial use for over a decade were really really bad at encoding music without degrading the signal atrociously.

And consider the whole backward compatibility problem -- DAB is rubbish and there's a better option (DAB+), but we can't use it because there's existing sets that don't support it. The only reason we've been able to move to Freeview+ is because of HD. Freeview+ on SD would give superior results, but it would render a lot of kit obsolete.

So if the codec writers produce that amazing new mathemagic just a little bit too late, we won't get to use it....

Twin brothers nabbed for scrap over sex with 'shared' girlfriend

The Indomitable Gall

I expect...

I expect that there'll be an "adult" film based on this true story in the works as we speak.

Tibetan monks lose their TVs as China's censors raid monasteries

The Indomitable Gall

Re: My karma just ran over my dogma

@Khaptain,

"No, not create another religion but simply to educate people to think for themselves.. We will never completely remove "ignorance" but we can reduce it."

Unfortunately, it's much easier to get the public to echo your views than to actually think for themselves. Consider the number of people who believe that science disproves religion, and consider Stephen Jay Gould's idea of "non-overlapping magisteria". It doesn't matter how much we intend to teach by logic and reason, most people who believe us are convinced purely by the presumed "authority" of the speaker, secular or religious.

Yes, hundreds upon hundreds of websites CAN all be wrong

The Indomitable Gall

Case in point: Hogmanay.

Over the last few years I've seen a new myth appear and it's all over the sodding internet: the claim that "Hogmanay" (Scottish for New Year's Eve) comes from the Gaelic "Oge maidne"... which doesn't exist. There is something similar -- "òg-mhadainn", but this means the very start of a morning (predawn, I believe). And yet it has spread so profusely that you'll even see someone posting pictures of his New Year's parties under the heading "Oge Maidne".

It's being copy-and-pasted around so much that it's killing genuine truth....

Hm, nice idea that. But somebody's already doing it less well

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Let's just...

On the other hand, several countries nearly bankrupted themselves trying to get in on the "imperial power" gig, and lots of people died in horrible painful ways....

Christmas ruined for 2,100 sex offenders booted off online games

The Indomitable Gall

@Aaron Em

<quote>Spoken like someone who doesn't know, and won't care, that convicted felons may not lawfully own firearms if any sort.</quote>

It's a satirical point -- it doesn't need to be true.

What Compsci textbooks don't tell you: Real world code sucks

The Indomitable Gall

@ AndrueC

"It's not always 'the programmer's' fault."

That was part of the message of the article, even if it was a secondary one.

But I think the problem is fundamentally this:

No matter how much design you do in advance, all programming is essentially "design by prototype" as there isn't a single programmer I know who can order his thoughts and visualise all the possible side-effects of a large codebase before he hits his IDE.

Therefore it follows that the output of any coding process is a prototype. That's what we need to start teaching to managers: "it's a prototype, it demonstrates the principles and design decisions required for making a production model, but it's not a production model." If you need to, say it's a matchstick model of the structure you want to build: it's identical aside from being a bit weak.

Kickstarted mobe charger 'kicked to death by Apple'

The Indomitable Gall

I'm no Apple fan, but....

The lighting connector is not the same as a USB connector, because the connections inside the computer are different. You don't want two different interface types that use the same physical cable, as that confuses the plebs who try to plug one into the other and get confused when it doesn't work. If the new iOS devices have internal chippery that talks both Lightning and USB, great. I have an old USB mouse at home that has a PS2 controller chip inside, and I can attach a PS2 adaptor (with no fancy components) and plug it into a PS2 port -- but that doesn't mean PS2 and USB are the same technology, and it certainly doesn't mean

that the USB standard should have mandated a PS2 connector!

I'm not a fan of Apple's money-sucking lock-in, and I will only buy Apple when my current dev project matures to the point where I have to start actively testing the cross-platform portability (and even then it will be under protest). I'm not even sure I'll be able to release for iOS (as my revenue model is more online subscription than app, and if Apple thinks it can suck 30% out of my server revenues they're sorely mistaken).

But I still wouldn't criticise them for using a different shaped connector for a different type of connection!

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Licensing terms - tried that

"Whatever happened to the EU directive that phones shall use a micro-USB charger? ."

Someone tacked on the proviso that it's compliant if an adaptor is available, neatly sidestepping the whole effing point of having a standard charging connector.

PGP, TrueCrypt-encrypted files CRACKED by £300 tool

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Not True.

