* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Boris Johnson set to step down with tech legacy in tatters

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Slimming the government

*AKA "the minister for the position we had to create so he couldn't f*ck anything else up"

Alan Brown Silver badge

"On being told he was last seen wobbling towards the kitchen area she was genuinely concerned he might injure himself."

In hindsight perhaps you should have told her he was heading outside?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Direct your ire...

You've got it in one. It was pretty obvious to a lot of people that he's a "stalking horse" - a convenient idiot to distract from the people behind the curtain and a convenient scapegoat for them later on

He's far too egotistical to even realise he's being played like a fiddle. His refusal to leave is as much a distraction from the mechanations as what's been happening up until how

Imagine scheming, pandering and planning to be leader your whole life, only to find you're utterly crap at it like everyone was telling you all along

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Direct your ire...

On the other hand, everyone having degrees in engineering, etc is just as dangerous

The problem is an UNBALANCED government and the bigger problem isn't the mix of people in the chambers but the non-democratic aspects of what's happening behind the scenes

Mad Nad said the quiet bits out loud on TV, boiling down to: "Only the rich donors matter. They call the tune and what anyone else wants doesn't come into it"

Unfortunately the other political parties in Britain are similarly captured and the USA became a lost cause many years ago

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Direct your ire...

Of course. "news" is reporting the unusual

This is WHY shootings and kiddy fiddlers get more coverage, despite us (and our children) being statistically safer than ever before

It's a good thing car-crash IT projects are reported. I would be more worried if they were not and it was regarded as "normal"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Direct your ire...

"How do you stop them from using idiot consultants to manage projects?"

The older I get, the more I favour carefully targetted and discrete assassinations

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Direct your ire...

I may be optimistic in thinking it may happen

I may be pessimistic in thinking it could take 30+ years to happen, as it did after Regency-era corruption was exposed

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Direct your ire...

> But the critical phrase in what you point out is "well-defined requirements".

I've seen a politically appointed leader create a requirement which wouldn't work and then shop it around vendors until one of them was actually brave enough to say "yes we'll do it" (the others had said it was broken by design and were fired before they started)

They built it as designed, under budget - and of course it didn't work. Fixing it resulted in costs ballooning out to 25 times the original contract price. Fingers were pointed, harsh wrods exchanged and the idiot in question sued the people who called him an idiot, because they'd hurt his feelings

After he was removed, the system was audited, found not to work and replaced in 6 weeks with an opensource solution that cost 20% of the price of the original contract

But somehow those who called the fiasco out for what it was were the evil people....

Johnson isn't the cause of the problems at Westminster. He's merely a symptom that's resulted in catastrophic positive feedback. One of the more positive aspects of his tenure is that it resulted in many of the corrupt operators feeling secure enough to cast off the blankets, step out of the shadows and operate where the corruption could be fairly easily documented for future action.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: 37 Billions

Wife of the Westminster anti-corruption committee leader

I'm minded of the stories of Russian anti-corruption ministers being found with _BALES_ of money stashed in their apartments (hundreds of millions of dollars).

Harding proved they were unskilled amateurs

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Sub-sea nukes

"Like it's always 5 o clock somewhere, the wind is always blowing somewhere"

Tell that to the people of South Australia

That's the reason they ended up having to buy grid-scale battery backup systems

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Sub-sea nukes

If you go all-out, 'renewables' can slightly outproduce carbon-emitting electricity sources, whilst still requiring substantial carbon emitting backing capacity for the occasions when they can't.

More importantly, electrical generation has historically only accounted for 30% of human carbon emissions, meaning there's a substantial gap between what renewables can produce and the electrical generation requirements for actually going carbon-free

The first sentence of the first paragraph above is the part that the snake-oil brigade latch onto to sell windmills and solar as the one-size-fits-all solution to everything

Nuclear isn't a luxury, it's a REQUIREMENT.

Water-moderated nuclear power was only ever intended by the guy who developed it to be proof of concept (a laboratory glassware proof-of-concept prototype built to power the Nautilus, using uranium not because it's the best fuel but in his words "because it was what was available") and 1950s nuclear scientists would be gobsmacked to see we're still using them.

