* Posts by EarthDog

436 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Dec 2014

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Pointless US Congress net neutrality vote will take place tomorrow!

EarthDog

Factional fighting.

This is a battle of for net neutrality barons vs against net neutrality barons. The bet is that the for oligarchy will give you more support that the against oligarchy fights you and it will give you the money you need to win elections.

Facebook stuck with IRS bill after court tosses $7 BEEELLION appeal

EarthDog

Re: Fight Fair IRS!

"Zuk is surveilling the world"

Fixed that for you, no charge.

EarthDog

six figures is gross

not net. If they are anything like other business take about 10% or less as net.

UK Ministry of Justice knocks down towers, brings IT BACK in-house

EarthDog

Re: Outsourcing - does it *ever* really work?

"If you actively manage, oversee and hold the outsourcer's feet to the fire, you can make it work."

If you replace "outsourcer" with employees you are in fact doing nothing different. There is no difference; you cannot walk away from project management, human negotiations, picking the right workers (every time I worked for a body shopI ended up being interviewed by the permanent staff as well as body shop managers), cost controls, etc. There is no free lunch.

EarthDog

Re: Tower of tickboxes

When I hear "Tower" I immediately think "Silos".

'Computer algo' blamed for 450k UK women failing to receive breast screening invite

EarthDog

So manslaughter is OK

Because preventing it it too costly.

Pentagon sticks to its guns: Yep, we're going with a single cloud services provider

EarthDog

Re: JEDI Cloud

Yes nice acronym. It reeks of marketing through and through. Now that's innovation!

Danish Navy expert finds no trace of exhaust gas in private submarine

EarthDog

what a Danish thing to do:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0342492/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

What a Docker shocker: Founder, CTO Solomon Hykes takes a hike

EarthDog

Re: Docker's future is bright

In my experience Docker really didn't help much in managing complexity. For any moderately sized project we ended have containers scatter around like jackstraws with hidden dependencies. Stateless is also fo limited value as there was, on my projects, a need to maintain state *somewhere*. So hacks had to be used to not only save state but to ensure consistency. It turned out to be tricky.

Windows 10 to force you to use Edge, even if it isn't default browser

EarthDog

Look on the bright side.

We can party like it's 1999 and 9/11 hasn't happened yet.

EarthDog

Do the right thing

Is the new motto. It changes a while back. But they do not mention for who.

Screw everything! French swingers campsite up for sale, owners 'tired'

EarthDog

Re: professional restaurant

sausage and gravy?

Woe Canada: Rather than rise from the ashes, IBM-built C$1bn Phoenix payroll system is going down in flames

EarthDog

Re: Without reading the contract specs or anything, I would think their would be withholds

Because ethics and professionalism. This is why we will never has Software Engineering, no one cares.

EarthDog

IBM cop out

They are the professionals. They could, for a fee, helped define the system with the Gov't. I've been through such exercises and this was the way it was done. We had people compare systems, look at workflows, and then help map data and functions. IBM's "you tell us what to do and then we take your word for it" is a cop out.

EarthDog

What was wrong with the old one?

And why can't we move back? Duh! There's always a defacto fallback which is often less complicated than building a whole new system.

EarthDog

Re: It doesn't sound like an IBM problem at all

obviously the users don't know how to use the software and refuse to change the reality of how payroll is done to meet the software's expectations.

Huawei's Not Hot Dog is possibly the Worst Tech Promo Ever

EarthDog

Re: Yikes...

Do you mean the one where it successfully IDs a hot dog, pizza, sandwich, cheese burger, blood sausage, and a bottle of chlorine bleach?

Marketing had them cover those up so it wouldn't make the company look bad....

Intellisense was off and developer learned you can't code in Canadian

EarthDog

And use a transaction block for a test run through so you can roll back

EarthDog

He should've used North

It seems to have died out but it combined the elements of C, Fortran, and uniquely Canadian constructs. I can't remember all the details but programs looked sort of like this,

While beer>0 eh?

if needsbeer(hoser) eh

openbeer(hoser) eh

if beer < 3 eh

hoser<- buddy eh

fin

fin

It also came with the Hockey framework and the back bacon library.

EarthDog

And as the joke goes, they all suck :)

We all hate Word docs and PDFs, but have they ever led you to being hit with 32 indictments?

EarthDog

Yes, you can add a digital check sum to it. If the version changes, the checksum changes. It allows you to track versions.

EarthDog

That reminds me of a story. I was working on a project for a large government organization. We were accepting a new app from a 3rd party and learning the system. The system could run a official report and then save it off. Well it saved it off but for 2 problems; the document which was an important legal document was neither locked nor signed. Which of course meant it could be easily tampered with. I was working QA on that one and flagged as a security breach (said government agency was paranoid about security).

We went to the vendor and asked for a fix. They considered it no big deal. One person went so far as to say "EarthDog cares about it but no one else does". Once our customer found about it they was rather upset.

That lack of professionalism is why I hate working in software.

Bosch and Daimler jump in together on driverless vehicle tech

EarthDog

Free self driving car!

Just sign this EULA over here absolving the company of all blame in case of an accident and permitting it to harvest and sell your personal information. You know, like how often you got to fast food restaurants or pick up booze at the liquor store.

Facebook's big solution to combating election ad fraud: Snail mail

EarthDog

Re: 'The identity theft detailed in the indictment'

But they were transparent about who they were and what their agenda was.

EarthDog

They can use street view as well.

Just use the same tool as you. Tech cuts both ways you know.

Three in hospital after NSA cops open fire on campus ram-raid SUV

EarthDog

White people can't be terrorists in the US.

EarthDog

Re: really?

moving target or not? Adrenelin or no?

