Posts by theOtherJT 1334 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2013
This is officially Very Cool. Has anyone actually tried using this yet - what level of feature completeness are we looking at here with regards to getting access to hardware acceleration from the GPU right inside a VM without having to resort to direct pass-through to a dedicated card, does anyone know?
Give it a few years. I expect to actually see this all over the place when very slightly mobile workers such as myself get bought a company phone instead of a company laptop. Once it actually works (assuming it ever does - which I'll admit isn't a shoe-in) this is something that would keep many, many accounts departments very happy as they get to reduce the number of devices they have to shell out for.
I've learned to really, really hate Drupal.
Everyone knows the worst part of software (and by extension web) development is having to maintain someone else's code.
Drupal Core - such as it is - isn't terrible. The trouble is the core doesn't really do anything except provide a horrifically complicated framework for writing extensions. By the time you've added enough modules to do what you wanted (which are frequently buggy, terribly documented, and not quite a match for what you wanted anyway) the whole thing has become a creaking pile of hacks-upon-hacks which are just waiting for an opportunity to fall over, so you end up writing even more modules to try and patch it all up.
This inevitably leads to having to read the source for all the modules you're trying to make play nice with one another, and by the time you're done with that and have written half a dozen "glue" modules to keep it all together (which you now have to maintain because there's a decent chance that some future update will break them) it's taken longer to get everything working than it would have done to write the entire site from scratch because everything you've written has had to be contorted around all the other crap that you didn't write and don't really understand.
What you're left with is something that's not only frighteningly fragile because it's made from 300 different components by 200 different authors, at least half of which haven't updated them in 2 years and probably never will, but also dog slow because the chain from "request" to "render" has to pass through every single one of those things.
</rant>
I'm not so sure about that.
If every ISP put a line item on your bill "Expenses related to government spying" and all announced a 10% increase in monthly contract price the day the legislation takes effect, that would probably be more obvious to the population than silently paying for it out of our taxes, which are already pretty incomprehensible.
There's a... voice... to the Reg. When it's on form it feels like a lesson from that one slightly elderly teacher who knew damn well that the world was changing but didn't have to like it. The one that was going to go on doing things their way because they were too good at their job to get fired for it. The one possessed of an acerbic wit which everyone feared getting turned on them, but loved to see directed at others. The one that could pour scorn with the very, very best of them and knowing that made any praise received so much more valuable because you could be utterly sure it was sincere.
On your best day 'Reg, collectively, you sound like that.
This, on the other hand... well.
I see the author is marked as "Team Register" which feels apt for something that reads like it was actually written by committee. A committee that was a bit reluctant to... well... commit. It feels like the sort of press releases you get from a really expensive PR department when they have something unpleasant to say but have no choice but to release it. Sure, the message is in there, somewhere, but the purpose of the statement was to obfuscate it not to promote it.
In short, I've read this twice, and I'm still not entirely sure what you're trying to tell me, only that I don't think I like the tone of voice I'm being told in.
Where do they go? What do they do? Who do they do it with? Do they have broadband?
Actually he answered this quite comprehensively in Soul Music. They go where they expect to go!
From the cartoon adaptation but the scene is basically the same in the book.
He goes into it in several others too iirc.
"Drawing a parallel between the development of human rights and the development of secure personal computers, Rutkowska suggested legislation may come to the rescue."
Unfortunately the sorts of people in a position to actually exploit the vulnerabilities she's talking about here are exactly the sort of people who don't give a damn about legislation, and when they do get caught breaking the law are in a position to make sure it's the law that changes, not their behaviour.
Then surely the smart thing to do is spin up an entirely new company for the duration of the project? Hire a project manager, get them to hire a senior staff, get them to recruit some programmers. Do absolutely everything in-house and if it does all go sideways you can just dissolve the company and make everyone redundant without it costing 35 million in lawyers and hundreds more million in "Contract termination fees"
Who the hell is negotiating these contracts anyway?
