Posts by Doctor Syntax

Lessons from the Mini: Before revamping or rebooting anything, please read this

Re: I was assuming this would be a look at the mini...

"Have fond memories of the the dear old Maxis."

I don't. Horrible contraption although it did have the disadvantage of following on from my MGB (kids to carry). The engine would rock itself out of gear on the overrun. It had an oil leak from around the gear selector and the seal could only be replaced from the inside of the sump so that never got done.

As to the original Mini, cute for sure but I never liked driving it. I have too many memories of driving on country roads on winter evenings where the headlamps were so low they were coated in mud almost instantly. Nevertheless AFAICR we drove the Botany Dept. Mini up both Slieve Gallion and Slieve Gullion which might explain how it ended up with lumps knocked out of the fins on the sump. At least it had the original sliding windows; the wind-up windows meant the end of the door pockets which were most of the interior storage.

Microsoft kinda did OK this quarter – but whatever, Wall Street loves Satya Nadella

Re: re Downvote

"anything critical of Microsoft seems to get downvoted these days."

Not quite anything. When the news is something particularly egregious they seem to keep their heads down. But it was informative that the first vote on your post was a downvote, so have an upvote for balance.

Despite best efforts, fewer and fewer women are working in tech

Re: Yup, women are smarter.

'In 2016 its still ok for your average 20 to 30 something to say "I dont really know computers"...Older than 50...I kinda get it, set in your ways etc etc.'

Amongst tech people it also seems to be OK to say "I don't really know history".

The Intel 8080 was introduced in 1974. That's 42 years ago. It was preceded by the 8008 and 4004. So your 50 year-olds were just kids at the time. They weren't the ones who were going to set those early micros to work. It was people who were already mid-career with enough experience of earlier generations of mainframes and/or minis to see the possibilities. A little calculations should show you that in fact we're in our 60s & 70s now.

There seems to be an assumption that people over 50 can't possibly understand about computers. Wrong!

The Internet of Things is 'dangerous' but UK.gov won't ride to the rescue

Re: UK.Gov, non merci

"It has nothing to do with the Government."

Maybe it's also nothing to do with Government that electrical equipment has to reach minimum safety standards before it's put on sale. Maybe it's nothing to do with Government that vehicles have to meet safety standards before being put on sale. Maybe it's nothing to do with Government that children's toys mustn't use toxic paint.

But, of course, Government does have a say in all these things. Why should it not also be able to mandate that stuff to be connected to at least the local section of the net meets appropriate digital safety standards before it's put on sale?

Yahoo! begs! US! spymaster! Clapper!: Spill! the! beans! on! secret! email! snooping!

Re: So long, and thanks for all the fish

'You assume of course that... the hardware/software hasn't already been "cleansed"'

A purchaser would be unwise to make such an assumption.

Re: Unpopular opinion time...

"But Yahoo are gagged"

Actually they do have an option. They have the option that MS took with email on the Irish server, the option that Apple took. Being prepared to say publicly "we won't do that" and being prepared to go to court to justify that could have earned them some respect which would have helped offset the reputational damage of the data breach. Instead they've had two missteps leaking out. The breach and going along with the scanning now serve to reinforce each other in the public's mind and the fact that they apparently weren't going to admit anything until word leaked out only makes things worse.

Third of Donald Trump's debate deplorables are mindless automatons

Re: Only a third???

The other two thirds are the bots.

NSA, GCHQ and even Donald Trump are all after your data

'His Trumpness wants Apple to make its "damn computers and things" in America'

I'm sure that if push came to shove Apple could decide to cease to be an American company. All it would have to do would be to go where its money-bags are currently lodged.

"Then along came Privacy Shield which, after a false start, addressed data protection concerns"

This doesn't even begin to make sense. It's false through and through and doesn't in the least address data protection concerns. That's why I refer to it as a fig-leaf, not a shield. I'm quite sure it will be torn down by the ECJ.

