Posts by pavel.petrman

'Please download in Microsoft Excel': Meet the tech set to monitor IT performance across central UK government

Re: One thing guaranteed to make me break down in tears...

Years ago I took part in developing a scada* application. We used to get dozens of change requests any one week, these often being changes to freshly requested and not yet developed features.

Once we added the possibility to export data to excel and import them back again, the change request rate dropped by an order of magnitude. We understood it as people had started using Excel as an alternative user interface to our program.

* Software for Control and Data Acquisition, or something like that.

Re: "please download the workbook in Microsoft Excel for the best user experience"

If only I got so far as opening a file with the 365 thing I've been blessed with at work. Every other program opens after you (double) click its icon. Not Excel. It registers your wish and files an entry to its internal event loop, only to pop a new fenster in your face a second, minute or half an hour later, exactly at the moment calculated to do most damage to your workflow. But all is good now I know about this - it used to be two to two hundred windows all at once before I came to realize this is a new undocumented feature and kept pecking at the icon in vain hope.

NortonLifeLock and Avast tie-up falls under UK competition regulator's spotlight

What's going to happen?

If the UK objected to the merger, what would happen?

Both Norton and Avast operate globally and both have their corporate headquarters outside UK, iirc. What does the "the UK was one of a handful of countries where some level of regulatory review was anticipated" mean? The whole deal would be halted, the joined company would be unable to operate on the UK, or something completely different?

Japan solves 5G airliner conundrum: Keep mobe masts 200m from airport approach paths. That's it

Maybe they did, but forgot to recalculate the ERP levels from SI units to the local standard unit for equivalent emissions: inches of mercury over isotropic square pound. Hence the twice as high emission limit (mentioned elsewhere in this forum) and associated band spillover problems. Perhaps a Gimli glider of radioelectronics, if you will.

I own that $4.5bn of digi-dosh so rewrite your blockchain and give it to me, Craig Wright tells Bitcoin SV devs

IIRC that was the main arguement of the council in question - who's going to pay for the machinery, health and safety precautions, workers' wages and environment protection? All of that will add up to a substantial sum and unless paid for in advance, no digging. Also, the data on the drive would probably be unrecoverably lost.

Autonomy's Mike Lynch gets yet another judgment date as US extradition wrangling continues

Re: Mr Justice Swift

Good cop - bad cop approach in court of justice, you say? :)

Mr Justice Swift

... doesn't appear to be a Nomen Omen in this particular case.

Edge computing set for growth – that is, when we can agree what it is

Re: Rebranding exercise

If I read my history books correctly, it was something like Mainframes -> Minicomputers and PCs -> Bla servers with virtualization and thin clients -> High performance PCs and hyperconverged on-site infrastructure -> Cloud and fancy rendering terminals, now it's Edge computing.

Clearly there are no big bonus payments dished out for improving and optimizing what works, only for disruption (in the original meaning of that word).

I'm sure, even if IT people are replaced one day by robots and those glorified finite state machines called AI by the marketing, these disruption reshuffling and relabelling excercises will continue, even if only as labour programmes to feed the starving techies.

Planning for power cuts? That's strictly for the birds

Re: Boom .....

In the early sixties, when the grid was not as robust as it nowadays is in central Europe, a mishap of this sort happened, only on a much larger scale. It was a very, very cold winter and every inch ounce drop SI unit of electricity was needed. Those times it was not uncommon for factories, streetcar operators and the like to run their own insular electrical systems which could be connected to the mains grid when necessary. All coordination was done by telephone. It was in the steel works where my grandfather worked, that the operations received a phonecall pleading for their "phase in" - the steel works power plant first needed to be phase synchronized with the grid, which most of the time it was not, for it to be connected as an emergency source of electricity. This phase-in was to be the first one after some refurbishment works on the main transformer. Then the phase-in would be done using a bulb connected between the steel works mains and the grid mains. As soon as the bulb went completely cold and dark, the phases matched. Only then this would be done with one bulb only and the technicians usually saved time and effort by not checking other phases. There was no way the other two phases would be out of synch when one phase was synchronized. Or so they thought - and you know very well where this is going. The bulb went dark, another phonecall dutifully came in, the senior technician pulled the lever, and the whole steel works together with the whole surrounding area went completely dark and silent, except for the glowing hot steel cooling slowly inside the production line and the atershocks of the generator trying to reverse-step its waltz and now dancing around the generator hall.

