Posts by Jonathon Green

Windows 11: Meet the new OS, same as the old OS (or close enough)

Re: What is an OS for?

Well, there’s Operating Systems, and then there’s all the other shit which comes in the box with them…

A hotline to His Billness? Or a guard having a bit of a giggle?

Re: Just a grunt

Ed Zander was omnipresent in (what later turned out to be) the latter days of Motorola,

I was working as a contractor with the team which used to be Sendo at what (from the mention of TTPCom) I suspect to be around the same time, and at one point when money got tight all of my timesheets had to go to EZ to be signed off. I assume that this actually meant someone in his office rather than The Man Himself but still…

UK government bows to pressure, agrees to delay NHS Digital grabbing the data of England's GP patients

Re: Law enables organisations

It’s probably perfectly safe for the organisations. You and/or I not so much…

Australian cops, FBI created backdoored chat app, told crims it was secure – then snooped on 9,000 users' plots

So Priti, tell us again about how end-to-end encryption on services like Facebook Messenger will pose a danger to the public by making it impossible for law enforcement services to intercept communication between evil-doers and ne’er do wells….

Just when everyone thought things might be looking up, Dido Harding admits interest in top job at NHS England

Re: £37 billion

“…the sum of £37 billion is what has been set aside rather than what has actually been spent. ”

So it’ll probably end up somewhere around the £100 billion mark in the final accounting then?

Contract killer: Certified PDFs can be secretly tampered with during the signing process, boffins find

Re: Pointless Document Format.

PDF is an ISO standard and has been since 2008.

Download[1] a copy here…

https://www.iso.org/standard/51502.html

…develop from it to your hearts content, and as long as you don’t infringe anybody’s IP on the actual implementation you’re free to sell it or give it away without it costing anybody a penny in license fees.

There (in my view at least) are many things wrong with PDF, but being an Adobe proprietary standard hasn’t been one of them for some time…

[1] Having paid your 198 Swiss Francs…

Those aren’t bugs they’re features.

Admittedly not features any sane person would want, need, or consider adding to a secure document exchange format, but then PDF was never meant to be that, and nobody who’d spent more than half-a-day or so examining the spec[1] would ever think it was appropriate to use it for that purpose…

[1] And for my sins I’ve spent a lot more time than that with it…

It took 'over 80 different developers' to review and fix 'mess' made by students who sneaked bad code into Linux

So a bunch of people from a University did A Stupid Thing, the Linux Kernel team apply collective punishment to an entire University, and then it turns out that the Kernel team’s review and QA processes (the things the silly people at the University were purporting to test when they did The Stupid Thing) seem to have holes you could drive a bus through….

Even allowing for the unpaid volunteer status of many of those involved, and the bad faith actions of a few of them this doesn’t look good for anyone…

Tesla Autopilot is a lot dumber than CEO Musk claims, says Cali DMV after speaking to the software's boss

I wonder what would happen if you ran an unassisted Tesla over a UK practical driving test with an examiner in it?

Once they can reliably and consistently do that across a wide range of centres from the West Midlands (pass rate ~40%) to Orkney (pass rate ~70%) without a DVSA examiner recording a serious fault I’ll believe we’re ready to start *thinking* about recognising autonomy...

Does the boss want those 2 hours of your free time back? A study says fighting through crowds to office each day hurts productivity

What office?

My employer hit a break point in the lease for our main development office a little while ago..

And guess what?

They didn’t renew. And (while they are at some point, probably) going to be getting us a much smaller facility configured mostly as collaborative space so that we can get together and point at whiteboards, look over each other’s shoulders, and thrash stuff out collectively as and when appropriate/necessary, they aren’t going to be replacing it.

I doubt that this is a unique scenario...

UK prime minister Boris Johnson reluctant to reveal his involvement in the OneWeb deal

He’s had his sound bite. Anything else is either details, irrelevant, unimportant, or somebody else’s problem, and actually delivering anything is optional.

