Posts by Glen 1

Our hero returns home £500 richer thanks to senior dev's appalling security hygiene

Re: Ahhh passwords...

I do wonder how many places accept unicode in the password field. Certainly would make brute forcing less probable.

Fed-up graphic design outfit dangles cash to anyone who can free infosec of hoodie pics

Re: Let's see if I can come up with a few.

Verity, is that you?

New UK Home Sec invokes infosec nerd rage by calling for an end to end-to-end encryption

Kapla!

NASA trumpets Orion completion as India heads to the Moon

listen here PAL...

Re: Old people paid for the pensions of those who were claiming

If only there were a way to attract younger people to work here, y'know, after they've grown up somewhere else so we've not had to pay for their education.

They'd arrive, get a job, and be *immediately* profitable from a tax point of view. Shazam! The boomers are more easily provided for, unless there's a vote or summat to make the UK less attractive to migrants... In that case it might end up being the other way around...

Re: Glen 1

AKA underfunding the NHS? They wouldn't do that would they? /s

Re: India is going to the moon with my tax.

Old people paid for the pensions of those who were claiming when *they* were working. More people working, fewer people claiming.

As that changes with the aging population and fewer people around to pay for it, either the current workers will pay more, the pensioners will get less, or a mixture of the two.

It has already started with increasing of the state pension age... TV licences... WASPI women...

Re: India is going to the moon with my tax.

"I am going to have to work for the rest of my life to pay for it all."

Twas ever thus.

We only finished paying the US for Lend Lease in 2006.

Going cap in hand to the IMF in the 70's

The 2008 bail-out.

The big ticket item coming up however, is the millennials having to pay for the baby boomers pensions.

With the baby boomers being currently the richest generation, and birthrates declining, how do you think *that* will turn out?

Alibaba sketches world's 'fastest' 'open-source' RISC-V processor yet: 16 cores, 64-bit, 2.5GHz, 12nm, out-of-order exec

Re: Here's the funny part...

The place of origin matters less than you'd think.

Examples:

The number of nations working on the Manhattan project

The origin of the Jet engine

Von Braun's contribution to Apollo

Bletchley Park improved upon Polish work

SSEM Stored Program Computer in Manchester

Linux

Wind the clock back further and we are all just apes learning to hit each other with sticks.

Re: Right on the expected curve...

*COUGH*Transmeta*COUGH

Rise of the Machines hair-raiser: The day IBM's Dot Matrix turned

Re: Try a Lathe

sometimes its less about safety, and more about not letting the ambulance chasers getting a toe hold, and subsequently keeping the insurers sweet.

Re: I had the reverse situation

"However some women seem to think that any man who simply talks to them is trying a come on"

People aren't born thinking that, it's taught. Unfortunately in many cases it's taught by bitter experience.

Re: Try a Lathe

Gotta watch out for that dihydrogen monoxide!

It's the main component of acid rain, you know.

Re: Let's face it, who amongst us hasn't lost a tie to the...

Ties can quite happily behind aprons

Re: Let's face it, who amongst us hasn't lost a tie to the...

Our ties were behind aprons...

Darkest Dungeon: Lovecraftian PTSD simulator will cause your own mask to slip

Re: I.T. Angle?

I was today years old when I learned about miskatonic university

Cyberlaw wonks squint at NotPetya insurance smackdown: Should 'war exclusion' clauses apply to network hacks?

Re: Cyberwarfare target is the network itself?

Depends on how you define network. A switch is simultaneously part of the network, and one of the targeted computing systems plugged in at either end.

In many (most?) contexts, the network 'begins' at whatever pipe you have to the internet. From that point in, there is at least the *possibility* of some control.

IT outages in the financial sector: Legacy banks playing tech catch-up risk more outages, UK MPs told

and how do people gain experience and expertise in solving these already solved problems?

Compare, if you will the Saturn V and the SLS.

Not having all those corner cases and regulatory requirements documented is a failure of a) the first team b) manglement for not insisting on it. and c) subsequent teams for not keeping the docs up to date.

Not *following* said docs, now *that* is the fault of the newer team. If the docs don't exist, then we just have to learn the hard way.

