* Posts by Spamfast

407 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2010

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Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

Spamfast
Pint

Re: Dual SIM phone

work to live, dont live to work

Haleluljah! Have a beer. And while we're propping the bar up, let's not bang on about work.

Unless they're paying you at least time an a half for being so - not for when you're actually called - then on-call is a scam to avoid employing enough staff.

For those still sufferering, next time you consider changing jobs then buy a throw-away SIM and use the number for the agencies (spit!) and your new employer. Stick it in a $10 burner phone and you can shred it later.

UK employment contracts often have weasel words such as "your hours are 37.5 per week ... but you may be called upon to work beyond those in exceptional circumstances". This is unenforcable because they don't define those precisely and contract law favours the one who didn't draft the contract.

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

Spamfast
Meh

Lilliput, Blefuscu & boiled eggs

If you hand the keys to the kernel level DMA API to any programming language then the code that uses that API can not be memory safe.

use of unsafe in Rust

Indeed.

I don't do a lot of application (i.e. program launched in userland on top an OS) programming these days but C would not be my first choice there anymore - I'd go for C++ making sure to avoid the use of memory-direct constructs. Rust looks like a good alternative in this domain. To be honest, when I have to knock something up to support what I do Python is often the better choice. My preferred arena is bare metal - sometimes RTOS mediated - design but I've also done work in Linux kernel space device driver stuff. The QNX micro-kernel userland driver model was a hell of a lot easier but Linux is okay once you understand the quirks of the subsystem in question.

Anyway kernel programming, especially device driver development, is inherently memory unsafe, regardless of the language used. If you have to and are allowed to bugger about with the contents of the physical memory map, device registers, interrupts and the rest then you better get it right and it doesn't matter what type of runes you're using to do that.

Rust may be 'safer' than C but at the end of the day it's the discipline in coding that counts and frankly, coming from safety critical, a lot of what I see in the Linux kernel's C code is god-awful in design, implementation, efficiency, documentation and error confinement. If this is the culture then I doubt Rust is going to make any difference and just adds more chances of screwing things up since there are now three times as many things to go wrong - the C, the Rust & the bindings between the two.

M'eh! Like I say, I prefer bare metal anyway.

Canvassing apps used by UK political parties riddled with privacy, security issues

Spamfast
Coat

Re: Flogging a dead horse

Dear Marjorie Proops, I can only achieve gratification via sadomasochistic, necrophiliac zoophillia. Is this okay or am I just flogging a dead horse?

(see the icon)

Spamfast

Re: Quote: This will further undermine public trust.

I upvoted you because I agreed.

I think it has already hit rock bottom.

But the events of the past few years have shown me that the current geological formation has an infinite depth.

Trump admin's purge of US cyber advisory boards was 'foolish,' says ex-Navy admiral

Spamfast
Terminator

Re: Bad timing ...

kiss the one he sits on

In that case ...

Bender for president!

Spamfast
Trollface

Re: Is 'learnings' a word?

You don't have to be smart to get into Harvard or Yale - or Oxford or Cambridge. Having rich parents generally makes you a shoe-in, especially if they themselves are alumni, having got in by the same method. Once there, you are almost guaranteed to achieve a degree in some fatuous subject like PPE or law without having to do any real thinking. It has to be this way if we're not going to run out of "qualified" senators & MPs, of course.

Only poor people have to be smart to have a chance at elite universities, and they also have to take on a lot of debt to do it.

Interesting side comment, despite its repeated claims to be the land of opportunity, the USA is one of the least socially mobile countries in the western world. Even the UK has better statistics. (Look 'em up yourself by the way. This is a rant not a scientific paper!)

WFH with privacy? 85% of Brit bosses snoop on staff

Spamfast

Re: so management are not measuring output

And there lies the rub.

Productivity is, by definition, getting the product out in a profitable way, whether that be physical widgets or whatever. As long as that happens, management shouldn't care about how the ones generating the product are doing it provided that they are happy.

Unfortunately, management defines its own productivity by how much it is seen to be interfering with the producers' activities.

IT department heads suffer from the same insecurity.

It's about justifying one's own existence.

Spamfast
FAIL

Re: Responsible adults

If you don't trust your employee, then why did you hire him in the first place?

The corollary, of course, is that if your manager insists on surveillance then he doesn't trust you and for your own career & psychological benefit you should find another employer as soon as possible.

