* Posts by Pete 2

3483 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

US, UK, Western Europe fail to hit top 50 cheapest broadband list

Pete 2 Silver badge

Chalk and cheese

So is this survey for the same quality of service? The same bandwidth? The same data caps?

Or does it vary from a 1MBit/s Wimax in a rural domain to a 1GBit/s FTTH in the most expensive cities in the world.

It seems to me that these variations are in line with the (lower) cost of equipment in countries with lower abilities to buy top quality kit when compared with those that prohibit cheapo hardware on the basis that a foreign power might be eavesdropping. Also that the cost of installing infrastructure is heavily dependent on local labour costs - which also vary enormously.

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: Gardening leave

> He was well p1553d off!

so, mission accomplished.

At least people aren't subject to a systemd message I encountered recently.

systemd: worker not accepting requests - worker killed

This is why HR should never be allowed near the sharp end of IT. It might give them ideas.

Pete 2 Silver badge

Comments are bugs, too

> Dick changed all the comments in the code. Sure, they all still looked OK to the casual observer but bore no resemblance to what the code actually did.

Ahhhh. Otherwise known as "version 2"

The amount of time I used to spend believing the comments, rather than the code. A working practice I have been completely cured of for many, many, years.

It seems to me that most of the time that bug fixes, tweaks, modifications or any other changes are made few people see fit to alter the comments to reflect what was done. Or why it was done.

At best you might get a passive-aggressive: # fix for bug report 93315 which is neither helpful (or often correct).

Tomorrow Water thinks we should colocate datacenters and sewage plants

Pete 2 Silver badge

go left or right?

> colocate datacentres and sewage

Just like putting the fax machine (remember them?) next to the shredder, it is vitally important that people can tell (smell?) one from the other.

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

Pete 2 Silver badge

Meanwhile in 2040 ...

... there will still be the same old my language is better than your language (grandad!) arguments. Ones that are criticising rust, go and all the other trendy stuff. Pulling them apart and inflating their inevitable weaknesses into major fashion faux pas.

Even though almost all of the platforms those quasi-religious arguments will be taking place on will still be written in C

Take this $715,000 and find security gaps in quantum computers, says NSF

Pete 2 Silver badge

Was Bohr a fermion or a boson?

> "Poor ol' Bohr must be spinning in his grave.

... we should be told, in order to know whether he has an integer spin (boson) or a fractional one that would mean he was a fermion.

Software upgrades help Mars helicopter keep flying

Pete 2 Silver badge

The shape of things to come

> we have increased the size of our team and are making upgrades to our flight software

It is fortunate that the helo doesn't run on Windows. Otherwise those software upgrades would consist of stuffing advertisements onto the platform

China's top tech city Shenzhen locks down completely for at least a week

Pete 2 Silver badge

Send help

> plenty of people outside China will be hoping Shenzhen gets on top of this outbreak quickly.

Maybe the UK should help out by sending China their secret weapon.

How quickly can Dido Harding be dispatched? it would be interesting to see just how much damage (to the virus - what did you think I meant?) one person can do.

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

Pete 2 Silver badge

One step too few

> Backups were performed and rotated and once a week

Necessary, but not sufficient.

Did they ever check that the backups could restore their systems?

In practice a much more difficult task than many would imagine as you need a complete identical set of servers (plus other infrastructure) to restore to.

Ukraine invasion: This may be the quiet before the cyber-storm, IT staff warned

Pete 2 Silver badge

Time for a change

> the first thing organizations should do to prepare themselves

Surely the first thing to do is to consider just what systems actually need to be connected to the wild west public internet?

Home working has required more companies to expose themselves(!) to outside connections. Hopefully from their employees, only. However, it still boggles the mind that there is sensitive, vulnerable and juicy targets of national infrastructure and security that is accessible, and therefore hackable.

I realise that nothing will be done until it is too late. That governments will take no action to protect vital systems until they get hacked into oblivion. Even then, there will only be an inquiry, conclusions that nobody was to blame and "lessons learned" while business carries on as usual. Just as the NHS learned in 2017 with the Wannacry attack. Although there was much fuss, many NHS systems remain open to attack - some even from the same malware.

