Posts by Herring` 218 posts • joined 23 Mar 2018
How many of these bits of malware get in through users clicking on links or opening attachments in emails? Let's face it, that's a far easier way in than trying to get past tech.
And how many C-levels demand access to their GMail/social media/etc?
Also ob. SMBC https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-02-20
People in IT rarely seem to be interested in spending time watching what users actually do. Specs are often thrashed out with managers of the users who don't spend any time with them either. I've winced when seeing people in the call centre trapped between an angry caller (with broken $EXPENSIVE_THING) and shit software that doesn't tell them what they need to know.
The other thing with software for internal use: if users are on it all day, does it make more sense to have something that takes a little longer to learn but once learned is very fast to operate, or to have something "intuitive" that's always slow to operate?
$1.40 a day sounds OK to me too.
Maybe, instead of wasting time on the internets while pretending to work, I should set about designing a global micropayments service. I reckon you could preserve privacy too by having the service throw anonymous tokens at the sites providing the content and then bundling up all the payments in one.
Hmm.
The ad people don't seem to get it. If you make adverts intrusive and annoying, people will start ad-blocking. Once they start blocking, they won't stop. Running a fucktonne of 3rd party JS counts as intrusive and annoying. Advertisers are the ones who have killed the goose etc.
If someone could come up with a decent micropayments service for accessing things like news, that might be better. I pay for news sites I use all the time, but I'm not going to subscribe to sites that I look at 5 times a month.
OK, I may be in a minority here, but aside from the horrible UI, Notes was pretty good for developing workflow apps. Also some nice security features. These days I sometimes come across a requirement for something that needs workflow/DMS/email/security etc. but there isn't anything else that quite fits the bill.
What passes for AI these days seems to have little resemblance to any actual intelligence. I would lose at Go to any competent player (never played it) but I know what a "game" is and what "lose" means. There isn't a machine that understands those concepts.
It's certainly not my field, but I wonder if perception is a key thing that's missing. A human baby, using sight, sound, touch etc. is able to build a mental model of how the physical world works. Is anyone exploring this process with machines?
Also, I note that the attempts to build self-driving cars use far more energy than a human driver would do. Plus sooner or later they are going to come across a situation which they cannot classify or classify incorrectly. What happens then will be ... interesting
Turned out the latency killed it
I remember going on a (rare) on-site visit with a user of our software. Watching them operate it, there was one bit of processing where they copied everything to the local drive, ran the processing, then copied it back to the network. Intrigued, I asked why. They said that on the network drive, the processing took half an hour instead of a few seconds.
We'd not seen this but I did spot one thing: they were on token ring and we were on ethernet. Getting back to the office, I investigated and found that one of my colleagues had decided that the best way to write a bunch of binary data to disk was looping through the buffer writing one byte at a time - instead of just one write operation for the whole thing. The effect on ethernet wasn't really noticeable but on token ring, well it had to wait for a token for each byte. 30 second fix once found. The guy who wrote that had a particular talent for coding obscure bugs, hiding a stupid decision behind many layers.
Here's an idea: anyone with one of these devices, every time you go out, leave a recording playing of you saying "Alexa, what's the weather forecast for Tashkent?" on a repeating loop. Eventually they'll run out of disk space. Also, using locations that you have no intention of going to will screw with their algorithms.
The way I understood it (which may be wrong), on Intel, effectively each core has two ALUs and one FPU. So hyperthreading increases throughput unless your work is mostly floating point - in which case the extra thread switches would be counterproductive. I don't know for sure, but I would've thought that a lot of things in a self-driving car are floating point. But maybe those are pushed off into a GPU.
I was wondering if you could have a cook and dispense system using something like the fusing rollers from a laser printer. Raw bacon goes in, cooked bacon comes out. Vary the speed to adjust how cooked you want it.
It's not quite as good as my idea to use a raclette grill mounted sideways to make a personal doner kebab machine.
The whole social contract needs rewriting, the treatment of veterans and their families is nothing short of disgusting,
When Help for Heroes got big, a lot of people were "Oh, isn't this inspiring. Isn't it great!" I don't consider it "great" that injured servicepeople are reliant on charity. Look at the number of ex-soldiers who end up homeless and/or with mental health issues. This isn't "great". If we can pay to send the military into combat, then we'd better be paying for the consequences of them too.
Back on the subject of the article, Private Eye has been covering this for years. Why governments keep doing the same thing - handing over public jobs to the same big companies who have no expertise and a shite track record - I really don't know.
it wasn't people who gave their personal data to Equifax - it was companies selling financial products. In a just world, there ought to be some liability on them too. They didn't take steps to ensure that they were handing over our data to someone who was taking the necessary steps to secure it.
Yeah, I know there's no chance of this happening.
The problem is no ID cards per se, it's how they could be used or abused. There are a few advantages - particularly with the upcoming confusion over who does and does not have the right to live and work in the UK. The Windrush scandal was caused by the Home Office demanding unreasonable amounts of documentation - stuff that no person would have kept.
Also, I recall many years ago being nicked for something (drunken stupidity). Turned out that there was another person with the same name as me, whose place of birth started with the same four letters and was a "proper villain". The police would not have it that I wasn't this person.
But yeah, if we had ID cards, there would have to be comprehensive oversight, strict rules about scope and it would have to be implemented competently. The chances of all that happening are pretty much zero.
Then you have to renew it every 11 months. Why is that so hard?
I know that, and you know that. But the people whose job it is to renew certs, not so much. Aided by the purchasing department that can't just go on the internet with a credit card but has to find out if it can be "bought more cheaply somewhere else".
Certificates and their expiry dates are well monitored now.
You're lucky. Place I worked at, every bloody year on this one system the cert would expire and people would flap around like headless chickens trying to find out why it had mysteriously stopped working. The security people in the US wouldn't let us use a cert with a longer expiry.
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