El Reg sits down to code with .NET for Linux and MySQL, hitting some bumps along the way

Re: Any MS devs looked at this?

You've not seen BOB'S posts then?

Oh, you said "worth [their] salt"

Nevermind

"THE OBVIOUS SOLUTION"

The obvious solution is copy and pasting from stack overflow.

Just because it's obvious doesn't mean its always the right call.

Re: MySQL?

"...MongoDB..."

It is web scale, after all.

Re: You can develop on Linux.

They *can* run on X, they *can* run in an xterm. but if you "have clues", they don't *need* to.

Especially if you're complaining about a "PIGGY UI"

Re: You can develop on Linux.

Pssshh X11?

If you're complaining about bloat, why have you left Vim/EMACS?

TWM FTW!

Industry reps told the UK taxman everything wrong with extending IR35. What happened next will astound you

Re: up to a 20 per cent pay cut overnight... For many, the cost of their current mortgage

Your career was always your own problem.

Look at the (permie) job ads, companies want to hire people who can already do the job. If they can already do the job, how is working for that company a step up?

You either have a Peter principal type winging it (and either sinks or swims ), or it's the same job for better pay because it's closer to London - where all (UK) roads lead.

Turning it off and on again IN SPAAACE! ISS animal-tracker kit needs oldest trick in the book

"Refused to work as intended"

Temporary Inability To Spin Undulating Propellers?

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, where to go? Navigation satellite signals flip from degraded to full TITSUP* over span of four days

Ooo ooo ooh! I bet heartbleed and spectre/meltdown

Hell hath no fury like a radar engineer scorned

Re: Can this inform the 5G debate?

They don't get out much. In fact, they don't interact much with anyone. Bloody shut-ins.

Learn Bluespeak with IBM: Internal buzzword-bingo memo schools staff on this newfangled thing called The Cloud

"redundo-gun"

Promoted to glory?

Grav-wave eggheads come closer to nailing down Hubble's Constant – the universe's speedy rate of expansion

Re: All of this assumes...

For those arriving from the future:

https://www.xkcd.com/2173/ is the comic from the day the article was published.

As in, chuckfarley posted a permalink to *todays* comic, which might cause some confusion when it's no longer today.

Internet imbeciles, aka British ISP lobbyists, backtrack on dubbing Mozilla a villain for DNS-over-HTTPS support

Re: ISPs giving Internet villain awards?

more like nominet-ing. Amirite?

ReactOS 'a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel', claims Microsoft kernel engineer

Re: Is there any reason to suppose this latest accusation is any more plausible?

It's in the Game

Reports of cyber attacks fall, says UK.gov survey: GDPR? Fewer nasties? More targeted attacks? We just don't know

Other than a compliance issue, what's the point of reporting a 'cyber attack'? And who to?

Microsoft: OK, we admit it, spring is over. Here's your Windows 10 19H2

Re: 1809 is fine

" something that actually works"

You can install common sense? Not clicking dodgy links is an installable thing?

Will that old Vulcan's engines run? Bluebird jet boat team turn to Cold War bomber

The sound of the boss arriving on site

A Register reader turns the computer room into a socialist paradise

Re: College in the 80s

PTerry had a man come over and engrave his stuff on to stone tables and buried them in the back garden.

Re: Socialism

"It's the working hard to enable others to also have a sufficiency is the bit that usually fails."

Capitalism at its purest is effectively a return to serfdom. Socialism (distinct from communism) at its purest depends on a perfect arbiter.

Everything else is just deciding where on the spectrum you feel you are. Would you be happy if police only answered calls from the 'insured'? If every road was a toll road? Universal healthcare? Higher education payed for from general taxation? You mark your X and make your choice.

$6,000 for tours of apocalyptic post-Brexit London? WTF, NYT?

Re: @Andrew Meredith

"militant remainer who either wants the EU or to be cut off from that big bad scary world"

We would not be cut off, merely negotiating from a massively weakened position.

"It amuses me that racists and xenophobes dont have the support of leavers but of the extreme remainers"

Citation needed

Since when was Tommy Robinson an extreme remainer? Or were you referring to the far right MEPs who have seen what Brexit is doing to our country and want no part of it?