Only 29% of techies truly want to stay in current job

Pete 2 Silver badge

If only

> plenty of serial moaners in those planning to leave.

In my experience, those who whine-on most about planning to leave are both the people everyone else hopes will leave, but also are the ones least likely to.

Pete 2 Silver badge

Fantasy meets reality

> only 29 per cent of IT workers globally have a "high intent" to stay in their current roles

Although most will do!

All this shows is the large gap between what people SAY and what they actually do.

However, this is a global study, so is not relevant to any particular country. It is far too general for any company to use for planning.

The study (as reported) also fails to provide a time limit. Stay in their current roles for how long. A year? Life? Or until they get promoted while staying with the same company?

Chinese rocket junk may have just smashed into Moon

Pete 2 Silver badge

New world, new sayings?

> Details still up in the air

Not a phrase that works particularly well on The Moon

Intel blasts Bitcoin mining, unveils own mining kit

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: What's that law called?

The Jevons Paradox

From the Wiki article: technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to the increased consumption

Ukraine invasion may hit chip supply chain – analysts

Pete 2 Silver badge

prices can only get higher

> chip fabs stockpile the gases they require, so "gas production line interruptions in Ukraine will not halt semiconductor production lines in the short term."

So not much of a stockpile, then?

As far as I am aware neon, being an inert gas, doesn't have a shelf-life as such. Maybe whatever it is contained in might contaminate it past the extreme levels of purity required given enough time, but we are told nothing about that.

Though whatever the background facts are, I still reckon that this conflict will be used as an excuse to raise prices.

AI-created faces now look so real, humans can't spot the difference

Pete 2 Silver badge

Missing option

> human evaluations of both real photographs and AI-synthesized images

How about faces of those who have had cosmetic surgery?

I reckon those would be even easier to spot than simulated faces. But would they appear more "fake" than photoshopped faces of real (unaltered) people.

IBM looked to reinvigorate its 'dated maternal workforce'

Pete 2 Silver badge

Prefering burnout over experience

> You will see that while Accenture is 72% millennial we are at 42%

Maybe the reason that Acc(id)enture has such a high proportion of younger employees is that they very rapidly leave the company in favour of better employment elsewhere.

Geomagnetic storm takes out 40 of 49 brand new Starlink satellites

Pete 2 Silver badge

Obligatory ...

> The Space Weather Prediction Center put a storm watch in place for the day of the launch as well as the day prior

It's at times like this I really wish I'd listened to what the Space Weather Prediction Center had said.

Why, what did they say?

I don't know, I didn't listen.

NASA taps Lockheed Martin to build Mars parcel pickup rocket

Pete 2 Silver badge

A lucky escape

> Mars parcel pickup rocket ... Until today, no contractor had even been appointed

If NASA was going solely on price, they might have chosen DPD.

I can just imagine, instead of sending a rocket, they would just have slipped a card under NASA's door to say that they tried to pick up the stuff from Mars, but nobody was in.

Chip shortage: Buyers sign multiyear, no-take-back deals to secure supplies, says NXP

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: Preserving the legacy

> not microcontrollers

From the article: Sievers talked about NXP's S32 family of products

and NXP says: S32 MCUs and MPUs for automotive and industrial applications

Pete 2 Silver badge

Preserving the legacy

> The long-term nature of these chip orders is turning out to be a boon for NXP

And therefore making it more difficult for developers to break away from existing designs, to use new chips with better features.

"Whaddaya mean you want to use a device with 32 times as much memory? We've just signed a contract obliging us to buy 20 billion of these 8-bit processors in the next five years"! Make do with the 32kB of RAM - that's all you have to work with.

How to get banned from social media without posting a thing

Pete 2 Silver badge

There's your answer!

As the lady says:

> "Social media is a time-wasting pit of crazies, pornographers, criminals, and perpetually angry nobodies flinging insults at each other,"

and in conclusion:

> Mme D's social media feed managed to irrevocably breach social media content rules within minutes of creating her account – without actually having any content in it.

