Posts by Warm Braw

Soon, no more blood tests or probing for prostate cancer? AI claims 99% success rate using more relaxing methods

I'd be quite reticent to start urine dribbling on my iPhone

If you've got an enlarged prostate, reticence will be the least of your dribbling problems.

In a trial run, Google Chrome to corral netizens into groups for tailored web ads rather than target individuals

Re: To its credit, Google...

Sorry, my original post was badly phrased. I meant that credit should go to the lawmakers rather than to Google for "opt-in" being the default - I very much doubt it was their preference. Why anyone would choose to do so is beyond me for the reason you so clearly state.

To its credit, Google...

Not a phrase you hear often.

Seems more likely that the same laws of which Google seems finally to be running scared already/will require explicit consent. Credit where credit is due.

Freezing in Newcastle? You're not alone: For one lonesome creature, the world stopped on 31 Dec 2020

An achingly hip coffee shop

It were all Costas round here when I were a lad...

The last time I was at the station it still looked like a bastion of chain retailers: it truly must be the end of days if Network Rail find themselves having to let their commercial space to independents.

Nothing new since the microwave: Let's get those home tech inventors cooking

Re: Smart heating system?

I'd left my dumb heating controller on its frost setting while away for several weeks, returning to find the house at a toasty 26C and the gas meter spinning like a demented fruit machine. If they can attach some of those robot arms to a Hive so that I can thwack a sticking motorized valve from a distance of 2000km, I might consider it worth the investment.

Laptops given to British schools came preloaded with remote-access worm

It strikes me that when many houses have access to more than one TV and there is a national curriculum and a shortage of laptops, there are cheaper and, potentially, more effective, ways of delivering education than by ad-hoc provision by individual schools. By all means have local - and familiar - teachers available to review work and answer questions, but turning every classroom into a broadcast studio seems a curious approach for a government that is otherwise committed to centralising everything. They have had a year.

And just like that, Amazon Web Services forked Elasticsearch, Kibana. Was that part of the plan, Elastic?

Re: Bad optics

I think one could equally worry about the future of new Open Source projects - why bother if you're simply giving a leg up to your massive potential competitors.

But it also works the other way - there wouldn't be the manpower to work on some crucial Open Source projects if large corporations weren't paying their staff to do it.

Open Source only really works if there's enough mutual interest between a disparate group of developers. It's hard for anyone to have a mutual interest with a corporation the size of Amazon, but licensing is probably not the answer: they have the resources to take a useful concept and reimplement it if it's worth their while. And if you insist on finding an answer, you might find yourself approaching software patent territory,,,

Plans for Entity Framework Core 6.0 revealed as Microsoft admits it is unlikely to match Dapper for performance

SQL's JOIN syntax is no harder to learn and more precise to use

And if you use a database that allows you to define a "virtual" table based on an underlying SQL query, you can tweak the JOIN or the data model subsequently without having to tweak the application.

There is clearly some mechanistic tedium involved in constructing a runtime object from a database row, but that was a largely-solved problem when COBOL was invented. I'm not convinced the convolutions of EF to deal with foreign keys add anything, and as soon as you start having to think how the supposed abstraction is actually working behind the scenes, the abstraction loses it value.

Not to mention that a lot of work goes into database query optimisation - you don't want an ORM second-guessing it.

Nice to see PostgreSQL called out - it's actually a very good platform for creating application-specific views of the database in a way that decouples the data from the application much more effectively than ORMs - at least in my opinion. And frankly, if you're trying to manipulate a database efficiently without knowing SQL, you need someone who does know SQL (or at least how the queries are executed) to do the work behind the scenes for you.

AnyVan confirms digital break-in, says customer names, emails and hashed passwords exposed

Re: The only way

That's really not practical though

At one time, that was commonly said about putting guards on dangerous machinery. Making people liable proved it was extremely practical.

I'd like to see the judge's face when someone claims to have taken reasonable steps to protect his customers' data by relying on code whose origins are indeterminate, whose accuracy he hasn't personally attempted to verify and for which no-one else is prepared to accept responsibility.

150,000 lost UK police records looking more like 400,000 as Home Office continues to blame 'human error'

Housekeeping error

That makes is sound like the cleaner mistakenly polished the spinning rust.

Dratted 'housekeeping', eh? 150k+ records deleted off UK’s Police National Computer database

Re: More lies and deceit from the Police ?

the clue is there in the word mainframe

I'd have thought that having all the data in one place, rather than scattered across the cloud, should make it easier to manage, not harder, in principle - but, admittedly, that's not much help if you can't find anyone who still has a clue how it works.

Last stop before MAUI: Xamarin Forms 5.0 released for cross-platform mobile, new features, new bugs

Re: Problems with the first release

Sorry, the Forms Previewer.

