Posts by John Smith 19 16330 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
The data fetishists all purpose reason for eliminating your privacy.
If there really are this many nonces around you'd think every other kiddie in the playground would have a story to tell.
And yet they don't.
This is because a) They think every adult is a nonce b) It's BS designed to get people to stop thinking critically about their own human rights and how they are being sold out.
Which option do you think is more likely?
Hard to believe but Commercial Crew has been an absolute bargain compared to the stripping LM have given NASA over the Orion capsule.
When you're asking ESA to contribute the SM for the vehicle because you've run out of money for the programme you know LM have turned them over properly.
Stated requirement. When launch is in terminal count (and MET is valid) pull clock setting from LV and set the capsule Mission Elapsed Time clock.
Actual code.
Capsule computer powers up.
Reads LV time
Set MET to it.
Carry out autonomous manoeuvres based on time stamps.
Anyone spot the difference between the stated requirement and the implementation, and why accurate setting of the MET could be kind of important?
1:10:20 "The sensitivity of this MET was not recognized by the (SW development) team.
Yes really, the VP responsible for Starliner development actually said that.
CMM was developed by Carnegie Mellon after studying how IBM Federal Systems built the software for the Space Shuttle.
1) Design the software in full before you start coding.
2) Have 3-4 person teams walk through each piece of code and log any mistakes found
3) Fix them later
4) Analyze the form of the mistake
5) Re-analyze the code base to find any other instances of it
6) Update the checklist of known bug patterns to stop it happening again.
7) Repeat until system is done.
It takes 2 minutes to explain but decades to implement and Fed Systems code was estimated to be 10x more expensive than industry standard LOC.
It never failed on any Shuttle mission, although a couple of the processors that hosted it did glitch.
But if you pay peanuts you will get code monkeys.
HP (on hands free) We want to buy you for $11Bn
Autonomy CFO (after phone is muted) No way are we worth that kind of money. They're morons.
Autonomy CEO I'm not saying they are and I'm not saying they aren't. But they got the money and they think we are worth it. So work out how we're going to get that money in. (phone off mute). OK, well I think we can accept that price.
Aha.
So that's why they're not going after the auditors.
They've already paid up.
As others have noted it's about the level of risk of this transaction not going though.
If it had been "We phoned up Kraft. They said they might be interested. Hold this license so we can book the revenue would you" Total scam.
OTOH. "Kraft have already rolled out half our system. It makes no sense without these (licensed) features so they will buy, it's a case of when.Hold the license and we can book the revenue. That looks quite reasonable.
It is (as it always has been) about data fetishists wanting to populate a database.
They really don't care wheather it works.
They just want faces and a "Computer says you're on our list" so they can do what they want when they want.
It's a personality disorder.
Not a policy.
Various reasons.
I think MS being a bunch of (alleged) scumbags at the time with various tie ins and hidden features that made their products work so much better together. Or at least give the appearance of doing so in the kind of demos given to PHB's who will never have to use the tools they "select".
Personally I think the key to Pascal acceptance would have been allowing you to create pointers to procedures, so you can do command parsing by a table lookup.
Viable in C (and the key to implementing C++ in the first place) and (as it happens) part of Delphi.
Good to know there's one independent environment that MS still couldn't kill.
"Windows 7,8,9,10,10X will be way better than all our previous s**t releases. No really it will be astonishingly fast (in a good way) and totally secure. You won't believe how good it will be.
Honest.
Pinky swear*
*Forward looking statements. T&C apply. Statements may be inaccurate, misleading or just plain bu***hit.
Make sure you set the assumptions to get it.
Which looks to be exactly what HPE did.
TBH I think HP's stockholders should take the whole Board responsible at the time (especially the CEO) to court.
These Aholes flushed $8Bn of their money down the pan for this fiasco.
I's say this expert witness has been the most honest of the bunch by laying out exactly what basis HPE wanted him to work, so letting the court knowing exactly what BS they wanted him to spout.
It hasn't?
Because if that's the case then the USG has full access, on demand, to the guts of any commercial networking hardware.
So any complaint about "Huawei has to co-operate with the Chinese government" is exactly the situation a US company has with the USG.
Let me guess.
