* Posts by Michael Wojcik

12131 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2007

Musk: Twitter will have 1 billion monthly users inside 18 months

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Real Twitter news...

What's the proportion of DMs versus broadcast on Twitter? I don't think I've ever heard anyone mention using Twitter for direct messaging. The whole point of Twitter is to screech at the passers-by. It's a perch to fluff what passes for your intellectual plumage.

And of that presumably rather small use case, what fraction of users understands what end-to-end encryption might mean? And what fraction of that care? And what fraction of that will investigate whether it's genuinely end-to-end, and how key management works, and how keys will be propagated to multiple devices (because if you did use Twitter for DMs, and you cared enough to want E2EE, you'd probably want access to your account from multiple devices)?

It's a pointless feature.

Epson zaps lasers into oblivion, in the name of the environment

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: 20 year old HP LaserJet

You can get the LaserJet 4 and 5 drivers for Windows 10, from Microsoft's driver archive site. It's a pain to find it, but it's there. PCL and PS.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: No HP MFCs, Thank You

Yeah, I'll never buy another HP or Epson printer.

Another problem with HP: the software has been abysmal for years. With a modern HP printer, you don't just get drivers; you get all sorts of bloated spyware and nagware and other annoyances, for who knows how sweeping an attack surface. And some years back I had to debug an apparently hanging HP printer installation on my daughter's Macbook, and it turned out it was running a script that did numerous iterations of "find / ..." to search for existing files, so it was iterating over the entire set of filesystems multiple times.

Horrible crap, made as cheaply as possible, and designed to extort ever more money from foolish consumers.

Such a pity, when Epson dot-matrix printers (the venerable MX-80 and the fancier FX-80) were the home printers of my youth, and HP LaserJets were the SOHO printer of choice (and indeed my current preferred printer).

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Can't help feeling it's more a bottom line thing than a green thing...

I've had an HP LaserJet 4MP for 30 years, and it Just Prints too.1 Yes, it's black & white only, but I don't give a damn about color printing.

The only maintenance it's ever needed has been new toner cartridges, and that rarely (I don't print stuff very often).

I loathe SOHO inkjet printers. My wife has gone through a number of them, and I've used them in my academic work. I've never seen one I thought was any good.

1For Linux, I can just send Postscript to the thing. For Windows, the drivers are still available on Microsoft's driver-archive site. It's a Centronics parallel port connection, but a USB-to-Centronics cable I bought online works just fine.

RIP Fred 'Mythical Man-Month' Brooks: IBM guru of software project management

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: The quote I remember

Well, to be fair, some of us have.

The teams I work with have a historical velocity. We break feature requests and defects into small pieces so estimation errors are individually small, and try to control for optimism. Then we can tell PM that we can commit to X amount of work for a minor release in a month, and Y amount for a major release in a year, based on that historical velocity. They decide what their priority list is, and we edit that based on what we think it should be. We leave some margin for discovered work and urgent interruptions.

It's certainly not a perfect system, but we usually hit promised release dates (and don't slip by much if we don't), and usually with the committed fixes and enhancements.

Those are lessons learned from Brooks, filtered through subsequent decades of research into software project management. You have a team, and it has a velocity; you're unlikely to increase that velocity over the course of a release. Bringing in new staff is necessary, but as much to compensate for attrition as anything else. You can create new teams to work on other features as long as cross-team dependencies are kept to a minimum. Teams shouldn't be too large, but should include developers with different areas of competence and interest. Beware the second-system effect; you can compensate for it by strictly limiting what can be included in the plan for the current release. And so on.

Many organizations do refuse to learn, of course. Hell, I still run into people who aren't even using source code change management.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Watson Jr. wasn't right about everything, but he sure puts the last few IBM CEOs in perspective. And not to their credit.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Man-month

Tell it to Elon Musk!

(No, seriously, if you see him, tell him that. I don't think he knows.)

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Man-month

Yes. There are a few others I like, such as Yourdon's Deathmarch (which is sort of an extended "hey, idiot managers, this is what will happen if you don't pay attention to Brooks"). But The Mythical Man-Month is one that everyone who works in or with software development ought to read.