Problems with the first release

Doesn't really bode well. I was never able to use the previous version because the Forms Designer in Visual Studio wouldn't work. There are lots of references online to it being unusable for many with occasional replies from others saying "works OK for me" - but no suggestion as to what might make the difference. In the end it was quicker just to use the native UI components than try to solve the problem. The Xamarin stuff is very good in principle, but that doesn't help if the tooling is flaky and I wouldn't risk breaking an otherwise stable installation of Visual Studio to see if the new version works better than the last.

Trump's gone quiet, Parler nuked, Twitter protest never happened: There's an eerie calm – but at what cost?

Re: Distributed options

They won't because these systems cost money to operate.

You can freely howl into the void. But "free speech with an audience" is merely a side-effect of a commercial activity (newspapers, TV, Twitter, Facebook....) for most of us.

Developers! These 3 weird tricks will make you a global hero

Even worse on the web

At least with native applications there's some consistency baked into the platform - you can pretty much guarantee the same shortcut will open the "File" menu, for example.

I don't have any disabilities that significantly affect my ability to interact with computers, but when I've tried to interact with websites using accessibility aids (like screen readers, for example), I'm struck by how laborious a process it is, particularly when there's no real semantic difference between the "commands" (links) and the regular text on the page. You often have to sit through a recital of most of the page's contents before you can find the link you want to follow.

There's an inbuilt tendency to put as much information on the page as possible as it's quite easy - for many people - visually to screen out what they're not interested in and it reduces the number of clicks needed to reach the target. But if you have to listen to the whole lot being read out (or have to scroll laboriously through it in large high-contrast letters reading every word) it's much quicker to have multi-level menus with fewer choices even given the extra navigation to move between them.

Of course, it would be good to get the basics right, but I think it would be helpful to offer different models of interaction for different users - with consistent mechanisms for invoking them.

Deloitte's Autonomy auditor 'lost objectivity' when looking at Brit software firm's disputed books, says regulator

Re: I imagine replies will be moderated for legal reasons...

I cannot fathom the downvote at all

And it seems to be propagating through the replies. Still, it's nice to know they took the trouble.

I imagine replies will be moderated for legal reasons...

... so I shall confine myself to commiserating with whoever had to decide whether to post this under "software" or "hardware" given the circumstances described.

React team observes that running everything on the client can be costly, aims to fix it with Server Components

Re: Lightning fast javascript?

I'm not sure it's JavaScript (per se) that's the problem - it's had enough performance work done on it for the purpose it serves. It's the operations on the DOM that take the time - if you were looking at the most efficient way to update a user interface it wouldn't be by applying a stream of incremental changes using a text-based mark-up language that then interacts with a text-based styling system that likely causes a significant amount of re-rendering that's then partially invalidated by the next incremental change.

It would be the same problem with Wasm - which is as near to native code as you're going to get - you still have to call back into the DOM to display the results.

Historically, the focus has always been on getting load off the servers and shifting it to the browser. If you're happy to do the work on the server, then there's an argument for doing all of it and simply sending a stream of GPU operations to the browser to draw the result. I think that's the way we may be headed, even if we're proceeding by a series of apparently random walks.

Scotland waves £15m around to tempt low-code partner to help with social security overhaul as technical debt mounts

Re: Low code needs to start at the policy end

The beauty of low code is you can adapt at make changes at a rate of knotts. It's not your traditional truth around time of someone upends a policy.

Well, I'm now totally reassured that the speed of a low code response has no detrimental effect on its quality or accuracy.

Low code needs to start at the policy end

The last time I had any sight of social security systems in England - which was about 20 years ago - the people processing benefit claims could only do around 60% of them using their aging ICL mainframe, the other 40% had to be manually calculated. The reason for that was mostly that as new benefits were introduced there were a whole load of transitional issues relating to people still being entitled to elements of old benefits that were no longer available to new claimants but also being entitled to other benefits from newer programmes with different criteria. The systems simply couldn't cope with the significant number of people who straddled various policy eras.

The only way to have a truly "low-code" benefits system is to select a set of parameters and for politicians to accept that their future policy options are mostly limited to changing the parameters rather than the algorithm for deriving the payment - or creating entirely independent benefits.

This, of course, will never happen - so there is a perpetual accumulation of cruft, however little code you (pretend to) start with.

Come, chant with us over a sacrificial goat and predict 2021's biggest tech stories to a high degree of accuracy

Re: Seconded!

Your goat-too source of capricious ruminations.

As Uncle Sam continues to clamp down on Big Tech, Apple pelted with more and more complaints from third-party App Store devs

Re: Its about the money

What's surprising is that they can behave like an intensely monopolistic corporation and it's taken so long for the people that are supposed to prevent that to notice.