Tiny Linux kernel tweak could cut datacenter power use by 30%, boffins say

Spamfast

Re: #pragma pack(0)

Using a compiler flag (such as GCC's __attribute__((packed))) to fully pack a structure removes all alignment padding and so reduces the size in memory and cache usage.

However, as mentioned, on some architectures attempting to read/write things bigger than a byte non-aligned causes a fault which can abort the program (or hard fault the CPU in the kernel or when using embedded bare metal or RTOS usually causing a reboot).

Some CPUs allow an excepton handler to analyse the fault and pull/put the bytes out/in one by one so that the user's assembler or higher level code doesn't have to worry about it but that's going to be very CPU intensive itself and may reset the instruction pipelining and caching.

Some architectures handle unaligned access transparently entirely within the hardware but there is genernally a bus cycle penalty if two 32 or 64 words have to be read or written across the memory bus and again this can cause stalls in the hardware optimizers.

So it's a good idea to have an understanding of your hardware platform even when writing apps in userland on a POSIX, Windows or other high level OS.

Atlassian's Bitbucket Cloud went down 'hard' today

Spamfast
Thumb Up

Re: > The om;y worse set of tools....

You've not used Gerrit, then?

Oh my. I'd forgotten about (or possibly blanked the memories of) Gerrit.

Spamfast
Facepalm

K.I.S.S.

I am repeatedly baffled as to why anyone chooses to pay for Atlassian product. At first glance the web UIs look very shiny but once you start to use them you realize how disfunctional they are. Bitbucket provides nothing that services like Github or others don't. Confluence is a piss poor wiki/colab/CMS compared to many others. And Jira, well Jira, is possibly the most inflexible, sluggish, non-intuitive issue tracker I've used. Even Mantis & Bugzilla are better and Jira doesn't even come close to addressing the sort of peer review that should be de rigueur these days let alone safety or security critical development regulatory requirements.

There are open source integrated systems that provide the same functionality available online, self-hosted or hybrid. In the past I've rolled more effective systems piecemeal from the likes of Subversion, Mantis et al.

The only worse sets of tools I've used are PTC's (Windchill PLM ...) and LDRA's code analysis, especially given the eye-watering prices they charge.

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

Spamfast

What the hell are they going to use to train all these new monster LLMs?

There's already a significant percentage of 'knowledge' on the Internet that has been churned out by the squawking birds.

Even if the current methods could lead to AGI, there's not enough good data upon which to draw, even if using copyrighted material that should be firmly off limits to these parasites. If they're allowed to squirt it back out into the source pool it'll all become worthless to them and the rest of us well before they've got these gas-guzzling things fully online.

It's an informational Ponzi scheme in a similar way to almost all cryptocurrencies being financial ones.

Now I don't even have to mess up Wikipedia articles myself. I can get my LLM to do it.

Open source router firmware project OpenWrt ships its own entirely repairable hardware

Spamfast

Re: Repairable?

As long as nothing is BGA, you can buy a perfectly good SMT rework station from Amazon for less than £90 which includes a soldering iron as well as the temp-controlled SMT hot air gun and a set of tweezers.

Learning how to use it without incinerating the PCB is a little trickier. Practicing on scrap is a good idea and I'm still learning to do devices larger than a 16 lead SOIC!

Australia passes law to keep under-16s off social media – good luck with that, mate

Spamfast
FAIL

Re: Australia's government counters ... many studies have shown social media is harmful to children

Cite some peer reviewed scientific studies that demostrate actual harm to under eighteens.

All legitimate studies and meta-studies to date find no link. For example, try PubMed.

Twenty years ago, people were writing similar scare stories suggesting a link between video games, mental health and violent crime. Again, upon rigourous analysis no link was found.

I do not like social media and you may not like it either but those are our opinions and we don't get to assert that people of any age shouldn't be using it without actual evidence.

Spamfast
Pint

Re: What Australian kids did with fake IDs…

* nostalgia alert *

Reminds me of my youth where we'd research the laxity of all the local off-licenses and pubs and share the data - by word of mouth in those days of course.

I was buying beer & whisky at thirteen. It helped if I parked my bike out of sight but it was easy to forget to take my bike-clips off! Luckily that didn't always break the deal.

