Posts by Julz

Ryanair faces GDPR turbulence over customer ID checks

The

Attitude steams directly from the top.

Microsoft cash to help reignite Three Mile Island atomic plant

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

Roger Waters…

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

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

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

Vantablack...

Devices with insecure SSH services are everywhere, say infosec duo

Bugger

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

Resource burden of electric vehicles set to triple by 2050

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

Re: So why was table lookup done in pspSystemThread?

Exactly this. Sorry I can only upvote you once.

Pa

ICL's Estriel CPUs had 7 :)

Re: 'broken configuration file'

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

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

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

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

Iceland

See title ^^^^^^^

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

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

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...

Re: Slow electrons

Space time is smaller in glass.

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

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

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

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

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

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'

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.

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

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

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

Perhaps

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

Is

Sockism legal?

Dream Chaser mini-shuttle set to take flight at last

I always had a soft spot for the mig-105.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-105

Europol now latest cops to beg Big Tech to ditch E2EE

Re: Every cloud has a silver lining.

Or just ask GCHQ for a copy...

Huawei wants to take homegrown HarmonyOS phone platform worldwide

Re: Pride

Are you talking about the USA sanctions or the Huawei OS?

Microsoft is a national security threat, says ex-White House cyber policy director

Re: Many of us older commentards here

I've not used any Microsoft products (oh, except a mouse) since 2001. Its not hard and it is very possible. I'm not dead set against Microsoft. I just find Microsoft products poorly designed and very poorly implemented, except the mouse...

Why making pretend people with AGI is a waste of energy

Re: Two men say they are Jesus. One of them must be wrong.

Try:

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691164090/qed

for starters...

Japan may join UK/US/Australia defense-oriented AI and quantum alliance

Try

Looking up: System Of Detection Of Wake (Systema Obnaruzhenya Kilvaternogo Sleda SOKS) . Been in use by the USSR/Russian Federation for quiet a while.

SWIFT embraces central bank digital currencies after sandbox success

The

Axis powers might have.

DARPA tasks Northrop Grumman with drafting lunar train blueprints

Road

Trains aren't new. This one might need a few tweaks though...

https://www.thedrive.com/news/33645/the-incredible-story-of-the-us-armys-earth-shaking-off-road-land-trains

European Space Agency to measure Earth at millimeter scale

Re: What are they using as their zero point?

The ground heaves by more than a mm due to day/night thermal differences. Not to mention the moon dragging a bulge of many mm around after it.

Oracle adds GenAI to Fusion with a whopping 50 use cases

Just

So.

Cryptocurrency laundryman gets hung out to dry

Just

That.

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

Re: Maths

Or 3/4's of a tractor, for lovers of Soviet statistics.

Re: Repeat after me:

Hun, Sun Ray?

Re: Repeat after me:

Lotus notes was a database with various functionality like email attached.

Ruggedized phone group takes the Bullitt, calls in PWC as administrative receiver

Software

Is just like any other goods or service and should be treated as such. If they do not work as described, then they are not fit for purpose. The consumer Rights Act 2015 and the amended Sale Of Goods Act 1979 are quiet clear on that. Well, in the UK at least. Other jurisdictions may vary.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/notes/division/3/1/4

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/faulty-goods-digital-content-services/

Ahead of Super Tuesday, US elections face existential and homegrown threats

Train crashes are BIGGER...

FAA gives SpaceX a bunch of homework to do before Starship flies again

Even

The first train journeys were dangerous too.

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2011/may/06/newspapers-national-newspapers2?CMP=twt_gu

Odysseus probe moonwalking on the edge of battery life after landing on its side

Just

Make them reflective on one side and black on the other. Let the Sun do the work.

US military pulls the trigger, uses AI to target air strikes

The

"I imagine they're also trying to use AI to generate patterns from the data that hadn't previously been thought of. I'd be scepitical, but you never know."

One thing that current AI is good at is pattern matching; finding stuff that us meat bags are too bored to find.

City council megaproject to spend millions for manual work Oracle system was meant to do

Re: I live there unfortunatley

I think that if a council area is run into bankruptcy (section 114 notice), then all the responsible elected officers should be bared from office and the whole council should be put up for re-election. Letting the same bunch of councilors that caused the issue (or at least didn't deal with previous issues) try to fix them seems ludicrous.

As

Part of the 'special circumstances' that rule was waved.

And

We should go with the German for their offices; Rathaus.