Besides the various great bits others have mentioned, I also like Brooks' catalogue of types of developers: the Language Lawyer, the Toolsmith, and so on. (That's from memory; my copy is in storage until we fetch the rest of our things that came out of the Stately Manor and don't fit into the current Mountain Fastness. Mountain Fastness 2.0 is still under construction.)

Japan successfully propels steam-powered spacecraft

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: EQUULEUS

This is one of the plot points of Stevenson's Seveneves. I don't want to post a bunch of spoilers just in case (though the novel's been out for a while), but some of the characters find themselves in need of reaction mass, and fortunately some is available in the form of a not-too-distant comet.

(This part of the book contains one of its best lines: "Physics is physics, but some physics is nuclear physics".)

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: EQUULEUS

Wait, are you saying Bud Lite contains beer?

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: TAI = UTC + 37 seconds, am I missing something?

Photosynthesizing plants will convert CO2 (not CO2) plus H2O to O2 and sugars, given appropriate conditions. Referring to that as "to breath" is dubious.

More dubious is what relevance that has for atmospheric GHG concentrations and atmospheric warming. Existing flora can only absorb CO2 at a certain rate, and are not primarily constrained by the amount of available atmospheric CO2.

Guess the most common password. Hint: We just told you

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: XKCD Rankings?

Rate restrictions help with online attacks against a single account. They don't help against multiple accounts in parallel, an attack which was documented in the 1990s; nor do they help with offline attacks. And considering how often large databases of password hashes are leaked, offline attacks are a greater concern.

Rate restrictions are also difficult to implement for distributed systems where there may be many oracles.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: XKCD Rankings?

I use a randomly-generated password. It's "4".

Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Well, those are publicly-traded companies with shareholders. And their market capitalization is large enough to cause collateral damage, which many investors – including all those ordinary middle-class US folks who are exposed through 401(k) mutual funds and the like – could be exposed to.

It's not something I worry about; our retirement portfolios are broadly diversified, and our withdrawal horizon is far enough away that we have time for our accounts to recover from normal downturns. But some people could be hurt.

Microsoft's attempts to harden Kerberos authentication broke it on Windows Servers

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Extend...

Yeah. I understand the motive behind this – Kerberos makes the TGS (Ticket-Granting Service) the hub for all ticket requests aside from requesting a TGT, so TGSes become bottlenecks. An extension which lets some services avoid the TGS interaction makes scaling easier and can improve performance.

But, of course, messing with a security protocol is an excellent way to break some part of security, and that includes availability.

Twitter set for more layoffs as Musk mulls next move

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Not sure why anyone would want to continue to work for this petulant bully

Yes, I get the H1-B serfdom issue, and it's not uncommon for people in the US middle class to be living paycheck-to-paycheck and want to be sure of another position before leaving. (I wouldn't have much faith in Musk's severance-payment promises; that money has to come from somewhere, and the $12K or whatever that employees are prioritized from bankruptcy proceedings won't go far.) But actually want to work for this idiot? There can't be many left.

I've been reading Miller's Toy Wars (1998) about Hasbro and the other big US toy companies, and I'm struck by the difference between the execs he writes about and Musk. Those were people dedicated to their firms and employees, actual visionaries who created innovative products and marketing strategies. Ruth Handler cooked the books,1 but she was the co-founder, co-chair, and president of Mattel. She invented Barbie. She created her first business from nothing, peddling decorative boxes her husband made in a home workshop at local boutiques. Hasbro's Hassenfelds essentially invented using children's television programming to market toys. Maybe you think all of that contributes nothing to society, but hundreds of millions of children beg to differ. And it was innovation.

What's Musk done? Bankrolled Paypal (ugh) in the early years, and gone along for the ride on Tesla and SpaceX, while wasting money and energy on quixotic side projects. Any already-wealthy entrepreneur could have done that, and I don't for a minute believe Musk brought anything special to the party. He's a beneficiary of a historical moment, and someone else would have played that role if he hadn't been there.

In The Ascent of the A-Word (2012), a cultural history of the term "asshole" in US discourse, Nunberg remarks that Donald Trump is probably the quintessential asshole, as popular usage has constructed the term. I think Musk may have since refined the category. Sure, Trump managed to get himself (or was placed by his handlers) in a more dangerous position; but for sheer assholery I think Musk has him beat.

