Posts by W.S.Gosset

Theranos vampire lives on: Owner of failed blood-testing biz's patents sues maker of actual COVID-19-testing kit

Re: Theranos?

> No, I'm sure he fought The Avengers...

No, I'm sure the Flask was DC not Marvel...

Say what, now?

> the worst pandemic that the world has known for 100 years

Errr... try 10 (11?). And that's only because the later MiddleEast one fizzled.

And the 1950s & 1960s pandemics killed over a million people each.

Factor in that the epidemiologists are saying coronavirus's actual mortality rate is much lower than its already-low apparent mortality rate (on the basis of more people being currently infected than are aware of being infected, because of its relatively slight symptoms and because its symptoms mimic ordinary cold+flu).

Basically, if you're not in your 70s+ or you haven't got CVD/heart problems or diabetes, you're looking at a normal flu season. During which many thousands die routinely each year.

C'mon, ElReg, don't YOU start in on the hysteria meme, too. We expect better from your beacon of sanity.

Tencent is now bigger than Cisco and Lenovo – and predicts this virus thingy will help it get bigger still

Re: Constantly confused

hey these timestamps are weird, eh? my post's is showing 2 mins earlier than yours but appearing below it.

we both had basically the same thought :D

Tencent?

At this rate, they'll have to change their name to Fiddy.

America: We'll send citizens cash checks amid coronavirus financial hardship. UK: We'll offer £330bn in biz loans

Re: UK Contractors

A/ I was pointing out Opportunity. An additional capacity/capability. I was NOT seeking to imply that contractors all desperately need a large sum of cash or else catastrophe.

B/ Having said that, this opportunity is transient so I would think if the terms are near-0 then it only makes sense to avail oneself of this free money. If you're cash-blocked on a particular asset you need, then you can get it. Or clear a high-cost debt (AKA re-financing). Or, if you're just in normal-town, then to invest somewhere (eg in UK: an ISA) -- you then, for free, earn the difference between the investment and the near-0 funding cost. Government-guaranteed too, so will not affect your credit rating or access to future credit eg mortgage.

(My trading&fundsmgt background is showing :)

UK Contractors

The vast bulk of UK IT contractors are "businesses" (per Company House/commercial status irrespective of separate tax IR35 status) and therefore should qualify for these guarantees/loans.

Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, surely has no frozen water, right? Guess again: Solar winds form ice

Re: Temperatures can soar over 400C

M. Christin would be far from the first and far from the last person to have his/her contribution written out of the science paradigm by Tha Boyz. :) E.g., the chap who discovered that arteries work precisely the opposite way round from "medical science"'s understanding, not only did not get the Nobel Prize for it, but the 2 chaps who excitedly asked to help him out on some subsequent work DID. I was there at the Royal Institution when its head did the scientific community version of tearing the Nobel Committee a new arsehole for this. Very publicly with the lights on him, cameras rolling, going internationally. Didn't work -- the committee is as answerable as ICANN. There is more arbitrariness and bitchiness in "science" than you can poke a pointed stick at.

Having said that, "Celsius" works better as a scale-name than Christin. I reckon. ;)

Re: Temperatures can soar over 400C

Well-lllll.... the chap who picked up the hourglass and observed that it made more sense for time to run forwards than backwards, so maybe the numbers being jotted down should go up over time rather than down, certainly has developed something markedly more sane and useful and contributory than the first.

Re: Temperatures can soar over 400C

Sorry jake, HildyJ's correct. The scale we use was created by a Frenchman. Jean-Pierre Christin.

The scale Celsius created was identically centigrade but inverted: water boiled at 0° and froze at 100°.

If you're looking for a textbook example of an IT hype cycle, let spin be your guide

Re: Optical metamaterials are just rescaled RF antenna theory

I agree with both of you, but Paul you take a quantum step upwards in scope and perspicacity with your final point re mindset change & reimagining of potential for use. An excellent observation, an outstanding one.

