Posts by dinsdale54

No-boom supersonic flights could slide through US skies soon

Tell me you haven't flown on Concorde without tellimg me you haven't flown on Concorde :lol:

The seats were plenty comfortable with loads of legroom. Headroom was limited but that's wasn't a problem once you are sitting down. The wine list was rather good. I don't recall any Foie Gras or caviar but I did have a decent steak - although obviously not as good as at Peter Luger the night before.

In 1998 my ticket was ~£800 London to New York, coming back on Concorde. Demand was quite low for the early flight back hence the good deal.

Need cash? Your IPv4 stash can now be collateral for $100M loans

Re: If the orange eejit gets a whiff of this...

A customer I used to deal with had a class A. Their chief technologist had decided in the early 90s that the internet was going to be a "big thing" and simply wrote and asked for one. It also meant that at the time I was dealing with them - late 90s - all the desktops in the company had a valid internet facing IP address!

It looks like they have sold off a lot of their space already, keeping a mere few hundred thousand addresses for their own use.

Europe's largest council kept auditors in the dark on Oracle rollout fiasco for 10 months

Re: The real truth ?

The spec is the spec.

It's what has been agreed to be delivered. If you change the spec then you are changing the contract - that doesn't usually come for free.

In the early part of my career I worked for a company that supplied systems to local government written in Oracle. The system was decently complex and did what it said on the tin. Most councils took it as is, or with a few customizations which were generally done on a T&M basis.

The couple of councils who asked for extensive customization were back using the standard system within a few years. They discovered that they weren't actually as special as they thought and the costs of maintaining a customized version outweighed any predicted benefits.

The quality of IT departments at the councils was a mixed bag. Some were pretty good while some didn't really have anybody who knew what they were doing. There were very few Oracle skills there. Somebody who actually got good at Oracle would likely be off for a better paying job pretty soon.

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Re: "it would suck"

A company I used to work for rewrote/ported its OS from a hand-rolled kernel to BSD. There was over 15 years of development work in the original and it took over 10 years before they had feature parity in the new one. It was a fair bit smaller than Linux.

As you say it's a HUGE amount of work. If you are relying on a small number of people, some working in their spare time to do this work you had better make a pretty good case for doing it.

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

Re: well...

Junior engineers may learn from their mistakes and become senior engineers.

That doesn't really happen with LLMs.

Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook

The legal profession is already filled with databases of existing legal cases with extensive search facilities.

The correct answer from AI should be "I don't have a fucking clue, how about you go and consult one of the existing, competent legal databases run by actual lawyers?"

It's like your overconfident bullshitting mate down the pub whose ability to make shit up was killed by the advent of google (this definitely wasn't me, of course not)

Open source router firmware project OpenWrt ships its own entirely repairable hardware

Re: So WiFi only for client connections. Really?

I doubt it as well.

This is why I purchased a Turris Omnia. The chunky CPU specs allow close to line speed (1gbps) routing. My previous home router couldn't handle the 250mbps connection I had at the time.

Hardly ANY reviews of home WiFi routers seem to mention the actual routing performance, just the WiFi bandwidth. A budget router may well not have the necessary CPU horsepower for faster internet connections.

AI hiring bias? Men with Anglo-Saxon names score lower in tech interviews

Re: You can't add arbitrary data to remove bias.

Yup.

In the mid 80s a schoolmate visited Manchester - possibly UMIST - and brought back an alternative prospectus put out by the students. There was a Q&A section for one of the engineering courses and one question was :

Q: Is there any sex discrimination?

A: No, she was not discriminated against.

Reaction Engines' hypersonic hopes stall as funding fizzles out

Re: They were always so bad at funding.

And like the Junkers engine, the Metrovick was powerful but unreliable. Whittle's original 1930 patent shows an axial compressor but the optimal solution on paper isn't always the most practical.

Wanted. Top infosec pros willing to defend Britain on shabby salaries

Those numbers seem low even if it's not London.

A relative started on 40K straight out of University as a junior dev and was on 60K within 18 months. That was 5 years ago.

Crypto scams rake in $5.6B a year for cyberscum lowlifes, FBI says

Re: Friend got scammed....

While learning about security is a sensible precursor to getting in to crypto, I'd start with considering the complete lack of any value to start with.

