Posts by Vic

All you need to brew beer in is a clear 25lt polyethylene jerry can.

You're going to mash and boil in that same plastic container?

Vic.

Re: Heartbleed

Would this have stopped Heartbleed thought? OpenSSL used its own memory handling code

I came here to post the same thing - Heartbelled would have sailed straight past this.

Larry's slides are lying. I am surprised.

Vic.

Re: Still vulnerable

It's 2015 and you're letting idiots access root instead of making them go through sudo

On public-facing systems? Yes.

To achieve root access, an attacker needs to compromise two separate passwords...

Vic.

Re: QoS != Net neutrality

Amazing how many articles are published on El Reg which manage to mix up QoS and NN.

And elsewhere. It's almost as if someone wanted that confusion to be pervasive...

Vic.

Re: Bobby Tables, 15, cuffed by TalkTalk hacking probe cops

I wish it were so, but it isn't. Every time I have to deal with an inexperienced developer they pull the same shite as the last one, and it takes years to get them up to speed and still longer to eradicate their technical debt.

OK, let me re-phrase what I said :-

"it is comparatively rare for the coders on the ground to write be permitted to commit such shite unless they are shielded from criticism by their management"

You will always get inexperienced devs producing rubbish. The reason for a team hierarchy is to enable the seasoned hands to train the new recruits. But, from time to time, you will find teams where one member - often categorised as "highliy productive" or somesuch - just keeps committing petabytes of utter crap, but will be fiercely defended by management who believe that kLOC is better that quality...

I let my graddies do an OO design, but then I replace theirs with one of my own or someone else better at it, and have them populate that

I've met innumerable grads who can't get that far. At interview, they'll spout the buzzwords - but when called on it, couldn't even begin to do a 2-class exercise. No understanding whatsoever of the process. And these are the people with the qualifications.

And so to the old hands - some people were once good but have long since stopped keeping pace. Some just never "got it" and carried on producing crap of a stadard I'd expect from a grad. They all have to go too.

I *mostly* agree. The difficulty is that many of them "stopped keeping pace" because they disagree with the direction in which that pace is travelling. And they are often right as well[1]. It's only with hindsight that we can see what really goes on...

If we want IT to have a seat at the top table, and in my view the world very much needs that to happen if humanity is to achieve its potential, then we as a whole have to raise our game. If that shakes loose the cowboys, the arts grads, and the dinosaurs, well, that's all good.

I'm completely with yoou there - it's your implementation with which I disagree :-) The formal education we currently offer in the field is frequently - nearly universally - useless. If all we did was to require such qualifications, we'd get code every bit as bad - or even worse. To change that state of affairs, we'd need to make a step-change in the quality of grads coming out of university - and that's going to take 20 years to filter through, with all those interim graduates getting a useful education, but a qualification that will be seen as useless for that period. That's hardly fair.

My solution would require companies and individual managers to be held responsible (to some extent) for their code - so when it goes wrong, they can't brush it under the carpet, they can't just blame some peon, they have to take the responsibility for which they've been paying themselves. A couple of rounds of that, and TPTB will actually start to take code quality seriously, because it will cost *them* personally not to do so. So when a dev tells them that the hack they're suggesting will definitely cause the code to fail, there might at least be a few seconds of reflection on whether or not to do it...

Vic.

[1] A customer of a customer of mine has a venerable - and *very* profitable - application written in Forth. It is very robust. But a new broom has come in, and they have set up a group to re-write the whole thing in C#, because it's more modern. That task began at least 8 years ago, and to date has produced *nothing at all*, despite having a much bigger team than is working on the "ancient" codebase. It turns out for them that the old way is indeed very much more effective than the new...

Re: Bobby Tables, 15, cuffed by TalkTalk hacking probe cops

So, you tell me how you'd see that happening that doesn't involve minimum educational requirements and a professional regulator, and I'm all ears?

You need to throw a few suits to the lions.

As someone posted above, it is comparatively rare for the coders on the ground to write such shite unless they are shielded from criticism by their management. The bigger problem is when management decide to cur corners in spite of advice against such action by people who know what they're talking about.

So far, when such problems occur, the blame lands on the shoulders of the poor geek who warned about the problem in the first place. What needs to happen is for a high-profile case or two - this one would do nicely - to be shown for the management failure it so clearly is, and for that management to take some personal pain for their actions. I'm not talking about a witch-hunt; merely the pain that someone will feel to be directed at the right person.

Formal qualifications in software are frequently useless. I've had hundreds of high-scoring grads in front of me who can trot out all the buzzwords they think I'll be looking for - but when asked to do a trivial OO design, are entirely incapable. This needs fixing long before we can start requiring such qualifications for work...

Vic.

Re: We can not lose....

That sounds like dinner to me!

s/dinner/breakfast/ ...

Vic.

Re: As far as the state of mechanics laptops

it tracks cars by VIN, and if you update a component, STAR registers that with the mothership, and anyone on STAR can pull up the service history.

That's not always such a great thing...

My missus has a 2005 Beetle. A few years ago, it had a major problem - it would just stop. It went back to the stealer on numerous occasions, as I've written about elsewhere.

She was thinking about getting a new car at the time - but every VW and Audi garage had the history of this car, and they all saw it as a problem vehicle, meaning they all offered SFA in terms of trade-in against a new car. And that was down to the incompetence of the grease monkeys working on it - the car is now perfect[1].

Vic.