Supply, demand and a scary mountain of debt: The challenges facing IT as COVID-19 grips the global economy

Re: seems..to have no idea what "left wing" means and confuses it with "..socially progressive."

To be fair to Khaptain, Benson'sCycle, your usage is essentially never seen outside academia. "Would-be socially progressive" would be a fair description of how "left wing" has been used by 99% of westerners for many decades, certainly since WWII. (The NHS was left wing at the time.) It extends the original core concept, to include the acquisition of implied social status by forcing others to change (without responsibility: always appealing to a higher virtue's demands).

The core original concept was that of being offended by another's wealth or privilege relative to oneself, and seeking to destroy it or preferably acquire it. (At country level, only the latter has been seen in practice : revolutions never destroy differences in wealth/power but instead transfer them to new owners, typically those urging the need for urgent change.)

Disinterested observers typically note strong hypocrisy amongst these activists, and their poster boy Karl Marx certainly stands as a representative example:

* Marx sustained his preferred lifestyle of privilege by sponging off a trustafarian rich boy.

* Marx wrote that he despised Engels' girlfriend because she was "too common".

Control is only an illusion, no matter what you shove on the Netware share

Re: NAS

I mostly use Dropbox, for precisely this reason. It even keeps a dozen or so history snapshots of each file: a lifesaver if a file gets corrupted.

DIY TimeMachine

NB: it is trivial to roll your own TM on any unix via shell -- I wrote mine in '96 on SunOS, just to get round a company's lack of source-control tools and to facilitate tiny per-client diffs in source autoexpanding to custom client-specific full-installs. In essence, run a find over $SOURCEROOT to walk the tree, create $DESTROOTNEW dirs on on any dir node, on all other nodes diff $SOURCEROOT $DESTROOTOLD, if no change create link in $DESTROOTNEW, else copy new file to $DESTROOTNEW. The end.

TM uses hardlinks; I used symlinks for easy auditability.

Quite useful for graphics+video workers actually. Intra-workingday TM backups explode as even tiny changes in multigb files each get a full copy taken. Rollyourown to set cycletime differently for those directories, and to trim out unnecessary snapshots intelligently (e.g., keep rolling 10min snapshots for 3 hours' rollback horizon intraday, then only EOD).

And can do so across your whole backups too: add "compression" of old backups by trimming out old intra-month/intra-quarter/intra-sixmonthly/etc snapshots. Trivial to do: just inspect (regex) snapshot-sets' filename-timestamp-pattern, rm -ring any matching set.

Re: Ransomware? Not so much.

Actually, TimeMachine WILL protect vs ransomware. Pre-ransomwarechanges' State is preserved ; you get copies of both pre- & post-ransomware State in your TM backup, appropriately timestamped.

Google reveals the wheels almost literally fell off one of its cloudy server racks

Re: Apparently the front fell off.

Harder to tow now, though, without any wheels.

( +1 for the Fred Dagg / John Clarke reference! )

Re: Earthquakes

> it's what all the DC providers in the Bay Area and Seattle do

Most of the *BIG* datacentres are now in Arizona: close to west coast, but cheaper energy and --key point-- no earthquakes.

.

Downside for the locals: the massive banks of refrigerators generate a low hum which drives many people bananas. Becoming an exponentially larger issue as the DC providers pile into Arizona, and are taking up land startlingly close to town. E.g., one 57-acre building on an 85-acre lot, in Phoenix, next to the park and coupla hundred yards from Nandos.

Re: Or to put it another way, there's at least sixty people like you in the UK.

OT, but this line reminded me:

The standard UK forensics DNA test (police, court, etc) is for budget reasons sharply cut-down in accuracy compared to other countries' tests. And appears to be less accurate, have more variability, than 1-in-a-million.

So that UK DNA tests will show you have at least 59 clones, just in the UK, and probably more. Your honour.

Quick, show this article to the boss, before they ask you to spin your own crisis comms Power App in 2 days

.

