* Posts by John Smith 19

16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

After four years, Rust-based Redox OS is nearly self-hosting

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"C and C++ have also given us quite a good idea of what not to do to write secure code"

Yes.

That was sort of my point. By showing people what not to do.

I'd like "buffer overflow attack" to be something you only see in a dictionary of retro IT terms in my lifetime.

But I don't think I'll live that long.

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"Everything is a URL" sounds like WAP to me

That's how Wireless Access Protocol was designed to allow phone specific websites to run on both the fairly low MIPS phones at the turn of the century and the more powerful ones running major UI's (for the time).

As you will have noticed it did not set the world ablaze.

Let's face it 50 years of C/C++ have given us quite a good idea of what to do to write secure code.

But no PHB wants to invest the time, money and effort to do so.

Because almost no customer wants to pay for it when they can have "The new shiny," WTF "new shiny" is this year.

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: A quirky investigation into why AI does not always work

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@amanfromMars 1

No, still no idea what it's talking about.

Perhaps you should check the house rules for badges?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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The trouble is Artificial neural networks are very attractive.

After humans are neural networks and we're intelligent, right?

But human NN can evolve

ANN's don't. Can they identify something they've already seen before? Probably (because that's what they work on, probability)

Can they create something they have never seen before? Probably

Is it going to be useful/attractive/pleasant/safe? F**k knows.

My instinct is that human NN are actually the the host for evolved microcoded processes that are too dynamic for current imaging to identify. IOW ANN's are just too primitive (and because they cannot evolve will always be too primitive) to ever be anything but occasionally useful. Their danger is they look much more impressive (in carefully controlled scenarios) than they actually are.

So just clever enough to be deployed in the real world and hence very dangerous indeed.

Talking a Blue Streak: The ambitious, quiet waste of the Spadeadam Rocket Establishment

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LOX makes lousy oxidizer for ICBM.

Which was Atlas 1 (also pressure stabilized "balloon" tanks) was retired shortly after deployment and Titan 1 (also LOX/Kero) was switched to storable (but highly toxic and carcenogenic and hypergolic) NTO/Aerozine 50 (a nasty mix of Amines that would make a perfectly acceptable WMD in its own right).

So yes it was obsolete as an ICBM from first deployment.

Ironically Black Arrow (with its HTP/Kero combo) would have been more storable and in principle faster to launch from a standing start.

As pressure builds over .org sell-off, internet governance bodies fall back into familiar pattern: Silence

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

Any word who trousers the cash?

Or what they are going to do with it?

Space-wrecks: Elon's prototype Moon ferry Starship blows its top during fuel tank test

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Well, what did you think "Build fast, fail fast" meant?

Seriously.

Musk's optimism for timescales is pretty notorious (recall the 2011 video showing the F9 US landing? Great CGI)

So they learned something they shouldn't do next time.

I'm pretty sure SS is going to go through at least a couple more iterations in design before this thing flies to orbit.

I'm also pretty sure it will happen barring Musk keeling over.

I'm just not sure when.

Thanks, Brexit. Tesla boss Elon Musk reveals Berlin as location for Euro Gigafactory

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" Leave without allowing financial trade and the EU takes a massive hit"

I think you have that exactly backwards.

It's the UK's access to the rest of the European finance market that's crippled.

That's the reason for various large UK financial institutions moving staff to Dublin and Frankfurt, or German banks moving staff back to Germany.

And of course establishing of Rees Moggs subsidary in Dublin.*

He may be delusional about the real level of power the UK swings in a post colonial world but he's not stupid.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"https://www.continentaltelegraph.com/"

So, another Leave propaganda site then.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"Shows how clueless you are then as I am a native speaker of England. "

And another interesting turn of phrase which I've never heard from any native speaker of the language.

Although it does remind me of some of the people I worked with at a multi national company that employed me.

Do you get paid by the line or the word for the length of your posts?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

"And also the benefits to the poorer of the society and everyone else."

Ahhhh.

Was that what Leave voters were voting for?

Or do you mean that's what the "poorer of the society" were told by the likes of Cambridge Analytica so they would vote Leave?

Because it's been a crock of s**t so far and the expected £70Bn shrinkage in the UK economy after 10 years outside the EU compared to BAU will make the govt of the day even keener to cut benefits to the "poorer of the society"

Hmm. "Poorer of the society." That's not how native English speakers would express that idea.

English not your first language codejunky ?

Magic Leap's CFO and creative director quit, and it's not a harbinger of doom or anything

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"moved from being an IF company to a WHEN company "

That of course being when it finally goes bankrupt of course.

