Posts by RichardB

Parker Solar Probe uncovers mystery of 'fast' solar winds

Hacked?

Here was me expecting an article about how someone had reindex the tables in their solar wind database so it actually worked in timeframes not involving cold coffee.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Not even convinced most of those mentioned in their charts are work jargon.

They are just simple descriptive filler lifted from elsewhere.

Perhaps those that disagree with their usage can come up with some better versions to express the same concepts?

To improve security, consider how the aviation world stopped blaming pilots

Dekker

Would be nice to give a little credit at least to Sydney Dekker, especially since you mention one of his books "Just Culture".

The Field Guide to Human Error is also an excellent eye opener, and to really rub it in take a read of Dietrich Dorners book The Logic of Failure.

These have been around some time, and have a huge impact on how we can choose to operate IT systems safely.

Meanwhile, in Japan, pet fish run up credit card bill on Nintendo Switch

Re: Intelligence

"premeditated credit card hack"?!

Surely you mean hake?

SQL Server license prices rise ten percent as version 2022 debuts

Re: Word soup

I rather thought it depended on the last point in time your license period ticked over into a new set of terms.

Eg if the last version release your SA covered before finance pulled the rug was 2008 then those are your license terms.

DuckDB, database wrangler used by Google, Facebook, and Airbnb, hits 0.5.0

I'd guess it allows you to tap into Jason's, parquets, Csvs etc with just a straight SQL query

I'm imagining it a something like a local and stripped version of Apache Drill.... Am I close?

If so sounds pretty handy.

Open source databases: What are they and why do they matter?

Interesting to get through that and not see any reference to the incredible but commercially failed RethinkDB, and the story written about it's demise.

https://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html

UK govt says contractors should challenge IR35 status via self-assessment

Re: boom for offshore consultancies

Some might suggest that would be a conflict of interest for a high ranking politician.

Others clearly disagree...

Terminal downgrade saves the day after a client/server heist

So whatever did happen to ram raiding?

I guess it doesn't work so well on electric mopeds...

HMRC: Contractors, don't worry about IR35 reforms in private sector 'cos it all went so well in public sector

Re: Typical DoubleSpeak from the government.

"(mainly to Indian IT Consultancies)"

One might somehow speculate that in a less open and transparent government there might be some personal or family related interests at play...

Cheeky chappy rides horse around London filling station, singing: 'I don't need petrol 'cos he runs on carrots'

That's something they could all see coming. But chose to not modify their business model to accommodate.

Re: Can we please start a rumour of a halloween merch shortage?

Check the best before dates...

Re: Why now

If only there was some mechanism by which employers could encourage people to do stuff for them.

Maybe some kind of token they could exchange for their time spent doing these tasks, that could then be swapped for something they really want.

Re: Why now

Cabotage.

With a soft C?

CFAA latest: Supremes to tackle old chestnut of what 'authorized use' of a computer really means in America

Re: Charges?

Not to mention conspiring to interfere with an ongoing police investigation. But I gather that is de rigueur these days in certain circles.

After 20-year battle, Channel island Sark finally earns the right to exist on the internet with its own top-level domain

/S

Glad to see no one making too many Sarky comments on here about the medium term prospects of their tourism industry.

Maybe once the paperwork is finally in place we may have moved on from beer related lockdowns.

'Up to 300' UK heads to roll at Brit IT services firm Allvotec, with 200 jobs offshored to Bulgaria in cost-cutting drive

Is there any uproar about any of this?

I mean, when it was boatyards and steel, people were complaining in the street.

I get the feeling IT can be wiped out without a middle class whimper.

It is 50 years since Blighty began a homegrown and all-too-brief foray into space

Planning Committee....

Right lads, a .303 has a range over 4500 yards.

How big do we have to make one to get to space?

13m you say? What's that in real money? 14 yards you say?

EU court tells prudish IP office to fack off for balking at 'fack ju' trademark application

I'd have thought the movie FAKK 2 might have some prior claim.

Google lives in an Orange submarine: Transatlantic cable will get by with a little help from some friends

What's the bikini got to do with it?

Does it go through an atoll or something?

Low code? Low usage, more like: Add G Suite's App Maker to the Google graveyard, it's switching off next year

Appmaker was treated just like all those other too good sci fi shows on TV when that had schedules.

Piddled around and hidden behind the sofa. Oh and you had to have the right subscription.

Not properly linked from the menus, had to spin up a 'default sql instance' on cloud in order to use _any_ sql.

As with so many things people make, it was almost good. Almost just enough to get people going. But no. They went and ****ed up just a few details to make it die an early and broadly ignored death. One can only speculate at the bullshit internal politics that must have driven those choices, and what agendas those competing teams must have, and how big a bunch of tits anyone who pushed it into their organisation must look right now.

This is also a system for GPs, right? UK doctors seek clarity over Health dept's £40m single sign-on funding

Re: what is a GP?

Not new under conservatives...

Working in a heavily IT company, it was fairly normal for our pcs to take 20m to go from boot to functional post login.

Well, I say normal, but usual would be abetter way to put it.

Layers and layers of garbage, websense, nonsense, startup programs etc.

