Posts by Doctor Syntax

Trump's govt hiring freeze means there's no US Privacy Shield chief: We tracked down the woman filling in for now

Re: how long will she keep her job?

I wonder how long any "non-family" member of Trump's administration will last

Families can fall out too. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/12/ramsay_hack_plot_guilty_plea/

"In the meantime the OES is being run by a career diplomat rather than a political appointee."

Maybe this will start a new trend.

What shall we call it?

Professionalism.

Consumers go off PCs as global shipments continue their decline

Re: Great? Super!!!

"as much use as an extra nostril."

There are too many who would appreciate the extra nostril.

Re: Consumers are making a choice...

"iPads are the best compute devices for our parents and grand parents"

Some of us in the grandparents age group were using compute devices a very long time ago. Judging from your juvenile approach, long before you were born. We've seen punched cards fall by the wayside. We've seen the rise and fall of DEC, the 8-bit processor, the 16-bit and the 32-bit. No, we do not all want your shiny toys. Go back to playing with your phone.

Yet again...

...no, people have not gone off PCs. They're just using the ones they have and don't need to replace them very often.

It's a mature market. O that Gartner and headline writers were mature enough to understand that.

DevOps, Containers, and three days in May

Nightmare.

DevOps and May in the same headline!

Prisoners built two PCs from parts, hid them in ceiling, connected to the state's network and did cybershenanigans

Re: 2 PC's what?

"I'm not saying it's correct, it's just that that's what we were taught to do back then,"

O'T'O'H' we don't write P'C's.

Re: Odd that there were network ports available inside the secure area

"You can cobble together the other parts and sneak them in pockets"

Is that a PSU in your pocket or are you pleased to see me?

What next?

A rehabilitation programme that involves taking old guns to pieces for recycling?

Gordon Ramsay's in-laws admit plot to hack sweary celeb chef's biz

Re: His in-laws?

"To say nothing of any family get-together."

Who cooks the food for those? They'd have to have food, even if all they did was throw it at each other.

Apple wets its pants over Swatch ad tagline

I do wish PR people would settle their differences by duel. The ancient martial art of Ecky Thump seems particularly appropriate for them.

Re: Daft thing is ...

"All of you who feel a compelling need to know exactly what time it is, several tens or perhaps a couple hundred times per day"

I don't. But I sometimes do need to know what time it is, particularly if I'm to meet SWMBO at a certain time.

Unlike some, however, I don't feel a compelling need to carry a phone (it used to be more compelling when I'd had heart trouble) and certainly no need, compelling or otherwise, to carry a smart phone.

Re: Daft thing is ...

@Jay 2

You need to be more selective about who you socialise with.

Law Commission pulls back on official secrets laws plans after Reg exposes flawed report

Re: Reflection of societal trajectory

"Also, hosts asking obsequiously"

You should have paid more attention. Obsequiously? Tongue in cheek more like!

Re: When are Prime Ministers democratically elected?

@Commswonk

On the whole I agree. However, dislike of one's face should should caution one against handling sharp objects in the vicinity of one's nose.

The various treaty changes should have required approval by referenda requiring substantive majorities of the sort which wasn't required by our recent advisory referendum. If that had been the case I think we'd have had an EC considerably different to the EU of today.

"didn't they all drop out?"

Or stabbed each other in the back. Delete as appropriate.

"This is a consultation by an independent body instigated by a previous prime minister"

So the current prime minister will feel free to ignore its wimpish recommendations and go ahead with her own, properly robust, idea of what's needed.

As you stare at the dead British Airways website, remember the hundreds of tech staff it laid off

"Maybe we should just turn shit off now and again just to prove we are worth the money."

I've always thought that that should be the response to beancounters wondering about the value of this "cost" centre. "Shall we turn it off for a day and see?".

And isn't it surprising that those who invented the term "cost centre" never see themselves for what they are: a cost centre?

Re: Correlation is not causation

"the long-experienced, now allegedly redundant locals."

FTFY

So the site was dead, not just TITSUP*

*Total Inability To Serve Up Pages

Re: The solution? Start with more outsourcing...

"stockholders are the problem. They want their money"

I don't know how this will work out for BA's stockholders but it didn't do too well for United; I see from the Beeb that they're down 3%.

Brexit factor lacking in Industrial Strategy, say MPs

Industrial factor lacking in Brexit Strategy, say MPs

Fixed that for them.

