Posts by Julz

Proposed US fix for Boeing 737 Max software woes does not address Ethiopian crash scenario, UK pilot union warns

Why

Could they not make it so you could disable MCAS but leave the electrical trim actuators available for the pilots to use to trim the plane?

China sets out world domination plan for its digital currency

Similar Circumstances

As you say might already have lead to shooting wars if you recall that Iraq started transacting for oil in 2003 in Euros prior to the various 'military actions'. There was also consistent speculation that they were trying to set up an oil exchange (a rival to the dollar loving OPEC) running in Euros which would have been v bad news for the USA.

Some old analysis:

https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/173/30447.html

Adidas now stands for All Day I'm Disconnecting All Servers as owners of 'smart' Libra scales furious over bricked kit

Hum

Buy this shinny 'smart' thing for £X and if you persuade ten of your friends to do the same you can become a super elite member of the smart thing club and be eligible to 10% of the profit generated by your friends sales.

It might actually work, if by work you mean fleecing the ignorant of their money.

Coding unit tests is boring. Wouldn't it be cool if an AI could do it for you? That's where Diffblue comes in

Functional

Tests have their place (just mocking api's doesn't seem very adequate...) but the devil is always in the non-functional testing space. If this was truly AI, then it could be of use in this space. As it's not, it can't.

Edit: Oh, and writing adequate unit tests is part of the job and if you deliver code into production without them you should be shown the comfy chair.

Amazon staffers took bribes, manipulated marketplace, leaked data including search algorithms – DoJ claims

Re: House cleaning

-pinterest is your friend.

Alibaba wants to get you off the PC upgrade treadmill and into its cloud

Re: so, a 'Network Computer'?

A few years later, in 1999, the Sun Ray 1 launched and it kinda worked ok.

Oracle hosting TikTok US data. '25,000' moderators hired. Code reviews. Trump getting his cut... It's the season finale

Re: Key fact missing

Now it makes some sort of perverted sense. I hadn't groked the TikTok no show at the Trump rally campaign.

Aerospike drags mainframes kicking and screaming into the modern world by feeding their data through Apache Spark

Non-sequitur

What ever happened to Aerospike engines?

At the very last Moment.js: Time-and-date JavaScript library fetched 12 million times a week ends development

Re: Typical JS

The inevitable result of a piss poor coding model. In order to facilitate the avoidance of the coding crisis of the eighties, when it was recognised that the model of the time couldn't produce the amount of code predicted to be required, all sorts of solutions were sort. These included forth generation languages (remember them), programming workbenches (kind of morphed into IDE's) and many others. But the winners were dynamic programming languages and voluminous user generated libraries. Oh well...

Edit; I missed off blindly copy and pasting code from the web. There are bound to be others I've missed but the general drift is there.

Re: advised developers to consider alternatives.

I find myself strangely in the position of agreeing with your forceful sentiment, as in general, dynamically downloading libraries of unknowable code to perform god knows what, doesn't seem to be a wise thing to do. However, a date/time package is not something that everyone should be rolling themselves. That way leads to a chaos of errant behaviors and unpredictable effects. So,how do you square this particular triangle?

Perhaps we should grow up as a profession and use maintained, accredited, stable, vetted libraries of code for these sorts of basic functions. Even paying for them (oh the horror). Kind of like growing up and being proper engineers.

The wild west days of the computer industry has been good to me over the years. It does however seem that the time to move on is overdue.

Worried about bootkits, rootkits, UEFI nasties? Have you tried turning on Secure Boot, asks the No Sh*! Agency

Re: they should have said...

Well, a great many people had a lot of physical access to your device before it came into your possession. Not to mention the access to the design process of the chips and electronics before they were even manufactured. Oh, and don't blindly trust your compilers and other systems type code including the OS and all the various firmwares. Just accept that the system is compromised by design and plan accordingly. Fatalistic I know but in lifetimes past, this was the game we played.

Personal data from Experian on 40% of South Africa's population has been bundled onto a file-sharing website

Giving data back is something you can do over and over and over and over...

VMware staff in Silicon Valley can leave a pandemic, wildfire-ridden zone – if they're willing to accept less pay

Is

This actually legal? Is it in the contract of employment that your employer can on their own decide to cut your salary? Is there a section dealing with where you live? And if so, is that ok? I'm thinking that this would be illegal here in Blighty but perhaps not in the Land Of The Free.

Don’t lump us in with Facebook, internet infrastructure companies warn European Union

Re: Is the problem simply that politicians don't have a clue?

