Posts by Alan_Peery

Soft eng salaries soar by 25 per cent – and, oh yes, devops is best paid for non-boss techies

Re: From the "no shit, Shirlock" files:

It would also mean horrendous commutes, from a cost & times and discomfort perspective.

Have you worked in a high density metropolitan area?

Official: Google Chrome 69 kills off the World Wide Web (in URLs)

Re: Reg -- AMP technology

No, AMP is much more than removing the comments section. Here are two posts I wrote up a few months ago:

https://plus.google.com/+AlanPeery/posts/7wkkmnR8as7

https://plus.google.com/+AlanPeery/posts/ihXMThBatYa

'World's favorite airline' favorite among hackers: British Airways site, app hacked for two weeks

Missing from the press release -- CVV status

The press release from BA says "financial details" but fails to specify if the CVV was also disclosed, or it is was not as it was only held in memory during the operations.

Curious omission.

It's official – satellite spots water ice at the Moon's chilly poles

But how much will it break down in vacuum, even with the intense sunshine?

Google shaves half a gig off Android Poundland Edition

Where are the missing e-ink tablets?

Why should a tablet not have an e-ink screen? There are cases for full functionality with a screen fully visible in sunshine -- even if that screen has to be monochrome.

Azure certifications are awful, Microsoft admits, so it has made new ones

Discounts for the first 300 is miserly

Come on Microsoft, you're a behemoth. Do you really only expect a few people to take the test, and need the revenue?

Open plan offices flop – you talk less, IM more, if forced to flee a cubicle

Re: What about disturbing others?

People are not all the same. Some thrive on interaction, others can't handle interruption. Don't assume that someone doesn't car or isn't productive because interruptions just because interruptions bother you.

Micro Focus offloads Linux-wrangler SUSE for a cool $2.5bn

$164 million was six months income.

OpenBSD disables Intel’s hyper-threading over CPU data leak fears

Re: Let's start a list...

Any two processes running at the same time. There's no need to confine ourselves to looking at the benefits that accrue to a single process when we have lots of processes on our systems.

Woman sues NASA for ownership of vial of space dust

Re: So... uhm...

Except with most companies, you have a work day, and if you go for a walk in the evening and find a pretty rock for your collection at home that doesn't become the company's rock.

'Facebook takes data from my phone – but I don't have an account!'

Re: host file?

Sounds like you should look at the OnePlus 6....

Jeff Bezos fires off a blue dart, singes Elon Musk and SpaceX

Re: Yowzers!

And don't forget the Russians, with their PNUTS nuclear engine in their back pocket:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semipalatinsk_Test_Site

I'm running role playing game (think D&D, but with rockets and James Bond) with the ideas you have aboveand PNUTS.

Web uni says it will get you a tech job or your money back. So our man Kieren signed up...

Re: Shortage ?

Ben Carson should go back to being a surgeon -- he was an asset there.

UK IBMers lose crucial battle in pension row

Re: Huge betrayal of trust

Some years ago I had to figure out if the two and a half years of accruals I had towards the five year minimum required for entitlement to the IBM DB pension was worth anything. I decided it wasn't, and made job choices accordingly.

The world would be a more just place if the court had proven me wrong.

Autonomous driving in a city? We're '95% of the way there'

Re: "Like a human"

Lorry puts on turn signal, road train parts to let him in.

Simples.

Intel's Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs have nasty hyper-threading bug

Re: ugh

Maybe the processor bug makes a function call fail, and that failure is caught by an exception? Unless the exception logs a message that could be a silent cause of slowness.

Elon Musk reveals Mars colony rocket capable of bringing pizza joints to the red planet

Re: How about

That's why you send a robotic ship ahead that makes the fuel for you. You only launch when the refining rocket says "I've got fuel, any takers?"

Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

Re: No opt out for end users -> extortion

So what word do you use to describe this situation?

"I broke your experience of _____, you have no choice in the matter, and I profit".

Because that is exactly how I see the situation. You may disagree, feeling that the experience is not broken, but failing to give a general and easily accessed opt-opt is not right.

Having consulted a thesaurus "coercion" may be more appropriate, but extortion isn't far off.

No opt out for end users -> extortion

It breaks my search history, as I didn't go to the originating website.

It breaks my offline reading with Pocket, as I can no longer search for articles the same way.

That's the start of the issues, I've posted elsewhere in the comments in more detail.

Re: ".. it'll look like it's from a legit new organization endorsed by Google."

Send a link to that post to The Guardian -- both the editorial side, and the web site administrator side.

