Posts by John Smith 19

Christmas Eve ERP migration derailed by silly spreadsheet sort

Extract, Translate & Load on Xmas Eve.

Genius.*

I smells a bonus at stake or a PHB with zero home life at work.

*Smart move about the no "lessons learned / wrap up " meeting afterwards.

Chinese boffins: We're testing an 'impossible' EM Drive IN SPAAAACE

Some people think it sounds crazy, some don't

But I'm kind of guessing that if the Chinese Academy is investigating it it's because

a)Some very VIP has required them to.

b)They know something others don't

While it's possible it's I'd guess if there was any obvious way this could be shot down it would have already been done.

Space is the logical place to test this and in principle a crewed station is an excellent position to do so. Let's see what happens./

Microsoft scores nearly $1bn non-compete contract with US military

Wow, $1Bn up front.

Nice work if you can get it.

"Blue badge support"

In the UK that means they would all have disabled parking?

Seriously what an opportunity to run the whole thing through some major (but slow) analysis software and pick up any bad coding practices, bad security practices etc.

You know, the ones that seem to surface every few months due to a "buffer overflow" despite the claim it's a ground up rewrite, no old code pre Windows 7 or 8 and written after all the devs had security coding training.

I got some MS written code for an old support request. Its quality was underwhelming.

Did EU ruling invalidate the UK's bonkers Snoopers' Charter?

"access to retained traffic and location data is extremely useful to the police"

"Police work is only easy in a police state." Joseph Wambaugh.

Convenience should be about the last criteria for any kind of mass surveillance law.*

*Drafted in the UK and introduced when the UK was Chair of the Commission by IIRC Charles Clarke in the wake of the Madrid train bombing (although the Spanish did not ask for or want it, possibly because they had a 1 party dictatorship under Franco).

NIST requests ideas for crypto that can survive quantum computers

Translation..

NSA confirm they have a working quantum computer

Gov claws back £440m for rural broadband

How about calling it "Recovered taxpayers money"

Sort of like what they do when they discover some big time crim has spent the money on fast cars and yachts that can be sold off and the cash returned to the exchequer?

BTW requiring the recovered money to bankroll more broadband is a better deal than the old nationalized industries ever got.

When the GPO, British Steel, British Leyland or British Rail made a surplus it ran something like this.

Nat.Ind. "Here's our surplus for the year. We'd like to invest it in some upgrades and improvements"

Treasury. "Thanks for that. Now bu***r off so we can spend it on outsourcing IT and a bunch of subs for those US missiles we just bought."

Eating Brotli will improve Edge's inner health says Microsoft

So Bros before..

decompression?

Capita is STILL the BIGGEST tech services supplier to UK.gov

top 20 suppliers have "worked hard on improving.. on changing perceptions at the Cabinet Office"

I think the CO's perception of them was quite accurate.

So another of phrasing that would be "lying" to the Cabinet Office?

This will persist while HMG insists on running years long "procurement" projects that only successful previous bidders have the pockets deep enough to sit out until they can take them for every penny release the stored value in the contract they have been awarded.

It will persist while they value contacts as "£10Bn" when it's really £1bn a year that a company has to be able to support and refuse to sub divide huge chunks because it would meaning having to specify actual detailed interfaces between the chunks, which would mean asking the Minister what they actually want, in detail.

Turns out there's a market for marijuana... plants' video surveillance

So Quantum are the only tape storage company making a profit?

Cause that sounds like quite an impressive achievement.

As for archive tapes being more valuable than new I'll be the NSA and GCHQ can confirm the truth of that.

People think "the cloud" will end tape but that's marketing BS. Actual big cloud operators know that disks (spinning rust and flash) will fill their data centres and still people will want more, but accept some access delays.

Just like mainframe operators discovered about 4 decades ago.

And just like them Quantum have discovered people don't want to think about what level the data is at, they just want it.

Frankly I'm amazed all storage operators don't do this.

The fact so many of them are in financial trouble suggests most don't.

Technology as a catalyst for cultural change

Corporate culture is a real issue if you want to try to change something.

Where IT is a service you get low interest in any notion the IT dept could know more about the business than the owner.

Where software is part of the whole business IE SaaS then people are much more receptive.

