Posts by Rosie Davies

UK's National Health Service will roll existing Palantir work into patient data platform

The NHS is not free. It's paid for by the public to deliver a public good. Personally I feel it to be a Damn Fine Idea(tm).

Except for those bits of the public that pay expensive accountants to stop them having to contribute, obvs.

Rosie

FOSS digital audio workstation Ardour reaches version 7

I've used Ardour with Ubuntu Studio for years and hadn't paid penny until I felt I wanted to; Mostly because people need to eat and partly because once I worked out the hourly cost for the fun I was having it was pennies. Granted I've run Linux on my own machines exclusively since forever so have never run acropper of the costs (in either time to compile or cold, hard, cash).

It's a great, big, capable program which takes a bit of effort to get your head around but also an absolute doddle compared to a 'real' recording studio. It takes time and effort to build something like that and, personally, I don't feel at all hard done by to contribute a little to the effort.

Rosie

Scottish space upstart's rocket crashes into the drink

<SIGH!>

"...boats and airplanes have..."

It's a Scottish rocket, those would be aeroplanes.

Rosie

UK politico proposes site for prototype nuclear fusion plant

Re: A centre for industrial decline?

Same. Once a week. Maybe.

Rosie

Biden administration prepares to bring hammer down on Chinese chipmakers

Graft

That's about the most jarring bit of US English I've seen on the site so far. In the UK grafting is working your whatnots off, whereas in the US it's skimming a little something off for yourself. Same word but completely different meanings.

In a related point, does anyone know of any sites that resemble El Reg as it was? Sort of mid-2000s to mid-2010s heyday era. I'm liking the new site less and less with each passing week.

Rosie

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Re: UXtards to blame

I thought that would get me some down votes, which is a bit sad really - what's wrong with learning the language of the country you're visiting? I learned a bit of Welsh when I moved here (because I didn't want to be one of 'those' people) and it's a right giggle, more people should definitely give it a try. It's very, very different from English in all kinds of fascinating ways.

Rosie

Re: UXtards to blame

Well...you could learn Welsh, you're in Wales after all. You'd not even need to learn much Welsh to operate a ticket vending machine.

Rosie

Voyager 1 data corrupted by onboard computer that 'stopped working years ago'

6 Months Ago

Traynor YGL-3 Mk III, crackly pots. Contact cleaner.

Not _exactly_ the same level of cleverness but you did ask. Also the Traynor is loud enough to make your ears bleed whereas Voyager is silent.

Rosie

MPs charged with analysing Online Safety Bill say end-to-end encryption should be called out as 'specific risk factor'

Termintion Point

Hmmm...I'm not sure how many legs using TLS as an example would have TBH. The sane implementations that I've seen use something like n F5 as a termination point, everything inside the termination point is plain text, only outside is encrypted. Which is sort of essential if you#ve got tp do anything based on packet payload a a Good Idea(tm) if you don't want to have key handling hell to deal with and servers wasting clock cycles decrypting when they could be doing something more useful.

Other than that, agreed. This is all going to end up under the umbrella of "aligned with Good Industry Practice" and largely ignored.

Rosie

China's Yutu rover spots 'mysterious hut' on far side of the Moon

Here be Dragons

Soup Dragons to be precise, as any fule know.

Rosie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clangers

Google sued for firing staff who claim they tried to follow 'Don't be evil' motto

Re: Their New Motto is

Mostly except for the *. If you are going to have right old swear please do it properly. Otherwise it's like alcohol free gin or some similar monstrosity.

Rosie

We're all at sea: Navigation Royal Navy style – with plenty of IT but no GPS

Squat

Only applies to a displacement hull (i.e. anything too big/heavy/slow to get up on the plane). If you have a planing hull (like the boat in the article's picture) the faster you go the higher up in the water you are.

Yeah, I know. Picky.