A friend is a greybeard programmer and at least 20 years older than anybody else he works with. All his team were in on crypto except him. At their last meeting he discovered that every one of them was out a decent amount of money from their 'investments' I think the smallest loss was about £8000 up to >£30,000. Somewhere somebody made money from them but the net is a large amount of energy was expended to move money from them to somebody else.

At least Charles Ponzi had a believeable story he was touting around the markets. Crypto doesn't even have that.

FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them

That was my approach however the movies I purchased on google play have been nerfed and can't be played in a browser at anything higher than 480p anymore. Oh well, I guess I can find an HD copy on torrent somewhere so I can watch what I actually paid for.

Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all

Re: "CIOs cannot turn their back on cloud."

Gartner generally aren't wrong because they ask their customers what they plan on doing, then write a report saying 'this is what everybody wil be doing'

The people they interviewed then have an 'independent' report to support doing exactly what they were already planning on doing.

Nice work if you can get it.

Techie told 'Bill Gates' Excel is rubbish – and the Microsoft boss had it fixed in 48 hours

Re: apostrophes for fun and profit

Personally I'd say the book is only being read by a single pedant.

Historically this goes all the way back to Which Tyler - the leader of the pedants' revolt.

Elexon's Insight into UK electricity felled by expired certificate

From Gridwatch - which I like because of the dials :

UPDATE

Tuesday 9th July

The TLS certificate on https://data.exelon.co.uk has expired, rendering their website and its data inaccessible

Regards Webmaster @ templar.co.uk

ITER delays first plasma for world's biggest fusion power rig by a decade

Re: 50 vs 500

Also doesn't include the power needed for containment - the 6,000 tonne magnet for example.

As fusion was "30 years away" when I was young (30 years ago) I will remain skeptical.

Former Fujitsu engineer apologizes for role in Post Office IT scandal

Re: Possibly controversial opinion...

I agree with some of this. He does seem to actually be trying to answer questions and isn't suffering from the intermittently faulty memory of many of the witnesses.

However on the technical side - which I guess is why most of us are here - the issue I have, and this was the same with his colleague Anne Chambers, is the clear assumption that the system was working fine and if they couldn't find a problem in the data after a cursory check then there wasn't a problem and it was somebody else's fault. To find bugs you have to actually go looking for them.

The whole culture of the PO and ICL/Fujitsu seems to have been to see everybody else as the problem when a good hard look in the mirror was needed.

British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'

Re: Attention customers

On the plus side, at least these bags got delayed due to a fault, not just because the baggage handlers couldn't be bothered to load the bags onto the plane and fucked off home - I'm looking at you, Firenze airport.

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Re: Too complex!

Early systemd looks exactly like a copy of the Solaris SMF - which fixed a number of issues with the init system - dependencies, parallelism etc.

I recall there was discussion at Sun about whether it was too big a change to the traditional init system. Systemd took that big leap as a starting point and has spent the next 15 years trying to devour all of Unix.

I have no idea whether that was always the plan or it's just a case of feature-itis.

Snowflake denies miscreants melted its security to steal data from top customers

Re: Any chance

Think how much the fine will be after the admin fee is added!

Starlink offers 'unusually hostile environment' to TCP

Re: We love it.

The issue that forced me to learn about this (referred to in another post) was a customer backing up data from Tokyo to Singapore IIRC. Plenty of bandwidth but significant packet loss.

My company ended up re-writing the data transfer protocol to use multiple tcp connectrions and making the send windows proportionally smaller. Packet loss then caused much smaller retransmits.

I see lots of comments about how Starlink is fantastic - which I agree with - but it's not what Geoff is discussing.

I've put in more time than I ever wanted to dealing with high latency jittery networks with packet loss. You can get in to all sorts of issues with large send and receive windows causing enormous retransmits at significant jitter or small amounts of packet loss. ~1% packet loss on a high latency network will pretty much remove your ability to to large data transfers, regardless of the theoretically available bandwidth.

The congestion control algorithm makes a big difference here. There are lots of them - which is a sign that none work well for all use cases. The author is making sensible suggestions as to which ones are well suited to Starlink.

Return-to-office mandates had senior employees jumping ship

A friend who did a couple of years working in Japan for a large computer manufacturer described their decision making process exactly like this. Meetings are where decisions are communicated, not made.

It does put the onus on the manager to ensure they talk to all the relevant people and listen to them but get that right and it's an efficient process.