Are you using "hibernate" or "sleep"?

Laptops have a sleep mode where the computer goes into a low power mode and keeps memory in RAM.

"Hibernation" is possible on any PC: Windows writes the full system state to disc then powers down.

If your computer takes a few seconds, it's just taking a nap, not bedding down for the winter, so it keeps the power connected to RAM while cutting the processor and hard-drive.

The Indomitable Gall

Hibernation files

I believe that once you activate the possibility of hibernation, a file is automatically created to reserve that space. It would be a bit of a bugger if you were in a rush to leave and hit "hibernate", only to have Windows start up the "disk cleanup wizard" for you....

Wikipedia doesn't need your money - so why does it keep pestering you?

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Wikipedia has a lot of problems

Grown up discussions usually involve people with a name.

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Wikipedia has a lot of problems

One of the biggest problems with wikipedia these days is the idiots who think they know more about a subject than other people who have written on the subject or who wont say where th einfo comes from

The biggest problem with Wikipedia these days is the collection of admins who will ferociously monitor a page to prevent anyone else from editing it but themselves. Therefore making sure that the information on the page is basically their own opinion. As a result

1. They edit the page to add some text which they hold to be self-evident truth

2. Another editor then has to remove the edit, because it doesn't fit his pedantic, public-school idea of good English ("you and me"?!? Egads!), doesn't make sense, or he just doesn't like it so points out that it doesn't comply exactly to the letter of one of the many woolly standards for sourcing

3. They revert their revert, rightfully ignoring the spurious reason why the self-important mod claimed it wasn't acceptable in the first place. (2 and 3 may repeat a couple of times)

4. An admin then locks the page, puffs up his chest in a self-righteous rage and says: "he was wrong".

{{ref|http://xkcd.com/386/}}

The Indomitable Gall
Stop

Re: I'm shocked, SHOCKED

Defend them all you want, but I would urge you to reread the appeal that they put on their website before doing so. They did not ask for money to defend internet freedoms. They did not ask for money to get certain photographs that WP contributors hadn't been able to source for free. They asked for money, and they cited only the operating costs of the website: servers, power, rent, programs, staff and legal help. It is not unreasonable for readers to assume that they need this money for the free volunteer encyclopedia bit.

It is dishonest.

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Out of that entire article

"It's just a bit of hyperbole"¹ ..... "massive cash pile"²

¹[citation needed]

²[citation needed]

{{ref|http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia_chugging/}}

Newspapers articles have always been acceptable sources for Wikipedia.

Musos blast US copyright bods: 'ARTISTS MAKE LOUSY SLAVES!'

The Indomitable Gall

Re: The way to do it...

Ah indeed... recorded music as advertising for live gigs -- excellent idea. These live gigs certainly need all the advertising they can get, as they are the artists' main means of promoting their recorded music. So let's build a perpetual motion merry-go-round of advertising adverts for adverts advertising adverts of adverts.

2. ????

3. PROFIT!

Micro-computer bakers open Raspberry Pi shop

The Indomitable Gall

Code::blocks

Has Code::blocks every been taken to court for that logo? It's more than slightly reminiscent of another one.

Look out, world! Are you ready for John McAfee: THE MOVIE?

The Indomitable Gall

Free for 30 days...?

Yup, it'll be free for 30 days, but just try getting it back out of the DVD player afterwards -- there'll be bits of it left behind clogging up the mechanism and making it run slow....

2012: A generation-spanning year for gaming

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Ouya is an onomatopoeic name

Vapourware? How so? It's a marketing dream: commodity Chinese components (Android phone internals), in a box, minus the two most expensive components (screen and battery). The only actual work they have to do to release it is set up their own app store and convince a few devs to upload their games. 2: PROFIT.

Stroustrup on next-gen C++: I didn't want to let go of my baby

The Indomitable Gall
Stop

Not understand the whole language...?

“A lot of people look at C++ and want to understand every dark corner. This is what you do if you want to be a compiler writer, but most people should look at what is the easiest way to write a good solution for their problem," said Stroustrup.

Oh no. Heck no. Hell no. F*** no.

That's hacking, not programming. It leads to training people to hack, rather than to program.

If I appear to be repeating myself, it's because it's a Very Important Point.

The world has enough different languages already, generating lots of incompatible code. When your language encourages people only to learn subsets of itself, it becomes effectively a myriad of closely related languages, but undefined and uncontrolled languages. "So you're a C++ programmer. Does that mean C++.subset(a,b,c), .subset(d,g,z) or .subset(f,m,dribble)?"