The current proportion [of GDP spent on R&D] is 1.7 per cent, below the average of 2.4 per cent and "substantially below the leading backers of innovation — countries like South Korea, Israel, Japan, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, which contribute over 3 per cent of their GDP to this area."

If only we had the productivity to support a higher R&D spend.

How's that for a remote login? NASA puts New Horizons probe to sleep 3.5 billion miles away

Re: the data speed

In the days of ASR33s & 35s that speed was almost unimaginably fast.

UK.gov cuts deal with Microsoft to avoid £15m post-Brexit price hike

Re: It is not public cloud but private cloud Office 365

According to your link the data centres are in the UK but it's still someone else's computer.

Radio hackers set off Dallas emergency sirens at midnight as a prank

"Or they were phoning the emergency services, to find out why the sirens operated by the emergency services were going off."

And in the event of a genuine emergency those 800 people would have been occupying communications bandwidth better used in dealing with the emergency.

The sirens are operated by the emergency services and, presumably, not easy to avoid noticing when they're operating. So 800 people thought the emergency services needed to be told that the sirens had gone off!

Internet Society tells G20 nations: The web must be fully encrypted

Re: About f'ing time encryption was pushed as compulsory on the internet!

Between them it's up to the Internet Society and IETF to push it; introduce encrypted protocols and then deprecate the old ones. After all, they set they standards. Clearly they do need to make public presentation of the case but they need to do more than talk; fait accompli can be difficult to argue with.

Eric S. Raymond says you probably fit one of eight tech archetypes

Disaster magnet: Never does anything obviously wrong but nearby things start to fail. Identified as far back as punched card days when mere presence was sufficient to make the card handling machinery start to crumple cards.

Re: Clickbait

"If you are a Reg reader..."

And Dilbert reader. There's another.

A classification system that can't fail. If you can't find anything specific just use the catch-all, JOAT.

Subpostmasters prepare to fight Post Office over wrongful theft and false accounting accusations

Re: Horizon, I know it well! (Well did, and bits of it)

That description immediately raises one possibility because elements of it are all to familiar. It sounds as if all sorts of modules were producing the XML portion. And if they couldn't produce valid XML in some modules it's quite possible that they might also have failed to produce well formed XML. I've certainly experienced that in the past. We had to train the staff in the primary contractor's tame Indian S/W house to write well-formed XML. Periodically they'd rotate them out and the next thing we'd receive a new variant which mis-handled names such as O'Neil. In our system I'd make sure that file was rejected and feedback was sent up the line. But if some non-well-formed XML were allowed to fail silently...

A/C, you have my sympathy.

Re: Injustice

"we need to take a closer look at how our legislative and justice system let this travesty continue"

An obvious factor is that the cases are prosecuted one at a time. It makes it very difficult for the pattern to emerge before considerable damage is done.

Re: Words

"and the PHB's at the post office didn't care"

Maybe it's time they started. If the complainants establish their case and the prosecutions then get looked at the possibility of perjury charges starts to raise its head.

Gartner halves tech splash forecasts, blames the US dollar

Re: Out of interest

"How accurate do Gartner's projections tend to be?"

And did they make any money on the Grand National?

Who really gives a toss if it's agile or not?

It's worth remembering that it's the disasters that make the news. I've worked on a number of public sector projects which were successful. After a few years of operation, however, the contract period was up and the whole service put out to re-tender.* At that point someone else gets the contract so the original work on which the successful delivery was based got scrapped.

* With some very odd results, it has to be said, but that's a different story.

Re: Agile Expertise?

"I always thought that one of the key goals of agile is to be able to cope with clients who continually try to change the specs and architecture."

it works if you're able to exhaust their capacity to change; at some point they need to stop so you can deliver something. When politicians are the clients that's not going to happen this side of the heat death of the universe.

"I'm in agreement with the guy above - a dozen devs, a page layout designer or two, some databases. One manager to co-ordinate and no bloody jargon."

Don't forget a well-defined, soluble problem. That's in your case, where you're paid by results. If you're paid by billable hours it's a positive disadvantage.

Re: 25% Agile:

"Working software is the primary measure of progress."

What about training the existing users, having it properly documented for the users of the future, briefing support staff, having proper software documentation, or at least self documenting code, for those who will have to maintain it and ensuring it doesn't disrupt the data from the previous release? Or do we just throw code over the fence and wave goodbye to it?

Re: 'What's Real and What's for Sale'...

"On time, on budget, to specification: Put these in the order of which you will surrender if the project hits problems."

