* Posts by Notas Badoff

1059 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Oct 2009

NPM apologizes for ham-fisted handling of recent staff layoffs

Notas Badoff

How to ruin your reputation

Thank you for including reference to that blog posting. Having read that posting a couple weeks ago, I today read carefully the non-apology from NPM, Inc. And at the end was Isaac's signature. That's a mark he'll not live down.

Be wary, traveller: There is no going back if you step over the Windows 10 20H1 threshold

Notas Badoff

Humpty-dumpty says...

"Now up to version 75.0.125.0, ..."

Oh dear, they aren't going for version number inflation in a small way, are they? 'at's a big jump from 44 to 75! Please tell me they aren't just going to adopt Chrome's versioning!

"it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

Windows Subsystem for Linux distro gets a preening, updated version waddles into Microsoft's app store

Notas Badoff

WSL fanbois are a thing?

Looking at the down votes above (BB excepted) and everybody who wasn't wildly enthusiastic about WSL got down voted. Amazing. I also use Cygwin. I also use VMs. I also have to have multiple Linux variants or host instances running simultaneously sometimes. How is WSL going to replace every scenario for everybody? Sheesh!

Menu mischief and interface deceit targeted by US lawmakers

Notas Badoff

What is A/B testing?

"The bill prohibits segmenting consumers for behavioral experiments, ..."

FBI catches heat, HS kids catch a hacking rap, and Albany catches a ransomware infection

Notas Badoff

JavaScript card sniffers: Gone in ...

Instead of "Fast and Furious" or "Gone in 60 Seconds", it is far better to quietly infiltrate and then slowly exfiltrate the goodies. Think "Low and Latent". It'd make a really long film.

(Wasn't there an "On Call" or "Who me?" article recently that mentioned a production line where every 123rd bottle of beer/scotch/whisky was shoved sideways off the belt into a large box for alternative delivery? This discovered in some really _really_ old machine controller code?)

Trend Micro antivirus fails to stop measles carrier rubbing against firm's Ottawa offices

Notas Badoff

Re: Jenny McCarthy

Anti-vax is parental drunk driving, with like dangers to own family and perfect strangers.

Statistics won't help when the parents are quite bonkers. 2 months of suffering and $800,000 in costs later, and they still won't 'unbelieve'.

Nice People Matter? NPM may stand for Not Politely Managed – job cuts leave staff sore

Notas Badoff

Clickety-clack

I wonder what Yarn is knitting together, fer instance?

VMware emits security alerts, Planet Hollywood chain hacked, SWAT death caller gets 20 years in clink, and more

Notas Badoff

Re: SWAT Death

Probably won't be noticed tacked onto this article's comments, but - hey - you saw it here first!

Within 5 years, possibly only 2-3, people answering phones won't - they'll pick up and then listen. If a _familiar_ voice says 'hello' then the conversation will proceed. No recognized voice in the first 1.5 seconds and the phone gets hung up or put to the side.

The phone companies, through decades of inaction on faked caller numbers, will cause a societal reversal - the caller must say 'hello' first.

All the irritation, confusion, upset and anger resulting will have a single identified cause - phone companies. Let their roasting begin!

In the West, we're worried about shooting down drones. In Russia, drones shoot you

Notas Badoff

one Quaffle, the two Bludgers, and the Golden Shotgun

Anybody know if Quidditch might have an accidental close cognate meaning in Russian? Perhaps Golden Snitch sounds like shotgun?

Judge puts the $5bn question to HPE: Who else apart from Lynch and Hussain were in on this alleged fraud?

Notas Badoff

Tipple of the hat to you

It is said that variations on the Drunkards Walk are efficient when foraging for food. Perhaps not so much when foraging for acquisitions?

Microsoft's corporate veep for enterprise puts the boot into boot times

Notas Badoff

"And they could be blaming Microsoft."