By fourteen I was regularly going to the pub sometimes with my brother-in-law who was a copper. I was actually small for my age at the time but most landlords didn't bat an eyelid. Probably helped that I was ordering bitter rather than the lager my friends tried to buy and sometimes got knocked back.

And it was my own father who turned me on to the bitter.

And I seem to remember that even supermarkets and big off-licences would let kids buy cider - two litre bottles of Strongbow or Woodpecker for thirty five pence or so. Can't stand cider these days - possibly related!

Ahh, happy days! ;-)

Spamfast
Happy

Re: Just wondering...

Have they repealed the laws of Mathematics yet?

Of course! They've done this specifically to allow a new generation of strong cryptography which only the 'good' governments can crack.

Spamfast
Thumb Up

Re: Australia's government counters ... many studies have shown social media is harmful to children

Don't get me wrong, I dislike all the social meda platforms and don't use them myself - to paraphrase Shaparak Khorsandi, I'm never felt the need to ask people to come on MyFace or whatever it's called.

But finally, someone posts the elephant in the room. As sebroni points out, there is no credible scientific evidence that social media causes harm to under eighteens and for some it actually proivdes social space that they wouldn't otherwise have.

There is also no evidence that smartphones are reducing the time kids spend outdoors or exercising. That trend was well established long before smartphones were introduced and is more down to the media scaring parents into keeping kids close, forgetting that a child is far more likely to be harmed by family and friends than by total strangers, that speed limits in residential areas are going down and that road traffic in many cities is also in decline due to ULEZ, subsidized public transport and similar schemes.

Of course, the parents don't want to have to interact with the kids now underfoot so they expect the TV, games consoles & social media companies to keep them busy while simultaneously decrying the inappropriateness of the content.

Go figure!

Chinese boffins find way to use diamonds as super-dense and durable storage medium

Spamfast
Coat

And since we have all this space the software can be even more bloated and inefficient than every before!

And we can store enough drivel & porn to keep us occupied for millenia.

Bring back core storage, Hollerith cards and punched tape for backup I say.

(I also miss pen plotters, especially when they catapulted a leaky pen across the drawing office. "Incoming!")

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

Spamfast
FAIL

Re: Slap on the wrist?

As with the other replies, I was using VT100-accessed System V'ish microcomputers & minicomputers in the Imperial Technology computer department in 1983 (although I was in the physics department) and nobody had even read access to others' home directories, let alone write. That's been UNIX standard since T,K&R created it to the best of my knowledge.

The sysadmin in question or one of his predecessors would have had to change the user home directory creation stuff and/or default umask explicitly to make home directories world-write.

I can see it happening if 'we're all friends here' for cooperative work but shared directories with sticky bits were available long before Sun/POSIX ACLs became common.

I'd have arranged a user lynch mob, sorry, posse to chase down the sysadm responsible.

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

Spamfast
Facepalm

My other half's favourite. (She was a teacher, now happily retired.)

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/cd/76/e8/cd76e8d776a8b9c11e3bb42f28361fb4.jpg

Spamfast
Headmaster

calculators are allowed in maths classes now, that's a shame.

Mathematics is not the same as arithmetic.

If a pocket calculator is giving you an advantage in a mathematics class or exam, then I don't rate that course or qualification.

Mathematics is algebra, geometry, calculus and the rest. Unless your pocket calculator has a symbolic evaluation engine built-in, it's not going to give you an advantage with any of these.

I got very good grades in mathematics at school and college (without a calculator as it happens although it wouldn't have made any difference) and use maths all the time for work (electronics, closed loop, transducers, comms, etc.).

I'm rubbish at arithmetic - never even learned my times tables!

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

Spamfast
Alert

Re: Dear lord no

based on Tomcat

A chill runs down my spine.

I avoid anything to do with

Wise decision. I have a list. Amost all of the server-side stuff on there has Java in it. JBoss is another hideous example.

Spamfast
Coat

Re: Good-bye to all that

If it is using flash....Flash has a typical life of 100,000 write cycles.

Flash? It was still running on set top boxes a while back but it's definitely well past its life cycle now.

(I'll get my coat ...)

Openreach reveals latest locations facing the copper chop

Spamfast

Re: Amazing

If it took an event like that to produce a power cut round here we'd be quite pleased with the service.