1Her 41-year (!) prison sentence was suspended, but she and her husband lost control of Mattel and about half their personal fortune was returned to the company. She went on to found a successful business making breast prostheses – she was a breast-cancer survivor herself.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Should be more goatse-y

It's ghastly and terrible and poorly done. Captures Musk perfectly, I think.

I like it a lot.

US Supreme Court asked if cops can plant spy cams around homes

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: The doorbell cams are fine. It is Amazon sharing the video with the cops that is disgusting.

jake is doing neither, as he clearly indicated in the post you are replying to.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Seems to me the cops aren't even supposed to look over a 6 foot fence without a warrant, unless there is probable cause

It's more complicated than that (isn't it always?), but in the US, it's true that the police aren't allowed to penetrate the curtilage without a warrant or probable cause. Some of the cases testing this are interesting, such as those involving the famous Mullet Doctrine.

Regarding the original post in this thread: In most of the places I've lived, you'd need to secure a zoning variance to have a hedge, fence, or other obstruction more than 6 feet or so tall around your property, never mind 12 feet. That doesn't mean you couldn't get away with having one without a variance, particularly in rural areas, but technically it would be illegal and the municipality or county could make you shorten it.

India follows EU's example in requiring USB-C charging for smart devices

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Yeah, mechanically, all the small USB connectors are rubbish. USB-C might be a bit better for longevity than micro-USB, but I have a Thinkpad with a USB-C charging cable and it's prone to falling out. Barrel connectors are much better from a mechanical point of view.

On the other hand, I'd love it if these laws had the side effect of outlawing Dell's utterly broken power-supply DRM. I've had that fail on two work laptops in a row. And it fails on the motherboard, so swapping chargers doesn't help. It's a notoriously crap implementation.

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: A CEO being held accountable?

Kevin White pointed out (years ago, on Popehat) that this is quite common. Do not answer questions from the FBI, or other Federal officers. Speak to them only through a lawyer. Lying to a Federal officer is a felony, and they're often quite good at leading you down the garden path into making some sort of false statement.

Security firms hijack New York trees to monitor private workforce

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Watching the watcher

The high-tech shit is cheaper to manufacture and maintain, and it gives the vendor something shiny to sell.

FTX disarray declared 'unprecedented' by exec who cleaned up after Enron

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Duh??

Bankman-Fried and Ellison were former quants (they worked for Jane Street). Not really the same cultural position as stereotypical frat boys, whose damage radius tends to be rather smaller.

They were also vigorous promoters of Effective Altruism (not necessarily vigorous practitioners of it), but the EA community is good at rationalizing its bad actors. You just update the posterior probability that an EA proponent is actually a greedy, self-serving bastard.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Inevitable

Just the latest version of wildcat banking, though without even the feeble state regulation.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: If everyone in the country gave me a Euro

Lots of people in the middle class in the US are millionaires, technically speaking. My wife and I are, at least the last time I checked our retirement accounts. Of course those have lost a lot of value over the past year, but given the breadth of our portfolios and bias toward low risk, either they'll be back up by the time we reach retirement, or most people will be in a similarly depressed position so we'll still be comparatively wealthy. We have mortgaged real estate but thanks to a hot local market it's worth quite a bit more than what we owe (not that liquidating it would be anything other than a last resort; we live here because we like it).

But we're solidly professional-middle-class in terms of possessions, liquidity, etc.

Being a millionaire is not, in itself, particularly exciting.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Next chapter

ASX, for one, has thrown in the towel on its much-ballyhooed Blockchain project.

I expect we'll see most central banks walking quietly away from cryptocurrency, at least for a while. Managers for institutional investors either were burned or saw their compatriots burned; they'll be reluctant to argue for significant positions in the cryptocurrency / DeFi space for a bit.

Some celebrities may take notice of the SEC investigations and class-action suits coming down on their peers who were too eager to promote cryptocurrency investments, and similarly decide to stay out of it.

Pro-cryptocurrency politicians I expect will learn nothing, and in fact will double down. The Backlash Effect is particularly strong for the sort of people who are inclined to go into politics (i.e. ideologues).

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Where has all the money gone !!!???

It makes sense if you set aside economics, history, and everything we know about human beings.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: The most honest statements re FTX

This is what you get when you provide sophomores with vast amounts of resources and no supervision.

