Posts by richardcox13

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

Re: Wish I knew what kind....

Look for "ten key less" designs.

Have main, cursor, and page-up/page-down/... as PC-AT; just drop the numeric part.

Daddy of a mistake by GoDaddy took Zoom offline for about 90 minutes

Power

which means plenty of your user populations now have an inkling about the power of sudo

This was well documented years ago: https://xkcd.com/149/

Malware in Lisp? Now you're just being cruel

Re: Malware in Lisp?

https://xkcd.com/297/

"Lisp ... Elegant weapons for a more civilised age."

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

Re: Progress Bars

Use the full link because the hover text can be the best part... and in this case definitely applies.

https://xkcd.com/612/

Location?

> and a burning plastic smell later...

This wouldn't be close to Hayes yesterday evening would it? Its only a "little" sub-station fire...

Satnav systems built for Earth used by Blue Ghost lander as it approached the Moon

Re: Precision?

For the special-relativistic effects that's all about your relative velocity: so no different.

For the general-relativistic effects: the moon is less deep in the earth's gravity well that either the satellites or normal (earth bound) receivers: so the effect will be less.

'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'

Re: Unless a finger smear or a slice of cheese is enough to damage the Cybertruck

> American cheese?? Ahhh you meant Freedom Cheese.

Correction needed: "Not-Cheese".

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

Old Is not Inherently Better Than The New; Visa Versa Also

Not sure where I would put this as a reply, so I'll put it here.

As the title says: each technology/approach/... should be evaluated on its own merits.

Some factors (eg. existing skills) can be mitigated (training). Attitudes of "I don't want to change" may need stronger action: if you are a developer you should expect change. All the time.

Sometimes not changing should be chosen, just remember the clock is ticking and how much are you willing to pay for support/fixes/.... for older platforms with few other users?

Just keeping things the same is just stasis. I'm sure many in my great-grandparents generation felt the same about oil lamps and candles over this new fangled electrickery.

Often changing from a limited hacky approach that while it works it is very much bailing wire and chewing gum. It "works" with constant intervention from developers.

The new way allows integration with diagnostics (with zero effort: work already done) so requires less support.

Reality this often isn't about anything expect an older developer trying to quietly make himself (IME always a man) invaluable.

People are against it because, so highly ironically, a lot of people involved in the ever-changing world of high tech...are personally resistant to change when said change means they must change.

This 1000%.

I've seen multiple times "senior" (in nominal experience, but not in ability) keep repeating the same approach. Even after training and all the support they needed. That the approach was based on an already unsupported platform using a hack to integrate. The (then) current way would have been less effort, but require a little thinking.

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

Different Types of Work Need Different Approaches

I have started to think that this disconnect: "meetings are key" vs "meetings are a waste" is really down to different job functions.

For managers (especially) and others: the work is meetings. That is where decisions are considered and mode; where progress on follow up is considered.

But for many others, including most individual contributors you real work is done working on your own (with as little distraction as possible. Meetings need to be as limited as possible (some choices need to be discussed/agreed, work in a team needs some coordination) for productivity.

The problem is too many managers not realising not everyone's (likely not a even a majority) of work is done in meetings.

Re: Scrum

In some cases the lack of agility is an unwillingness to do the feedback step and make changes to the way of working.

In others it is an assumption that "agile is cheaper" which has never been a claim of the agile movement (rather than those making training/consultancy money off "agile"). Agile is about getting the customer what they need now (not what they through they needed some years ago).

Re: Scrum

5 developers (or more likely 4 with a tester) can, over a few quarters cover a lot of functionality.

I've done, over less than 2 years, in a team that was usually that size[1] a complete custom e-commerce site plus complete backend (CRM, product management, order processing through to shipment, returns, inventory management, ...)

[1] There was a brief, few weeks, period of more people but that was largely due mitigating customer changing what they wanted while not changing the deadline.

Re: Scrum

That's because most organisations/teams/departments/... claiming to be agile are not agile. They are doing the "easy" bits but not the hard parts of agile. Thus have all the disadvantages without any benefits (outside claiming "we're agile).

Daily scrums have their place. But requires: it is a cohesive team working closely together for one goal, and decent leadership to keep the scrum focused (any discussion needs to be done outside the meeting with just those who need to be include). 15 min should be more than enough as even with 2min per person (more than enough in most cases) as if you have more that 5–6 in the call then you are too big to be an agile team.

But then that requires all the team members know that a scrum is there purely to keep everyone in the team aware what else if happening.

Man who binned 7,500 Bitcoin drive now wants to buy entire landfill to dig it up

Re: Oh Dear, Oh Dear, Oh Dear

An actuarial approach could be taken: chance of finding the drive times chance of working times expectations of bitcoin value dropping.

Vs. search cost plus recovery.

Assuming values as claimed, I would expect investors would take those costs times significant multiplier as their cut (multiplier to account for the risks and costs) out first. Assuming costs of anything over £25m he's going to see very little.

Much like pay-outs with no-win no-fee lawyers.

