* Posts by Paul 195

325 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jan 2011

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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson moves to shut Parliament

Paul 195
Mushroom

Re: So, to sum up. . .

For an interesting comparison, the Brexit petition in favour of proroguing parliament managed to collect 304 signatures.

The petition requesting that parliament is not prorogued was gaining about 300 signatures *every ten seconds* this afternon. It's slowed down a bit now that (presumably) lots of people are travelling home from work, but it's still averaging around 250/second.

Paul 195
Facepalm

Re: Benito Jonsolini

Yeah. On the one hand, I tend to agree with those who say that insulting the intelligence of Brexiteers is condescending and counter productive. On the other hand, far too many of them make ridiculously stupid comments, like the one above about Verhofstadt.

Bomb-hoaxing DoSer who targeted police in revenge was caught after Twitter taunts

Paul 195
WTF?

Re: Not a Great Start in Life.

And of course, the small minded have downvoted your post, and the admirable post you replied to. And no doubt, this post as well.

Tesla’s Autopilot losing track of devs crashing out of 'leccy car maker

Paul 195

Re: Autonomous driving is months, years, or decades away

@Goresh No, but currently humans are doing a way better job of it than the machines. And in all sorts of weather and road conditions more challenging than Arizona highways in daylight...

You're not Boeing to believe this, but... Another deadly 737 Max control bug found

Paul 195

Re: Follow the money

Waterfall works reasonably well if you understand the requirements and problem space up front. Which for problems like "aeroplane should not fall out of sky" is probably the case. It does not work well when the thing being designed has to cope with constantly changing requirements, which often happens with commercial or enterprise software. Here Agile definitely works better. There are no silver bullets. Understand your tools and what they are applicable for, and don't use your hammer to put in screws.

Anyone else find it weird that the bloke tasked with probing tech giants for antitrust abuses used to, um, work for the same tech giants?

Paul 195

Re: Anyone surprised?

Spain, Nicaragua, Italy, Germany, Argentina, Uganda... nobody said all coups were right wing. Just the majority of them.

Paul 195

Re: Anyone surprised?

@naive

What a strangely appropriate moniker. The people running Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc probably see themselves as "liberals", but nobody could mistake them for "leftists". They are good old-fashioned capitalist monopolists. And Youtube and Facebook are by now well-known for basically showing people what they think they want to see. YouTube's unpleasant habit of showing more and more extreme material to viewers means that by now I would imagine your feed consists of flat earth videos, Klan rallies, and the occasional cute kitten.

Having bank problems? I feel bad for you son: I've got 25 million problems, but a bulk upload ain't one

Paul 195
Big Brother

Times have changed

Back in the good old 80s, there was no GDPR, and not even a Data Commissioner, and it really was the wild west. It wasn't uncommon to create test data by taking a subset of live data. After all, what was the worst that could happen?

Revealed: Facebook, Google's soft-money 'blackmail' to stall Euro fake news crackdown

Paul 195
Flame

Don't be evil

Unless it interferes with making shed loads of money.

Quit worrying about killer robots, they are coming whether you like it or not – and they absolutely will not stop

Paul 195
Paris Hilton

Worse than the terminator

Philip K Dick's Second Variety (also available as a mediocre film) painted the really chilling truth about autonomous weaponry long before the technology to build it was available: a machine does the thing that you designed it to, and carries on doing it whether or not it serves any purpose.

It makes The Terminator look like a nursery story. https://philipkdickreview.wordpress.com/2014/05/07/second-variety/

Paris to cheer us all up again.

May Day! PM sacks UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson for Huawei 5G green-light 'leak'

Paul 195

Re: Torydammerung?

@Voyna i Mor

As unpleasant and dim as Williamson was, I honestly don't think he's done anything as bad as any of Hitler's senior ranking Nazis...

Someone's spreading an MBR-trashing copy of the Christchurch killer's 'manifesto' – and we're OK with this, maybe?

Paul 195

Re: Mixed feelings

I don't think we should be referring to mass murderers as "nut jobs". The Christchurch killer has some unpleasant and irrational views, but calling him a nutjob serves to reduce his culpability as well as being prejudicial to millions of people who have mental health problems but get through life without killing anyone (except occasionally themselves unfortunately).

He committed his act of mass murder not because of mental illness, but at least partly because of a prevalent narrative that paints Muslims as problematic. But admitting that means that the many people complicit in spreading this narrative might feel bad, so let's just say this guy was crazy and let ourselves off the hook.