Ellison, like SBF, loves espousing (and probably to some extent holding, though she seems to have a rather low level of commitment to them) radical opinions. She's not big on considering their actual ramifications or complexities. It's the intellectual equivalent of adrenaline addiction: craving the rush that comes from being controversial.

That's not a good personality trait for a business leader, or for that matter any other sort of leader.

Koch-funded group sues US state agency for installing 'spyware' on 1m Android devices

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: What about the mandatory installation of Facebook?

Yes, it's quite different.

Apps pre-installed by the manufacturer are part of what you elected to purchase. You may find them undesirable, and may object to the manufacturer's failure to notify you about them; but they are the actions of a private party, and as such are a matter that falls under the statutes that govern purchased products.

The state (in the broad technical sense of "whatever organized governments hold sway in a particular jurisdiction") installing an application on your device without your consent is a government intrusion into your personal property. Those have a very different status under US law, as they should, given the overwhelming power of the state. Doing so without your knowledge is even worse.

Others have noted that the app is (apparently) not active until enabled by the user, which is good; but it's not nearly sufficient to excuse what the plaintiffs allege in this case.

Multi-tasker Musk expects to reduce time at Twitter, seek another leader

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: "a CEO will be hired"

Why? When has the CEO of a large firm ever actually suffered for their mistakes at the helm?

You take the job, collect the money, walk away from the collapse. Apparently there's no shortage of available positions afterward, to judge by any number of colossal failures.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: work your arses off like I do

And claiming to work your arse off while producing little of discernible value is yet a third.

Evernote's fall from grace is complete, with sale to Italian app maker

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Irrelevant

Joke-Alert icon insufficient to protect against Poe's Law, apparently.

Investor tells Google: Cut costs now and stop paying staff so much

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Ooh, ominous. Is this gnomic sally better than StargateSg7's detailed rant the other day? Sometimes it's so hard to decide where to award Kook of the Week. We may have to expand to multiple categories.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Many of the services Alphabet/Google kill exist not for themselves, or for their users, but to harvest data. That's what Google's telephone directory-assistance service was for. That's what 8.8.8.8 is for. That's the primary function of search and Mail and Maps and Drive.

When the rate of new data falls to a certain point, there's no reason to keep the service going.

In other cases, of course, it's Google doing long-term A/B testing, or tweaking services to change how they're monetized. Thus we have Voice merging into Hangouts, then Hangouts and Duo being terminated in favor of Meet and Chat. One vein starts to look tapped out, so move on to another.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Indeed clearly Google is doing it wrong

Exactly. The entire purpose of an organization like this is short-term extraction of value. It's a completely logical capitalist formation. We may dislike it (I certainly do), but it's not some sort of aberration; given the way public ownership of corporations works, of course some people are going to create parasitical organizations that seek to grab whatever cash they can quickly, rather than look to the future.

After all, Keynes' Maxim still applies: In the long run, we are all dead. If your job is maximizing profits for a group of people who are currently alive (and may not be for that many years), then planning for the future is untenable.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: The real problem with 'other bets'

If I were Alphabet I'd be looking to unload Nest. Sooner or later the Amazon juggernaut will roll over most of the other players in the "smart home"1 space. Amazon want to control as much of home-automation technology as they possibly can, and they're quite prepared to cross-sell and predatory-price until they do.

1Not that I think it is, mind. I wouldn't put an Internet-connected thermostat in my home if you paid me to.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: "not labor intensive"

Though I have no love for Alphabet, I agree. Ignore "activist investors" as much as possible.

That said, of course this sort of "milk investments for short-term profit" is explicitly what this sort of investor exists to do. Whoever wrote this letter is just doing his job. It may be an obnoxious job, but that doesn't mean the author is a fool – just a professional raider.

Intel hit with $948.8 million VLSI infringement verdict

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: RaspberryPi Pico is in deep-yogurt then... (or pick any device, not just to pick on Pico...)

That's the thing. You can't use the summary to evaluate the patent. The summary is there to help people decide whether the patent might apply to some instance. You have to read the primary claims to see if there's anything not obvious to an ordinary practitioner (which is the standard).

