Posts by wikkity

Your roadmap to the Google vs Oracle Java wars

Here we go again

Spouting the same old nonsense that has been demonstrated to be incorrect so many times. There are that many flaws in this article it is unbelievable and I for can't be bothered pointing them out yet again.

UK General Election 2017: How EU law will hit British politicians' Facebook fight

Re: Appealing to the individual voter?

As much as I like [most of] his policies I doubt he could get close to affording them. That said I personally think he would be much better that May when it comes to negotiating. Mays posturing is just going to get everyones backs up, she already has the EU against her and makes it worse every day. Corbyn comes across as actually sincere and can command respect, to those who politics does not mean arguing like school boys/girls. The negotiations are going to be long and hard, someone who can maintain respect rather than focusing on getting sound bite and newspaper headlines would be best placed.

Amazon: 'Alexa, how do you fix shoddy APIs that keep breaking apps? Asking, er, for a friend'

Re: I think I've found the problem ...

How many enterprise systems do you know that are self contained?

Maybe you are lucky you are to have a problem domain that does not need to interact the outside world. Possibly you work for a company that does it's own weather forecasting, banking facilities and handles currency conversion, provides it's own banking facilities, can plot travel routes taking into account current traffic conditions, checking stock levels at customer and distributor sites (all using different APIs), checking for fraud patterns, ...

Re: "unless they submit their skill to a full manual test run each day"

Wow, 6 thumbs down [and counting]. Does this mean no one out there checks their software when it's deployed? Some of the projects I maintain use dozens of partner and third party API's and provide many APIs used by others. By not having automated and manual checks to ensure the system is 100% ok we'd have clients wanting to know why we we were caught with our pants down and some of those outages would be likely to be mentioned in a article on here.

Sure it's naff when a dependency is offline or changes but that is life and you need to be as proactive as possible. But someone complaining that this is something they shouldn't have to do staggers belief, even if you have an arranged level of service things can go wrong. Testing and health checks are essential if you want to be able to react BEFORE the pressure is on.

"unless they submit their skill to a full manual test run each day"

Which for anything that your income or reputation depends on you would do. Anyone who sits there smug that it worked when released and waits for users to report problems is asking for trouble. And not just once a day.

Ex-IBMer sues Google for $10bn – after his web ad for 'divine honey cancer cure' was pulled

Re: But seriously though folks....

I'd still prefer to try the honey over homeopathy like Mr Jobs.

Angular framework's grand ambition: Not breaking anything

That's a very precise number of developers.

But not accurate, it's actually 2008, I think someone miscounted

WebComponents

Angluar is good for want it is good for but goes beyond. Want we need is HTML5 compliant web components supported fully across browsers then we won't platforms.

DNA-bothering eggheads brew beer you were literally born to like

£25,000,?

I can brew 50 pints for about £20 ingredients (I make my own candy sugar) or 15-30 pints for a shop kit for £15. That works out, for the first case at £1000 for 2000 pints, a saving of £24000!

If I assume that it takes me 1 hour to brew and 1 hour to bottle each batch and charge £30 an hour for my labour I break even at £24000 for my time (ignoring taxes, I'm sure brewing beer is a tax deductible acivity). But brewing is a hobby, if it wasn’t buying 200 bottles of beer is a lot cheaper. Even on sites like beerhawk that charge well over treble for stuff you can get in the supermarket

"plenty to keep you and your pals going for some time"

From the link "plenty to keep you and your pals going for some time"

I thought the beer was tailored to my genes, what if my friends have different tastes, when it's my round I rarely ask for X pints of Y?

Beer is an aquired taste

Like many things your taste and preferences for beer changes as you experience it. When I was a kid sneaking a sip of my dads beer I decided I'd prefer to drink shandy as it was nicer. As I got older and going to the pub I drank what my dad and his mates drank, ales*. I went to university and everyone drank lager but didn't enjoy it and stuck with beer as that is what I was used to, I then moved onto stout and apart from the odd real ale nothing but stout for years.

Then a double epiphany, I discovered Belgian beer and moved to a town with a few pubs that sold well looked after real ales and non-stouts were back on the menu, happy days. For many years the idea of having a single beer in the fridge or drinking the same beer in the pub seems a waste, sure I could drink Leffe/Chimay/Duvel till it came out of my ears (though Duvel is likely to come out somewhere else first) I would not want to every day**.

I'm sure you could theoretically also find a food that matched you genetically, but would you even want to eat the same thing over and over again? What you'd prefer depends on circumstance, on a summers day in the garden I like my own home brewed strawberry wheat beer, at winter like the xmas beer from sam smiths, on a friday after work I like a few stouts, Saturday few selections of good ales and the rest of the week a variety of home brews and supermarket purchases.