^Ties^Tiers

Re: MS Excel has an internal competitor?

1/ Perspective point: those quants generate ~50% of most banks' P&L. Despite being apparently 1-2% of the bank. If they drained 50% of your global resources, the bank'd be quite happy with that: break-even point.

2/ I've been both sides of the inside/outside fence in several countries Ties 1-3 banks, and as both developer and manager. e.g. I put together the world's first enterprise-ready credit derivatives trading AND structuring platform, and I put together a way to plug Excel directly into (most) trading systems AND use it directly as the pricing/analytic engine (with no coding: the s/sheet model becomes the code). And I'm afraid that the bank staff nearly always had a towering sense of how to fiddle around and waste time, and serious antagonism to just nailing what the business needs. Factor in a buying process that routinely had them locking in platforms that didn't fit well. And so re the quants: "the tech which governs them" is almost guaranteed to be regarded by them as irritation context rather than something to take on board.

MS Excel has an internal competitor?

> Power Apps is Microsoft's platform for no-code application development, intended to empower users to come up with solutions without the need to trouble the IT department.

Errr.... that's been MS Excel for 35 years.

With ENORMOUS success.

(e.g., you would be staggered to learn how much the wholesale banking+finance sector relies on Excel behind the scenes, to get around the shortcomings of their IT).

Not exactly the kind of housekeeping you want when it means the hotel's server uptime is scrubbed clean

Re: Urban Legend? It's not always the cleaner

Bit like kleenex and tautliner, but with additional cultural specificity. It's a brit thing. As is being an exception ;)

JCB tends to imply council work or big construction work. And are big and yellow and have a special place in every tiny child's heart. They are Propah!Diggers. I dare say no Case 580n backhoe song ever tore up the UK music charts & t'internet, for example?

Whereas... the JCB has its own Song which did.

Re: Lockable outlet?

> I'm trying to come up with some way you could make a plug that can't be removed without a key.

They're all over the place in big shopping centres over here in oz.

Typically just a clear perspex box projecting around the sockets, perhaps 4"/10cm deep to allow lots of room inside for plug, holes _just_ big enough for the cord to slot in, and the opening lid fitted with a lock.

Transparent so that it's immediately obvious that it's just a powersocket, plus is easy to find/recognise. Yet keeps kids' sticky fingers etc out of it.

Mortality Gradient

Refineries have maths-head engineers sit down and calculate a Mortality Gradient for every identified fire/explosion/etc risk.

The gradient allows a quick visual understanding of the number of fatalities at each location, office, etc for each event.

So-oooo... I am in full sympathy with a policy mandating shutting off all unused elec kit! :)

Re: Who was really at fault?

> a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone

You're confusing "telephone" and "pangolin".

Easily done: "there's an Ant for that" sounds a lot like "there's an App for that".

Chips that pass in the night: How risky is RISC-V to Arm, Intel and the others? Very

#2 ============================================>

_{(I'm a man of my word)}

"cash coypu"

Two thumbs up, Rupert. Two thumbs up.

Latest bendy phone effort from coke empire spinoff Escobar Inc is a tinfoil-plated Samsung Galaxy Fold 'scam'

Re: increase in ADHD workers with gibberish on their hands

Then they should wash their hands. With soap. Haven't they seen all the helpful videos and earnest finger-waggings?

Still hoping to run VMware's ESXi on Arm any time soon? Don't hold your breath – no rush and no commitments

Xen speed?

Xen running linux on intel using its custom drivers, runs at only a 3% penalty to the bare metal. Which is awesome.

Anyone know what it's like on ARM?

Ex-director accuses iRobot of firing him for pointing out the home-cleaner droids broke safety, govt regulations

Guess he matched the product then

Non-compliant director of compliance

Grab a towel and pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster because The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is 42

Re: May the towel be with you!

I am so jealous my teeth are revolving.