The guy who developed that first nuclear reactor? He went on to develop a "walk-away-safe" version which was hot enough to be a drop-in-replacement for coal-burning technology (water-moderated nukes are not) and produced less than 1% of the waste of the first design. The US government killed it in 1972 because it would have divorced the civil nuclear program from its dependency on the waste products of weapons-making systems and therefore exposed uranium-producing plants to arms limitation treaties that dual-purpose plants are exempt from

One of El Reg's own columnists was a pretty passionate pusher of the tech (RIP Lester). As a nice side effect of picking up the "better mouse trap" (which is currently being assessed in China at Wuwei), the molten-salt thorium technology removes the single biggest barrier to economic viability of rare earth mining in most parts of the world (by making thorium a saleable product instead of "dangerous radioactive waste") and would remove the effective stranglehold on supply that exists (hello cheaper magnets and other items)

Systemd supremo Lennart Poettering leaves Red Hat for Microsoft

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: People are awful

Amen

I've learned to live with systemd, that doesn't mean I like it - and I'm adamantly opposed to it stepping outside the boundaries of process management

Unix philosophy is "small simple units". Systemd is neither - and it cannot justify the added complexity in the way that (say) PostgreSQL can trivially do so over MySQL (My Cow Orkers refuse to migrate to Postgres for large setups, resulting in man-years of scripting tweaks being needed which are simply not needed for Psql - they refuse to even TRY it)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What makes you so sure he won't continue to fcuk up Linux

The problem is that there are many _MANY_ more like him at Redhat

This is a particular problem the further up the food chain you go.

Mediocre programmers end up being pushed into management to keep them out of the way, where they end up causing even more damage as they end up with more free time to throw bad ideas around and more power to make them happen

The good guys are either too busy coding, firefighting or hating having been promoted into management and away from the work they loved

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.

"Red Hat's focus is on servers."

No, Red Hat's focus is on a half dozen very large customers who generate 80-90% of its income and a large part of what THEY want boils down to "modernised Xterms"

This is why academic users have been increasingly jumping ship to distros which accomodate their needs

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Motive found.

Having interacted extensively over the years with Redhat: Yes, you're right

Under IBM: Yes, you're right

There's good reason scientific linux users are jumping ship to Debianesque distros

WRT Systemd: sysvinit definitely needed replacing with something capable of parallelising process startups, but dropping an elephant on a peanut is not the way to do it

FBI and MI5 bosses: China cheats and steals at massive scale

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Colour me surprised

At the same time as building up the competitor, they've also been building up DOMESTIC groups whose dominating political systems and culture are antithetical to the West

Part of the problem is that unlike most of the rest of the world the USA didn't actively seek to denazify its locals after WW2 and just before it entered the war it actually had more members of its Nazi party than Germany did (complete with swastika flags and Nuremberg-style rallies at Madison Square Gardens)

American fascists simply rebranded as "anticommunists" after WW2 and Dwight Eisenhower's 1963 warning that America was on the verge of letting the military-industrial tail wag the civilian dog was ignored. Today that tail is very large and sweeps a lot before it

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: S IP mple gix

"Look at Jira as an example..."

Microsoft did the same to the existing market. It was "good enough" - and cheap. Only when it had established itself as THE dominant entity did it start strangling the market

This is one of the reasons Linux terrified them in the late 90s/early 00s

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: S IP mple gix

For that matter, copyright was intended to give the same limited protection for creativity and has been abused out of all recognition from the original grants to become a serious impediment on creativity and the arts rather than an encouragement

The influence that music and movie industries have had on lawmaking is wildly out of all proportion to their actual value and economic turnover

Alan Brown Silver badge

The Lumiere Brothers spring to mind as a classic example

Alan Brown Silver badge

Pot, Kettle, etc

Let's not forget how both Britain and the USA came to be business/industrial superpowers in the first place

China's simply demonostrating it can follow the example seat by the leading lights

Tech world may face huge fines if it doesn't scrub CSAM from encrypted chats

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Assumption Alert....Posturing Alert

in addition, the rule of thumb for crypto is:

"when you start using crypto, you encrypt EVERYTHING, including your laundry list, otherwise whatever's incrypted is obviously valuable and therefore worth targetting"

(the corollary of this is to ONLY encrypt your laundry lists, causing much wasted effort to find your dirty socks)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: So they've finally found another angle

wrt the PS: Nadine Doris said the quiet bit out loud - "Only the big donors matter"

And they're coming to the view that the one with the bird-nest hairdo is now a liability. He's being moved from convenient idiot to convenient scapegoat but is refusing to go quietly

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: If they can do why do they not tell us how?

"Boxed ticked, parents can sleep whilst the children surf the web."