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Waste El-Reg Space

Anyone who complains about Morisette's examples patently does not know what irony is. Perhaps you should learn about rhetoric before trying to correct others about it.

Irony is the trope of the violation of expectations. It's one of the "master tropes" that subsume other tropes and figures. In fact, under its broadest definition, it includes all tropes, since communication consists precisely in what new information is produced in the recipient. That new information in turn consists precisely of what expectations were violated.

Every communicative act is ironic.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Easy choice Elon

Who draws the line ?

Twitter. Their platform, their choice. Freedom of the press belongs to the press.

If you don't like it, don't use Twitter. I don't. It's not mandatory.

Starlink purchases 'Twitter takeover' ad package, Musk dismisses it as 'tiny'

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: I wonder how much Grammarly pays YouTube

The Grammarly ads do manage to achieve a particularly obnoxious strident tone, which coupled with their choice of chipper Bright Young Things as models makes them impressively grating.

"Do you ever write anything? Would you like your writing to be filtered so it is devoid of style, voice, and interest by a collection of half-assed heuristics derived from ill-considered schoolmarmish style guides? You need to download Grammarly immediately! Do it now! I SAID NOW."

I have various writing-related degrees and used to teach writing, so my opinion of Grammarly (and the built-in "grammar checkers" in Word and the like) is not high to begin with; but I'm certainly not taking usage, diction, and particularly style advice from a company that produces advertisements to such poor rhetorical effect.

Commercial repair shops caught snooping on customer data by canny Canadian research crew

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Hmm

I suspect you upset people with a sense of ethics.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Snooping

I'll withhold judgement since we don't know anything about what the agreement was between the customer and shop. It sounds like the customer might have been very vague about what was to be done, in which case attempting to recover files would be justifiable, and then as you say if there were reasonable grounds for suspicion based on filenames it's hard to see this as a privacy violation.

The cases given in the article were obviously more clear-cut.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: And anyone is surprised?

This is such a stupid piece of security theater anyway. It's not hard to conceal a good-sized explosive device in a functional "business-class" laptop.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: And anyone is surprised?

Yes, when you arrive in the US on an international flight, you go through Customs. That's a cursory check for the vast majority of people. They look at the form and wave you through. They don't examine your luggage or other possessions. Even if they did, hollowed-out pound coins with SD cards are not high on their list of things to look for.

KittenHuffer mentioned the TSA, who would be involved for the return trip. That's even less of a concern. CBP officers are Federal officers; TSA scanners are not. TSA scanners consistently fail to catch 90-something percent of suspect material in tests. Their primary effect is to make people throw away their water bottles.

Cerebras's supercomputer has more cores than world's fastest iron – with a big catch

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Kook Post of the Week right here. Glad to see SSg7 back in form. We've been suffering through a trough of low-quality kookery from the likes of Dave LineNoise.

Shocker: EV charging infrastructure is seriously insecure

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: SDR? Why is there any wireless comms used here at all?

I can't see lending one of my vehicles to anyone I wouldn't trust to offer to compensate me for whatever fuel, or electricity if I had an EV, they used. I'd decline, but they'd offer. Except family members who've learned not to bother, of course.

But if you're in the habit of letting people you don't trust drive your car, then ... I'm not seeing how this threat model works.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Cracking gas pumps isn't rocket science either

Save us all from "visionary" leaders.

Amazon founder Bezos to donate 'majority' of $126bn fortune

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Oh God!

Dear Mr 6 sir –

I hope this missive finds you in good health through the support of our Savior Jesus H. Christ. While we are not previously acquainted, know that I am Prince Michael Wojcik, only surviving child and heir to King Bezos of Amazoncom. Our family fortune of some $126 billion (ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIX BILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) now falls to me, but I am temporarily unable to retrieve it because our family misplaced the checkbook and I lack funds to purchase a replacement.

If you could see your way to forwarding to me the minor sum of $10,000.00 (TEN THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS) which I might use to remedy this inconvenience, I would happily divide the fortune with you in equal shares. Expect your portion by next Tuesday or possibly March 2047 at latest.

US Department of the Interior seeks $1b single-vendor cloud contract

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Area end of Nowhere

Er, it's not like the DoI does a lot of data-crunching within the typical National Wilderness or something. They mostly have their computers in offices.