EarthDog

Re: really?

In Afghanistan and Iraq it was discovered 5.56mm had poor performance stopping a truck bomb due to poor penetration. NATO 7.65mm became the preferred round of choice. If you look at the picture the SUV has close to a 45% slope on the windshield. That would be my guess.

Due to Oracle being Oracle, Eclipse holds poll to rename Java EE (No, it won't be Java McJava Face)

EarthDog

Re: Isn't it obvious?

As I posted (too soon! I didn't see this post. sorry) earlier it has "Krac" in it.

EarthDog

Krakatoa? It has Krac in it.

EarthDog

Folgers? Maxwell? Might get sued by Folgers. Might get away with it if you say it was named after the scientist.

EarthDog

Go with a planet motif

I'd like to see Planet 10, Nemesis, or maybe GJ 1214 b

Electronic Frontier Foundation chap John Perry Barlow has died

EarthDog

Re: Before we all get wet eyed ...

In the 1800's it was normal. As was life threatening child labor (which, let's face, prostitution is), toxic food (which we aspiring for these days), banks defrauding people, tainted water supply, etc.

The good 'ole days were not so good.

EarthDog

Also sued oil and gas companies.

Back in the 90's there was an oil and gas boom in N. Wyoming [1]. The oil and gas companies were their usual cheerful selves; ripping through fences lines, cutting roads through pastures, dumping crap all over the place, etc. So Barlow, being a local boy, gets upset and demands they stop.

Of course the companies, including Haliburton which Dick Cheney was running at the time, chuckled and said, "you go run off little fella before you get hurt". They thought they were up against a dirt rancher. They did not realize he was a rock star writer with deep pockets and lots of friends.

So in the end the companies had to give in and reach agreements to minimize damage when exploring and drilling on private land. They coulddn't be stopped as they had the mineral rights, but thy had to make sure the surface rights users weren't impacted.

[1] I was one of many cynical veterans of booms riding it at the time.

EarthDog

Too bad he didn't go into brain surgery as well.

Women beat men to jobs due to guys' bad social skills. Whoa – you mad, fellas? Maybe these eggheads have a point...

EarthDog

Re: What the hell...

Nurse: Do you think this is a good idea?

Doc: Shut up woman. I'm the doctor here!

!bzzzzt!

(patient dies)

Doc: nurse, clean up that mess.

Next patient!

EarthDog

Re: Wow...

So your dead career is all women's fault?

EarthDog

Re: wtyf

There are entire boooks and workshops for women on the topic. They are not just sitting around passively.

EarthDog

Re: "when their kids no longer need any parental care."

In the US most families, there is no choice in *most* cases. You must make approx. 50k usd/yr to take care of a family of 4. And America's largest employer, Wal-Mart, does not pay much above minimum wage. And no, forcing everyone to get a college degree will never work.

With wages lagging inflation; esp. the cost of shelter, transportation, education, and medical care; having a single bread winner does not work.

EarthDog

Re: Gender roles are the problem

And men who wish to stay home with the kids need more respect. Women do not get much respect for it, men less. This is one of the things I meant when I wrote in a previous post that Feminism can liberate both mean and women.

EarthDog

Re: wtyf

I've worked places where both men and women have it. If your workplace doesn't find a better job.

EarthDog

Re: Wow...

What do you mean by equal? In what way? No 2 people are ever equal. What does that prove?

EarthDog

Re: positive discrimination - between their legs and not skills.

There's no such thing as positiv discrimination. Either there is discrimination or not.

DevOps: Bloody hell, we've got to think about security too! Sigh. Who wants coffee?

EarthDog

Cultural transformation will never happen

As long as management is in a high speed race for more profit. Security blocks time to market is cannot be sold. There is no "our application costs 10% more because it is 50% more secure" in the mix.

EarthDog

Behave as adults

I recently worked on a government project which required slightly higher security than normal. Security painted several stakes in the ground such as all libraries must be scanned and vetted, all tools must be scanned and vetted, patch levels must stay in synch etc. In other words, be having as adults.

The resistance on the team was unbelievable. They were all refugees from the private sector ( *cough* CA *cough* HPE *cough* IBM *cough* Oracle *cough*) who were working fast and loose with OSS to meet marketing deadlines.

I was working QA at the time and was backing up the security team. We was working to help ensure they played nice. Telling them things like they could not use the latest shiny shiny without proper vetting did not go over well. They kept screeching "waterfall! waterfall!" when it really wasn't. It was just another requirement to meet.

Your basic private sector developer has no clue what a modicum of security means and DevOps "Engineers" had no real ideas in the beginning on how to implement it. It took quite a while to get it right. But there was no compromise on meeting the minimum standard.

But basically it came down to vet the libraries, scan them, patch ASAP, vet and scan your own code, and good QA which included tests for various vulnerabilities. Basically, behave as responsible adults.

One thing we did do which security was quite happy about was in code reviews in pull requests. It even allowed us to meet some requirements immediately. They accepted as good practice without much fuss.

So just be an adult!

AWS looks to tech old guard, hires EMEA boss

EarthDog

Hopefully not infected

He started pre-Carly. Hopefully he avoided being infected by her lerperous leadership.

Eggheads: Cities, don't woo rich Amazon with sweetheart HQ deals

EarthDog

Re: Monorail

Dag nabbit you beat me to it.

EarthDog

Re: Game theory

Denver flat out does not want it. Even the Governor is not really thrilled at the prospect. Remember Colorado flat out refused the Olympics in 1976. I don't even know Bozos has it on the list given past history.

NASA finds satellite, realises it has lost the software and kit that talk to it

EarthDog

Often that is how Astronomy works

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