Posts by Howard Sway

Q: Post-lockdown, where would I like to go? A: As far away from my own head as possible

LifeShip hopes to cram a million astronauts into a capsule this way

Ugh, this all sounds a bit too much like some creepy science fiction movie from the 1970s.

The sort of thing where you'd see fresh faced smiling couples queueing up outside "LifeShip HQ" waiting to get their DNA extracted, then they'd be led to a room with shiny silver cylindrical pods with automatic doors, and after they'd got in and the door had closed there'd be a muffled scream and a shot of some green gloop flowing down a perspex pipe.....

Ch-ch-ch-Chia! HDD sales soar to record levels as latest crypto craze sweeps Europe

Re: Here's an idea ...

Knitcoin?

I quite like the idea of going to the shop and paying in big round woollen coins. Good proof of work too. But then all the knitting machines would get bought up, and textile mills would start churning them out and it'd cost £700,000 to buy a woolly jumper.

I'm thinking of starting a crypto called "Printcoin", once I've bought up a load of printers. It's a corner of the hardware market that hasn't been ruined by this stupid fad yet : Instead of "mining" using a graphics card or HDD, you use the printer to "mine" what I'm calling cryptonotes, which it spits out on paper. and you can then go and spend in a shop.

Microsoft suspends free trials for Windows 365 after a day due to 'significant demand'

this is how it is, you will be assigned a location randomly

Er, I am in a location. It is "where I am". My location is not something that can be "assigned", randomly or not. You can't pass this tripe off as a feature, it should be one of the more basic features to correctly set the user location. Doesn't inspire confidence in anything more advanced if they can't get this simple thing right.

US labor official suggests Amazon's Alabama workers rerun that unionization vote

Crikey

"the mailbox was placed in a tent, branded with Amazon's anti-union messaging and a sign on it saying vote here – in full view of Amazon's surveillance cameras"

I mean, rather than getting into arguments about unions and their behaviour, of which many examples both good and bad can be found, shouldn't the most important point be the staggeringly awful way Amazon behaved here. You don't put ballot boxes (which in effect the mailbox here was) in a place branded with exhortations to vote one particular way if you believe in fair elections. And you certainly don't have cameras that you the company control conspicuously pointing at anybody who might dare to be seen turning up to vote. It's one step short of putting a sign up saying "you will be recorded if you set foot in here, and once identified we cannot guarantee that you will not suffer woeful consequences for doing so". Mind you, I get the impression they didn't actually need the sign, and they'd made it clear enough already what the implied threat was.

It could only have been more shameless if they'd put the tent in the middle of a crocodile pen.

LOL ;-) UK govt 2 pay £39m 4 txt msgs 4 less thn 2 yrs

Over a million quid a month?

The advertised price for phone deals with "unlimited" texts ranges between £10 and £20 a month : buy one of those and there's your texts sorted.

Email is free to send, you just need a 10 year old server as a full time mail server : that'll manage millions per hour.

Next : mail merge. If only there was some kind of off the shelf package that could do this.................

Russia tells UN it wants vast expansion of cybercrime offenses, plus network backdoors, online censorship

wants vast expansion of cybercrime offenses, plus network backdoors, online censorship

Good job we have Priti Patel defending us against such unwanted state powers......... I am awaiting the government response once she's calmed down and stopped shouting "where do I sign! where do I sign!".

Amazon sets the date for televised return to Middle Earth: September 2022

Sure, but you'll have to wait for season 7 before the Millennium Falcon turns up.

Microsoft's Cloud PCs debut – priced between $20 and $158 a month

the Cloud PC resumed in precisely the state we left it

Great, perhaps they can think about porting this feature to the desktop OS as well, as it's been missing from Windows for decades.

Otherwise, a rather expensive way of playing "move the mouse, guess how long it will take for the mouse to move on the virtual desktop", or everybody's favourite, "restart the router AGAIN, my ISP's algorithm has decided for the fifth time today to throttle me for using too much data even though I'm on an 'unlimited' broadband plan."