Re: and Gabriel a CEO so like the one I used to work for that I found him actually hard to watch

Likewise, I could never watch Gervais's The Office. That wasn't a comedy, it was a documentary.

Re: than it is in England O! that fabled England of hazy lazy long summer evenings' village cricket

My favourite cricket team of englishness:

The Hammer Bottom Butsers Cricket Club

Both Butsers and Hammer Bottom are real places where I used to live in Engerland. Another local cricket club reviewed their appearance with: "They are however charming people and, on the day, deserved losers".

They then embarked on a world tour (see link). Seriously. They had all sorts of scrapes and adventures, and met ever so many interesting people. And played jolly good cricket.

Importantly, they lost heroically to Tikli Bottom.

A sad day for their dry cleaners; a glorious day for English humour.

Re: in French we make 'cricket' rhyme with 'trumpet'

Eh? Eating tea and crickets?

eg, endless repetitions of all Enid Blyton's boys and girls having big adventures then coming safely home in the afternoon to Mother laying out a feast of tea and hot buttered crickets?

No wonder you were confused. You may even have missed some of the books' cultural allusions or abogshuns.

Re: fun facts

Or to quote 1971's Monty Python's Big Red Book (which is blue):

"Can YOU spot the deliferate mistale?!"

'Up to 300' UK heads to roll at Brit IT services firm Allvotec, with 200 jobs offshored to Bulgaria in cost-cutting drive

Re: 3d-print strawberries.

Based on the taste of the supermarket ones, we already have these.

Microservices guru warns devs that trendy architecture shouldn't be the default for every app, but 'a last resort'

"nothing new – it's an idea "from the early 1970s" "

Older than that, methinks.

In my experience, though, all the various changing memes have been merely current-hard+software-circs snapshots of the larger & unchanging oldiebutgoodie: "Common Sense": Keep moving parts together, separate at changes of "speed" (eg, scope, commonality of function, cost of infrastructure, frequency of user changes, etc).

Those separation decisions are often based on net results of externalities so can change over time as they do; eg huge rise in network speed:cost ratio, huge drop in cpu cost allowing users to have a mainframe each (in their pocket), drop in cost of various levels of virtualisation, etc etc etc.

Closest label I've seen to this/commonsense is "Responsibility Driven Programming".

Mac OS X example

> applications deployed as a single process, or monoliths, can be modular in their design

Mac OS X's core is, at devel time, a micro-kernel+kernel structure ; at release time, a single blob.

'Unfixable' boot ROM security flaw in millions of Intel chips could spell 'utter chaos' for DRM, file encryption, etc

Utter Chaos?

> utter chaos will reign

Nonsense! It affects only a subset of the world's machines and it really only makes easier some already-extant attacks.

So... partial chaos will reign.

Or perhaps, utter chaos will have a surprise surge in the electorate. Despite forming a new minority party, it fails to secure control of the country.

Fancy that: Hacking airliner systems doesn't make them magically fall out of the sky

Re: NO!

I *did* honest to god think that —in light of his well-known career etc.— the HR reference and the "never flew another moon lander" thing* was loud enough signalling of a joke.

Clearly I was wrong.

_{* No one even landed on the moon twice, let alone flew the lander}

NO!

Neil Armstrong's ignoring-the-warning stands as an example of what NOT to do.

HR came down on him like a ton of bricks.

Destroyed his career. He never flew a moon lander again in his life. FACT.

Hackers? Leap day? Nope, just plain old internet hysteria took down stock-trading-for-noobs app RobinHood

1987

I'm reminded of a presentation at uni at the time by Head of IT for the ASX Australian Stock Exchange.

It went fully electronic (first in the world) in 1987, in an all-or-nothing big-bang overnight Live cutover. Same day, the global market crashed — Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong by 40%.

He was somewhere between quietly proud and chuffed when he said he likes to say re the project: "The market crashed but we didn't."

