Posts by SVV 1217 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Nov 2013
For a professional DBA, "manage" in this context means "envisage the horror of managinig", quickly followed by "rapidly find a new job where their boss is not a gibbering fuckwit who would even suggest that managing a million databases was some sort of actual real practical possibility".
I suspect that of the 50% who got upgraded, a very small percentage actively thought "I want the upgrade". More likely that that's the proportion who don't know or don't care how to stop the default upgrading. The other side of the coin is that the other half of the user base has actively disabled updates due to having being burned by a problem caused by one, or an awareness that update borkage keeps happening, so that they're not willing to risk it, at least until no news stories have appeared reporting all the problems with the latest one (a situation that has not yet happened)
This is a huge proportion of the user base that is now at different version numbers, and by being so cavaliet about the problems that have been caused by breaking when updating, Microsoft now finds itself yet again in a position with its' Windows user base stuck on all sorts of different OS version numbers, the exact scenario that this whole process was explicitly meant to avoid.
Investigate and fine the big companies first, rather than pick the low hanging fruit of smaller organisations that may not have had the money or even the knowledge to get things sorted in time. The operation of HMRC gives no confidence that this is the way that things will be done.
I have seen far too many examples of sizeable companies virtually offering open access to customer data to far too many people in the IT department, and have been brushed off many a time when raising the issue with managers who didn't want "the burden and unnecessary cost and effort" of having to bother themselves with any potential disasters that would have arisen had someone decided for any reason to exploit the lax state of affairs. Even talk of legal issues was sometimes met with a "yeah, whatever" attitude. Some nice publicised cases with resulting reputational damage may be the only way to properly stir these incompetents into meaningful serious action, which will actually be good for all of us in the end.
"I'm not so paranoid to believe that it's all done with evil intent by some British-accented villain chuckling "excellent, excellent" while watching us on a remote monitor from his lair in a hollowed-out volcano."
Well that would just be silly. The Big Z has only just recently started the construction of the new Facebook HQ on Hawaii and he's far too uncouth to have properly mastered the accent yet.
Nice to hear that old chestnut again. A whole 19 minutes before it killed someone. Care to inform us what you consider an acceptable MTBF (mean time between fatalities) is before you continue testing your invention that you've invested heavily in to make you all rich ?
Who wants to set up a crowdfunder for a fleet of loudspeaker-fitted vans that can drive round gadget susceptible neighbourhoods blasting out "Alexa, order me a 16" megapizza and 250 cans of Stella" and other such fun proposals? OK Google / Siri / etc can also be catered for, and the orders made as expensive / embarassing as desired.
Premium options could include "send all my private photos to my boss" or "turn the heating up full", but this may raise a number of ethical issues I've not thought of yet....
All those luvverly unintended consequences just waiting to happen due to the ignorance of those letting this particular monster out of the box. Foolishly having been overconconfident about competence and good intentions saving us from harm.
"As a result, the algorithmic decision may disproportionately discriminate against certain groups, and are as unacceptable as any existing "human" discrimination."
Or as acceptable as any existing discrimination, depending on whatever a government chooses to do at any point in the future. Oh well, judging by the naivety of the politicians displayed here, who talk as if algorithms are nothing more than natural phenomena, rather than instructions created by people, I'm sure the average Mr Buttle or Mr Tuttle in the street will not be too worried.
"This is ambitious.. and it will require industry to connect more than 2 million additional premises a year for the next seven years. We won’t do that by government diktat"
But Phil, that's exactly how you are doing it, seeing as you've just said you want it to happen, whilst providing no plan, no money, etc!
Just beat me to it - was going to invest,then read what you had to do and..... sighed.
I understand that money must and should be made here but can we please just be able to buy it with, y'know, actual money? Jumping through pointless hoops to get simple things done with tech is what many of us get paid for, it's not nice to have to do this for.leisuretime enjoyment This is pointless irritating geekdom, the book is celebrating wonderful historic geekdom.
Dear British Business,
Sorry you can't recruit the people you need, but our aspiration to make Britain an economically successful global centre of technology and innovation is much less important than the need to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands in order to pander to our voters who don't like foreigners coming here,
Yours cynically,
The Conservative Party
And at the same time, science is not enough. "We know that evidence is not convincing for anyone, at any age," she said.
OK.....rather a sweeping statement there, do you have any, you know, EVIDENCE for what you're saying? Or is such a concept a kind of heresy in the faith-based world of Agile conferene land, as the true believers listen in rapt awe to the preachers of the new religion? What's next : "Agile works in mysterious ways"?