I suppose it may be fairer to call it "dialectisation", but the end result is that code is harder to share and maintain, because programmers' expectations and assumptions vary so far from each other's.

People hack the solution from the coding techniques they know, because the right way to do it is obscured.

If you really want a language that supports multiple subsets of functionality, you have to find a way to segregate and mark them clearly and unambiguously, so that programmers are able to identify what they know and look for what they don't know.

Business sues for $750,000 over bad Yelp review

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Well,

Quite. But theft's for the *criminal* court to decide, and presumably she reported it at the time and the police decided there wasn't enough proof. Innocent until proven guilty....

The best e-readers for Christmas

The Indomitable Gall

Bedtime reading...?

Given the constant claims that backlit screens are particularly bad for messing up melatonin production, isn't it worth pointing out that an e-ink based screen is a far better option for your wee bittie bedtime reading...?

Pioneering spidernaut snuffs it after short Smithsonian stay

The Indomitable Gall

Preserve it in aspic.

Preserve the body in aspic. Or maybe even amber, for extra Jurassic Park kudos.

Forget fluorescents, plastic lighting strips coming out next year

The Indomitable Gall

@AC re: LEDs

"The cost is to high and the reliability hasn't been that good. Of the twenty I've bought so far 4 of them have failed within the first week which gives me reason to doubt I'll get the advertised 20,000 hours of use from the remaining ones."

Failures in solid-state semiconductors are generally rare. Early failure normally indicates a manufacturing fault. And manufacturing faults usually result in early failures.

IE expect the duff ones to die very quickly, and expect the decent ones to last a long time.

Chinese student fails job interview because of iPhone

The Indomitable Gall
Stop

"the gesture" @ Ole Juul

"But I am puzzled at to why the kid would pull out any electronic aids at an interview other than to make an impression. That gesture by itself is suspect in exactly the ways detailed by the interviewer."

Let me suggest a perfectly innocent reason: maybe it went off during the interview, and he wanted to silence it. Benefit of the doubt, yes?

Microsoft Surface with Windows 8 Pro gets laptop-level price

The Indomitable Gall

Exactly.

Two different devices. One's a tablet, and the other's a laptop. With a very shitty keyboard.

The Lord of the Rings saga lies hidden deep in your Mac

The Indomitable Gall

Legal implications...?

Is it just me that thinks it would be utterly hilarious if Apple got ripped open by the Tolkien estate for this one...?

The Indomitable Gall

Re: I remember a time

When I was a student in Edinburgh, he AI department used fish for the workstations, ran out of common ones, and started onto methods of cooking them. The CS department used Scottish islands but were running out of names and was resorting to various little skerries and sea rocks on the admiralty charts....

Staples to offer in-store full color 3D printing service

The Indomitable Gall

The pragmatist in me...

The pragmatist in me says "horses for courses". No-one buys a differential gearbox at Staples anyway....

Six of the best Nintendo Wii U games

The Indomitable Gall

The point/devs.

"Until devs start to actually make use of the hardware in the WiiU fully, I just don't see any point getting it when I have my current consoles."

Which devs? Me, I'm think Android, Linux and PC hackers. If I can use a Wii U Controller with them... cool. My wee Galaxy can sit in my pocket while benefitting from a bigger screen and proper game controls, or pipe my Skype between the controller and the net. And when I get home I can do the exact same thing with my PC. At work, I could use it with dual-screen on my PC to control presentations with more finesse, previewing the next slide before announcing it and changing the order of slides on the fly to respond better to my audience and cover subjects that repeat without having to copy slides (and risk versioning problems when I start editing).

Scoop! The inside story of the news website that saved the BBC

The Indomitable Gall

Ads before vids...

Yup, annoys the hell out of me here when I go to watch a 30-second video and get forced to watch a 1-minute advert first.

Of course, that's exactly the same reason why I never watched the ITN channel in MSN video back when I was living in the UK, so it's hardly specific to the BBC....

The Indomitable Gall

Hyphenation

Hyphens haven't been "banned", people have just started giving sensible advice about when to use them. A compound term can be pronounced as one word, two words, or something in between. If it was pronounced as one word, it would be "dumbingdown". If it was pronounced as one-and-a-half, it would be "dumbing-down". But it's pronounced as two clear, distinct words, so it's "dumbing down".

There was a period of "hyphen escalation", where the policy was "if in doubt, hyphenate", but it was never "correct" per se.

