Posts by Doctor Syntax

FCC Commissioner blasts new TV standard as a 'household tax'

Re: Is it wrong ..

"If you're referring to the transition from analogue to Freeview, I think that was done quite well."

Yup. My reaction was to wonder if they're still on analogue over there. We've actually gone through two transitions in post-war TV broadcasting: VHF/405 lines to UHF/625 and analogue to digital. Both were handled with sufficiently long transition periods so that anyone actually forced to buy a new TV must have been using a pretty ancient one on its last legs: my last analogue CRT set used with an STB had one colour channel die.

Culture, schmulture. DevOps, agile need to be software-first again

Re: Nice article.

I'm guessing many of the haters in the comments are 50 somethings, or retired and just don't get all these "new fangled buzzwords" and think that "we did all this devops stuff on mainframes back in the 70s".

I'm sure we're mostly in those groups. I certainly am. Mainframe? Yes, I learned FORTRAN on a University mainframe back about 1970; haven't use one since.

Buzzwords? Let's be careful here. We've seen a lot of technology change and it's all had its own terminology (and I'm convinced more changes of terminology than were strictly necessary - OO didn't really need to start from scratch given that it essentially added to existing concepts). But basically it's just the names for actual stuff, stuff that we've grabbed with both hands when it offered something useful. Microprocessors from 8-bit upwards? Great. 8" floppies? 5 3/4"? 3 1/2"? QIC? CD? DVD? MFM? ATA? SATA? USB? RDBMS? Yup, all good stuff, all grist to the mill. All mastered and taken to heart. Even just listing a few makes me realize, yet again, how much has changed and how we've all changed with it.

Management buzzwords, methodologies and the search for the Silver Bullet, that's a different matter. We've seen a lot of those go past us as well. The real difference that age brings isn't being unable to handle the buzzwords, it's that we've seen the same things go past again and again, just with different labels on them and the same mixture of good and bad results. The reason management prefers young coders to the old and grizzled is that we're resistant to bullshitting which is what they do best, and often the only thing they do at all. What we've learned is that there's no Silver Bullet, the best approach is to look at what you need to do, choose the approach that seems to fit the job in hand best and ignore the labels.

You'll eventually look back and say the same thing. The only difference will be your list of technologies.

Re: I know my career hasn't been typical...

As for your second point, "generalising the schema" is de facto denormalization and logically ends with something like Redis.

Not necessarily.

Take, for instance some process control situation. You're going to take data out of the database, pass it to some machine, take the results of automated inspect and then either pass the job onto the next machine or send it into some rework loop. You can hard code all these rules. Alternatively you can have tables which define the rules so that your code becomes a rules engine. You want to modify the process? Change the rules. You want to reuse the whole thing in a different process? Set up a new database, same schema, different rules.

Another instance: you have a block of data which describes the job. You never handle individual parts of it, you just bung it out to the machine that does the job. You could "normalise" it - and I've seen this done against my advice - but, in fact you're breaking the normalisation rules because it is, really, a single entity. The right way is to treat it as a blob, store it as a single entity, output it as a single entity. I watched the spec of the job change and more and more tables were added, more and more code written to split the data up, store it and reassemble it.

The version I did had even more complex demands than changing the spec of a single product over time, it started with multiple products with different specs to which many more were added over time. No problem, the database didn't need to change as all it saw and all it needed to see was a single column to hold the blob in a simple table to keep track of it. Another line of business with a broadly similar requirement? No problem, a few tweaks of code to handle some different T&Cs and we're good to go. We were being agile but I don't think we were necessarily Agile.

"Perhaps you mean horde."

I think hoards was better. After all, hoards are often buried or at least hidden out of the way.

Re: I know my career hasn't been typical...

"All these analyses and methodologies seem to start with the assumption that "software" consists of FaceBook and Enterprise CRM systems."

I'm not sure an Enterprise CRM system would be a good place to start either. First you need a good RDBMS. The good news is that at least you don't have to be Agile about developing that; you can buy it in. Then you need a database schema to sit on it. And once you have that in production you'd better have it right because once it starts to accumulate data it'll be a pig to do a reorg. If you're clever and take the time beforehand you can make your schema general enough and the application configurable enough to set it up for all sorts of different enterprises but ISTM that that's the opposite of Agile.

"For me, a 2009 talk by Andrew Clay Shafer codified this thinking right around the time it was codified into DevOps. To a room full of agile lords and ladies, he proposed something wild and crazy: what if you were responsible for how your code ran in production?"

We were doing this over 20 years earlier. I've previously supposed that we were doing DevOps ahead of time. But...