Sounds like where I live. My single phase mains supply, 'maintained' by SSE, suffers from almost daily brown-outs and at least once a month it drops out completely for a second or two. Every few months it goes out completely for ten to twenty minutes. We never get an apology or even an explanation as to why, let alone any kind of compensation.

I've got a couple of compact UPSes that can hold up the ISP's VDSL SIP/DECT/FSX router, my gateway router/access-point and my file/mail server for a couple of hours but everything else has to rely on residual capacitance in the power supply circuits to ride out the ripples and shut down for the longer events.

Oddly my partner who lives less than a kilometre away has a far more stable service to her house from the very obvious and noisy 1.8MW substation at the other end of her street whereas I seem to be directly connected to the larger 10MW facility at the edge of town. (At least I think so as I can't find any smaller substations closer to me.)

Anyway, when telephone providers remove POTS, they should be obliged to offer a free UPS to keep at least one FSX port active for twenty-four hours or so. Either that or a serious cut in the cost of the service as a result of the reduced SLA.

Lebanon: At least nine dead, thousands hurt after Hezbollah pagers explode

Spamfast

I'd rather my cardiac surgeon have a pager to get him/her to the theatre in the event of my relapse than relying on SMS or Whatsapp.

Newer doesn't always mean better - and as should be self-evident to anyone with a jot of knowledge about IT & comms it certainly doesn't mean more reliable.

A web search for "Emergency Services Network" might be enlightening to those who disagree. Unless of course they're happy fo have their tax contributions spaffed on non-functional, over-budget, behind schedule infrastructure.

Spamfast

When they came for the ...

Hezbollah are terrorists - totally agree because they engage in violent acts with no regard for innocent bystanders. (Although that could also be laid at the door of many a Western government's military actions.)

Hamas - the same. (And by the way, who almost certainly killed & kidnapped Israelis deliberately so as to cause the inevitable slaughter of Palistinians in the Israeli government's knee-jerk over-reaction.)

The IDF are terrorists because they indiscriminately bomb Palestinian camps on the pretext that there may be Hamas therein. (In which case there might also be Israeli hostages there too but that doesn't seem to worry them.)

But if it turns out that the IDF or Mossad are connected to this then it's clear that the Israeli government has turned Israel into a terrorist state.

Antisemitism is an irrational hatred of Jews. Disgust at the Israelli government is not antisemitism - otherwise there are a lot of antisemitic Jews out there both inside & outside of Israel.

It's unpopular to say so but frankly the Israeli state has become as fascist as the AfD who are alarmingly close to taking over several of the Bundesländer in eastern Germany and Trump's rednecks might in the USA.

I just hope that Nigel Farage's "I'm not racist, but ..." buddies are kept in check in the UK.

FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them

Spamfast
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Reminds me of TV sets

Funny you should say that.

I was in a rather posh hotel in the Netherlands a while ago with a rather grand spacious public area between reception and the lifts (elevators).

It still had a row of phone hoods on one wall but they no longer had phones, just a notepad, a pen and a USB socket!

(Makes me think of my favourite "plot holes you could drive a Sherman tank through" disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow. If the library hadn't had POTS payphones, Jake Gyllenhaal wouldn't have got to be groped by Emmy Rossum. Bring back POTS! Hang on, if he hadn't gotten through to Dennis Quaid then maybe Jay O. Sanders wouldn't have had to die at the shopping mall with the surprisingly fragile roof.)

Spamfast

Re: Reminds me of TV sets

I know, I have a FRITZBox! myself which as you say, has both an FXS port & a DECT base station built-in. Nice kit and supplied gratis (well, included-with) by my ISP. They're fairly ubiquitous in Germany & some other European countries for domestic phone/net providers as well. The stock firmware is not as flexible router-wise as OpenWrt but at least it gets regular auto-updates and is way better than the non-maintained, limited functionality crap most UK ISPs give punters.

But we were discussing long-lived technology. Baseband POTS is still one of my favorites for its simplicity & elegance. (Okay I'm a bit biased - I used to design payphones.)

TCP/IP's doing pretty well longevity-wise too. :-)

Spamfast
Thumb Up

Re: Reminds me of TV sets

I doubt that any other tech equipment has that long a lifetime.

10 pulse-per-second rotary dial POTS terminals (Plain Old Telephone System aka analogue telephones) from the 1930s still work fine on modern PSTN lines.