* My dad now prefers wine and lager :-(

** Responsible drinking and all that.

Pure Silicon Valley: Medium asks $5 a month for absolutely nothing

Re: "The idea of quantity over quality is long gone."

That is because of they "produce words that people want to read", which unfortunately in this case is not the journalism that El Reg referred to. However they are making money from articles based on the way popular thought is orientated, which is how much benefits immigrants get rather than the hell they had to go through and somehow miraculously survive.

Such "press" is not journalism but provides people with want they want, confirmation that their view of the world is correct and shared with others, and it does not get more correct to them if it's printed on paper and on sale. Unfortunately the affect is to exaggerate the beliefs and suck more people into it.

IMHO These _journalists_ are responsible for a lot of the mess the world is in but it is profit that drives it as after all they are a business. I think the term newspaper should be regulated based on fact and how many related facts are ignored. Very hard to do I would imagine and I would not know where to start.

I'd sympathise with Trump about the press but I suspect what I consider press to be the exact people he whines about are the people I'd call real journalists and vice versa.

Today's WWW is built on pillars of sand: Buggy, exploitable JavaScript libs are everywhere

Re: NHS hospital a couple of weeks ago. PC in the corner was XP

There are still a lot of XP devices out there, especially in places like hospitals where it is needed to communicate with perfectly serviceable medical equipment manufactured when XP was cutting edge. They do however have restrictions in place and kept off networks unless required and then limited.

Linux on Windows 10: Will penguin treats in Creators Update be enough to lure you?

Re: Java is so easily messed up... just put spaces in a path or a password...

"Windows is no longer constrained to 260 characters path for a while, although you may have to enable the new behaviour explicitly:"

Did someone tell explorer? I had this issue with explorer on win 7 enterprise last week trying to copy a java source tree onto a USB drive, had to use cygwin.

Re: Java is so easily messed up... just put spaces in a path or a password...

"the issue with Java is exactly it can't parse anything correctly because its developers couldn't see beyond their noses"

WTF, java is a programming language if it can't do anything the programmer has not programmed it to do. If a developer failed to handle whitespace in input that is not the languages fault. I the case of command line args which I think you are getting at, the same issue needs to be addressed by the developer into C++, C, etc. If you had an app that took a password as an arg like

myapp.exe password with space

in c++/C you will have three args unless you do:

myass.exe "password with space"

Autonomous cars are about to do to transport what the internet did to information

Re: Works for cities

If more people were to rely on automated vehicles there'd be less privately owned cars sitting parked on the streets so more spaces.

My street is a perfect example, the house were built long before it was ever considered a single house would have two or three cars parked outside. The road is narrow, you can get cars half on the road and pavement with enough space to drive down. It's a cul-de-sac as well. It can be hectic to get out in the mornings or evenings, and if you are expecting a delivery of something large, e.g. building materials you need to go around your neighbours to be able to get the delivery truck near your property. The less privately owned cars the better in my eyes, something that could get us down to one per household would be great (yes we have a car and fortunate enough to have a big drive).

Uncle Sam needs you... to debug, improve Dept of Defense open-source software at code.mil

Re: I'll gladly lend a hand to these nice American chaps!

Remind me again, after all the dust settled, was there any SCO proprietary code?

Sounds good

But maybe they should have held off the announcement until they had sorted out copyright issues and had something to release. Sounds like it was one departments job to set up the mechanism to get things published and everyone else needs to start following, I'm guessing someone's employment objectives depended on getting this done

Sysadmin's sole client was his wife – and she queried his bill

I sometimes wonder how we can justify your salary

I'm sure there a lot of people on here who employ their spouse/partner. I'm more than happy to pay my wife do to a job even if I can get someone cheaper and faster to do it.

Amazon goes to court to stop US murder cops turning Echoes into Big Brother house spies

Re: i'd like to see the option

From what I know. I've done some development with Alexa and monitored network traffic between it.

Plus, despite what people may think of Google/Amazon/Big Corp, I seriously doubt they would be continuously gathering what is being said whilst their product description clearly states what it does.

Just using it it is clear that the trigger word is detected locally, they have difficulties with a a 5 year old kid trying to activate it but once triggered, both Alexa and Google Now have no trouble understanding the search term. I doubt either would do anything to damage their reputation by blatantly lying.

