* Posts by Julz

1004 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Oct 2009

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UK 'extremely dependent' on US for space security

Julz
Joke

Re: Good article

"The Anglo-French Jaguar project that was supposed to produce an advanced trainer instead produced a successful ground attack aircraft"

Joke from the seventies:

How do you improve the power to weight ratio of a Jaguar?

Remove an engine.

Microsoft revives DOS-era Edit in a modern shell

Julz

Re: I think there's a lot to be said...

Now your all just yacc’ing on…

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

Julz

Windows

Just say no.

Signalgate chats vanish from CIA chief phone

Julz

Hum

Close to the bottom.

Aardvark beats groundhogs and supercomputers in weather forecasting

Julz

Why

Not run the model on the existing weather super computers for more accuracy?

Euro techies call for sovereign fund to escape Uncle Sam's digital death grip

Julz

Re: Too little, and way too late

Killing our space program and buying Polaris was also in the mix.

Apple's alleged UK encryption battle sparks political and privacy backlash

Julz

No

That's the job of GCHQ.

Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up

Julz

Well

They did say "energy", no mention of how much...

Governments can't seem to stop asking for secret backdoors

Julz

There

are millions of phones and other computers but not so many networks...

Julz

Re: You also need control, and trust, the rest of the compile time and runtime environment.

Arguably part of the runtime environment but yes, the logic that is used to process your code is itself a security concern. Ken Thomson's essay is a good start down the trapdoor of paranoia into the land of the queen of hearts.

I was just trying to point out that having visible source code isn't any real form of security guarantee and that saying so is at best disingenuous but most likely downright dangerous as people might actually believe that it is.

Julz
Black Helicopters

This

Statement is at the heart of a great deal of peoples faith:

"You can't hide a back door in open source because it would be immediately visible and removable"

But it isn't true. You also need control, and trust, the rest of the compile time and runtime environment.

Only a very naive infiltrator would put a piece of malicious code in plain sight.

US Cyber Command reportedly pauses cyberattacks on Russia

Julz

The

Irony of the War Of Independence runs deep.

DXC paid 50% more than original contract value for disastrous public sector Oracle project

Julz

Re: Disastrous Public Sector Oracle Project

I wouldn't be that charitable.

Dark mode might be burning more juice than you think

Julz

Re: what exactly causes our devices to consume energy

Then add in all in bit barns whirring away providing the mostly useless content not to mention AI rubbish.

Tesla's numbers disappoint again ... and the crowd goes wild ... again

Julz

Re: often making better designed and better built cars,

Hurrah!

UK unveils plans to mainline AI into the veins of the nation

Julz

I

Also remember that initiative. It paid (well some of it) for my job at ICL for a number of years. Other than my personnel benefit, it achieved not so much. Anybody remember Goldrush?

Honda upgrades robot brain into OS for future electric cars

Julz

Hum

“deliver a personalized ownership experience that will enhance the joy of driving.”

Just one more step to "Genuine People Personalities".

Sigh...

Eurocops take down 'secure' criminal chat system known as Matrix

Julz

I'm

Curious as to what law they were breaking. Perhaps they didn't pay their taxes on time.

Billionaire food app CEO wants you to pay for the privilege of working with him

Julz

Unfortunatly

This sort of thing isn't uncommon in the art and history world. Many rich kids get their parents to pay for them to 'work' at prestigious galleries and institutions. Good experience apparently.

Tech giants set to pay through the nose for nuclear power that's still years away

Julz

Hum

You can make more, just need enough nuetrons.

Boeing again delays the 777X – the plane that's supposed to turn things around

Julz

Re: Fun fact

As stated above; it's a clone of an Airbus 320, so what sort of competition is that?

Julz

Hey

Stop being reasonable and rational, We, want slogans and improbable rhetoric.

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

Julz

I use them for stage lighting; no fuses...

Ryanair faces GDPR turbulence over customer ID checks

Julz

The

Attitude steams directly from the top.

Microsoft cash to help reignite Three Mile Island atomic plant

Julz

Re: "..the dull blue-green glow of hubris.."

Roger Waters…

Oracle wants to power 1GW datacenter with trio of tiny nuclear reactors

Julz

Well

For starters, they are not surrounded by an unlimited supply of cooling fluid.

Mind the talent gap: Infosec vacancies abound, but hiring is flat

Julz

What

About the firms that want these Infosec employees, hire suitable candidates and then pay to train them for their role. Radical I know :)

Low orbit satellites for phone service may cause more light pollution

Julz

Vantablack...

Devices with insecure SSH services are everywhere, say infosec duo

Julz
Black Helicopters

Bugger

The NSA will have to 'arrange' for a different set of accesses...

Resource burden of electric vehicles set to triple by 2050

Julz

Wars have a way of concentrating the mind and freeing up resources...

How did a CrowdStrike file crash millions of Windows computers? We take a closer look at the code

Julz

Re: So why was table lookup done in pspSystemThread?

Exactly this. Sorry I can only upvote you once.

Julz

Pa

ICL's Estriel CPUs had 7 :)

Julz

Re: 'broken configuration file'

Turing might like to have a posthumous word about the impossibility of determining the difference between code and data...