Eggheads have crunched the numbers and the results are in: It's not just your dignity you lose with e-scooters, life and limb are in peril, too

Editing?

Normally a big fan of the publishing here, but, is the Ed still on vacation?

Why would you trot out lines of stats about the types of injury and then move swiftly into the bold (and apparently unsupported by the stats you just quoted) assertion about head injuries?

Please, Reg, a little discipline would go a long way.

We've heard of spam filters but this is ridiculous: Pig-monkey chimeras developed in a Chinese laboratory

Re: "all died within a week"

How many weeks do they have to suffer uselessly before it stops being cruel?

So they've already managed to breed Egg Heads?

How to fool infosec wonks into pinning a cyber attack on China, Russia, Iran, whomever

Re: This is news?

https://wiki.c2.com/?BattleOfWits

Googlers fired after tracking colleagues working on US border cop projects. Now, if they had monetized that stalking...

Perhaps more to the story...

"Speaking through a megaphone pointed at Google's offices in San Francisco where he had until recently been employed,"

Can't help but wonder if perhaps some people were already on a sh1tty list.

Section 230 supporters turn on it, its critics rely on it. Up is down, black is white in the crazy world of US law

Seems easy to stop them republishing politicians lies. Just ban politicians from the platform.

But where do you stop then? Your mate Bob from school posting Meme's that have political slants?

Gill from work who posts something a little bit edgy about a new law?

Announcement from the government that inflation is 2.4%?

Double downtime: Azure DevOps, Google cloud users put the kettle on

Re: Its just scale

Hahahahahhahahahhahaaa

Its just scale

When my infra cocks up it knocks out a project or 3 for a while.

When GCP cocks up it knocks out many, many projects for a while.

Question is, for -me- are they more likely to cockitup, or me? I still think that for anything outside my core skillset and that of those around me, it's a fair bet that theirs will be significantly better, with the added advantage that when they _do_ mess up, it's pub time not panic stations.

It's Orphan Data in Backup Hell: No, it's not a Netflix series about storage admins...

Ah, Ops awakens

Like Visual Studio Code and your data lives in SQL Server? Microsoft has something for you

be nice to get the sqlproj back

Are you a Dapr Dan? Microsoft teases runtime for Kubernetes to make microservices sparkle

Re: Interesting

Is that where you get burnt?

'We go back to the Moon to stay': Apollo vets not too chuffed with NASA's new rush to the regolith

"flew over to Marshall Space Flight Centre in my T 38"

Cracking bit of understatement just casually dropped in there.

I'll Just hop in and fly -my- supersonic jet over there....As one does.

GNU means GNU's Not U: Stallman insists he's still Chief GNUisance while 18 maintainers want him out as leader

Nice to see the important bit buried deep in the article.

18 or 300 or 400.

Really? There's a hundred missing maintainers, but these noisy 18 are the headline?

Where are the missing hundred? Did M$ and 0racle dissapear them?

If your org hasn't had a security incident in the last year: Good for you, you're in the minority

Re: Not strictly true

and a fool if you say that you do.

Orford Ness: Military secrets and unique wildlife on the remote Suffolk coast

Now we know

What NIVEA stands for.

NIght Varnish East Anglia

Devonitely not great: Torbay and South Devon NHS declares 'major IT incident'

Re: What ?

Bloody Romans.

If Syria pioneered grain processing by watermill in 350BC, the UK in 2019 can do better... right?

Why the focus on Robots, not power tools?

Machines, whether physical or informational have been providing automation of tasks for... ever?

The government is never going to be able to keep pace with businesses on this and for sure education will never even keep up with the government.

Revealed: The 25 most dangerous software bug types – mem corruption, so hot right now

In short...

be careful what you stick in it.

be careful what you stick it in.

respect boundaries and limits.

somethings aren't what you think they are.

This image-recognition roulette is all fun and games... until it labels you a rape suspect, divorcee, or a racial slur

Or, you know, get free publicity.

Much like your 'local' coffee vendor deliberately messing with your name...

Stallman's final interview as FSF president: Last week we quizzed him over Microsoft visit. Now he quits top roles amid rape remarks outcry

Six lines

Astroboffins baffled as black hole at center of Milky Way suddenly a lot hungrier than before

It was obvious, in hindsight, that runaway anthropomorphic climate change would eventually trigger the black hole death of the local galaxy.

Auditors bemoan time it takes for privatised RAF pilot training to produce combat-ready aviators

"At the end of the war Canada wrote off the UK's share of the costs along with the rest of the UK war debt to Canada."

Proper team player there.

Sadly not everyone took the same approach.

Re: "Auditors bemoan time it takes"

It's starting to look as if they have pruned back the RAF just a little too far

The wheels on the bus go round and... Oh dear. Chancellor Sajid Javid unveils spending review

Re: Promises, promises...

What are they going to do... call an election on him?

NATO sharpens its cyber-lances, prepares for war games with virtual jousting tournament

Re: Getting Down and Dirty in Semper Fidelis-like Nitty Gritty ........

While the article is poorly written, it does later reiterate and alude to the concept, as being something that is below the threshold of IRL military intervention.

Harvard freshman kicked out of US over OTHER people's posts on his social media

What's the USA kicking out illegals and visitors got to do with the UK going down in flames??