Part of the problem is that the regulators are still working on bricks-and-mortar timescales - they see the dangers coming down the track but fail to appreciate how quickly they become embedded. Part of the problem is that when regulators outside the US try to take action they come under trade pressure for threatening the profits of US corporations.

The basic rule for "platform" companies has to be that you can't own the platform and use it yourself (except exclusively) - it's inherently anti-competitive. If Amazon wants to have an e-commerce platform, it can't sell on it itself. If Apple and Google want to run appstores, they can't distribute their own content. That, at least, would be a start.

The ghosts of Microsoft SQL Server past, present, and yet to come: The Reg chats to Azure Data man Rohan Kumar

To be fair, the original licensing requirements for SQL Server (which essentially meant if you used it to support a web service you had to have a licence for every possible user of the website) forced me into the sub-optimal position of having to use an Access database instead and Jet drivers that leaked memory and locked up to the extent that the web server had to be restarted several times a day. I moved swiftly on to PostgreSQL, though in its more recent incarnations SQL Server became a much more credible candidate for a lot of applications.

SQL Server has been both useful and affordable for a relatively small proportion of its life.

Watt's next for batteries? It'll be more of the same, not longer life, because physics and chemistry are hard

Re: Thin films, thin arguments

There was I thinking their thin film division was responsible for The Da Vinci Code.

Why make games for Linux if they don't sell? Because the nerds are just grateful to get something that works

I wonder how well the internet would have came about if it was all private intellectual property and heavy licensing contracts

Presumably, the same way the mobile phone network came about?

Expect €5m cloud, says European Centre for Midrange Weather Forecasts

Re: portmanteau

Although if you always carry a coat, it doesn't show much faith in the weather forecast.

This product is terrible. Can you deliver it in 20 years’ time when it becomes popular?

Silicone conform spray

Do you prefer it in an Aerosol?

Stony-faced Google drags Android Things behind the cowshed. Two shots ring out

Google doesn't say much about continuity

Never has, never will...

Up yours, Europe! Our 100% prime British broadband is cheaper than yours... but also slower and a bit of a rip-off

Re: County lines

They could certainly soon get them wired.

Re: Value for money

It's a difficult thing to evaluate. I'm currently on a volcanic rock in the Atlantic (I'd like to think that one day I will be hollowing it out for nefarious purposes), but can get a 100Mbit/sec connection for €27,99 a month - provided I take a contract for 2 years. ADSL has roughly the same monthly price, but because of fixed costs is significantly cheaper for a shorter contract (note that they load significant "installation costs" into the fibre product but not into the ADSL product). However, you can't get any sort of service without going through a person to person sale (in a shop or by telephone) and that of course has to be paid for by vigorous upselling. The great thing about the UK market is the relative ease of sign-up and switching.

Not just Microsoft: Auth turns out to be a point of failure for Google's cloud, too

Re: Redundancy

It's certainly difficult to see how you'd replicate between two different providers without some form of mutual authentication - which means instead of needing one authentication provider working in order for the service to be available you'd need at least two.

Raven geniuses: Four-month-old corvids have similar cognitive abilities to great apes at same age, study finds

Re: tasks testing addition and understanding of relative numbers?

>their language skills are shocking

That's what they want you to think.

World+dog share in collective panic attack as Google slides off the face of the internet

The Register contacted Google

Given we're not talking about Apple, you might be able to infer from their silence that they eat their own dog, er, food.

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

The microburst of joy you get when you select Block User

Is only available if you've created an account, by which time it's a bit late.

On the one hand I find it frustrating that Google is constantly complaining about logins from unauthorized devices and flinging captchas in my path at every opportunity, but it at least means their stalking is at least partially frustrated. I don't think it's a good trade to offer more information in exchange for less annoyance. And equally for advertisements.

Buggy behavior bites .NET SqlClient for unlucky Linux users

Re: This is most likely nonsense so stop...

You cannot optimize middleware for a given OS without causing performance problems and/or security issues

Middleware is just software. If you can't develop software, even complex software, that runs reliably on multiple platforms then presumably all the Linux and GNU contributors have been wasting their time.

You've got to be shipping me: KatherineRyan.co.uk suggests the comedian has diversified into freight forwarding

Re: website redirected to an Australian shipping company

In Boris-speak an Australian shipping company is one that has been contracted by Chris Grayling.

Cops raid home of ousted data scientist who created her own Florida COVID-19 dashboard

Re: This isn't about Trump

Unfortunately, the enablers are a sizable proportion of the electorate - Trump won last time basically because enough voters chose to reject fact in favour of fantasy.

That applies in spades when it comes to Covid - a lot of people flatly reject the truth and there are votes in pandering to their beliefs.

All Trump did was to demonstrate that if you remove even the pretence of integrity from politics it is an electoral asset.

