* Posts by John Smith 19

16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Pennsylvania sues IBM for fraud over $170m IT upgrade shambles

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

Superb opportunity for headline sadly wasted.

"Tom Wolf" orders "Bonfire of Insanities" following review of project more than fifty percent over budget"

and assorted variations.

DOOM'd! Quake god John Carmack lobs $22m sueball at ZeniMax

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Just sad

I liked the guy.

From 1000 Hp super cars to a sounding rocket called The Stieg he was quite a hoot and how many wives know the way to their mans heart is a 5 axis CNC machine?

But he's lost the trade secrets case so he's y'know guilty of stealing stuff (and IIRC encouraging others to jump ship) from them. It would be strange if there wasn't a "no shares for you if try to steal our IP and/or staff" clause in the options contract. So no pudding for him.

Force employees to take DNA tests for bosses? We've got a new law to make that happen, beam House Republicans

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"They still believe in Social Darwinism of course."

Of course.

Because their great-great-great-grand father proved he was superior that naturally translates down to Junior. the attitude of the British upper classes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (as Michael Creighton pointed out on the subject of eugenics, a word I only knew from the Wrath of Khan episode of Star Trek).

Yeah.

Do Americans still bleat on about having a classless society?

The only ones I can believe who would still have that idea would be people capable of a very high level of self delusion or membership of the top 1% (or both).

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Intersting to see what are the *real* priorites of this government.

I've worked for US companies whose stated aim was to eliminate any employee (or potential employee) who had smoked in the last 5 years.

I have peed into a cup to do so. The spectrum covered 12 major classes of drugs, but the tester said they can do about 24 (if a company pays of course). This is was not some kind of national security role, just a fairly normal service company.

Because in the US being able to die of preventable and treatable diseases is viewed as "Freedom."

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Big Brother

Why this kind of selection reminds me something very nasty?

Because it is?

If fast radio bursts really are revving up interstellar sailcraft, here's the maths

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"It's an intergalactic WiFi ?"

Yeah, but the data rate's s**t so the security is non existent.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

TBH I suspect it's another case of pulsars.

Also thought to be some kind of alien comm system.

Since the sources are outside our galaxy the "fast" bit suggests it's us that are moving and the beam are just being glimpsed as we whizz across their path.

Of course it's bad news if this really is a drive system for a solar sail transport network.

That suggests that smarter minds than ours (working for a lot longer) have not come up with anything better than sub light travel.

No FTL liners plying their trade between the stars <sigh>

FCC under fire for trying to ditch cybersecurity

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"communications networks as part of the US' "critical infrastructure" – "

Funny I had assumed it already was given the number of SCADA systems that seem to communicate over it and the number of supply chains that depend on JIT ordering and delivery, never mind the ability of people to talk to each other.

BTW with this mandate would this put the internet properly under FCC regulation rather than shoe horning it in using the 1934 Telecomms Act?

Spy satellite scientist sent down for a year for stowing secrets at home

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Black Helicopters

Pah. Barely a few hundred GB

Now that Booz Allan Hamilton contractor alleged to have lifted 50BT.....

I thought these guys worked quite closely with the NRO and don't like any kind of imagery (or information about imagery) from getting about.

Clearly we are expected to think the man has mental health issues but of course with a sealed report it's impossible to know if the result was he was sane or so barking mad he should have an election campaign

Official: America auto-scanned visitors' social media profiles. Also: It didn't work properly

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

$300m was the trial.

The live systems will be a lot more expensive.

Not that it will be any more effective.

Favored Swift hits the charts: Now in top 10 programming languages

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

Interesting to see what people say/think is the new hottness and what's actually being used.

I note Java and various kinds of C seem to be the way to go.

What went up, Musk come down again: SpaceX to blast sat into orbit with used rocket

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

But as always the real question is not how clever is it.

It's how much does it lower the price to put 1 Kg in LEO.

Because if it doesn't change that by much (IE 90%, not 10%) it will change little or nothing.

