Posts by Sandgrounder 59 publicly visible posts • joined 22 May 2020
It is also equally reasonable to assume that every business that looks after it's own systems will at some point have some employees that make incompetent actions resulting in data breaches on data loss. It is also likely that a not insignificant number of companies will suffer the actions of malicious employees.
There is no perfect solution, no 100% guarantees.
Whilst mac hardware may continue to be perfectly functional, the lack of software support is going to force it to be junked.
Whilst you may be happy running obsolete software with no security patches in your home basements, this is not an option in business. To keep ISO and cyber essentials certifications requires all equipment to be run on supported versions. Fail to do this and in addition to losing your certifications, you invalidate your cyber insurance cover. Lose your certifications and you can't get government contracts or work from many large companies.
Whilst up till now this has been just a Mac issue due to Apple locking down updates on old gear, Microsoft seem set to follow suit with their hardware requirements for Windows 11.
Then we get to the basic operational issues. If you use your Mac for nothing but basic web browsing and the odd document, it will probably still be useful after 7 years. So good for you if your 2010 Mac still runs. I've not been so lucky, funnily enough because I use mine for building stuff for Apple kit.
I've already had to replace iMacs and iphones because Apple stopped allowing OS updates and iOS updates.
1. The only thing I need a Mac for is building apps.
2. To build apps, I need XCode.
3. To upload apps to the store I need a current version of XCode.
4.To install a current version of XCode requires a current OS.
5. Despite being fully upgraded to 16GB ram and SSD drives, Apple blocked OS updates to my iMacs because the year of original purchase.
Every singe statement above is a direct business decision and nothing to do with hardware or technical capability. The result - I'm forced to skip my old hardware on a 5/6 year schedule and buy new gear to keep in business.
One of the biggest risks with old software is not bitrot or bugs but security. Vulnerabilities are found in software on a frequent basis that allow unauthorised access, privilege escalation, defeating of encryption and so on.
Software that isn't regularly patched is vulnerable and putting data at risk. There is a reason that the UK cyber essentials certification for example insists that all applications run on supported versions and platforms (or have appropriate mitigations to isolate and minimise risks). This shouldn't be about keeping the upgrade cycles running.
It matters not whether it be Oracle, Microsoft, Google or Bobs Best software inc. Even Apple these days don't try to pretend security issues don't apply to them. It doesn't matter if it is open or closed source, see LogforJ debacle.
Software requires support and requires patching as and when vulnerabilities emerge. Someone has to pay someone to do this, the mindset that it is simply faulty or should be done for free forever is not sustainable.
Obviously some software is better than others, some companies have better practices and quality control. And in these parts, 90% of folk believe all software developwers incompetent and themselves Omnipotent. That doesn't change the basic facts that all non trivial software is at risk and security requires supported software.
Its about time all of us, especially those in the IT industry, woke to the reality and seriouness of the threat.
Give it a rest.
I know it is a tradition in these parts to beat on about Linux on any article that mentions Microsoft but at least try and make it entertaining. This is more tedious than a dinner party of vegans.
Or how about a comment on the actual article? Tell us all the ways your Auntie doesn't want to use AI on her shopping lists or something.
Is this wish list for common functionality provided by any other platforms or are we Microsoft bashing? Does macOS or any of the Linux distros provide a common print preview API for example? I actually agree with your post, Microsoft had the resources and could of done a great job, instead of resting on their Windows 3.1 laurels about having a shared printer driver for multiple apps and never moving the sticks on to the next step.
The only other platform I'm aware of, Android, made printing even more hell than Windows by forcing a separate printer app to be used. Had to save the file to the file system and load up a separate app made by your printer manufacturer (if they bothered) to print anything. I'm out of date on this, maybe Android printing has evolved since the dark days a mere handful of years ago but it was an awful mess.
Yes, it's all so simple. Standardise it. Why has no one else ever thought of this?
Why not setup your own company and present your brilliant plan to local authorities? I'm sure they will be blown away as you present the standard processes that you will be implementing. Along with your strategy to get their entire work force on your side to make it happen.
Your book of standard best in breed solutions for all business functions will be worth it's weight in gold. You will have no difficulty in attracting investors and finance with such breath taking knowledge. With full multi vendor support to get everything working seemlessly together the implementation should be trivial. Throw in a single website, knock up an app and it will be done.
Can you deliver next Tuesday?
How about some ideas about what an alternative solution would look like? Something plausible, not the usual "I could write this in my shed with a couple of mates" type of answer.