Of course there's a push from the likes of BT/OpenReach in the UK to discontinue the baseband POTS service on your copper pair in favour of SIP services so that is unlikely to be true for much longer

Post-CrowdStrike catastrophe, Microsoft figures moving antivirus out of Windows kernel mode is a good idea

Spamfast

Re: How will AVs function without being in the kernel

How many threads?

800. I kid you not.

I can show you a screenshot of Process Explorer's System Information view with the executable path, thread count & working set columns.

Maybe Trend are confusing a higher thread count with good quality material?

Spamfast
FAIL

Re: How will AVs function without being in the kernel

Damn right.

Try doing a complex build before an after installing Trend.

Anything that involves parallel processes opening, reading, closing a bunch of files while opening, writing, closing another file - e.g. a build tool calling a compiler - slows down about tenfold after installing Trend in real-time filesystem protection mode only even if excluding all the executables, DLLs, data files and directories involved from scanning. I've seen this with lots of different toolchains using Cygwin, MSYS or native tools. With just Windows Defender enabled on the whole filesystem and Trend de-installed, the performance returns to the previous level.

At one place I wasted several man-days collecting instrumentation logs at Trend's behest after which they could give no explanation of why it happens or instructions on how to prevent it short of fully uninstalling their flaky product.

On a 64GB 12 core 24 hardware thread Windows 10 Pro machine, even when the PC has no foreground applications running, Trend has twelve userland processes running, with a total of over eight hundred threads between them with a combined working set of about three hundred and fifty megabytes. Heaven knows what kernel resources are being used by the modules loaded there. This is for real-time filesystem protection only.

And they're allowed into Microsoft's security summit?!

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch could be gone in ten years – for chump change

Spamfast

Re: Recurrence

Both Germany and Denmark have brilliant infrastructure for mandatory deposits on glass & plastic drinks bottles & tins. Larger supermarkets are also obliged to provide non-store-specific automatic recycling machines that crush the plastic & tins and bigger ones can even take crates of glass bottles. They spit out a coupon that can be redeemed for cash or used towards one's next shop.

One niggle I have though is that the German ones don't accept Danish recycling and vice versa. We try to get rid before we cross the border but there's often an expletive when we open the tailgate on the car and spot ones that have snuck across with us. It would be nice if there were an EU-wide scheme that worked cross-border.

A similar scheme seems like a no-brainer in the UK for any government that actually believes the green rhetoric it spouts.

As pointed out, it's not going to eliminate the trash Brits toss into their environment but it might go some way and maybe start instilling a better mindset.

More coppers on the beat issuing spot fines for littering (and maybe summary execution for spitting out gum!) might help too, but that's a different rant. ;-)

Spamfast

Re: Recurrence

Before we get too smug about how responsible we in Europe & North America are, it is well to remember that we export an awful lots of our waste of all types to Asia & Africa.

GNU screen 5 proves it's still got game even after 37 years

Spamfast
Thumb Up

mux me baby

I fell in love with screen but we split up when I started dating tmux. Both are excellent but tmux is a bit more Spamfast/idiot friendly. And yes, tmux can do TTYs as well. Back when my interface really was VT100 serial terminals I used Emacs to achieve similar multitasking minus the restart ability. All great tools.

As my T-shirt says - Real men use the command line. (Also women and small blue furry creatures from Alpha Centuri.)

France charges Telegram CEO with multiple crimes

Spamfast
Meh

Don't shoot the messenger.

While I agree that the high-ups in Telegram should be held responsible for vetting material on shared forums on their platform, the argument that because normal private Telegram chats are not end-to-end encrypted then the CEO should be held responsible for everything that is communicated within them is ridiculous.

The public switched telephone network has never been encrypted at all. Maybe the CEO of British Telecom should be arrested every time a crook fesses up that he called his mate to organize a burglary?

The postal system is not end to end encrypted. Maybe Royal Mail should steam all those letters open and check to see what people are writing to their grandmas?

I do wish Telegram would follow the pack and E2EE all private chats to be done with it but just because they are briefly unencrypted on a server in Dubai or wherever doesn't make the argument for hanging the virtual postman or his boss.

Spamfast
FAIL

Re: EFF

"You can't prosecute me, it was a simple oversight not to file my taxes! This is quite unfair for a simple procedural issue!"