Copyright zealots FAST to pursue 'far greater' fines for historic piracy

Re: Are they going to persue the Linux kernel pirates?

Maybe an uninvited move into GPL enforcement is the next step.

Re: How will they demonstrate historic loss?

"The courts will need proper proof of loss, not extravagant assertions."

I'd guess they hope to avoid this. Make extravagant assertions but offer to settle for a much smaller amount if it doesn't go to court.

Tesla's big news today:
sudo killall -9 Autopilot

"Until then the AI is expected to keep you safe whilst surrounded by unpredictable human driven cars."

And even then, should that come to pass, it will have to deal with other unpredictable elements of the environment, human and otherwise.

Re: Wot! No rear facing Radar?

"I prefer Motorways with always on speed cameras"

So you prefer the drivers around you to concentrate their attention on one small aspect of road safety at the expense of watching what's happening around them?

Openreach split could damage broadband investment, says BT's chief exec

Re: No one is saying Pointless G.fast can't do the job - up to a poiint.

"Or you could write to the Chief Exec or the Chairman of the Board."

Yup. Write to the chairman. It used to be a good ploy and probably still is.

Re: Open Reach Split

"Whilst separating pension assets and liabilities is not a trivial taslk BT managed it many years ago when they sold their original mobile business."

Actually they didn't sell it. It was split out. BT shareholders received an O2 share for each, now devalues, BT share they owned. It was these shares that Telefonica then bought from the then shareholders.

Whether this was a good idea is questionable given that BT has since paid to buy back into the mobile business.

I'm also not sure how well the pension worked out given that anyone working for BT Mobile who retired before the split is now being paid a pension from the BT scheme.

Re: Pensions ...

"As soon as interest rates finally start to go up"

But in whose lifetime?

Re: Pensions ...

"And take responsability for missmanaging the pension funds?"

See previous comments about how pension funds actually work.

Re: Pensions ...

"I reckon they could afford to pay a little more than £250m in the later years of their recovery plan"

Here's a little exercise for you. You are in charge of BT's finances. Your have £1bn available. You have claims both for investing in infrastructure and payments to the pension fund. If you pay that £1bn into the pension fund how much do you have left over for investment?

Re: Pension scheme.

"So, their argument is, that because they can't run a pension scheme properly, they should be allowed to monopolise the market to pay for their incompetence?"

As per another comment, the pension scheme is run by a separate, specialist company as is normal. The trustees represent BT and employees.

The deficit is a partly result of the Treasury/IR/HMRC screwing pension schemes over the years (Exhibit A: Gordon Brown's ditching tax relief on dividend income for pension funds; clearly a tax on the future as seen from the 1990s and now we are in that future. Exhibit B: the tax-man's suspicion that pension funds* are a vehicle for secreting profits leading to enforced contribution "holidays" when the fund gets in surplus in economic good times, in turn leading to deficits in bad times because of the missed contributions; we've had a lot of those bad times lately. Exhibit C: low interest rates and QE cutting the income from bonds used to pay pensions; IOW more bad times).

The deficit might have been made worse by the cutting of headcount over the years. There are now fewer contributing members but many surviving ex-members who are receiving or will be due to receive pensions.

The consequence is that BT is making extra payments to try to get the fund back into balance. That's money that can't be invested in infrastructure.

But don't let's have facts getting in the way of a good rant.

*The tax-man doesn't have to worry about the funding of his pension. That's essentially a Ponzi scheme.

Yahoo! hides! from! financial! analysts! amid! email! hacking!, privacy! storm!

Re: Hello I'm Yahoo!

"any revenue consequences on the NSA's bed warmer from this won't be reflected in these figures."

Revenue consequences won't be. Payments for services rendered might be squirrelled away in there somewhere.

You work so hard on coding improvements... and it's all undone by a buggy component

Re: Tower of Abstraction Syndrome

"taking a dependency means taking the responsibility of ensuring that it is secure, and continues to do what you want it to do over time."

Sadly true but the responsibility really ought to lie with the provider of the code.