Everyday. Heck, every hour 55 minutes when Windows Update kicks my system in the particulars for a long minute. There is no "could be".

Dead LAN's hand: IT staff 'locked out' of data center's core switch after the only bloke who could log into it dies

Notas Badoff

All right, what's all this, then?!

So they needed a network audit before firing him. And they really needed an audit after he 'left'. And now they need a miracle? Oh, and an audit.

What do WLinux and Benedict Cumberbatch have in common? They're both fond of Pengwin

Notas Badoff

Re: "Shoving the ow into Windows"

Shurly it should've read 'ows'. Going on 25+ years for me. You really think I've suffered only one 'ow'?

You like JavaScript! You really like it! Scripting lingo tops dev survey of programming languages

Notas Badoff

Re: That's because everyone under 40 is a "web developer" now...

I find myself agreeing and disagreeing with you. Code quality inside the product is most dependent on the quality in front of the keyboard.

Yet, when people sneer at a language, I like to point to this quote:

"Finally, a note of caution. This language, like English, can be a medium for prose, or a medium for poetry. The difference between prose and poetry is not that different languages are used, but that the same language is used, differently."

Man drives 6,000 miles to prove Uncle Sam's cellphone coverage maps are wrong – and, boy, did he manage it

Notas Badoff

Impossibilities

I'm trying to figure out all this in terms of the "impossibility of proving a negative". That seems to be the FCC's mode of operation - increase that difficulty. Meanwhile they are "arguing from ignorance" that everything's just peachy. Have I got that right?

Ministry of Justice abandons key plank of £280m IT project

Notas Badoff

Agile after Alzheimers?

Legacy application:

* underlying hardware isn't made or serviceable anymore

* underlying system software is not updated or supported anymore (e.g. compilers, libraries)

* original architecture no longer extendable (they've retired)

* application no longer maintainable (see above)

It's not 'legacy' even though still used, but legacy because practically and realistically "we can't go on this way!"

Without forethought and continual attention, software systems age and become fragile just as people do.

legacy: 4. A piece of ones' history left behind for following generations to experience.

Can't unlock an Android phone? No problem, just take a Skype call: App allows passcode bypass

Notas Badoff

Are we there yet?

"... which taught me the most important thing, which is realizing that what you have learned till now is nothing of what should be learned."

That'd be all of us then?

( Recently met someone who'd been through one of those boot camp thingies, and they had a look of - not deer in the headlights - but rather deer with auto grill imprints and fur smelling of tires. Like, "wait, I have to run that fast and faster just to survive?" )

It's 2019, the year Blade Runner takes place: I can has flying cars?

Notas Badoff

Who does?

Kudos on your allusions:

"Tyrell had told me Rachel was special. No termination date. I didn't know how long we had together. Who does?"

The fastest, most secure browser? Microsoft Edge apparently

Notas Badoff
Joke

Re: An architecture not too well ...

A separate module, hopefully not super-glued into the previous architecture. I have my doubts though.

Would the architects have ever thought they'd change out Microsoft's renderer for Chromium's? Would they have spent the time to make that possible? *THAT* is where we can well imagine past/present/future fits of HAHAHahahahahaha....

Yet another mega-leak: 100 million Quora accounts compromised by system invaders

Notas Badoff

Quora: Crack for the curious

I had to arrest myself! No longer a 'user'...

Why, you're no better than an 8-bit hustler: IBM punts paper on time-saving DNN-training trick

Notas Badoff

There's $<x> in those <y>

A lot of early geophysical data tapes used very weird floating point formats, and for some it was as little as 6 or 8 bits of 'precision' with wonky small exponents affixed.

It was good enough precision to find last century's oil. This century they want to find your face in a crowd. Congratulations, you're resources.

Office 365 Exchange enjoys a less than manic Monday. Users? Not so much

Notas Badoff

Re: Echoing in Redmond

Normal computer coding involves just "0", "1", "many". Just have those three possibilities for the status board, and 5/7ths of the time it'll be the pleasing "many".