The account (obviously) was banned, blocked and b*ggered due to the LACK of hate-content.

How can we recruit for the future if it takes an hour to send an email, asks Air Force AI bigwig in plea for better IT

Pete 2 Silver badge

Marked up

> "Would you ever buy a $100 computer?"

Though I have sneaking suspicion that what costs an ordinary person $100, the american military pays 10 - 100 times more for.

Infosec chap: I found a way to hijack your web accounts, turn on your webcam from Safari – and Apple gave me $100k

Pete 2 Silver badge

Value for money

> A security bod scored a $100,500 bug bounty from Apple

And that's still cheaper than testing stuff before it escapes it is released.

LG promises to make home appliance software upgradeable to take on new tasks

Pete 2 Silver badge

The cynic in me

> use LG’s ThingQ app to upgrade their clothes dryer with new software

I reckon this is just a ploy for the company to extract more revenue (nobody said these upgrades would be free) from existing products. Maybe even as a marketing ruse to increase the price above and (far) beyond the actual cost of the additional hardware.

OTOH, "upgradable" is just another word for hackable.

On the gripping hand, it means they can do away with their software testing team. Gotta bug? Never mind, we'll just push a patch.

Pop quiz: The network team didn't make your change. The server is in a locked room. What do you do?

Pete 2 Silver badge

One man's ceiling is another man's floor

> within a couple of minutes I had rebooted the FreeBSD server that ran DNS into single user mode, made the necessary modifications to the DNS files and restarted the server

No doubt the half of management who were pleased had realised that the network team could be replaced by a lone individual with the right motivation. I assume the other half of the managment who were livid had just realised the same thing.

Buy 'em by the punnet: Raspberry Pi offers RP2040 chips in bulk

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: Brilliant little devices.

> Quartz, isn't it?

Yes. Even though it fits in a pint pot.

Planning for power cuts? That's strictly for the birds

Pete 2 Silver badge

Who HR's HR

> that old favourite of the HR axe-wielder: "restructuring."

Why are they the only department that never gets staff cuts?

Open source maintainer threatens to throw in the towel if companies won't ante up

Pete 2 Silver badge

Tech crash?

> Dutz's distress call comes just days after another open source developer, Marak Squires, sabotaged two of his own projects.

The 2008 financial crisis arose because lots of american financial products were made of a mixture of high-risk debt that nobody quite understood their exposure to. It worked for a time, until confidence ebbed and some of those debts turned bad.

Are we now seeing the same thing in the world of FOSS? That every organisation fed at the trough of "free" (gratis) software with little or no understanding of the risks and exposure they were building in. And just like in 2008, it worked fine, until some "players" defaulted and then the whole mess turned sour.

We have all heard of technical (or software) debt. Where past shortcuts in design, implementation or documentation lead to far more work in the future. But that at the time, those failures did not seem important.

Are all those chickens coming home to roost?

Open source isn't the security problem – misusing it is

Pete 2 Silver badge

six million flies

> the real problem isn't that it was open-source software

No. The problem is that it takes virtually no skill to download a package and follow what every other user does with it.

Having the knowledge and experience (and time: paid for by a person's employer) to perform a security audit, or even a risk analysis, on that software is a rarity.

Much of the popularity of FOSS packages is the knowledge that lots of other people and companies use the same stuff. So it's gotta be OK, hasn't it?

Whether security is a product or a process is not really relevant. The problem is that nobody takes responsibility for FOSS. Nobody has to fix problems when they arise, get written into new releases or are discovered. That lack of enforcability and the associated freedom from obligations, is the major factor behind such software being free (as in beer).

Two sides of the digital coin: Ill-gotten gains in cryptocurrencies double, outpaced by legit use – report

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: outpaced by legit use

Apparently you can now use BTC to buy an american politician.

Judge for yourself if that is either a legitimate or a legal use.

The National Republican Congressional Committee will begin accepting campaign contributions in cryptocurrency, the party announced (in June 2021).