Re: Best practices like remediation coaching and eLearning

"They are also running a devops security roadshow tour at this very moment"

What a remarkable coincidence. My flabber is utterly ghasted.

Re: Over egging the pudding maybe

"Just because an application CONTAINS a component with a vulnerability does NOT mean that the bug is exploitable in the application. It is very very frequent that applications will include a jar-file for a very specific purpose, pass a very restrictive set of inputs to the code in question and exercise a very small fraction of the included code."

If you don't know the bug's there and what it is you've no way of knowing that your very restrictive set of inputs passed for your very specific purpose won't exercise the small fraction of code that includes the bug.

Re: DevSecOps ? We're really going there ?

'I think we should probably actually just talk about it as "DevOps."'

I think we should just talk about the good old-fashioned maintenance phase. The long-lasting part of software's life into which it's launched by the development phase.

Re: Biased?

"Two years to fix that little number."

Let's look at that a little more closely.

As far as I can make out from wonkypedia the code with the bug was released in March 2012. It was discovered independantly by at least two lots of researchers in mid-March and the beginning of April 2014. It was disclosed to the developers in early April. How did they discover it? By examining the open source code. Had it been closed source it wouldn't have been discovered let alone disclosed. It was announced to the public and a fix released on the 7th of April.

In other words, from disclosure to fix took about a week. By my calculation that's about 1% of the time you allege. The two years was the time it took to discover. Had it been closed source that time would have been somewhere between longer and never.

"If you're not *paid* to go searching for problems, assuming you actually have the skill and know-how, how often do you do so?"

And even if you're paid, as the discoverers were, how do you do so when you can't review the closed source?

But, hey, don't let facts and details get in the way of a good rant.

Re: Levels of blame...

"Also APIs change over time - consequently the application also needs to change."

Wrong way round.

APIs might grow but should not change or remove existing functionality therefore the application should not need to change except to take advantage of such extended functionality

Why offer and API if you don't intend it to be used?

Why use it if isn't stable?

By offering an API a responsible developer is making an implicit offer that it will not change. Unfortunately there are irresponsible developers and/or maintainers out there but an API which fails to maintain backwards compatibility deserves to get a bad reputation. Developers, and their users, have better things to do than keep chasing changes made by other developers with twitchy fingers.

Re: Levels of blame...

'Behavioural dependencies can be very subtle, no amount of unit/integration testing will cover them all (100% is not enough, people will depend on officially "undefined" results).'

Such people deserve a good smack on the head from each of the users on which they've inflicted their code.

One of the many good points discussed in TMMM was whether a written spec or a working example should be taken as the working standard. The example given was the 360 H/W where programmers came to rely on the data left in some registers after an operation where the contents of those particular registers was undefined in the written spec. It then tied the designers to maintain that particular behaviour in future generations of the H/W whether they wanted to or not.

Unit tests give a third alternative. Publish the unit tests of a library. If the functionality of the library is added to or bugs fixed more unit tests can be added but no test should be changed or removed*. That guarantees backwards compatibility, it gives users a set of examples to use. And, importantly, any behaviour which isn't covered by the tests cannot be relied upon. Any developer who assumes some behaviour not covered in the tests does so at their own risk.

*If the need to change or remove some functionality arises it's time to start out under a new name or at the very least, a new major version number so that the old version can still be made available for applications needing the old functionality.

Re: Levels of blame...

"The closest we get is things like Javascript libraries and XML DOM's where you can instruct a browser to run off and download the latest JQuery or use a particular version of the Google web fonts or whatever, and it tries its best to do so. And that works quite well, to be honest. Millions of website rely on it."

You think that's a good idea? The application now depends on a component downloaded on the fly form a source where neither the website developer nor user has any control unless, as a use, you run NoScript. The newly downloaded component could have been updated so that it no longer supports the required functionality, has become buggy or has been out-and-out converted into malware. Or, as in an earlier comment, suddenly been made unavailable because of a spat between the developer, the site hosting it for download and, in that particular case, action over a trademarked name. And the situation cascades. NoScript users are familiar with the situation that allowing one address suddenly brings in requests to allow a whole lot more.

