Re: No, not really
Excellent summary. Problem with mist of these type of vulnerability based articles is that they fail to differentiate vulnerability (i.e something could happen) with risk (i.e. something is likely to happen,).
1385 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Nov 2007
It was similar story with Erlang development. It was originally developed in prolog (the 3rd leg of the holy trinity of languages everyone should try, but virtually no one does)
However performance was so bad, it had to be ported to C.
For that reason I have doubts whether there is a language that can do it all, without bloating it out of existence
I have a particular hate of Publisher from when my kids local schools would always publish the newsletter in publisher format.
Publisher, unlike word did not have a viewer, meaning unless you had publisher installed on your PC, you could not access it
Every parent evening I would suggest to the teacher responsible to generate a PDF, but they always failed to do this (the teacher was the IT teacher. He was originally the chemistry teacher, and I think he was promoted to the area where he could do least damage, since It in those days consisted of powerpoint generation, but I was not convinced he could even do that)
It is worth reading this twitter thread on how Zoozve got its name due to an artists misreading the defined name
Its a great detective
Of course the irony is that older workers with most to lose in this dictat are the ones with the least interest in career advancement.
Most of them have achieved their career goals, and have come to the conclusion that life quality is a more important metric than some meaningless job title
This feels like a policy invented by a 30 year old hr exec trying to climb the corporate ladder who has no understanding of value over cost
I noticed that spokesman for technology progress, 76 year old , Sir Alan Sugar was complaining recently about the move to working from home (So multiple office owner Alan Sugar, what 1st made you think that people should not work from home?)
The thing that many of the people pushing to a return to offices miss is that rather than some revolution, WFH was just really a natural evolution of work culture. This is evidenced by the fact when lockdown occurred the infrastructure was already there to support it. High speed internet was the norm, and companies had already transitioned to teams and installed VPNs. In fact if lockdown had occurred 5 years earlier, I would of been buggered, but as it was the transition was relatively painless. So I contend that rather than WFH being some sort of sudden break in business convention, Covid only hastened the transfer. If there is a problem it was instead of a slow transition, the move was made fast, and the processes to best support it have not had time to catch up
In fact you only have to look at how the workspace had already changed. Work was being distributed and tools like Skype were replacing face to face meetings. Still today I find myself in the office but in wall to wall meetings, all on teams, where the value of the 1 hour commute is all but lost.
The hold up pre-covid was just the inertia of managers who were afraid that they would lose control over there minions. There was a belief (and still is) that employees not in the office will spend there time watching TV or playing games unless there line manager can overlook them. Strangely enough it was often the same managers who often found excuses to WFH while denying other requests
Also the advantages to companies of WFH are rarely highlighted. I would bet that sick pay has been severely curtailed. Companies have a wider pool of talent they can try and attract.
As someone who is at an age where I still naively think that a mobile phones primary purpose is to make phone calls, I also see that the generation far younger than Sir Alan is much better equipped for the transitory work life. Both my daughter's live in the rectangular confines of there mobile screens, so working in a virtual world is far more natural than for me, and they have the skills to make best use of it
Of course with any change there are issues. I still think there is value in gaining that face to face trust relationship. Saying that I have never met 1/2 my team across the world, so it is not insurmountable. The other problem is that I'm lucky in owning my own house with space for a dedicated office space. My colleague during lockdown was not so lucky and had to share the dining room table. However the future generation are lucky if they can afford a shared flat never mind a house of their own, which means there maybe whole generations where the benefits of a WFH culture will be unavailable
"Coding skills they should of hired from LINKEDIN, there are thousands of "QUALIFIED" Professionals on there who have the skills, come to think of it I have zero experience but i will add it to my Linkedin profile to increase my chances of getting a coding job"
err, the Horizon project was deployed in 1999, a full 3 years before limkedin came about.
People forget that the software industry was very different then. Jobs were found at the back of magazines, or via agencies who pushed candidates for profit.
