Posts by W.S.Gosset

Brit banking sector hasn't gone a single day of 2020 without something breaking

Question for the Commentards!

RE a related bank cockup, and some possible future ones:

HelloSailorBC Global Retail in London started having their ingathering-of-all-globaloffices daily upload crash when its size grew too large (over 10gb IIRC), about 3-4yrs ago. Someone "fixed" it in 2secs by changing the file-load method (in C# IIRC) from normal to the memory-mapped one. This SHOULD have had no effect or actually worsened it, but instead solved the problem immediately.

What this implies is two-fold:

1. C#'s(?) file access library uses a Schlemiel-the-Painter algorithm on normal reads, AND

2. there's a bug in the low-level Disk Driver or Storage Driver: use it too hard and it falls over _{(suggests a race condition)}

The latter is what interests me. Anyone know what setup that company uses, under the hood, for their storage?

Because it's buggy.

Re: Y2K+X

> But why the software would accept a date a year in the past is just poor programming

Errr... it didn't. It rejected the input. Hence the problem:

lots of money that SHOULD have been reflected in/distributed through the retail accounts, instead remained in a wholesale account(s) and the upload file was moved to the Rejected directory rather than the Processed directory.

_{Sauce: I've worked with these systems a lot.}

Late $440m Christmas present for HP: Judge triples damages windfall from Quanta in CD-ROM drive price-fix showdown

Re: Ignore the man behind the curtain

As an indication of HOW fuckedup the ACCC is, internally, culturally, etc:

There was a big push by politicians+public some years back to derail the parasites infesting it, to get it to go back to doing its pre-parasites job, by imposing strict "performance metrics".

The only one not bowdlerised to pointlessness was the requirement to report the results of a survey of "External Parties"'s opinion of the ACCC, annually.

The ACCC management have their heads so far up their own faux-elite arses that they regard their own staff as outsiders, and the survey is run on the staff. Then reported as external.

Re: Ignore the man behind the curtain

The Oz laws are excellent. The problem is the enforcement is shot to shit.

ACCC, primarily. As an example of their AWESOMENESS, they PROVED that there was no abuse of market power in the Aust'n Dairy Industry, and that therefore the farmers were fully protected and had no grounds for action and had to just suck it up and take whatever price the milk-processors told them to take.

They did this by setting up a test whereby the milk-processing oligopsony* would sell precisely the same milk to the supermarket binopsony under two different labels with two different prices. The ACCC howled with triumph when the report came back that the supermarkets had paid a higher price to the processors, and that the processors had captured all of that, passing none of it on to the farmers. Therefore proving that the market was working efficiently. And that there was no imbalance of market/bargaining power between farmers and milk-processors or farmers and supermarkets which needed redressing.

Seriously. They said that.

One of the more mind-scrambling pieces of publicly proudly presented "logic" I've ever come across.

.

* Monopoly = one entity's control of all supply; Monopsony = one entity's control of all purchases. Oligopoly = small number of entities etc.

Beware the Y2K task done too well, it might leave you lost in Milan

Re: knocked back the expresso

> > "Damned stupid English maps!"

> FWIW, have you ever tried navigating the UK using a French or German map? Same issues in many cases.

Interestingly, the opposite language-mapping effect occurs in Australia if looking for fruitpicking/farm/outback jobs.

If you search in English, you find essentially zero jobs.*

If you have established to Google that you are non-English-speaking, by for example checking your email in your home language:

(a) when you google you are swapped to your home country's google, and

(b) you find thousands and thousands of jobs.

The jobs "map" is vastly better in Foreign than in Native, for that sector in Australia.

I discovered this via a French backpacker houseguest, and have confirmed it with German-, Spanish-, and Swedish-speaking backpackers.

* "essentially zero": for example, last time I checked coupla years ago, using a radius roughly equivalent to sticking a pin through London and a pen through Edinburgh and spinning the whole UK around in a circle, there were 3 (THREE) jobs accessible to English-language searches.

In French+google.fr 2 seconds later on her laptop, there were high tens of thousands.