What you describe as working quite well is actually far less regulated than a distro's curated repository.

NHS patients must be taught to share their data, says EU lobby group

Re: Of course not.

"there might well be some sort of data-sharing clause in there as a matter of course."

Some of the principles of data protection (from the ICO's site.

2. Personal data shall be obtained only for one or more specified and lawful purposes, and shall not be further processed in any manner incompatible with that purpose or those purposes.

5. Personal data processed for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes.

6. Personal data shall be processed in accordance with the rights of data subjects under this Act.

7. Appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data.

I think that should be sufficient to rule data sharing clauses illegal. In particular, passing data out of control of the original custodian makes 7 particularly difficult to achieve.

Oh, and look at this one:

8. Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data.

So much for the Privacy Figleaf.

Re: Trust is earned

Just that. And governments everywhere are doing the exact opposite of what they need to do to earn it. How long is it going to take for them to realise this?

First earn trust by accepting that past behaviour is wrong and stopping it. That means more than having a tribunal tell you that you were wrong in the past because you were misusing legislation. That idea of "wrong" can be fixed by continuing to do the same under different legislation. It wasn't wrong because of the legislative framework, it was just wrong. So TPTB need to recognise that, publicly acknowledge it, apologise, and stop it.

Then start afresh. Make the data protection principles the basis of all handling of personal data. Share data only with specific informed consent. Give feedback to data subjects as to when and how data is shared. Make it a condition that when data is shared under consent it cannot be further shared without new specific informed consent. If this is breached each data subject should be entitled to a payment sufficiently large to make such breaches unprofitable with damages where the data subject has suffered actual loss as a consequence (e.g. medical history passed to an insurance company that then raises rates).

May blocked plans to bring in more Indian IT workers – Vince Cable

Re: As a British IT worker....

"spend their last few days in employment pretending to teach their cheaper successor the ropes"

With a bit of thought this could be turned into an opportunity. Consultancy to fix up the mess the successor makes could be much more lucrative than the original job.

Basic income after automation? That’s not how capitalism works

"many of the people working today are not saving for their own retirement, they are still paying for the retirement of the previous generation of workers who got lucky in the life-expectancy versus actuaries-estimates failure."

The real problem here is that, at least in the UK, the state and the Civil Service pension schemes are essentially Ponzi arrangements. I'm not sure if there was any actuarial planning at all when they were set up. If the IR, as it then was, had had a genuine contributory pension scheme along the lines of private industry's funds I doubt that they'd have done away with tax relief on dividends of such funds or taken the short termist enforcement of contribution "holidays" which have left so many of those private pension schemes in deficit.

"but people only have 2 feet, therefore we need more people or we need them to buy more shoes."

The only consequence of having two feet is that shoes are bought in pairs. The relationship between numbers of feet and numbers of shoes is that the latter is an ever increasing integer multiple of the former.

Re: Simple

"Will automation result in other jobs opening up for these people, once their taxi/truck has become completely autonomous?"

Yes, operating the tow trucks to rescue all the autonomous HGVs that have become stuck having been satnaved into routes which were totally unsuitable.

Re: Err

"Thanks to the wonders of feminism women have less leisure time than ever before."

Really?

I grew up in the late '40s-early-'50s in a house that had no electricity. Doing the family wash occupied at least a full day of my mother's time once a week. Clothes had to be washed in a tub which had to be filled up by bucket. They had to be wrung dry by a heavy hand-cranked mangle. In the absence of modern fabrics they all had to be ironed - without the help of an electric iron. But perhaps you count all that as leisure.

Re: Fallacy

"Most of the workers in those industries were unskilled and when the coal mine/steel mill/factory closed there weren't any new jobs in the area that they were qualified for and they weren't able to re-train for anything else."