Rosie

Doggy DNA database adopted by Gloucestershire cops to bring crims to heel

Pramagtically

For my dogs this is likely to reveal they are equals parts fox poo, badger poo and well decomposed rabbit. Possibly with a smattering of dog in there.

I love dogs. They're completely disgusting and couldn't give a fig.

Rosie

Hungover Brits declare full English breakfast the solution to all their ills

Cocktails

Savoy recipe corpse reviver number 2 for preference.

Works as well today as it did 100 years ago.

Rosie

Pakistan's Punjab province tells citizens to get jabbed or have their SIM card blocked

Re: Momento mori

I thought that as well but if you go a bit further down the article you get to "And of 42 deaths in people with Delta variant infections, 23 were unvaccinated and seven had received only one dose. The other 12 had received two doses more than two weeks before."

So 28.5%. A little less than 30% but not a lot.

Rosie

Guy who wrote women are 'soft, weak, cosseted, naive' lasted about a month at Apple until internal revolt

Re: Inclusive must mean that we only include things that we like...

"know who the bastards* are and can easily avoid them"

Isn't that what Apple are doing?

*Leaving aside any judgement on whether the guy is a bastard, has only acted like a bastard, or just said a things for the lolz in circumstances where for the lolz isn't appropriate.

Rosie

This developer created the fake programming language MOVA to catch out naughty recruiters, résumé padders

Re: Back in my contracting days...

Way back in the early 90s when I was developing code for a software house that specialised in recruitment software text matching was certainly a thing. There were OCR and matching modules to do exactly that - scan a CV and let the machine do the CV assessment for you. I've long since left that area but I'd be surprised if it wasn't still being used, certainly it was on lots of people 'must have' list.

Rosie

Excel-lent: Microsoft debuts low-code Power Fx language... but it is not really new

Everything Old is New?

I'll admit I've not dug into the low/no code stuff so am slightly commenting from a position of ignorance but from the blurb it mostly reminds me of the MDD/round trip engineering voodoo that had a bit of a hypebubble in the late 90s. IIRC Visual Cafe did a not completely horrible implementation of it; draw your UML and it generated the code for you.

Obviously that fell to pieces when you had to do anything even moderately complicated. As soon as the logic gets a bit involved it turns out it's easier to understand code than it is to follow a diagram. I thought that had killed it off a fair while back.

Anyone out there who knows a bit more than me (low bar to clear) care to point out why this is so very different?

Rosie

LibreOffice 7.1 Community released with user-interface picker, other bits and bytes

Re: And yet no Android version

Have you tried AndrOpenOffice? I have it on my phone and it sort of works well enough, certainly well enough I was prepared to pay fir it. Though the phone is a Cosmo, I'd hate to try and use it without a proper keyboard.

Rosie

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

Tablets can be Useful

I know not an iPad but I've a Galaxy Tab 6 and whilst it wasn't useful for much more than Netflix and games without anything extra installed on it a couple of apps have helped it a lot.

Nebo is great as a replacement for a (paper) note book. I can happily scrawl away but end up with something I can search through easily. Which dead handy when someone asks me about something that came up in a meeting 4 months ago and had a like span of about weeks before fading into obscurity. Until it became urgent again.

Ibis paint is also a lot of fun. Plus it has the advantge of infinite undo for the utterly hopeless artist (raises hand and pleads guilty).

Both Nebo and Ibis come in Apple flavour as well so I think the comparison stands, provided you get an iPad with a stylus.

So far as plain consumption goes. The screen is nicer to look at and the sound quality much richer than my phone. So from that point of view, not really a must have but a nice addition if you're prepared to trawl around eBay looking for a decent second hand one.

Buy new? Don't be ridiculous!

Rosie

You look for the largest objects in the universe and two come along at once: Astroboffins spot mega radio galaxies dwarfing Milky Way

Re: ANcient Wisdom

Perfect! Thank you very much.

