Posts by DeathSquid

C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'

Re: How bunker mentality

Devs that are fighting the borrow checker are the problem. They are almost always trying to do something unsafe, and they don't even understand why it is unsafe.

Techie left 'For support, contact me' sign on a server. Twenty years later, someone did

You touched it last!

I got a call once. It was a university where I used to work teaching out for support because the student project submission system I'd written in 2 weeks, 15 years earlier, wasn't scaling well with their labs of hundreds of Sun workstations. Maybe that was because when the code was written, the department had 3 computers? Anyway, I considered offering to update the code but wisdom prevailed, and I suggested that surely they could find someone with a spare 2 weeks for a rewrite...

The mystery of the rogue HP calculator: 12C or not 12C? That is the question

Re: Err, no

I've got a 12c, a 15c, a 16c and a 41c on my desk. I use them all regularly. Nothing beats physical buttons when chewing through large calculations. The 41c, I'll admit, is an affectation. It was the fitrst machine I ever programmed back in the 70s. But the others are true workhorses, each designed for a different purpose.

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Agile works. But Agile doesn't mean that sales people (including the CEO) can keep shifting the goal posts every week. Agile doesn't mean fixing the delivery date before you know what you are building. Agile doesn't mean no design or tests. No process can succeed under such circumstances. You need a north star that doesn't move and you need customers who are willing to engage in incremental requirements discovery, implementation and delivery. At its heart, Agile is about building stuff that works in the real world, for real people.

Hands up if you want to volunteer for layoffs, IBM tells staff

It's great to see Finance will be "impacted". Live by the sword, die by the sword. Hopefully HR will be next...

Are you ready to back up your AI chatbot's promises? You'd better be

Re: Disclaimer

This is what statutory consumer rights are for. The retailer is on the hook if the item is not fit for purpose.

Google sends Gemini AI back to engineering to adjust its White balance

Re: Can't think why...

I worked there and I can confirm they all think like Californians no matter where they come from. They go native fast, which is a great indication of how good the local culture is at assimilation.

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

Re: Good luck

I don't want to pay for an ad free experience. I want to be paid for for my time watching ads. The best UX is being able to set your own rate. The advertiser pays and shows you the ad, or not.

What stops people from setting their price to £1m?

There is a price at which most people will elect to watch ads. Dynamic price discovery will find that point.

Rise of deepfake threats means biometric security measures won't be enough

Re: Biometrics

Those are easy enough to fake.

Fujitsu finance chief says sorry for IT giant's role in Post Office Horizon scandal

A Japanese Sorry

The playbook in Japan for corporate malfeasance is some old guy with a barcode haircut say he's sorry, in a highly stage managed way. Then nobody goes to prison. Nobody involved in the Olympic scandal did time, for instance. But god help you if you are a gaijin. The police will arrest you without charge, and hold you without bail for years until they force a confession. Goshn was just the highest profile case of hostage justice.

The executives at Fujitsu need to do jail time. They killed people, and paid themselves handsomely.

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

Yes, the system stayed up...

As lawmakers mull outlawing poor security, what can they really do to tackle online gangs?

I never understood the fuss. Just run Linux and it won't happen. And if it does, just restore from backup.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

And the date date will duly be pushed back to 2040, 2045 and 2050...

Japan to allow limited rideshare services starting April 2024

Re: Rising shun

Taxi companies are quite responsive in Japan. There's an uber-like app you can use to call a taxi, and you normally get a car in less than 15 minutes.

That said, I noticed it has become quite a bit harder to hail a taxi on the street. Especially at busy times, all taxis have their hired light on even when empty. I presume that's because people have called them via the app.

Internet's deep-level architects slam US, UK, Europe for pushing device-side scanning

Re: various tricks

Cincinnatus?

Sarah Silverman, novelists sue OpenAI for scraping their books to train ChatGPT

Re: OED

Interestingly Google Bard responds to that prompt with a direct quote:

"Willing suspension of disbelief, George? How can I suspend disbelief when I'm watching you act? You're about as convincing as a chocolate fireguard."

Japan's digital ID card gets emergency review amid data leaks

Fingerprints aren't acceptable in Japan for cultural reasons.

A giant shit show

The government has been cooking this frog slowly. Originally, the cards were entirely optional. Then you had to provide them to open bank accounts and lodge tax returns. Then they shut down the very convenient out of hours kiosks that municipalities provided to print key documents, and forced you to use MyNumber or take the day off work. Now the health insurance card integration is intended to make them effectively mandatory.

Problem is, getting a card is a typical government service. It can take 3 months or longer. So you'd better hope you don't get sick. Or if you do, that you are wealthy enough to pay out of pocket. What makes me think that politicians get their cards without all the rigmarole of the little people?