If you're rich enough in the UK, that's exactly what happens. There are many documented cases of HMRC 'coming to an arrangement' with tax evaders to pay back a, usually small, percentage of what they've "mistakenly" overlooked in return for not being prosecuted.

If you owe them ten million, it's unlikely you'll be prosecuted. If you owe them two thousand, you may get a custodial sentence.

Tired of airport security queues? SQL inject yourself into the cockpit, claim researchers

Spamfast
Unhappy

Be afraid, be very afraid ... of the wrong thing.

I have no experience of the TSA having not had to use any US airports on my travels either before or after the terrorist catastophes in and around 2001.

But the organisation and especially its, probably underpaid & undertrained, staff seem to be held in contempt by many Americans from the jokes and comments in the media and places like this forum.

It seems pretty clear to me that much of the additional security measures at airports I have used - mostly in Europe and especially those in the UK - are more for reassurance that 'the government is doing something about this threat' than actually to make us safer.

It has also of course been a feeding frenzy for service companies and shoddy security tech slingers who have been able to fleece the taxpayers for all this with the help of their paid-for politicians and civil servants.

And of course the added inconvenience and FUD for the rest of us is exactly what the terrorists wanted to provoke.

Lego's Concorde is the only supersonic jet you can build for the price of a fancy dinner

Spamfast
Trollface

Observation error alert!

Hehe. Flame war over LEGO, eh? I take it you missed the disclaimer and the icon?

You can indeed ignore the instructions and you can still buy brand new big boxes of generic bricks which contain suggestion leaflets to get you started, thankfully, although I tend to go to secondhand shops and then give 'em all a good wash once they're home as that's better for the environment and my bank balance to boot.

Originally the 'kits' were generic helecopters, racing cars, boats, houses and so on, not specific duplicates of characters and props from movies & TV or attempts at detailed copies of specific real-life vehicles. It was SOP that if we got a gift or saved up for a kit containing twenty or thirty pieces we'd build it to the instructions, play with it for a bit and then add the bits to the collection for less prescriptive use of the wheels, windscreens & windows. The generic blocks in the kits added incrementally to the scale of our subsequent creations.

But a £150 to £500 LEGO Concorde, Space Shuttle, R2D2, Millenium Falcon or whatever containing hundreds of pieces very specific to the instructions is not sold or purchased to be used as a generic set of parts. These are bought to be assembled and then displayed, most often by adults lacking the patience or skills for more realistic model-making. Essentially, they're just 3D jigsaw puzzles with a crib sheet. Once assembled, most of them are too fragile to play with unless the assembler glues them together which, guess what, means they're not going to be broken up and put in the bucket of bricks under the bed afterwards.

People are entitled to entertain themselves how the like, but that is not the original mindset that makes LEGO such a good toy for imaginative play for little kids as well as big kids like me. And yes, I still have LEGO without the tacky little people and Disney crap that I, my partner and - now she's old enough to migrate from Duplo - her granddaughter enjoy using.

Spamfast
Trollface

** !!! Nostalgia Alert !!! **

LEGO meant 'play well' accoding to the legend. The company has lost the plot in a lot of ways - other than financial, of course.

Before the rot set it, LEGO was unisex, uniform and required imagination - both because there were very few custom parts and because we had to imagine the people or creatures inhabiting our creations which was much more flexible. See this advert, for the orginal spirit.

Yes, there were some novelty parts in some of the later kits but once you'd built whatever it was it could be broken up, added to your collection and the funky bits could be repurposed. The challenge back then for enthusiasts was to build something novel that looked like an iconic building or vehicle but using mostly standard pieces with perhaps a few canibalized ones from kits. Or you could just create generic buildings and cars and so on and play with them in your own scenarios.

Now the kits are full of highly customised pieces moulded specifically for the target design, highly gender stereotyped, cynically co-marketted with TV & movie franchises and once built the kit is often never dismantled. You might as well buy a Revell or Airfix model and glue it together. At least painting the result and applying the decals takes some skill with those and the result really does look authentic.

I hated it when they brought out LEGO people as it seemed like a cop out and a cynical way to gatecrash Playmobil's turf. And yes, I was still a kid then!

NASA will fly Boeing Starliner crew home with SpaceX, Calamity Capsule deemed too risky

Spamfast
Trollface

Re: Reputation

That needs to be chiseled in stone in the CEO's office.