The year ahead in technology fail: You knew they were bad, now they're going to prove it

Pete 2 Silver badge

Nothing to see

The Metaverse - the next 3D-TV

HDMI 2.1 - irrelevant

Windows 11 - still doesn't beat W7

NFTs - ways of relieving those with too much money, of their burden

Predictive Dirty Dozen: What will and won't happen in 2022 (unless it doesn’t/does)

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: I predict .....

That come the end of 2022 the same people will be making much the same predictions for 2023.

Electric fastback fun: Now you can surf the web from the driving seat of your Polestar 2

Pete 2 Silver badge

Don't look down

> Get rolling again, and streaming content will continue in audio-only form.

> It makes sense; one would not want drivers jabbing away at the touchscreen while their vehicle thunders down the highway.

Unless they are randomly jabbing away trying to get the video back. Something that mysteriously disappeared as soon as the driver should have started paying attention to the view in front, rather than on their screen.

Online retailers delaying sales of Raspberry Pi 4 model until 2023, thanks to a few good chips getting scarce

Pete 2 Silver badge

Floatation sinking?

> But the supply chain challenges have also worsened for Raspberry Pi 4 models in the last month

Not what you want to announce if you are planning an IPO in 2022

Luxembourg judge hits pause on Amazon's daily payments of disputed $844m GDPR fine

Pete 2 Silver badge

Redeployment

> "We have no guidance about what we need to do, so how do we do it?"

Perhaps if they took some of their lawyers off making up specious excuses and put them to work on reading the EU law, they could work out what needed to be done. As every other company that manages to operate without breaking that particular law, does.

They would probably get to the solution even quicker if the daily penalty was increased,

Fans of original gangster editors, look away now: It's Tilde, a text editor that doesn't work like it's 1976

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: One to rule them all

> 2. LibreOffice is not a plain-text editor and does not include one.

You are wrong

LibreOffice provides a Save as text option. I know this as I have just tried it.

Pete 2 Silver badge

One to rule them all

> But what if you don't edit code and don't need syntax highlighting and all that jazz?

Use Libreoffice

> What if you just need to occasionally tweak a config file?

Then it doesn't matter - since it is only occasional use. The secret is to learn the most common ONE, that is available on every platform. If that is vi or nano, so be it.

While all those "arcane" editors have many features, it is not obligatory or sensible to use them all. The only features an average user needs to know are how to open a file, navigate to the correct place (line), alter text and save the results.

RAF shoots down 'terrorist drone' over US-owned special ops base in Syria

Pete 2 Silver badge

A winning strategy?

> ASRAAM missile to destroy the "small hostile drone." ... estimated to cost around £200,000 per unit

Not to mention the cost of the aircraft required to launch it from.

However, I recall a line from the film Charlie Wilson's War about the US involvement in countering the russian invasion of Afghanistan. The idea was that the USA-ians supplied the insurgents with "cheap" missiles to shoot down expensive russian aircraft. Something along the lines of "If they can shoot down a $10 million helicopter with a $100,000 missile the russians will lose"

The line may well be apocryphal, but tactically it has a ring of truth to it.

US Commerce Dept says China has brain-control weaponry

Pete 2 Silver badge

In plain sight

> developing "mind control weapons"

I have heard is said that is what Facebook et. al are.

Gnu Nano releases version 6.0 of text editor, can now hide UI frippery

Pete 2 Silver badge

Cosmetic?

> version 6.0

It seems like there is some diddlin' with the UI but little in the way of "what can I do with the new release, that I couldn't do with the previous one" functional improvements

Is it decadent that I use four different computers each day, at different times?

Pete 2 Silver badge

Bright little apples?

> the strong light from a tablet

Not being familiar with Apple products I admit to speaking from a position of ignorance.

However, I would expect any decently designed tablet to have a night-time mode or app, that altered both the brilliance of the screen and maybe even its colour.

Bloke breaking his back on 'commute' from bed to desk deemed a workplace accident

Pete 2 Silver badge

actions, not words

> more than half of UK employees would quit if their company pulled hybrid working options

Although I reckon that is about the norm, with or without any particular benefit being the subject of the survey.

The point being that there is a large proportion of employees who spend all their time grumbling about how bad their employer / boss / working conditions are

And how they are (always) thinking of leaving.

