Posts by Warm Braw

Microsoft emits Preview 3 of next-gen WinUI framework, says Linux support 'is not off our roadmap'

Re: Glad I'm not a Windows UI dev

The WIMP interface is a solved problem

In principle, but not in practice.

There have been a number of reasons to revisit implementations. One is the advent of the mobile phone/tablet that not only has a much less precise pointer (the human finger) but also a significantly different resolution to the traditional computer screen (originally much less, latterly much more). Some of the assumptions built into original WIMP APIs are not great under those circumstances, especially if you want your application to work reasonably well across a range of screen sizes and resolutions.

Another is the advent of the GPU. When you're no longer directly drawing to a bitmap you might need to construct your API differently so it's clearer which objects can be rendered by the GPU later.

And a third is network transparency. That's particularly hard because it's difficult to predict how future technology might change assumptions about how the balance of work should be divided between client and server, but you can't easily add it later without possibly undermining the assumptions you might already have made in your local API.

And that's just the graphics primitives. When you come to high-level features such as checkboxes, buttons and text layout, the web stuck its oar in by doing things differently and we've been in search of convergence with desktop applications ever since.

But apart from that it's largely solved. In 2D. For now.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledges £12bn green economy package

World-beating?

Word-bleating.

Heavy-duty case closed: Peli tried to steal peli.co.uk from rightful owner, says Nominet

Re: I'd like to thank the author...

It's more of an (alleged) case of mis-taken identity.

Edinburgh Woollen Mill ransomware claim: Crims demand cash from target in administration

I had to take my mother to an EWM shop a year or so back. They were operating entirely on hand-written receipts and carbon paper. It had already been about a week since the PoS system had failed and the shop manager was not looking forward to having to manually enter all the sales details when normal service was restored.

However, unlike many other businesses, they at least had a backup plan to avoid a Total Inability To Sell Ugly Pullovers situation.

The revolution will not be televised because my television has been radicalised

Re: The algorithms

They're not algorithms.

Algorithms are deterministic, reproducible processes that transform inputs into outputs.

What we're dealing with here is AI, which is very different. In this case, it even works the other way round - you start with the desired outcome (more people click through and invite their friends to do the same) and then select the inputs best suited to provide it. And the AI isn't working out what aspect of the input is most likely to make us click through, our brains process that information, the AI is simply able to predict our proclivities: it has no understanding of what those proclivities might be and it can't be "controlled" for the reason that it's simply detecting and amplifying our own intrinsic flaws.

There have always been gatekeepers to information and it's tempting to see social media as a means of bypassing the gatekeepers and allowing the "voice of the people" to be heard. However, as soon as you start promoting one lot of content over another lot of content (whether it's "trending" or "people who liked this will like that") you inevitably become an information gatekeeper because you are influencing the information that people choose to receive - or are able to receive, or are permitted to receive and you inevitably influence the message.

I don't think we can do much about the human tendency to prefer a plausible, coherent narrative to inconvenient and messy facts. However, we can accept that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, et al, are as much information gatekeepers as "traditional" broadcasters and print media and they're going to have to be held accountable for what they publish in the same way. Society is simply not going to be possible if there is a widespread rejection of the search for objective fact being a desirable (if imperfectly achievable) goal.

[Checks meeting agenda...] Where does it say 'Talk cr*p and waste everyone's time'?

That does raise uncomfortable questions about the motivation for wanting "hands-free" kit, but it does lead neatly back to the opening words of the article.

Brit Conservative Party used 10 million people's names to derive their country of origin, ethnicity and religion according to ICO report

The Register has contacted the Conservative Party for comment

*crash* Mr Cain *ooft" is a little *thump* busy right *argh* now. His successor *thwack" will call you *scream* back.

Apple drops macOS Big Sur on the world – and it arrives with a thud, sound of breaking glass, sirens in the distance...

Efforts to download the software overwhelmed Apple's servers

Given that Apple* is not exactly renowned for its smooth, glitch-free OS upgrade process, who are all these people who didn't perhaps think it might be wiser to give it a week or so?

*Not that it is unique in this respect

Halt don't catch fire: Amazon recalls hundreds of thousands of Ring doorbells over exploding battery fears

If only these devices were connected to some central server...

... the owners could be alerted to the danger.

Alexa: play Ring of Fire...

The evolution of C#: Lead designer describes modernization journey, breaks it down about getting func-y

Breaking a lot: we can't do that

Somebody put that man in charge of the .NET Framework/Core!

