Posts by Denarius

Sex and drugs and auto-tune: What motivates a millennial perp?

Dabsy, not just you

virus and buggy PC sold for money ? I was baffled by that PC "art" A seldom seen brother had a laptop that was slow when I visited. I have no idea where he got so many PUPS, trojans, virus and other hindrances, aside from Windows 8. I could have sold it for thousands instead of considering a serious fire.

As for millennials, so little makes sense. At Oz fast unfood institutions, they dont even look at physically present humans of prefered gender for partners, just use fondle slabs instead of fondling the wetware near them. Is it to avoid charges of unwanted touching ? Maccas has changed but not its menus

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

Nothing new ?

Alain, I wish I could agree. IMNSHO, after working for a series of outsourcerers over the decades, is that the immediate PHB does indeed behave as you suggest. However the beancounter and management droids a layer or 3 above want slow crappy code. Much more revenue is drawn from suckers customers who persist in throwing good money after bad. The old sunk capital problem. Perhaps the mantra, " fail fast and fail often" is not so much for code cutters as their firms customers.

As for articles main premise, I fully agree. Taking the extra time to work out a modular structure pays dividends when releasing updates. Aside from that, the challenge in producing elegant code that works efficiently and well is a buzz for me. Unfortunately there are many code cutters who don't upgrade their code quality(ie competence with language of choice) who mistake elegance for difficulty. ITIRC Dennis Ritchie promulgating a great attitude with his comment about the first thing he did when designing code was push the keyboard away to make room for the paper and pencil.

El Reg rifled through the history of Huawei's 'new' GaussDB – only 'new' bit is machine learning

back in the day

No more DBAs. Self tuning blah, blah.Where have I heard that before ? Ah yes, SQL Server aka Sybase initially. A long time ago. No doubt others since. One wonders if TeraData are still only relational database with EXPLAIN verb to detail how query optimisations are being processed. Anyone know know ? Now adding AI. Oh wait, AI added, not a hope then.

Tech giants get antsy in Northern Virginia: Give us renewable power, there's a planet to save... and PR to harvest

Re: Money Talks

@veti. reliable maybe. Long lived definitely not. Amazing the sort of gunk that gets on heat exchangers or primary turbine blades. One report of gold clogging turbines enough to cause problems. I digress. Usually corrosion is a major problem, likewise tidal power.

Re: Money Talks

@Ptol: not necessarily. New 4th gen reactors include breeding cycle types. Effectively the amount of available fuel is close enough to millennia if not more. Even the old high temp breeders generated far more fuel than they used. Old breeders could be potentially risky. Learning to use liquid metals as coolants took time and engineering. ie a pump that ran 20,000 amps at about 1 volt. Fun stuff, sodium. The new designs are fail safe.

Take my bits awaaaay: DARPA wants to develop AI fighter program to augment human pilots

Re: Only reason they are keeping pilots in the mix

Voyna, Yanks did not have to counter. Kamikazes were militarily ineffectual. As it is, close in defense weapons are still improving. Thats why the Russians have hypersonic weapons and are developing more. The arms capability race continues. One hopes that none of these are used in hot war and reliable airbreathing rockets are developed that can be used for cheap space launches.

Re: Only reason they are keeping pilots in the mix

Doug,

perhaps not. Current rumours about the latest flying hardware investigations indicates reason is soaking into USAin military thinking, once the F35 disaster has ground its way to a much loathed past. Different platforms, including aircraft for different roles, whod a thunk ? Long terms plans for wetware flown aircraft are predicated on idea that humans manage unpredictable or novel situations faster and better than drones. eg startups with a rational idea versus corporates. I digress. In some situations like sub hunting or mine sweeping drones will do better. Doing a marauder attack requires much more variability to respond than mere silicon.

You're not still writing Android apps in Oracle's Java, are you? Google tut-tuts at dev conf

nice maybe, however

How much do the next tools and languages help manage privacy for both developers and end users ? Are the libraries checked for snoopware ?