The joker is government systems where it's all backwards. Ministers want corporate changes and think IT can do that when they should start with the change. IOW software is the effect, not the cause.

Sphere 3D has had two offers to buy parts of its business

I like tape

It's more recoverable as a backup medium.

But sadly it seems I (and most other users) don't like it enough.

MPs suggest introducing web blocking to tackle suicide rates in UK

Have HMG considered the reason-

As Bismark is reputed to have said "governments come and governments go but the bureaucracy is there forever."

Blair wanted to give the UK ID cards and the cradle-to-grave NIR to go with it.

Incidently blocking these kinds of sites is (IIRC) already listed on the list of site CMD's BS laws already cover. Along with "Esoteria" WTF that is (magick & spells I think)

ARM buys HPC software specialist Allinea to help devs code good

Exciting times ahead.

Of course when a company is bought in and there is an existing in-house team this can be viewed in various ways.

In house team have spotted superiority of other company efforts and knows they cannot be matched quickly. Simplest route is to buy them.

In house team is struggling and senior management have spotted this and have bought in other co to remedy this.

Other co bought in to shut them down as competition to ARM offering.

And so on.

But let us hope 2017 will see the in house and outsider teams merge seamlessly into a single smoothly functioning team that delivers superb products.

Merry Xmas.

'Upset' Linus Torvalds gets sweary and gets results

I wonder about the devs

So they want to contribute to the Linux kernel.

But they don't want to do the work necessary to make sure their contributions work.

Why are they bothering?

NASA – get this – just launched 8 satellites from a rocket dropped from a plane at 40,000ft

Re: How do you get that through baggage handling?

Very carefully indeed.

Mentioning the word "rocket" inside a US airport in earshot of any staff is likely to make people very twitchy, leading to the arrival of a bunch of young men with automatic weapons to make further enquires. *

* Paraphrased from a talk by a US rocket boffin on how to take a rocket engine in as cabin luggage. They tend to equate "rocket" with Surface to Air Missile.

"cross-range capability, to help hide the orbits of spy satellites they'd be deploying."

Probably not. The cross range was to allow the Shuttle to return to it's original launch site within 1 orbit, theoretically in case of a serious, but non fatal, systems failure. Otherwise you'd have to wait about a day till the launch site came back under it's ground track.

It now seems to be generally agreed the purpose of this "feature" was to allow a military Shuttle to snatch a foreign spacecraft out of orbit You Only Live Twice style.

It didn't seem to occur to anyone at the time that this would only happen in the middle of WW III or that if you did it you'd probably be starting WW III with whoevers satellite you just stole.

Getting it probably consumed the bulk of the 40-50 000 hrs of wind tunnel time it took to design.

"That's because it was mainly a political device"

What really screwed STS was the insane project funding rules it had to be designed and built under, courtesy of Caspar Weinberger, Richard Nixon's loyal stooge head of the Office of Management & Budget.

Basically NASA reckoned full reusability needed 2 stages and probably 2 new engines. The OMB funded 1 stage and 1 new engine.

Only an ex-pat British engineer figured out the Mother-of-all-drop-tanks-and-RATO-packs could make it work on the budget given.

"First launch 1990. They don't fly too many missions for some reason."

Simple. It's the most expensive LV in terms of $/lb in the US inventory.

This might have something to do with the bulk of its structure being made by a solid rocket company who is a major stockholder in Orbital.

I wouldn't exactly call it an accounting scam to avoid the USG realizing how much profit is being made on the solids (which AFAIK are not available for any other application, so no comparison pricing is available) but it is curious the estimated price in development doubled when that supplier came on board.

Crim charges slapped on copyright trolls who filmed porn, torrented it then sued downloaders

People don't like lawyers

But they do sometimes have uses.

I agree this is not one of those times.

Officers of the court engaging in illegal activities

Is that not grounds for disbarment in any state of the US?

The lives as practicing lawyers should now be over.

UK Home Office slurps 1,500 schoolkids' records per month

Just a note this is the British Dept for Education they are talking about.

No doubt the USians have a much more intrusive way of dealing with furriners.

basically the Dfe have to do the job of the Home Office because the Home Office can't

That's the real truth.

Once again the Home Office is not fit for purpose, and once again the Tories will probably play this "protecting the public."

