Posts by Jim 59

"...physical access is a prerequisite to an attack..."

Yawn. Next.

6TB if memory? That's more than every Sinclair spectrum manufactured, put together. In fact it might be more than every 8 bit home computer in the UK.

It might be a good idea, if they can keep the politics out of it. But what are the chances of that?

Will it eventually become a badge meaning "this website agrees politically with the people who awarded this badge" ? Given the condition of much of social media, it seems likely. The badge might then become just one more piece of ordinance in the ongoing "culture war".

Many things are better without the addition of politics. Remembrance is one example. If MLT and co can indeed produce something like the Fairtrade mark, and treat it as such, then it might just work.

Most of the general public dismissed the HE advice when it changed to recommending the same levels of alchohol for men and women, something which:

- seems to contradict common sense

- contradicted the previous guidelines

- contradicts guidelines other countries.

- has an odour of politics about it.

Just to note Q4OS is currently at number 40 in the Distrowatch ranking. This article might push it up a few places.

And that dear old basket case Ubuntu is at number 4, below Manjaro. Oh, mate.

“DevOps was the inevitable outcome of building and operating the sites that became the web's giants.” As [Shafer] notes, once a website involves “thousands of computers distributed world-wide, you can't just log in and do an upgrade. You can't give a few commands and reload the site. At this scale, automation isn't an option. It's a requirement.”

All customers are not alike. True, a large PaaS or SaaS company might run with an infrastructure like the above. Downtime is somewhat acceptable, and comprehended in SLAs. But what about an air traffic control system, for example, or the CAD systems of an IC manufacturer, or the control systems for a power station, or a trading floor computer, a payroll system, and so on and so on? They all have different characteristics and priorities. Or more accurately: the same priorities, but in a different order.

Isn't Devops most popular in environemnts where there is, in fact, a limited amount of ops ? Your 1000 SaaS web servers might be crawling with devs who release a new SW version every 2 weeks. Smashing! But meanwhile, in air traffic control, they take a slightly different attitude. And the CAD lads are only bothered about backups and speed, while the bankers obsess about security and compliance. The power station manager thinks your ansible-playbook is gorgeous, as long as it doesn't black-out Surrey.

Is the Devops crowd just a little bit parochial?

OO

some 25 to 30 years ago, there was a belief that software production would change radically...

...This was O-O, or object oriented software. Software production would radically change, the experts predicted... Of course, software production didn’t change radically into the component utopia that the academics had envisaged...

I confess to leaving a C++ course in 1991 almost overcome with excitement about OO. At the time I was working for Texas Instruments, and OO seemed like an unbeilievably powerful way to solve engineering problems. Select a few objects, glue them together, et voila. An end to repetitive programming. An and to complexity. Write and exchange objects. Share and enjoy.

High level languages embraced OO. Even assembled ones like Perl and VB. And whatever the current flavour-of-the-month language is, it is almost certainly OO.

But orgasmic object sharing never materialized. Instead, standard "object libraries" became part of the language. Instead of being a super-duper, custom built, poloymorphous, multi inherited, operator-overloaded panacea that we would exchange and embellish and re-use, OO turned into a boring old standard library. Basically, OO == stdio.h.

The OO model is still the best way to handle complexity as an application grows. Only the code re-use remains elusive.

OK now I must return to that programme, think I'll re-use that class from 2 years ago. No. it wold be quicker to write a new object. After all, I am better at the language now, and conditions have changed, and the hardware is 10 times faster now, so that optimized cache is no longer needed, and, and...

Apollo

Don't you just hate those posts where commentards bore you with obscure computers they once used. Well stop reading. I won't have a bad word said against Apollo. Ah yes, and the sublime Domain/OS. If the Ubuntu/Gnome crowd want to see how a graphical shell is really done, go forth to Ebay, where you can buy a nifty DN3500 for only....

Oh yes they do

Phrase/sentence howler - come on Ed.

"You might have heard the words "combination" or "permutation" used in conversation..."

Permutaions and combinations are not news to Reg readers. This isn't the Grauniad.

"...mathematics has a convenient formula for the calculations shown above and you can search the internet for it... "

Or just remember it from school. Not a bad article, despite my sniping. Just told to the wrong people.

"My personal experiences with the NHS have been uniformally excellent and the staff friendly, helpful and competent "

I've had good NHS experiences, medium ones, and awful NHS experiences. That's the trouble. You never know what you are going to get. Here is a very trivial example, three recent blood tests:

1. Nurse took a sample of blood so skilfully I felt no discomfort. Had I been asleep when she stuck the needle in, I probably wouldn't have woken up. She was also friendly and efficiant. Great.

2. Same surgery, different nurse. Talked non-stop about her holidays while wobbling the needle painfully in my arm. Afterwards I almost fainted, which might be unrelated.

