Posts by Doctor Syntax

BGP super-blunder: How Verizon today sparked a 'cascading catastrophic failure' that knackered Cloudflare, Amazon, etc

https://xkcd.com/908/

OK, you all know which it is.

Having bank problems? I feel bad for you son: I've got 25 million problems, but a bulk upload ain't one

Re: I call bullshit

"Well, I do, and haven't."

Find a dictionary.

Look up "hubris".

Re: Reversing the debits into credits?

It's the obvious move. The tricky thing is the legend or, if it's a company's accounting system, the transaction type you put against it to explain it on the statements.

Re: "the bank's reputation would be left in 'tatters' "

When I was a Lloyds customer neither the former TSB nor the Lloyds branches gave a shit anyway. The staff who'd been in the local branch Lloyds had closed were OK but the big town branch? No way.

Re: 10 minutes, not a second more...

I liked the days when we had real fuses, not resettable circuit breakers. You could take a fuse out and keep it in your pocket to prevent that sort of thing.

Bill G on Microsoft's biggest blunder... Was it Bing, Internet Explorer, Vista, the antitrust row?

Re: Microsoft did not used to need to see the future

"For some reason Microsoft did not follow their winning strategy with phones."

I doubt the phone industry, manufacturers and networks alike would have allowed them. They saw the way the PC makers had been shafted and wouldn't have let that happen again.

EE-k, a hundred grand! BT's mobile arm slapped for sending 2.5m+ unwanted texts

“We accept the ICO’s findings"

That actually makes a nice change from recent reports of regulator cases. The usual response seems to be "we don't accept the findings" and even "the regulator was too stupid to understand the technology" or words to that effect.

Curioser and curioser: Little Mars rover sniffs out highest ever levels of methane

"an important potential fuel source for vehicles"

They'd still need oxygen to burn it.

Go fourth and multi-Pi: Raspberry Pi 4 lands today with quad 1.5GHz Arm Cortex-A72 CPU cores, up to 4GB RAM...

Re: Pi-top

James,

On the subject of PiTop, I got one years ago for my grandson. My reaction was that for that purpose the location of connectors didn't work out very well. In particular the power and headphone connector were on the same side and as the power connector needed to be internal there was no easy way to connect plain old phones or speakers. Perhaps it would be worth thinking about how best to lay out the connectors for this sort of purpose - and then about something along the lines of chromebook except running NextCloud as the server (on a Pi, of course).

Re: Sata

"If only they had added the much requested sata port."

A while ago I looked at similar boards with onboard SATA. The SATA was an onboard adapter from USB so you could do the same thing with a USB/SATA cable.

Hot desk hell: Staff spend two weeks a year looking for seats in open-plan offices

Re: Am I the only one who loves it?

"the company actively encourages staff to work from home!"

From home or at home? It's not necessarily the same thing. Someone covering, for whatever, reason, a geographical area remote from the company office may work from home but seldom be at home. Sales is the obvious example but not the only one. My daughter works in clinical trials and spends a good deal of time at the participating hospitals; the company office is only occasionally visited.

Re: Cost analysis

My approach would have been to decide, arbitrarily if need be, and, if the bean counters didn't like it, refer each item to them for them to decide.

Re: Human nature

"it dawned on him that he had no idea what I do here"

Manglement often don't know what staff really do. And vice versa.

But we all know which would be manglement's take.

Summer's here, where's Windows 10 19H2? For Microsoft, spring ends whenever the heck it says so stop asking

Re: To be fair...

Take a leaf out of Debian's book: give the next version a name to look forward to but the only give a release date when it's ready.

Alternatively they could adopt the 1st movement of Mahler 1 as a theme tune - sometimes known as "Spring without end".

The autumn release, of course, has an existing internet meme to adopt, Eternal September.

'Bulls%^t! Complete bull$h*t!' Reset the clock on the last time woke Linus Torvalds exploded at a Linux kernel dev

Re: This is why Diversity matters. Linus is wrong, but he can learn from my story. Here's how.

Nice one, A/C but maybe a little too subtle for some.

Re: This is why Diversity matters. Linus is wrong, but he can learn from my story. Here's how.