Secondly, does any of this allow any OS to finally backup and restore an Android phone locally to a PC or external disk without using some cloud in a commonly accessible format ? I have tried a few that made such claims. All failed in either backup or restore unless new device == old device and even then were mostly unreliable.

US foreign minister Mike Pompeo to give UK a bollocking over Huawei 5G plans

Re: To paraphrase Sir David Kelly..

@J. You really need to stop inhaling your religions impropaganda. Much as I loathe merkins as a nation, (not necessarily individuals) most of the unpleasant types arrived in the first two centuries. After that many arrivals were the victims of murderous PHBs, crowned or otherwise. As for mass extinctions, WTF ? Such as ? North American farmland is reverting to wilderness, Europe has forests replanted. Only non-western nations are mass damaging environments. Dont seem to here much about that.

The only things lately that have become extinct are reason, reasoned discussion and manners

Tractors, not phones, will (maybe) get America a right-to-repair law at this rate: Bernie slams 'truly insane' situation

Re: Really good?

>> 'short' working days, round these parts they harvest well into the night

Only harvest ? Around these parts they till and sow late into night also, with lights that set fire to remaining weeds.

You may have an interesting sociological point. Almost every ag business around here also is into restoring old farm machinery. A few are into horse powered kit even. Are the Amish are going to be fashionable soon ?

Rising sea levels? How about the rising risk of someone using a nuke?

chernobyl wildlife park

Even the BBC has mentioned in passing that the no-go area is swarming with wildlife, not that one would want to eat any. As for Japan, aren't they scared of mere tritium watch hand levels of radiation? Which reminds me. ElReg key rings. Any more for sale ? I have a few greenies I want to scare :-)

Re: @TheVogon ... How about both?: Rising sea levels and nuke use

Germany and electricity. Don't the oh so efficient nuclear fearing green Krauts import much electricity from nuclear France ? Or am I out of date with a 28% figure ITIRC? Yes that my green coat. </sarc>

Mozilla tries to do Java as it should have been – with a WASI spec for all devices, computers, operating systems

If it happens

Long long time ago, (1980s) IBM and Apple ITIRC, had a project for compile once, run on any unix. Died to willful non-cooperation. Probably too hard at time but VM approach may allow it to work now. Any similarity in concept the the Rich Binary concept M$ is trying out ? Somehow I feel history is repeating. Orackle, M$ and now Moz all have similar competing approaches, no-one wins. Unless one of them kills Java, then all win. Orakle excepted, but who would care ?

DXC: Slashing costs affects ability to attract, develop and retain staff? Who'd have thunk it!

Re: "Maximizing shareholder value.."

@n10cities

Even Jack Welsh the ex-CEO of GE eventaully stated "Maximising shareholder value" was the most stupid thing he had heard.

Re: What recruitment?

AC, never underestimate the ignorance and stupidity of the PHB classes. A few good meals and tickets to whatever expensive wastes of time and they sign anything. Most of us have had the external process consultants arrive with their checklists, fresh out of uni and and unclued. A firm beginning with A in the past was a master of this. Often we had to hand hold the helpless "consultants" who were supposed to be telling us how to do our jobs so their tickbox sheets were filled in. Cost a fortune, achieved waste of time and money but E suite seemed happy.

What bugs me the most? World+dog just accepts crap software resilience

Re: Speak for yourself!

@Gene

hand tools at country junk shops. Learn to sharpen them. Good power tools are available but only at industrial stores in in industrial areas. And they are expensive. Ironically, in Oz, tradies buy cheap tools because on work sites 5 finger discounts happen often.

OTOH, I would love to able to buy simple spare parts like commutator brushes. I have a 40 year old drill that just needs new brushes. Consumer grade but it has survived a lot of tradie work.

Re: Who bears the cost ?

@Fungus.

True. IMHO the article misses a point by not asking if new features are worth it. I would love phone to just work and not do uncommanded actions occasionly. And as for the desktops where every desktop developer seems hell bent on objects moving, shrinking, reappearing, whatever without any user input. At least a few of the minimalist desktops have resisted.