Tackling the AMP users one site at a time. :-)

My AMP critique from back in December

Originally posted at https://plus.google.com/+AlanPeery/posts/7E8cRhfx587, I hit on some different aspects of why AMP is a technology that should die.

=======

Speeding up the Web, what could be wrong with that?

Google has implemented something called AMP into the Google+ Android app, and on a post there I ended up writing a substantial critique of AMP.

AMP is a new Google technology I'm not fond of, because

1) It's breaking my reading and bookmarking workflow and

2) It centralizes more power with google and

3) It might hurt the originating website's viability and

4) For the same original URL, users in Google+ (and probably soon Gmail) get different URLs depending on what device they read on and

5) There's no easy way for me to opt out that I have found

In very quick summary, an "Accelerated Mobile Page" link points back to cached content is substituted for the direct link to a website if that website opts in. The page loads faster, but the link points back to Google rather than the original site (leading to complaint #1 as I can no longer track by site, etc), and Google knows I have followed it (#2) and the website doesn't get the traffic (complaint #3) though there may be a reporting mechanism I am not familiar with and they do have to opt in.

I'm only getting a grip with how AMP shows up now, and it changes depending on where you're reading content. When I first read the original post I was using my mobile phone, and the URL shown in the Google+ post was an AMP style URL -- so I edited the URL by hand into a normal URL by hand as I thought the original poster had posted an AMP URL. Looking at the original post in the a PC web browser I saw the normal URL. We suddenly have two URLs instead of one which makes confusion possible (#4).

The final bit is that I haven't been able to find a way to disable the AMP mechanism from affecting me personally, as Google+ doesn't make this an option(#5). This means my workflow is broken, as the URLs I add to Pocket for offline reading when I am using my phone don't reference the real website.

https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-changing-works

https://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/introducing-accelerated-mobile-pages.html

The original URL, with some editing so you can see the URL fully:

http:// www.smh.com.au /world/us-election/trumps-tech-adviser-peter-thiel-backs-utopian-technology-less-sure-democracy-20161116-gsqrnu.html

The AMP'd URL that I see when using my Android phone:

https:// www.google.com /amp/s/amp.smh.com.au/world/us-election/trumps-tech-adviser-peter-thiel-backs-utopian-technology-less-sure-democracy-20161116-gsqrnu.html

Leaked: The UK's secret blueprint with telcos for mass spying on internet, phones – and backdoors

Re: Only one question

Next time use the vote instead for the Liberal Democrats -- who have a sensible policy in this area if memory serves...

Gang-briefed by IBM bosses in Hawaii? Nah, I'll take redundancy

Re: The Island with Bear Grylls

Not if you have been forward looking, and ordered bags with built-in flotation device using the company cards...

TVs are now tablet computers without a touchscreen

Needs broadband is ridiculous in this day and age.

For most people, yes. But for the frugal or the very income-limited, there is a huge role for over the air reception. Hopefully with a PVR, as the benefits of time-shifting and advert avoidance are huge.

>my entire setup - with all those boxes and necessary cabling - doesn't come to

>half what that guy paid for his TV. Probably not even a quarter. And I've

> had the same setup for nearly 10 years now,

Did you add the cost of your network into the above computation?

Jimbo announces Team Wikipedia: 'Global News Police'

Re: Trust Jimmy Wales to make decisions for us?

Why is a comment like this made as Anonymous Coward? If true, it's neither embarrassing nor likely to be something that couldn't be said because the policies of the person's employer requires clearance first.

SPY-tunes scandal: Bloke sues Bose after headphones app squeals on his playlist

And where is the quarterly/annual confirmation of snooping continunce

Just because you said Yes once, shouldn't mean you've said it for all time...

Startup remotely 'bricks' grumpy bloke's IoT car garage door – then hits reverse gear

Re: re Why do you need the intermediate server, which is just another thing to go wrong?

Don't you turn your heating down at night?

Or when you leave the house for 12 hours? If you don't do this, you're wasting money heating an unoccupied house.

Sounds like you've found some nice kit on Amazon, stuff that would be hard to dig out amidst everything they carry. Could you post links to the kit?

Re: re Why do you need the intermediate server, which is just another thing to go wrong?

You just assumed the household has a regular occupancy pattern. That's not true for all households, and those with irregular patterns do have a use for "warm up the house, I've arrived back from the sales trip" functionality.

Why do GUIs jump around like a demented terrier while starting up? Am I on my own?

vi and emacs -- the Janus faced god of editors

The wise man sayeth:

The manifold path of editing on the world of the file system is best followed by worshiping both aspects of the true editing god(s), vi AND EMACS.

Clone it? Sure. Beat it? Maybe. Why not build your own AWS?