It was the lack of new jobs that was the real problem. The old industries closed because of cheaper overseas competition. The early C19th mechanisation of those industries also made old skills obsolete but replaced old jobs with many new ones. The challenge governments face now is to recreate that situation.

Re: Fallacy

"If your skill set is no longer needed in your profession because the job has been automated, there may well still be human work to be done in the form operating and monitoring the new automated equipment but this is not part of your skill set and you are now out of a job."

This was the argument being made in my area about a century ago when one of the cloth making processes was mechanised. In fact the population in the area grew hugely in the following decades as employment in the textile industry soared. Those new recruits didn't arrive with the appropriate skills, they had to learn them to adapt from previous trades just as the Luddites would have had to do.

Re: Errrm

"But there are many more cars now than there were horse carts then"

If you see early films of London the streets were just as crowded as they are now but with horse drawn traffic. I suppose, however, that London itself is bigger.

Re: Errrm

"I must admit I gave up reading the article after that example as it was so bad."

Given that the operator was referred to as "she" the obvious corollary was missed: she will simply buy more shoes.

Orange blows up French govt website in terrorism censorship snafu

Hmm. A few "accidents" along those lines might make govts realise that messing with DNS might make life harder than they like.

US government wants Microsoft 'Irish email' case reopened

"Which means plenty of paperwork and getting it right with t's crossed and i's dotted and other such things that your typically lazy bureaucrat doesn't want to do."

It also means having to provide a pro facie case. Either they didn't have that or were too secretive to put it forward.

Re: I've chosen to not use those services

"Surely even the Merkins wouldn't expect to legally get MS to raid your personal email server."

They might expect MS to raid your email client if it's running on W10.

Re: users don't control where data resides?

"Yes, you work in IT ... d'oh! Joe Public cannot."

Not true. For one thing most ISPs offer en email service. Of course that's not ideal either as it makes flitting between ISPs more inconvenient than having a separate email provider. It takes a minimal effort to find a 3rd party provider as soon as you get over the idea that you might have to pay for such a service.

"In its new filing, the DoJ focuses not on where the data is stored, but who controls it."

Neither seems to be the appropriate issue. The issue should be whose data it is. For email the data belongs to the user. The controller of the server on which is resides is simply the trustee and messing about with the law governing trusteeship could severely damage your entire financial system.

Apple's car is driving nowhere

"Not wasted as such, they may come about one day and the same info and laws will be in place and apply equally."

If you give permission before the technology is ready then you're apt to get technology that isn't ready unleashed on the public roads. Correct sequence should be develop first, then prove that what you've developed is fit for purpose and only then should permission to deploy be granted.

Yahoo! cancels! earnings! call!, dodges! hacking! questions!

"we keep people connected to what matters most to them"

What would that be? The TLAs?

Hey! spies! Get! in! here! and! explain! this! Yahoo! email-scanning! 'kernel! module!'

I find it reassuring that your representatives in Congress are finally getting the idea that this sort of thing isn't good. I look forward to the day our own representatives in Parliament cotton on to it.

Blighty's Home Office database blunders will deprive hundreds of GB driving licences

Re: Stasi nation

"We need an election as soon as possible, ... May & all being considered representatives of a Nazi state"

You've clearly forgotten that what they're doing is responding to what they believe was the expressed will of a majority or the electorate, albeit a narrow one, as expressed in the referendum. Assuming for a moment that that belief was correct* how do you think a general election would change matters?

*I'd like to think it isn't but he spate of xenophobic assaults since the referendum result is far from reassuring.

The IRS spaffed $12m on Office 365 subscription IT NEVER USED

Re: I can see it now...

"Add in some off-shore data centers"

At least Microsoft would be prepared to go to court to stop the FBS snooping on the IRS.

You've been hacked. What are you liable for?

Re: About time too

"not collecting information they don't need in the first place."

I'm not sure this will even occur to them. In the first place those making the decisions will probably have filled in a few online forms asking them for data that wasn't needed & will accept this as just the norm. In the second place wants will carry more weight than needs.