That needs to be chiseled in bone in the CEO's forehead.

(Figuratively speaking, of course.)

Spamfast
Happy

Re: Thunderbirds are GO !!![*]

One hell of a wait for the next *bus* !!!

Nah! About normal for rural services. (In the UK at least.)

Row erupts over data sharing function in UK doctor software

Spamfast

Re: The BMA>

Well, some unions do sometimes act in the wider interest than their own members or union management and the BMA does often take a position with which I concur as a patient.

But yes, it is first and foremost there to support the interests of doctors, not patients.

So as with ACPO and POLFED, it's always wise to read between the lines!

All three organizations have a habit of becoming obstructive when it's their own under scrutiny, as do many other trade bodies.

Spamfast

Re: What GP?

Okay, so it may be a partnership or it may, in the case of multi-practice company, be an Ltd, possibly wholly owned by a Plc. Tomato, tomato. Anyone with more authority in an organisation of this sort has the same access as all those with less, otherwise said minions - doctors or admin - find themselves sidelined, passed over or 'let go' and possibly black-balled if they refuse or blow the whistle.

When I registered back when, I registered with a specific doctor and would almost always be seen by said doctor. This still shows on my record which, yes, I know is held by TPP - I access it via SystmOnline and wouldn't expect the practice to have its own on-site servers and IT department.

The point is, there is no longer a single GP who has sole access to my record. That's not necessarily a bad thing but the press and BMA and so on still try to act as if there is a cosy and private relationship with some sort of continuity of care, whereas the idea of 'your GP' is long gone.

Within a single Practice there should be a difference in access permissions between medical staff and admin staff

With emphasis on 'should'. The reality is that staff always share access 'to speed things up'. There have been a number of cases where admin staff have been caught doing nasty things with the records of patients they've taken a dislike to in or out of work. If caught, the staff member gets fired, fined and/or maybe a suspended sentence. The owners do not get any penalties in the cases I've seen.

That's a different matter from whether they actually start looking at a particular patient's record without good reason - that's something that, in theory, occasional/random audits of the records system's logs should show up, assuming the Practice actually bother to do any audits.

I think this is rather the point. My - singular - GP no longer has my record in a filing cabinet to which he or she has the only key. But there appears to be no visible or mandatory third-party policing of access to the virtual one that has replaced it.

I am in two minds as a result of all this. The NHS has an extremely bad record regarding misuse of patient data with repeated behaviour later judged to have been unlawful yet with no individuals being prosecuted. On the other hand, the fact that there is no longer such a thing as 'my GP' suggests to me that all handsomely-NHS-funded practices should be replaced with publicly-owned ones and the profits reaped from them ploughed back into the public healthcare system.

The argument for doing this with dental practices is even more compelling, but that's a whole other rant!

Spamfast
Stop

What GP?

I would indeed prefer if only my own GP doctor & I have access to my medical record.

Unfortunately, my GP is now a limited liability company, not an individual.

In my case this company is wholly owned (I think!) by the 'partner' doctors who have their names on the letterhead.

For the last fifteen years, when I have been able to get an appointment, I have never seen one of those partners but instead have been seen by a new doctor each time who I then never see again. No doubt the doctors I did see were cheap enough for the partners' to employ to deal with the NHS plebs while they see their private patients and/or play golf off in Florida.

So every new doctor I've seen has had unrestricted access to my record. And no doubt the usual poorly-vetted, impertinent & self-aggrandizing reception staff do too.

There are now companies that own multiple GP medical centres in more than one town and the company therefore controls the patient records of even larger numbers of people, with lots of employees with access to all those patient records.

ITER delays first plasma for world's biggest fusion power rig by a decade

Spamfast

Re: World's largest tokamak?

I am inclined to agree with tony72.

At this point, we should let commercial entities work (un-subsidised!) on fusion and instead use all the state money currently being spent on ITER & the like on supporting renewable technology deployment and improvement - which starts reaping benefits peacemeal as soon as it's online, green hydrogren and kerosene for road transport, industry and aviation - which is much lower risk, and the replacement of gas powered domestic & commercial heating systems with heat-pump, solar thermal, solar-voltaic and other high efficiency low-carbon self-contained HVAC.