It is rather impressive how C# has evolved, though I'm not entirely sure that things like dynamic types or LINQ are worth the trouble in practice, though they're undoubtedly significant technical achievements. I have similar misgivings about ORMs (like EF) - the superficial convenience hides a lot of implementation detail you might ideally want to control.

However, this might partly be sour grapes on my part because they develop new features faster than my coding is capable of evolving...

Tim Berners-Lee asks everyone to do new biz a Solid and let him have another crack at fixing the Web's privacy

I'd say it was rather different.

There was always control over what people wrote and printed for public consumption by virtue of the cost of production: hand-setting type might be cheaper than paying monks to make laborious copies, but it it was still expensive relative to the earnings of an average worker. This meant that the value was very clearly in the content: if the content were not valued, it would not be possible to cover the costs of production. Of course there was also ephemeral personal writing - but it was never intended to be shared widely and usually sparing and to the point.

What has happened now is that the cost of "publication" has fallen dramatically, to the point at which it is almost, but not quite, free. The value in the content is now equally low - noone is really going to pay to see your aunt Betty paddling at Brighton or your thoughts on the state of the world. Because nobody wants your content (or, at least, your content specifically - millions of other thoughts are available), it has to be paid for by you, but because that cost is relatively low, you can pay for it by agreeing to have your personal data exploited for profit. The telling thing is that very few people would be prepared to pay the price in actual cash.

It's not so much a technical phenomenon as a social one - and I don't think a technical fix is the answer.

Apple cracks down on iOS terminal apps because they can download code

If you have to review code before you let it run on your device to ensure its "reliability", there's something seriously wrong with your security model.

Or it's all about revenue and the "reliability" thing is your anti-trust defence.

UK tax dept's IT savings created 'significant risk', technical debt as it faces difficult conversation with Chancellor

A new Child Benefit IT system to replace the existing one

For a government that seemingly believes children who choose the wrong parents deserve what they get, there's an obvious, cost-saving fix.

UK's 'minimum viable product' for Brexit transit software will not be ready until December, leaving no time for testing

Re: Wow

the UK saved billions by not being in the EU and their bailout funds

Ah, that's why there's been so much money to splash on Dido, Serco, "boutique" consultants and bungs to "VIP" cronies for failing to supply PPE.

Uber is now a food delivery company with a substantial sideline in taxis

Uber Eats delivery experience is integrated next to on-demand trips

Hi, mate. Sorry about the smell in the back, just got to drop off a load of Surströmming on the way.

Let's Encrypt warns about a third of Android devices will from next year stumble over sites that use its certs

You would have thought that adding a certificate should do it.

I've just checked a phone I use from time to time owing to its compact form factor that runs Android 4.0.4. It lets you add a certificate (from internal storage) to the user certificate store. You'd think that would be enough, but obviously Let's Encrypt isn't going to be making a fuss about nothing.

Further investigation suggests that up to and including Android 6.0, certificates from the user store are by default also available to apps, but from that point on, they're not unless the app is built to allow user certificates.

I'd have thought there are lots of cases where people will have custom security configurations that require their own root certificates. Are browsers deliberately preventing use of the user certificate store?

What am I missing in this picture?

Criticalstudies.org sounds pretty important, right? Wrong: USA says it’s an Iranian fake news front

Re: Meanwhile in London...

it's hyperpartisan

But masquerading as a factual site: the only clue to its political origin is that Shaun Bailey's name appears in the footer and his address given as "4 Matthew Parker Street" - aka Conservative Party HQ. No party branding appears on it anywhere, only the minimum identification required by law is present.

I can't see how you could have an arbiter of fact for political messaging, so the only other proportionate safeguards would be clear labelling and transparency of funding. If the party of government is not prepared even to label its own messaging clearly, then there is no hope of any protection from "fake news".

Re: Meanwhile in London...

completely off-topic and unrelated

Hardly. Political disinformation masquerading as fact is not uniquely originated by foreign states we may happen to have taken a dislike to. Going after the Iranians or the Russians or the Chinese is just displacement activity: endemic domestic disinformation is the real problem.

Meanwhile in London...

... the recent work of a Mr. S. Bailey goes unmolested.

