Posts by usariocalve

This US national lab turned to AI to hunt rogue nukes

There may be some countries that don't have laws about it because it's considered ridiculous. Does Monaco prohibit the possession of nukes by Individuals? Why would they bother to pass that law?

The nodes have it in the Great DB debate: Reg readers pick graph

Why not just take a big graph database, transform it into an SQL database, and do some head-to-head performance calculations?

The theoretical stuff is all BS. Put them head-to-head and see what happens.

Just pick one from the LDBC. Or heck, pick them all.

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

The only place a GraphQL call isn't an RPC is in that misguided engineer's mind.

Unless somehow that GraphQL call is being serviced locally, it's a Remote (ie: not local) procedure call (we're calling a function that lives somewhere else).

Should be easy to win the rights to .tv when you're name-checked in the contract's tech reqs – right, Afilias?

This is pretty standard fare for RFPs when one vendor is favored.

US boffins: We're close to fusion ignition in the lab – as seen in stars and thermonuclear weapons

As an FYI, it's been posited that thermonuclear weapons embed their plutonium in an aerogel (fogbank), which keeps them stable and sub-critical until compression occurs.

Asahi's plan for Linux on Apple's new silicon shows Cupertino has gone back to basics with iOS booting

The one level interrupt is probably a legacy holdover from PPC, where there was only one interrupt level. When Apple transitioned to PPC they synthesized the 8 levels of 68k interrupts, just like these guys did.

Interrupt levels are always iffy, because everyone always wants the highest priority one. So why bother with multiple levels when they all have to be arbitrated anyway?

At the very last Moment.js: Time-and-date JavaScript library fetched 12 million times a week ends development

It's crazy that people are complaining about mutability. Who gave the mutability police authority to declare that all libraries must follow the mantra of immutability?

I mean, the Javascript runtime is already a memory pig. Lets make it use more memory by requiring programmers to create new copies of objects when changing an instance variable/property? Who thought up that dumb requirement?

I can only assume that programmers have gotten more stupid as time goes on. First they complain about C being dangerous, now they complain that "oh no, objects can be changed." What's next, functional programming?

Remember that clinical trial, promoted by President Trump, of a possible COVID-19 cure? So, so, so many questions...

It's amusing to me that people are fiddling while Rome burns. In an emergency all kinds of standards are thrown out the window.

Or we can wait and die, which seems to be what "reasonable" people want us to do.

Atlassian finally unleashes free Jira tier – nearly six months late yet just in time for coronavirus crunch

Jira Free has been around for a while; I've been using it for months. Service Desk and Core, though, are new.

How does Monzo keep 1,600 microservices spinning? Go, clean code, and a strong team

Really, the development methodology you pick depends on your set of requirements.

Monolithic applications are more difficult to change, and generally are more fragile.

Microservice-based applications have their own challenges, but because the APIs are published their contracts are much easier to enforce and side-effects are essentially non-existent...or at least easily traceable.

You can sort of get modularity in a monolithic app, but you start having versioning problems once you get to a certain point. You can design around that problem in a microservice architecture, since it's the behavior that matters, not the implementation.

In the end, micro services will probably be better because it reduces the cognitive load on an individual developer. It requires more work up front, but in the long run developer brainpower is the most expensive resource you have, so anything that makes development easier will win.

if developer_docs == bad then app_quality = bad; Coders slam Apple for subpar API manuals

It's pretty ridiculous. For example, there is little to no documentation on HealthKit. Did you know that you need to store your query anchor? Are times in UTC or local time? The documentation is silent. Devs just use stackoverflow, which is basically lore from people that got things to work.

Boeing admits 737 Max sims didn't accurately reproduce what flying without MCAS was like

At ARS there was a mention that the system might have re-enabled itself, but I didn't see that in any other discussion of the incident.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/ethiopian-air-pilots-turned-off-737-max-anti-stall-system-then-it-turned-on-again/

Hackers manage – just – to turn Amazon Echoes into snooping devices

Instead of re-flashing an echo, why not pre-hack an echo and plug it in?

Anyway, the vuln has been fixed.

Amazon's eating its own dog food when it comes to managing the Alexa ecosystem, so if you want a place to start take a look at amazon's IoT infrastructure; it's pretty tight. You'll have more success ripping the client cert off of an echo and using it to abuse the system, at least until the cert is revoked. The big weakness right now is that there's no way to prevent someone from -attempting- to connect - a revoked cert will still eat resources at some level.

US Congress finally emits all 3,000 Russian 'troll' Facebook ads. Let's take a look at some

Facebook doesn't want to say that its ads don't work, but its ads don't work.

Sysadmin shut down the wrong server, and with it all European operations

I was at a defense outsourcer in Texas 20 years ago as a sales engineer selling system management software, and was told an amusing story about job control GUIs. One day they had put in a fancy new GUI in front their LPARs, to make their lives easier. The senior guy spun up an LPAR (or whatever you called it), ran some jobs, then shut it down.

Well, it kept asking him over and over if he wanted to shut down the LPAR, and he got annoyed and just started clicking "yes." It turns out he shut down like 18 LPARs by mistake. He only stopped when someone ran into the room panicking, asking if a catastrophic event had happened.