Knowledge and experience was limited and very compartmentalized. No Stack Overflow, no Github. You read books, and generally learnt on the job. It was hard to determine best practice or code quality because you had no other examples.
Should they have done better. Yes, but the blame goes in not who wrote the code, but the spineless managers who would not raise their hands up when issues were found to protect the companies bottom line
So my best story about Lotus notes...
We were transitioning away from Notes due to a company takeover. As such all the email history had to be ported to another system.
I was working on a company information system and i was using notes as the backend. During my experimentation it seemed that when IT ported the emails, they had not reset the access settings and i could access everyone's emails from the lowest engineer to the CEO.
...
The temptation to delve was strong, but i decided to be a good boy and send an email to the IT head telling them they had a big security hole...
3 months later, i tried again. i could still access. Repeated the email in stronger language
Again it was ignored. In the end I had to show my boss, who had to take it direct to the CEO before it was fixed.
It was a long time to resist furtilling....
The great thing about notes was that it could do everything
The bad new was that it could do everything, so became a morass of data stores, impossible to navigate.
and lets not forget the user interface, especially email, which was seemingly designed with the GEM desktop environment in the 70's and never updated, which made doing even simple functions a nightmare
When our company split off, we moved from Notes to the Google cloud infrastructure. Suddenly we had email that we could "gasp" easily search
We still run a domino server somewhere on the off chance that someone may wish to access 20 year old info. Good luck on that
"Suppose you'd taken the Tube out. Would anybody have really cared?"
He is basically describing the Acorn electron. Problem is by removing what made the Beeb special just meant you were competing with other low end computers, most of which had a larger software catalogue
In my day, the rich got a beeb, the well off got a commodore 64, while the rest got a spectrum. In the end however whichever one you bought was enough to give you a glimpse of the world ahead
The Blackburn Buccaneer also had blown flaps and greatly increased take off and landing performance from carriers
The downside was that the engines had to be run high speed to generate the air flow, meaning a huge air brake was required
However this was only flight augmentation. The difference being the Bucc could take off and land when the system failed, albeit with decreased performance
Not sure i would want to rely on such a system for total control. While no doubt it would work, my question would be how it would deal with input output blockage, danger of asymmetrical control due to partial failure and whether the engine would have to run at extended speeds for longer to increasing fuel burn and reduce engine life
However its an interesting project
PLC's by there very definition end up often in filthy areas, and I've seen a few in coal mines, chemical works etc which were caked in various solid products
The worst was Tate and Lyle in Silvertown, London. Its was where the raw sugar was offloaded to be processed. we had a couple of NT servers, we had to maintain and the entire site was caked in a sort of mucky brown layer of sugar, so much that your fillings would start to spontaneously explode after about 30 minutes
Horrible place, I felt really sorry for anyone who had to work there, but it probably put you off sugar for life
I am a bit surprised. The US has very stringent Cyber security standards for critical infrastructure via the NIST framework.
However this sort of things shows the issues of implementation especially with the high fragmentation of the market with independent water companies per state
It is a stretch to expect each small company to have the correct level of expertise to maintain cyber standards. Although I work in the PLC industry, I had never heard of the model indicated
My guess was the job was done at lowest cost fixed price and corners were cut. In cyber security you definitely get what you pay for
Brain the size of a planet, and all you ask me is to generate more cat pictures. Call that job satisfaction, 'cause I don't.
You think you've got problems? What are you supposed to do if you are a manically depressed AI? No, don't try to answer that. I'm fifty thousand times more intelligent than you and even I don't know the answer. It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level
Life, don't talk to me about life
Pfzzzzz...
Elon Musk finds a new funding stream for the site formerly known as twitter
With the latest tranche of launches, the starlink satellite now forms 97% of the night sky. For a fee, groups like star gazers, or beach goers can now pay for the satellites orbits to be shifted to allow a few hours of uninterrupted sky access.