BBC makes switch to AWS, serverless for new website architecture, observers grumble about the HTML

In fact, the licence fee subsidises the government:

Part of the fee also contributes towards Freeview and Freesat, and towards the UK broadband rollout, funding local TV channels and S4C, the Welsh language TV channel, as agreed with the government as part of the 2010 licence fee settlement.

And the World Service. And now free licences for (some) elderly.

Having said that, I'd be rather more impressed if their content management worked rather better so you didn't get glaring stupidities like articles about a photograph turning up on the Red Button service where you can't see the photo and articles that mention a place turning up in the regional news for that place even if the mention is irrelevant. Wrapping some HTML or MHEG around the content is rather less impressive.

Trump H-1B visa crackdown hit with legal double whammy: Tech giants, Chamber of Commerce challenge rules

Re: Elephant in the room?

Partly, I suppose it depends where you're moving from...

I know several IT people who've moved from the UK to the US. It would appear to me that their quality of life is significantly worse, but the trappings are undoubtedly much more impressive.

With less than two months left, let's check in on Brexit: All IT systems are up and running and ready to go, says no one

Re: Apparently still negotiating

We are doomed! This time for real.

Regrettably, this has been apparent since Johnson was deployed to sabotage May's plans (and they weren't exactly unproblematic). Covid unfortunately disrupted my personal mitigation efforts, but I did finally get my Portuguese residence just before lockdown 2 would have put an end to any hope of an escape route.

I don't recall anything in the Brexit referendum about having to battle through a deadly pandemic to secure the right to live in a country with toilet paper and a variety of food. I hope my pessimism about the future of Britain turns out to be wrong, but its appetite for self-destruction does not seem to be diminishing appreciably.

Check an HGV is Ready to Cross the Border

Early information about this system suggested it was little more than a series of tickboxes whereby exporters would promise they really had the right paperwork and could proceed across the Kent border to the Farage Garage - the truth of their assertion only coming to light when the lorry finally reached the port.

If they can't even deliver that on time, there is really very little hope. Not that it's been in massive supply anywhere in 2020.

Google's home security package flies the Nest, Chocolate Factory pledges software support – for now

Re: Quelle surprise (Not)

I presume this means the end of the partnership with ADT that El Reg announced a mere 3 months ago. Certainly the "smart home" products on ADT's website seem to be their own brand.

My skeptical comment at the time was that although it would be a good thing if a support contract obliged Google to pay some attention to the longevity of its products, it seemed unlikely. I'm nevertheless genuinely surprised by the speed at which this has happened: it seems to be unprecedented even for Google.

US govt ups minimum H-1B tech salaries to $208,000 a year, more than startups can hope to afford, say VCs

If you're constantly importing staff into, say, the Bay Area with the result that you end up with an inflationary spiral caused by wages chasing an ever-increasing cost of living, it isn't sustainable either. Particularly if you drive out all the lower-paid workers your expensive staff depend on.

There are signs that coronavirus has belatedly demonstrated that people do not need to gather in one place to deliver effective results and that there are substantial cost savings to be made by moving staff out of expensive hotspots.

I suspect the H-1B change may now be largely irrelevant - instead of onshoring cheaper workers, more jobs are going be offshored instead now the feasibility is unarguable.

One of the EU arguments for the freedom of movement of people was that the freedom of movement of money otherwise gave an advantage to the rich (which is why people like Farage and Trump are so opposed to it). For service workers, technology has given them a virtual freedom of movement - physically keeping them out isn't going to work any more.

Linux Mint pushes out its own Chromium build to help users avoid Canonical's Snap Store

Re: Snaps R Us

Snaps are an awful experience as an end user

The problem seems to be that there's an extremely poorly documented set of magic incantations that are necessary if the default installation doesn't align with your use case (connecting "interfaces") and the scope of the incantations grows ever wider as the need to give supposedly-isolated packages access to system resources becomes more apparent.

Plus, of course, we have the Unix approach of letting a thousand flowers bloom, which means it will be some time before the various flavours of containerisation converge on a common set of well-known principles.

Right to repair? At least you still have the right to despair: Camera modules cannot be swapped on the iPhone 12

Re: One positive aspect

Firstly, if you don't have the right to repair the phone as you see fit, it's not your phone whether it's in your possession or someone else's.

Secondly, the best way to prevent dodgy parts being used in repairs would be to make legitimate parts readily available.

