Posts by iGNgnorr 75 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jan 2019
"Where Visual Studio has become somewhat bloated with age, Visual Studio Code, now approaching the seventh anniversary of its release, remains lightweight enough to run comfortably within a browser."
VS Code is far too bloated and complicated to do simple editing, and far too simplistic and complicated (how many add-ons do I need to do *that*?) to do anything serious. I really don't understand why I don't remove it. Maybe I just like to be fashionable.
"Good luck with that!"
Not least becuse a Chromebook has a broken keyboard as far as I'm concerned. ([Google developer thinking:] Oooh look, there's a key I don't use: let's remove it (becasue obviously if *I* don't use it, no-one does) and add a Google search key for those who can't figure out how to search Google any other way.
I've had similar problems. Openreach never fixed anything despite Zen sending them half a dozen times over a couple of months. Suddenly, a few weeks after everyone had given up, things got better overnight. Our guess is that Openreach changed out some of their kit overnight ... never admitted to anything though
It is particularly stupid that Sears failed: for decades before Amazon, Sears had a successful catalog business. They really should have been able to adust that to the online world, but failed to do so. Maplin is another which failed to do exactly the same thing.
Those who make the rules are falling for the idea that humans make mistakes (they do) and that driver "assistance" things do not (provably false, time and time again.) A big difference is that when a human makes a mistake, they take immediate corrective action. The assistance things just blunder on.
"After all, there is OpenMediaVault. You can install it on a RasPi an tailor it to exactly your needs. Mission accomplished."
Have you actually done this? There's slightly more to a NAS than sticking some software in a Pi. How about getting a SSD cached four disk RAID setup working on it for a start. Or two ethernet connections.
Is OpenMediaVault actually more secure than a commercial NAS? While QNAP's screw-up here is appalling, there is no guarantee that *anything* else won't have security issues.
My first NAS was a Drobo. After this stuffed itself, I went for a QNAP. It has been much better than the Drobo. Until recently.
A non-functioning Drobo sometimes recovers by itself if left disconnected in a cool dark place for several months (seriously!) Mine actually did so, and it is now a backup for the QNAP - and powered off 99% of the time.
A few months ago, QNAP updates started breaking things. Sometimes they'd get fixed, then broken again (broken timestamps on files copied to n SMB connected drive for example.) Their huge failure in putting hard-coded credentials in the Hybrid Sync Backup is just the icing on the cake. QNAP seem to have abandoned any pretence of quality control.
The aforemention Hybrid Sync Backup arrived unasked for on my QNAP. Luckily for me, I decided to disable it just a few days agao as for me it is completely useless. I also don't actively use any of the internet-facing aspects of the QNAP, although it is well-nigh impossible to have a NAS which has no internet access at all: it is no use whatsoever if it isn't on a network, and unelss you are going to run more than one network, that network is going to be connected to the internet.
My QNAP is currently off, and to the best of my knowledge unaffected by this malware, but later today I'm going to disconnect my wired LAN from the router, and investigate thoroughly.
"Linux is a community effort but they could use the money, okay?"
From the article, the main gist of his request is commitment to use and test the kernel for six years. There's no point devoting resources to supporting a kernel for six years if no-one bothers to use it or test it.
"Why is why the correct solution is to generally simplify."
I worked for some time under a manager who kept wanting to *add* simplicity. She didn't seem able to understand that adding anything is the exact opposite of simplicity. You can just guess what the product was like both before and after simplicity was added.
"...even some of them have been guilty of switching to a "pay++" model where you are nagged to pay again for stuff you don't want."
Or switch to a new owner and/or to in-app payments and want you to pay for it again. This is usually accompanied by non-improvements. (e.g. AquaMail or Solitaire Megapack.)
"You are thinking small. If you dredge deep enough then eventually there will not be enough water to fill the gap and job done !"
I've heard people ask (here in Blighty) whether someone digging a hole was trying to get to Australia, so if those down under start digging in the opposite direction, they may meet in the middle. I'm not sure this solves the original problem however.