"Systems will go down catastrophically, but you can't simply give up, and punishing people just takes you back to the overly cautious state where software is released infrequently. So, as described by the Google SRE book, you instead celebrate failure"

Thanks for explaining to me that we weren't doing DevOps after all. They didn't go down catastrophically so we didn't have failures to celebrate, only successes to lament.

As a database guy to some extent I've always been puzzled about this salami slicing thing. Do you set up the database by introducing a table at a time or do you set up all the tables empty for the first release and then add the columns one at a time for each subsequent release? And how many release cycles do you expect to have before the developers get anything to develop against. At least as the data volume grows with use each reorg following each sprint's schema change will get longer and longer so eventually there'll be really good failures to celebrate.

Cynical? Moi?

Dear America, you can't steal a personality: GDPR godfather talks privacy with El Reg

I'm not sure I see the use case for this machine readable data extract. If I might well want to stop using a service. I might also want to use another. The two are not necessarily connected. If they're not then I need to input sufficient data into the new service. I'd also want the old service to delete all such data as the GDPR says it must if I ask. But if I were to ask for the data from the old service to save me from inputting data into the new I'd likely find that the formats and maybe content differ. I'd end up either doing the input manually as I'd have to do in other circumstances or I'd have to convert it if possible but although most of us here could do that the bulk of people wouldn't and in any case we'd probably find the job more trouble than it's worth.

And that "if possible" phrase covers a multitude of possible problems. Just take addresses. Different businesses have different ideas as to how many lines go into an address and how long they are, what the fields are* etc. I have memories of trying to cram reasonable addresses from the order processing system into the unreasonably short fields of the accounts system; the accounts staff had the same problem wrapping individual address lines over multiple lines in the accounts.

* Why do so many address formats assume I live in a city? Apart from just visiting I haven't lived in a city since the early '70s.

Re: Actual result

Checkbox added to EULA saying "can use all my data" before you can install the product

And any court in the EU would throw it out as non-binding.

"If you choose to fashion a modem to to the ODB port then that is your doing,"

And if you can, so can the vehicle manufacturer.

I love disruptive computer jargon. It's so very William Burroughs

Re: My personal favourite

"II'm guessing that was someone's in-joke"

I'll leave you to discover where "prehensilising some Serbian peasants" came from.

"And all brits sound like they are from south London to me"

Meeting a Geordie is clearly still a treat in store.

Re: Talking about jargon...

don't say "swimming pools" but "deep standardized aquatic environment"

That's fair enough. After all, they are a recognised standard unit of measurement.

Re: Reminds me of this from the 90's

"amazed it's still there and working!"

But not very well. Compared to modern bullshit it's almost lucid.

Re: British revenge

"you Brits created ITIL"

Does anyone actually admit to having created it?

"We tend to write the resulting mess as separate words but that's a cosmetic detail."

It helps with wordwrapping.

Re: "all Americans sound like Woody from Toy Story"

"Woodpecker Cider was a fixture of my youth. Not use whether it still exists."

I think its relationship to alcohol was somewhat homeopathic.

"Being able to make up new jargon whenever you like is one of the finest unique features of the English language."

My distant memory of a year of Science German in the 6th form says that not only can German do this but it can do it with twice as many letters and probably more with a bit of effort.

"I don’t know whether what you think you’re writing is supposed to mean"

Was this intended to mean something?

Re: Phew!!!

"I started reading, couldn't understand a thing"

The worrying thing is that I can't tell which of them he did make up and which he didn't.

Co-op Bank's users moan over online wobbles

Re: Architecture

"That is to say the current design looks reasonably pretty"

Pretty dreadful would be my description. it was obviously designed by someone who'd just bought a load of whitespace going cheap and wanted a punter to unload it to. A browser really ought not have to go full screen to display a small handful of fields.

I'm not in the least surprised if they ask people to tweet bank details. This is the same crowd that sends out spam looking exactly like phishing spam - says Coop bank in From and Reply to but originates elswhere, asks customers to click on in-spam links which claim to go to their own domain but which resolve to an IP address belonging to the same non-bank domain as the spammer. IOW they're training their customers to be phished. Anyone with the mentality to do this clearly has such a deep ignorance of IT security that they're likely to get phished themselves.

TL;DR if this was down to some stupid pratt in the bank getting pwned I wouldn't be in the least surprised.

Gartner says back-to-school PC sales failed. IDC says they worked

Re: Plus

"Since it's easier to repeat the previous success than try something new, you end up with everything looking like clones."

You've just described the process which ensures that if there's no product today that meets a particular demand there won't be one tomorrow because it will be dubbed "niche", not because anyone knows it's niche but because, without an existing product, it's niche by definition.

The polite summary of this is that it's a self reinforcing feedback loop. The alternative is that marketing spends all its time looking up its own arse and finding the obvious.