>NCR

Or "Numbers Changed Randomly", as we called them in the 90s.

How do you ascertain user acceptability if you keep killing off the users?

Re: First aerial food delivery?

Well... manna. Gotta count as about the earliest food drop on record.

Re: ObXKCD

Madness. Utter madness. The lot of you. LOOK AT ALL THESE STEPS!

Tchoh.

THIS is how you cook sprouts:

1. Cook a steak HOT in lots of butter, biff steak out to rest, biff brussels sprouts into the same pan+juices, fry HOT till some charring, the end.

2. No, really, that was it.

3. Owright, if you're feeling really flash, maybe halve/quarter the sprouts first.

Tooth Um Zup

> "Please stand aside! Disruptive technology falling! May contain cashews."

Ahhhhhhh Dabbsy, mate, that last was a stroke of genius.

Barked with laughter when I saw this.

Merry Christmas, mate.

LibreOffice 6.4 nearly done as open-source office software project prepares for 10th anniversary

Re: I think you underestimate it...

> .csv export

.tsv

tsv dominates csv profoundly.

Vivaldi opens up an exciting new front in the browser wars, seeks to get around blocking with cunning code

Re: Filtering by browser is a throwback

Embrace

Extend

Excrete

JavaScript survey: Devs love a bit of React, but Angular and Cordova declining. And you're not alone... a chunk of pros also feel JS is 'overly complex'

Re: Not sure where to go

> Step this way and read up all you need to know:

I filed this when it first came out -- it is excellent.

And also one of the socratic protagonists most wonderfully echoed my own feelings, and this is the quote I kept:

You know what. I think we are done here. Actually, I think I’m done. I’m done with the web, I’m done with JavaScript altogether. [...]

I’m just going to move back to the backend. I just can’t handle these many changes and versions and editions and compilers and transpilers. The JavaScript community is insane if it thinks anyone can keep up with this.

"If it's Thursday, it must be another framework/library/time to re-learn nothing but a ream of new words for the same damn thing. Again."

Very much more of this sort of thing, please

Hear hear. Very much hear hear.

I've been growingly concerned that El Reg is turning away from its USP.

Viz., (ex)front-line practitioners, writing entertainingly but with ability to land more telling blows than others due to actually understanding what's important and understanding what's going on under-the-hood and behind-the-scenes. Not just pure IT but relevant and insightful, eg Worstall. This, in a nutshell, is how TheRegister has garnered a global gold-class reputation.

Latterly, it's all got very samey-samey, little or no UTH/BTS insight, cookiecutter journo-ese. Very occasional and very refreshing returns to form (eg Dabbsy, Stobb), but so few now as to start mourning the loss of what ElReg stood for.

Re: Doesn't paint JavaScript in the best light...

...or who even have a clue what Fitt's Law is?

Re: WWW was never meant to be interactive

> HTML was never intended as a means to produce complex interactive user interfaces

Quite -- & actually quite the opposite.

Our entire "modern" world-wide web is in fact only the Read-Only Prototype subset of hypertext, quickly hacked out by a chap frustrated at the slowness-of-progress on the all-singing-all-dancing 2-way hypertext environment -- just as a bit of a talking point, a demonstration that at least the display ideas worked, to actually SEE something tangible rather than all the endless theoretical wrestlings, and to encourage progress on the main problem.

Instead, the world+dog leapt on the prototype and ran screaming off into the middle distance with it, and the full proper non-jumble-of-DSLs-masquerading-as-frameworks hypertext project kinda withered away in the background.

It's been "amusing" to watch people progressively plug that originally-planned functionality back into things, but via nails-on-blackboard bandaid hacks tottering on top of, and leaning backwards over, something fundamentally read-only.

Re: Frameworks

> because the current momentum in this space is to compile, transpile, minify and otherwise preprocess JavaScript six ways from Sunday and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Uh, oh, it's been infected by its near-namesake's old slogan:

"Write Once, Run Anywhere"

BlackBerry tells UK High Court that security outfit SentinelOne is its direct rival

And there you have it

> systematically poaching its top talent ... a salesman

If anyone has ever wondered why and how and just how the HELL great technology companies implode, this is a classic statement of a classic symptom.