If I had to rate customer support for these threee, I'd rate them:
Amazon 9.9/10
eBay 2/10
PayPal -1/10
PayPal are the least helpful company on this planet in my experience. They simply will not help. Unfortunately a number of small businesses use PayPal to process online payments, so either you stick with Amazon or take a risk and use the small business and PayPal.
Fortunately, in the UK the credit (not debit) card rules force the card companies to properly process chargebacks when things go wrong with a PayPal processed payment. I always think at least twice before using PayPal to process a card payment, and often just don't take the risk.
I've not had to force a chargeback very often (3 or maybe 4 times in my entire life,) but 2 of those have involved PayPal card payments.
There's change, and there's change for change's sake. There's far too much of the latter, which makes useful changes easy to overlook.
An important ability in programming is to get it right. Jumping from one language to another doesn't help this necessary ability. Do one thing and do it well, aka "Jack of all trades, master of none."
"Yes this pandemic costs money. So what?"
So someone has to pay for it. The government? They don't actually have money: what they spend comes from your pocket and mine. Soak the rich? Well, there's actually not enough of them to pay for all this. Businesses then. We're already seeing that many of them are struggling - of course, to some they are just laying off staff so they can keep their big bonuses, but with no income and your prospect of making them pay for unnecessary isolation, it doesn't actually work quite like that. How's your local pub/nightclub/beauty salon/etc. doing for example? Rolling in cash?
I used to work as a systems administartor who, among other things, provisioned Linux virtual machines. As these were development systems, the users all needed root. One user was persistently and increasingly noisily complaining that the systems I supplied were very unstable and kept needing to be rebuilt.
After the third time for one particular system in a couple of days, with management now involved, I decided to mount the offending broken system from another one. It had managed to perserve the bash history before it killed itself: yup, rm -r from the root directory.
The complaints from that user about unstable systems stopped. No apology was offered of course.
"But for most of their lives they've been horrid."
I don't know how long you've been around, but IBM have been around over a century (only 96 as IBM though,) and particularly in the context of this article, for most of those, they were excellent with their employees but also their customers. Their competitors did no fare so well as evidenced by a few anti-trust actions and consent degrees.
The brief time spent openly defending open source - while creditable - was but a blip in their long history.
"A process failure during manufacturing of one batch of resistors should be found when the random samples of the batch are tested."
Generally, items like resistors are not tested for 18 months. As another poster suggested, this may be an under-spec'd item which is not itself at fault, merely over-used. That a mere resistor dying causes an entire unit to fail sounds like a potential design issue too. Re-furb of a board with a dead resistor ought to be possible.
"bankrupt if he loses"
Not necessarily. He may be on a no win, no fee deal with his lawyers. Given how IBM tends to win cases, that would normally tend to suggest it is unlikely, however, in this case, IBM have lawyered themselves in a bind: they are in trouble either way, so I'd say there's a good chance he (personally) has nothing to lose.
"What is wrong is the ridiculousness of keep using software that's so old it was invented when computers didn't have enough memory to hold the full date of the year and keep replacing the hardware while keeping using the same software.
Practicality the whole servers have been replaced by now, if anything remains of the old servers at all, and yet they keep using COBOL for them.
Hard disks start to fail at about ten years if not earlier, wires and fans don't last forever, there are also problems like the bios ending being so old it just dies even if you keep changing the battery
Buying cheap ends becoming expensive and replacing the whole servers with a version of Linux and up to date (By Debian stable standards) software would end saving the state a huge amount of money in the long run.
Yes, there are newer versions of COBOL but this is the COBOL that was used in the eighties,;even if you want to keep using COBOL you should at least update to the modern version so there will be people left alive that can use it when the Year 2038 problem strikes."
There are some absurd comments posted hereabouts, but this one is beyond ridiculous. Have you no clue whatsoever about managing computer systems? Even the Linux ones you seem to think are the answers to everyone's prayers?
Yes, hard disks fail. You apparently don't know that it is possible to move data from old disks to new ones, and even if the old ones fail before you do that, you restore from backups. Maybe you've heard of RAID? If not, maybe should learn about it. You'll no doubt be shocked to know that shops which run large COBOL systems actually perform regular scheduled backups in case of worst case disk system failure. And know how to restore from them.