3. Same surgery, third nurse. Friendly and efficient. Almost as good as (1). I noticed she ommited to wipe the injection area with alcohol beforehand, presumably slightly increasing my chances of an infection, but I didn't say anything.

Taking blood samples is trivial, but the same inconsistency happens in the most serious treatments. I could relate depressing stories of crappy "treatment" received by seriously ill relatives, but won't. Some will argue that poor NHS experiences are caused by lack of funding but I think that lack of responsibility and accountability plays a big part.

Put bluntly, the NHS, as a huge publicly funded body, lacks motivation to keep you alive, to treat you with compassion or to minimize your discomfort. Human nature dictates it. A private health company, on the other hand, is highly motivated to achieve all these things. But then, private health companies are also motivated by profit, which can lead to a whole different set of problems, equally as bad as the above.

Okay sorry about the lecture, I'll stop there.

"another BBC owner here went from model B with a watford dfs to my beloved Acorn A310 Archimedes. 6502 assembler was better than Z80 by a street mile, but ARM assembler..."

2 grand for less memory than a Speccy. No wonder you had to write everything in assembler.

On the subject of making IT boring, this article reads like a Puppet in-house magazine. Did The Register ask any questions in the "phone interview" ? Or just transcribe a statement from the Puppet marketing director ? Come on, man.

For the same reason that cartoons have only 3 fingers and a thumb, many roadsigns are not accurate representations, nor should they be. They are designed for quick comprehension and no more. If Matt Parker can design a pentagonal ball which is also clearer and quicker to recognose than the current model, I'll sign his petition.

I miss Lester

These articles remind me of Lester Haines (RIP), and his stout work on Logowatch over the years.

On Uber - "The norms of modern online journalism require that at this point we embed a few tweets from the unwashed masses* decrying Uber's descent into branding anarchy, as if anyone really gives a tinker's what people are gobbing off about in 140 characters or less."

TomTom - "A free whalesong CD (including the hit track The Ross Sea Minke posse versus the Japanese whaleburger crew) to sharp-eyed reader Mat Butterworth."

More on Google site:theregister.co.uk haines

Never got ET. Perhaps at 15 I was a bit too old.

Never got Bladerunner either, for which I apologise and will keep rewatcing.

Loved The Thing (1982) on TV but couldn't watch it, or other gore-fests, in the cinema.

Tron perhaps "didn't impact pop culture", but it did help to send regiments of us down the computer track.

On topic, I don't think Rudd needs to understand encryption to a deep level for her job, so long as she gets the relevant principles, many of which are stated in the above comments.

15 years for reading terrorist literature on the Internet ? A tad OTT ?

Cynical view

Call me cynical, but I reckon it would be easy-peasy to stop phones getting into prisons and to block signals within, but allowing a certain level pf phone traffic helps to pacify prisoners

Stale web domain - that's a paddlin'.

Hitachi

$article = "" unless $article ~= /josticks|whale *song/;

Ansible/Devops

In your devops team, I am sure there are qualified software engineeers. But how many team members have years of experience as real, full time systems administrators ?

Right. There aren't as many sysadmins in the world as their are devs. Devops teams tend to be lopsided. A better decription would be devdevdevdevdevops. So you end up with a polished and elegant Attlasian infrastructure, but everyone thinks that "Dirty Cow" is some James Herriot thing. Get more oppy. Your infrstructure will than you.

I'm not sure what the solution is. Giving me a rate rise would be a good start.

"Oracle refused to comment. "

Oracle declined to comment..

Rejected.

Bring back this article when it contains the phrase "josticks and whalesong"

Morals

"If you are not opposed to this domain being hosted, you are a Nazi sympathiser, regardless of..." - careful @Kaltern. Becoming what one despises, and all that.

I agree that cencership is a necessary evil. But this is more about personal ethics than state censorship. I am strongly for free speech, but would not provide my contracting services to an organization like Stormer. Would you? Of course not. These companies feel the same way, and have done the right thing in my view.

Semi visible text

Not to mention the absurd contrast theft which plagues "modern" websites. The Register is in the minority with its crisp black-and-white text. Many sites are now only readable with constant eye strain. Or they were until a few months ago. Those who brought us semi-visible text are now in full reverse-ferret, but my accountants still server up limp whiteish on whiter text, and Google search is still pretty gutless.

Safe space

It seems reasonable to treat online abuse like abuse in the street (as if you were shouting in somebody's face). In fact, I thought it was already treated like that.

The problem with a specific "hate speech" law is that it could be used as a means to silence criticism or dissent, leading to the "safe space" rubbish we see on some university campuses, bottling up extremism, and eventually promoting hate rather than reducing it.

"online" isn't the problem. "anonymity" is the problem. If Twitter could verify users' real names and addresses before letting them post, everyone would play (reaosonably) nice. I don't know technically how that could be done, but if you can figure it out you will be a rich man.