With Nominet’s board-culling vote just days away, we speak to one man who will publicly support the management

Re: Hey hey we're the monkeys! ...and we want more bananas

“ Directorships are most often a reward for going to the right school.”

As far as I can tell non-exec directorships at least are most often a reward for having given someone else a non-exec directorship...

Seagate UK customer stung by VAT on replacement drive shipped via the Netherlands

Re: We live in a time when virtually every country in the world is in some kind of trading bloc

“ meet a new bus, same as...”

Was it a magic bus?

Big Tech workers prefer 3 days at home, 2 in the office. We ask Reg readers: What's your home-office balance?

This train has left the station for me. My employer has already pulled the cord on a break clause in our office lease and the doors will close forever (for us anyway) at the end of next month. We are however looking for other (much smaller, and configured almost entirely as shared meeting spaces of various sizes) premises for face to face white boarding etc. and will have a generous, more-or-less no questions asked budget available for ad-hoc get-togethers of geographically clustered team members in the coffee shop, hotel meeting space, or whatever of choice.

This is fine by me, I enjoy the luxury of a dedicated office in my home and loath the open plan office space we had, especially since, for no obvious reason, we moved from a “pod” based layout to much more densely packed benches, a change which led me to violent fantasies involving even the most convivial of colleagues. I am however acutely aware that not all of my colleagues are fortunate enough to have an otherwise unused room with space for a proper desk, multiple monitors, and all the other paraphernalia which makes a working day comfortable and productive...

Texas blacks out, freezes, and even stops sending juice to semiconductor plants. During a global silicon shortage

Re: Doomsday Preppers

So more of a can’t then...

Popular open-source library SDL moving development to GitHub despite 'calamitous design choices' in git

Meh. Git is just another in a long line of CMS/RCS tools which aren’t as good as ClearCase. Which is easy for me to say as I’m not the one who has to pay for the infrastructure and support staff needed to keep a good sized ClearCase installation running smoothly...

Faced with the sack, Nominet CEO half-apologizes for taking the 'wrong tone,' asks angry members to hear him out

Actually I imagine it will be those members of staff currently engaged in gardening in that “complex landscape” which has been magicked into existence by the current board, and that if they do walk then there will be no impact at all on the core services Nominet is actually supposed to be providing to its membership...

Microsoft suspends donations to politicians who backed attempt to overturn US presidential election

Re: cuts out a lot of scope for dispute

Bear in mind that if the 2016 election had been decided on popular vote rather than electoral college it wouldn’t have been Trump in the White House in 2020 so, (unless you think HRC would have had the need and the will to resort to similar tactics) the question would never have arisen...

DBA heroes don't always wear capes. Sometimes they just have a bunch of forgotten permissions

Re: "you cannot do that!"

or possibly...

“Hold my beer...”

Linus Torvalds labels Super Bowl 'violent version of egg-and-spoon race'

Re: It's all homoerotic crap.

So how’s the weather today in Scarborough...?

Re: It's all homoerotic crap.

I tend to go with Ernest Hemingway on sports, although I’m opposed to Bullfighting, Mountaineering isn’t spectator friendly, and the only pure form of motor racing is closed-road motorcycle road racing...

The Fat iPhone, 11 years on: The iPad's over a decade old and we're still not sure what it's for

This. The reason I have an iPad rather than something significantly less expensive is GarageBand, along with Positive’s Grid Bias amp modelling and a nifty little box which lets me plug a guitar in it provides me with a very handy, hugely effective musical sketch pad I can take (and use) pretty much anywhere...

Showering malware-laced laptops on UK schools is the wrong way to teach them about cybersecurity

Re: re: free school meals

If only the SNP fielded candidates on our side of the border...

Here in Braintree I’d certainly take one of theirs over the ironically named James Cleverly given the choice...

150,000 lost UK police records looking more like 400,000 as Home Office continues to blame 'human error'

Would anybody be surprised if......