And, of course, the system is discriminatory. A citizen's card lasts 10 years and when it is about to expire they get a renewal form sent to them. Foreigners get a card that expires when they renew their visa (which can be as short as 6 months), and get no renewal form sent to them. Do they get a refund on the health insurance? Don't be silly.

Will they actually fix any of this? No. The system is ony intended to extract more tax.

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

Re: Hmmm

Boffatrix.

The Pentagon is shockingly bad at managing its employee smartphones

Blackberry were cheerfully handing everyone's data to the NSA. And there is no suggestion whatsoever that the data was used to advantage US companies.

Google's big security cert log overhaul broke Android apps. Now it's hit undo

The way Google performance reviews work is that you only get promoted for rolling out new stuff with metrics showing "impact". This incentivises breaking changes and forced upgrades.

If you keep running software working well and diligently reduce tech debt, then layoffs for you!

Meta, Google learn the art of the quiet layoff

Smart people respond to whatever incentives are present. Google et al go out of their way to hire smart people. As they wind back on remuneration and job security, expect the best to leave. Area 120 was set up to specifically attract entrepreneurial innovators. Now Google is cutting loose the very people most likely to generate future products. A CFO obsessed with expenses rather than profit is in charge. We all know how this ends: HP.

The smart money will trade into these stocks expecting a short term lift in profits from good people leaving, then exit at the peak just befire the long term damage become apparent.

Alert: 15-year-old Python tarfile flaw lurks in 'over 350,000' code projects

You could claim classic tar(1) has exactly the same security hole. Or GNU tar with the -P option.

US EV drivers won't be able to choose vehicle safety alert sounds

Noise Pollution

Making noise at less than 30km/hr will only cause more noise pollution in residential areas. At that speed, an alert driver can always use their horn to make themselves known as necessary. Anyway, hybrids have been tooling around at low speeds on battery only for years, and there's been no problem up until now...

Doctor gave patients the wrong test results due to 'printer problems'

Re: Photocopier challange

Ummm, basic physics says the seat belt is much less useful when travelling in reverse, particularly at low speeds. Countries that ignore physics should form aunion with that US state that legislated pi to be 3.

I've been in that meeting. The one where the business wants backup servers that MUST be available if the other one fails. The same meeting where the accountants point blank refuse to sign off on additional server racks, rooms and air conditioning. And they blanch at the cost of the emergency power generator.

Strategy? You document everything. Then when a failure takes down the business, the right heads roll.

It just goes to show you don't need to be a doctor to be a fool. Accountants are well up to the task.

Actually, the problem is not mental capacity. It is hubris. Doctors often believe they are the smartest people on the room even when they have no clue.

Dinobabies latest: IBM settles with widow of exec who killed himself after layoff

The fact that you feel the need to call me names rather than address any error in my statement says it all.

It was rather more than a global sales office. You might wan to read this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

IBM's history of aiding the Nazis implement the Holocaust provides historical context. This company has always been sociopathic, so it is no surprise they continue to abuse people and cause suicides. Business as usual.

Choosing a non-Windows OS on Lenovo Secured-core PCs is trickier than it should be

A leopard never changes its spots.

I hope all the people who said Microsoft had "changed" have learned their lesson. Nothing has changed. Microsoft still needs to be put down like a mad dog, for the good of humanity.

Google updates Chrome to squash actively exploited WebRTC Zero Day

Re: Could not have happen with HTTP/1.0

Yeah. They had buffer overflows back then too. The Chrome org rewards engineers for building shiny new ad and user tracking features. Code health is a poor second.

Only Microsoft can give open source the gift of NTFS. Only Microsoft needs to

Re: Microsoft Bashing

Indeed. What cracks me up are the desperate downvotes by people who are stuck in the past for one reason or another. They puff out their chests, harrumph, and declare how things are in the "real world". I've been in this game for 40 years, and every tech cycle I see those who don't want to or can't change getting left behind. It's a cruel business.

Re: Microsoft Bashing

I don't know what your "real world" is like, but over the 20 years I've worked for 3 fast growing Fortune 500 organisations and not had to touch microsoft crap personally. Over the last six or seven years, I basically haven't seen windows used by anyone I work with. It's all Linux, Macs and mobile OSes.

The 90s are well and truly over. The future is the cloud and mobile devices.

Japan's earthquake disrupts already fragile tech sector

Slow news day?

The epicenter was in the sea, east of Sendai. It's a bit of a stretch to claim the Renesas factories were near it. Gunma is further away than Tokyo, right in the middle of Honshu. Ibaraki is only a bit closer than Tokyo. Even the closest in Yamagata has a whole prefecture between it and the coastline.

Inspecting factories with heavy machinery after a quake is SOP here.

'Boombox' function sparks Tesla recall

OTA software update, not a recall. Is it me, or are the TSLA short sellers getting a little shrill and desperate?