Jack Dorsey's side hustle – payments outfit Square – acquires buy now pay later darling Afterpay for $29bn

make the financial system more fair, accessible, and inclusive

Seem to remember a little thing called "sub-prime mortgages" that was sold with exactly the same idea. Remind me how that episode of consumers taking on mountains of debt they couldn't afford to service due to stupidly easy credit availability went............

What's not clear is who takes on the liability for non payment with this system. Presumably the vendor must still sue the customer if debts aren't repaid. It surely can't be Afterpay that has to settle up : that would be far too risky.

Australian court rules an AI can be considered an inventor on patent filings

nothing in Australia law says the applicant for a patent must be human

Undoubtedly true. But I guess this means that the precedent now applies to all other laws too. So you'd have to charge animals with causing road accidents, or stealing human property, prosecute them and jail them if convicted in a court of law. Would a kangaroo have the right to be judged by a jury of its' peers, 12 other kangaroos good and true? The judge may become a little impatient when the jury fails yet again to tell him their verdict.

If the patents for flashing lights and lunchboxes that the AI allegedly invented were at all worthwhile, why didn't the guy claim to have invented them himself? I doubt that the computer would have been able to hire a lawyer and sue him.

You MUST present your official ID (but only the one that's really easy to fake)

You MUST present your official ID

At least in France, people are used to petty officiousness as a way of life, and can have the fun of endlessly devising ways of getting round it. Here in the UK we have the spectacle of a governing party fighting with themselves like cats in a bag over whether or not to introduce such urgent measures a whole two months from now, which will inevitably result in another half baked compromise that is no use whatsoever and still an annoying inconvenience.

I have my vaccine status letter stored safely in a drawer, so that when something is eventually decided I might still have a chance of going out to buy a loaf of bread amidst all the chaos that will result.

Bill for HMS Vanity Gin Palace swells by £50m in two months

a new oceangoing gin palace

I presume this is part of the much trumpeted "levelling up" agenda. So, can't wait until they give me my multimillion pound yacht too.

What's that? We're not going to be levelled up THAT much?

What a rotten swizz!

I'm feeling lucky: Google, Facebook say workers must be vaccinated before they return to offices

Facebook also announced that employees will need to be vaccinated

What if they've read all the anti-vax bollox on Facebook?

There's a woman on my street still walking up to people handing out loony religious anti-vax / covid "hoax" conspiracy theory leaflets to unfortunate passers by - I've read one and it has printed links to several Facebook pages. And she's been doing this for a year, so they can't have been taken down.

eBay ex-security boss sent down for 18 months for cyber-stalking, witness tampering

he agreed to harass them online in service of a corporate objective.

This is the heart of the matter - all the pleading about how drunk he was and how remorseful he is shouldn't obscure the fact that this was an organised campaign of cruel harassment by senior managers at a huge multinational corporation. The creepy weirdness of what was done to the victims shows that a part of the company was seriously out of control.

Watch for any response to the matter from the company once the case is complete. If there isn't a lot of very profuse apologising, with real structural changes to increase safeguards against repeat performances, and they try the "just a few bad apples" excuse, it will confirm that this awful case has roots in a corrosive corporate culture that is still not being properly addressed.

Thinking about upgrading to Debian Bullseye? Watch out for changes in Exim and anything using Python 2.x

Debian 11, also known as Bullseye

Presumably named after the Marvel comics villain, rather than the British darts based tv gameshow where you could win a speedboat and a "canteen of cutlery".