For the next phase-in, after the whole power generation station has been duly rebuilt, three new bulbs were procured, for the old one was pronounced unreliable by the management.

Another bird poop story

I heard this story from a line technician with a local distribution company. They would register a very perculiar failure on one of their local 22 kV lines around the same date every year. It was a sudden potential drop very early in the morning, not correlated and not looking like any other typical failures they would see. It went for some years with inreasingly more targeted observations every year (and correspondingly more intense expectations). Once they got a young hunter on the team, and he agreed to actually go and observe one suspect section of the line at the usual time the potential drop was expected to happen. He would go and camp right next to the line for a week, before he would be presented with the clearest of explanations. The line became a temporary home to a huge flock of migrating birds who spent the night sleeping on the line. At the very instant the sun rose, every bird woke up at exactly the same time and took a dump. The number of those birds along the line was so huge that the, erm, potential drop they collectively undertook actually registered on the line diagnostics.

Lawmakers propose TLDR Act because no one reads Terms of Service agreements

Re: The biggest lie...

The lie about the age of 18 gets evened out by the other side of the most frequently occuring type of an Internet transaction, in which one party advertises being 18, the other asserts via a button to be 18 or more, and in reality neither party actually is.

North Korea pulled in $400m in cryptocurrency heists last year – report

Re: Further to the North Korea story:

Hello Mr. McAfee, nice to have you here.

Google says open source software should be more secure

Re: "on developing open source projects"

The post I reacted to was about the question of spending millions by for-profit companies, my response was about said companies actually spending millions and how such spending of millions on open source tends to end. No word about wanting, willing od ideals on my part. All I said is big companies actually spending millions tend to affect only the qualitative aspect of open source badness, not quantitative. Or, if you will, the direction of badness changes, not its length.

Re: Everybody knows

Of course I could have, but should I have? I believe I shouldn't. First, the article is about Google and I believe in comments being to the point of the corresponding article is a good thing (as a general rule for Friday rant hygiene). Second, I believe I would either cause enormous hosting costs or even a hardware failure, if I were to list all open source related misdeeds of Micros~1, Facebook, IBM, Oracle, ... No Mungo... never kill a customer. Oh . .. the wound! The wound!

Still, you have my upvote.

Re: Everybody knows

Actually, Google (and Facebook and IBM and others) did spend millions of dollars on developing open source projects and are continuing to do so, and those projects are available to general public and actually widely used.

I, for one, am looking forward to using a program with a new version of Log4j included, which will be built, by Google, on best practices of security and performance.

And it will be much better than any competition, at least at the beginning, when there actually is competition.

Later it will not seem to work without Google's geolocation services and analytics services.

Further on it will be progressively rebuilt by Google's team so that it's impossible to turn off advertising and snooping of all of my data to Google.

And later still new network protocols and data storage formats will be proposed by Google, and later endorsed by them, which will make Log4j work only within Google's walled garden on modern and secure infrastructure.

Oh what a joy it is when Google speaks about security and invests in open source.

Weed dispensary software company's ambitions pruned after Spotify trademark clash

Re: Or

I once got told off for confusing church people, pecause I chose the pope-voting day for fine tuning the fuel injector on my 1988 air cooled Tatra 16 litre V 10. The chruch goers who saw the thick black cloud accused me of spreading bad news...

Logitech Signature M650: A mouse that will barely emit a squeak or a clickety-click

Re: IPA all the way...

I find applying Laphroaig on the reception side of the smooth plastic surface instead of the smooth plastic surface itself alleviates not only the primary problem but makes much more bearable, too, the inevitable putting up with whatever is brought about by using appliances coated with said smooth plastic surfaces.

Think small, score big: India details subsidies for chipmakers

One has to wonder

Few years ago it was hard disks (after that flood), now its chips... what will be the next big shortage?

Alibaba Cloud slapped by Chinese ministry for mishandling Log4j

Re: Last paragraph

Already at "ministry’s network security threat and vulnerability management efforts" I thought if what eventually constitutes the last paragraph. Security threat and vulnerability management indeed.

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Re: Incredible

Good question. I once had a colleague who often wrote his C++ all in one line, starting with something like "delete new ...". His overloadment of every available operator bordered on insanity ... at the far end. He was a line count genius but no one wanted to touch his code even with a long well earthed stick.