Rosie

ANcient Wisdom

So this sounds like concrete proof that the ancients were correct, just thinking too small. It's not the Earth that is a flat disk but the universe. The mega-galaxies that are so far away are squishing up close in the currents on the edge of the universal disk before dropping off into...ummm...something. Probably divine. Let's call it divine because it makes the explanation easier.

Obviously the universe is supported by turtles, all the way down.

More seriously, does anyone cleverer that me know what the amazing capabilities of MeerKAT are?

Rosie

Apple's M1: the fastest and bestest ever silicon = revolution? Nah, there's far more interesting stuff happening in tech that matters to everyone

Well...OK

I take your point. It's Apple doing what Apple does and doing it very well. I'm not convinced that writing off architectural changes to produce something that is very fast and very efficient is a complete goer though. Energy usage by a single consumer device may be inconsequential compared to energy use by a screamingly fast 4U beast but (guessing TBH, I've not checked the numbers) there are a lot more consumer devices than there are 4U beasts. Less energy used at the consumer end is less energy used overall and that's mostly a good thing.

The other bit that doesn't seem quite fair when writing this off is that it's a different approach that has been shown to give good results. That by itself is likely to cause some thinking outside of Cupertino about similar architectural changes; if only to get up the noses of Fanbois bleating on about their phone going 15 weeks between charges (not the greatest of reason for doing anything mind). Even if it is just phones and laptops at the minute there's little historical precedent within IT for anyone respecting artificial market segment boundaries when it comes to implementing good ideas. Aforementioned 4U beast only with 1/10th of the power consumption for the same performance would be a big saving for anyone's energy bill.

Yes, I know that it's more about shunting data around as quickly as possible rather than chewing through it at the moment. That's likely to change; storage, bandwidth and compute tend to jockey around playing pass the bottleneck so it'd be surprising it at some point in th next couple of decades people weren't complaining about not having enough fast enough cores to chew through the bits they're delivering. It'd be nice to have the compute side of things going screamingly fast when questum entangled transfer interfaces (that's made up BTW) are drowning them under a tsunami of data.

Rosie

The nightmare is real: 'Excel formulas are the world's most widely used programming language,' says Microsoft

Re: Access?

Access is entirely appropriate when there's some young clever clogs who looks as though they may be a threat in 10 years time. Manipulate them into believing that they must understand RDBMS and that Access is the most advanced RDBMS there is, and that to get ahead they should really spend the time gaining a thorough and in-depth knowledge of how Access does things.

Cackle evilly as they spend the first two decades of their career learning how to not do things the way Access does them.

Rosie

LibreOffice 7.1 beta boasts impressive range of features let down by a lack of polish and poor mobile efforts

Re: Whilst I agree that cloud collaboration is important these days...

Likewise only on a Cosmo. For that I use AndrOpenOffice which works well enough I even paid for it.

Rosie

It may date back to 1994 but there's no end in sight for the UK's Chief customs system as Brexit rules beckon

Pratchetisms

I assume the "Check an HGV is Ready to Cross the Border" system was named by Leonard of Quirm?

That said, having a system deployed into production 23 days before it's needed beats the usual sharp focus on delivery deadlines by about 5 days.

Rosie

It's always DNS, especially when a sysadmin makes a hash of their semicolons

the days when 'we made it up as we went along'?

You mean last Tuesday?

Rosie

Missing Alan Turing memorabilia to be returned to Blighty from the US, 36 years after it went walkabout

Re: And the next story will be ....

I get what you're saying but the article says 1984. By 1984 we had Frankie gos to Holloywood, Culture Club and everything. Downright progressive it was, for a given definition of progressive.

Rosie

Touchscreen holdout? This F(x)tec Pro1 X phone with sliding QWERTY keyboard might push your buttons

Physical Keyboard ++Good

Admittedly I'm a bit biased, I hate touchscreen typing. I found myself mentally editing what I wanted to say down to the fewest possible words to vaguely get across a reasonable approximation just to avoid typing any more than I absolutely had to.