They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

Is there anywhere Doom has not been implemented?

It seems everything can run doom.... would it be more interesting to have stories on where implementations have failed :-)

Eutelsat OneWeb blames 366th day for 48-hour date disaster

Re: Rocket Science

> Don't forget Excel's year 1900 bug that is still present in every version of Excel.

You mean Lotus 1-2-3's "1900 is a leap year" bug that Excel copied because they wanted compatibility with the, then, dominate spreadsheet.

This worked – who uses Lotus 1-2-3 today^[1]?

And, yes, it has been over two decades since I needed to create my own date handling (MS-DOS didn't do system libraries), but even then could use day count since epoch with a little reading (pre-internet days) and store that.

^[1] I expected there are some who take pride in their masochism.

Boffins carve up C so code can be converted to Rust

Re: Why?

> I had a problem so I thought to use Java, now I have a ProblemFactory.

Clearly you are doing it wrong. No REAL^(tm) Java programmer uses a ProblemFactory. They start with a a abstract ProblemFactoryFactory and after that I don't care anymore.

Microsoft rolls out AI-enabled Notepad to Windows Insiders

Notepad is an especially familiar favorite for many techies

That's a definition of "favorite" that I was not previously aware of.

Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?

Re: "Shared Cloudy Thing"

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tapes"

Or, perhaps today: a courier with a box of micro-SD cards.

BBC weather glitch shows 13k mph winds in London, 404℃ in Nottingham

Re: Neptune is jealous

You can select either...

That's not "Hurricane Force"

"Be assured there won't be 14,408mph winds, hurricane force winds..."

Hurricane force is ≥ 73 mph and while there is no upper limit on force 12; I think being > Mach 18 is into a while new realm where everything down to bedrock would be scoured off (and the bedrock would be eroded pretty quickly).

Maybe someone messed up the data feed to it was read as being multiples of the speed of sound rather than, the correct, km/h and was a bit too clever is automatically converting.[1]

[1] This is the site where you can turn it up to 11.

Microsoft veteran ditches Team Tabs, blaming storage trauma of yesteryear

Re: What I don't understand

If your editor cannot do this natively there may well be an extension to do it.

> tab tab tab

Is indeed quicker, which is why any text editor that is worth the CPU/Memory/... to run will automatically insert the correct number of spaces (including less than four if there is already a character or more in place. And auto-indent the next line to match (use shift-tab to reduce indent). A serious editor (eg. what you should be using if paid to write code) will support an editorconfig file in the repo so the team shares settings and does not depend on everyone configuring their editors the same.

If your standard editor cannot do this, then PEBCAK.

Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

> This is like vi vs Emacs with 'religious overtones,’ project chief laughs

That would imply that the editor wars didn't have religious overtones.... and my memory of the late 80's Usenet editor wars was very much religeous.

I think the writer of the sub-head maybe a little young, likely "sweet summer child" applies!

Google says replacing C/C++ in firmware with Rust is easy

Remember "Plan on doing it twice, because you will" (typically the second time is disguised as debugging).

The benefit of working through the problem once in prototype mode is you get to work out all the edge cases and business logic before doing the real implementation. Too many times what seemed simple initially turns out to be simple in the normal case and then lots of complexity on the edges; with no real way to plan those edge cases because the spec/user-story/... didn't consider any of that.

What is this computing industry anyway? The dawning era of 32-bit micros

Re: 386 and 68020 had ports of Unix

Uni temporarily had a test unit. Problem it was supplied with insufficient memory to get reasonable performance even for a single user.

This would have been 1990 (just before I graduated).

SpaceX grounded after fumbling Falcon 9 landing for first time in years

The best sual form is attoparsecs per micro fortnight, but in this case that's a bit small.

Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails

Re: Honourable mention

> I'm pretty sure Pascal lost entirely due to braces.

And its need for non-standard extensions to do anything useful.

Standard Pascal cannot do something as simple as prompting for a filename and then reading that file.

Rocket Factory Augsburg breaks down the SaxaVord blowout

Re: SpaceX just had a bad day

It was the twenty-third launch for that booster. One individual booster with more reuse than all other rockets combined.

As failures go it is small.

(|From the video appears a landing leg failed, which could indicate further checks for stress crack like problems while refurbishing boosters is needed.)

Choose Your Own Adventure with Microsoft 365

Re: Reinventing a very old wheel

Leasing goes back to James Watt.

His science and engineering is significant.

But more so the "have a free steam pump for your mine; pay my company based on the fuel saving" business. Which made him and his partners a mint.

AI models face collapse if they overdose on their own output

Re: Wolves.....

A more serious case of the same thing.

Automating the analysis of lung x-rays to detect some lung disease (can't recall which). Didn't work, the models fixated on the newer images with higher resolution (input positive cases) over older lower resolution images (input negative cases). So any recent x-ray was positive, whatever the state of the lungs.

The wonders of having no means to debug the model building other than extreme care with input selection when building.