Re: AWS vs the real world

With the cloud, you get a list of risks as well -- you just don't get to read them.

Just wait for a hurricane to hit AWS-East and you'll see what I mean.

Confirmed: TSA bans gear bigger than phones from airplane cabins

Re: Obviously a real bummer for the Theives Support Association

I think you've got it backwards -- this makes it *much* easier for thieves.

Re: So...

This will make it *easier* for devices to be copied at the border, as they will be out of the traveler's hands and thus more vulnerable.

Today's WWW is built on pillars of sand: Buggy, exploitable JavaScript libs are everywhere

Re: Lots of shouty, no content - because the topic is messy

The scope of this topic could be described as list of websites -> list of libraries -> library -> list of vulnerable versions -> list of vulnerabilities in each version -> technical details of each vulnerability. The paper only looks at the first four components. If you're looking the details in components 5 & 6, start with the list from component 4 and consult each release note and CVE.

I'd argue that the list from component #4 (mentioned on page 4, point 4 of the doc) is the most valuable point from a deployment strategy, because it would allow you to check your version(s) against that list and patch. The problem is that the javascript library world is poorly managed, because there are approximately 400 (!) versions across 11 libraries (pg 4, figure 1), so the list is simply too massive to include.

Uber hires Obama's attorney-general to review its workplaces

Re: Re:Why? and then we ask ourselves why women in are few and far between

> the same as enrollment in university CS

Seems you should be taking the population into account, and not just grads. If you're only hiring grads, you're practicing age discrimination.

Lap(top) of luxury: Porsche Design revs up 2-in-1 Windows 10 slab

Avoided a big error in the Surface Book

The tablet portion has a USB port, something that is missing in the tablet portion of the Surface book. Lack of USB connectivity in the tablet means a lot less flexibility.

It's a USB Type-C 3.1 with Thunderbolt.

GitLab.com melts down after wrong directory deleted, backups fail

Re: All of the above notwithstanding, it's a bit hard to understand use of rm -rf ...

After you're done with the copies of data you're holding in a temporary filesystem, you clean out the temporary filesystem.

Just make sure you're in the right filesystem... :-(

Hewlett Packard Enterprise to outsource global IT team to CSC borg

Re: Déjà vu

There was the minor fact that Worldcom had been indulging in *lots* of financial shenanigans completely unrelated to EDS work, IIRC.

Computer forensics defuses FBI's Clinton email 'bombshell'

Re: Governmental emails had already been provided

The prosecution side (aka crime lab), didn't do the test well and destroyed the evidence -- it wasn't there any longer to be lost by Clinton or the independent lab. That's all a right-wing distortion of facts. See my other comments in this chain for details and links.

The *government crime lab* (prosecution) destroyed the evidence

re 3) So you're now alleging that *Hillary* covered something up in the sexual misbehavior of Bill, rather than being an uninformed spouse defending her husband?

re 5) Above you said 'because the rape evidence had become "lost" [while in HER custody]', implying per personal possession. Now you admit that your sources don't say when it was lost, or by who. It could have been lost by the police. It could have been lost by the independent lab. It's pretty unlikely that it was lost by the defense attorney, as they are not allowed to hold evidence for very good reasons. For Hillary to be blamed for this, it would have to proven that she turned either the police or the lab to illegal behavior.

But turns out the story is completely different than that. The police lab cut the evidence (a bloodstain) from the defendant's underwear, and after blood testing (not DNA, this is 1975) ended up tossing out the bit of material. So when the defense (Clinton) asked for the underwear to test (as required by her duties as public defender), there was nothing to test. The government lab had destroyed the evidence, collecting only a blood type, and it was their incompentence that let the defendant plead guilty and get a lighter sentence. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2f13f2awK4&feature=youtu.be, Hillary Clinton being interviewed about the case.)

Then you go onto the notion of defeating a polygraph test, but again offer no proof that Clinton coached the defendant to do so.

Re: Governmental emails had already been provided

So you're blaming Clinton that the FBI failed to follow good process and show up with a warrant and get a copy of the full email server? Or show up with a warrant and oversee the extraction process?

Government related emails were requested, and provided. If the FBI failed to follow sensible process, leaving the individual involved with a reasonable understanding that requirements had been complied with, how is that the fault of the individual? Or must we all keep a copy of all our documents in case the relevant government agency decides to broaden their initial request years down the line?

Re: It's incredible how this has become a "scandal"

A very nice summary of open issues on candidate Trump in that last paragraph -- well done.

Large numbers of emails have already been inspected, no smoking guns...