Dutch nuclear authority bans anti-5G pendants that could hurt their owners via – you guessed it – radiation

Re: Rocky atoll for sale

That is why I like Mikrotik and Ubiquiti wifi boxes - their leds and displays are very easily turned off in configuration. (I don't know about junipers or procurves but I'd hope they, too, can accommodate wifi-sensitive homeopaths.)

Wi-Fi not working? It's time to consult the lovely people on those fine Linux forums

Re: Doctors waiting room?????

Sorry, it was only meant to signify the level of smallnes of the small talk. I live in the middle of Europe, where we still have doctor's waiting rooms and are still kept waiting for hours on end, even with appointment. But the comment was meant to be about manuals, how they get thrown in the bin and how people are upset afterwards for not beingproperly informed.

Re: "first read the fine forum thread until the end"

This reminds me, tnagentially, of a recent small talk I had with an elderly gentlemanin the doctor's waiting room. We talked about lithium batteries and how they are prone to catch fire when physically abused beyond their design limits, like throwing a smartphone on a concrete pavement from a window on the 8th floor. Or trying to force charge them when outside their designed temperature envelope. The gentleman, exasperated, exclaimed, but why nobody tells us? This is the first time I hear about this! Sir, was my answer, watch your grand children closely next time they unpack the newest electronic gadget you bought them, and marvel at the now inborn muscle memory of throwing the several booklets, chock full with warning and hazard information, nicely into the paper recycling bin, like a good child they surely are.

Fans of original gangster editors, look away now: It's Tilde, a text editor that doesn't work like it's 1976

Re: Ta for the heads-up :-)

Well done on the editor! An even better done (or is it more well done) on recognizing the fine but most important distinction between writing a piece of software for your own use and doing so for wider public.

If I were allowed to to rid the world of one sort of people, it would be those asking to be put in charge of software procurement because they sucessfully copypasted a PHP3 message board from an outdated Stack Overflow answer to their own Web page built in Front Page on their silver themed Windows XP ten years ago.

When product names go bad: Microsoft's Raymond Chen on the cringe behind WinCE

Re: I swear it was unintentional...

Oh Germany...

Fluke - a very expensive brand of various measurement tools.

WTF and WTF II - an "innovation park" and a BMW's factory (Westlicher Taxölderner Forst).

Ass - Ace. You see innovation asses and education asses everywhere.

Hell - Light beer. Bavaria Hell available at every shop.

There are many more, these are still fresh in my memory as I had an hour for a Bavarian Hell this week while an electrician ass checked my desk appliances with his Fluke. And the recent expansion of WTF to WTF II doesn't need any explanation to anyone who's driven a BWM recently.

After deadly 737 Max crashes, damning whistleblower report reveals sidelined engineers, scarcity of expertise, more

Re: "scientific testing" of safety is done by the manufacturing companies

The decision between old and new wasn't informed by design and development costs but by airlines having or not having to do new type training and certification for crews. If you have to dish out for retrainig, you might as well start thinking about giving Airbus salespeople a call...

Theranos' Holmes admits she slapped Big Pharma logos on lab reports to boost her biz

Re: modified COTs equipment

Phew, a good thing, then, that Theranos didn't use a modified John Deere tractor for their blood tests. The test results would be slightly better than those of Theranos own machine, but in the court it could have ended up quite badly!

Huawei's AppGallery riddled with malware-infected games

Re: "if we receive a substantial reply"

And the ${CURRENT_ISSUE} is of utmost importance to them and the ${MONETIZATION_VECTOR_POLITICALLY_ACCEPTABLE_NAME} of their users lies at the hart of the company's culture and aspirations.

Desktop bust and custom iPhone 13 Pro made from melted-down Tesla car for the Elon Musk dork in your life

Some say

Some say Musk got his hands dirty in his early products, too, namely in portions of PayPal software. I use the accounts on him pulling his weight in his startups to give an example to my fellow software developers how one _doesn't_ work in a team with long term goals in an established industry. The same goes for Gates, whose excuse is that he actually did much of the establishing.

Lenovo ThinkPad T14s: Impressively average, which is how corporate buyers like it

8 GB RAM

is way too little today even for the most basic office computer. Excel - Web app. Teams - Web app. Outlook - no idea but looks like a web app too. Edge - Chromium memory hogger without an effective means to strangle the omnipresent javascript bloatware. Even the receptionist needs at leas 16 GB of memory to get going. Not that htere are any meaningful options - even Firefox seems to be paid by memory producers rather than Google today.