Rising encouraged those exploring new ways of working to involve others, to tell stories about their small experiments. "That will convince people more than any kind of evidence," she said.
I rather thought that stories about experiments were "a kind of evidence", seeing as they would have to consist of at least some statistics and analysis to be of any worthwhile substance and usefulness. Passing on experience of positive outcomes for the benefit of others is not exactly a wildly new and original idea in any field ever, and only adds more, erm, evidence to the theory that simple platitudes and snake oil are still available in profusion in agile world.
No, we're going to be monetised and manipulated. And targeted ever more agressively. Same as we are now. Only much worse and in an increasing number of situations.
That's the rather sadder and more realistic view that I get from reading the article. They'll just throw a few "benefit to society" crumbs down from the table now and then to retain public support. Of course, you can argue that by taking away so many decisions from us we will instead be able to use our time for higher and more noble purposes. But then you'd have to come up with a convincing argument that the level of distracting novelty that is so eagerly lapped up by so many has a natural limit to it, rather than being essentailly infinite.
Some of the most recent of Amazon's 7706 patents :
Food packaging with multi-layer structure
Updating code within an application
Generating an application programming interface
Visualization of network health information
and my favourite from my brief perusal :
Server system (USPTO Applicaton #: #20180084665)
A system includes a rack and one or more server systems mounted in the rack. A server system includes at least one sever node and each server node includes an array of devices including mass storage devices and at least one server device.
all from : http://stks.freshpatents.com/Amazon-Technologies-Inc-nm1.php
Frankly, from those that I've read I'm surprised they haven't managed to recently patent portable bound volumes of paper in which a story or factual information is encoded in printed text.
Seeing as it would be pointless sending a letter to you at your old address asking if you no longer lived there once you have moved out, it probably had a tickbox and the new resident ticked the "yes, that guy no longer lives here" box and sent it back. Although that would be only one of the many flaws in their system if that is the case, judging by the rest of this highly entertaining story.
Do some research on the long history of this song, and the reactions of various authorities and moral arbiters and artists to gain a complete understanding of all the arguments that will be rolled out and rehashed yet again regarding the issues of censorship, appropriate types of content and ultimate acnowledgement as literary works rather than dangers to society. Then you'll see how all the "what about rap, punk, metal, etc" arguments are direct parallels (the Nick Cave example given is directly and conciously in this lineage of this song, by the way). We are dealing with art and imagination here, and artists often imagine not nice things to make art from.
As to acceptable artist behaviour, well the playlist is going to end up being pretty sparse if that particular criterion is to be used. Read an average rock band biography and you'll find plenty of just causes and impediments to pass the purity tests being set here. Many artists outside of the "rebellious" genres being far more atrocious than the "bad boys" of rock, who are actually nice well behaved boys in some cases.
I presume Saint John Lennon and his popular beat combo will be next in line anyway, he having been a merciless mocker and insulter of the disabled in print, tv interviews, etc throughout these golden 1960s, as a starter example on his particular lengthy charge sheet if we are to suffer another round of trials in this long running series of prosecutions.
"Applications running within guest virtual machines on Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor can escape to the host machine and execute malicious code on it."
I am guessing it's this bit :
"Virtual drivers and Hypervisor-aware Kernel - Allows the guest operating system to communicate directly with the parent partition over the VMBus when accessing devices and making I/O requests, thereby increasing performance of the guest operating system."
So basically trading security of host OS for performance of VM OS by executing code that should be running in the VM on the host. Not such an incomprehensible nightmare really, more a case of monumentally stupid insecurity by design. I believe the marketing term for this is "fully integrated, high performance".
I bet this sort of thng is running all over Azure too, and they must be patching like mad, as the consequences of it being exploited would be too horrendous to contemplate. But will patching each new exploit that can be launched due to this ability be sufficient for such a fundamental design cockup?
"Fingers tightly crossed the robot overlords appreciate El Reg's puns, sarcasm, and irreverence toward corporate power."
If they called an operating system Android Pee and nobody laughed so much that they were in danger of doing so themselves, I think we can safely conclude that that's a "No".
"The cyber-break-in occurred because Equifax ran an unpatched and therefore insecure version of Apache Struts, something it blamed on a single employee."
Astonishing level of arrogance and incompetence. Management not fit to run a bath, let alone a major credit rating business. No, that's not the fault of a single employee. It's the fault of lack of comprehensive, well researched system architecture, effective code reviews, failure to take responsibility at higher levels, inadequate network, database and application security, both internally and externally, non encrypted storage of personal data, general fuckwittery and many more reasons too in all likelihood.