Just because there is a large number of something doesn't imply anything will be found. Given that the FBI took a quite thorough look at a rather large pile of email and found no smoking guns makes it pretty likely that nothing will be found in the 35k emails very broadly estimated in this article.

Governmental emails had already been provided

Skip to #5 for the part of this response related directly to the article, or read on for US politics rebuttal.

Since you appear to bringing your politics into this, rather than sticking to the technical details of this well-written article, here is some relevant politics back at you:

1) It's pretty easy to explain Hillary's old time reporting spreadsheets from her time as an employee of Rose being in the White House. You move out of one house in Arkansas, you move into another -- random documents come with you unless you're particularly good about purging files.

2) Trump shredded documents that had been actually requested in a governmental investigation of racially biased leasing policies: http://europe.newsweek.com/donald-trump-companies-destroyed-emails-documents-515120?rm=eu Failing to note this given that we're in the final week before an election where Trump is the other candidate would be bias by exclusion.

3) How are the accusations against Bill Clinton around sexual misbhaviour relevant to email retention?

4) You should really provide a link to this supposed "lost evidence" as this summary http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-freed-child-rapist-laughed-about-it/ doesn't mention it, depsite being apparently pretty complete.

5) The admin for Clinton's personal email sent in the emails matching matching a reasonable "government business" filter, and months later deleted the other email (eg personal) on the system after significant time for the other side to check that the data delivery had been fine. There was no requirement that Clinton maintain backups of personal email into the indefinite future AS THE GOVERNMENTAL EMAIL HAD ALREADY BEEN DELIVERED. For a well-written summary of the steps carried out, see this post: https://plus.google.com/+AmandaBlain/posts/6ugnBQCdL9S

Tesla's big news today:
sudo killall -9 Autopilot

Re: "This progress must be ..."

That's just NIMBY in a different place. It has to be tested *somewhere* even for the difficult cases, so why should your roads be special?

There is also no indication that Teslas running under autopilot features are more dangerous than other cars under human piloting.

Re: Switched Off?

Rather the opposite of that. "It's just the every so often one of the meals gives them superpowers." Superpowers like automatic braking that avoids an otherwise occurring collision.

OK Google, Alexa, why can't I choose my own safe, er, wake word?

There are *many* other phrases that would be unique, and not trip false positives. I would go with "Nebuchadnezzar" myself.

A large part of the "OK, Google" insistence is about branding, and brand reinforcement, not technology.

Re: Trickery

Your points are valid, but no longer required if a simple button press/long press is required before the voice recognition starts.

Microsoft won't back down from Windows 10 nagware 'trick'

Re: so Desperation

I had a Windows phone, a fancy Lumia that was handed out to one lucky attendee at a Microsoft one day conference on Azure and other technologies.

* I couldn't adjust the font size small enough in any of the apps. I prefer to read emails more than 30 words or so at a time.

* Inflexible home screen layout compared to Android.

* No ability to replace the keyboard functionality

* Many of the apps I wanted were not available, and no corresponding work-alike available.

*** Stitcher for podcasts

*** Zinio for magazine reading

*** Pocket for offline web page reading

*** IMDB for movie lookup

*** App for renting the city bikes available in London aka "Boris bikes"

*** Weather Pro -- a weather app that breaks the next five days by 4 hour forecasts, very good for planning outdoor activities

*** App for accessing the detailed Ordnance Survey maps for planning UK hikes

*** Strava app for tracking bike rides

*** App like FB Reader for reading public domain (out of copyright) books in .mobi and .epub formats

* Commercial and market leading apps weren't as good as either the iOS or Android versions

*** Kindle page formatting options not as flexible

*** Google Photo style backup didn't seem to include a "photo album" feature up on the website viewer

*** Skype was just weak overall

*** Web browser lacked the "save image to file" function

*** Map tool lacked verbal directions, ability to plan trips via public transport or bike

As it's been a while since I used the Lumia, I might have forgotten a few things or the story might have improved. My feelings at the time were that anyone who was satisfied with the Lumia phones simply didn't know what was possible.

US power grid still fragile in the face of EMP threat: GAO

You should read up on Startfish Prime

It's the biggest, and happily the last, of the atmospheric EMP tests.

Starfish Prime caused an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), which was far larger than expected, so much larger that it drove much of the instrumentation off scale, causing great difficulty in getting accurate measurements. The Starfish Prime electromagnetic pulse also made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, about 1,445 kilometres (898 mi) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights, setting off numerous burglar alarms and damaging a telephone company microwave link. The EMP damage to the microwave link shut down telephone calls from Kauai to the other Hawaiian islands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime#Explosion