(Or do I have an off-by-one error there...?)

Holy moley! The amp, kelvin and kilogram will never be the same again

Notas Badoff

Re: I am concerned...

In all these comments the weightier, larger question has been ingored: Will this make me fat?

Foxconn denies it will ship Chinese factory serf, er, workers into America for new plant

Notas Badoff

Re: Waste dumping

No, no, they'll just rename the whole effort. Remember when they insisted all those boats in the South China Sea - *all* those boats - were working on reef conservation? Who knew reefs require missiles, artillery, and destroyers for defense?

No, they'll just insist they're now into marshlands conservation....

Lloyds Banking Group: We're firing 6,240 to hire 8,240

Notas Badoff

Blame the stock market

While not at all refuting the above reasonings about scurrilousness, I have another disheartening possibility.

After years and years of the stock market welcoming news of layoffs by *boosting* the stock price, companies have now decided to reframe everything in terms of layoffs.

Great news! We're hiring 2000 new people! (no, no, that's ambiguous, must rewrite)

Even better news! We're laying off 6000 people! (right! that's positivity!)

It's a topsy-turdy world we've got.

On the seventh anniversary of Steve Jobs' death, we give you 7 times he served humanity and acted as an example to others

Notas Badoff

Re: Sorely missed...

tearing off that plaster never felt so good!

Thank you Kieren - it needed to be done.

Send up a satellite to zap space junk if you want Earth's orbit to be clean, say boffins

Notas Badoff

Re: It all seems a bit far fetched, to me

The contents of how many Olympic swimming pools would it take per satellite?

Although, to put a damper on the idea, there are a lot of scientists who'd be real pissed at you putting water vapour clouds _above_ the atmosphere and destroying their 'viewing' in infrared and millimillimeter wavelengths.

Secret IBM script could have prevented 11-hour US tax day outage

Notas Badoff

Tweak this

"... and make tweaks to its contract."

Maximum Unplanned Downtime (Per Year):

Requirement: Less than 26.5 minutes (aka 99.999%)

Performance: Approximately 11 hours (omg 99.877%)

I read this as the contract gets amended to state that 24.9 years of free support is added to contract years, starting next month.

(If you're going to lop digits off the end of our guaranteed percents, we'll lop digits off the front of your revenues)

Brexit campaigner AggregateIQ challenges UK's first GDPR notice

Notas Badoff

They screaming, me smiling

"But it was still holding the data when the law came into effect, making it liable, the ICO has said."

How many CxO's will wake up tomorrow screaming? It's a bad dream come true.

Man cuffed for testing fruit with bum cheek pre-purchase

Notas Badoff

Re: How does this work?

It was voodoo. He was trying to put his wrinkles back on the cantaloupe.

Microsoft reveals train of mistakes that killed Azure in the South Central US 'incident'

Notas Badoff

The American Midwest is famous

for wild weather. I was once shown a building in Fort Worth Texas that was scheduled to be dismantled, because a tornado had twisted the 35 floor steel-frame building just enough it make unserviceable. Stick "building twists" in your disaster plan!

I figure every disaster recovery plan ought to be looked over by a Dutchman (floods), an Indonesian (earthquakes/volcanoes), and a Midwesterner (everything else?). There are some reasons for the crazed looks they have.

Boffins bash Google Translate for sexism

Notas Badoff

Re: What's the problem here?

"Are the authors of the study suggesting that one randomly chooses masculine and feminine pronouns when talking in general about professions and trades?"

They do.

(I've been using the singular they for so long I'm astonished people are still hold onto their he things)

Notas Badoff

Re: Chinese isn't gender neutral in that form

Don't forget 它 for "it".

More on point,

他们 -> they

她们 -> they

它们 -> they

Hey, we're cool as all three he/she/it third-person plurals go to the same place. We're sexism free, right?

