Posts by NinjasFTW

Re: aggregated and securely anonymised

Why even bother to try when its based on date of birth and postcode.

There is 3 houses in my postcode.....

Re: Typical Google

Have you read the proposed law at

https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/DPB%20--20Draft%20news%20media%20and%20digital%20platforms%20mandatory%20bargaining%20code%20Q%26As.pdf?

I don't see how there is any misinterpretation in it.

It reads as if it was written directly by NewsCorp. Its an abomination of a proposal that will have far reaching implications for the internet as a whole

Re: Kill Innovation?

Not my speciality but a couple of years ago our virtualisation guys moved 200 VMs from one physical ESX cluster to another with no interruption so i don't think its that uncommon

Re: Well, that's a nicer eulogy than the Steve Jobs rant

you don't automatically get all the shitty things you've done in life (Not talking about Paul Allen, just in general) ignored simply because you've died! This doubly applies to how they've interacted with others.

If you care about your future legacy or that of your descendants then you should maybe think about while you're still alive and can do something about it.

If we sanitise asshole behaviour then it becomes more acceptable to be an asshole. There is enough of them around as it is!

oh god this.

My open office now has white boards tacked to the end of every row of desk, infringing onto the walkways.

Every morning, all the teams have their daily standup and completely block the walkways.

The general chatter is so loud I need to wear headphones to focus on a task and there is always one person within 20 meters who likes to loudly talk about what they did on the weekend/had for dinner/what their cat threw up etc.

I don't think anyone actually believes in the whole increased collaboration thing. It is just a thinly veiled excuse to cram people into the smallest space possible.

If they actually cared about collaboration, everyone would have an office/decent cubical but there would be a large amount of meeting rooms or gather areas where people could work together when needed and actually get work done in peace when they need focus time.

@ST So you ask for metrics to back up a statement.

Metrics are then provided and then rather than dispute them you shift the argument from LGBTQ to race and throw in an ad hominem attack to boot.

Your argument also struggles because its not the majority that are asking for quotas but the minority groups.

Leaving aside the argument as to the benefits of reverse discrimination in the first place, can it still be justified when the group(s) it was setup to benefit has exceeded the desired result of equality?

Except you know it wont be offshore bods thrown under the bus because that would mean that they have to admit that offshoring causes issues.

Its more likely to be blamed on one of the few remaining guys as a justification to move the rest offshore.

Never let a good crisis go to waste and all that

Re: Equal Pay for Equal work....

This is what i'm struggling to understand from what i've read.

The brief seems to indicate that people get placed in specific teams when they join. I'm guessing it can't be graduate placement because of the reference to 4 years of previous experience.

So does the recruitment process at Google mean that you apply to work there for a non-specific role and then they find the best spot for you based on your skills/interview/education?

I'm personally not sure i'd apply for a job at any company when the role wasn't well define before hand.

Re: My G1

I loved my Desire Z but ironically it was the phone that turned me off HTC as they stopped updating it pretty rapidly while other phones of the same HTC range were.

It also had several annoying bugs that were never ironed out and I never got a response from HTC about.

Re: Reasonable Trolling

ah the equivalent response of jamming your fingers in your ears and going "nanananananana".

You know who else denies things without addressing the argument? Trump. Why are you such a Trump supporter?!?!?

Re: Oh dear...

lol as soon as I saw the title of the article, I knew who would be the author and what it would say before looking at it.

At least he has stopped quoting Florian Muller!

Re: "We need to promote women disproportionately, pay them equally or better..."

And that study doesn't take into account the role.

It is based on picking 100 random women and men and comparing the average wage.

It doesn't take into account pretty important factors such as job, experience, education etc.

Can we at least compare apples with apples please?

If we are going to pull random stats out of the air we can say that men are 20 times more likely to die at work so maybe they deserve an extra £1.30 an hour

http://www.healthsafetynews.co.uk/entries/commentary/male-workers-20-times-more-likely-than-females-to-die-at-work-

Re: Recurve or Compound?

Depends on the recurve bow.

I used to have several single piece wooden ones (15+ years ago). Not as powerful but with a much more ye-olde feel. They were stored unstrung but could be restrung in about 30 seconds including removal from the case.