But none of them ever do (more's the pity for those they would leave behind). Partly because they are all talk and no trousers, but mostly because no other company would employ a morose git who would spend their entire time at their new company complaining about how bad things there were.

What came first? The chicken, the egg, or the bodge to make everything work?

Pete 2 Silver badge

The one thing that is never planned for:

> Although everything had been planned. Nothing could go wrong. Right?

... is a failure of the planning process.

After all, if it was admitted that the planning process could fail, then the knock-on is that nothing could be trusted. Although that degree of paranoia realism is probably the secret of successful planning.

And if the planning process is considered open to fault, the conclusion can only be that it is impossible to plan for that. Since that plan would also involve the (faulty) planning process.

It's primed and full of fuel, the James Webb Space Telescope is ready to be packed up prior to launch

Pete 2 Silver badge

New! Improved! oxidiser!

> Oxidiser improves the burn efficiency of the hydrazine fuel

I have a sneaking suspicion that the NTO does a little more than "improve" the hydrazine. Without it, the telescope would just be squirting N2H4 out of its thrusters.

P.S. for a very readable book on the subject, try Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants available from a south american river. Ideal for the christmas period when there's bugger-all on TV.

Computers cost money. We only make them more expensive by trying to manage them ourselves

Pete 2 Silver badge

Free to get locked in?

> Do we really need the “freedom” to choose whatever you want on your desktop, or laptop, or indeed, your data center?

Yes.

Not to be free to choose (that can be done on a cloud based operation, anyway). But the freedom to decide when to change supplier, when to find a better price and when to re-architect stuff as the business changes.

As for capex / opex, those arguments are bogus. It is quite easy to get external finance for capital purchases. Thus replacing the monthly cloud costs with monthly loan repayments.

When civilisation ends, a Xenix box will be running a long-forgotten job somewhere

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: The secret to a long life

> breaking things in obscure ways

Oh yes.

Even when that "start job" is an nfs mount request to a system that has been turned off (i.e.the box being booted has had no changes applied to it since the last successful boot) AND that the mount options in fstab include bg to background the mount.

Bitter? Me? Yes please, I'll have a pint.

Pete 2 Silver badge

The secret to a long life

> "I still wonder if it is still being used..."

Many years ago the company that paid me to sit at a desk bought a proprietary system from an american company. It ran (IIRC) Solaris 2.6 and was the epitome of a "black box" solution. Data went in and something useful came out.

The machine was locked up tight. Nobody in the company had access to it. No-one knew the root password. It never received any software updates whatsoever and it kept running.

It seems to me that provided the o/s and the apps are stable and that adequate security is implemented, there is never any need to perform updates - or introduce new bugs as the skeptic might describe the process.

Is it still running today? Doubtful, since external environments change and boxen that do not change with them become obsolete. However that little box was the "perfect" computer. it never needed maintenance. it never crashed. It just quietly got on with its job.

I suspect that if it had been allowed to, it would continue running indefinitely. Much like that Linux box that gets stuck on boot-up with "a start job is running ... no limit" report on the (text) console. That is, if the user knows how to get to the text console.

Smart things are so dumb because they take after their makers. Let's fix that

Pete 2 Silver badge

What are error messages for?

> "Server Error 500."

ISTM there are two issues here.

The first is to appease irate users who have made the basic error of relying on technology that still needs another 5 minutes under the grill before it will be ready for everyday use by everyday users.

The second is that the function of an error message is to communicate state in an accurate (top priority) and concise form. Such that those in the position and with the ability to resolve it receive the information they require.

In the second case short numerical error messages do the job very well. Provided the error codes are unique and well enough defined that a single code points to a single cause of failure (and from there, hopefully a well defined fix). Their nature also makes it easy for a non-techy to report the exact message to those who need to know. Often without too much prompting.

However, they also provide a perfect platform for tech-haters to criticise systems for "gobbledygook" as their meaning is obscure to the average person. However, would a longer message, along the lines of "I'm so sorry but the computer is completely buggered up at the moment. We will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal" be any more helpful than "Oooops, sorriy", or just :( ?