That's why the "no demand" joke rings true with so many people.

Re: Plus

"I'm also confused when people need to buy a laptop for work, and complain about the cost. If it's an essential tool, then it's a cost you factor into your fees, and assuming your accountant isn't an idiot, it should be a tax write off in some form or another. At the very least you should get the VAT (or local equivalent) back."

I agree in principle although, in fact, for someone who isn't VAT registered, VAT is the one thing they won't get back.

But what the OP wanted was a netbook. That was a genuine product but it threatened MS because it was sold without Windows*. MS then made a cheap licence for Windows available with the stipulation that it wasn't powerful enough to challenge the regular laptops running full price Windows. This effectively stopped the products from being as effective as they might although, as I said, with Linux they were powerful enough.

There may also be an element of snobbery; "it's a chicklet keyboard". Of course it is at that size and price. So what? You can type on it.

*It's also possible that the market couldn't then, comprehend a computer that didn't have Windows. That's no longer the case.

Re: Plus

"14-inch laptops have screens that are too small for more than one working window"

The netbook size is usually about 11". I have one running Linux. I use it for work in libraries or archives where I want something small for data gathering. I normally run text-based applications in a 80x25 window which leaves room to spare but then I did used to use an Osborne luggable as a terminal back in the day. If I wanted to use multiple full screen applications I'd simply use multiple workspaces. That comes naturally to a long-term Linux user and I understand Windows has caught up with that so it's not really a problem. As the OP said Unix he might not even be intending to use GUI - another trick that Unix/Linux users are used to is having several command line sessions running and flipping between them with Alt/F1, Alt/F2 etc. You're not going to use them for compute-intensive stuff but if you adapt to flipping between several single application workspaces or terminal sessions they're quite functional. Mine is running an Informix RDBMS to power the data gathering applications.

Re: Plus

"I would quite like a small size laptop"

You're the 10th person to ask for that today. We don't stock it. No demand.

Mine's the one with the old joke book in the pocket. Or is it the old excuse book?

Re: Plus

"your desire is extremely niche, and the laptop market is very much mass marketed. ... The laptop and consumer desktop market is designed around price points, not features."

Designed by whom? By marketing of course. Tell me again how marketing, with their deep understanding of customers' desires, have created these soar-away sales figures.

Beware the GDPR 'no win, no fee ambulance chasers' – experts

"I had tens of thousands of names and addresses, all verified."

Verified that they existed or verified that they wanted letter-box litter?

Re: In the recruitment industry the panic is just starting to set in.

"I predict much wailing and gnashing of teeth in recruitment, as soon as a recruiter sends out a job spec to half the internet and lots of legally switched on types notice that they didn't give consent under GDPR and fire up the lawyers."

And well deserved. One could spend time customising a screed for one particular gig only to have the pimp send it out for something quite different. I'm sure this must occasionally cost perople gigs they might otherwise have got so real money's involved.

Re: At least we know now

"What all the PPI firms will be doing next"

And doing it to each other with any luck.

Re: Let me understand...

" Don't hate the player, hate the game."

Why not both?

"In a game of Top Trumps, Tax always beats GDPR."

Except, of course, Top Trump.

Re: Waiting......

"banking on the odds that they wont be in the first companies to fall afoul of GPDR"

They're probably also banking on being able to get it all fixed in time when someone else falls foul of it first. Good luck with that!

Re: Dwarves???

The plural third person singlar, present tense of the _verb_, which is what is being used in the article, should be "dwarfs".

FTFY

Software update turned my display and mouse upside-down, says user

Re: I wonder...

"we had to call in the Leitz engineer to lock the lenses in place"

Back then even the sales guys were techies. We had one new microscope, actually the new top-of-the-range job, as a loaner to try to sell it to us. The objectives weren't par-focal. One was one of the 0.95 NA Plan Apo dry lenses so that couldn't be touched, but when the salesman rolled up and we told him he took the 10x out, adjusted the internal components to fix it and locked them in place with a smidge of SWMBO's nail varnish.

"to stop the students nicking them. And these were medical students - supposedly the creme de la creme."

I was in Halls with medical students - it brought an air of reality to any subsequent dealings with the profession. The Leitz salesman left a sample of a new Fluroite 0.90NA with us on approval one time which I've still got somewhere. It wasn't a patch on the Plan Apos. They didn't want it back, I think it never went into production.

A fair chunk of my working life was spent looking down Leitz microscopes. Beautiful pieces of kit.

Re: I wonder...

It sounds like a very inexperienced microscopist. The image in the eyepiece is upside down already.