Brit Parliament online orifice overwhelmed by Brexit bashers

Paul 195

Re: No conspiracy needed

Usually it's quite exciting getting downvoted on El Reg, but I can't see who I offended with this post. Unless it was someone from Oracle unwilling to accept that relational isn't always the answer.

Paul 195
Holmes

No conspiracy needed

There's a good article here explaining a little about how they scale this website according to demand: https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/08/16/scaling-the-petitions-service-following-the-eu-referendum/ . Unless they've changed it since this was written, it looks like inappropriate use of a strongly transactional database is the bottleneck. This is one of the cases when a scalable non-relational database might have been a better choice for recording the initial petition signing, with the count updated in a transactional way only when the user clicks the link in the email they are sent.

Facebook's at it again: Internal emails show it knew about Cambridge Analytica abuse 'months' before news broke

Paul 195

Re: People who think this is a new phenomena in IT

Microsoft definitely played very rough with their competitors in the 90s - in a not dissimilar way to IBM in the 70s and 80s. But so far nobody has suggested they sold their users out to the highest, sorry, that should read "any" bidder. Saying "never mind Facebook, look at Microsoft" is just whataboutery.

I don't hate US tech, snarls Euro monopoly watchdog chief – as Google slapped with €1.49bn megafine

Paul 195

Re: Shame the UK doesnt have laws to deal with monopolies for the general public's benefit

Well of course, at the moment it benefits from all the rules that it helped draft as a valued member of the EU. In the future, who knows?

Brit prisoners to be kept on the straight and narrow with JavaScript and CSS

Paul 195

Aunt Dahlia? Is that you?

The HeirPod? Samsung Galaxy Buds teardown finds tiny wireless cans 'surprisingly repairable'

Paul 195

Re: Why bother?

I don't want to buy a refurbished phone. I do want to be able to keep the phone I currently have beyond the lifespan of a single overworked LiOn battery. Apple, Samsung et al are relying on us buying new phones every couple of years even though at this point the gains for the consumer with each new generation of devices are fairly marginal. And in some cases negative as manufacturers vie with each other to remove things like headphone sockets.

Paul 195

Re: Why bother?

Isn't the point not that these particular earbuds are not great, but that with a little effort gadgets can be made repairable? If Apple's designers and engineers are so good, then why are they not able to create gadgets which are easier to repair? Built in obsolescence should not be a viable business strategy; governments should tax the crap out of devices that cannot meet a defined set of repairability criteria. I would suggest starting with replacement of batteries (batteries are consumables and should be seen as such), and screens (which are inherently fragile).

Uber driver drove sleeping woman miles away from home to 'up the fare'. Now he's facing years in the clink for kidnapping, fraud

Paul 195

Re: Are you kidding?

@Doctor Syntax

Ain't it the truth. I sometimes think the main purpose of Uber is to make the other tech club titans look more palatable.

Paul 195
Flame

Re: Are you kidding?

Uber have some of the lowest ethical standards to be found in the corporate world. In the past their attitude towards complaints has been generally to . blame the victim. Remember this story about the women who got raped by an Uber driver in India: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42291495

Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster

Paul 195

Re: We have surely reached peak beard.

This is pretty unfair to those of us who had beards long before they were hip, and will still have them when they aren't

'Occult' text from Buffy The Vampire Slayer ep actually just story about new bus lane in Dublin

Paul 195
Mushroom

I'm enraged at the lack of a flame war. Buffy was superb TV. Have the angry hordes keen to defend it all disappeared into the Hellmouth?

Cut open a tauntaun, this JEDI is frozen! US court halts lawsuit over biggest military cloud deal since the Death Star

Paul 195

Re: About Oracle's entire future, not just Oracle Cloud v AWS

Amazon are dominant in this space, but not a monopoly. Azure is actually showing higher growth at the moment, and Google's cloud is also doing well.

Well Holby damned! We've caught a virus: Brit medical soap operas team up for 'cyber' episode

Paul 195
Alien

Re: Alternatively...

@alain willliams

Not Doctor Who - clearly the Gerry Anderson helmed UFO. Pure sci-fi genius complete with gull-wing cars, and mini-skirted space technicians with purple hair. https://youtu.be/RQj_WajKgDY

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

Paul 195

Re: GPS is not this day and age

The ZX80 was a low-end device, but the Zilog Z80 chip it ran on was the processor for all sorts of much more serious machines. And it is true to say that its registers were mostly 16-bit (apart from the 8-bit accumulator used for arithmetic...).