Alexa does occasionally get triggered falsely so there is certainly some audio uploaded that was not intented, however the Aleax app lets you see the history and remove things.

i'd like to see the option

to allow police see any recordings in the event I'm murdered. I can understand the privacy issue if they just tried a general blanet request to see what I've been saying, but FFS the bloke has been killed, the poilce need all possible evidence.

It's incredibly unlikely the device recorded anything but a murder investigation covers everything, 99% is probably irrelevant.

We have two echos in our house + google now on three phones and 2 tablets., i would not call them invasions of privacy, they only upload audio when the Echo/Alexa/Dot/Google is triggered. There is a reason these and similar services can only be triggered by a discreet set of words, the devices are optimised to listen for those words, subsequent audio is then uploaded for processing.

Finally proof that Apple copies Samsung: iPhone 7 Plus halts, catches fire like a Galaxy Note 7

Re: due to mechanical stress

You are sitting on it wrong!

Oh, irony of ironies: Gov.UK's transparency report reveals... nothing

RE: would listen to experts outside of government

Depends on what the subject matter was. They've never listened to experts about some subjects, e.g. drugs.

Lately it's becoming across the board, but I think this is due to politicians trying too hard to appear vote-able, there is much more of a tendency nowadays for politicians to ignore what they actually believe in and go what they think Joe public thinks, and Joe Public does not believe expert opinions are based on fact and understanding.

Cloudbleed: Big web brands 'leaked crypto keys, personal secrets' thanks to Cloudflare bug

Re: Unbelievable

Sorry, no idea what went wrong with that, possibly no beer on a Friday afternoon. I meant to say:

Only the compilers fault if it generated code that did not do what the source specified. The error in this case was down to a programmer.

Impressed

By the way they handled this. After what seems a professional investigation they've held there hands up, assumed responsibility without trying to pass the buck and did their up most to put things right.

Sure their testing had a gap but whoses doesn't. More tests get written for bugs than originally implemented.

Re: Not sure if it's Ragel or the dev whose at fault here.

Definitely the developer, cloudfare even admit that if you read the write up.

Re: Unbelievable

O my the compilers fault if it generated code that did not do what the source specified. The error in this car was a programmer.

'Hey, Homeland Security. Don't you dare demand Twitter, Facebook passwords at the border'

Re: Bollocks to Trump

RE: I don't have anything to do with Twitter, Facebook

They'll also want your theregister password

Apple to Europe: It's our job to design Ireland's tax system, not yours

RE: fake laws

Nowadays they are called alternative laws.

Java and Python have unpatched firewall-crossing FTP SNAFU

Stop press C/C++ are vulnerable too

Apparently there is this socket thing that will let miscreants send communicate with software running on your machine.

Zuckerberg thinks he's cyber-Jesus – and publishes a 6,000-word world-saving manifesto

Our greatest opportunities ... lifting people out of poverty

"lifting people out of poverty", an opportunity? FFS, this is not an opportunity, this is what you referred to in the bit about humanity, not "All those pictures and updates"

Don’t panic over cyber-terrorism: Daesh-bags still at script kiddie level

Re: "saner heads should prevail"

Maybe my d key was not working but I manged to miss the d in activated twice there!

Re: "we are very resilient as a country"

Some might interpret that as the American people will recover from incidents due to their national pride and will bounce back. Some might interpret as Americans don't give a shit about anything else apart from themselves so add it to their vindication. While I sincerely don't want to detract from the absolute atrocity that was 9/11 but there was an surprise amongst many Americans that they are not globally liked. Personally I'd say the former.

Politically I don't know, never read trumps book, what does he say about handling situations that go south? Go bankrupt maybe and claim a tax deduction against future loses? Might be resilient for staying financially afloat but as a country?

Debt has nothing to do with resilient, some of the countries on that list with lower debt are much less resilient, I'd certainly prefer to live here than there. In fact debt could enforce you to be more than resilient, if you don't pay people back things can get worse, try owing the tax man or your mortgage provider!

Is this because

1. They don't need funding because the threat of Russian hackers have established all they funding they need.

2. A reality check

3. The internet bandwidth is full of Trumps tweets, reteets and responses that there is no capacity for doing any hacking

Re: "saner heads should prevail"

I heard that the football was now activate by a twitter bot. Think it was activate by the phrase

(Russia||N Korea||China) will pay for the wall

(NATO country) will pay for defence

MEPs in 'urgent' call for new laws on artificial intelligence and robotics

This is

the exact kind of stuff that the EU wastes money on that excites people and encourages so called popularist* trends. I'm sure we will need this at some soon, but is now really the time for a bunch of politicians to start telling researchers what they need to do? And how much money will be wasted in the meantime?