Had a couple of long bows too but they were ridiculously hard to string and it would be better just to whack someone over the head with it!

but if the Frenchman is as good (or close enough) to the Brit but is cheaper then you are going to hire the Frenchman.

Furthermore if you know there is a steady stream of French that are all prepared to accept lower rates then your subsequent job postings are going to be based on that.

Lets face it though, most of the debate isn't about the levels of western Europeans in companies. People from similar economies are always going to have similar expectations and therefore more even competition.

The only way that companies aren't finding skilled labour locally is because they don't want to pay for it. They are used to a cheap, good enough workers and don't want to accept that skilled workers are expensive because they are skilled.

Re: Wind power in South Australia

"One of the many blessings of Brexit is that the UK wont be forced to adopt EU mandated energy strategies, but will be free to pick what is tried tested and proven to work instead."

You mean like Hinkley C which is using an untested design?

Re: Fuck the poor then

In tax accounting terms yes the poor are worth less as tax generators, but the poor then get their revenge by absorbing more than they can ever repay from the tax streams that others pay.

The problem is that its only the middle class who end up paying the full tax rate.

The poor get lots of 'help'/subsidisation (yes i'm aware this is debatable) and the rich have the resources to find all the loop holes.

As someone who is likely to remain middle class and had to work hard to get there it does annoy me that changes to tax normally affect me in a negative way.

I am grateful that I am where I am but human nature is always going to look enviously at others getting handouts or avoiding responsibilities.

Re: So, to sum up...

yeah,

attention grabbing but misleading headline, check

half the article then converted into a hatchet job, check

obvious author bias, check.

basic click bait article designed to stir the pot. Pretty poor from El'Reg

Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean its not there

There are numerous reports of reports of very high quality movies being released.

The video of that poor airman (at work so don't want to look up his nationality) that was burned to death in a cage was apparently professionally done.

Chances are that we are not the target audience for this stuff so we are unlikely to see most of it.

That Daesh spend so much time and effort on social media stuff says that it's seeing results from it.

Reports on Brit kids that have gone to Syria etc often show that they have been groomed through social media contacts.

This report is a load of crap and is just being used to further the govts desire to run a police state but I think its wrong to dismiss the effect of Daesh propaganda based on anecdotal evidence.

I keep hearing people say that we will still have access to the single market but i'm yet to actually see anything that will confirm this. Boris mentioned it again in a column today.

I know that the Swiss (and others?) have access without being members but they have do all the things that the Brexiteers don't want to do such as payments and agreeing to EU rules on a lot of things etc.

Is there an agreed method by which we get access to the single market without all the conditions attached? It would be appealing if there was but it sounds a bit like wishful thinking!

Re: Florian Mueller

Yes why would anyone believe anything that Florian says after the clear bias he has towards Oracle.

I wonder if his bias has something to do with him being paid by Oracle for 'consulting'?

Re: Yeah, but no, but..

People may be happy doing the role and I have no issue with that. The problem is that a lot of these roles will be automated eventually.

We are only just starting the see the start of it with PaaS etc.

Systems are made to be automated, I can push a button at work and get a VM provisioned, it will have an application automatically installed (i.e. Tomcat/Websphere/Apache/Oracle/ELK/Mysql/Cassandra) with a basic configuration. We only use it for dev environments currently but there are plans to expand its use. The various middleware teams have seen their work tickets reduce by 20% since this was implemented.

This is only going to get more widespread once docker and co start to pick up steam. There will be administrators for the Docker platform (unless devops people have their way!) but it will be less than there would be for all the individual application areas.

The administrator role won't be going away any time soon but it will start compacting.

Re: Not sure I get the point...

yes, its called motion and its bean around for a long while.

I use it for home monitoring/security and doorbell type system.

If there is movement in the house during the day when i'm at work it records any movement, sends it to an offsite location and send a push notification to my phone.

If i'm home and someone approaches my door it sends a push notification to my phone with a link to the live stream of the door cam. That way I don't have to go downstairs to answer the door for another window salesman etc.

Cost a hundred pounds and a good few hours to setup but all using common components and open source software

Re: Bunch of tosspots

Its not a protest against religions, its a protest against the preferential treatment that religions receive in day to day life.

Why do certain beliefs get accepted? Why is the FSM any more or less disprovable from anything else?