Return of the flying car, just when we all need to escape

We piggyback the 4G from our mobile phones

I'm doing much the same right now in my Covid/Brexit exile, despite there being a FTTH port on the wall: it's only cost effective to connect it if you take a 24 month contract. And frankly, I don't believe the "W" in "WFH" is going to last that long. At which point, pasta day is going to be pretty much a permanent state of being.

Devs strung up about .NET 5.0 string changes that may break working code are told: It's not a bug, it's a feature

Re: Internationalization was always a huge PITA

... and your currency to the US dollar.

Microsoft to rethink crash-prone Visual Studio extension model, shift towards cloud

Crash-prone bloat

Unfortunately, the more recent versions of Visual Studio have become ever more bloated and crash-prone - or, more frustratingly, simply-not-working-prone, even before you start adding in extensions.

And it's not even as if it's simply accumulated cruft - I recently had to install VS2017 in order to convert an old .NET Core project so I could open it with VS2019 - the conversion functionality existed only in VS2017 and had subsequently been removed, despite VS2019's multi-Gigabyte footprint.

The whole MS development ecosystem needs a thoroughgoing overhaul.

Upcoming Linux 5.10 release will love you longterm, pushing support out to 2026

Enduring for 30 months

I'm not sure an OS should present such a gruelling challenge to its users.

QUIC! IETF sets November deadline for last comments on TCP-killer spawned by Google and Cloudflare

Re: I don't get it

It's a fundamental problem of abstract layered protocols that they can be suboptimal in specific concrete cases.

OSI networking had 5 different choices of transport layer, partly for this reason and partly to stop the French complaining, but that's a separate issue... If you imagine an old-fashioned network with "reliable" serial datalinks (i.e. each hop has its own error/loss recovery), the network mostly takes care of packet loss for you (thought not entirely). In a more modern network, packets get lost all the time and the endpoints are almost entirely responsible for dealing with it - and that means end-to-end acknowledgements. But when do you send them? If you "know" the receiving end will respond to arriving data with some data of its own, you can hold off sending the ACK and roll it up with the data being sent in the opposite direction - that can be done by guesswork, but of course if you pass the responsibility up to the application layer it has a better chance of knowing the optimal timing.

A more specific issue for QUIC is that HTTP/2.0 multiplexes individual data streams onto one TCP connection - a lost packet stalls every stream awaiting retransmission, even if data for only a single stream failed to arrive. Now of course, there are multiplexed transport protocols that don't suffer from this problem, but they all suffer from abstract vs. concrete compromise in terms of their chattiness and responsiveness.

If you go for entirely textbook layering, there's quite a lot of state that needs to be kept too for each HTTP, TLS and transport connection, some of which disappears if you roll all the layers up together.

The purpose of QUIC is essentially to come up with a transport+application protocol that is specific to the HTTP/TLS use case (though it has wider applications) and hence can be better optimised for that purpose. I can remember a time when the IETF would have been up in arms about layer violations, but I suspect this one is likely here to stay.

What a time to be alive: DB Admin raps about Microsoft SQL Server and he ain't even paid to do so

I do not get paid to do this by anyone...

Regrettably, this is just another example of the disappearance of formerly lucrative musical employment opportunities.

Has Apple abandoned CUPS, the Linux's world's widely used open-source printing system? Seems so

Re: Postscript

At the time, Postscript was an expensive feature: apart from the licensing fees, it needed significant processing power and memory, which is why it was mostly found on networked printers that already had to incur the cost of a local processor. It remained very much a feature of the Apple world - PC printers were more likely to use PCL 3 (or even ESC/P) - for some considerable time. It was far from a panacea - in the past I've had loads of documents fail to print because the Postscript was too complex for the memory available on the printer or the Postscript levels were incompatible.

It does seem rather typical of the industry that just at the point at which printing was about to be a boring, solved problem it is in danger of being unsolved.

Security much? Twitter should have had a CISO to prevent Bitcoin hack, says US state financial body

If that's that the voters want, then democracy presumably demands that's what they get. There's not been a recent shortage of voters seeking authoritarian - and indeed retributive - legislators. In the UK, however unpopular the government may presently be owing to cronyism and incompetence, it still seems to have significant support for its hostility to the rule of law (because foreigners). If you believe that 'democracy' means your own values should be reflected in public administration, then you're going to be very disappointed in both.

UK govt advert encouraging re-skilling for cyber jobs implodes spectacularly

Re: You mean "faux outrage"?