There are a few challenges to consider,
a) This is a big enterprise, a multi billion £ "business" ;
b) Whilst on the surface it appears there are many local authorities doing similar stuff, the reality is that there are major differences between how each and every one operates. Each need a bespoke solution. "Make them all work the same way" is about a realistic a plan as "just stop crime" is as an answer to prison overcrowding.
c) there is a reason the same suppliers get asked every time - they are running these systems already. whilst there are well publicised issues, a huge amount of local and national government stuff totally depend on them to function.
d) The depth and breath of functionality required is huge. It is hard to visualise how much these systems do if you've no experience with them.
e) the customers/end users lack the skills or understanding to support these projects. Keeping the lights on day to day is challenge enough. This is both in business and IT skills.
f) there are existing legacy systems that have to be kept running whilst the new project is done. Migration of these to new processes/systems is high risk, high complexity and time critical.
g) doing nothing is not an option. Existing Hardware is approaching end of life with no like for like replacement. Software and even operating systems are no longer supported. Many existing processes can't manage the changes that will be required to support new business requirements.
You just belong to a bygone era where organisations valued their staff, provided proper training, career paths and a job for life.
Hire a brilliant team of your own, write it all in house, maintain and modernise as you go is a fairytale. The reality is failing systems, unfit for purpose and impossible to maintain. In the real world, even the best designed and built systems fall into decay as the original authors move on, new staff fail to understand the system and new requirements bend the old designs past breaking point.
In 21st century IT, skilled and experienced staff are seen as a burden and cost centre, to be ruthlessly rooted out and cast on the bonfire. Ironically, often replaced by a bunch of cheap students.
Large organisations reap what they sow.
Would you buy a car from your local higher education college because they run a mechanics course?
Professional software development is a highly skilled business that requires time and experience to learn. No matter how bright the students, they cannot deliver something like this.
A significant chunk of my business comes from companies that thought it could be done for free/on the cheap by a bunch of students. My experience is that 99.95% (approximately) of such code ends in the bin and 100% of such projects fail.
And that's before we open the can of worms about academics.
Ok. I feel qualified to answer this. I was tech lead on a project for a major bank that needed to migrate a few hundred small programs from running on old/obsolete x86 architectures to a modern, fully supported and maintainable environment. These programs were not the core banking applications, these just ran in the gaps between the main systems, doing one or more jobs necessary to keep data processed and flowing across the enterprise.
Sounds a straightforward task,
- we had the knowledge and skills to read the old code;
- all the programs were in a small, isolated area, walled off from most other systems;
- there were minimal functional/logical changes, just rewrite it to do the same as it did;
The project ran for over a year and had still not been completed when I moved on. We found significant challenges in multiple areas
a. No-one knew what each program was doing or why. There was no documentation. There were no business users who remembered why the program had been needed. There was no IT knowledge as to why something was done.
b. No-one understood what the data was. As much was scraped from application screens as written to database tables. Many fields had multiple types of data in, mixes of dates, numbers and alphanumeric codes. Many fields were bit masks for other fields.
c. The enterprise world is dynamic and ever changing. One example springs to mind where data from source A and outputs it to destination b, takes data from B, mixes with source C and D, writes out to destinations E, F and G. but when source C is a mainframe screen with 15 fields, of which only 12 still exist, and there is an update part way through the rewrite that removes that screen completely. what now? Anyone know where the data can still be found.
d. There were 100s of hard coded edge cases, all interwoven into an impenetrable web of conditional logic statements, tress and branches.
e. The test data was not fit for purpose in most cases. With 20+ years of industry mergers, new products, obsolete products, half migrated systems etc, there could be 4000 different types of data from records in a single table.
f. The number of test cases required to test every possible combination of data was rising towards infinity. We stopped calculating past 100 billion.
g. For the majority of the programs it was not known how many systems would be impacted by an individual program, let alone be able to plan a proper regression test.
Yes, we had the original source. Yes, we could write it again to do the apparent same thing in the new environment. That was usually the trivial bit. Finding out whether it still did the same in every use case in every combination with no impact to anything else. Almost impossible.
These programs dealt with moving transactions between hundreds of thousands of current accounts, savings accounts, loan accounts, bad debtor accounts, accounting systems and so on every day, with total revenue in the hundreds of millions.
To anyone who has never seem the complexity and scale of enterprise systems, it is like trying to handover air traffic control duties at Heathrow to a parking attendant in a small car park.
So save the smug old-timer comments for the playground. Realise that there is a whole world of IT technology, skills, knowledge and implementation that has been achieved by the efforts of many from several differing generations across the last 50 years. You think you know it all. Think again.
Any glaring examples of products that have been ripped from Foss?
Amazon Elastic Search was the most blatant case I can remember.
Apple. They don't stop at Foss, they do it to commercial products too usually accompanied by banning the original vendor from the app store to boot.