An ElReg article on phones a month or so ago made a similar point about phones getting insane cameras as a new feature instead of better battery life and security updates. I would simply like daylight readable screens but these only occur on industrial units.

I suspect many of us older types would prefer to use familiar stable software with improvements in speed and resource reductions. OK same thing. Scrap java and bring back assembler sort of approach.

Could OpenAI's 'too dangerous to release' language model be used to mimic you online? Yes, says this chap: I built a bot to prove it

if not already said before

Why does Hitchikers Guide come to me where Arthur is told the Mice want his brain and Zaphod says, not much to emulate or words to that effect. Its been years ^H^H^H^H^H decades since I read it, OK ?

Boss of venerable sect with millions of devoted followers meets boss of venerable sect with... yeah, you get the idea

Do you realize the secular authorities were worse?

Meh, Western cultural myth mostly for Inquisition. Few burnings verified, unlike the secular governments who burned and tortured freely. At least the Inquisition had rules of evidence, unlike secular courts until relatively recently if one was a mere citizen. I note the secular ruling elites are busy destroying that now. Secret security and family courts etc. The secular states of the 20th century had a death toll that dwarfs anything done by any religion, aside from Marxist cults. Have a read of Howard Starks books or "Fields of Blood". BTW, not a fan of any big organization. Perhaps the USA Founding Fathers had a point when they discussed the dangers of allowing legal fictions like companies to be effectively immortal.

Dratted hipster UX designers stole my corporate app

Re: It's not just designers

Herring: why the false dichtomy of "does it make more sense to have something that takes a little longer to learn but once learned is very fast to operate, or to have something "intuitive" that's always slow to operate?" In my limited experience user speed of operation and efficiency of anything go together.

I concur that all too often the end users have no input to UI design or or that matter, into what the Next Big Thing, all singing, all dancing software project does. They then have dump years of training and experience to do much the same thing, just slower. (especially if COTS is involved)

Re: or an un-improvable legacy interface designed a thousand years ago by a goblin

or much much worse. Anything "designed" in last 12 years. Case in point. A simple flat screen TV, just a few controls on front. Power, input and channel up|down. Can you see them: No. Are glyphs close to standard : No. Is there any feedback, audible or tactile: Absolutely not. Are the controls detectable without big magnifying glass and bright lights: No. And lastly the buggers are hyper touch sensitive so stray insects, cat tails trigger them. Yet my 13 year old grandson thinks its a great looking design and is baffled by my insistence the control interface is foolish. "But it looks good" he says as if mere functionality is irrelevant. I have found some millenials who agree with me that user interface design on most new gadgets sucks so it is not just old grumpy experience.

Fun fact: GPS uses 10 bits to store the week. That means it runs out... oh heck – April 6, 2019

Re: Does anyone still use them?

Yes, pilots. Many Dell Streak 5s became XCSoar gliding flight management computers because of their transflective screen. ie a readable screen even in Oz sunlight at 10,000 feet. In my limited experience only a Sony Experia gets close at cost of needing its own lithium battery in cargo storage to keep screen brightness up. So with all the brands trying to differentiate them selves, all they do is become slimmer, greasier and more fragile when falling out of pockets instead of something many people have expressed an interest in, a daylight readable screen.

As for Garmin maps, lets just say in my experience in emergency services other brands have at least located significant roads between rural towns.

As for another date of doom, damn, more hardware checking in two months to see which of my devices get trashed, Finally a reason for consumer gadget buying.

Start trek, the next generation: PCie 4 flash controller demo flaunts speedy peripheral vision

not a problem

the next lot of "security boot" and "software integrity checking" plus whatever horrors java and the latest bloat from the L and windows producers will slow everything down

World's first robot hotel massacres half of its robot staff

at last

Applying something useful that fixes a defined problem instead of market droid madness

A few reasons why cops didn't immediately shoot down London Gatwick airport drone menace

Re: How about a high power laser burst ?