TOTC my wrinkly bottom.

If at first you don't succeed, send another Mars lander – this time a deep driller

Better put a couple of metres on that drill bit

To give the equivalent of the radiation protection we get at sea level on Earth needs about 4m of Mars soil.

Now if they could target a site with a suspected ice deposit close to the surface.....

I wish them luck.

Murdoch's 21st Century Fox agrees £18.5bn Sky takeover deal

"It's the Sun wot won it." That's what has politician sh***ing themselves

Because they believe it.

They should look at the facts and put Murdoch and the Boy on a muzzle, if they have the guts to do so.

'So sorry' Evernote rips up privacy changes

So its now opt in not opt out, without the option to opt out as it was.

Wow.

Took about 1 week.

David Cameron never understood this in 5 years.

Thing is though the company has lost it's customers trust.

While IRL no consumer should ever really trust any company they are now aware that this companies management are thinking about harvesting their data and they did not think they should even bother to ask first.

US voting machine certification agency probes potential hack

Still not that big a deal. It only lets someone in the backdoor to decide who runs the US

And that's only every 4 years.

Plenty of time to fix this.

Right?

SQL injection --> failure to validate any input field --> lame ass attack vector.

IBM boss pledges to hire 25,000 Americans in next four years

"Yep! You could get one in each of the social sciences."

I'm not sure if that depresses me more about MBA courses (and their entrants) or Social Sciences courses.

Still no known treatment for sociopathy either.

the "free" market

Where the cheap beat out the good

Where the cheaper beat out the cheap

Where the federally funded beat out the cheaper.

Until the money runs out.

Do MBA's attract sociopaths or do they actually create people who behave like sociopaths?

I think there's at least one PhD to be had answering that question.

Kids, look at the Deep Learnings! (We’re just going to slurp your data)

One day all these slurpy companies will be swept away by the superior preditor in the space

The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Share and Enjoy (all of your data with us).

But seriously SysOps have always had that power. And without end to end encryption they always will.

Not to mention it's on servers in a country where THE PATRIOT Act is still viewed as rather a good thing by the government.

Poor software design led to second £1m Army spy drone crash

"laser altimeters probably intentionally.. wavelength that is going to be reflected by water"

Maybe so.

But radar altimeters have been around for decades and for UAV use can be as light as 0.5Kg.

And WTF did the GPS not confirm it or rather, deny the data was right.

If only our British 4G were as good as, um, Albania's... UK.gov's telco tech report

A superb opportunity wasted.

I was hoping something along the lines of "Greek strong man urges HMG to do the heavy lifting on USO"

<sigh>

Trump's 140 characters on F-35 wipes $2bn off Lockheed Martin

"More and more i think economics has little connection with mathematics."

It's the stock market valuation of a company having little relation to it's actual assets, normally seen in the case of Facebook.

In accounting the difference between what the assets of the company actually add up to (quite a lot in the case of LM or Boeing, not that much for Facebook) and what the total share capital would cost to buy is called (no trace of irony here) "goodwill."

MSP Redcentric: Our financial errors are WORSE than we thought

So did the CFO do this off their own bat

or were they pressured by the CEO to "Make the numbers look good"

Because of course if the latter you can bet no one''s going to give the CEO the push.

BTW the UK has the 2nd worst record for late payments in Europe.

Only Italian companies are slower payers.

This is not something to be proud of.

Flaws fixed in SAP's police and military software

Surely know the SAP marketing slogan?

"Resistance is futile."

Trump meets Google – exclusive transcript

Many a true word spoken in jest

Nice work.

But a very dismal (but true) view of Google.

Well, well. Auditors say UK govt procurement body hasn't saved your tax cash

"should achieve very large savings.. not clear exactly what spending should be centralised"

Indeed.

And avoiding all those "We simply have to have things just a little bit different from everyone else because..." conversations would help as well.

BTW if they get £67m+ in "benefits" off these framework contracts and the outfit costs £66.4m that's a £600K+ profit, is it not?

Who gets that?

P0wnographer finds remote code exec bug in McAfee enterprise

MIT Lincoln Lab is the bit that deals with defense software and systems.

So if they use this as their AV I'd guess they'd be pretty annoyed about this. I don't think they do.