"The X-wing is a cool design, but in the 30 years since the end of Episode VI, it seems odd that no-one has come up with at least some more outstanding modifications."
The F18 Hornet entered service in 1983, over 30 years ago now, and is still going strong. Yes, there have been other planes since, but it does it's job so well there are hundreds of the things still flying all around the world.
The Nimitz class first came into service around 1975 and the first replacement "Gerald R Ford" class are only just under construction. Hell, the B52 bomber has been in service since the FIFTIES and is expected to stay in service until some time around 2040.
Military gear can have a very long life cycle - especially if it was expensive.
...and no, it won't be "Upgrading everyone to IE11".
It'll be cleaning up the mess we inevitably get into after we're told that our web-apps still aren't compatible with any browser except IE8 and an "updated version" will be available in the new year. Like we were told in December 2014.
And 2013.
Because sometimes we find flaws in things that let you escape from the secure mode in which you're supposed to be trapped. Sure, I'd hope that with a cash machine that wouldn't be possible, but sometimes really _weird_ shit gets through.
I heard a story of a PoS terminal many years ago where one of the custom buttons on the unit mapped directly to shift. Hold down for 8 seconds and up came the "Do you want to turn on accessibility mode?" dialogue, which brought the start menu to the foreground with it. From there one could get at the "Run" menu and bad things happened.
Again, I'd hope that you couldn't pull such a trivial trick on a cash machine... but you never know. All it takes is for someone to work out that you _can_ and then it's just a race between the machine being robbed dry and the bank taking it out of service if there's no patch available.
Possibly.
On the other hand, sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. It's like that bit where you're trying to tidy your house before you have people over and after half an hour all you've achieved is making even more of a mess because you had to take everything out of various cupboards and drawers in order to work out where to put things away logically.
It's possible this "One Windows" thing actually will pay off, and we'll get a useful integrated codebase across multiple device types a few years down the line. I want that to be true, I really do, because that sounds pretty good... but then I'm excited by the idea of an Ubuntu phone, because I like that sort of thing.
If they can reign in whoever it is that decided they need to go full Google on the data slurp, and then spend the next 2 years beating their various UI designers with the projector used for the "YOU WILL ALL DO IT THE SAME WAY" presentation until they submit, this could work.
Could.
I hope.
Not holding my breath.
Microsoft has never really understood "Customer relations". They had a such a good product in WinPho7. Reviewers liked it. People who owned it liked it. It didn't need much to shine.
What Microsoft then did was spend the next 5 years trying to make it fit better into THEIR ecosysem to the detriment of the overall user experience rather than iron out the glitches that stopped customers from actually buying one - and clearly this hasn't changed.
One can only hope the worst of the pain is over now that they have finished "unifying the code base"* and they can get on with actually improving the thing for the user. Never really been their strong point tho, has it?
* I'll believe that when I see it - ask me again in another 3 years.
"We maintain our position that the datr cookie plays an essential role in ensuring the security profitability of the Facebook Service, and we are confident that the evidence will demonstrate this conclusively,"
There you go Facebook, fixed that one for you. I'll waive my usual consulting fee.
I'm not sure I get it either - not the overwhelming popularity of the show anyway. I think it's mostly nostalgia for those of us who grew up watching Baker, Pertwee, McCoy et al. A nice reminder of a more innocent age perhaps.
Judged objectively the vast majority of Dr. Who episodes are utter unbearable shit. I mean, just terrible in every way. Badly acted, badly written, badly directed, badly produced... they're just crap - and it was ever thus, not just since the Eccleston era started.
The trouble is you have to watch them anyway. Every so often - maybe only as much as once every other series - the stars come right and we get absolute pure gold. For that, I keep watching them just in case this time, maybe this time, this is the episode that has you sitting on the edge of the sofa like you're 12 years old again.
Midnight.
Blink.
Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead
A Christmas Carol.