I bought the Planet Gemini and it was a nice enough device to use stand-alone. I've now got the Cosmo which is a big improvement on the Gemini and sufficiently good that I'm not tempted to get the Astro - which seems to be the same form factor as this device.I can touch type on the Cosmo at speeds fairly close to what I get on a full-sized keyboard. That's important enough to me that I don't ever want anoterh phone that doesn't have a physical keyboard.

Rosie

Linux kernel's Kroah-Hartman: We're not struggling to get new coders, it's code review that's the bottleneck

Re: No surprise.

Speaking as someone who has been a sound engineer and reviewed a LOT of other people's code...it doesn't matter. There's the satisfaction of a job well done, whether that's listening to a piece of music you saved or seeing a piece of code romp through a scenario that would have choked it.

Rosie

Won't duke, duke, duke the URLs: AWS backtracks on plans to block old-style S3 paths

Ambidextrous

I am liking the new site feature for supporting both left and right hand sides of the pond, as per your fine example 30 September 30 (though possibly a th would help?)

Could I propse non-Reg units go through a similar thing? Maybe 68 Farencius 20? 20 feetres 6.1?

I didn't have anything of any value to add, no. Why do you ask?

Rosie

Lars Ulrich threatens to make another Metallica album during web chat with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

Re: Deluded article from a cretin

"...how would you describe The Register, a circus?"

Welcome to the circus fellow clown. Mind the pies, they have RJ45s in.

Rosie

Cosmo Communicator: More phone than the Gemini, more pocket computer than phone

Re: Got Gemini, Getting Cosmo

Guilty as charged y'honour. Planning on not repeating that particular destruction test on the Cosmo.

Rosie

Got Gemini, Getting Cosmo

I was an early back for both so have had the Gemini for a fair while now. It works well enough as standard smartphone, the main irritant being websites and apps that can't cope with landscape properly and I don't really notice the size or weight but then again it lives in my handbag when I'm not using it. The keyboard is an absolute dream to use, I'd got really fed up of constructing messages aroudn the lest number of words rather than saying what I wanted to because I find on screen keyboards an absolute PITA to work with. Touch typing means I can say what I actually want to say or witter on at superfluous length, depending on your perspective.

I backed the Cosmo mainly for the backlit keyboard and because they're a small company doing something a bit different. THe external screen and camera aren't tht important to me, at least until the thing arrives then they'll probably become an invaluable feature that I'll wonder how I ever coped without. Or something.

Do we get a proper Reg demolishes review on this one?

Rosie

Just what we all needed, lactose-free 'beer' from northern hipsters – it's the Vegan Sorbet Sour

I've made a chocolate stout (from grain with all the hassle and mess that implies) and no chocolate was used in the mix. It's due to the roating of the malt, a bit more than amber (that gives you your 'biscuit' flavours') and a bit less than black malt (_really_ astringent, too much makes your mouth hurt).

I don't know what the real brewers get up to but cocoa is much more expensive that chocolate malt and you'd need a LOT of it to get a reasonable flavour (I know, I've tried). I'd be surprised if they did this but am probably as wrong about that as I am about so many things.

Rosie

Backdoors won't weaken your encryption, wails FBI boss. And he's right. They won't – they'll fscking torpedo it

Re: Technically Do-Able

Wouldn't surprise me if I were wrong, I'm good at being wrong.

I was thinking PKI type stuff.

Keypair 1 is used to allow encryption between the two people who are having the conversation (sender's private, receivers public).

Keypair 2 for the comms data, (sender's private, $somewhere[comms_data_store] public)

Keypar 3 for the stream containing the same as keypair 1, (sender's private, $somewhere[warrant_required_data_store] public).

Access to the private key for 2 and 3 would be the bit that's subject to controls, far moreso for 3 than 2. That's also the reason I said a bit over double the traffic as I was starting from the point that there's already one encrypted stream, not one unencrypted stream.