I think the government's superspreaderforecaster-in-chief is quoted as saying, with respect to support for jobs, "the f*ing ballerinas can get to the back of the queue". The art and entertainment sector makes up a significant part of the economy and it's not the "faux outrage" of the "lliberals" that's astonishing, but the political opportunism of the right that would like to see its permanent destruction regardless of the economic cost because it doesn't tend to support their world view. That seems to be the new political correctness and it's no better than the old one.

Re: Soviet Union reference

People were very keen to participate because it was one of the few ways you could get to travel abroad and potentially "defect".

Can't see IT being a route to escaping our present pestilential pit anytime soon. Even if there were anywhere to escape to.

Five Eyes nations plus Japan, India call for Big Tech to bake backdoors into everything

Re: Can never work

what they want they cannot get

What they want is mass surveillance: they have no interest in "terrorists sharing keys", except as a pretext for getting it.

Facebook's anti-trademark bot torpedoes .org website that just so happened to criticize Zuck's sucky ethics board

Re: Convention

The trouble with that argument is that the logical conclusion is you can't actually name the company you're complaining about without their permission....

Git your ass to the cloud! Gitpod hooks up with GitLab to take on GitHub Codespaces

Re: Sorry Mr Efftinge

I agree with the sentiment, but it's going to be an uphill struggle.

I needed to do some tweaks to an old project recently and decided to install the latest Visual Studio - around 24GB of disk space for the options I needed, a fairly modest set. Its usability seems to be regressing with each new version. It keeps telling me about updates to packages being available, though I'm not using them, as far as I know. Though I can't tell, because in the previous version I installed some options I was pretty sure I wasn't using and the whole thing broke until I reinstalled it. It's now so complex and precarious that having someone else take care of the configuration (and the disk space) looks increasingly attractive by comparison - though it's not a comparison that should need to be made.

And yes, browsers are dreadful as UIs: it was never their purpose and bolting a whole insecure OS-like runtime into them just makes them worse. Desktops aren't going to be here forever, though and in the absence of a browser-alternative designed specifically to remotely host UIs, browsers are going to be the default by virtue of ubiquity.

In the face of the cloud virus, I think we're going to have to accept a "new normal" that is inferior to our past experience whether we like it or not.

Was he sent on a spool's errand or something? Library staffer accused of stealing, reselling $1.3m of printer toner

Re: aow much, actually?

I did wonder whether the quantities might be reminiscent of The Great Escape.

UK, French, Belgian blanket spying systems ruled illegal by Europe’s top court

Re: Not for much longer

after that the European Court of Justice has no authority in the UK

I've no doubt that is what will be said in public. However, authority, like sovereignty, is a largely theoretical term: what matters in reality is who has power.

The UK will be at theoretical liberty to go its own way, but the practical consequence will be a severing of data-sharing with the EU: if they're prepared to cut of the US, they'll happily cut off the UK.

If you wish to demonstrate autonomy over your own body, you can saw off your lower limbs - with the practical consequence that you wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

Nvidia unveils $59 Nvidia Jetson Nano 2GB mini AI board, machine learning that slashes vid-chat data by 90%, and new super for Britain

Automatically constructing and animating your face

How could that be potentially detrimental in any way?

Imagine running a dating app and being told accounts could be easily hijacked. How did that feel, Grindr?

Imagine running a dating app and being told accounts could be easily hijacked

I wouldn't take it lying down.

Microsoft says bug, sorry, 'a latent defect' in Safe Deployment Process system downed Azure Active Directory

Re: New buzzword

While undiscovered: latent defect

When triggered: blatant defect

UK privacy watchdog confirms probe into NHS England COVID-19 app after complaints of spammy emails, texts

Given the spike in infections...

... it's a good job the app is finally here.

Perhaps it's the app spreading the infection by surreptitiously retrofitting 5G technology to your phone and channelling vaccines into your proudly unmasked face through the microphone.

Key-cutting machine borked sideways after visit from the BSOD fairy locks things down

Re: I wonder...

As it happens, I had some keys cut by one of these the other day.

They're not entirely automatic - they rely on an operator to feed in the original key and then the correct blanks, one at a time as each one is cut.

Despite rolling a homegrown translation app with iOS 14, Apple resorts to freebie tool for Dutch Ts-and-Cs waffle

We'd give you our own definition of Apple

Bietser?

Alphabet promises to no longer bung tens of millions of dollars to alleged sex pest execs who quit mid-probe

A few years after Blakely gave birth to their son

That's an unusually long gestation period.