But then

they -> 他们

Oops, defaults to the 'he' variant. But what would *you* translate bare ambiguous words to? Remember, your balls arereputation is on the line!

Wannabe Supreme Brett Kavanaugh red-faced after leaked emails contradict spy testimony

Notas Badoff

Re: Yet Another America - Fall Of Rome - Moment

I am all in favour of more people knowing about Social Credit System. Replacing the Five Black Categories with this new greyish Social Credit is so much more flexible when you might need to suppress *anybody* at a whim.

Think of your worst SciFi nightmares, and this duplicates or betters it. Your social credit depends on what your friends, family and workplace say and do. If they are not totally compliant, you can't buy a car/house, get a good job, enter a good school or any at all.

This is collective punishment 'refined', inspired by the cruder solutions of previous eras in that land.

Google goes bilingual, Facebook fleshes out translation and TensorFlow is dope

Notas Badoff

Google Assistant is bilingual

At least for most of those 'no' means 'no'.

What are they going to do when one of the pair of languages is Greek, where 'no' sounds like 'okay' and 'yes' sounds like 'nay'?

OMG! Battle looms over WTF! trademarks

Notas Badoff

Stunned silence

I can't believe there isn't an audiobooks company that isn't named TLDR.

Gartner's Great Vanishing: Some of 2017's emerging techs just disappeared

Notas Badoff

Re: 4D Printing

World's first-ever 4D printing for ceramics

The 4th dimension is indeed time, or rather, time and heat or time and stretching. Print, then cause the final shape to (cough) unfold.

SentinelOne makes YouTube delete Bsides vid 'cuz it didn't like the way bugs were reported

Notas Badoff

Re: ::shrugs::

Deleted Aug 2 as 'promotional'. Nominated July 2, so not likely related to timing of ElReg article.

"Non notable and promotional. The various listings as "visionary" all derive from the same source:PR. The other references are just routine financing and similar., and do not satisfy WP:NCORP DGG ( talk ) 23:55, 2 July 2018"

Actually, how lucky they are. There'd have to be a 'Controversies' section after all this, right? (And no, a controversy still doesn't make you notable enough for an article)

Go Zuck Yourself: Facebook destroys patent suit over timeline

Notas Badoff

Win, settle... or sublimate

"until they either win or get a settlement?"\

Or the speculative funding gets cut and they go bankrupt. And eventually they evaporate into nothingness.

Emma's Diary fined £140k for flogging data on over a million new mums to Labour Party

Notas Badoff

Re: UK's 11 main political parties

"Pity there are no other real alternatives to vote for. The right is crap, the left is crap and the centre is full of ' Don't Kows' ."

And there are no alternatives to the "Don't know hows"

Imagine Python fan fiction written in C, read with a Lisp: Code lingo Nim gets cash injection

Notas Badoff

Shattering news

"... to develop a Nim-based sharding client for Ethereum, said to be the second most valuable cryptocurrency after Bitcoin."

So will this then be compatible with the rest of Ethereum, or is this a fork? Destined to be called Ethereim?

Uptight robots that suddenly beg to stay alive are less likely to be switched off by humans

Notas Badoff

H2G2

Perhaps more than a few of the subjects had read/heard The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

Giddly Putrid Personalities

Pentagon 'do not buy' list says нет to Russia, 不要 to Chinese code

Notas Badoff

Re: Nothing New

"Oranges grown in the south are sweet, in the north sour" is an old Chinese reference to nations and supposed differences between them. The most interesting version of the story is all about counting diplomatic coup. So posturing has precedent, yes.

But... the pessimist can imagine four coming developments following from reasonable security worries.

One is that any business or industry that is credibly critical national infrastructure will be required to show not only disaster recovery style duplication of internal infrastructure, but also that one leg of that duplication employs only 'trustworthy' components. Think banks, local governments, energy companies, and the like.