Another classic symptom is the proud declaration of moving to a Professional Services focus.

Das Reboot: Uni forces 38,000 students, staff to queue, show their papers for password reset following 'cyber attack'

I've said it before and I'll say it again

There is NO substitute for hard copy.

Your papers are on order.

Re: Expensive

The witty ones' T-shirts spell it

CNUY

Google security engineer says she was fired for daring to remind Googlers they do indeed have labor rights

Re: Companies have no God-given right to exist

No, no -- nonsense. These commentards would pick up a random retail item, turn it over, read "Made in China", and scream "STRAW MAN!!111"

Re: Can someone please explain...

> who would be doing the forcing?

> It cant be the union as they arnt the ones offering employment.

Actually, it can be.

Welcome to the REALITY of (abuse of) unions, as opposed to the theory.

Same concept as the yawning gap between the faux-left (99%) and the actual left (1%) _{(and typically vilified by the 99% -- Orwell was savaged for his ideas by the socialists/faux-left, not the right)}.

The unions, like any large system, get hijacked by parasites. And a substantial proportion of them get hijacked by triumphalist parasites. And they can and do put pressure on government/industry to make it illegal/impossible to work. Some of them get arrogant and aggressively shut down companies who seek to avoid union employees.

For example:

Australia's BLF morphed into the CFMEU (via the WA branch) and is routinely dragged into court for closing down building sites and even every building site of an entire company, if an employer seeks to engage non-CFMEU workers. And by "building sites", I mean fuckoff great big-ticket major-con$$truction type things, and also most large government projects -- the type of employer which In Theory is All Powerful & Oppressive. And they are happy to use/threaten serious violence -- I've seen myself 2 sites have a busload of rentathugs delivered to "help" the actual picketing workers, being instructed on the footpath re who "the enemy" is.

Extreme example of the degree of control: they have shut down entire project portfolios of entire companies because management took down the black CFMEU Flag, which MUST be flown from the highest point on site (usually a crane). I am not joking.

But the max.court penalty is low five figures per-breach-of-law so they just ignore it. Just that one union has been shown to increase Australia's large-project (buildings/infrastructure) cost by a minimum of 20% relative to other countries.

quick google: A chain: B C D(a) D(b)

You don't work on any large construction project in Australia without CFMEU permission. "No ticket, no start". It's their law.

Hey, ICANN, if you need good reasons to halt the .org super-sell-off, here are two: Higher fees, more website downtime

Re: PCH's numbers are buggered?

Ah ha & Ta. Didn't spot the 10.5m user number on p3.

So instead what we're seeing in this letter is PCH deliberately obfuscating the numbers by its second and rather surreally-phrased financials discussion. Instead of simply saying .org's income would drop from $129m to $100m, it presents a bizarre mangling of the cost-base size vs the donations-size.

Taking a step back:

What the hell is a non-profit doing pulling $100m a year profit? What the hell is a non-profit doing charging a 230% markup? AKA sitting on a 67% gross margin. .org domains shd cost say $3.50/yr, not the $10 or $9.05 cited here.

And taken in context of your own note re PCH's non-profit $250m/yr profit, servicing non-profits such as .org, and stepping in to protect that income stream, and doing so with disturbingly deliberate obfuscation of the key numbers...

Just HOW many backs have been quietly scratched by systemic parasites for the last 40+yrs under the guise of internet infrastructure?

Re: PCH's numbers are buggered?

Flipping that upsidedown, looking bottomup at actualcost-per-domain:

* #130,000 costing $30m/yr implies actual costs of ~$230/yr per domain.

* #10m costing $30m/yr implies actual costs of $3/yr per domain.

Again, anyone have any insight into the actual cost for the services PCH/Afilias is providing?

PCH's numbers are buggered?