The competences that the political systems select for include things such as being able to raise/have loads of money to give to your party. Be friends and have influence with all of the correct people for any given definition of correct. To be able to give a credible interview while defending the indefensible and simultaneously not saying anything of substance that could be used against your party at a later date. Being arrogant enough to believe that you have the right to make decisions for others while conveying the the air of being one of the people. There are others but you get the idea.

While none of these actually exclude experience outside of politics, those who are steeped in the inner machinations of the relevant political system will always be at an advantage. Shit but hey :(

Salon told to change ad looking for 'happy' stylist because it 'discriminated against unhappy people'

Re: "developers, developers developers"?

Hum, some of us don't care much for unrealistically upbeat people and their delusionally optimistic world views.

Bah humbug...

Re: "developers, developers developers"?

Hum, if only. Is that five years 'experience' doing the same thing every day or five years 'experience' learning something new every day? Or perhaps five years 'experience' following what the person next to you did or five years 'experience' in pretending to be competent.

I guess that's why you have interviews and you have to try and gauge what's what. Same with other traits you might be interested in like 'happiness'.

Re: How I feel in the office

So how did you get over thirty parsecs away?

Brexit border-line issues: Would you want to still be 'testing' software designed to stop Kent becoming a massive lorry park come 31 December?

If

you want some data to base your rants arguments on:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/826446/port-freight-statistics-2018.pdf

With a million unwanted .uk domains expiring this week, Nominet again sends punters pushy emails to pay up

But

The person targeted with increasing the number of registrations held by Nominet a few years ago got their bonus, so what's the problem?

Intel screams Tiger Lake is 'world's best processor' (then quietly into its sleeve: for thin Windows, ChromeOS laptops)

Re: Munch crunch munch crunch

Surly than should be, nom, nom, nom...

UK govt: It's time to get staff back into the office! Capita: Hey everyone... about that...

Re: Like hamsters on a wheel

Hey, what about us buggy whip makers?

Re: Isn't it ironic

For a while, I basically did the first two. Expense account was nice though.

Dell: 60% of our people won't be going back into an office regularly after COVID-19

Re: We seem to have lost the point of commerce

Raw Data => Processing => Collated Data

Arranging bits, bytes and nibbles (whatever happened to nibbles?) can also adds value, for some meaning of value.

Ex-Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain loses US appeal bid against fraud convictions and 5-year prison sentence

Sorry

Confused.

She was in the UK with diplomatic immunity, as both sides agree. So the alleged act was covered by the immunity, so no extradition as what might have been done can't be used as grounds for extradition.

She is now out of the UK, so no diplomatic immunity but the alleged act happened when she did. Still no grounds for extradition.

Am I missing something?

Re: I thought we had abandoned extradition

The question to ask is who was the senior spook, her husband or her?

Here's some words we never expected to write: Oracle said to offer $10bn cash, $10bn shares for TikTok US – plus profit share promise

Re: Keeping it local

Oh I don't know, if your a Brentford fan it probably does. Rightness is a bit like truth, mostly dependents upon who and when you ask.

That isn't the DoD contract you are looking for

Or perhaps it is...

Re: Keeping it local

Same or similar thing happens in most countries around the world. It's quite unusual that you get the situation you do in the UK, when pretty well anyone with pockets full of cash can buy whatever they want. Including it seems our national infrastructure. Some might question the wisdom of that position.

Or

Post 1989 Russia. Hum, perhaps talk of Russian interference was a mangled misinterpretation of the administrations adoption of perestroika politics. Let the reconstruction commence...

Worried about the Andromeda galaxy crashing into our Milky Way in four billion years? Too bad, it's quite possibly already happening

What

About the dark matter? If it is real and is responsible for the unreasonable orbits of stars in galaxies, then a merger like this is going to be an interesting ride.

Hidden Windows Terminal goodies to check out: Retro mode that emulates blurry CRT display – and more

Memories

Flood back. I wrote a cross compiler to drive a Tektronix's 4010(? I think) from a DG Eclipse written in PASCAL! You could take the output from the Eclipse and display it in nice green floaty lines on the Tektroniks. Give me a break, it was a university project...

Highways England primes market for £2bn tech spend as part of massive investment in crumbling roads network

Missed the joke icon. I had images of big bar codes running across the carriageways...

Where would you put the asset tags?

So long, Top Gun... AI software waxes US F-16 pilot's tail 5-0 during virtual dogfight drills

Re: One day maybe...