Private cryptocurrencies make lousy national currencies: International Monetary Fund

New digital forms of money have the potential to provide cheaper and faster payments

This is where its' scamminess becomes clear for me, and shows it's intended just to rope in individual punters as mugs. If you're an actual business, the cost of a payment is irrelevant compared to general business bank account charges. And as for "faster" - when was that ever an issue? Most businesses settle credit invoices a significant time later than the time of the actual purchase. So what is the point of risking massive volatility by taking on debt in a cryptocurrency, when a pound you owe today will be worth exactly the same as a pound you earn tomorrow? You would almost be obliged to buy the crypto at the same time as making a purchase to insure aganst volatility, the same way companies trading across borders hedge on holdings of multiple currencies.

What is your greatest weakness? The definitive list of the many kinds of interviewer you will meet in Hell

Interviews from hell

They never really bothered me : I always happily walked away, safe in the knowledge that only a fool would accept a job there, and therefore it would be a nightmare of incompetence and mediocrity.

It cracks me up when I hear the regular moaning about how there's a shortage of required tech skills. I believe it may have something to do with the fact that there's an almost limitless supply of dumb HR people who've done nothing more than read the "how to be a HR person" book and think that qualifies them for recruitment to technical jobs. I gave up on the whole charade years ago. Almost felt sorry for one (very pleasant) recruiter who really tried to persuade me to go for a role. I told him him that the 3 stage interview process that the company apparently was very keen for me to attend showed that they loved their processes more than using their brains. And he understood that I wouldn't be spending 3 days of my life to confirm that.

Hole blasted in Guntrader: UK firearms sales website's CRM database breached, 111,000 users' info spilled online

They set out to piss off the gun owners? Really?

Why did you say this? Are you implying that you are going to go round and shoot them?

Alan Turing Institute to spend UK.gov grants on AI for air traffic control and banking

Prosperity Partnership Project

A nice way of saying "taxpayers money shovelled to HSBC".

Even Facebook struggles: Zuck's titanic database upgrade hits numerous legacy software bergs

Our backend database is so big...

it even requires its' own backend database! Not sure whether this is an attempted brag, or an admission of unsuitability for task............

The rest of the whinging about how difficult it all was can, I think, be answered with the reply "hire lots more DB staff then, you can afford it".

UK celebrates 25 years of wasteful, 'underperforming' government IT projects

small proportion of permanent secretarieshave first-hand experience of digital business change

Yes, but on the other hand they can all speak excellent Latin.

And they'll commission report after report, at whatever wasteful cost, as long as they can be sure that the conclusion is never reached that they themselves are the problem.

Dang vaccines dented our bottom line in the connected home sector, says Netgear

precious silicon having been "consumed" to make glass vaccine vials

Nothing like getting your priorities right, is there Dell? You sound like undertakers whining that Q2 earnings are down on last year.

Akamai Edge DNS goes down, takes a chunk of the internet with it

Bad days happen to everyone

Is that it? Rather than promising plans for vastly increased resilience, all we can expect is an "aw, shucks - what am I like!"

I'd prefer, as just one example, an explanation of what type of release and deployment method they're using. Because the frequency of these outages strongly suggests an unwise faith in the Continuous Deployment religion in the most fundamental services the net relies on.

Troll jailed for 5 years after swatting of Twitter handle owner ends in death

swatting

Why is there a need to invent a name for this, especially one that makes it sound like nothing more than something you'd do to an annoying fly?

It should be described as premeditated murder : it seems that rather then bother with the fuss and risk of hiring a contractor to do the evil deed, you can try to outsource it to the police in a trigger happy country. A victim of this deserves much more respect than saying they've been "swatted". It sounds like saying that their life was worthless.

Brain-computer interface researchers warn of a 'bleak' cyberpunk future – unless we tread carefully

It's not the thought reading functionality you need to be scared of

Once they've read enough of them, someone will be able to use an AI big data muncher to work out how to write them back.

Get ready for your compulsory daily upgrade.

Dog eats UK government's Hydrogen Strategy homework just as summer recess arrives

diesel was the future....of course, 20 years on, that was a mistake

Please do tell us what you think the unknown potential consequences for the environment that the dangerous byproduct of burning hydrogen called "water" might be......