_{(I'm feeling tired and fuzzy and I'm just skimming, so please view the following with caution and/or hobnailed boots. I may be overlooking something obvious.)}

I initially went to point out that if operating revenue ex-donations only covered 4% of $30m operating costs, then just to break-even the new owners MUST raise prices by at least 25 times. So take whatever your yearly.org bill is and multiply by ~25. (vigintiquintuple it?)

But then it occurred to me: if that's the revenue then the US$1.135bn purchase price is senseless. Let's say they jack prices up 30x, to make an actual profit: ~$10m/yr. Never mind a return on your $1.135bn -- it'd take over 100yrs just to break-even, and that's assuming interestrates+inflation = 0. Which they don't. It also assumes you have more than 9yrs asset life. Which, technically, they don't.

Looking at the href'd letter: yup, PCH's numbers at top of page 4 contradict those of middle/low page 4.

* Top p4 says .org is currently earning US$100m/yr ($900m over 9yrs, being netted off simplistically/nodiscounting against the cost-of-investment plus the 9yrs operating cost).

* Lower p4 says .org is currently earning $1.3m/yr (and relies on $29m/yr donations just to meet its running costs).

To put it another way: @$10/yr per domain, PCH's letter says .org's number of live/active/sold domains is BOTH

* 10,000,000 AND

* 130,000.

Does anyone have any insight into .org's actual #size?

What’s that Skippy? Google’s coughed up $330m in tax Down Under?

Re: Yeah well

> STOP charging business on 'profit'

I agree with your larger intent but strongly disagree with re-defining something as tail so you can wag the dog.

The TOOL used, to manipulate profit, is what should be addressed.

And that tool is Transfer Pricing (nearly always).

Most commonly now of IP. So for example, Google-Luxembourg "owns" g's IP, including its trademarked name, and "charges" Google-UK BwahHaHa% of its revenue as royalties for use of the name/IP.

Regulate transfer pricing, and you've smashed nearly all of the multinationals' tax dodging.

Re: Yeah well

> I pay my tax on my income NOT on my profit from going to work.

Actually, you ARE paying tax on your profit from going to work. And so are Australians. You pay tax on your Net Income, after Deductions.

It's just that in the UK, historically, allowable deductions have been wound down to buggerall. Nowadays, they're really only available to special categories of workers -- eg (IIRC) nurses buying uniforms, builders buying steelcap boots.

In Australia the principle has been expressly stated: you pay tax on all income less all costs incurred in earning that income. The end.

With two big exceptions: can't claim commuting costs (boo!chiz!), nor clothing-etc that's not special purpose (esp: suits). So that season-pass and that mounting drycleaning bill for your suit -- suck it up.

Other than that, pretty much every work-driven cost is deductible: journal subscriptions, proportion of home-internet used for work, percentage of mortgage for room dedicated to work, income protection insurance, sunglasses, etc.etc.

Errr... careful. That info-"source" 's Chief Economics Correspondent firmly believes (and has castigated governments and the ATO) that if you e.g. buy a car for $1,000 and sell it for $800, you have made $200 PROFIT. Seriously.

To put it another way, that organisation is hysterical fun but not an information source.

The ATO's data shows that, of those large companies not paying tax:

* 34% simply didn't make a profit, and

* another 38% are still working thru previous losses (aren't back above water, profit-wise).

Then:

* 20.5% are taking advantage of standard ATO-created accelerated-deduction-rates _{(eg, write 100% electronics off in year of purchase for tax, depreciate over 3 years for real-world)}

Leaving a grand total of 7.5%.

And they're taking advantage of special ATO-created rebates and subsidies and special offsets and so on, such as the Research & Development rebate (which the ATO is clamping down on).

*SMASHED* them!

Gross Margin over that 10yrs was ~60%. [per here]

Average AU-derived revenue ~A$2bn/yr [per newspaper TheAustralian]

Taxable Income therefore average A$1.2bn/yr, vs Tax Paid ~A$50m

therefore:

Effective Tax Rate = 4.2%

IT isn't supposed to stand for Insider Trading... Palo Alto Networks sysadmin and pals accused of $7m shares caper

Nah

He got caught.