...the loss of data during a “routine housekeeping” operation was used to justify removing the requirement for DNA profiles, fingerprints, etc of innocent individuals not connected to ongoing inquiries to be removed from police records.

No?

Me neither...

Salesforce relieves Republican National Committee of its tools citing 'risk of politically incited violence' across the US

Is it too much to hope...

...that a <irony>United</irony> States divided down the middle and teetering on the edge of political violence might have a little less time and energy for getting up in anybody else’s business and offering unsolicited advice on infrastructure procurement?

Lenovo reveals smart specs that let you eyeball five virtual displays, with strings attached

Re: But will it be cheaper?

Dunno, but it’ll definitely be cheaper than buying a new house with an extra room which has room for 5 screens... :-)

Boeing will cough up $2.5bn+ to settle US fraud charge over 737 Max safety

Re: Airline safety = lives

You still can.

But in a somewhat different way...

United States Congress stormed by violent followers of defeated president, Biden win confirmation halted

Re: ...and where exactly do you live in the US?

None of which has ever stopped the USA interfering in and destabilising the politics of other Nation’s internal politics in pursuit of its own ends.

There’s a certain joyless irony in the sight of the USA visiting the sort of chaos it generally reserves for other nations who deliver election results it doesn’t approve of upon itself...

File format conversion crisis delayed attempt to challenge US presidential election result

Re: Google Docs?

...which immediately brings to mind the image of a cloud of hapless interns running after them picking up said Vtech toys, giving them a quick wipe, and then putting them back in the pram.

'Best tech employer of the year' threatened trainee with £15k penalty fee for quitting to look after his sick mum

...but on the other hand when you’ve got decent corporate policies backed up by a proactive HR department it’s a lot harder for shitty local management to screw things up for you....

A couple of years ago we had a number of these “Spartans” interview as candidates for junior positions at the company I work for.

The cookie cutter nature of the CVs, the obvious “Boot Camp” nature of the training, the obviously heavily coached responses to interview questions (hell, they even dressed pretty much the same, regardless of gender...) and discomfort when you tried to get them to go “off piste” from their canned responses, the generally creepy vibe about the whole enterprise, and the dubious nature of the contract terms gave me the raging heebie jeebies and I gave all the candidates a firm and unequivocal thumbs down with a recommendation that we should have nothing further to do with Sparta Global.

Nothing I have heard since has made me remotely regret that decision. At the time I felt that the whole operation bordered on exploitative of young, inexperienced people, it seems my only mistake was in my assessment of which side of that border they were on...

US nuke agency hacked by suspected Russian SolarWinds spies, Microsoft also installed backdoor

Re: MRDA/YMMV/SNAFUBAR/Don't Panic ... All Systems are Normal and under our Command and Control ....

Oh God, he’s making sense again. And it’s never good when that happens...

About $15m in advertising booked to appear on millions of smart TVs was never seen by anyone, says Oracle

Re: Naughty step

That is indeed absolutely wrong of you. This sort of behaviour is right up there with fast forwarding through the ads on recorded TV or holding magazines over the bin and shaking them so that all the advertising inserts fall out...

Social isolation creates craving in the same brain region as wanting food or addictive drugs, study finds

It's no social integrator

It's a one man isolator

It's a back brain stimulator

It's a cerebral vibrator

Those energy stimulators

Just turn your eyeballs into craters

But an orgone accumulator

Is a superman creator...

UK's Space Command to be 'capable of launching our first rocket in 2022'

Our space force will totally be ready to launch rockets in 2022.

There won’t actually be any rockets until 2035, but our gallant boys in whatever-the-heck-colour will have been ready for a full 13 years when the rockets finally come rolling over the garden bridge to Boris Island Spaceport...

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledges £12bn green economy package

I’m a huge fan of electric vehicles, I’ve owned and driven them for years and can’t imagine ever owning another IC powered vehicle as anything other than a weekend plaything ever again.