A couple of IT projects I worked on for the military were similar. It took a while to understand the culture but it worked well - If you had a good manager.

Tesla devotee tests Cybertruck safety with his own finger – and fails

Re: Who's next

You know Mohels do circumcisions for free?

They don't get paid. The just collect tips.

I'll get my coat

Security pioneer Ross Anderson dies at 67

Re: Serpent

The AES spec determined that all entrants would use a 128 bit block size and at up to at least 256 bit key size. I believe Rijndael did offer larger block sizes but once it became AES that feature was dropped.

At the time, encryption was very CPU heavy. No custom functions in mainstream CPUs like today. We sold quite a few nCipher cards to customers wanting to run VPNs and suchlike. Limited use cases for them these days.

Virgin Media sets up 'smart poles' next to cabinets to boost mobile network capacity

They own the cabinet but not the lamppost.

So, no because ensuring 'appropriate community engagement has taken place' = NIMBY. No danger of getting anything installed if you have to get approval from the locals.

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

Re: We dont go for "uptime" records

Yes, that's generally a good policy. The time to find out whether a system restarts is not when you are trying to restart everything after a power outage.

Yes, there are likely caches in RAM which need to be rebuilt and will increase latency for a while.

Some years back I had an angry customer (investment bank) to deal with. One of our servers had crashed and taken down a trading application - despite being in a failover cluster. What the bank then discovered was that they didn't know how to restart the service - about 20 applications on a similar number of servers. The services had to be restarted in a specific order - which they didn't know since everything had been running for several years uninterrupted.

This is when I also learnt the lesson that the more somebody shouts at you, the more likely that it's their fault.

When red flags are just office decoration: Edinburgh Uni's Oracle IT disaster

Some years back, a colleague who had just joined from another Unix server company recounted a similar story.

They were running benchmarks on the soon to be released next gen systems and up to their neck with both hardware and software issues needing to be fixed before anything would run successfully. His WTF moment happend when the CEO passed him in the corridor and said 'I hear you are getting great benchmark numbers on the new systems'

It had only taken about 3 layers of management speak for the message to completely reverse from the truth.

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

Re: Call it molehilling.

ICANN wouldn't be able to charge for that.

They'd just collect tips.

While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?

Re: Likewise ...

In my many years in presales I dealt with a - thankfully - small number of really unpleasant organisations and individuals.

I once suggested a sales incentive where the top sales rep in the company won the right to tell a customer of their choice to go fuck themselves - regardless of the financial consequences.

I have never seen such enthusiasm from the sales reps for a reward scheme!

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

Re: So what was actually wrong?

Here's the code and the explanation of why it's moronically stupid.

This extract from EPOSSCore.dll has been written to reverse the sign of a

number and is equivalent to the command :-

d=-d

Public Function ReverseSign(d)

Ifd<o Then

d= Abs(d)

Else

d=d-(d*2)

End If

ReverseSign = d

End Function

Whoever wrote this code clearly has no understanding of elementary

mathematics or the most basic rules of programming.

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

Re: The possibilities are infinite

Read this witness statement / watch the testimony. It's depressing.

https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/witn00620100-david-mcdonnell-witness-statement

TL;DR :

The part of the system that was core to subsequent issues was known to be a badly written POS before launch.

The guy brought in to assess the system and remedy issues wasn't allowed to rewrite it and was moved on when he complained.

The was pressure from government to launch on schedule.

Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

Re: Vicious circle with high demand

You might want to check on that.

Uber have been pissing money away for years but they are now profitable.

https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2023/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Second-Quarter-2023/default.aspx

Sadly, this profitability appears to have coincided with their service getting much worse - in London at least.

Robocar tech biz sues Nvidia, claims stolen code shared in Teams meeting blunder

Re: Puzzled

Quite! This isn't slashdot (yet)

Will anybody save Linux on Itanium? Absolutely not

Re: Other VLIW systems

If somebody says they have a new architecture and part of the pitch is 'we can fix problem [X] in the compiler' - You should probably run rather than walk away.

At the couple of places I've worked where there was a compiler team - they were usually very cautious about what was achievable. It was the processor architects with some clever pet project who handwaved away significant problems as something for the compiler.