If the MEPs don't want the rest of the EU going down the same route they really need someone handling what is a good idea to do without pissing money away, or at least how it is handled PR wise.

I went for pint last night and the conversation started from this, with everyone saying it's good we are out of Europe so we won't pay for this! 15 minutes later it's about some polish guy on TV saying he gets housing benefits (which people don't understand how, as we are of course now out of europe now). It just takes one stupid thing the EU does (and there are a lot no doubt) before anything else vaguely related to Europe is dragged into validate an established opinion.

Disclaimer in case it was required, I was a remainer, but that milk is now split so move on but still a bit of distaste. That said a hard exit is the only sensible course but a fragmented Europe would be worse for us.

* my definition is basing opinion upon gut reaction and hearsay rather than fact, and something genuinely I feel is going to cause absolute mayhem in the years to come.

Virgin Media swallows 215,000 new fibre customers in Blighty

Re: Sort out your pricing and customer service, Virgin

Internet is good, TV packages are just not worth it. Last price increase was enough to motivate me reducing my package from the list of things to do at some point to things to do now, took about 4 years to get around to switching from the full to the basic channels, only extra channels we ever watched were the kids channels, which were only available on the full package.

Kids nowadays only watch YouTube, Netflix and Disney life, now £40 a month better off (disney life is 4.99 and we already had netflix and skynow). I can completely understand why people would choose to use things like mobdro when half your subscription package is simply for a handful of channels that are not anything special, like nicktoons showing endless repeats of the same cartoons but unavailable in any other legal form by themselves.

Google claims ‘massive’ Stagefright Android bug had 'sod all effect'

"between the combination of Java and Linux"

And the fact that most android software is implemented in a particular programming language is significant how?

China announces it wants more immigrants, better diplomats and science-led industry

Re: okay, but...

> You mean like the UK still hasn't fixed it's public toilets - since Victorian times.

I've not seen a broken public toilet in the UK for years. Then again I've not seen a public toilet for years as they've all been closed around here.

Google nukes ad-blocker AdNauseam, sweeps remains out of Chrome Web Store

Re: Interesting why block this one?

I assume that this one is blocked as the software is "clicking" the ad and therefore incurring the charge ad as the article says this could be considered fraud. They are not blocking this one as it blocks ads.

While I'm sure Google would like to earn the extra cash from these clicks they have a responsibility to their clients to ensure ad clicks are bona fide.

China to Donald Trump: Twitter diplomacy 'undesirable'

Re: Proof Positive

I think you have a typo there, should be an a instead of an i.

How-to terror manuals still being sold by Apple, Amazon, Waterstones

Re: WTF

> READILY AVAILABLE. TO ANYONE!!! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!! I

They already have, you have to be 18 to buy a knife in the UK. Children have to steal one from the kitchen.

Facebook to hire 500 more in Blighty

Re: It would be nice to see some tech jobs outside London

It would be nice to see some tech jobs outside the South

FTFY

Google: If you think we're bad, you should take a look at Apple

Re: Apple does not enforce screen positioning either.

No one else can sell ios devices so there is no one to enforce. Android users are free to move the app form the initial position.

Apple, Mozilla kill API to deplete W3C battery-snitching standard

Re: Besides...

Or push them ads for better batteries or external battery packs.

Linux in 2016 catches up to Solaris from 2004

Re: GNU utils

have nothing to do with Linux. Linux is an OS, the gnu tools are user software. The user decides what software they like to use on the OS of their choice, if they decide the gnu toolchain is better that bundled with the OS, that should not reflect on the OS itself.

Google man drags Emacs into the 1990s

Re: Whats this GUI thingy?

"I have three Emacs sessions"

But if you use the GUI version you only need 1 session with C-x 5 2 (make-frame).

As for a mouse with Emacs, I do like/love using nothing but a few mouse clicks to cut and paste a block of code, to non believers it looks like Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar with his teeth.

Re: didn't flicker every time you pressed a key

Never noticed, I had to look at the keyboard when typing on a zx80, I guess by teh time I looked back up it had been drawn.

What will happen when I'm too old to push? (buttons, that is)

RE: because the light that lights up to tell me the alarm is set is so bright

I close my eyes when I'm wanting to sleep. It works, you should try it.

Skin tattoo will tell your phone when you've had a skinful

massively hard to prove?

Not really, in cases of a crash it's common nowadays for mobiles to be examined and checks with service providers. It's probably OTT to check during all car related incidents but if they suspected you of doing it they would. There was a case not so long ago where a woman who caused a fatal crash deleted her sent text messages and was surprised they found out.