No, eyesight risk also. Many many years ago I read of a Swiss short range tactical anti-aircraft EMP weapon. Used a smooth-bore howitzer (120mm IIRC) firing a special shell. Shell used gas generation to power a electro-magneto-hydrodynamic (hope I got that right) generator feeding a cavity resonator that emitted a brief 10MgWatt EMP pulse. Cannon bore was the wave guide. Intended to fry aircraft electronics in an oncoming ground attack. Single shot per shell but if drone is over airfield or fence in a no fly zone many of the risks are mitigated Source: International Defence Review , early 1980s.

Britain approved £2.5m of snooping kit exports to thoroughly snuggly regime in Saudi Arabia

@ A Coatsworth

out of curiosity, what is a country run by atheocrats called ? North Korea ?

OSIRIS-REx space probe catches a whiff of water on asteroid Bennu

Re: There's no mystery

@ Spherical Cow

True, even Julius Caesar commented on the never ending rain. Be nice to get a load here to settle the dust. Believe me, soggy beats drought any time. When the eucalyptus start dying and wild birds come down from the mountains and turns up at the door demanding to be fed the Oz climate gets distressing.

Naked women cleaning biz smashes patriarchy by introducing naked bloke gardening service

Re: Let the comments begin...

@LucreLout.: Exactly so. Also much of the local vegetation is mammal hostile. Lastly, Oz has highest skin cancer rate in world. I cant see how Work Cover/Work Safety laws do not demand protective clothing as sun exposure is rated as a risk. This spring has been the worst I recall for early active snakes. The western browns in my yard are bigger than usual and more aggressive than usual. I suspect these new "services" are more for patio plants in the high rise hells the chattering classes eulogise.

Australia to build a pirate-proof fence: Brace yourselves, Google

root cause?

to my humble uneducated eyes, this looks like another "globalisation is inevitable with lots of benefits" that costs Oz citizens more as usual. Just like Oz Free Trade Treaties that seem to cost us and benefit only the other side. I for one am sick of merkin ads. At least the old Oz ones were not as infested with chunderous distorted audio. The IP cartels have long set Oz prices well above anywhere else for same product if it was even available. Inside national borders the process is called cartel behaviour. In Oz it is business as usual. This site blocking is another attempt to force Australians to buy high priced goods rather than stop the media companies discriminating against Australia. No wonder Oz had high piracy rates. It was the often only way to get what anyone else overseas could buy. This legislation looks to be bought and paid for by the Big End of Town which TweddleDee and TweedleDum have long been in thrall to. (For non Oz citizens, Liberal and Labour parties, the two pretend political entities in OZ)

No doubt some fool fuzz thinks it might also restrict access to Daesh propaganda also.

WIPO 'temporarily suspends' whistleblower CIO amid allegations of misconduct

Shooting the messenger

is normal practice isn't it ? Most whistle blowers get destroyed, often by the institutions that benefit most from their activity. I admire whistle blowers courage. The ruling clerisies are outrageous. Now what can be done about it aside from haranguing your MPs, at least trying to vote with your wallet and refusing to vote for candidates who are party or organisaional hacks when another election comes around.

NSW government finally released 'net vote system review, says everything's just fine

not only but also

All Oz Public services have symptoms of an infestation of techno-utopians, ie gullible clever people. that is, moderate to high IQ idiots. Any argument that includes the words "inevitable" should be shut down as dangerously naive immediately. Given the high levels of distrust of all Oz political processes and institutions, this is is another tree trunk masquerading as a straw to bring levels of distrust to dangerous highs. To accept any security thruogh obscurity shows the AWS open buckets issue is not understood as the potential disaster it can be for victims of identity theft. Now where was my local MPs email address ?

China doesn't need to nick western tech when Google is giving it away

Re: "There was a niche for a not-apple variant in the market"

@DougS: It is hard enough to switch between Android phones, let alone between Apples whatever and Android. Pity BlackBerry failed with QNX. Love to have seen how the Oz snoopers would try to trojan that.