Problem #1: over 1/3 of detected sexual offenders are under the age of 18 and equally distributed between genders

Yes, really

Let's not forget Jamie Bolger. For all the outcry, the case type isn't _particularly_ unusual when you look at history, only becoming rarer more recently

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Nobody can sensibly deny that this is a moral imperative

The best response to "Think of the children!" is "Jimmy Saville always did!"

The worst predators tend to operate in plain sight, usually posing as stalwart pillars of the community.

After all, you're NOT going to entrust your kids to the dirty raincoat brigade or a bunch of heavily tattooed gangbangers - but you probably won't think twice about letting them hang out at a church social group, etc

(Ironically, the heavily tattooed harley-riding gangbangers are likely to be extremely protective of kids, etc - as are almost all "screaming queens" I've known in my life)

Vendors are hiking prices up to 30 percent and claiming 'it's inflation'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: It's shit like this...

"what do you do if they decide to just jack up the price?"

Which is exactly what a lot of UK universities are now belatedly discovering about the "Free" services offered by Microsoft and Google...

Virtually none of them formulated policies for migrating elsewhere or backing out in such an event

"Oven ready deals" aplenty

Tracking cookies found in more than half of G20 government websites

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: simple incompetence strikes again

Yup and most of the trackers are things like Google AnalLytics

People who regularly talk to AI chatbots often start to believe they're sentient, says CEO

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Do they never learn?

the formula is simple:

Men are men

Women are men

Couples are men

Underage girls are FBI agents

Alan Brown Silver badge

My cat is sentient

But I wouldn't trust it to make rational decisions or hold a conversation

An AI chatbot is just a glorified echo chamber Eliza. You don't actually need a large library to fool users into believing they're dealing with a human

Gtk 5 might drop X11 support, says GNOME dev

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Agreed

"I do appreciate that Wayland is cleaner from an aesthetic standpoint and jettisons numerous amounts of X11 functionality that were already irrelevant in a modern system 20 years ago yet alone now."

It would still make far more sense to have a coordinated effort to cleanup X than to continue trying to bang the square peg of remote windowing into the Wayland triangular hole

I've tried very hard to like Wayland, but it just breaks too much stuff and the "we know better than you" attitude from the people behind it means it won't ever be sorted out

If you're dealing with Germans it's got a name - "The Teutonic blind spot" - you can explain why you want cupholders until you are blue in the face, but they simply will NEVER understand why you want cupholders, as it is forbidden to drink liquids in a vehicle, so there is simply no requirement for them to ever be there"

This also explains the computing equivalent of Volkswagon putting ECUs in car footwells where water can pool if windows are left down or broken, on the basis that "users are told not to do this, therefore we don't need to worry about it happening" (vs most Japanese engineers taking the point of view "Users WILL do it, we MUST ensure the hardware can handle it")

It's even worse when you deal with "certain germanic companies" who respond to poor reviews by threatening legal action (yes really) unless the reviews are removed....

Sony responds to inflation with $3,700 gold-plated 'Walkman'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: It's cute and everything...

Top end walkmans (eg: Aiwa HS-J08) were in the region of £900 back in the mid 80s and that won't change much as the cost was in the mechanicals, not the electronics

Inflation adjusted, the pricing is pretty similar

Alan Brown Silver badge

LIes , damned lies and statistics

"Vinyl, which accounted for more than half of music purchases, only accounts for 4.7 percent when including streaming."

Or in other words, physical sales are miniscule (but they'd been in free fall since the 1970s anyway), essentially filling a "novelty" or "nostalgia" category - which is exactly what the Ikea "turntable" is

Crypto sleuths pin $100 million Harmony theft on Lazarus Group

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The entire point

"it seems to be easier to steal it than protect it"

So are high quality gemstones or other "small high value negotiable items"

The Dilinger misquote applies here: People rob banks because that's where the money is. The added incentive is that nobody's shooting back (at the moment) and you don't need a stocking over your head

Dutch University retrieves Bitcoin ransomware payment and makes a profit

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Cryptocurrency anonymity

On a serious note, these methods are being sucessfully traced too.

The recovery rate is fairly decent for paths that don't lead into Orc- or Nork- country

UK signs deal to share police biometric database with US border guards

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Feeling it might be Ireland . . .

"I have suspicions that the ROI might be one of the three EC countries agreeing to go along with this plan"

And I have suspicions as to why

Hint: "Rathkeale Rovers"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Just another reason to not visit the US for me then

It's not just the fares. Adding travel insurance is eye-watering

Alan Brown Silver badge

Incorrect since 2018.