Anyone care to list others for the hall of shame?
I would suspect that selling accounts software without TLS 1.2 for the last few years could leave Sage open to claims that their product was defective and not fit for purpose.
For their corporate lies department to then attempt to force perpetual license holders to purchase a new product as the only "fix" for their defective software could be tantemount to blackmail.
If I were a customer, I would be seeking legal advice to seek immediate redress.
Do all your machines come from the $100 bargain bucket, do you deliberately buy crap or are you the unluckiest user on the planet?
Are the rest of world really that dumb to keep buying Intel? OK, the answer to that is obviously yes but that's not the point.
You say Facebook, Teams? Problem solved, it's a software issue.
Let me fix this for you:
iPad + Magic keyboard/stand are an expensive and inferior copy of Microsoft Surface devices. Whilst the iPad hardware is great, the fisher price OS that the vendor insists on inflicting on its users is a crime (and will remain so whilst touch screen and macOS remain isolated from each other) .
If you are happy with the surface pro format, why change? If you like Microsoft hardware but need some more oomph including a graphics card or prefer more of a traditional laptop whilst keeping a pen for writing/drawing, then this is a decent, if pricey upgrade.
Have you ever set eyes (ears?) on this laptop or is your expert opinion based on your intuitive understanding from the spec sheet?
In days gone by, manufacturers considered thermal properties and heat dissipation when building PCs, be they full size towers or laptops. Even the choice of fan made a difference on whether your device ran quietly or sounded like a jumbo jet taking off. Days before the cult of thin swept all before it.
As an actual owner and daily user of the Surface Laptop studio, I would like to share my experiences
- in my normal daily activities the laptop is virtually silent and the fans remain off. These activities include software development and running various simulators and emulators when testing mobile apps.
- on the rare times the fans do come on, they are an order of magnitude quieter than the typical laptop fans I've heard from other devices. Certainly no worse than using an average business grade desktop PC.
As to other points in the article:
- I've never cut my wrists on its edges. They are no sharper than any other device I have used and I can use it to work on all day with no ill effects when away from my usual desktop environment.
- The battery lasted for a full 8 hour workshop yesterday, where OneNote was used constantly, with Teams and Outlook running in the background. I've never tried hours of video rendering or continual code compilation tasks whilst waiting for it to die. I also doubt it will get close to an Apple M1/2 powered laptop. However, in [my] normal usage, I am never concerned that the battery won't last a half day at a customer's office plus a few hours on the train home. It beats my previous Surface Book 2 comfortably.
- I love the form factor for taking notes, drawing architecture diagrams, annotating documents. To borrow a phrase, it just works.
Take your seats folks, its Bingo time.
- Web pages should be plain HTML, no scripting, no CSS
Yep
- Lazy Web Developers
Yep
- Why does anyone need a smartphone, The good old telegraph is fine for everyone
Yep
- Who uses a mobile anyway, it's much easier to whip out my desk, chair, 3 widescreen monitors (one portrait aspect) and boot up my workstation to find directions whilst on the move via my custom bash scripts
Yep
- Apple isn't a monopoly, Raspberry pi exists
Yep
- If you want a fully functional computer, optimised 10,000 times, that fits in your pocket, that can do almost anything anywhere and now you want to run your own software, go and built it yourself
Yep
- We should take what our Apple overloads prescribe and be grateful for it
Yep
HOUSE!
A database that can predict its own data. Imagine the opportunities this will provide
- No more clunky data access code for inserts / updates, the db knows what is about to arrive.
- Banks no longer needing to track transactions, they can simply predict your balance.
- Instant democracy, no more pesky voting, results will be in before the count starts
- As for IoT, forget it. We can predict what sensors would have been installed along with the readings
Simply not true.
There are tens of thousands of apps created by companies and distributed for free as it provides a better / easier / faster / shinier / more persistent * way for customers to use their services.
* Delete as appropriate
For example:
Banking apps
Streaming services
Messaging services
Here is another crazy idea. Rather than wait for "them" to build the Web just the way you want, why not have a go at building it yourself. Then you can sell what you have to others.
That would surely prove that you know better than "them" about what "they" want.
Tip: I wouldn't recommend you bet your mortgage on this.
I learnt from a book all sorts of "proper"/extreme programming you could do with VB. Passing string pointers around, direct read and writes to memory locations, multithreading, accessing the real Windows API and best of all, how to hack MTS and COM+.
Used it to great effect to help modernise an enormous and cumbersome MDI based VB application. Kept the MDI shell in place whilst rewriting the core functionality in C# using .NET 2002. Only needed a few calls to obtain the MDI child window handles and drop in the .NET forms into place and wire up the event handlers.
My biggest learning of all - just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should.