A 1970s magic trick: Take a card, any card, out of the deck and watch the IBM System/370 plunge into a death spiral

Re: Those were the days

I still have nightmares about the overlay tree for the RSX-11 network management ACP that had to shoehorn the configuration management code for every supported network device and protocol into 8KW. Less of a tree, more of a rainforest.

Not merely useful, imperative: if you've got a deck of cards, your options are pretty much limited to adding cards or removing them. The trick is to pick the right ones.

Windows on Wheels is back, though the truck has come to a standstill, much like the OS

Can't be for lack of cooling, judging by the size of the case fan.

Uncle Sam sues Facebook for allegedly discriminating against US workers in favor of foreigners on H-1B visas

Re: Temporary visa holders often have limited job mobility

Indentured labour is a form of servitude in which you "voluntarily" agree to have your rights restricted for a defined period, but not in perpetuity. I'd say that was a reasonably accurate description of a system in which you are effectively tied to an employer and expect to be paid significantly less than the going rate for the job in the hope that eventually you might be released and treated like an equal.

Temporary visa holders often have limited job mobility

Strange how creating a form of indentured labour in order to appease the natives is ultimately to their detriment.

If only there'd been other examples of the negative economic consequences of xenophobia that might have better guided immigration policy.

'Massive game-changer for UK altnet industry': BT-owned UK comms backbone Openreach hikes prices on FTTP-linked leased line circuits

Certain use cases...

If Ofcom have nothing to say, I would hope the CMA would be interested in services being charged at a higher rate if they're potentially competitive. What next, a higher line rental if you want your phone to be able to reach the Vodafone sales team?

GitHub's journey towards microservices and more: 'We actually have our own version of Ruby that we maintain'

Re: I know I'm too old to be agile

The point I think I failed to make is that "agile", like every development methodology, is a trap, it's just a trap of a different kind.

If you're firing out frequent updates, you're pretty much constrained by the skillset of the people you have to hand (because you haven't time to reskill/rehire) and you end up with dreadful decisions (like adding cruft to your applications to do database joins) because the frequent release cycle that allows you quickly to add functionality means that long-term architecture changes have to be approached crabwise and likely with much ultimately unneeded effort to keep each iteration functional in its temporarily incomplete state.

Constant incremental change is fine right up to the point that the premises on which your development is based turn out never to have been valid, or have become invalid over time. It seems a little optimistic to assume that one development approach should be appropriate at all stages of a project lifecycle.

Good architecture starts with modularity

I know I'm too old to be agile and am insensitive to the Zeitgeist, but I got a distinct whiff of "Emperor's new clothes" from this interview.

We would then rewrite these queries into multiple queries that respect the domain boundaries and perform any necessary joins at the application layer

Nothing screams "modularity" like building a knowledge of your transient database schema into your applications.

For the foreseeable future we're going to remain with MySQL just because we have a lot of expertise there

If you had more expertise available with a database that facilitated doing joins across multiple data sources, you might not have had to build that into your applications. Shouldn't you be looking at the expertise you need, rather than the expertise you have, especially on a "foreseeable future" timeline?

AWS reveals it broke itself by exceeding OS thread limits, sysadmins weren’t familiar with some workarounds

Re: Agreed

This.

"Does not scale" leads directly to "does not compute" in such scenarios.

I can't glean a great deal of useful insight from the AWS post, but it does seem that there's a kind of circular dependency: the scaling and provisioning depends on higher-level services that don't work when there are scaling and provisioning issues. Calling up the protocol stack is a risky business, because it inevitably calls right back down.

It's been an Honor serving with you but you're our 'competitors' now, Huawei tells its sawn-off mobile limb

Re: "It's been an Honor serving with you but you're our 'competitors' now"

It's not just the hardware. There's not much you can do (presently) if you're, say, a European country concerned about most international traffic routing through one of the Five Eyes where it will be mined not just for military but also economic intelligence.

It seems reasonable to expect that there will not only be more control over infrastructure equipment, but increasing control on peripheral connectivity between geopolitical blocks.

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

Re: Two things, or maybe three.

why we should have difficulty

I think one problem is that even at this particular point we don't actually know what the final regime is going to be. It would have been more logical to have a negotiation, agree on the regime and then have a transition period in which the necessary systems were developed and tested.

But given that it would have been even more logical not to bother with this self-inflicted chaos, we deserve all the difficulty we create.

UK Court of Appeal rebukes Home Office for exceeding its powers with bunkum 'national security' GSM gateway ban

While we're part of the ECHR, it wouldn't fly for the criminal offence - but if it's such a big deal, presumably bringing in legislation would be a cheaper and more certain way of dealing with it in future.

Retrospective legislation on taxation is actually quite common, particularly to close perceived loopholes.

Not sunshine, moonlight or good times – blame it on the buggy

And yet he still lives on

At some point in the near future, anomalies of this sort will be considered to have occurred in meatspace and will be rectified accordingly.