Re: Technically Do-Able

You'd encrypt only the data, forward it $somewhere for safe storage until someone turns up with the appropriate bit of paper saying they're allowed to look at it. No need to wrap encryption in encryption in encryption, just three different sets of encrypted information each using a different key pair. Traffic goes up by a bit over 2 (two copies of the actual content plus a tiny bit for the comms data) and no need to be diddling down at the TCP layer.

I never said it was a good idea, just tht it could be done.

And you don't catch people by keyword search, at least not unless you're really stupid and believe that would work. You catch people by working out who you'd like to know more about and then set about knowing more about them and the people they talk to. Old school like.

Rosie

Technically Do-Able

At the risk of getting flamed to oblivion and with caveats that I don't necessarily think it's a good idea and that it being technically do-able doesn't consider a lot of other factors...

It is do-able using something akin to RBAC with crypto protection on various layers of access. Broad brush (without thinking about it too deeply), you'd want three sets of (PKI) credentials:

Keypair1: User keypair, what is in place in pretty much any of the secure end-to-end products already

Keypair2: Communications records keypair. Who said something to whom and when but not what was said

Keypair3: Wrong'uns keypair. Access to everything, communications. Used for reading what clowns, mime artists and other undesirables are saying to one another.

Information accessable to one key pair isn't accessible to any other key pair with KeyPair2 and 3 being subject to legal/regulatory/whatever controls.

Yeah, I know. Those controls are a right whatnot to get right.

Rosie

Google kills AdWords!

Explanation

Thank you for noticing the bold, almost child-like palette used in the new logo. It is indeed meant to remind us of our younger days, when everything was new, fresh and exciting. Like Google's new ads service!

The use of two converging lines suggests the many seemingly divergent streams that your customers follow across the web will coalesce to bring you Bigger Unexpected Google Generated Exceptional Retailing Ascendancy Lifted Levels. The use of gentle curves expresses that the subtle art of persuasion as opposed to the sharp forcefulness of compulsion will drive your business to the next level.

And after all that, erm, fertile language; I think I need a shower. Several before I even begin to feel clean.

Rosie

Hip hop-eration: Hopless Franken-beer will bring you hoppiness

Hops?

I've been making beer without hops for years. There's a fair few recipes here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sacred-Herbal-Healing-Beers-Fermentation/dp/0937381667 (which is every bit as woo-woo as the title suggests but the recipes are fun). I've also made a really good summer beer (light and refreshing) using Mugwort and lemon for flavouring. Hops were approved of because some of the other ingredients used for flavouring had some interesting* effects on the drinker whereas hops tended to calm them down. Not sure about that last bit mind (even if I have read it from multiple sources), Friday nights in most towns suggest that people will still get rowdy despite the hops.

* For a given definition of interesting

UK mobile customers face inflation-busting price hike

Re: Abuse

Last time I bothered to check I was paying £10/month (somewhere around $14/month). That gives me 1GB of data (I mostly use WiFi so that's plenty), unlimited texts and 600 minutes talk time a month (I'm an unsociable moo so rarely get anywhere near that).

It looks as though those figures compare at least reasonably with the ones you quoted.

Rosie

Ten new tech terms I learnt this summer: Do you know them all?

Re: Sublimated Ear and Gaseous Elbow.

I was impressed at the self-restraint that prevented Gaseous Arse not being used instead.

Rosie

Q. What's today's top language? A. Python... no, wait, Java... no, C

On Another Note

I'm not going to get involved in a 'my language is better than your language' discussion; I've got the battle scars from too many of those already.

What did strike me as a bit strange was characterising a professional institute with a royal charter as "a technical advocacy organization". I wonder if that doesn't sell them a little short. Mad Bob the technology yogi is a technical advocacy organisation, albeit not for any technology that exists, and I'm not sure that's really comparable.