Mountains on neutron stars are not even a millimetre tall due to extreme gravity

bodies of dense fluid contained in an elastic crust

So they're a bit like a Gregg's steak bake?

AWS gave Parler a chance, won't say if it talked to NSO before axing spyware biz's backend systems

Is that good enough for mission-critical operations?

I've never thought that relying on AWS was good enough for things that are truly mission critical.

What's interesting is why a company peddling stuff like this actually chose to use AWS, rather than hosting their own servers. Surely they'd prioritise their own security over ease of use?

Ad tech ruined the web – and PDF files are here to save it, allegedly

Lab 6

It had to happen : ladies and gentlemen we have found the real Nathan Barley.

For instance, you could start here, with Issue 2 : A Gemini-PDF polyglot and The Tilde Quilt where "If you enjoyed last month's PDF-MP3 polyglot doc-cast, you're going to love this hybrid Gemini-PDF file".

You will be dumbfounded by The Tilde Quilt, which "combines the exclusivity of private pubnix membership, the value-hoarding artificial scarcity of sequential integers, the inspiration of spatial constraint, the north star of the unbounded cartesian grid, and the immediacy of named pipes" and is a "brand new media paradigm".

It is a crappy little piece of ASCII art.

Happy 'Freedom Day': Stats suggest many in England don't want it or think it's a terrible idea

Re: Ha

How is someone expected to take "personal responsibility" and use "common sense" against an invisible virus? The point of the precautionary principle is that it sets standards for minimising risk and helps to protect others from irresponsibility. Why is there a speed limit outside schools? Surely that should also be left to personal responsibility too if your beliefs are consistent. But how would you then react when a boyracer mowed down some kids? Aren't speed limits a sensible precaution to help protect others too? Or is it an unacceptable nannying restriction on "freedom"? This stuff is too subtle and complex to be restricted to political slogans in my opinion.

And if you want to know what will happen in a few weeks when everybody's been out partying after the end of restrictions, just look at what happened in Holland over the past month. They did the great reopening a month ago, and it's been followed by a huge locking down again as cases rose spectacularly. It's the same virus, so expect the same here. Again.

Where on Gartner's Hype Cycle is Gartner's Hype Cycle?

Where on Gartner's Hype Cycle is Gartner's Hype Cycle?

Exactly where it's always been : in the hidden magic 5th quadrant which says "I can't believe all these mugs feel they have to keep buying this drivel in order to try and convince their bosses that they're up to date and won't miss out on the big new trend".

Impromptu game of Robot Wars sparks fire in warehouse at UK e-tailer Ocado

Bot Smash

Unconfirmed reports are now claiming that the fire was started after the robots converged on the potato aisle, with the aim of converting the spuds into inedible instant mash.

One must wonder at the quality of engineering going on in the design and construction of these bots. "Does not cause a fire resulting in the callout of 20 fire engines when they collide" should be one of ther more basic design requirements.

That's not a mistake by the way : what is now being minimised as just a minor smoulder saw 20 fire engines rushed to the scene from across South London. Also, "A fault in a battery charging unit caused a robot to catch light at Ocado's Andover distribution centre in 2019.The site, which processed 30,000 orders a week at the time, burned for four days and was completely destroyed".

Buyer of $28m Blue Origin space ticket has a scheduling conflict – so this teen will go instead

"Now I'll become the youngest astronaut ever because I'm 18 years old"

No, you'll become the youngest astronaut ever because your dad is a multimillionaire willing to spend millions on a brief joyride for his spoilt son.

It'll be the best 3 minutes of your life, until you get to university and find an attractive someone who's impressed with your "I've been to space" brags.

This is the data watchdog! Surrender your Matt Hancock smoochy-kiss pics right now!

have trust and confidence in the protection of their personal data captured by CCTV

Padon my misunderstanding, but wasn't he caught actually breaking the law, which he had sternly warned others against breaking?