I dunno, you hear the brexit lot saying all these (announced, not yet happening) factory closures and job losses are nothing to do with brexit.

"we knew what we were voting for"

I will remember those words as I pass the job centre.

Re: Hmm

"They are getting desperate in their negotiating/begging"

Talk about alternative facts!

The EU saying repeatedly they're not going to renegotiate (and sticking to it) and the UK having to *ask" for extension after extension tells you where the desperation lies.

The only thing the EU is desperate to do is protect the four freedoms.

Re: They could do a real brexit tour

"apart from Scotland and London"

Soo nearly half the UK by area, or half the UK by population.

Or to put it another way...

Apart from the parts of England, and Wales that stand to lose the most, most of the country voted to remain.

We've Falcon caught it! SpaceX finally nets a fairing half after a successful Heavy launch

Re: Why are they still paying Boeing and LM

pork-barrel politics

The in and outs of Microsoft's new Windows Terminal

Re: oh yes...

a different shade of red.

eg #990000

Inflatables, solids, strap-ons and riders – oh my, it's the week in space

Re: It's amazing how you can miss things

"We are go on that alarm"

Refactoring whizz: Good software shouldn't cost the earth – it's actually cheaper to build

Re: Confidence to Competence Ratio

They were not digging *at* pascal, but at people who are not familiar with pascal.

"Too many code typists are so full of themselves, gleefully exercising their buzzing-with-excitement brains all day, never realizing that they forgot to take any formal training on subjects such as Algorithm Design or Data Structures."

I take the point about lack of broadness in people's knowledge, but let's face it, when was the last time a web dev needed to know big O notation? Sorting algorithms beyond data_structure.sort()?

All the interesting problems have either been solved or are being worked on by Real Programmers™ . All the nuances are hidden behind library function calls. There is money to be made in the harder maths side of things, but thats called 'data science' or 'research'.

The jobbing programmer making yet another CRUD app might well the know the bullshit interview question on how to swap 2 variables without using a third, but have the common sense never to use it.

You see it a lot of the Real Programmers™ bullshit in books and academic papers where the maths is the point, not the actual implementation (which is all a programmer will care about). The arena where single letter variable names - with superscripts and subscripts - are considered essential. The sheer unreadability of it seems targeted to exclude rather than educate.

Example:

What is the sum total of the contents of an array?

Not-Code™:

For each element of array, add contents to running total.

Maths speak:

Sigma something something McSquiggle

TL;DR Theres a difference between the 'if all you have is a hammer' saying and not hiring someone because they don't know web assembly when the job spec is for angular.

Re: Confidence to Competence Ratio

"They think Pascal is a unit of air pressure"

It is.

Slightly more seriously, an obsolete language rarely used in anger this century is not on my list of demands from employees. Sure, Pascal was the Python of it's day, but that day was 30 years ago.

The anticipated retort is "It's not about the language, it's about learning/understanding blah blah" to which I reply:

Then why the dig about Pascal if it's not about the language?

Planes, fails and automobiles: Overseas callout saved by gentle thrust of server CD tray

Re: " And Brad, of course, was in Europe,

∈ = "is a member of the set" or "is an element of"

Translation for those not inflicted with squiggles

Buy, buy this American PCIe, drove my PC on the Wi-Fi so the Wi-Fi would fly

Re: Romanes eunt domus...

Conjugate!

If servers go down but no one hears them, did they really fail? Think about it over lunch

Re: re One should always check the current standards for voltage before plugging in

Got one from the big M before they closed.

Compared to a wall wart they are massively expensive.

But to me, the convenience of having a plug that fold flat and you can trust to pull > 2 amps is worth the cost

Tesla driver killed after smashing into truck had just enabled Autopilot – US crash watchdog

Re: What's the point?

As stated elsewhere, it is relative speed that'll kill you.

Where a truck wanders across lanes, the barrier means the difference between a nasty accident (but survivable) and getting smushed.

Re: Detecting Trains

It might just be better at detecting the signage/warning lights (where they exist)