Oz opposition caves, offers encryption backdoor compromise

caving in

@Scrutiniser. You are making the usual mistake. Oz governments of all stripes are becoming more intrusive and controlling. Right and left are just terms, used mostly by factions of 19th century totalitarian religions. From the non-privileged citizens view an oligarchy spouting Marx or Free Markets is the same thing with different labels. Both are re-implementations of absolute monarchies justified by Divine Right. This is why the Market boosting droids do not quote Adam Smith any more. Smith had good insights on how societies fail to work fairly if only economic issues are considered in regulating company behavior.

Boeing 737 pilots battled confused safety system that plunged aircraft to their deaths – black box

Re: Hey software, get the fuck out of the way!

Re Airbus crash south Atlantic. AFAIRC from chats around airfields and a few public documents this incident also showed defects in pilot flight currency in directly handling aircraft. Similar incidents had happened to other airlines whose crews flew recreationally. Those crews looked at all instrument data such as indicated airspeed, angle of attack and engine power settings. They correctly concluded airspeed data was wildly wrong and flew their aircraft accordingly. Airbus were notified of the airspeed pitot tendency to ice up. In the crash incident the crew failed to realise a full stall happening because of a strong belief in all IFR pilots that one trusts instruments ahead of anything else, thus failing to assess all data.

If Boeing has drunk its version of AI KoolAid in it control system, then I will have to think about seaborne travel more positively.

CISA's Palace: Congress backs new cybersecurity nerve-center for cyber-America's cyber-future

funding ?

all well and good to have another well intentioned bureaucracy bleeping at overworked, underpaid and under trained staff. Useless if agencies have no money to buy supported hardware and software, let alone train staff. Worse than useless if the PHB levels are infected with techno-utopianism about AI, cloud and other trivia. So lets outsource the lot to lowest bidder so its not goverments fault when all systems belong to whomever. Oh JEDI again. This is a mind trick. Something being done, just not what the pundits thought.

Hands up who isn't p!*$ed off about Amazon's new HQ in New York and Virginia?

about time

all democracies or pretenders to the title abolish the political classes by abolishing self selecting organisations usually called political parties. The need to be bought, sorry, ask for donations then stops. Set 4 or 5 year terms for a single city or state council and replace the 20 or 25% as appropriate every year after 5 years. Select members by random ballot. Once having served time on council, citizens name is removed forever. No advertising, no point in targeting voters because there are none. Oh, and any use of public money cannot be in secret, NDA or protected by trade secrets nonesense. If the activity is funded by citizens, it is to be public knowledge. This applies to TLA so taxpayers can see what is being spent on empires, internal and external.

NBN satellite user waiting for extra gigabytes? Keep waiting

SkyMuster slowing

Satellite NBN is slowing in year I have used it. Still beats _any_ terrestrial radio like 3G (In my locality, 4G is a fleeting fading myth, 5 G does not exist) by two orders of magnitude. And yes, I use a directional external high gain antennae. May Keating, Howard and their parties funding organisations burn in hell for selling Telstra infrastructure. Since this is Oz, all that will happen with any capacity increase is more users put on same capacity so service levels continue to drop.

<offtopic> Just wait until the real reason for MyHealth Record when revealed) Mass data mining to allow privatised Medicare to raise big money for government that sells it and more for the donors whose "Health Insurance" companies will make a kiling. Literally if one has a chronic health condition. Officially denied by Health Minister ? yes, which reminds me that Shaws dictum is worth recalling. "Believe nothing until it is officially denied" No, I loathe Labour party too </offtopic>

Chinese teen braniacs are being trained to build new AI weapons

Remember Fifth Gen computers ?

Nothing happened then and AI wont happen now other than China will have practice making AI accelerators for their home grown CPUs. See that recent TED talk on why AI is a waste of time. Expert systems not so much. However the Wests growing stupidity is a real problem.

Mything the point: The AI renaissance is simply expensive hardware and PR thrown at an old idea

at Last

well put sir !