CrowdStrike blames a test software bug for that giant global mess it made

I recall for sometime ago at my first job (so early '90s) talking to my manager about test rigs. He talked about how much effort, for a safety critical was put into testing the test rig. The test rig itself was relatively simple, but validating it covered all necessary good and bad cases for the test target was substantial.

For something you are pushing updates to at a rapid pace, needs more than just a few tick boxes.

It isn't as if CI/CD pipelines running multiple sets of tests using all sorts of software ( for example on Windows Server 2022) are hard to come about (the VM images for these are freely available.

Underlying organisational culture about "updates faster, respond fast, Fast, FAST" is likely the real problem.

CrowdStrike CEO summoned to explain epic fail to US Homeland Security committee

Are you aware of the politian's falacy?

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

If you are outside the kernel you restart the user process (there are well established approaches to this).

Dropping back to previous definitions after n failures is also an option (works very well with good telemetry).

Re: WHQL

Remember WHQL validates that a driver calls APIs correctly doesn't make a mess of interrupt handling, etc.

That there was a dependency on a definition file would not be in scope, because that is not the kind of thing that drivers for hardware drives have done historically. It would be great to see WHQL being updated to broaden tests.

Even better would be MS saying new "no third party drivers in the kernel" (Windows has long supported non-kernel drivers). However that would depend on MS being willing to fight through US and European counts that it isn't an anti-competitive measure (ie. third party software writer's laziness is an insufficient reason to allow kernel access).

Re: Dave Plummer has a different take on this

> From what others have said crowdstrike bypassed their own rollout procedure to force the update straight onto production networks, bypassing staging.

Exactly: this isn't the failure of an individual, but an organisational operations failure where a choice to "push and be damned" led to being damned.

Deeper is the clear failure to do fuzz, and similar, testing within an integration test suite in the publication pipeline. As this would quickly lead to seeing the driver's lack of input validation with respect to the definitions.

Re: "CrowdStrike marked their driver as a boot driver"

Any OS, from a kernel component will have this problem.

Eg. RedHat: having a kernel panic due to CloudStrike: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/7068083

Edit: note I make no comment on whether the use of definitions + driver in kernel mode is a good idea[1] rather than the driver just being a bridge to user mode worker where everything happens[2].

[1] I don't think it is.

[2] The chance of a company like CrowdStrike getting this right (handling the worker failing...) seems low.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Re: So, to the unfamiliar…

First: MS did try to stop ring-0 antimalware but was threatened with anti-trust lawsuits by the usual crowd (including, IIRC, McAfee[1]). (Can't now find the reference.)

Second: Crowdstrike did the same thing to RedHat Linux last month https://access.redhat.com/solutions/7068083 caused kernel panic

[1] CEO of CrowdStrike was McAfee CTO when McAfee was breaking systems...

Re: Ahhh, the Cloud, the Cloud

According to the status history, yesterday's Central US Region issue (not at all world wide) was a configuration change issue in a storage cluster. Which is nery much not good, but not a made malware update.

The status page does have an alert about VMs running CrowdStrike Falcon agent having problems.

Re: Related?

Now top of the front page... doing a live update page: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cnk4jdwp49et

Re: Too many eggs in too few baskets

History says... there will be little impact, and that will be temporary.

Financial markets are all about predicting the future, they don't care about the past.

Re: So, to the unfamiliar…

If you do not have CrowdStrike tools installed .... then you need to do nothing.

This is a third party issue, not Microsoft! A bad update has been deployed.

FWIW another tick for my thesis: "most security software creates more problems than it solves".

Azure VMs ruined by CrowdStrike patchpocalypse? Microsoft has recovery tips

Depends.

If the server rebooting has 0.1s in which to pull down the update before the bad previous update crashes, then 10ms extra latency may be significant. While n/w roundtrip may be measured in microseconds within the DC, it will be milliseconds to another DC.

Equally if it is a database server you then restore the most recent DB backup.... if your DB is not been backed (could be incremental and/or log) up every few minutes your business data is very vulnerable to loss.

> The multiple and up to 15 times just makes it even crazier.

But does make sense. The theory is that eventually the network stack gets enough time before the next BSOD to have updated to the latest files, which don't trigger the BSOD.

I can also imagine this very much depends on the machine's internet connectivity being very low latency and very high bandwidth.

The Clacktop: A Thinkpad Yoga with a mechanical keyboard

Re: Curiously, I watched a video yesterday

The point is you choose the key switches and key caps. There is considerable difference between the IBM classic feel and one for fastest (gamer) response.

Heavy Enough to Bludgeon

> heavy enough to bludgeon someone to death

This is a good starting point for a keyboard on its own. Before considering any other parts.

No more slipping as soon as a key is pressed a little harder...

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

Re: BSOD

In my day we had General Protection Faults... and it was a good day if you went more than a couple of hours between them...

Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project

Re: Agile misconceptions are rife

That would be doomed under any process.

Unless the budget was generous and had been set after a full (waterfall style) done perfectly design and estimation: which almost never happens.