Congrats, Satya Nadella. In just five years, you've turned Microsoft from Neutral Evil to, er, merely True Neutral

Paul 195

Re: Depends

If I was worried about data slurping, I wouldn't replace a Windows machine with a Chromebook. Slurping is baked into everything Google does, and is very hard to turn off.

Furious Apple revokes Facebook's enty app cert after Zuck's crew abused it to slurp private data

Paul 195
Flame

Re: Stupidity of the common man

I get a bit fed up with the El Reg commentards ready to lambast the stupidity of everyone else.

In this particular case:

1) they were targeting children

2) People outside the IT industry are not generally as well-informed about the bad habits of the likes of Facebook. Particularly as they cloak their behaviour in deceptive and misleading language .

Calling people stupid is just victim blaming. The culpable party here is definitely Facebook.

Tech giant to spend $500m dealing with housing crisis caused by tech giants

Paul 195
Devil

Re: Clever idea to retain employees

@Trainee grumpy old ****

Yes, that was the way I read the article too. But since it is Microsoft, no amount of logic or facts will prevent those who think Microsoft is the embodiment of wickedness from dumping all over it.

Army had 'naive' approach to Capita's £1.3bn recruiting IT contract, MPs told

Paul 195
Flame

Re: Actually...

@Tom 7 has the right of it; the idea that public/government entities are woefully inefficient compared to private companies has been tested to destruction by almost four decades of privatisation. Time and time again, basic maths shows that there are no magic efficiencies available from the private sector, but the need to pay shareholders a profit means costs are only cut by employing the same staff under worse conditions to do the job they were doing before, only with more shortcuts taken and worse outcomes.

In the case of civil service outsourcing of IT, any expertise inside the civil service to either carry out large projects themselves, or even be in a position to judge how well they are being managed by outsourcers is now long gone.

Begone, Demon Internet: Vodafone to shutter old-school pioneer ISP

Paul 195

Re: tenner-a-month?

Yep, that was Demon. They were great once, but after they changed hands the service gradually got worst. I finally binned them sometime round the early noughties as their ability to provide a reliable ADSL service got worse every time they "upgraded". And of course, they had long since outsourced their help lines from people who understood the system and cared, to some remote call centre on the other side of the world staffed by people following a script.

This is the final straw, evil Microsoft. Making private GitHub repos free? You've gone too far

Paul 195

If Microsoft cured cancer and ended poverty, there would be hordes of people ready to explain how it was another evil scheme. They are no worse than most other large capitalist enterprises, and better than some.

Blighty: We spent £1bn on Galileo and all we got was this lousy T-shirt

Paul 195
FAIL

Don't worry

Brexit looks increasingly unlikely as there is no deal imaginable that will get through the house of commons, and none of the politicians saying that "no deal is better than a bad deal" actually have the balls to do it. They are quite keen on someone else doing it, but Boris and Gove would never do it. JRM might just, but he's a few nannies short of the full Norland's College to be honest.

Shortages, price rises, recession: Tech industry preps for hard Brexit

Paul 195

Re: And all we can do...

I don't want a second referendum. I want the grownups to put a stop to this Brexit nonsense. The people who want Brexit need to go away and only comeback when they have a properly costed plan.

No, that Sunspot Solar Observatory didn't see aliens. It's far more grim

Paul 195

Re: Jackanory

>> Where's Bombastic Bob when we really need him?

He's run out of capital letters and is waiting for a fresh delivery.

Solid password practice on Capital One's site? Don't bank on it

Paul 195

Re: Single figure entry

> Re: Single figure entry

> Surprised that password managers don't have a "three named chars" function yet, since it does come up > a lot.

Password Safe does (https://pwsafe.org)

You want to know which is the best smartphone this season? Tbh, it's tricky to tell 'em apart

Paul 195

Re: My wishlist

And wireless charging !

Often derided by those who haven't actually used it.

Another German state plans switch back from Linux to Windows

Paul 195
Coat

Re: Lots of companies run Linux including Google

> So in years time, the landscape might shift a lot more than we currently expect.

Yes! It will be the Year Of Linux On The Desktop. (again).

BBC websites down tools and head outside into the sun for a while

Paul 195

Sounds like a shoo-in for "Who, me?"