Most systems which run COBOL at scale don't have BIOSes, but even if they did, BIOSes don't fail due to batteries. As for wires wearing out ... maybe the cheap eBay knock-offs you use for your 'phone, but not those used on business systems.
What the version of COBOL originally used has to do with it is entirely beyond me. COBOL programs compiled 40 years ago on IBM mainframes will still run today. Assuming the source code hasn't been lost (this is actually a genuine problem) it can be recompiled with the current compiler, usually with no changes.
"This time for old-style dumb phones with no geo-location hardware. See the flip-phone beloved by Gibbs in NCIS"
As other posters have pointed out, a mobile 'phone's location can be triangulated from nearby cell masts. That's what allows a cellular network to connect to your 'phone. No need for GPS, no need for Wi-Fi location. No need for Bluetooth location. Just the mere fact it is a cellular 'phone and is switched on.
"I'm interested in just how accurate any of these measures are. For example, A lot of houses (in the UK at least) have the living area separated from the street by two courses of brick and an air-gap, often pierced by a window and a door. Someone who is legitimately indoors following the self-isolation rules could wrongly be placed several metres outside the house. Alternatively, people walking on the pavement outside could be classed as contacts despite never actually having anything to do with the self-isolating individual."
You are missing the point. Twice.
1: This is being implemented using anonymised data, therefore it isn't for tracking individuals. (Clearly, without anonimisation it could be, but this isn't the stated use.)
2: This isn't anything to do with people just stepping outside, it is to track significant movements. It is to get a picture of how much general movement there is, and where it is taking place. (Again, without anonimisation, it could be used to track individuals, but that isn't the stated use case, and in any case, not whether anyone is one side of a wall or the other!)
For example, this data can be used to see if tens of thousands of people are driving 20 miles to exercise, or whether just a few hundred are. One may require further restrictions of movement, but the other probably not.
There are obvious concerns about how this data could be [mis]used, but mistaking someone walking past your home for you isn't one of them.
"In the mean time, we start with languages that compile to JVM, but aren't Java."
I don't wish to give Oracle ideas, but once they've got the Java APIs nailed down (which given the makeup of SCOTUS seems at least somewhat likely,) if they then follow that up with the bytecodes supported by the JVM, then anything else using the JVM is also in deep ... stuff.
"Pet projects and administration are almost always the very last things that organizations in a bind cut. The peons who keep the place running have little cachet, so cutting them is easy."
The rationale for this is simple: QA and support do not create revenue. Pet projects, in someone's mind, might one day, possibly, maybe, create revenue. Administration is where the decisions are made about who goes, so administration is clearly essential in order to determine who else to get rid of.
"pushing out a firmware update that breaks people's RAID arrays will turn this situation from a problem to a disaster"
Unless the article has been updated, this is a reading fail. They are warning that a RAID array with a bunch of these will have them all fail at the same time *without* the firmware update.
The US also has jaywalking laws, making it illegal to step off the sidewalk onto the pavement except at a formal crossing point or intersection. I'm not sure it applies if you are pushing a bicycle though.
(Yes, I do know this isn't applicable everywhere, and it is widely ignored anyway.)
"This is a solution looking for a problem unless the problem is actually the internet giants trying to reduce ISPs down even further to nothing more than dumb pipes so they can ultimately grab their business."
Please see the UK Labour party's intention to take over internet delivery in the name of making it "free" (as in beer, not as in freedom.)
Back in the day when printed dumps were the way to debug a program, I found that making extensive use of the office floor was an excellent substitute for having a very large desk (which was in any case already in use for filing.) Really useful to be able to look at variables, logs, and [printed] compiler listings at the same time.
"Programming languages are just that - tools to get a job done."
That's all very well, but if every screwdriver had to be examined carefully, odd features looked up, and the whole thing rebuilt before someone else could use it, that wouldn't be a very good screwdriver, would it?
"But, this is the US of A, a country which has re-defined the term lobbying and set the example of how not to manage corporations or professional interests, so what else can you expect ?"
FTFY (The term "lobbying" is actually defined by the physical layout of the Palace of Westminster, and the lobby is where constituents and others can meet their Member of Parliament.)
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