Alphabet, Apple, Dell, Tesla, Microsoft exploit child labor to mine cobalt for batteries, human-rights warriors claim

Re: One-eyed selectivity

> Jet engine turbine blades are...

...typically made with cobalt "superalloys"

Re: One-eyed selectivity

Yeah, and there's a lot of it in waste concentrates on mine sites, bundled up with other metals etc from the on-site preliminary processing for hte metal(s) they can actually get to economically. You'll periodically see prices quoted on the markets for various types of "waste" concentrates which are only viable for people with the right kit.

Re: One-eyed selectivity

> not sure that it is quite as bad as that

You're forgetting the real-world cost, and that it varies according to physical/chemical realities of converting various forms of X into an X we can use.

Sure, we could do without coltan. And, identically:

Sure, we could all switch from driving our current shitboxes to driving Bugatti Veyrons.

It's just a matter of money, right? Easy peasy. So it costs a couple of orders of magnitude more! Who cares! No change will observed in how people conduct their everyday lives, nor will the hell of commuter traffic be affected in any way.

> they can be recycled

Not economically, they can't, not even remotely. Virtually all high-tech raw materials are not used as elements but compounds. Creating those compounds is not quite a one-way street, but to get back to something once-more usable is typically somewhere between catastrophically expensive and ha ha ha haaaaa.

Consider by analogy how effortless it is to extract an unwanted spoon of sugar from one's tea. And that's just a solution, not a compound.

So all those batteries and solar panels are going straight to landfill. Japan is staring at an "wall" of EV batteries rolling off their 10yr lifespan imminently, due to hopping in hard & early on that virtue-meme-bus.

Problem: those compounds are highly toxic. Getting on for category-1 nuclear-waste levels of toxic. But where an EV-battery-sized amount of nuclear waste might have powered a city for a few years, the faux-green plan is create 1 per car and a few more per house.

Re: How much cobalt per car?

Gah. No, it's not. 10-15 kg/battery, not mt/battery Apologies: got interrupted, was in a rush when I got back to the computer, forgot the switch of units for that example.

>> the oil industry is a far bigger user of cobalt than the battery industry

Bullshit.

Oil industry uses cobalt as a CATALYST, to strip out sulphur. The only "use" is in process losses ("spent hydrodesulphurization catalyst"), which are about 7,500-8,500 tonnes of cobalt per year, for the entire world's oil. And the oil companies are doing a lot of excellent research to recover and reuse even that usage (and all the other metals: molybdenum, nickel, aluminium, etc.).

Batteries, OTOH, were using over 20,000 tonnes per year in 2017, when total global demand was just 71,000 tonnes.

In 2019 global demand is over 90,000 tonnes and the increase has been attributed essentially entirely to additional battery production.

Automobile manufacturers' EV projections are for 2.5x demand within a few years. The Tesla S3 alone has a production target of 500,000 cars, which is 5,000,000 - 7,500,000 tonnes of cobalt just for that one model. Or 50-75 years of 100% of current global production. (Musk is not seeking low-cobalt batteries because he's a gween-hewo, that's just virtue-badging -- if he can't get them, his busted business model is even busteder.)

> My guess is that oil industries are very good at getting away with widespread environmental damage (and global warming)

Actually, no.

I suggest you/everyone actually learn a bit about the upstream raw materials industries you all critically rely on before joining in with the idiots/liars who like shouting dramatic slogans for attention. Who, indeed, often just make up bullshit.

Please don't be misled by attention-seekers banging the virtue-drama drum -- do due diligence.

One-eyed selectivity

Note the woketivists didn't pick on the far more relevant mineral to all these manufacturers: Coltan. Of which virtually the whole world's supply comes from the congo. No differences in practices, between minerals.

Possible reason?

Solar power is effectively impossible without coltan. And it needs relatively large amounts of it.

.