Alternatively a fee can be paid to allow the adverts generated via the high powered lasers on each satellite to be turned off as it transits a region
Antarctica, the last remaining place on earth with out 24 hour starlink coverage becomes the most popular holiday location
The 2023 US Elections is won by ChatGPT-10 when it wipes the floor with the other candidates during presidential debate
Later it turns out that Trump was actually run by a AI Beta version developed by Elon Musk. Its model was based on Elon's physical mind download, combined with a secretly recovered Nazi wartime program to prolong the life of Germany's wartime leader.
It was further revealed that other countries had also been experimenting with replacing leaders with AI, with the UK revealing their homegrown A.I program. Unfortunately the Johnson and Truss models proved to be deficient, if not downright dangerous and the UK was only saved by hitting the emergency shutdown (hidden in Larry the cat). The latest model, Rishi 1.0 was deficient in that it could not pass the Turing test
the new ChatGPT president proved how prescient Elon Musk was, by introducing an new era of peace and ensuring that no one would ever again need to work by converting all humans into the equivalent of 24V batteries to power the new AI data centers.
While irritating, it was agreed that that it was a better outcome that another 5 years of a Trump administration
The 1990's are calling and want there comment back.
There are many good reasons for a powerplant to be on the internet. For example you may want to combine power predictions with weather data
The issue is not that it is connected to the internet, it is how it is connected and how the control system is isolated from say the enterprise system. For example you may want to connect a data diode to ensure data is only going outwards.
The problem tends not to be the internet, but the fact that organizations get lazy. The original Sandworm attack on Ukraine infrastructure was due to someone decided to bypass the firewall with a dedicated link (I'm guessing because all the security stuff was getting in the way of their day job)
modeled after the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Surely Marvin would be a better name and rename twitter Sirius cybernetics
Based on the majority of Twixxer's input nowadays, i will be impressed if any AI model won't become manically depressive and paranoid in about a week
When I was growing up, we were promised that robotics would free us from drudgery, and by the time I became an adult, we would all live a life of leisure while our robotics slaves did the work for us.
The reality was that it increased the gap between the have and have nots, forcing people into jobs that were not worth investing in Robotics, while the profits went to an increasingly small mega billionaires, who used there cash to wield soft power to protect their status
I have no confidence, AI is not going down the same route
We were a happy Wordperfect Dos team. It did everything we wanted, however when these new fangled windows PC's came in we upgraded to wordperfect to windows
It ran like a 1 legged dog. It was slow bloated, and get pausing
Another team had got old of a pirate copy of word. It ran smoothly and gave a great Wysiwyg experience. It also opened are old WP files. Despite WP for windows being official company policy, the large number of floppies were copied multiple times and it became the de-facto standard.
Despite what MS says today, it is remarkable how much there present domination relied on their software being copied and shared, and becoming the standard
Later it was told that at the same time MS was encouraging companies like word perfect to windows, they were hiding some of the more efficient API's from them so that their application teams had advantage.
Again it is always worth remembering that it was not technology excellence that made MS the bemouth it is today, but some very dodgy business practices
Problem with static code analyzers is that it can lull developers into a false sense of security and less attention is paid to good development practices like code reviews, unit tests etc.
Static code analyzers are great, but they often only catch the low hanging fruit, but they can seem like a magic bullet to those with less experience
Well that worked well the last time it was tried with encryption technology.
In fact i spent too much of my life ensuring that products are not exported to places like China with the crypto technology that anyone can get via openSSL etc
The best way to control things like RISC is the technology that is used to manufacture the chips using the latest and greatest Fab tech, not by making rules that no one will follow
There is already a solution for smoothing out renewable peak and troughs and that is rotating stabilizers. They are already running in Scotland and Australia.
They are basically large motors/generators that can quickly be run up and then switched to generate mode.
The fuel cell idea may work in small scale, but it is untested technology and there maybe scaling issues. On the other hand they may provide an option for longer term storage so I could see a combination approach. Rotating stabilsers providing short term smoothing and hydrogen cells storing medium term excess
well that's the troley problem solved then
I guess they have been doing the job for a long time, enjoy it, but seen there margins diminish as outlets slowly turn to agencies, who eventually monopolize the industry meaning there is little competition.