Second is that it might become hard to find everything needed from unassailable sources. And so each state may find it necessary to sponsor and support domestic component development. Quite like China has been doing for the last few decades. Or, hey, like the fallout we've seen lately regarding GPS?

And this might be hard for hardware/software development, since the personnel devoted must also be unassailable (not on visa for instance). And so not only will governments keep winding the STEM, but make it more urgent through national service. "The Marine Corps builds coders!"

And then we'd come full circle. Would a company $here hire someone who has been in national service $there? Y'kno, weaponized?

A pessimist's thoughts are nightmares. I'm not suggesting the above, but am at a loss against the natural progression of ideas. What do you do to guarantee a nation's (or union's) security in the face of a hostile untrustworthy world?

How hack on 10,000 WordPress sites was used to launch an epic malvertising campaign

Notas Badoff

Trench warfare

Here I was thinking that "ad brokers" were basically "ad aggregators", but that's not really true. They are "hole aggregators", aiming to fill the holes on all those web pages. When they run out of jewels and gems, they fill the holes with turds, though wrapped in toilet paper sometimes. They turn your browser into a latrine. You knew this...

Google Translate spews doomsday messages, Facebook snatches boffins, and more in AI

Notas Badoff

They can out thunk us

You mean gTranslate has gotten better then?

I've mentioned before that you can get from 'fragrant' (as in Hong Kong) to "sweet-smelting". I hadn't yet found that gTranslate can't figure out the difference between 'flying' and 'flat'.

Type in 'airplane' to get '飞机' in Chinese, then reverse that to get "open country". Oops.

That's what happens when your neural net gets lost in the outback.

Microsoft Visual Studio Code replumbed for better Python taming

Notas Badoff

Re: To enable it?

These aren't the truth values you're looking for. ... Move along.

Microsoft's 'room-scale' Ginormonitor probably not as big as a room

Notas Badoff

Re: "Tokyo Appartment Sized"

Hmm, did they mention if the aspect ratio was 2:1 ?

Crooks swipe plutonium, cesium from US govt nuke wranglers' car. And yes, it's still missing

Notas Badoff

That dirty yard in the neighbourhood

Sigh. It's not going to be a "dirty bomb". The problem will be much quieter and therefore sinister. Somewhere someone is stupidly 'accidentally' spreading this crap all over some neighbourhood. And no one will know until the damage to people has been done.

This one - Goiânia accident - will give you the idea. Perusing List of civilian radiation accidents will raise the hair on your neck until it starts falling out.

Gotta love "In the summer of 1992, a utility worker for the Taiwanese state-run electric utility Taipower brought a Geiger counter to his apartment to learn more about the device, and discovered that his apartment was contaminated." Or "The incident was discovered months later when a truck delivering contaminated building materials to the Los Alamos National Laboratory drove through a radiation monitoring station."

Python creator Guido van Rossum sys.exit()s as language overlord

Notas Badoff

Live! from your keyboard - your reputation

Um, wow. When the BDFL (retired) is minded to point to the code of conduct and also remind everyone that maillists are public information...? It has obviously been rough riding herd on a federation of (some) foul tempers?

Two things to note here.

No misogyny, misandry, racism, classism, or other -isms were employed in the making of this debacle. Just people being much much less than ideal. Thus this is a good (?) example to point to, that there are way too many people out there who simply don't know how to play well together. Quit trying to out-Godwin each other, everybody loses.

From the nature of the interactions, you have the chance to be a much *nicer*, more *intelligent* person in print than in real life. When you forget one person's name in real life you've lost one future friend. When you forget your humanity on the web, you've lost your career.

Boffin botheration as IET lifts axe on 20-year-old email alias service

Notas Badoff

Re: Another "use someone else's server" service bites the dust

"we give you a prestigious email address for nothing ..."

They were members of the organization. To me that implies membership dues. For a membership perk from my dues, I think I'd much rather have a prestige email address than a one-time t-shirt with some idiot logo variant printed on it.