Ten weird Chinese mobile phones

The Indomitable Gall
FAIL

...that would be awesome!

(Until you want to send a text.)

Badges for Commentards

The Indomitable Gall

New HTML...?

But wait, this box says "Plain text only -- no HTML allowed"...!

Is there a list of all permitted HTML somewhere?

Jock and Awe: Scottish schools' sixty-mil 'slab splurge

The Indomitable Gall
Stop

Oh dearie me no....

I can't say I'm enamoured of this idea at all. I'm Scottish myself, and a teacher -- although at present I'm teaching at a university overseas. As you might guess, that makes me a language teacher, and I really can't see the use case for this at all. I'm not a luddite -- far from it: I've just left a career in IT management, and in my spare time I'm developing language learning software, so theoretically I have an interest in "a tablet in every schoolbag". The problem is that I see the touchscreen interface influencing pedagogical decisions too much, leading to (most likely) the use of trashy Rosetta Stone "click the right picture" tasks, as well as the word juggling of the "fridge poetry" style tasks that are gaining traction in the online language sphere.

What's missing is the keyboard, which is key to my whole workflow.

People rail against keyboard-based language learning on the grounds that language is primarily aural. This is true, but then again that's why you've got a teacher in the classroom! IT in schools should be a supplement to instruction, and written language is a supplement to spoken language. The synergy is obvious: talk in class, write at home. And "writing" means "typing", which means "keyboards", which means "sod off, tablet!"

Pong creator turns nose up at Nintendo Wii U

The Indomitable Gall

The flaw in your argument....

Wireless HDMI.

A powerful smartphone can already generate HD on the fly. If we accept graphics 1.5 gen out of date, a smartphone can double as a console...

Heroic Register reader battles EXPLODING COMPUTER

The Indomitable Gall

Offboard PSUs...?

Seriously, isn't it time we took the least reliable and most potentially damaging component (not to mention a major heat source) *out* *of* *the* *big* *box*?!?

Convert your iPad into a foosball table and relive the dot-com days

The Indomitable Gall

The privilege of seeing things in relation.

The fact that this appeared around the same time as the article on magazines puts me in mind of the "Innovations" catalogue of the 90s. Lots of cool gadgets and gizmos of minimal practical use....

The secrets of spacetime revealed - on your workbench!

The Indomitable Gall

Surely shome mishtake?

"As an aside, the experiment takes advantage of yet another bit of quantum strangeness. It proposes using a single photon – but the lenses I mentioned at the top are designed to focus the light wave so that it’s the same size as the block. Wave-particle duality in practice!"

Erm... isn't strangeness a property of quarks? How can a photon exhibit strangeness? Careful with the terminology now....

Jubcropgate: El Reg in snake-fondling nude nipslip outrage

The Indomitable Gall

OUTRAGE!!!!

If you look back at the comments to the original story, there wasn't any outrage -- the problem was that El Reg had broken the sacred code of NSFW. A few people were worried about corporate JDAs and off-the-shoulder eyeballs. This article is just overstating it for amusing effect.....

Lawrence 'Empire Strikes Back' Kasdan to pen future Star Wars script

The Indomitable Gall

Pedantry....

I thought the verb "divvy" was pretty much accepted these days, leading to a regular past form of "divvied"...?

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Why not...

A) They're crap.

B) They're derivative and unimaginative.

C) They're based on an interpretation of the single mention of the term "clone wars" that isn't in line with the meaning introducing in the prequel trilogy.

Do you know a chimp who's feeling doleful? Mid-life crisis, probably

The Indomitable Gall
IT Angle

IT angle...?

Come on, El Reg -- where's the IT angle? I'll give you a clue: Belize. Running from the cops with someone young enough to be his granddaughter. How could you have missed it?

Ten Linux apps you must install

The Indomitable Gall

However...

If you're a fan of the command-line, then you should heartily approve of anything that fits the proper Unix computing model and interfaces with a command-line tool rather than reinventing the wheel -- hence ClamTk, GParted, LuckyBackup and SMPlayer. This sort of tool prevents coders from migrating away from command-line apps by keeping them relevant and accessible to all users.

And in fact this is our best weapon in the war against bloat: low coupling, high encapsulation, high reusability.

Freeview to be nudged down to clear 5G bands in 2018

The Indomitable Gall
Coat

Elvis has left the building.

<-- But he left this lovely sequin jacket behind.