Don't feel sorry for the CFO though. Like the other members of the C suite you can bet he was "appropriately" rewarded for his "skillz".

That me walking out the door.

'Literally a paperweight': Bose users fume at firmware update that 'doesn't fix issues'

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I got the impression "Were good, but went a bit s**t later"

Although I've never owned any Bose kit.

So it have just been a fancy rep, and a very few quite good early products?

Or is it they are good at the core electronics but s**t at the whole running software updates thing?

IOW yet another tech company that hasn't realized it's now in the computer biz, with proper upgrade testing and roll out cycles.

Before you high-five yourselves for setting up that bug bounty, you've got the staff in place to actually deal with security, right?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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PHB "But if you train them, they'll only leave."

Which makes perfect sense.

If you're a psychopath with no loyalty to anyone or anything but yourself.

OTOH Normal people tend to have some loyalty to organizations that value them enough to improve their skills. It's important that those be useful skills and they should be recognized in their pay. The upside (from management PoV) is that the pay rise may not be as generous as in companies which are basically bribing you to join them from elsewhere (possibly because their management are a bunch of s**ts and staff turnover is very high, always a red flag)

It's surprisingly easy to retain staff if you a) Pay reasonably for the skill set b)Give them access to training help them move up c) Don't act like an Ahole manager. Beyond that "Better the devil you know" will stop people looking elsewhere. Especially if they have already experience how much worse other managements can be.

The "IT staff shortage" is really code for "Most companies have managers who can't do all three of these together."

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"we need to make it so it is not just patching all the time."

Indeed.

Bug bounty --> software bug --> fix software bug.

So f**king what?

Why is that bug there? Wrong parameter? Why did the developer think it needed that parameter? How many other developers think the same?

Now instead of finding 1 bug, you've found a dozen in your code base.

For free.

That's the bit that PHB's should like.

NASA spanks $34bn on a disposable rocket – likely to top $50bn by 2024 moon landing

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"But the money needed is serious, and the stream of it needs to be long-term."

Or the launch vehicle needs to be able to be bought like an aircraft, without requiring the intimate involvement of the company that builds them to launch it.

Then any country with the funds can get to space. It'll be cheaper than running their own development programme but not as cheap as an ELV coming off the line (but then it'll have a few 100 launches rather than just one).

At which point it'll be up to those people who've bought it to use it constructively.

May the best people win.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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And remeber Boeing is the *safe* pair of hands on Commercial Crew.

And yet they seem to be progressing no faster than those NKOTB SpaceX. A touch of dementia in the corporate memory perhaps?

Funny how that works is it not? It's almost as if someone is hoping to cut off supplies to ISS in order to kill it, to release funds for another human spaceflight project.

And let's not forget that Orion will be the first capsule where NASA couldn't even afford to get the Service Module built in the US on the budget. ESA are providing this as a trade off to continue their access to ISS.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"Does the cost of a properly built, equipped and staffed level 4 containment lab, "

And AFAIK the UK has 8 of them*

It's not a lab coat. Lab coats are insufficient at level 4.

*I'm not sure why. Most major European countries seem to have about one each.

Welcome to cultured meat – not pigs reading Proust but a viable alternative to slaughter

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

Why am I thinking of the origianl Judge Dredd movie?

Oh yes.

"Eat recycled food. It's good for the environment and ok for you."

Seriously. 200x the cost so they can squeeze cattle farmers out of the supply chain?

Either accept you like meat and live with it, you've got a meat intolerance and it will kill you or you prioritize not harming animals over your health?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"BTW What do penguins taste like? Fishy chicken?"

Don't know.

I'm told that cat actually tastes like rabbit. IE needs lots of slow cooking.

Which leads me to wonder do dogs taste like chicken?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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""What was a wistful daydream just five years ago is now an inevitability,""

Oh yes the old "It's inevitable" meme.

The usual BS from promoters of something

BTW this idea is around 70 years old. Frederick Pohl & CM Kornbluth. "The Space Merchants" product "Chicken Little."

Labour: Free British broadband for country if we win general election

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"for most of the country speeds are determined by whatever technology BT decides to give them."

Yup.

Now Openreach as a state owned institution that is not under BT's direct control.

Maybe.

What a boar! Wild pigs snort and snuffle €20k worth of marching powder stashed in Tuscan forest

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"Try not to look like a wounded seal ... you'll live longer, in any walk of life."