[1] I fixed it. It required no new parts - the issue was entirely down to poor interconnect, because VW skimped on the strain relief.

Re: Seriously?

Since some utter twat made having the airbag lamp do it's "on and then off" bit at startup a mandatory MOT item a few years back

I'm expecting to start finding timer circuits[1] in cars in the near future, so that the bulb lights in the expected fashion, even though the system in question is long dead...

Vic,

[1] I was going to write "555 timers", but 555s are actually quite expensive to buy in this country these days - you either inport them from China, or build something Arduino-based, because microprocessors are now cheaper than discrete chips...

Re: Look on the bright side...

They're constructed in a way that allows the doors to be opened normally even after rather harsh impacts

That's not the sort of thing I'd trust...

Many years ago, I was involved in a crash whilst driving an Austin Ambassador[1]. Although I was hit from behind, the shell moved enough that I had to lie across the front seats and kick with both feet to get the door open.

When I was learning to fly, part of the forced-landing procedure we were taught is to open the door on the way down. That way, you stand some chance of getting out...

Vic.

[1] What can I say. I was skint, and I needed something I could sleep in if necessary.

Re: This is what happens

Putting out a shite app suggests that the A team is employed elsewhere...

Well, if you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them ...

Vic.

Re: @LucreLout

But they do have glow plugs these days which are intended to have a similar effect on determining when the fuel burns.

Nope. The glow plugs pre-heat the air in the cylinders to ensure ignition will happen even when the engine is cold. As it warms up, the glow plugs are switched off (this might happen before the engine even starts).

Ignition is caused by diesel being injected into hot, compressed air. Old-style injectors merely ramped up the diesel pressure until it overcame a calibrated valve, at which point the valve opened and diesel is sprayed into the cylinder. This causes a relatively slow build-up of fuel:air ratio, with quite a bit of attendant knocking.

Modern diesels tend to have a high-pressure rail of diesel, with electrically-operated valves controlling flow into the cylinder. This leads to better combustion timing and reduced knocking.

Vic.

Controversal solution - all US companies store ALL data (including US data) in the EU. Problem solved

Not a solution at all.

At present, the US believes it can order US companies to turn over any data they hold, wherever that might be. This is the basis of the Microsoft vs. DOJ case.

So even if US companies did as you suggest, it doesn't solve the problem at all until and unless the US starts to respect local laws. And it'll be lovely to have bacon delivered by air...

Vic.

Re: Only way I see it....

The NSA broke the internet :(

Not so. The NSA merely broke American Internet companies.

We keep hearing about the Internet routing around damage. And it seems to be doing so. Things might be a little more expensive (in cash terms, not overall) for a little while - US hosting is very cheap - but even that is probably onlt a transient situation.

Vic.

Re: Err- Linux?

Hint - I managed HPC systems at an F1 team.

At Lotus?

Because Page 1 of the article tells us :-

The front-line computer systems are VCE Vblocks. These come ready to run with systems built by Cisco, EMC and VMware on a Windows platform

And Page 2 claims :-

the Microsoft Dynamics logos are a reflection that Lotus F1 is very much a Microsoft house

So although you might be right, you are directly contradicting the article; a little evidence might be a good plan...

Vic.

Re: You realize it's not really Lotus

Lotus Cars doesn't do the chassis and the engine is a Merc.

You can tell it's not made by Lotus by the way it completes the distance without breaking down...

Nevertheless, the GP's point was almost certainly about the financial issues faced by the F1 team, not Lotus Cars.

Vic.

[ Former Esprit S3 owner ]

Re: re robots

The car's launch from the pit or from a dead stop is all computer controlled and only when it's moving close to speed does the driver take over.

That was true last season, but not this.

Launch Control et al. are now banned. The driver has to do it manually.

Vic.

Re: He's crashed, he's crashed...

getting knocked off when Grosjean hits the wall or another car

That's very unfair.

Maldonado does his bit for ... errr ... let's call it "aerodynamic evolution".

Vic.

Re: Wish I was still young

My ideal job. F1 and IT

Probably not.

I used to work with a guy who'd spent time as pit crew in F1. He got into the job because of his love of racing. He got out because of his love of racing. As he put it - "whenever the Grand Prix is on, you're stuck at work".

Vic.

Re: If Dyson are so good....

do you honestly think the executives making purchasing decisions at commercial cleaning companies give a flying [redacted] about how well the vacuum cleaners actually work?

The ones I used to work with certainly did. They had to maintain a certain level of cleanliness to retain the contract, so the more effective the cleaner, the higher the profit.

They also liked the fact that our cleaners could be thrown down the stairs without breaking vey often...

Vic.

you don't need to use even 1,400W for a vacuum cleaner

I used to work for a vacuum cleaner manufacturer.

Back then, there was a machine on the market that was advertised as being able to pick up a bowling ball. "And how often do you need to do that?" was the first thing that cam einto my miond, but didn't seem to occur to many...

You don't need much power at all to clean a room - air is not a particularly dense medium, and accelerating it to the appropriate speed isn't hard. But you do need to ensure that the airflow isn't blocked; the vacuum itself doesn't perform any cleaning, it is the airflow into that vacuum that carries the dirt.

So it's pretty much all about the design of the pickup head; power is largely irrelevant.

Vic.

Re: Communications service providers have a critical role

So someone who will go to any misguided extreme to prevent terrorism?

Exactly that. Except for the "preventing terrorism" bit...

Vic.