Whoosh.

Re: yes, well, but...

Perhaps you didn't understand it. If your concern is to get an item of data onto disk ASAP then you don't achieve that by leaving sitting round in the cache until such time as an algorithm you don't control decides to put it on disk. If you can do direct I/O then it's faster. OTOH caching is going to be best for overall throughput but does leave cached data at risk for some time.

If you're a good DBA you are paranoid about integrity and consistency of data. You assume there are things out there such as power failures ready to attack*. You don't like the idea that a page from this table might get written and a page from that not so that a join fails or returns incorrect results. You look for an RDBMS engine that can (a) do journalling so it can roll back incomplete transactions and roll forward those committed but not yet completely updated in the tables and indexes (b) coordinate its cache flushing with the journal, (c) coordinate all that with, if necessary, backing up the database whilst still continuing transactions and (d) have its parameters tuned to gain the optimum throughput. The parameters for that case are not necessarily going to be those suited for general purpose file system I/O, even a journalled file system; it's much more complicated case. In such cases the engine needs direct I/O so that the programmer can rely on data having been written when a write call returns.

Even with ordinary file system I/O Linus had a wake-up call back in the days of ext 3, or maybe even ext 2. IIRC memory sizes had gone up and as the file system simply made use of otherwise unused memory as cache and it transpired that instead of being flushed frequently because of lack of space, caches were sitting around until the kernel synced them on the basis of time since the last flush. Realising the possible consequences of this - possibly some data actually got lost - he commented "what moron put that in there?" or something similar.

I assumed that it was self-deprecating, the lesson having been learned. Ext 4, of course, being journalled, made things much more secure. But maybe not.

* Of course you don't expect this to be an everyday occurrence. Indeed, you hope you never have to deal with it, but then any system administrator taking routine backups hopes never to have to use them to deal with anything other than a careless file deletion by a user.

Re: yes, well, but...

"The fact that this episode is even note worthy makes me believe he has made progress."

You need to bear in mind that these sweary episodes make the news because they are not and were not BAU.

Linus has always had some sort of opposition to direct IO. One symptom seems to be the absence of character devices for disk partitions - something which has been part of Unix for as long as I can remember (V7 days). There are ways round it but it's a strange fixation. I'm not sure why he failed to grasp that applications such as database engines rely on their own journalling schemes for their integrity and that when a journal write completes the programmer should be able to assume that the data is actually in storage and not lounging about in cache and vulnerable to power or other failure.

Shut the barn door: UK data watchdog tells MPs mass slurping by firms is a huge risk to privacy

Re: ...and so it goes on....

"I have no idea why no government (anywhere in the world, as far as I know) has introduced an opt-in law for this crap."

Cough. GDPR. It's going to be a while before enough cases work through enforcement and appeals to make the offenders really sit up and take notice but it is opt-in.

Re: Informed consent?

It takes a lot of words to be so unclear. Especially to be so unclear that you might not notice what they fail to exclude.

Re: privacy, it's a war!

You're that concerned & you're using Chrome?

Re: Tell people *why* the slurp is bad for them

"I have nothing to hide"

You could point out that they almost certainly have stuff which they're contractually obliged to hide. Pretty well any log-in credentials that access anything that deals with money and especially banking sites will, if they check the T&Cs, have to be kept confidential. How do they propose to do that if HMG have a back door into the communication? Avoid the online access altogether?

Queue baa, Libra: People will buy what Facebook's selling. They shouldn't, but they will

Re: Faecesbook, so...

Well played, sir.

Re: Half the population—

"Actually, it never was Gaussian"

I don't think few if any distributions of real things are. Running off to infinity at the extremes bucks reality.

Re: Half the population—

"Don't ask me to account for this."

I think it's simply this: if you don't use it you lose it.

Re: Unless FB is in my mattress

Why not? It's all good data as far as FB are concerned.

"Which digital company has the worst possible reputation for the mismanagement of the personal data of its customers?"

But who are the customers and who are the product?

UK.gov must sort out its crap data and legacy IT, warns spending watchdog

That's not fair.