Open-source, cross-platform and people seem to like it: PowerShell 7 has landed

Re: Who are you and what have you done with Microsoft?

*bzzt*

Minesweeper.

MS has therefore been failing its customers badly since XP! (Or was it NT?)

Alleged Vault 7 leaker trial finale: Want to know the CIA's password for its top-secret hacking tools? 123ABCdef

Schulte = Dark Milton

And I said, I don't care if they lay me off either, because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time, then, then I'm, I'm quitting, I'm going to quit. And, and I told Don too, because they've moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were merry, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn't bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it's not okay because if they take my stapler then I'll set the building on fire...

Nonsense.

It's an open & schult case.

Sure, check through my background records… but why are you looking at my record collection?

Re: "you can no longer laugh at Dance of the Vampires" ?

Hear hear.

Deontological ethics is the bane of mankind. The mindset affects much more than tiny questions like this.

Re: Contractor Testing

> I'm frankly horrified by how many "coders" we interview who simply cannot write a basic program in 45 minutes. The test we use isn't FizzBuzz but has a similar order of complexity.

Yes. The point of fizzbuzz is not this-that-or-the-other tech.choice -- it's whether or not the person can analyse&structure things logically. If you teach programming, you'll have your jaw on the floor at just how few human beings can think logically -- a necessary precondition for coding usefully in novel situations.

Amongst coders, many many nowadays are just typists.

Interesting addition:- a surprising number of people who can "pass" fizzbuzz are also precisely the type of person you don't want programming for you. Because they are merely trained repeaters of thoughtpatterns with a long list of "seen before" patterns, rather than actually being able to think through problems. One useful characteristic of this type of person is how fast they resort to copying other people/solutions.

The sheer amount of damage I've seen caused in large by this additional subset, hiding behind apparent tech.skill, makes my stomach hurt.

Re: Contractor Testing

Yes, Agile (the current incarnation of the endless rebadging of prototyping (AND of the actual waterfall model, interestingly -- if you read the chap's actual paper, he categorically BANS what his work was immediately seized upon as authority for) ) is per its "creators" absolutely NOT intended to imply binning specs, but rather to speed their coding-implementation.

Similar to waterfall though, the New Church has taken one small part of it out of context and extrapolated it, turning it into something very different.

Standard human pattern, interestingly. e.g., Buddha insisted that NO scriptures ever be kept, then a hundred or so years later, the Chinese send Tripitaka into his homeland to triumphantly restore the scriptures they had "lost". (The Asian branch of Buddhism also insists no one goes to nirvana except priests. So do what they tell you.)

Re: And if you don't do social media?

Trump Derangement Syndrome is actually becoming MORE deranged with time.

Re: credit rating

> Do you mean "credit rating"? I sincerely hope any loan applications I might make in the future are not turned down because I don't have a Facebook account.

This is EXACTLY what will happen. It is in fact happening right now, just not quite across the entire board. All those fintechs and banks boasting about their enhanced algorithms etc --> majority of them are just plugging in socmeeja.

Brexit Britain changes its mind, says non, nein, no to Europe's unified patent court – potentially sealing its fate

Hmm. Signalling?

The article's excellently written (nice one, Kieren), with the exception at the end that shooting-it-now instead of letting it drag out is declaimed as pure ideology.

Most people who've done bulk-project/-portfolio/-org work wouldn't have thought of that, leaning hard towards it just being much safer/commonsense to kill something dead as soon as it's guaranteed dead. Loose ends have a bad habit of snarling up real stuff later.

But now that you've put the politics idea in my head...

<stroking chin thoughtfully> It could well be that this IS a political move but in the much larger strategic game. Brexit in large. And the ridiculous "negotiation" approach taken by the EU.

It could well be Boris&Co taking the opportunity for a costless signal to that other venue that Hard Decisions WILL Be Taken & Timely. Framing and improving the negotiation basis for the larger matter; pre-puncturing part of their posturing, saving time and hassle.