In that case, it isn't "his personal data", you don't get to have the security company charged under the data protection act if you get caught on camera robbing somewhere!

I mean, do they really think that the country is outraged because the footage got out, rather than because of what he did? It's the good old fashioned establishment elite defending their own right to break the rules, punishing the whistleblowers instead for daring to show therm up as hypocrites.

Microsoft solicits Clippy comeback – later reveals it had already decided to bring back the peppy paperclip

Dad at the disco

Thinking he's hanging out with all the cool Instagram kids, whilst they laugh at his creaky moves and find more confirmation that he's past it.

Imagine a world where Apple shacked up with Xerox in the '80s: How might it look today?

Alternative histories

Very interesting, but what about the one where Jobs employs tech titan Lord Clive Sinclair instead of Jonny Ive, and walks out onto a stage in 2010 to reveal the device that will change the way we live forever - an electric bicycle with a calculator on it.

UK govt draws a blank over vaccine certification app – no really, the report is half-empty

Re: Here in the EU...

Thanks for mentioning this Just went and applied for one, as it's bound to save some problems in the coming weeks as infection numbers rise if I can carry it with me.

Site is at https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/covid-pass/get-your-covid-pass-letter/

Only takes a minute.

Report: 83% of UK software engineers suffer burnout, COVID-19 made it worse

Agile methodology

It's a logical contradiction. A methodology can never be agile because a methodology is a set of rules that you must follow. And in practice, it's just a load of managers clueless about what actual programming work entails congratulating themselves for being so fashionable by believing they have somehow adopted the compulsory buzzword trend. And they do love sets of rules.

The only way to truly be an agile software developer is to work for yourself : no incompetent project managers, no time wasting waffle meetings, no project charts to fill in, an 80% reduction in unnecessary email, far fewer phone calls, nobody interrupting you asking you to do their work for them..... the list of negatives and time wasters could go on here for a long time. In 20 years of working in companies I never saw an efficient programming team of more than 3 people, with every good team having one developer who really knew their stuff. And I saw a lot of companies when I worked as an external consultant. Same dreary management-inflicted inefficiency in every single one of them.

You'll never Guess whose data has been nicked as US fashion firm confirms systems breach

The unidentified perpetrators managed to break through the company's high security standards

Our unsinkable ship has currently been repurposed for underwater storage purposes....

Lightweight VS Code is only getting heftier with addition of official web server extension

Lightweight?

I have tried the Linux version, and gave it a fair go for a few days, as I'm no luddite and wanted to see if it was as good as other people are saying and whether it would make my work more effiicient. It was not a pleasant experience, compared to my working combination of gedit, CMake (for complex stuff) and command line.

The source code colouring (for C++) was so overenthusiastic that code was a complete brainache to look at. And I couldn't be bothered to spend time trying to go and customise it.

What really did it for me though was that you are forced to split your command line build statements into a huge blob of JSON, which is difficult if you do anything more trivial than helloWorld, and when you do a build it then just deciphers that JSON back into the command line statement you dismantled in the first place and runs it in a command line terminal! This is spectacularly pointless stuff, creating extra work to redo the work you've already done, and you can't get round having to do it. Compared to my usual working method of using gedit (which does tasteful code colouring) and a command line window where I can press the up key to redo frequently used commands, it was woefully tame wasting. Backing up projects was also painful compared to the simple shell scripts I use.

For an experienced programmer, it was the same old "being forced into doing stupid stuff im order to use an IDE" experience that I had hopes for it avoiding.

Richard Branson uses two planes to make 170km round trip

For 96% of the world’s population, space begins 100 km up

Actually, for 100% of the world’s population, space is where we all live. We don't exist outside the universe.

Looking forward to the pathetic "Well, when I climbed Everest there were a few more centimetres of snow on top so actually I was the first to climb the world's highest mountain" brag by Bezos next week..