Same guy can initiate a project as sign off on the expenditure for that project. Companies house check shows it's one man band with him as sole director.
That's always an accident waiting to happen. How many others at his grade also have that power?
And let's not forget £1.22m is about the "Average" UK citizens salary (that's of working citizens because that figure never takes into account people on benefits, which should make the average much lower) lifetime salary.
Excellent work.
This is proper Black Team level testing. Thumbs up.
In the 2nd decade of the 21st century (IOW this IT s**t has been going for a while now) any developer should be reading "user supplied input" as
DANGER! User supplied input. Expect anything. Trust nothing. Suspect everything until proved safe.
But apparently not. :-(
Because in Germany the regulation of mains frequency never gets that bad?
OTOH if working below that limit was in the UK rail spec (which you'd expect suppliers would have glanced at as they might be tested for compliance with it) it should have stayed working.
"anonymous server farms in unknown jurisdictions"
Or as they used to call it back in the day a "Mainframe"*
To mis quote Dune "He who controls the data controls the universe."
*Because that's basically what it logically is.
Amazon really is the IBM for the 21st century.
Yeay.
Yes and no.
One pattern has been an OTS account package fed by a bespoke LoB system that supports (at a deep level) the core business.
Accounts are well understood and the OTS package will be kept up (or should be, as it's one of the reasons you buy them) with the relevant legal requirements.
True.
But PHB's never bother spending time on studying past, when they could going toward (their) bright shiny future.
I've worked for various companies who were industry leaders in their sectors.
A bespoke SW system was often a key part of that. It let them play a tighter game than their competitors. OTOH you have all the support costs of a one of a kind bespoke system and a PITA if it's badly documented and the Subject Matter Expert (or "Archie the archive as I like to think of them generically) retires or gets hit by a bus.
Here's the thing.
If you want to leverage the benefits of a standard OTS you've got to
1) Do a detailed mapping of your business processes (not just the software bits, all the peripheral stuff). How it really works.
2) What you want to keep of them and what you want to change (and to what?)
3) Map as much of that onto your chosen ERP using configuration settings (which you'll need to document and update as needed) which you should be able to transfer to later versions (because it will go end of life and you will be without support, which is one of the reasons you went for an external solution in the first place, wasn't it)
4) That leaves the nub of processes you want to retain but your chosen ERP won't handle (possibly because it was chosen for you by some PHB in an office far far away....). Now you have to write actual code, and document it to allow it to be ported when the next (inevitable) upgrade happens without fuss.
I've never done this. The reason is simple. It needs a better person than I am, leading a better team than I've ever worked with, to pull it off.
For those who are doing this I will wish you good luck.
You're going to need it.
I hope I'm not and the sort of data fetishist weasels who want that access are as ignorant of the law as they are greedy and lacking in empathy for others.
But these weasels are determined little carnivores.
I sometimes think only poison will stop such sharp toothed little preditors.
So stop f**king doing so.
What's the plan?
Brexit means they don't have to comply with the GDPR directive so they can do WTF they like with people's data? Forget any ideas you might have about this being anonymous either.
No doubt another item on any US trade agreement Bozo would "negotiate" on the UK's behalf.*
To my British chums this polling day. If you vote for no one you roll over for everyone.
*The sitting PM who doesn't have the balls to face a 30 tv interview. Weak. Very weak.
It's all the anticipation needed to avoid getting caught, and planting all that evidence to ensure someone else takes the wrap.
It's just exhausting.
But note to investigators.
Trust nothing that you find on compromised network.
It may be correctly recording what attackers have done.
Or it could be a carefully managed mirage staged for your benefit.
Why it doesn't even need much processing power.
Amazing.
April 1977. Launch of Apple II. Brought first spreadsheet program to run on users hardware without requiring IT dept support (or even be in the office).
2019 The dumb terminal is back again.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
I think is a much more succinct description of these architectures.
Given the usual code monkeys who sling it together in some sweat shop from cutting and pasting stackexchange messages together they are probably right.
</empathy mode>
Still as I didn't gamble on this or buy any of these no harm done.
<empathy mode>
Of course I'd be pretty annoyed if some of my friends or family were f**kwitted enough to do so.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