They can't blame incorrect data for the Windrush fiasco. They'd deliberately thrown the data away. It wasn't there it couldn't have been incorrect.

QED (Home Office style).

A $4bn biz without a live product just broke the record for the amount paid for a domain name. WTF is going on?

When I tell people about a product I say "it's available on Amazon". They google Amazon "whatever product" and click a link

Probably you know a lot of people who never found what the address bar is for. I'd start to type in amazon.co.uk* on the address bar, autocomplete would do the rest but that's only because I'd typed it in some time in the past.

Its value is as part of the branding and the branding has value because Amazon have put in the effort to build a search engine which works if you ignore the false positives, logistics which mostly deliver and humongous data centres and warehouses to support it all. Voice.com, OTOH?

* You're partially right in that the .com variation is less use that the corresponding name under our local TLD.

the FCA money-laundering regs require photo ID to prove you're you you have photo ID

FTFY

Re: "Has whoever sold the domain actually got the money?"

"MicroStrategy received the money in cash on May 30"

They're probably still staring at each other saying "Did we really just do that?".

Re: Dunning Krugerands

Credit actually due to another commentard a few weeks ago. Unfortunately I can't remember who.

"It did however just spend $30m on a single domain name, and so garnered more press attention."

Has whoever sold the domain actually got the money? In real dollars, not Dunning Krugerands? Just asking.

Must watch: GE's smart light bulb reset process is a masterpiece... of modern techno-insanity

Re: Light bulbs and printers...

I had a similar experience with a cousin's new printer. In that case it was supposed to be set up via his W10 laptop. Between them, as I eventually worked out, they contrived - repeatably - to set it up on the wrong subnet. Much the same solution - USB cable and, in this case, his ancient Dell running Linux.

Re: Disappointing

Gotta leave something on the table for commentards.

Re: Good reason

GE marketing?

The guy who thought it up?

Some guilt there, I would think.

Re: What about if, during the fourth cycle, you panicked and turned it off after just seven seconds?

And what about when you get to seven in the fourth cycle & start to think you might have missed three back in the second cycle?

I doubt they've incorporated actual H/W to do all this timing so it's a S/W function. Now why would you ever need to reset a light bulb for any other reason than the S/W having drifted off into a state in the wide blue yonder and no longer functioning as you'd expect?

Re: Well, yes.

people who purchase so-called "smart" thingies are rarely actually smart

That's because the thingies are only smart by comparison.

Good old British 'fair play' is the answer to vexed Huawei question, claims security minister

"The Chatham House Rule states that what is said at a particular meeting or event may be repeated but not attributed."

There seems to be an exception for HMG ministers who want to be quoted.

DXC: We've told UK government that up to 2,150 heads could roll in latest job cuts

Clients, real and potential, should take note of these VRs. When the dust settles it means the best are gone. Who do you want to do your work?

Comms room, comms room, comms room is on fire – we don't need no water, let the engineer burn

Re: And then some fool fills up a car with Li-ion...

"the risk associated with hydrogen cells in everyday cars."

Or trains: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/business-48698044/hydrogen-trains-are-these-the-eco-friendly-trains-of-the-future

Don't panic: Dixons Carphone's share price crashes 30% after statutory losses hit £329m

All these markets which look like they're growing exponentially aren't. It's really a sigmoidal growth curve. Yet every time folk are amazed to find it's levelled off. Every time.

Re: Why even bother buying on-line?

"I can walk there plus there's a decent pub on the walk home."

If it's there on the way home it's also there on the way there. Cut out the middle man and just walk to the pub.

Autonomy integration was a 'sh!t show', HP director tells court

Re: Commodity Ownership

It seemed his CFO did challenge him but it was ignored as just an opinion.

Re: I'm confused

"being conned doesn't mean you deserve to lose your money."

AIUI HP were bidding (or at least Leo was bidding) against Larry. When you outbid another would-be buyer you set the price. It looks as if the price he they decided to bid was based on the value that they hoped to gain by integrating into their product line rather than on past sales.

"He oversaw the due diligence process, he said."

Not only was it overseen but someone claims/admits to doing that!