Profoundly true anywhere.*

From the arctic to the antarctic (where they make a good lunch for polar bears) to the offices of corporations large and small (where workplace psychopaths will also find you an amusing chew toy).

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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Free range gammon.

Not just for Christmas, they'll be enough left over for new years.

Why yes it is a hunting jacket.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

So the pig ate my drugs?

Funny you should say that.

Now they will be eating you.

Magic Leap rattles money tin, assigns patents to a megabank, sues another ex-staffer... But fear not, all's fine

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"is it possible this is all just a Ponzi scheme?"

No.

Ponzi schemes (or "rollover frauds") work by raking in cash for something and paying the first generation "investors" back with the takings from the second generation.

AFAIK there is no evidence that 1st generation investors have received any money, or 2nd, 3rd etc have either.

It's not a Ponzi scheme. It's a massive waste of money for the people whose funds those investment funds are managing.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

"JP Morgan Chase.. brought in $1bn and was a critical anchor partner: "

I'll bet.

It's the VC version of the halo effect. Much loved in the US where some celebrity says "This is great," and people buy it because y'know "They wouldn't steer us wrong, would they?"

Which when you say it out loud sounds kind of retarded. Financial follow-the-leader.

$2.6 Billion So what's that get you?

That's ball park for what Intel spends on designing a new generation Pentium (not the wafer mfg process)

That's what ARM spent on designing several generations of ARM processors.

That would have Reaction Engines build their ground test engine core, E/D nozzle combustion chambers and inlet and be well on the way to their flight test vehicle.

That's a shedload of money for what doesn't look like much at all.

Gavin Patterson's gravy train keeps on rolling as former BT boss tossed two more sinecures

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Fat cats don't like to be without their cream for long.

No surprise there.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Trollface

Re: No it isn't. Not defamatory at all.

Do not feed.

Don't miss this patch: Bad Intel drivers give hackers a backdoor to the Windows kernel

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"The pattern is clear." housing development called "Lakeside" is out of sight of open water

Not always.

My British friends tell me "Waterfront" is usually a euphemism for "next to a canal."

Player three has entered Cray's supercomputing game: First AMD Epyc, now Fujitsu's Arm chips

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Instruction set design is tricky.

Too specialized and you only sell one computer.

The challenge at the instruction level is to abstract out the key enablers of a large set of problems (ideally multiple sets) your customers would like to solve so they can be put together in different ways.

That means talking (and continuing to talk) to your target customers before you start design.

Kind of like the thinking behind Unix. Well focused tools that can go together in lots of different ways.

50 years ago, someone decided it would be OK to fire Apollo 12 through a rain cloud. Awks, or just 'SCE to Aux'?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"...the more I am in awe of the accomplishments of the Apollo program."

Technically it's Apollo/Saturn since both were needed.

The key point.

They knew the limits to their knowledge.

They knew they didn't know everything (and couldn't in the time allowed) so they planned around it.*

*They also had about 5% of the whole federal budget (itself considerably swelled by Vietnam) rather than the 0.9% NASA has today (less that the DoD spends on the aircon for its overseas bases).

UK Info Commish quietly urged court to swat away 100k Morrisons data breach sueball

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"Why was I not offered the post of Information Commissioner?"

Oh, they don't just offer it to anyone.

You have to apply.

That's the bit where you earn the salary.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

"But he was legitimately authorised : he just abused that permission."

Sounds like a PHB PoV to me.

One more time.

It's not about trust.

It's about not making it possible to do this.

So you don't have to trust a person.

Concerns raised over privacy and security of UK Home Office's £842m biometrics programme

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"all of the DNA ancestory tests have been regulated into the system"

You mean like in the US, where one of the companies CEO's just handed the keys to the FBI?

Surely that would never be misused.

NSA to Congress: Our spy programs don’t work, aren’t used, or have gone wrong – now can you permanently reauthorize them?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"Congress should be confident enough that it can approve them permanently.”"

Is she f**king joking.

Basically

"You signed this blank piece of paper 6 years in a row. Why not save yourself the hassle and just give me your permanent signature to copy?"

And "We can't tell you anything about how many plots have been discovered or how many US citizens we spy on."

with the unstated message "And there's not a single thing you can do about it"

Accountability.

It's a sign of weakness. :-{

This is the true total arrogance of career data fetishist.

Please tell us why you're not securing yourselves, UK.gov asks businesses

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

Demand an end to E2E encryptiong then b**ch about lack of security.

F**k em.

They've certainly tried to f**k the British public

At every opportunity HMG data fetishists demand data they don't need for reasons most people wouldn't like if they were told (and hence why they aren't told).