640 GB ought to be enough for anyone, as it seems.

Re: 1920 x 1080

I'd like to add to everything others said regardingresolution: your retina display is attached to a mac. These lenovos will most likely run windows, in corporate environments, with decades old legacy programs based on pixel raster graphics. These don't work well outside 100 dpi on Windows. So it makes sense to go for a display were you can see single pixels, barely, but you can, so that you don't need to set other DPI value than 100. I'm told users of Apple computers are not exposed to such difficulties.

ESA's Solar Orbiter will swing past Earth this week – sure hope nobody created a big cloud of space junk up there

Re: If they do hit some space junk

Apparently only if they put the junk there on a non-commercial account but made some money in the process of putting it there (wink wink Apple).

Apple sues 'amoral 21st century mercenaries' NSO for infecting iPhones with Pegasus spyware

Re: Terrorists and paedophiles

I wouldn't be surprised, really, if a (proxy) country somewhere raised the age of consent selectively to the age of 99 for a person of a specific interest to a democratic country expressly founded to foster and defend freedom of its citizens, in order to get the now paedophile arrested and tried for their terrible, abhorrent crime. Or at least getting the contents of their smartphone fought against, because terrorism, paedophiles and pgp keys. These evil paedophile.

Terrorists and paedophiles

... seem to work well as an excuse for everything amoral an illegal these days. Not long ago the excuse was called "class enemy" where I live, though it worked to exactly the same effect.

How a malicious Android app could covertly turn the DSP in your MediaTek-powered phone into an eavesdropping bug

Re: Eavesdropping bug

Pascal Monett, so do I, it wasn't meant to be exclusive. I just didn't want my comment under a rather specific article sound like I think the whole world of electronics and the Internet is a shambles. Which of course it is.

Eavesdropping bug

I wouldn't worry about that. Given Google's attitude, as attested by their response to the undocumented mircophone array built into Nest units, I consider all Android powered smartphones eavesdropping bugs, in order not to be surprised at some later date.

Crypto for cryptographers! Infosec types revolt against use of ancient abbreviation by Bitcoin and NFT devotees

Non-Refundable Tokens

Thank you, John Cleese, for calling the thins what they are! Non-floodable tokens, wasn't it?

UK Ministry of Justice secures HVAC systems 'protected' by passwordless Wi-Fi after Register tipoff

Re: Bet I can take a guess

I bet you are not far off. A few years ago a case made waves in Slovakia where an underage "hacker" broke into the main Internet-facing gateway/mail server of the country's national security bureau (abbr. NBUSR) with root password, no joke, "nbusr123". If I recall the fallout correctly the office proceeded to file a complaint with the police against the youth and assign one official to sit in front of a KVM screen all day, monitoring traffic, and to disconnect the RJ-45 connector at the end of their shift, rendering the Internet presence of the bureau to be accessible within official hours only. The authorities saw no problem in any of said steps.

UK data guardian challenges government proposals on automated decision-making

Re: Elements of healthcare become more efficiently managed through AI

@codejunky no contest to efficiency in health care in general, I specifically meant the named efficiency in decision making. I would consider efficient decision making regarding health care a dangerous thing even if not administered by AI.

Elements of healthcare become more efficiently managed through AI

I hope someone paused to think whether efficiency of decision making is the right thing to strive for in regard to healthcare.

James Webb Space Telescope gets all shook up – launch delayed again

Re: a "sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band"

A good measure of a man is how he calls his machine's errors. My favourite is Xerox's mispuff.

Technologically, the 914 is so complex (more complex, some Xerox salesmen insist, than an automobile) that it has an annoying tendency to go wrong, and consequently Xerox maintains a field staff of thousands of repairmen who are presumably ready to answer a call on short notice. The most common malfunction is a jamming of the supply of copy paper, which is rather picturesquely called a “mispuff,” because each sheet of paper is raised into position to be inscribed by an interior puff of air, and the malfunction occurs when the puff goes wrong. A bad mispuff can occasionally put a piece of the paper in contact with hot parts, igniting it and causing an alarming cloud of white smoke to issue from the machine; in such a case, the operator is urged to do nothing, or, at most, to use a small fire extinguisher that is attached to it, since the fire burns itself out comparatively harmlessly if left alone, whereas a bucket of water thrown over a 914 may convey potentially lethal voltages to its metal surface.