I used to help out as a demonstrator for a pollen analysis course (not my job but there weren't enough of the regular staff with the knowledge). This was the first time in about 2 1/2 years into a degree course that students had had to set up a microscope for maximum resolution; at least it felt like that. So they were shown how to set up the Kohler illumination etc. You could guarantee that the first thing to do when called over to help with an identification was to set the microscope up properly, even if you'd done that only a few minutes earlier.

Re: It's always the same, isn't it?

"The engineer interrupted the workman to explain that even a large particle of cigarette ash could cause the disk heads to crash. The workman heard him out - then happily resumed drilling."

Why wouldn't he carry on? He wasn't smoking.

Re: Every day's a school day

" When you have a preferred orientation in mind and the imaged object seems to have a different idea in mind, rotating the camera so that all images are oriented the same way is often the best solution."

A microscope normally inverts the image compared. This means that when you move the specimen on the stage the image moves in the opposite direction. It's not difficult to get used to this, especially when using a mechanical stage. (I'm surprised the microscopist in the story had a problem with this.)

Cue using a microfiche reader. The lens is rotatable and has the same effect as rotating the camera in the story. If you put the fiche in the wrong way round so the text appears upside down you can just rotate the lens but then you have to move the fiche in the opposite direction to the way you want to move the image. Again, it's not difficult to adapt, at least I never found it so. But if the fiche was photographed to the writing is sideways on you have to rotate the lens a quarter turn; that fixes the image orientation but then sliding the fiche on one axis moves the image in the same direction whilst sliding it on the other axis moves it in the opposite direction.

Judge says US govt has 'no right to rummage' through anti-Trump protest website logs

Re: This is another huge win

"the rest of the world has nothing to do with American case law"

It wouldn't necessarily be binding on other jurisdictions but it could still be put before a judge as a model of how to handle such a case. If the judge accepted it that might then set a precedent elsewhere.

"Not that it will be of course. Sane results like this directly undermine their attempts to wage economic espionage on a cowed and fearful populace."

The way case law works suggests that this will be cited in the future, at least in the US. The great pity is that it's less likely to be useful in the UK.

Rejecting Sonos' private data slurp basically bricks bloke's boombox

Re: It’s not for El Reg readers, is it.

"They also assume that they can and will be tracked, and that protesting doesn't change anything."

They probably don't believe that voting doesn't change anything either. Or they didn't until a year or so ago.

Re: Software v. wetware

"According to your standard I'm a raving nutcase"

That's what your handle says.

Re: Connected?

"Good luck with your unconnected light bulb."

Great idea. It never burns out.

Re: Crap like this...

"Which, I thought was the coolest party trick ever, and then I found out how much B&O systems cost!"

The coolest party trick ever was getting people to pay their prices.

Look! Over there! Intel's cooked a 17-qubit chip quantum package

"Ah, but it'll shuffle the cards better."

It doesn't need to. All the orderings are already in there. You can play all the possible games at once but it'll only tell you the result of one of them when you ask it if you won.

Dear America, best not share that password with your pals. Lots of love, the US Supremes

Re: Sadly, a decision which needs more clarity

"I think people are missing some of the details in my original post here."

And you are missing the point: company rules provide for disciplinary action within the company with the ultimate sanction of a quick journey to the outside of the front door but no further.

Re: Sadly, a decision which needs more clarity

"For a long time similar rules applied in 'normal' businesses,"

The rules might well apply. The sanctions available to a 'normal' business would not include recourse to the Official Secrets Act unless the business were carrying out work for HMG in which case, depending on the work, the Act could apply.

Re: Sadly, a decision which needs more clarity

"No, the PAs would."

Only if the PA then uses the access to commit a criminal act. Corporate rules do not have the sanctions available under criminal law.

Re: Sadly, a decision which needs more clarity

"Since each of those companies very clearly stated that such activity was forbidden and a disciplinary offence, I presume those managers/Execs in the US offices will now go to jail?"

It depends. Clearly they could be disciplined by the company but that isn't a criminal offence. If, however, the PA used the password to commit fraud then the PA could go to jail and possibly the manager as an accessory.

There's a very simply difference here: company rules are not the subject of criminal law, fraud is.

Re: Interesting opinion to have...

"otherwise the person would be liable to prosecution back in the EU."

Didn't you get the memo? US law overrules everyone else's

Re: What happens if...

"Seems to me the individual has been sent down because of the intent not just the action."

Just this. Intent can be an important factor in criminal cases.

Dumb bug of the week: Outlook staples your encrypted emails to, er, plaintext copies when sending messages

"Bring back the testers"

The new system seems to be working fine.

MS ships alpha code. Users and security researchers test it. Bugs get reported back to Microsoft.

What are you complaining about?