Julz

Spot On

Preemptive execution and huge caches strikes again. Given some situations, you can have a lot of rolling back and invalidating of cache lines to do on a context switch which has caused all sorts of design decisions to be made including the one to move away from micro kernels which, I feel, is a poor one. When I was doing such things, I measured Ultra SPARC CPUs using an average of 4 clock cycles to perform a context switch in and out of kernel space. That figure on modern CPUs and kernels is in the order of hundreds and even thousands of clock cycles, and no, they are not clocked that much faster. The quest for straight line CPU speed and marketing bragging rights amongst CPU manufactures has had many consequences in both the security of and the real world speed of systems.

Patch management still seemingly abysmal because no one wants the job

Julz

I

Think a more interesting question is; why are there so many patches? A combination of poor release and testing systems combined with a high threat area and intensity are probably two of the main factors. Perhaps those areas could be improved upon which would lead to a much happier life for both the poor sods applying the patches and the end users experience of the system.

StewartWhite: just read your post. I agree, we should not just tolerate the current mess.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Julz

Re: Related?

I would say yes it is better than going into a boot loop or a BSOD.

Your next datacenter could be in the middle of nowhere

Julz

Iceland

See title ^^^^^^^

Hey Microsoft – what ever happened to 'Developers, developers, developers'?

Julz

Hum

Software is a goods (that sounds awful). There are services around the goods such as maintenance, installation etc. but the delivered software is most definitely a goods. It does have a physical instantiation, it does have set of delivered features, it must deliver on those expectations. The instantiation is the material that it is delivered upon. In ancient times that might be a tape or a disc but nowadays it's more likely to be a download, which is instantiated on the receiving device. The set of features is the definition of what the software is expected to do. The expectation is that it delivers those features correctly and without prejudice.

The rules that apply to goods apply to software, it's just that most don't seem to know or care. Mostly the problems around fitness for purpose stem from a lack of clear definitions or changing expectations. We have been bludgeoned over the years into accepting very poor quality software. Free software has also muddied the waters and lowered expectations. To use your example of cars. There are well defined systems for recalling cars to fix defects that have caused the delivered goods (the car) from not performing to either the expected specification or to regulation. This includes the software components of the car as well as the more physical components. Such pathways should also be available for software only goods.

We just live with poor software and throw our collective hands up as if saying. "it's all far too complicated" and "what do you expect". Well, how about expecting well engineered software that correctly deals with the complexity. Oh, you would probably have to pay for it but who expects a free car?

/EndRant

UK minister recalls two planning decisions which blocked datacenter investment

Julz

You can build new building on such sites as long as the new buildings footprint is no more that 1/3 greater than the existing buildings and that no harm is done to the green belt by building them. Harm being a subjective term...

Julz

Re: Slow electrons

Space time is smaller in glass.

Record labels gang up to sue AI music generator duo into utter oblivion

Julz

Hum

William Gibson's Idoru suggests otherwise. I know it's fiction but ABBA are already half way there. Hum maybe there's a song there somewhere...

India to build re-usable launch vehicle after nailing third landing of mini-spaceplane

Julz

Well

They could have gone for a lifting body approach like the MIG-105 etc.

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Julz

Re: Too complex!

My recollection of the "there was discussion at Sun " was that it was very heated and SMF was almost universally disliked by those using it on customer sites.

McDonald's not lovin' its AI drive-thru experiment with IBM

Julz

Re: Bacon-topped ice cream anybody?

On one of my earlier (late 80's) trips to an exhibition in Germany; you could get beacon bit topping on an ice cream in the hall food carts.

Tape is so dead, 152.9 EB of LTO media shipped last year

Julz

Re: Obsolescent Media

Not just for chasing media formats. One of the background tasks that computer operators (remember them :) ) did when things where quiet was Forth Bridging tapes. That is, copying and old archive tapes onto other tapes so that the archive remained viable. If I remember correctly, the operating system (George 3 at the time) had a built in job to keep track of everything and prompt which tapes needed to go on which drives etc. Just leaving a tape to molder in an archive is a sure way to have a write only backup.

By 2030, software developers will be using AI to cut their workload 'in half'

Julz

Re: From

Different bit of ICL. That the horizon software had issues is no great surprise. The shit show was the coverup and the rabid prosecutions.

Julz

From

The ICL Technical Journal, 1987:

"The present 5G programme has been designed to respond to a number of pressures, some recent and some visible within the industry for many years. The main drivers have been:

The high cost and unpredictability of software development and mainte­nance, coupled with the shortage and mobility of trained programming staff. This has been a constant problem within the industry for two decades in spite of significant advances in software engineering methodology and more recently with the widespread adoption of fourth generation systems. It used to be called the “software crisis”, but the word “crisis” seems inappropriate for a phenomenon of such longevity. “Limit to growth” is a more durable phrase which better captures the effect of this problem."

This was the justification for a number of workbench (old name for IDEs) style 5G products within ICL to improve programmer productivity most of which tried to autocomplete and suggest boilerplate style code. It would seem nothing much has changed...

UK PM Sunak calls election, leaving Brits cringing over memory of his Musk love-in

Julz

If

You look at the lectern (in downing. or is the drowning street...), when its a government announcement it has a government crest attached. When it isn't, it doesn't.

Japan's space agency enlists train operator's AI to foresee in-orbit failures

Julz

It

Will predict that the AE-35 unit will go one hundred percent failure in 72 hours...

HR expert says biz leaders scared RTO mandates lead to staff attrition

Julz

Perhaps

If you could expense travel time to work attitudes might change.

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