Unbreakable smart lock devastated to discover screwdrivers exist

Paul 195
Happy

Still giggling

"We designed this fingerprint lock of againsting [sic] theft," it begins. "However the lock is invincible to the people who do not have a screwdriver."

At last, a solution for those of us who need to repel hordes of screwdriverless rogues.

Sub-Prime: Amazon's big day marred by server crashes, staff strikes

Paul 195

Re: I did write to the Gates Foundation...

To be fair to Mr Gates, although Microsoft in their evil empire heyday of the late 90s were notorious for crushing their competitors to dust, nobody ever suggested that they treated their staff badly to the point where they had to pee in bottles etc... or that they paid them as little as they could get away with.

Euro bank regulator: Don't follow the crowd. Stay off the cloud

Paul 195
Holmes

Just be sensible

Keep your crown jewels locked up in your own data-centre/private cloud, but take advantage of public cloud for scaling for your public facing web services etc. And be aware that vendor lock in is definitely a thing with public clouds. Your code running on commodity hardware is easily portable, but all the metadata and scripts that keep your service elastic and fault tolerant are not.

Giffgaff admits to billing faff, actually tells folk to turn it off and on again

Paul 195

Re: Sheeple

I suspect the reason it took GiffGaff so long to notice is that in practice it will have affected very few users. Most GiffGaff users who require data will already be using a goodybag for it, and this problem explicitly only affects those users who were using airtime credit to pay for data and switched to a goodybag part way through. if you want to abuse customers perfectly happy with GiffGaff as "fanboys" that's fine, but the fact is most of who use it find a perfectly adequate way to purchase usage of what is these days a commodity service; mobile telephony and data. I wouldn't put my "love" of it any higher than that, and since no GiffGaff user is tied to them with a contract, anyone who doesn't like it can terminate the relationship whenever they want.

Amazon, eBay and pals agree to Europe's other GDPR: Generally Dangerous Products Removed from websites

Paul 195

Re: Ha

Don't you kind of wish for a world where Trading Standards Officers were like Judge Dredd? "Step away from the botulism laced hotdogs, perp!" On reflection though, that might (literally) be overkill.

Paul 195
Facepalm

Re: Ha

I quite agree. The idea that merchants should be forced to only sell items that match the description and meet all relevant safety legislation is clearly bonkers. Would you be interested in signing a petition to scrap the MOT as well, since these killjoys are determined to keep deathtraps off the roads? I'd suggest that legislation on who and who can't service and install equipment connected to the gas main is also outdated red tape which only serves to stifle innovative business models. There's no limit once we free our imaginations.

Paul 195
FAIL

Hurrah that Brexit will soon free us from nanny-statism getting between consumers and rapacious multinationals! Hurrah! Facebook will be free to slurp as much data from us as it likes! Hurrah! Amazon can resume the profitable business of selling exploding hoverboards, butterfly knives, and god knows what else into the UK in only a year's time.

I can't wait.

Schneier warns of 'perfect storm': Tech is becoming autonomous, and security is garbage

Paul 195

Re: SkyNet is coming!

My phone beeps and tells me when I have an appointment, or have to go and do somethng, and I obey. Are you sure SkyNet isn't already here? It doesn't need to destroy us, it's already in charge.

Paul 195

Re: ahum, dumb fucks ?

@DCFusor - I wish I could upvote your post more than once. Given the number of people on the El Reg forums who are IT professionals in different capacities, we are the people who have collectively built the insecure mess the "dumb fucks" (or otherwise) are stuck with. A little more humility from all of us commentards would be welcome.

You should find out what's going on in that neural network. Y'know they're cheating now?

Paul 195

Re: recursive obscurity

> Neural nets are like people, "I don't know how I came up with it, I just did" is an intrinsic characteristic of both.

Not quite true - if you ask someone how they came up with the idea for a song or a novel, you might get that answer. But if you ask a doctor why they made a particular diagnosis (for example), they will be able to explain their reasoning. For a lot of the classification type tasks AI is being used for, explaining their reasoning is very useful.

A Reg-reading techie, a high street bank, some iffy production code – and a financial crash

Paul 195

Re: Or...

You aren't wrong that the programmer doesn't necessarily need to code a loop, but I think you might have picked up downvotes because none of the examples provided actually makes the intent nearly as obvious as the original code. And certainly nowhere near as obvious as the COBOL snippets in some of the other comments. All of the "no loop" examples require a certain amount of thinking time to unpick.

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