Posts by Doctor Syntax 40413 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Migrating large amounts of data can be a pig, but our DBAs are more than up to the task if they're given sufficient notice to prepare"
I can testify to that. I've spent a few weekends doing that when the client's vendor released updates. As the site was warehousing it meant having the business clear a weekend so it needs more than simply IT planning.
Fortunately it didn't happen too often and, after all, it was billable ;)
"they are an IT house which does banking."
Sadly, not true. That's what they ought to be. It's what all banks ought to be. But are any of them? For an example of a bank's IT competence take this example from First Direct's page of what you need for internet banking:
modem (minimum speed 56kbp).
Please note: PCs and Macs connected to Local Area Networks are not supported.
Nobody told them that these days home users' PCs & Macs are normally connected to the net by ADSL or FTTC via wired or wireless LAN.
"NoSQL being used where RDBMS are more appropriate"
I'm beginning to suspect this is because of modern development methodologies. Don't bother to work out what you need, just dick with it till it's right, fix it in the next sprint & all that.
You can do that with code, no problem, but once a database is deployed & populated it becomes a pig to have to reorg large amounts of data. Cue DBAs taking the cattle-prod to the devs.
If you're going to use RDBMS you have to design (shock horror!) first so that what goes out into production can stay there with as few changes as possible for as long as possible.
"I'm leaning towards "This is BS", but absent any evidence either way, I just don't know."
Let me help a little.
Let's assume it's true that the files have been decrypted by the Russians, Chinese or whoever (RCow). Presumably this would mean that they'd discovered an intentional or deliberate back door in a supposedly solid cryptographic system. This raises a question: how would the UK or US know?
Possibly RCow took some action that revealed it. But remember that decrypting German cyphers in WWII was so sensitive that it was kept secret for decades afterwards. It was also so sensitive that not all information could be acted on & a disinformation operation was run to provide plausible alternative sources. Would RCow be so incompetent as to let slip, by incautious word or deed, what they'd accomplished. It strains credibility.
Alternatively perhaps the western cryptographers decrypted a message by RCow saying that they'd achieved this. The same reasoning applies. Would they then release this story and reveal what they'd accomplished?
I call BS.
"most of it is public information"
So it is but for any one person it takes time, effort & expense to locate as anyone interested in genealogy will tell you. You may run into multiple people with the same names and have to devote more time to sorting them out. Having it all neatly laid out by the data subject saves an awful lot.
"This is entirely different situation as we are not enemies with ourselves."
There is, in fact, a similarity. If my govt. wishes to spy on me it should do so with due process of law. It should go to a judge, or at least a magistrate, with sufficient a priori evidence to get a warrant. This concept of due process was introduced into English law by Magna Carta. In a few days, no doubt, the PM will be saying how great Magna Carta is & how splendid that this has been part of English law for the last 800 years - whilst being quite happy to see this principle violated.
An APT can't be expected to use due process. My govt. should. It is unacceptable if, like the APT, they don't.
"Nobody does spot checks on checksums for data that shouldn't be changing?"
That doesn't help with data that should be changing. Nor does it help with whatever the original vector was - that won't have changed and will still be a potential danger.
I'm not saying you're wrong to say flatten & rebuild as that's my view as well. But transferring the data cleanly to a new build isn't going to be easy as it will all need to be vetted.
And whilst this is happening business needs to continue. A long time ago someone described a particular migration as like transferring passengers from one aircraft to another in mid flight without waking them up. This sounds like another of those.
Where's the experiment? All you say is that there's a lot of Linux about. No experiment, thought or otherwise
And then you trip up by the comment about BSD being like Linux. You've got the resemblances in the wrong order. BSD is a Unix variant. Linux is a Unix-like OS - and one that's rapidly becoming less Unix-like in the estimation of many of us.
"It is still somewhat parochial, especially to those of us who are, thankfully, not within the gravitational field of the blackhole that is LUN DON."
I take it you're not a UK taxpayer. Because for those of us who are our money is definitely within the gravitational field.
"The thing is, no user cares, any more, what the underlying O/S is. They do care about the quality, range and ease of use of the applications they want to run.
And this is where Linux still falls down, flat on its face. "
I have a cousin-in-law who could be the archetypal uninformed user. For several years I had to go round to run his annual Sophos licence update before he had confidence to do it himself. I bumped into him in the street the other day & he asked me to call round & install Linux for him. He has an old Dell that's on XP. All he needs is a browser & I can install a choice of those for him. And a whole lot more he's probably never thought of but it's going to confuse him no end not having an A/V package.
"They're MEP's pretty much the most fairly elected and representative politician we'll ever encounter."
Powerless. You forgot powerless. The European Parliament is a fairly powerless talking shop.
It's the officials who have the power. They're appointed. We're not allowed to vote for them.
The powers given to the officials are given by treaties. We're not often allowed to vote on the treaties. When people have been allowed to vote & voted No they've been told to vote again until they gave the right answer.
So perhaps the disenchantment in Britain stems from the fact that we're not allowed to engage in any democratically meaningful way.
"Make it mandatory for all software licences to be registered centrally, and forbid unauthorised staff members from signing licences or contracts."
If there are no consequences for ignoring such mandates people will do so. Get the bean-counters to agree that any dept. the drops the business in it by breaking licensing rules will have any penalties that the vendors impose charged against them. If nothing else it will protect the IT budget.