11-year-old graduate announces plans to achieve immortality by 'replacing body parts with mechanical parts'

completed the three-year course in only a year, topping his class

Well yes, but he was competing against young adults with round the clock access to Belgian beer on tap and susceptibility to other "distractions".

Once he hits puberty, the dream of "replacing body parts" will vanish and turn into "placing body parts", probably much to his dismay.

Linux Foundation celebrates 30 years of Torvalds' kernel with a dry T-shirt contest

designing a T-shirt to celebrate 30 years of the software

In a piece of software that doesn't run natively on that software : Adobe Illustrator

Think I'll submit an entry : "My friend went to the Linux 30th birthday party and all they got me was this lousy t-shirt designed on proprietory non-Linux image editing software".

IBM insiders say CEO Arvind Krishna downplayed impact of email troubles, asked for a week to sort things out

an IBM VP who made it extremely expensive, maintenance intensive, and free of customers

Isn't that what all of them have been busy doing?

IBM were always the first two, the third one is the result of them staying that way when the world moved on.

UK's data watchdog probes use of private email to discuss government business at the Department of Health

This little digital dark age is all very convenient

For a government that seems to operate on the basis of corrupt deals and casual incompetence, it is easy to see the attraction of off-the-record communications, both for avoiding accountability now, and for the impossibility of having the full extent of the awfulness ever exposed in the future.

I doubt that last part will work though, as we appear to be living through a time whose chapter in the history ebooks of the future will simply contain the words "what the hell were we thinking?" in 40 point bold.

Nvidia launches Cambridge-1, UK's most powerful supercomputer, in Arm's neighbourhood

Britain's most powerful computer?

Is it really true? Has Cambridge finally overtaken "Bournemouth"?

Gov.UK vows to chop red tape in the digital sector. What could possibly go wrong?

government should “only regulate when absolutely necessary and do so in a proportionate way.”

Wow, this is revolutionary thinking guys! Nobody's ever had that thought before! Is there any more evidence needed that we have a government of chancers with nothing to offer other than their own ambition for self advancement that they could actually offer up a new policy paper containing this wildly original idea? Do any of them even know what their own party's political philosophy is meant to be?

"cut down on cumbersome and confusing policy so businesses are freed to come up with new ideas, grow their firms and create new jobs and prosperity"

Shit, I guess I'll be able to free up a space in my diary, so that I can scrub out the "do red tape" entry for next Wednesday afternoon and pencil in "have a new idea" instead. Hope it's a good one.

Do any of them have any idea at all about how businesses actually work?

Five consultancies with severe branding difficulties win spots on UK government's £580m 'transformation' services framework

identification of the correct commercial and operational models to deliver the technology strategy

May I suggest "buy some computers" and "write applications to do stuff and run them on those computers" ?

I mean, what other "strategies" are there once you've waded through the £500 million worth of guff about transformational service aquisition blah blah?

GitHub Copilot auto-coder snags emerge, from seemingly spilled secrets to bad code, but some love it

Re: The final stage

Not the final stage : then you would need another AI StackOverflow, where the AI coding bots can go with the problems they get when copying from StackOverflow, and ask other AI coding bots how to solve the problem. When they find an answer that compiles, all the other AI coding bots can then copy and paste that answer into their own output, and if that causes any problems they can go back to AI Stack Overflow and repeat the process, in an infinite loop of crapness.

This will just accelerate the current trajectory of "why should I ever have to solve a programming problem myself", and race it much faster towards the meaningless codebase of doom.

NHS England staff voice concerns about access controls on US spy-tech firm Palantir's COVID-19 data store

NHS signed a £23m two-year contract with Palantir

Well, you can't expect to be allowed access to your own data for such a piddling amount as that!

Yet more proof that the Big Data Grab is not going to be for the benefit of the NHS at all. The people who are trying to control our lives by owning our data and profiting from it however will be richer and more powerful than ever.