Rosie

UK.gov snaps on rubber gloves, prepares for mandatory porn checks

Just Guessing

But based on what a devious little whatnot of a teenager I was. I'd expect this will just result in the details of Mum's/Dad's/Granny's credit card being circulated all around the playground and suddenly Maud, 94, has developed all kinds of new and unexpected interests.

Rosie

Microsoft boasted it had rebuilt Skype 'from the ground up'. Instead, it should have buried it

+1 for mentioning Visio.

I used to love using it WAY back before Microsoft got their hands on it (yes, I'm old. Why do you ask?). Now I cringe ever time I have to go near it.

K.I.S.S is everything.

Rosie

What a tit! Uber CEO hijacks his staff breast-pump room to meditate

Re: El reg - the daily mail of tech

The Daily MAIL? My word this wonderful rag has gone up in the world. I remember when it barely aspired to the level of the Daily Sport.

Rosie

First-day-on-the-job dev: I accidentally nuked production database, was instantly fired

Nearly No-one

Who has:

- Ultimate responsibility for ensuring all documentation is correct?

- Ultimate responsibility for ensuring back-up work (including testing regime)?

In both cases it's the CTO's job.

If the tale had stopped before it got to the bit about the new chap being fired I'd have gone with "No-one, it was a wake-up call for everyone." Even C level folks are only human. Things can get over-looked; over-reliance on assurances from the management chain can combine with a monstrous workload to help this along.

But it didn't stop there. The actions of the CTO tend to suggest someone lacking the emotional maturity, willingness to take personal responsibility and with the primary desire of covering their own behinds at all cost to ever be trusted with that responsibility.

Rosie

UK hospital meltdown after ransomware worm uses NSA vuln to raid IT

This is the UK. We don't have the construct of first degree murder. I feel it might be quite challenging to prove that $whatever was released specifically to kill, which is what you'd need for a pre-meditated murder conviction (UK's equivalent of first degree) but causing death by being a silly bugger (AKA manslaughter) would be more likely to succeed.

Nope, I'm not a lawyer nor do I work for the police. I just work in IT so take an interest for...ummm...idle curiosity. Yes, that's it. Definitely that.

Rosie

Not the droids you're looking for – worst handsets to resell

Why Does This Matter?

I'm not really sure I understand why this is important. Who sells their phone after only one month? Even six months doesn't make a great deal of sense to me. I've still got the same HTC M8 that I got Gods only know how long ago. OK so it's got LineageOS on it so I get the weekly updates but it's still working perfectly well. Doesn't freeze up, UI responds speedily enough and the battery is easily good for a day and a half of normal usage. I've not seen anything on a new phone that's making me think "oh yes, must have that" so why do I care that it's worth pennies to the pound on what I paid for it?

Fingers crossed the next device will be a Gemini (assuming they get the thing out the door). A proper, useful keyboard on a phone would be a wonderful thing to have; and I'll probably hang on to that until the heat death of the Sun.

Rosie

Who really gives a toss if it's agile or not?

Re: Limits of pragmatism

Oh very well done! I think that may win the prize for the most tangential insertion of the UK leaving the EU I've yet seen.

Looks, I understand you're upset. There are a lot on this side of the channel who feel the same way. I also understand the anger and abuse but you need to move past that. You might want to think about seeing a counsellor if it continues to affect you in this way.

Back on thread.

I quite like the idea of thinking of projects in terms of size/complexity (first came across this from the Robertson's categorisation of rabbit, horse and elephant). If you've few stakeholders and can turn on a sixpence then you're in a rabbit project and agile is great. If there are multiple stakeholders (especially if they're in different organisations), heavy regulatory frameworks and generally need to be pointed in the right direction then you're you're in a elephant project and waterfall/Bohm is probably a better fit.

Horses for courses (to continue the animal theme). This project has all the hallmarks of an elephant so it looks as though the rabbits have been crushed underfoot.

Rosie