I worked in a building that had Big Red Buttons (standard Radiospares product) at intervals along the corridors. They sounded the bomb alert. One day the alarm went off several times with consequent disruption. It was eventually traced to one of the cleaners who decided the the buttons needed polishing.
I spent over a decade dealing with terrorism amongst other crimes. My place of work was car-bombed. I survived handling an item that turned out to have been booby-trapped with explosives. So when I tell you that I think due process of law and presumption of innocence are right and unconstrained trawling wrong I think my arse is reasonably well informed. And yours?
"the Register's position on this topic"
It's news to me that the Register has a position. It publishes articles by individual writers.
"I really wish El Reg would just stay away from this topic altogether."
OTOH, if you're not happy with it you could stay away.
"to the embarrassment of everybody else that works there."
Citation needed. Has anyone who works there told you they're embarrassed? AFAICT they must be a fairly unembarrassable lot.
I don't have a problem with the idea of climate change. Of course climate changes. It's the sort of thing where change is the only constant.
I do have a problem with the current fad for taking short term noise & trying to imply that a long term trend can be distinguished in it. If there is a long term trend to global warming it'll only become clear in the long term. And at that point it will become possible to make reasoned attempts to explain it.
I also have a problem with treating models as holy writ. A model is a form of hypothesis and needs to be tested against reality. Given the long term nature of climate such testing could take some time.
If we don't lack terminology what term do we use to describe variations of temperature, precipitation, atmospheric & oceanic behaviour over the short periods up to a couple of centuries? If you want to call that "climate" what term do you use to describe the longer term variations on the scale of thousands of years?
Actually, I think we do have a good term for the shorter variations: "noise".
"Why do you expect to be rewarded for piling gold coins into a vault, and having a dragon sit atop it?"
He didn't complain about not being rewarded for piling gold coins into a vault and having a dragon sit atop it. He complained about banks paying poor interest and banks operate in a very different way. Most of the money they are lent by savers they lend out again to people who need it for some purpose. Generally the people who need it are prepared to pay for the benefit they receive from the loan. This makes everyone happy to varying degrees. The original lenders get a return on their savings. The banks make a return because they lend at a higher rate than they borrowed and the eventual borrowers hopefully get whatever benefit they were aiming for (if they didn't then they won't be happy).
And at present it's not working like that. Due to interest rates being kept lower than inflation the lenders are being ripped off.
The gold coins in the vault arrangement works very differently. The gold price fluctuates and you make your money by buying the gold coins when it's low and selling when it's high, a little detail nobody seemed to have explained to our former chancellor when he sold our gold at the bottom of the market.
"Housing prices were rising long before QE and have been for years - so you can't blame QE for this."
I think the causality runs the other way round:
1. Elimination of housing costs from inflation measures used to determine interest rates.
2. Off-shoring a lot of production of items in the inflation indexes leading to very low values for those indexes.
3. Maintained low interest rates in view of the low apparent inflation.
4. Low interest mortgages lead to bigger and bigger price rises for housing as all the cheap money goes there.
5. LOTS of financial shenanigans to tap off as much of that home loan business as possible including selling loans to people who can't possibly afford them.
6. BIG liquidity crisis as soon as the people who couldn't afford the loans start to default.
7. QE to fix the liquidity crisis.
8. Low interest rates due to QE fixing the liquidity crisis ultimately caused by too long a period of low interest rates in the first place.
If long continued overly low interest rates were the original problem it's difficult to see how continuing unduly low interest rates for a long time is going to solve it.
"Late this year, early next is the conventional wisdom here."
Yes it's been the conventional wisdom for several values of "this" & "next" now. It hasn't happened. Does this suggest that there might be a problem with the theory?
There's certainly a problem with the effect which is that although inflation might be low, when interest rates are lower savings lose their value. It's the unspoken intent, of course. For one thing it encourages people to spend instead of save and for another it's the loss of value of savings that makes the debt less burdensome in the future.
But people have savings for a reason: it's money they think they'll need in the future. So at some point in the future we discover that we haven't got the savings we need & there's damn all we can do about it. I think economists, instead of reading more & more papers & books about economics, should go and read TMMM, especially that bit about the tar pit. Because that description about pulling one paw out only to get another stuck more firmly seems to describe exactly what economic manipulation is doing: solving immediate problems at the expense of more problems which aren't immediately obvious.
This week both the machines & the checkout operators at B&Q were causing problems
Four items - I should have known that was one too many for the automated checkout. It refused to accept the last item was the right weight although it had accepted one previously.
Grab the items & go to one of only two manual tills in operation (since last time I was there they've replaced all the manual tills with new ones but still never seem to have more than one or two operators).
Despite the lengthening queues the operator, instead of checking stuff through & collecting money PDQ, is trying to get everyone to get one of the new loyalty (sic) cards. I complained. As I got to pay someone who was collecting cash from the tills (including the ones without operators!) got to mine. The operator put them off saying snarkily "this man's in a hurry". So I told her yes, I had to get away to go elsewhere to get the stuff they were out of stock of.
Two things that really annoyed me about this: way back my wife was in the initial staff of this store and at that time it was well staffed and well managed; and nearly as far back, I had a gig setting up the S/W for their allegedly super-duper distribution set-up - so how come they can't use it to keep stuff in stock?
In my first venture from the world of science into IT the shop was mostly VAX/VMS. The machine room was occupied by two operators sitting side by side watching two terminals. The terminals were displaying apparently identical streams of VMS messages. Both operators were called Simon. Looking back, that seems scary.
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