Google Cloud started running its servers for an extra year, still loses billions

Re: Careful with that Google TV

For god's sake! Don't give them ideas!

Brocade wrongly sacked award-winning salesman who depended on company insurance for cancer treatment

Psychopath

Psychopath (n.)

1. A person with a personality disorder indicated by a pattern of lying, cunning, manipulating, glibness, exploiting, heedlessness, arrogance, delusions of grandeur, sexual promiscuity, low self-control, disregard for morality, lack of acceptance of responsibility, callousness, and lack of empathy and remorse.

2. A member of the HR team.

How to polish the bottom line? Microsoft makes it really hard to claim expenses, say staffers

Mail in receipts

Current employer requires receipts to be snail mailed to HQ. The stamp is, of course, claimable by submitting another expense report and mailing in the receipt. The stamp is, of course, claimable...

Reminds me of the old joke about the programmer's skeleton found in the shower holding a bottle of shampoo. The instructions read: wash, rinse, repeat.

Email blocklisting: A Christmas gift from Microsoft that Linode can't seem to return

That's a Microsoft problem...

Sounds like a Microsoft problem. Their customers are not getting email they want. They should take it up with their email provider or find a more reputable one.

Remember that day in 2020 when you were asked to get the business working from home – by tomorrow?

Yeah, I remember. People took their laptops home and were fine. Because the business wasn't running any Microsoft crap, everything was butter smooth. Google tools work from everywhere and just kept working. Mail, calendar, video conference all just worked. Shared docs, no problem. VPNs to development resources were long in place. Everything was already cloud based. It was an uneventful day.

Confessions of a ransomware negotiator: Well, somebody's got to talk to the criminals holding data hostage

Re: Pointing the finger of blame/numbers managing

I worked at very large company where the IT team clearly had a backlog KPI. Their strategy was simply to close tickets after 4 weeks for being too old. That combined with the fact they never seemed to fix any tickets at all encouraged people to give up filing them in the first place.

And then they wondered why business units built their own IT teams...

Red Hat OpenShifts gears at summit to pin its future on 'open hybrid cloud'

OpenWhat?

The marketing folks really should have come up with a better name than OpenShift. Especially for countries where people tend to drop their aitches.

Salesman who helped land Veritas UK's 'largest ever' deal was lawfully docked £275k in commission, says judge

Re: Meanwhile in the boardroom

You've obviously never sat on a board. It's a half a day a month, max.

Turns out humans are leading AI systems astray because we can't agree on labeling

One weird old trick to deal with captchas...

Look near the top of your browser window. There's a back button. Press it, and the captcha disappears.

Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC

Re: ARM wrestle

This century, mobile is where the growth is. And Linux/Android holds the dominant market share globally. Windows isn't even a rounding error.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

The Clouded Leopard. Because they never change their spots.

Never thought we'd write this headline: Under Siege Steven Seagal is not Above The Law, must fork out $314,000 after boosting crypto-coin biz

How was he to know it was illegal? He's just a cook...

IBM HR made me lie to US govt, says axed VP in age-discrim legal row: I was ordered to cover up layoffs of older workers

Re: For all you young 'uns out there, this is the "old" IBM in all its glory..

I'll certainly conceed that the same behaviour by a corporation with a different history would be equally as reprehensible. But I'll continue to argue that history is relevant because it sets the trajectory for corporate culture. Not irrevocably but, left uncorrected, fundamental cultural flaws have a way of resurfacing over and over. In IBM's case there appears to be decades of ongoing extreme amorality and anti-social behaviour where corporate social responsibility is given zero or even negative weight. To not recognise the pattern and how it is transmitted is to fail in any attempt at rectification. A fine or punishing an individual will not change embedded culture. In extreme cases, and I believe that IBM is one such, the only viable approach is to disband the company.

Incidently, we see similar patterns with certain banks. "Mistakes were made" goes the non-apology, the fine is paid, and then the circus starts again.

Re: For all you young 'uns out there, this is the "old" IBM in all its glory..

You don't get it, do you? Coroporations have culture that can span generations. It's convenient to say that was then and this is now, especially when then was shameful. But when you see ongoing patterns of abuse across decades the problem is clearly deeper than whatever idiot happens to be in charge today.

And if you feel that swearing somehow makes you sound more erudite, why don't you stop doing it as an AC?

Re: For all you young 'uns out there, this is the "old" IBM in all its glory..

The old IBM says hold my beer, and collaborates with Nazis. Specifically on tabulating populations for termination. This is distasteful history but absolutely true, and I raise it with respect for the millions of victims. Something IBM doesn't seem to mention in their official corporate histories. In any case, the DNA of an organisation has a way of running true, and it seems that IBM has systematically and amorally engaged in decades of abuses against their workers. This shame stained corporation should have been disbanded 70 years ago, but it's never too late.