Not only will this have a chance of reducing our carbon output, it'll create far more diverse employment opportunities, reduce reliance on morally bankrupt fossil fuel companies and countries (Russia for example) and it'll save everyone money on their fuel bills.

Fusion research can continue but we have existential threats to address that it can have no possibility of addressing in time.

Spamfast

Re: The power source of the future

renewable energy

Fusion isn't renewable - it uses up lithium & deuterium. We have a lot of deuterium in the sea although it's a bit of a bugger to extract. We have considerably less lithium which is also highly in demand elsewhere of course. Neutrons released from the fusion reaction transmute the lithium to provide the tritium - of which we have a tiny supply from elsewhere - that will be fused with the deuterium in a commercial reactor. Or at least that's the idea. Nobody's every even demostrated that this could be implemented continuously in a working reactor.

Neither is it going to be clean as suggested in the article. There's going to be a lot of neutron-irratiated scrap to handle during and after a reactor's lifetime, a fact that is always omitted by the vested interests driving the agenda. The cost and difficulty of decommissioning JET - which only ever fused tiny amounts of precious tritium with hydrogen - demostrates this clearly.

And I have my doubts that it'll be commercially able to compete with actual renewables but would only be useful for baseload fill-in if transcontinental super-grids aren't created or aren't able to move available capacity about.

Glastonbury to turn festivalgoer pee into eco-friendly fertilizer

Spamfast
Pint

Re: Misread the headline...

I'd give you an 'owe me a keyboard' but have a beer instead. Made I laff!

Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy'

Spamfast
Trollface

Re: I only just got the hang of the sudoers file format

Argggh!

So instead of a very easy to implement, low footprint kernel feature to allow a root-write-only bit in the file attributes to cause an exe to run as root we have to have the whole policykit architecture in place to perform a task requiring elevated privs.

The policykit documentation is as awful and ambiguous as the systemd stuff. Then, which version of policykit is this machine running? Where are the configuration files kept for this particular build of policykit? How do I find that out?

While it can get complicated, configuration for sudo can exist in as little as a single /etc/sudo.conf file which can allow specific users or groups to run specific tools with specific constraints. Good luck demonstrating to yourself that your systemd & policykit configuration is providing exactly the security permissions you want.

The sources for SUID in the kernel & for the sudo exe have undergone extensive review and are very stable. Systemd & policykit seem as stable as The Persistence Of Memory and as easy to grok as something from Hieronymus Bosch.

In terms of numbers, the vast majority of Linux instances are in very small devices - routers & other network comms, home-entertainment/industrial/agri-mech/marine/automotive displays & control units etc. - which often can't and in any case should not need unlimited amounts of CPU, RAM and peristent memory. (Otherwise they'd be too power hungry, expensive or unreliable.) To enable improvements in the 'run it all as root' policy in a lot of this stuff the last thing we need is to mandate systemd & policykit for priv-elev.

Fragile Agile development model is a symptom, not a source, of project failure

Spamfast
Trollface

Compression ratio approaching infinity.

Arguing about 'Agile' is the same as arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin but here goes.

The following comments are with reference to the front page and principles of 'Agile' which read suspiciously like a piece promoting The Law Of Attraction or any other self-help snakeoil.

  • Accepting that responding to change is better than following a plan requires the developers to have indefinite time to work on the current project.
  • How, exactly, do Agile processes harness change? What would these processes be, then?
  • Motivated to do what? What tools would they be?
  • Show me the studies that demonstrate to some level of confidence that face-to-face is always most efficient.
  • Saying that something promotes something desirable does not make it true, especially when one fails to define what the first something is.
  • Who defines whether something is 'simple'? (I can't enumerate the number of decisions - many made by me - to keep a piece of a design 'simple' that have caused no end of complexity later.)
  • Define self-organization. Can I see the evidence that the best things come from any definition of self-organizing teams? In any case, show me one commercial entity that would allow a team to be truly self-organizing.
  • Who decides what metrics are used for 'tuning' - whatever that is!?
The information content in that website is close to zero. I can sum the whole thing up as 'the best way to do something is to do it in the best way possible.'

Spamfast
FAIL

If you want to discuss good ideas that have become a money-pit disaster, profiting B-ark 'specialists' only, I've got three words for you (or two words and a TLA if you prefer).

ISO NINE THOUSAND

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