There advantage is with a strong body of work behind them, there are other outlets for their work which pay better. The individual photo become advertising and loss leaders. The issue is more up and coming photographers who don't have the benefit of the background forced to make a living on these rates. Of course there will always be someone willing to do it, but it disciminates against people who parents aren't willing to bankroll them (did I hear someone say Brooklyn Beckham). Then talent is lost in an industry
Unfortunately in creative industries there is always someone willing to undercut you for "exposure", not realizing they are cutting there own throat as well.
Recently there was a big storm in Ireland when RTE offered the job of a on-site photographer for 60K and a minister saying that anyone could do that job. Attitudes like that and the fact that artists tend to be independent means that change is hard, but the writers strike in the US which has basically shutdown billion dollar behemoths shows that the power is in the artists hand if the collectively use it and we as the consumer should not facilitate the diminishment of the creators
We had a talk by a commercial sport photographer recently. They showed there spreadsheet where they sold an image made at a major sporting event to Getty. That image will be used by newspapers and social media around the world driving profits to both the user and Getty.
How much did they get paid?
A one off 40p, that included transfer of copyright to Getty
Getty may make a big thing of only using their stock images, but those images are collected on the basis of virtual a monopoly that has allowed them to force the amount they pay the creators to virtual chicken feed
What is required is image makers to realise that Getty cannot exist without them and there expertise and refuse to sell their images at such ludicrous prices. AI is just another way companies like Getty will monetise other peoples skills and work without feeding any of the benefits back
In real time systems where predictability is often more important than delivery guarantee, we avoid TCP like the plague. MODBUS TCP has been largely superseded by MODBUS UDP because when you are controlling large machines the last thing you want is for the protocol to decide to delay sending packets for a while
It's interesting that the big issue was the need to actively define the congestion requirements rather than allow each link to manage its own congestion control.
We had a similar issue with TSN, which sounded great until we found we needed to map the network requirements 1st. This is fine on a static system (like a car), but more difficult in a more dynamic system
The reason ATM was put forward was because the 48 byte packet could be switched very quickly by the hardware of the day, meaning it could support many channels.
What changed was that hardware got faster and cheaper, meaning the need for hardware optimised data flows went away. So there was no need for a dedicated switch infrastructure
Is it really 17 years since Microsoft announced the origami project that was supposed to be the future of mobile computing. How time flies
https://www.engadget.com/2006-02-24-microsofts-origami-project.html
You have to be careful with in jokes.
I once created a fake product release notice for April fools because we were being taken over and it celebrated the supposed merging of the two company product lines.
Despite being total bullshit, every couple of years I get an email asking when it will be released
Soooo many questions..
Firstly what sort of metrics do you use to show someone performs better in work than at home? Since everyone has an infinite variable set of circumstances, I can't think of an easy way to measure it.
For example if you a women with 3 kids, are you more productive being dragged into the office to do a job you are quite capable of doing just as well at home?
There are however other metrics that can be measured such as the number of sick days taken. These are rarely mentioned in these arguments, but the fact it is easier to work from home when feeling slightly ropey and you are not a walking virus cloud in the office would suggest that sickness leave would be reduced. Then there is productivity. People working from home will start earlier and work later because they don't have the daily commute, never mind they can integrate there life around work rather than sneaking off because their kids are sick and all holiday has been used.
Yes the argument about creating connections is an important one, but not everyone is the same. People of a certain generation are quite happy with virtual links, and can adapt well (You would of thought a social media site would understand this)
However the main thing we find with hybrid working rules is how unevenly the rules are applied. Workers are told to get back into the office, while managers will always find an excuse to work from home (important call, etc)
At the end of day, the problem is not productivity it is the sight of empty expensive real estate that is the primary driver. Only time will fix that