Absolutely nothing.

War, huh, yeah.

Still

expensive. A BVR missile like a meteor costs around £2,000,000. So by your numbers, a hundred dumb drones carrying a missile each would cost £200,000,000 to arm. The single F35 would cost the same to build (your assumption) plus it's missile load. Lets assume it's in a non-stealth configuration and is carrying six meteor missiles. This adds up to £12,000,000 for its armaments, a cool £188,000,000 less than the drones.

Yes I know I'm ignoring a load of other stuff, but this is just order of magnitude, fag packet (is that still a thing), arithmetic.

Watching

the video. The biggest difference seemed to be the 'AI' could shoot better. On each merge, the 'AI' did way more damage than the meatbag. Perhaps the lesson is to let an 'AI' be in charge of the gun.

This PDP-11/70 was due to predict an election outcome – but no one could predict it falling over

Re: Performance Upgrade

The microcode was absolutely unique to each set of 'cpu's' (pain in the arse when boards were changed). There was also logic built into the systems that could not be circumvented that implemented the slugging. If all was not hunky dory, it would default to the most restrictive slug. Again, a pain in the arse if you had an inquisitive customer.

Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly via TCP, UDP. Obviously, nothing can go wrong

Re: Cycles of re-incarnation

The universe that is the internet stopped being intelligent a long time ago.

Re: Yet

Love your choice of adjectives :)

Yet

Another attempt to make an application into an operating system without the fifty plus years of development, no instrumentation and piss poor resource control and security. If you want that sort of thing I guess you could buy a Chromebook, but most people don't. If you want to see how well this tends to pan out, just look at the mess that is you most/least favorite Java application server.

If you can't understand how Instagram 'influencers' make millions, good luck with these virtual ones doing even better

Re: Why bother with a real job...

It's always been thus. I would have had a really hard time explaining to my ex-coalminer grandfather what my job in computing actually was and why people would pay me money to do it. Value is what people at any point in time decide it is. A hundred years ago, lumps of coal. Fifty years ago, marshaling bits and bytes. Now, influencing what people buy.

Space station update: Mystery tiny but growing air leak sparks search for hole

What

if the leak is in the Russian living quarters?

SAP blogger reveals top tips for keeping clients happy: Don’t swear, remember to write a pithy subject line, and TURN OFF CAPS LOCK

Well

I think that actual credibility, enthusiasm and honesty is probably a good thing rather than, as the SAP wanker says, "staff should 'convey credibility, enthusiasm and honesty'". But I'm not an overpaid consultant. Well not anymore...

Sun welcomes vampire dating website company: Arrgh! No! It burns! It buuurrrrnsss!

Re: Inappropriate garb

I always find judging people by how they look and dress such a great way of determining the content of their character.

eBay won't pass UK Digital Service Tax costs on to third-party sellers – unlike Amazon, which simply can't afford it

Re: How convenient

Oy, stop being rational and reasonable. We all want to bash the big guy here. Exploitation by the bourgeoisie of the noble working classes. Up the revolution!

America's largest radio telescope blind after falling cable slashes 100-foot gash in reflector dish

Re: Aliens!!!!!

That concept was alien to them.

Microsoft spills beans on release, pricing for folding fancyphone: Start your Surface Duo engines now

Move fast and make mistakes?

NASA to stop using names like 'Eskimo Nebula' and 're-examine' what it calls cosmic objects

Re: Horsehead Nebula is OK

or the mafia...

Re: Human Nature

If only I could up vote more than once.

However as Trigun says there is more going on and I think it is far more dangerous than people merely projecting their own fears onto other peoples behavior. It is a sort of race to the moral high ground while at the same time castigation those that are not pious enough. I think it is a form of mass hysteria (hum, can we continue using that sexist term? :) amplified via the always on, connected and uncritical population at large. A race to find ever more things that might offend and ever more righteous ways of signaling your superiority to the majority by your awareness of these so call offenses. No matter there might not be any actual offense, that is of no consequence. It is the act of signalling to the uninitiated, the ignorant but most importantly to your fellow acolytes, that matters. Quite literally, that act of being holier than thou. This is the object of the exercise. Quite sickening.

As ever, a name has been coined for this, the purity spiral, and the chattering classes are all a chattering about it. How long I wonder before that term becomes persona non gratis. There is an ok'ish BCC radio shown exploring the phenomenon.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000d70h

USA decides to cleanse local networks of anything Chinese under new five-point national data security plan

The ever present danger of spell checkers combined with dislexia ;(