Just occasionally they stop cocking about and produce something that's almost perfect. This episode just might have been one of those times.
You know, the first thing that went through my head when I heard that was
"Combined spinal injuries and maternity ward"
and I find the concept about as appealing. With a name like that you just _know_ it's going to be something you don't want to be part of.
you used to go to the website for... pretty much anything really... and there was a "Support" button, and when you clicked the support button it had a little text box you typed your product ID into and it came up with a nice text heavy page full of detailed descriptions of what things did, along with direct links to an FTP site to get you the latest versions of those things?
No "Would you like me to detect your hardware?" - because 90% of the time the reason you are here is because the hardware is acting up and so you're actually using a different machine.
No "Would you like to take a survey?" - because the only thing I've ever wanted to put in those is "I want you to stop interrupting me when I'm trying to get shit done"
No "Please read 37 pages of licencing before I release the download button" - because... because why? I mean, really, why? What _possible_ licencing term could there be that applies to a soundcard driver that would require me to read all that oh, and STOP BREAKING WGET YOU BASTARDS.
In that world - before companies decided that all their users had to be treated like dribbling morons and had to be poked and prodded and directed every tiny step of the way - shit like this didn't happen!
Stop trying to save people from themselves, Dell, YOU'RE. NOT. HELPING.
Presumably in theory they can - if they could get hold of whatever keys google used to sign the device certificates with (I'm assuming there's key based security at work rather than some variation on "all android devices have a root password of "G00g13")
That such a leak could in theory occur and land them with a really nasty legal bill is probably why Google are moving toward a full disk encryption process for newer android versions.
Politicians like money. They understand money. You weaken encryption standards? We steal all your money. It's that simple.
You know that little machine you put your credit card in at that nice restaurant last night? You know how that works? Encryption.
Remember when you booked a cab on the internet the other week? Encryption.
That record you bought on Amazon? Encryption.
Traded stocks recently? Surprise! Encryption there too.
You ruin encryption, all that good stuff has to go away. Fuck with encryption and all indirect, non-cash commerce is going to have to go away, and trust me, that's going to be a damn sight worse for the overall prosperity of your country than anything that angry young men with bullets and explosives can achieve.
"Windows" is a long established, recognised brand that sells.
That's clearly what Microsoft's marketing department thought.
Having a phone/tablet that is "the same as Windows" on their computer is a good thing in their eyes, because they don't have to learn another OS to use it. Users like familiar
And that's exactly why they thought it.
What they didn't get as far as working out was that it's not actually possible to square that particular circle. Of course everyone wants Windows on their phone to be the same as Windows on their desktop, that means less effort. But then if they get that, everyone actually hates it because Desktop Windows doesn't work on a phone, and Phone Windows doesn't work on a desktop.
Faced with contradictory goals (Everything should be the same across all products <> Users hate it when we try and use the same UI on multiple products) they went into a flat spin and started changing things apparently at random, mostly not for the better, trying to work out what to do.
If they'd thought a little harder they'd have realized that what this all really comes down to is that what people want is to get as little hassle as possible, and if WinPho had delivered better in that respect by just doing everything you wanted it to with the least amount of fuss and never doing anything obviously weird, then no one would have actually given a damn if it was the same as desktop Windows or not.
Because this here is the same shit we keep getting from Microsoft. They just don't know what they're doing with it.
Microsoft to customers: "It's a phone! No, wait, a desktop replacement pocket computer! With native Windows apps! No wait, with "Windows Store" apps which aren't the same... No wait again, with Android apps! No, not Android apps, then people will buy Android, shit... um... New entirely for 2016: Native Porcine Aviation binary compatibility layer!"
Meanwhile:
Customers to Microsoft: "We're not buying any of these things until you get your bloody act together for fear the next mind change involves you redesigning the entire thing specifically to do air traffic control for flying pigs - because that would make about as much sense as your "Strategy" so far, if you could possibly be said to have one!"