Some say without a major cut in price per Kg Mars won't happen either.

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"But how much does it really cost to rebuild an exact copy of a satellite "

That's actually a pretty good question.

In production engineering the term "learning curve" actually means what's the cost to double production. In combat aircraft (in WWII where this stuff started to be studied) it was about a 15% reduction per doubling. With more aircraft made in large single pieces in more automated ways it's less effective. However satellites remain highly labor intensive.

NASA had a classic case of this. IIRC the Voyagers were going to be a single probe but for various reasons they ended up building two. The second was significantly cheaper.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Sloppy seconds?"

Only if there's a stage leak.

Which is usually the precursor to a lound bang.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

"Don't call it reused. Call it launch proven."

Yes, that strikes just the right tone of concerned, but tested.

I think we have a winner.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

Don't call it "re-used"

Think of it as "pre-loved"

All joking aside this really is a step change in rocket re-use which has never been done before.

It's taken 15 years to get her.

Sadly it doesn't look like they will be able to manage to bring back the 2nd stage as well.

State surveillance boom sparked by fear-mongering political populists, says UN

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"security through proportionate and effective measures "

What an astonishing idea.

Treat terrorists as criminals and catch them through the normal methods of criminal investigation IE Due process.

The NSA didn't catch the 9/11 bombers.

The NSA didn't catch the Boston Marathon bombers.

And let me remind people of the women engineer who wrote "Insisting on perfect safety is for people without the balls to live in the real world."

DeepMind. Blockchain. Medical records. Google. AI – wow, we just won machine learning bingo!

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

Maybe DeepMind should have tried building the trust before they stole the data

Because it's not their data.

It's not the NHS's data.

It's your data.

Trust them I do not.

Get a GRIP! Robolution ain't happening until TOUCH is cracked

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

"flexible rubber materials and pressurised air for passively adapting grasps "

Looks like the amateur at Shadow Robotics was right all along. Theirs used rubber balloons in stocking bags as pneumatic muscles. Limited maximum strength but very high strength/weight ratio, so they did a complete set of muscles, like a real human forearm (somewhere around 60 actual muscles in there).

IIRC the SoA in conventional manipulators is one that can pick up a cherry from a mound of cherries and put them on top of a cake.

Used 2 soft(ish) rubber belts and probably a fair bit of fine tuning on the materials selection for the belts.

Royal Navy's newest ship formally named in Glasgow yard

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

"But sadly all we've got..a piss pot gin palace..same armament.. on a Toyota pickup truck"

True. Just imagine what the world would be like if Toyota made pickup sized power boats. :-(

But, but BAe build a boat on time..

I mean, what are the odds???

And post Brexit they can start to compete on the world stage, offering their (literally) killer warez.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

HMS Begbie

That'll be the new ship with the bow section on retractable hydraulic rams, able to snap forward and batter it's way through the side of a much larger ship.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

OMFG

You mean BAe Systems has actually delivered a naval vessel on time?

I'm feeling a bit light headed and will have to lay down for a while.

Police Scotland and Accenture were at odds over ill-fated IT project i6

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"So the contracted result would have to work for about 1 1/4 years perfectly t"

Oops.

That should of course have been 2 1/4 years to break even.

I'll take a wild stab and say it'll be a lot easier to merge some of these forces IT systems together then you'll have a 2-3 clusters left whose structures and way of doing things will be so different that merging them will be a serious PITA.

OTOH how "real time" do you need your data to be? "instant?", Every few minutes? Hourly? Nightly?

Apparently clumsy (but fully automated) linking existing, working systems may beat a new centralized super duper (but overdue and highly buggy) SoA package.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

£46m to save £20m PA.

So the contracted result would have to work for about 1 1/4 years perfectly to pay for itself.

Instead it didn't work at all.

Hats off to Police Scotland (or should that be Polis Scotia as First Minister Sturgeon would like them rebranded ?)