Apple might have to pay that €13B EU tax bill after all

Or an 'error of judgement' :)

TBF this is actually largely how tax law works. If you are found liable for a tax bill, the govt just wants the money. If you pay up, you generally are in the clear (apart from little people doing their tax returns obviously)

The important bit is not to keep evading tax after being investigated, that's when they throw the book at you. See Lester Piggott / Bernie Ecclestone. In Bernie's case, it was more of a leaflet they thew at him, in exchange for another £650 million.

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

Re: I've always been curious...

Sounds like a Bolt action rifle would be more appropriate.

It is 20 years since the last commercial flight of Concorde

Re: Gorgeous aircraft

My main memory is that they were noisy. I flew pre refurbishment and sitting in a window seat you had to speak up to the cabin crew in the aisle. Excellent wine list! I believe the work of Jancis Robinson.

The interior was small but once sitting down it was fine. The seats were comfortable, if a little vintage looking and you were only there for a bit over 3 hours.

I was booked for a 2nd flight when they were grounded.

I also cycled to Heathrow to watch the last commercial flights land there - 3 Concordes landing one after the other. It was VERY busy on all the perimeter roads.

Oh yes, the windows got hot to the touch.

Teardown reveals iPhone 15 to be series of questionable design decisions

Re: It cuts Apple’s costs, so they do it.

Agreed.

A pilot at DHL told me that the cargo needed to cover the cost of the flight was half a palette.

Planes are expensive compared to most ground transport but for high value items it's still noise on the bottom line.

Post Office Horizon Inquiry calls for compensation to be brought forward

Re: False

That's getting in to the weeds. There was evidence given during the enquiry that testing was taking place, concerns were raised about the quality and it was signed off for release anyway. The module that came in for the most criticism was the 'cash accounts' module that deals with --- in branch transactions.

Goodbye Azure AD, Entra the drag on your time and money

The quality of a product is inversely proportional to how often it is renamed.

I can't really think of any counterexamples from my working career.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Re: Maybe not.

Get a second hand Thorens TD150/TD160. Should be possible at that price.

If you also spend a bit more for a better arm then you effecively have a Linn Sondek with at least one zero missing from the price.

I ripped all my remaining vinyl and sold my TD150 to a mate so he could do the same thing.

Oracle pours fuel all over Red Hat source code drama

Re: Opensolaris anyone? @containerizer

Sun converted from BSD to SVR4 to try to end the Unix wars which set Unix back several years. On balance this was sensible.

Given that a lot of SVR4 IS SunOS, it wasn't a major technical challenge but it did result in a fair bit of change for existing users without any immediate benefit.

Sun was very innovative for many years. SunOS and then Solaris introduce a load of advanced features - some mentioned previously - so if you were on Solaris, you could do things that other people couldn't. In the early years there was NFS, NIS, RPC and then later SMF, Zones, ZFS, DTrace etc.

Working with Solaris was a good place to be for a long time.

NASA 'quiet' supersonic jet is nearly ready for flight

Re: Concorde, so loud

They were stupidly inefficient at low speed and when using afterburners. At mach 2 and 60,000ft they were incredibly efficient. The problem was getting up there.

Twitter rate-limits itself into a weekend of chaos

Additionally, Perhaps El Reg could consider not filling an article about how Twitter is difficult to access with endless links to Twitter. Duh!

Virgin Media email customers enter third day of inbox infuriation

Re: gmail ntlworld

To be fair, Google discontinued offering an email service to ISPs (which VM were using) so VM had no choice but to move it.

I had mostly moved to gmail many years before that when blueyonder were only offering a 30MB mailbox and gmail was offering 7GB. I still have some historic emails on VM that I need to dip in to once in a while. While I can now log in again, all emails before Monday evening are absent. As usual VM have offered no explanation or ETA that's anything other than $TIME+6hrs.

Crypto catastrophe strikes some Atomic Wallet users, over $35M thought stolen

I kept all my money in $SINGLEPOINTOFFAILURE has been stupid for as long as savings have existed. Crypto just seems like a good way to herd the financially naive into one place.

Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file

Re: COW

COW storage which saves you having to Moove it Moove it

Fujitsu bags £142M UK government work since Horizon probe announced

Don't forget the Horizon bit of Fujitsu is ICL as was. You would have to travel a long way to find a more useless bunch of fuckwits still operating.

My guess is that there are a bunch of entrenched systems that only they have the people to manage/develop and therefore they are still winning business.