Space telescope that is more sensitive

Well said. More sensitive to space radiations it's poised to observe as well as more sensitive to being handled roughly, as there is no plan in place for service once it flies. It's a good approach to measure twice, especially in view of the optical anomaly the Hubble was sent upwards with.

UK health secretary confirms end for NHS Digital, architect of the GP data grab debacle

Re: "people-centred, digitally-enabled, data-driven vision"

Obligatory XKCD, namely the part about the carbon neutral servers.

Server errors plague app used by Tesla drivers to unlock their MuskMobiles

500

When one spits out a round hundred error code over HTTP, it means either the error is really unexpected (one didn't pave the path to a more specific code, like, say, the usual and quite often seen 418) or that the implementer didn't really bother. Like, when selling a feature called autopilot, which actually is no autopilot at all.

Honor 50 Lite: Google Play Services are back on Huawei's former stablemate but that's nothing to get excited about

Re: Hello... can you hear me?

Good of you to mention it. Brings some memories back - from those dark 3G times, when even venerable Nokia E series phones had had difficulties when roaming betwen 2G and 3G regions. No Android-run smartphone could really be relied upon conection wise, the only smartphones that worked reliably (at least with T-Mobile networks) were Iphones. A technical office guy explained to me (then very confidentially, though I believe he no longer works there) that their cellular network was tailored to work perfectly with Iphones, whereas other brands needed to tweak their slabs to work with the network. Skip some ten years, and most T-Mobile networks in Europe are built with Huawei tech (no more Nokia and Ericsson), 3G being switched off in most places, Iphone is to the engineering guys just one brand of many, and voila, one gets better reception and better LTE parameters with good value Huawei phones than with pricey Iphones.

One has to admire these things, by the way. Reliable high throughput wireless links (bluetooth, wifi, 4g, 5g, all of them) are work of alchemy, time and again killing hopes of many a small networking start up. Things like 256qam demodulation, 8 bits per baud, by a 4 sq.mm. chip in a wristwatch, just to get those AR Pokemon game updates while strolling in the park. A miracle.

Riverbed Technologies files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection following pandemic 'headwinds'

Numbers don't add up, like with so many startups

Call me old fashioned, stupid or both, but I don't get it. 2 billion in debt for a company with 1,400 people? After 20 years in business? In software and services? To me this smells like Covid was a passable excuse and the headwinds needed not be anything more than a fart in their general direction.

A lightbulb moment comes too late to save a mainframe engineer's blushes

Re: I had a somewhat similar problem

That was acutally a happy ending, from safety perspective. I once pressed the big red button on a machine in integration testing, after which the machine proceeded merrily with its doings and a warning dialog came on its HMI screen, saying "TODO connect big red button procedure".

South Korean privacy watchdog apologises for violating privacy while mediating privacy lawsuit

Refreshing wording of the apology

Interesting to see words like "leak", "victim" and "apologize"[sic!] in report on an own goal. Altough the "victims" may regard the Facebook case rather than the lak in question, the rest is good. One is more likely to read about a small portion of account being accessed in a way not sanctioned by the terms of service and the leaking company regretting deeply the media coverage regarding the case. Usually makes one think of ways to make the leaker regret other things, too.

The Ministry of Silly Printing: But I don't want my golf club correspondence to say 'UNCLASSIFIED' at the bottom

Re: I had a brush with a bunch of senior lawyers

You remind me of a story where there was a database (a very old sybase, if I recall correctly, with data stored as flat text files, even the system internal data including passwords), two secretaries and an on-call database man summoned to sort out some weird user account problem. Said database man needed to analyse the problem and ask many questions, and so he got one of the secretaires to sit next to him when he sifted through the files. Having done wis preliminary checks he proceeded to open the account data file. The secretary was still sitting next to him, looking at the screen. As soon as he opened the file, she muttered some unpleasant vocabulary about female anatomy. When the database man inquired what was wrong, the lady exploded: "one is supposed to keep one's face, isn't one? That is why I have my husband's name as a password. And that other bitch thinks she can use her lover's?"

Epic battle latest: Judge reminds Apple it has 30 days to let apps link out to non-Apple payment systems

I came here solely to comment on this very thing and am pleased to see that almost the whole discussion revolves around this topic.

I would hazard a guess that Apple wants to avoid a future court ruling which would order it to speak to The Register under court supervision!