That said:

This is a Boris announcement, and with that in mind I’m not expecting to see hordes of happy people driving their EVs over the garden bridge to Boris Island airport any time soon...

Apple now Arm'd to the teeth: MacBook Air and Pro, Mac mini to be powered by custom M1 chips rather than Intel

Re: memory

“ Talking of which - what exactly IS the difference between the air and pro ?”

$300

Biden projected to be the next US President, Microsoft joins rest of world in telling Trump: It looks like... you're fired

Re: Yay! Party time!

‘I think that if the republicans attemp to desenfranchise 10's of thousands of voters there is liable to be civil unrest (I guess)‘

Nobody needs to disenfranchise (or to have seriously attempted to disenfranchise”) anybody for that to happen. All it needs is for someone to reinforce and enable sufficient people In their preexisting beliefs that the system is corrupt, connect them with each other, and encourage them to act on those beliefs. But it’s not as though anybody in a position of influence would ever do anything as irresponsible as that is it. Oh, wait...

Hold on people, it could prove to be a bumpy ride over the next few years yet...

Pakistan calls on Facebook to extend holocaust denial ban into Islamophobia crackdown

Re: Failed state

A bit like the USA then...

Congrats, Meg Whitman, another multi-billion-dollar write-off for the CV: Her web vid upstart Quibi implodes

Re: "Our failure was not for lack of trying"

This.

Who cares what happens to the business, it’s employees, it’s creditors, and it’s investors as long as you can skim a few % off the cash flow and exit with sufficient credibility to repeat the cycle a few times. There’s always another plausible idea and a new batch of gullible punters to fleece just around the corner.

Business 2.0[1] baby!

[1] Which I see from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_2.0 0 was the title of a publication covering “The New Economy” which enjoyed impressive growth in the late ‘90s before being sold off to a large corporation and eventually closing down in 2007, never having made enough profit to justify its own existence. Quite apt really....

Let’s check in with that 30,000-job $10bn Trump-Foxconn Wisconsin plant. Wow, way worse than we'd imagined

I like Americans. They’re funny!

Nominet refuses to consider complaint about its own behaviour, claims CEO didn’t mean what he said on camera

Re: Clearly out of control

But why would they do that? Nominees actions seem entirely within the norms for companies conducting business with, for, on behalf of the current government, c.f ferry companies with no ships....

Bill Gates lays out a three-point plan to rid the world of COVID-19 – and anti-vaxxer cranks aren't gonna like it

Re: "Would have thought © would be more appropriate though."

So would that be a registered trademark then?

Remember Entatech? UK liquidators are still trying to seize founder Jason Tsai's assets

An interesting definition of “...the little guys...”.

It's IPO week and one of Wall Street's own is raising the spectre of a stock market crash

Re: @AC - There is a huge bubble with s***talking elephants in the room

When our resident LGM makes more sense than tech company market capitalisations then you just know there’s a reckoning round the corner....

...but hopefully not until my employer conceives and executes an exit strategy which makes the considerable number of stock options I’ve accumulated In the years since we were four people in a serviced office worth more than the paper they aren’t printed on. :-)

How do you solve 'disruption' at the UK border after Brexit? Let's call Peter Thiel! AI biz Palantir – you're hired

Re: Financial stability <-> public service contracts

My working assumption is that they’re the Air America of technology companies....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_America_(airline)

So we’ll be getting a world lead Truck and Trace application?

We want weaponised urban drones flying through your house, says UK defence ministry as it waves a fistful of banknotes

Oooooh! I think know the answer to this one, is it...

“Is this likely to be used by or against an official army with a mutli $Bn defence budget fighting against insurgents in an urban environment ?”

Yes.

Bad apples: US customs seize OnePlus earbuds thinking they're knock-off AirPods

If you’ve ever wondered what sort of person would want to work for an organisation like CPB you now have your answer...

IBM ordered to pay £22k to whistleblower and told by judges: Teach your managers what discrimination means

Re: targeted by four managers within IBM

This is sarcasm, right?