(As an indication:

If we used solar for 100% earth's power needs, we'd completely exhaust the world's reserves of coltan in a shade over 4 weeks (8% of annual reqts). _{A further 2 key minerals are eliminated by 12%. Solar is actually the least renewable of any energy supply, making coal's second-worst case of centuries look luxurious.}

Problem: essentially all our hightech stuff nowadays utterly relies on coltan. Your smartphone, your laptop. The lift's circuitry, your car's engine mgt, the traffic lights. Your washing machine, etc etc etc)

Buzz kill: Crook, 73, conned investors into shoveling millions into geek-friendly caffeine-loaded chocs that didn't exist. Now he's in jail

Re: I don't get it...

because that would've involved Working

Attention! Very important science: Tapping a can of fizzy beer does... absolutely nothing

Re: Bends

> Divers suffer from the bends for the same reason when nitrogen bubbles form in the blood when they decompress too fast.

Good point! You have hit upon a cure for this syndrome!

Scuba divers need no longer hang around for long tedious hours at various unter-altitudes reading soggy newspapers or poking uselessly at short-circuited phones.

Now, via the innovative WellyGoss™ Technique, they merely burst out the surface at full speed, are rapped smartly over the head with a hammer 3 times, let out one almighty belch, and climb safely onto the boat. Huzzah!

.

EDIT: ah poo -- just belatedly saw Roger beat me to it. Perhaps the WellyKynastoGoss Technique? Or better, WellyKyn -- makes for a great advertising slogan: "make the welkin ring with the wellykyn ding!"

Re: So many flaws

> IIRC a "fizzy bottle" of pop does not fizz bubbles on the inside until you open it, shaking or not.

Do not be afraid, my son.

Schroedinger's Beer

> IIRC a "fizzy bottle" of pop does not fizz bubbles on the inside until you open it, shaking or not.

Beer is quantum in nature. It's not actually there or not there at all until you open it. Or rather it is both. Until you open it and collapse the probability wave (with or without tapping).

Proof of beer's probabilistic nature:

If you open a beer, you may find that you have some, yet if you check it and check it and check it again, sooner or later you will discover that the bottle-or-can is empty!

In the olden days this was regarded as witchcraft. But we are modern and know better now. It's quantum!

Re: So many flaws

for SCIENCE!!

Re: So many flaws

and call for volunteers to assist them

Cops storm Nginx's Moscow offices after a Russian biz claims it owns world's most widely used web server, not F5

I've only observed State trials in Russia, and these do indeed have the startling riding-roughshod characteristics stated variously above.

You say that normal commercial/civil trials do not have those characteristics, rather instead being effectively like normal Western trials. Assuming this is true, then :

We should be able to gauge the actual level of involvement of the Russian State by how the trial proceeds.

Rational:

Rambler acting alone.

Startling levels of trampling of evidence, facts, and law:

Rambler acting as catspaw for the State.

> The storm troppers kicking his door in, is just how they roll.

Hence the phrase:

"Gone tropper"

Revealed: NHS England bosses meet with tech and pharmaceutical giants to discuss price list of millions of Brits' medical data

Re: IP

?!?

seriously??

Re: a class-action lawyer could tear them a new arsehole

^scapels^breadknives

IP

Strikes me that the IP for each patient's data rests with each patient.

The internal NHS text here treats it as the NHS's own work.

Methinks a class-action lawyer could tear them a new arsehole*.

.

_{* (they always make room for more of them on their consultative boards)}

You cannae break the laws of physics, cap'n... Boffins call BS on 'impossible' black hole, fear readings were botched

Re: And this!

Thousands of people all agree a good narrative sells better than dull facts.

19C Scientist: "I must find the explanation for this phenomenon in order to truly understand nature."

21C Scientist: "I must get the result that fits my narrative so I can get my paper into Nature."

Careful with that Axe, Eugene: Excessive use of body spray causes school bus evacuation

Re: London's finest subsurface transit system

Well, there's that old Royal Mail train(let).

And the underground non-Underground route to the War Cabinet Rooms.

The 19C sewers are a bit awesome too but I guess they might be more accurately labelled as subsurface transhit.

How much cheese does one person need to grate? Mac Pro pricing unveiled

Isn't that from Lord of the Rings?

"One does not simply work over Mac d'or"