Re: Good on him

The update process should be able to handle this unless you're saying that you think security only patches will follow a different process without regression tests etc.

I guess if you have an emergency patching procedure that skips or reduces the amount of regression testing done then it would be beneficial to be able to only update the security fix in question.

Testing bandwidth is one of the biggest constraints that I have to deal with so I do get the appeal of only deploying kernel patches when they are needed but for us they would still need to follow the exact same path as the standard update process

ELK not dev ops

I use ELK a fair amount and have absolutely nothing to do with dev ops.

I wish this article was better written and wasn't under the dev ops category because ELK is a really nice open source product (Paid features available but there are open source plugins that replicate) that can really help you understand what is happening in your environment as a whole.

Beyond the basics, it does take a bit to setup and you do need to understand the data its handling but its a good product that scales really well.

We use it for both high level dashboard type analysis as well as detailed troubleshooting.

From a single platform I can:

See any servers that have been stopped/started

See any exceptions that have been generated, broken down by cluster type

get application response times for individual calls or the average as a whole

report any transaction timeouts

track a user transaction from end-to-end across multiple different systems

long term trend analysis reporting

cognitive dissonance

Note: This is the one time in history I'll be complimentary of an Oracle product.

Oracle producing a good product that is open source.... just feels wrong!

I had to read and then re-read the license information before I would believe it

Re: Isn't there a standard defence against lasers?

@mage

maybe for a couple of watt laser you get in a store, not for something military grade in the k/w range.

Actually the mirror would need to be perfect, a single spec of dust or abrasion would be enough to dump a load of heat into the surface to destroy that section of the mirror.

A laser pulse rate is at least 50Mhz so that spec of dust is going to get numerous pulses of energy no matter how fast its spinning.

The laser doesn't even have to destroy the missile completely, it just has to create just enough damage (hole, warping) that a missile travelling at > mach 3 will tear itself apart.

You haven't mentioned how you are going to get an extremely polished mirror to actually survive the stresses of being attached to an ICBM either.

Re: Big hammer

The flipper robots weren't the most exiting to watch granted but by the later seasons there were some fantastic bots with spinning, weighted discs and crushing jaws.

Razer was my favorite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razer_(robot)

Many bots also 'evolved' righting mechanisms that effectively rendered the flipper bots toothless.

Re: @ ben edwards

Yes, let's just throw away the correct way of doing things because people today are too lazy to bother to learn how to do things correctly.

After we get rid of the scourge that is case sensitivity, lets target other punctuation marks next. The semicolon is surely the work of the devil anyway.

I'm not too fond of vowels either, 95% of words will still make sense without them and think of how much keyboard space we could save wtht vwls n thm!

Re: Oh Joy!

I ended up spending 30K to rip out existing 12 Core CPUs to replace them with 6 Core CPUs (of a higher clockrate) for my Dev environment.

Ended up saving close to 1 Mil in licence costs.

There do seem to be a lot more CPUs coming through that run less cores but at higher speeds, suspect the chipmakers are realizing how people are trying to scale back on their licence costs.

Re: It's personal data

and how many of the above points would Talk Talk have addressed?

I'm so glad that companies with massive proven records of not being able to keep data secure is going to be handling so much more of it!

Yes but what happens when you spend big bucks for your Porsche and then you try and drive down a road that is 'sponsored' by Toyota.

Suddenly you find that your speed is limited to 28 MPH, your cruise control wont work, your radio automatically switches to a station playing only ads and your cup holders fold themselves away.

That is what a two tiered internet offers.

Compression

Yeah,

Thats my concern too and not alleviated by the comment from the Sky guy about needing to reduce the bit stream.

I remember when I went from Virgin to Sky TV and the difference between the HD channels was amazing. Virgin must use a bucketload more compression.

I've recently upgraded to a new 4K TV (a lower range Panasonic) and the difference between my old 1080i is astounding.

The biggest frustration is watching some of the UHD content on Youtube and knowing that UHD content as standard is so far away :(

Re: Those of us who haven't "upgraded"

I had kinda accepted the system tray icon sitting there as it wasn't really interfering but the new popup behaviour is fucking* ridiculous.

Any vague intention of actually upgrading to 10 is now gone owing to the spamming way Microsoft is going about it.

*I really don't usually swear in public comments like this but I am well pissed off about it.