But I'd love to know who does use it as their AV.

A classic case of big company takes over big company and niche market product is neglected.

Samsung SmartCam: Yes, those eyes really are following you around the room

I'll note one other user case and one other failure.

Farmers can buy these on EU grants and put these at the start of rights of way across their fields (which they are legally obliged to honour) so they can say "Get off my land"

In addition to the stupidly complex UI I'd also guess that once on your phone it'll want to hoover up your address book and any assorted other personal s**t you have stored there, y'know, because.

It's a ratchet: Old storage guard face incoming tech squeeze

2 questions

Do storage and processor upgrade cycles align? AFAIK they don't. Moore's law is slowing down but is there a storage Moore's law to compensate?

Secondly how fast do those flash arrays wear out? Yes the spinning rust can crash, which is why you stripe the data.

I get that saving power, volume and area are important but how does that compare to overall system reliability of flash Vs conventional

There was a reason people started splitting systems into big processor arrays and big storage arrays. It still seems pretty valid to me.

Higher tech prices ARE here to stay. It's Mr Farage's new Britain

I keep thinking of an episode of The Professionals.

this one. around 42:58

Sadly no chance of sorting this out with a double tap to the skull.

"This was a rational decision that prices in the uncertainty and short-term pain."

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

That is all.

Someone just chucked another $21 million at carbon nanotube memory techies

"Schmergel "

has got his hands on more of the precious (cash).

PAC chair: Who's naughty or nice? The 3 IT mega projects that had better watch out

"And the big supplier knows how to bid."

Too true.

And they have the deep pockets to put up with the years of bidding till they get to f**k the government over 3x.

UK farmers AKA "Barley Barons" get shedloads of cash through the CAP.

AFAIK "soft" Brexit, "hard" Brexit either way the EU money machine will stop paying out.

So either HMG picks up the whole tab for the CAP (and you can bet the NFU will lobby like crazy for that) or there's going to have to be a serious downsizing in farm payments. Which I think is code for the Welsh hill farmers getting the s**tty end of the stick.

ESA to try tank-to-tank fuel switch on sat that wasn't designed to do it

Tricky.

Short of some kind of servicing mission (no way that's going to happen less than 5 years) or they come up with some clever operations hack.

Which looks like what they are planning to do.

Over the years ESA and NASA have come up with some amazing (and amazingly complex) procedures to make probes and satellites either do things they were not designed to do or compensate for parts that have failed, through a mix of very clever simulations followed by software uploads to implement the plan.

I suspect that this will involve some clever valve sequencing coupled with some patches to override certain safety features to do with tank pressurization.

I'll with them good luck

UK.gov has outsourced tech policy to Ofcom because it is clueless – SNP techie

"if an authoritarian government gets in to power"

I think he means more authoritarian than the current lot.

Like "Global Thermonuclear War," the only winning move is not to collect this data in the first place.

But the 4 horseman of the infocalpyse BS has done its work.

Fatal flaw found in PricewaterhouseCoopers SAP security software

"manipulate accounting documents and financial results,"

Indeed.

IIRC PwC picked up the remains of Arthur Andersen, the "auditors" of Enron.

And it looks like been infected with some of their old corporate culture.

Like others I'm gobsmacked this needs write authority on anything and I could certainly see someone playing the Shaggy defense if anything happens at any of their clients.

I'm presuming they don't think anyone of any importance in their clients reads El Reg so they won't know.

I think PwC may be surprised.

Marc Andreessen has a pretty creepy relationship with Zuck

“Does that mean the cat’s dead?” Zuckerberg replied.

He doesn't do metaphors very well, does he?

Hmm I quite like "Andreessen groomed Zuckerberg to run Facebook" as a headline for this.

Is Andreessen a real Nordic name? The implication is that he is "Andrew's son" IE the son of Andrew, but I don't think Andrew is a common or valid Nordic name to begin with.

The Dread Server BlackBerry Enterprise is no more

So still a pretty impressive system. And still Canadian

So not quit under the thumb of the NSA.

Remember that amazing video of the whale leaping out the gym floor and splashing down? Yeah, it was BS

TBH it's the ones they hired on share options that I feel sorry for (a bit)

They are going to be worthless.