In the real world it's more likely to be a trade-off of how much of each to surrender.

Re: Government still spends an outrageous amount of money on IT

"There are only 60 million people in the uk ,so the amount of criminals is less than that."

Courts, at least high courts, seem to have enormous scheduling problems.

That's from personal experience. In the worst cases I've spent several hours on each of several consecutive days waiting to be called as a witness despite the fact it would have taken, worst case, about half an hour's notice to get from lab to witness box.

They need to schedule judges, barristers, barristers' juniors, instructing solicitors, witnesses and jurors. Whilst the sittings are built around the judges' schedules it's not always easy to estimate how long a particular trial will last and if one overruns then it might disrupt not only the remainder of the list but also other courts where one of the barristers or witnesses might be scheduled to appear. Add to that the fact that start of business can sometimes be held up as some other matter has to be urgently brought before the judge.

It's not surprising that magistrates' courts are the one thing they've sorted out - my limited experience there is that they have multiple brief cases so, although one might waste half a day, there's no "can you come back tomorrow?".

There could be a huge win by improving high court scheduling but I doubt it could ever be an easy job.

Re: 'What's Real and What's for Sale'...

"Usually I check something(s) in every day, for the most major things it may take a week, but the goal is always to get it in and working so it can be tested."

The question is - is that for software that's still in development or software that's deployed in production?

If it's the latter and your "something" just changes its data format you're going to be very unpopular with your users. And that's just for ordinary files. If it requires frequent re-orgs of an RDBMS then you'd be advised to not go near any dark alley where your DBA might be lurking.

Software works on data. If you can't get the design of that right early you're going to be carrying a lot of technical debt in terms of backward compatibility or you're going to impose serious costs on your users for repeatedly bringing existing data up to date.

Payday lender Wonga admits to data breach

Generic PR statement with omissions corrected:

We take issues of customer data and security extremely less seriously than making the biggest possible profit

Forget Mirai – Brickerbot malware will kill your crap IoT devices

Re: telnet??!!?

"WONTFIX. They say to install dropbear instead."

Which in turn has had its problems, e.g. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/20/250000_routers_have_duplicate_ssh_keys/

If someone is serious about bricking mass deployments of vulnerable kit upatched versions of that could be near the top of the list.

Re: Telnet really?

"but there are configurations out there that require telnet due to crap applications."

The problem here isn't telnet being used because it's needed. It's telnet being used despite not being needed or not having secure passwords if it is.

Re: I think the best way to describe this

"I think its a good thing, and there should be more of it, the only drawback is its dependency on central C&C."

Looking at the attacks they interrogate various aspects of the system although it's not immediately obvious what they were doing with it. The second one in particular collects quite a lot of detail. This puzzled me until I realised it wasn't a script running on the device, it was running on the C & C server which will be collecting intelligence on the devices being attacked. It seems quite possible that this is in part an analysis phase to design a worm which will brick devices a whole lot faster.

"Then why don't you hear about Kirby and Electrolux vacuum cleaners anymore"

Never heard of Kirby. But we have a Bosch branded vacuum cleaner, a Hotpoint branded washing machine, both bought fairly recently replacing Vax & Zanussi. Dishwasher is AEG. Freezer is Zanussi. I'm not sure how familiar these are in the US but they're all well known brands here.

One of the possible fates of good brands is that they can get asset stripped. Some firm of beancounters the brand and, not having any idea themselves of how to build an electric kettle* or whatever cuts corners to bring the price down and eventually ruins it. However the original owners who put in the work had a valuable brand and got paid for it.

*You may recognise recent experience speaking here. So far Amazon Basics looks like they've got their kettles built by someone who knows how to do the job better than the well-known brand. But then Amazon now have a brand to look after.

Re: Telnet really?

"Anybody that deploys any Unix computer with telnet installed and answering is a moron and should consider a career change."

The people deploying these don't know they're deploying a Unix computer. They think they're installing a gadget they bought in a box that says video camera, video recorder, thermostat or whatever.

Facebook's 'delightful' AI Clippy the Paperclip creeps into Messenger

Re: and it will be as broken as Google is

"Sometimes one feels safer knowing that there are no musical groups comprised of alto clarinets, bagpipes, banjos, and violas."

I think our local arts centre could probably assemble one at fairly short notice.

Staff, projects shed as Ubuntu maker Canonical tries to lure investors

Re: Reason to invest with Canonical

And do it all without snooping.