Delayed, over-budget smart meters will be helpful – when Blighty enters 'Star Trek phase'

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" coal 3.5%, Gas 41.9%, nuclear 16%, Renewables 35.8%, oil/other 2.8%"

Depressing as f**k if you're in Britain.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

And where will all this power come from?

About 1/5 of the UK electricity supply is nuclear, from old nukes that have to be near end of life.

On shore wind with some windmills hitting 6% operating?

But the root cause of this clusterf**k is that the UK has no energy policy worth the name

It's all "market forces"

Look how well that's done for the UK so far.

Astroboffins rethink black hole theory after spotting tiny example with its own star buddy

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Thumb Up

Interesting stuff often occurs on the boundaries of things

Like the neutron star/black hole boundary.

I think it's less a case of a new class of black hole as just one that's smaller (quite a lot smaller) than anyone they've seen before.

Now the question is how common are these? Quite rare (so there aren't a lot of them to see) or quite common but not noticed as they keep themselves to themselves and don't drain any nearby stars material?

It's always good when new observations show new things. I'm not sure we should scrap existing theory just yet though.

Linux kernel is getting more reliable, says Linus Torvalds. Plus: What do you need to do to be him?

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which would suggest they are a CMM5 shop without the formal certification.

Since the key things are

1)Find the bug

2)Find why it got through our development filters

3)Update our filters

4)Check the rest of the code base for any other with this pattern.

It would seem they are engaged in this process unconsciously

He actually seems a fairly modest and quiet guy most of the time.

Except when someone suggests something breathtakingly idiotic.....

Inside the 1TB ImageNet data set used to train the world's AI: Naked kids, drunken frat parties, porno stars, and more

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

Oh look. AI rediscovers Garbage In --> Garbage Out

Let me guess

"We had to get the training set from somewhere"

And boy they weren't picky where.

I sense something like the issues in the music industry when sampling first started and people said it wasn't violating copyright to take a chunk of some other record to make theirs.

It's not your copyright. It's someone elses. They should decide (as they do in music now) if you can or cannot take that copy.

Guess what's on the receiving end of more NASA dollars for SLS?

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The gravy train rolls on.

A great victory for Boeing stockholders.

"Excellent" as Montgomery Burns would put it.

Scariest thing about Halloween? HMRC and Defra systems still a risk to post-Brexit borders

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"...everything they do say is completely impossible".

Because it is?

"We'll use technology to avoid a hard border"*

WTF did that even mean?

And this NI is in the EU/NI is part of the UK VAT thing?

*Paraphrasing various numpties over the last 3 years.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"successfully tested CHIEF's ability to manage up to 300 million customs declarations each year. "

F**k me sideways.

Govt organization runs stress tests that show system capacity exceeds forecast worst case requirements.

Oh my giddy aunt. I may have to lie down with the shock.

It's quite amazing how these old mainframe apps scale up, is it not?

Now, how many others aren't quite up to the mark yet? IIRC there are about 70 systems that may be involved, but of course that might just be "Project Fear*"

*Project Reality as it's know to those with critical thinking and research skills.

Well, well, well. Fancy that. UK.gov shelves planned pr0n block

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"will not be commencing Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017".

Yet.

No mention of actually removing the law because it's bats**t crazy.

Blood money is fine with us, says GitLab: Vetting non-evil customers is 'time consuming, potentially distracting'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

Old Captains motto

"If you have the fare we'll take you (or your cargo) there"*

But please, pretty please, don't for one f**king second, pretend you have any values beyond "Maximize profit"

*Another honest one would be "We're in it for the bucks and we don't take prisoners."

UK govt snubs Intel, seeks second-gen AMD Epyc processors for 28PFLOPS Archer2 supercomputer

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Joke

The old archer says

"I'm still Awesome"

Experts warn UK court digitisation is moving too fast and breaking too many things

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"three times more time allocated to it for hearing on that day than could possibly be heard."

Also AIUI a popular tactic with the British NHS outpatient clinics.

A British friend was scheduled for one at 9am.

Never saw a consultant before 2pm.

Day totally wasted.

AFAIK this is about closing courts --> reduces costs and basically nothing else.

HP to hike upfront price of printer hardware as ink biz growth runs dry

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I've never not had trouble with an HP printer

Paper sensor f**ked

Cartridges drying out when you need them to work.

Cartridges report near empty when you can hear fluid sloshing around inside them.

Just my personal experience but I had an old Cannon bubble jet that never let me down till some skel stole it.