Ireland is a secular country these days, with a _very_ strong distaste for church interference in matters of state

Alan Brown Silver badge

"but it takes 2/3 of the states to bring a proposal forward and 3/4 to pass it."

It's a good idea to read "It can't happen here" - and reflect upon the thought that it very nearly DID both in the late 1930s and in the late 2010s

When the novel was turned into a teleplay in the 1970s, the producers felt that audiences would find the idea of a fascist takeover eagerly assisted by wide swathes of the American public to be so outlandish that they turned the sedtionists into flesh-eating lizard alien invaders. In reality the USA Nazi party was _larger_ than the German one and had Nuremburg-style rallies (complete with swastika flags) at Madison Square gardens as late as 1940.

American fascists didn't go away after WW2 and the USA didn't actively denazify like other countries did. Instead the people involved rebranded themselves as anticommunists and carried on. What we're seeing is 80 years of failure to deal with a problem that's resulted in a resurgence of an old problem (Nazis loved the American south, Hitler raved about Jim Crow policies and Eugenics in Mein Kampf). The gun issue is merely a symptom of much deeper problems that need dealing with

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: really look at the second amendment

A well regulated militia would be better than the current crop of chaos monkeys currently flinging shit in all directions whilst screaming something about freedums

The NRA used to teach gun safety and sensible behaviour. It got turned into a political pressure group a long time ago. There are other firearms groups which have stepped into the shoes it used to occupy and most of them have little tolerance for the kind of twat who thinks you need a semi-auto carbine with huge magazine to go target or varmit shooting

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Vassal State

opening a floor to ceiling window of the 5th floor nursery and carefully positioning a skip outside...

NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

"only to find the cleaner had unplugged something important."

Rule #1 of IT: Get friendly with the cleaning staff. They can be your greatest allies or foes

Once they understand that unplugging computer equipment is a "really bad idea" they won't do it (especially if they have the idea that it can lead to them looking for another job and you have ways of knowing who unplugged what and when)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Pottering around not doing much

"The best staff are constantly chasing promotions and extra duties"

In my experience the best staff are actively avoiding this shit because they already have too much loaded on them. It's the glory seekers you're describing

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Pottering around not doing much

"He did so well he was promoted to area manager, and hated every minute of it"

Yup, it's not just "the peter principle" but that mangelement only see things in terms of manglement and assume everyone wants to BE manglement

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Alan Brown Silver badge

write up exactly what's discovered and what actions were taken

The fastest way for lessons to be learned is for it to hit the customer financially. Everything else is "water off a duck's back"

I'm quite serious about this. The moment we started charging hourly fees for callout issues which turned out to be "not our fault" was the moment a number of repeat offenders suddenly had their "come to jesus" revelations (They got one warning first, most ignored it)

One case which springs to mind is a customer who insisted on a callout (2 hour drive) for our staff to un-minimise the icon for the program she was using, claiming that we must be causing it to shrink remotely. Her husband eventually admitted he was doing it to play solitaire whilst she was out.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"...the largest trust has an IT team who are as good as any I have worked with across private industry"

All at the mercy of the competence and IT know-how of the financial department....

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Getting the most for your money.

"Beancounters don't seem to allocate a value to data loss, or efficient use of staff time."

_COMPETENT_ beancounters do

Such people tend to be headhunted away from government jobs very quickly

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Getting the most for your money.

"Because if not they not only claw it back, but reduce the following year's budge too."

This can be solved by finding out who the responsible beaqncounter is and introducing their face to their desk. Repeatedly

Failing that, ensuring said beancounter's department gets shafted in the IT stakes has an eye openeing effect on their outlook

Chinese boffins suggest launching nuclear Neptune orbiter in 2030

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: This is a big mission ...

It would be "but commmmmmmunism!"

A quick look at the current world political situation suggests the problem isn't "the communists"

Startup rattles tin for e-paper monitor with display fast enough to play video

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I suspect most e-paper goes into much smaller displays."

Mainly because the yield rate on larger ones is problematic - just like LCDs 10-15 years ago

Software-defined silicon is coming for telecom kit later this year

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Remote kill switch

"Yes, but they're OUR ruthless capitalist bastards, not THEIR ruthless capitalist bastards"

Anyone non-USAian will be looking askance at this for exactly the reasoning brought up

Whatever hit the Moon in March, it left this weird double crater

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Chinese Junk on moon

They're not always small. Admiral Zhjeng He's fleet being a case in point... (and it would explain what happened to those ships)