I suspect that merging the 8 (?) forces in Scotland will be like the back offices of the various UK councils. It will need to be done gradually, with the consent of the various IT departments IE bottom up, not top down.

Zero-days? Sexy, sure, but crap passwords and phishing are probably more pressing

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"vulnerabilities can be drastically different in terms of exploitation complexity"

True enough.

But of course it helps if you keep all the patches on a package up to date first.

This just suggests even more strongly defensive and offensive network security operations should be separated. That way there's no "Oh should be reveal it or pass it to the offensive team" b**locks. Everyone knows where they stand.

This easy one cloud trick is in DANGER. Why?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

I often wonder how many of those government "digital transformation" projects did this

In theory all of them. Because most of them (I'm looking at you Universal Credit) cover multiple systems on multiple hardware stacks.

But in practice.......

And so the principles of Hut 6 live on.

FBI boss: 'Memories are not absolutely private in America'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

""Those who would give up essential Liberty,.. temporary Safety, deserve neither...

The full text was quite common on the signatures of emails on the 12th of September 2001.

He and his ilk don't want a world free of crime.

They want a world free of due process where they can read what they like, when they like and store it forever.

This is the data fetishists manifesto.

"Give me 6 lines from an honest man, and I will find something with which to hang him."

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

A real policeman once said

"Police work is only ever easy in a police state."

Comey (who is a political appointee) wants an easy life.

F**k him.

CIA hacking dossier leak reignites debate over vulnerability disclosure

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

On the upside.

Perhaps some of the mfgs mentioned (who might know of these vulns, but hoped no one else did) will finally accept they are "out in the wild" and do something about them.

So what is the patching system for a Samsung TV?

Yes this is me in "Mary Poppins" mode.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Zero day vulns sound great for TLA's

A secret way into a system that only we know about. That only we can exploit...

Except.

IRL what's the chance of either of those statements being true?

Vulns threaten everyone.

Keeping cyber defense and offense combines sounds like a good idea but it's like having developers test their own code, which is now recognized to be a very bad idea.

NASA's atom-chiller ready to fly to the ISS

John Smith 19 Gold badge
IT Angle

Sinces it's got atoms in a quantum state

perhaps some of their experiments will do something toward building these new fangled "quantum computers" people seem to be so excited about.

Maybe.

Perhaps.

Just saying.

Whatever happens it's a staggeringly tightly packed bit of kit and (I suspect) quite frugal electrically as well given the strictly limited power available to run the whole ISS.

Look! Up in the sky! Is it a drone? Is it a car? It's both, crossed with Uber

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Not the dumbest idea I've ever seen.

So basically Transport aaS.

It offers a personal transport bubble but without the personalization of your own vehicle with the rollout costs of a bus rather than a rail service and the ongoing payments of a travel pass.

The future.

More "choice." Less individuality.

Shock report: 92 per cent of US government websites totally suck

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

So stuff that's mandated and monitored gets done but otherwise....

Who knew?

Rap for chat app chaps: Snap's shares are a joke – and a crap one at that

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Anyway, trading is absolutely nothing like gambling in a casino. "

A regular business school experiment has been to run a share selection test against a bunch of shares selected by sticking a pin in a list of share names at random.

Quite offen the shares can produce quite reasonable returns.

Anyone whose read "Flash Boys" will understand the American stock market is highly stacked against anyone making any kind of large scale stock purchases.

The clue is that Hedge Funds do not make losses and have crashed when asked to honor actual stock purchase orders they have bought automatically. An organisation that does not make a loss, ever is a statistically impossibility in a fair market.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Historically pre selling big blocks to "institutiional" investors was how you ensure success

The fact they bought gave people confidence it wasn't a scam.

Otherwise it is indeed money for just existing and being big.

Morgan Stanley have tasted blood. I think they'll be wanting to do more of these. I hope they do. It expose the whole thing as a mix of scam and delusion.

As for voting rights. How many companies have gone down the pan while the majority investors (mostly pension funds) did FA because the management kept saying the right things while failing to deliver a turnaround (except in their personal finances of course).