And I say this as someone who actually really _liked_ Windows phone when it first rocked up.
I was using a WinPho 7 device over the weekend, an old Nokia 700. It's just a lovely, lovely thing to use. Feature incomplete, no doubt, but so _nice_. Everything's sort of... where you'd expect it to be. It feels like whoever designed it was thinking about how it would be used rather than just trying to make it look like it did in the concept sketches.
Every release since then seems to have just been another step further away, and that's really sad.
Unless you are using a full server MoBo then I don't see the use for this.
Yeah, but I _am_ using a full server MoBo (several of them) to provide some bigass storage boxes, and if I could fill their spare ram slots with this stuff for cache + intent log purposes that would improve the throughput I get really dramatically. This is a brilliant, brilliant idea for enterprise storage.
...if it works. Like everyone else I can't seem to get any detailed information on how this would fly in practice.
All our user data is held on ZFS running on Linux or BSD machines, which are mounted as SAMBA shares on the windows boxen with GP to redirect every folder the user can write to onto the network drive. No access to any local filesystem is permitted.
ZFS snapshots hourly, sends backups to the onsite backup (more ZFS) nightly, and the onsite backup backs up offsite weekly.
Any user machine that is infected with anything is simply confiscated and an identical unit dropped in to replace it whilst it is DBAN'd and then re-installed by one of our hell-desk monkeys. During this process the user gets a strict telling off and isn't allowed to carry on working until they've reset every password we have under the watchful eye of one of our IT team.
Obviously it's not perfect - users could manage to get files in their home directory encrypted and then that could make it's way through the layers of backups before they noticed. On the other hand, there's a word for data like that "WORN" so it probably won't matter.
Mostly however we protect ourselves by running Linux on every desktop that doesn't _HAVE_ to run Windows for operational purposes. In a building with over 1000 machines in it, the asset DB tells me only 89 of them are Windows.
I've never understood this either, especially from the current government, seeing as how the Conservative party are always on about how wonderful business, capitalism and all that are. I mean, I basically agree with them in broad strokes, but surely if investing in things and making money off them is such a good thing, why are they so reluctant to do it?
This is clearly a technology worth a fortune. If you own a percentage on the profits from a company that has a patent on the only SStO technology you're on the gravy train for years to come. Why on earth WOULDN'T you want that?
And to demonstrate this particular exercise in futility:
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Key's in the title lads.
Michael Dorn (aka Worf for the one person on here who might not already know who he is) has been trying to get a new (TnG continuity, some time after the end of Nemesis) series going about what happened to Worf for quite some time now. He seems to have had some success - at least up to the point of being in discussions with CBS about it, and it would be nice for him to succeed, although the cynic in me suspects that he won't have and this will be a reboot movie tie-in with the same old characters because some market test suggested that would sell better.
A "Star Trek" set in the TnG timeline but with a focus on the Klingons could be an interesting show I think. It gives an opportunity for the Federation to still be the shining light that Rodenberry always wanted it to be, for there to be that feeling of "We can be better than we are" but would also allow more dark storytelling because you'd be seeing that from the outside.
I'm not sure they're as much of an issue as people often make them out to be.
I've never installed an app other than some fairly specific IT worker type stuff (SSH client, RDP client) on any phone I've ever owned. I've never needed or wanted them.
I'm pretty sure there's enough people out there who would be perfectly happy as long as the email, calendar, address book, media-player, and web browser all work well and play nicely together. You know - kinda how they did in Phone 7 :/
I'd be very happy with this IF and it's an enormous IF I could run regular win32 programs on it, but I can't so it's no good.
What I do see here is the first step on a road that gets us where we want to be in a few years time once Intel has it's power consumption down to a level where regular Windows 10 can run on a mobile device with an Atom cpu in it.
Should that day come, this whole venture will look a lot less like a bad idea than it does right now, but for the meantime I agree with the article. A bit too niche.