Even attempting that crappy excuse to cover up such an appalling systematic set of failures should disqualify the ompany from any more financial services work ever again.
"There's a certain solace in seeing the world as a computer: Human failings become bugs in the system and geopolitical instability can be patched in the next operating system update. That's rather more appealing than an endless loop of strife and stasis."
Unless the computer runs Windows, in which case the next operating system update tends to become an endless loop of strife and stasis.
"Asked during an on-stage demo what she thought about Cortana, Alexa said, "I like Cortana. We both have experience with light rings, though hers is more of a halo."
Full marks for being able to stick around for the rest of the presentation after this : I would probably be getting thrown out instantly afterwards by security due to my reaction were I unlucky enough to have witnessed it.
Look we're DOING SOMETHING! Doesn't matter that anyone who can flash a plausible or even real ID at a camera and provide some searchable US linked address details can purchase ads galore, it will have approximately fuck all effect.......
And as to the truthfulness of the content? No, won't be treading into that free speech minefield, will they?
The political ads horse bolted far too long ago for Google to rein it in, and tailored targeting has proved to be such a stream of $$$ that they won't actually be able to wean themselves off it. It's all been proven to work so effectively that the hope of a majority of informed citizens making informed choices, depending on their personal evaluations has long since gone, not that it ever had any more right to exist than what we have now in our democratic societies. But please don't try and fool people into believing your attempt at corpoarate holiness, as it's just as fake as the news and ads you are slinging. If you really gave a shit you'd just stop running all political ads.
Henceforth all requirements gathering should only be completed the day before the delivery date, with the key business stakeholders "holding their cards close to their chest" by not revealing the details of what the systems should do until then, having promised the shareholders that they have taken back control from the "IT Elites" because they've had enough of useless experts, and that anybody who doesn't believe in a vastly more profitable future due to this approach is talkinjg down the company. Then they blame the IT department at the end when the project fails.
Oh wait, that' what normally happens anyway.
They say that they had to throw away the records because of their age, due to the data protection act. But they haven't thrown away the records of everybody's birth certificates, passport applications, etc, which in many cases will be much older, and are of a similar importance as the immigration records for identity proof. Nor have they asked for consent to keep them under GDPR, for that matter. So it was all a convenient way of meeting their "targets" for removing people and they're in the middle of a shitstorm of their own making, now that people see that "being tough on immigration" equates to "sending home" people who have lived and worked here almost all their lives.
"Humberside Police received a £130,000 fine for losing the details of a rape victim"
I see the government is still spending money taking itself to court and fining itself. Presumably the fine of £130,000 for the police force will mean that future rape investigations are in no way hindered due to lack of funds?
"While I am optimistic about the potential to bring technology to bear on the greatest problems in the world, we are on a path that we must tread with deep responsibility, care, and humility. That is Alphabet’s goal.”
I rather thought it was making money myself. Oh well, maybe the tech messiahs of Silicon Valley are not such amoral geeks after all. So you won't be bothered anymore when we do point out any transgressions of your noble pureheartedness in the future. Some sort of slogan might be needed to capture this new gracious spirit that has wafted down upon you. How about "Don't be Hypocritical"?
Unfortunately, cashing in the money and then having massive delays in delivering advertised product is an authentic retro Sinclair experience : both the Spectrum and QL got them into trouble for doing just that back in the 80s.
Would it be overly cruel to suggest that Alan Sugar might be the one to bring in to do the "you're fired" thing?
First of all, if you want to generate good code, a tool that produces the very lowest common denominator of an average of GitHub code is not something I want anywhere near my code base. At least use a selection of proven, robust code that you have evaluated as the best possible examples you have seen. Or actually, in fact just use THE BEST example - oh, but then you just basically did an incredible amount of work to reproduce what everybody else does easily in practice, which is to use a good existing helper class to wrap the basic file API hard work, and you have ended up with a ttragically less good helper class.
Then, use an intelligent example to illustrate your invention. void read(File file) is a fucking stupid example. Oh, I'm going to read a file and do nothing with what I've read? Useful. Wrapping a readLine function and just calling it read would earn an instant removal from any class design duties ever again in my team, at the very minimum.
Finally, this code is just shit - the variable names are unacceptable abbreviations for real production code, and the pointless return statement at the end of a void function is just a bad joke. Don't even get me started on the layout. If I had to manually modify the calling code to every function in every io class that your tool produces in such a massive way to just make it acceptable, I would end up doing FAR more work than I'd "saved", compared to doing it properly myself, or just using a good existing helper class.
So, in conclusion : limited, but useless.
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