The good times are over, Peter Thiel tells Silicon Valley's oligarchs

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Which wolf wins

Which one you feed.

Fraud detection system with 93% failure rate gets IT companies sued

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: Buttle or Tuttle?

Yup.

Terry Gilliam's movie remains a potent metaphor for government FUBAR.

Softbank tears off chunk of ARM, feeds it to hungry Saudis

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

Well if the Saudi's have a $100Bn investment fund and like the UK

Reaction Engines Ltd would be interested.

Ground floor of a fully reusable SSTO launch vehicle?

Self-employed bear the brunt of Spring Budget with additional National Insurance contributions

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

meanwhile pensioners remain looked after

Perhaps because they statistically vote Conservative most of the time?

CMD was pretty partisan once he didn't have the Lib Dems to put a brake on his behavior and May looks set to continue looking after "her" voters and f**k everyone else.

A mooving tail of cows, calves and the Internet of Things

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

Interesting that one of the first useful bits of IoT kit is not actually on the Internet

And you can bet it's quite a bit more expensive than the usual mass market s**t.

It's quite amazing that the guts of a mobile phone can basically fit into the form factor of one of the smaller memory card formats.

Other potentially useful applications are monitoring street light failure for replacement (the SoA in replacing large numbers of street lights is a)Someone reports it has failed b)Man with van drives round after dark checking they are all working).

Salford and Liverpool City Councils plan IT trading venture

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

That said better a company based from the council than staff TUPE'd to Crapita, Atoss etc

But you can bet if they succeed one of those ilk will be sniffing round to buy them up.

Actually it seems that UK councils with shared borders have (slowly) started to share things like payroll, personnel and some legal services.

If it's done locally and not imposed from central government it can work and can save money.

US Senator snaps on glove, probes insecure IoT toymaker CloudPets

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"whether the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act applies to Spiral Toys"

You've got to wonder is the Senator being rhetorical or does he genuinely not know?

Because I'm pretty sure that putting a lot of childrens data online with effectively no access control would breach their "online privacy" quite a lot.

Your Amazon order is confirmed: Eutelsat via Blue Origin. Estimated delivery date: 2022

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

Proof positive that US Rocket companies lead the world

In producing spiffy videos..

Although I do like the ambition.

Given the number of times it took for SX to get it right I suspect the barge landing will be the trickiest part to get right.

The smart money says get the grid fin design started now.

Smut-scamming copyright chaser 'fesses up, will do hard time

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

Lawyer doing actual time

Well deserved.

This internet version of "Suing for peace" needs to be stomped on.

Let's see if they can get the money off him.

That CIA exploit list in full: The good, the bad, and the very ugly

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

UMBRAGE?

Does that make the Team Leaders code name "Dolores"?

Fancy that – the sharing economy lobby doesn't speak for the sharers

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Labour arbitrage"

Yes that's a more honest description of the process.

However arbitrage is a process that has gone on for centuries and has performed a useful function for all parties.

These companies do not.

After 20 years of Visual Studio, Microsoft unfurls its 2017 edition

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

MS "cross platform"

Extend, enfold, extinguish.

Incomplete support for C++ 1998 standard 19 years later.

Says it all.

Help wanted: Uber boss Travis seeks babysitter for him and his execs

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Clearly needs someoene with personnel management experience.

I think I know someone he'll get alone with just fine.

Personally I'd like Uber to die but that's just me.

They'll be another change-the-market-by-establishing-a-monopoly-using-the-internet-as-a-cover business along in a minute.

Watt the f... Dim smart meters caught simply making up readings

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Current transformers..and measured the voltage signal from the mains plug."

And with a 10KHz sample frequency that would give a system able to accept a component up to 5Khz or 100x nominal base line UK mains frequency.

Which sounds like it should be able to cope with a very nasty load indeed.

But.

Analog design is hard and y'know actually paying for a good analogue designer who knows WTF they are doing....