Disappointing to see that there is still no support for VST instruments. Given the ubiquity of them in music production since the early 2000s and that Audacity is a wannabe Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), this is a huge omission. Despite this, it is still in the premier league of open source tools. I can't think of many others that get so much right - including the user interface. For free, you cannot argue with what the team have produced. This is one project I will not hesitate to contribute to once I have been able to put in the leg work to learn enough to be useful.
Some of the comments above made me chuckle. It reminds me of people seeing word processors for the first time and being amazed at what they could do. Yes folks, editing audio on computers is a thing. Works quite well too.
This smells like a lawyer looking to open up a new front for huge paydays against any company that uses a system that could be, in the eys of a lawyer, labelled AI.
Been wronged by AI? Call us now to start your claim.
Whilst the intention may be honerable, I'm sure that the genius who came up with software patents was worried about protecting the little guy too. How well that works.
There are so many issues here. For example, demographics change. Populations age. The % of each population group fluctuates.
Does a company have to check the census every year to figure out how many Somalians are in a local population in case it has increased or decreased?
How does a company validate the dataset for suppliers?
Who decides whether the dataset is relevant to the task in hand?
How much will it cost to retrain your AIs for every product for every update? Will make server patching appear a walk in the park.
How long is your dataset valid for?
Will end up with an army scouring through every possible product containing AI looking for the slightest chance to claim a trivial infraction against anyone ticking a box for todays list of society's protected charactistics.
Insufficient latter day saints in your traffic modeliing for your 10 year old route planning app? Where there's blame...
This would be a perfectly reasonable opinion on the Guardian comments as everything is either the fault of Brexit, Cummings or both. I suggest it is almost certainly not that. We in Britain had laws and systems of knowledge recording long before our European brethren gathered together to invent civilisation and we continue to have them.
I too have no evidence to support such a belief, but opinion trumps [pun intended] facts every time.
Yep, there is specific legislation that describes in detail what data the police have to delete and after what time period. It is nothing to do with GDPR.
Personal [nominal] data depends on a number of factors as to if/when it can be deleted. Data on category 1/2 offenders cannot be deleted. Data on offenders in categories 3 and 4 is deleted after 10 years (IIRC).
Unsolved crimes obviously have no offenders. Nominals may still be linked with these as suspects, witnesses, victims and so on. Similar rules apply as for offenders, the data cannot be deleted for category 1/2 crimes.
Most police systems follow a POLE model, people, objects, location, events. Personal data is not limited to people. Locations can be classed as personal, eg. home addresses of nominals or non-personal, eg. crime scenes.
Objects can also be in scope. These can include items held as evidence and as such, deleted personal data can trigger destruction of physical evidence, warehouse records and so on. This is usually only an issue for object data held by individual police forces and not on the PNC.
The seriousness of this incident is getting overhyped by the press. Whilst crimes occurring across force borders will not be easily linked, it is completely false to suggest that criminals will become unknown by the police, their fingerprints no longer available. Data is held in a multitude of other systems by police forces, some off the shelf, some custom built. There is some level of automation to transfer data from some of the packaged systems to the PNC but , to my knowledge, there is no linking of data for deletion to/from the PNC. Each force is responsible for deleting its own data, and the PNC is managed separately. The deleted data will still exist in the original source systems. Dependent on which system, it may be possible to identify the data in the force systems that was transferred into the PNC and is no longer there. This may be an option if other attempts to restore the data are unsuccessful.
More like a once independent species assiilalated by the Borg. Free will and a right to self determination may have been lost but there is a rather cool hive API and you can release any 3D shape as long as it is a cube.
They have both usb-c and a bespoke connect port. Charging works on both. Why is continued support for an additional proprietary port supporting hardware that could deliver power and drive a full docking station that pre-dates the latest USB-C equivalents classed as bad? Perhaps they lack courage to screw all existing users?
Teacher is a fool.
This has nothing to do with cloud. Incompetence places data at risk regardless of who owns the box it sits on. It is naive in the extreme to think that because you can physically touch a server, it is safe. A proper security strategy has to assume that the internal network is equally as compromised as a public one.
No, it doesn't cost more to create multiple blobs. This is purely a design decision.
For a multi tenanted application, it would be expected that a separate blob be used for each tenant.
In a single tenant application a single blob for different customer's data would not be unusual, in the same way multiple customer's data would be in a single database.
So many claims on here that advertising does not work made by no doubt very clever people who can sidestep most of the tracking. You must all be so much smarter than those dumb business people who buy ads.
Yet many of those dumb business people make an awful lot of money selling stuff. And they keep buying the ads too.
Advertising doesn't work? Really? Who are the people being dumb now?
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