Smartphone industry is in 'recession'! Could it be possible we have *gasp* reached 'peak tech'?

improvements ?

a daylight readable screen. If Dell Streak 5 inch could do it, why not something else. Not all of us live in caves or only come out at night. Until I have to, I will keep my old phones including a dumb phone that does not run the java abomination of Android. It just works. Battery is also easily changed.. Simple camera that does well even in harsh light conditions. Also 7 years old and survived years of motorcycling in rain, hail and dust with Oz summer heat under black leather.

Official: IBM to gobble Red Hat for $34bn – yes, the enterprise Linux biz

Re: Amidst all the wailing and knashing of teeth here

@ST. Let me count the ways...

On line and in use file system resizing, Had this for decades in some form. In use swap partition changes Brilliant visualization via the RH based hypervisor. Change memory or CPU allocation on the fly. Set up pools of memory and CPU to allow resources to be dynamically re-allocated within pool limits on as needed basis among virtual servers. Online patching. ie no required reboots. Storage virtualisation good but everyone has that now via storage fabrics. None of this matters as AIX sys-admins of my acquaintance agree IBM wants to kill AIX and use Linux only. Cost cutting perhaps or fools seldom differ ? The best argument I can find is that migration costs between OS, let alone hardware is always stupendous, especially if IBM is involved.

Granted the capabilities of AIX are now simulated in the "cloud" for basic X86 the AIX advantage is minimal for all but biggest organisations. However those really big orgs don't change basic infrastructure lightly or easily.

Farewell RedHat, I hardly knew ye

RH CDs got my first Linux PCs up. Really liked the earlier versions before I found the one or two true Linices. Debian and flavour of week. :-) I suspect that IBM will also continue lowering its AIX sales push in favour of RH derived linux. The loss of AIX will be a lot of nails in the coffin of a truly flexible commercial Unix. That loss will have devastating effects on whats left of IBMs future.

OTOH, Devuan may benefit which is a benefit. Centos may have an interesting time dealing with IBM though.

DXC share price tumbles on El Reg bombshell of Americas boss ejection

standard recipe

IMNSHO, outsourcerers seem to behave the same way. Expressed as pseudo-code.

Apply socialised psychopaths aka sales weasels to CEOs and boards who have the common delusion of PHB class that anything of engineering or technical matter is simple.

Apply $$ to political funding bodies

Apply contract lawyers to agreement with suckers/customer

Apply sword to customers staff

Do Until broke OR Bought

Apply sword to their own staff

Apply $BS to stockmarket until clients lost

Apply $MAX $$ to multiple PHBs

Done

Have you ever, ever felt like this? Have strange things happened? Is high-speed data going round the twist?

we fiber fethistsare happy

but this being Oz, how long before ZTE own the IP ?

Americans' broadband access is so screwed up that the answer may lie in tiny space satellites

umm

they accidentally knock down Chinese satellites or make pretty shooting starts ?

Telstra Health to keep troubled Aussie cancer database contract

As usual, suspect brown paper bags

The techno-utopians and believers in Big Corp have such power in persuading or getting the MPs to toe the party line in Oz one does wonder if the utopians/political advisors and the party machine funders are being paid to push big Corp providers to replace smaller organisations that give a stuff about what they do. Given Telstra cant even keep their mobile service reliable 60 KM from national crapital this month, suggests not giving them any further tax payer money until basic competence in core business is demonstrated over a significant time. Significant time being defined as 5 years and two CEOs, whichever is longer.

Facebook names former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg head of global affairs

Why surprise ?

How many pollies have shown they can avoid wads of money ?

Spotted: Miscreants use pilfered NSA hacking tools to pwn boxes in nuke, aerospace worlds

you trust any of them ?

just like the useful idiots who speak of the spooks setting up the Oz Panopticon. "Why should I worry, I have nothing to hide." Mentioning the poor sods who get extra jail time in Merkin Land merely because an algorithm institutionalises training sets racism does not scare them or PRC Social Capital example has no effect. As for Kapersky, whoever is behind them, at least the IT audience gets to hear about issues. More than the spookeries who developed the tools originally ever did.