* Posts by A Non e-mouse

3263 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2010

Elon Musk finally finds 'someone foolish enough to take the job' of Twitter CEO

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Headmaster

Don't confuse leadership with traits such as megalomania. Being a leader does not imply you crave power or control.

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Re: As usual, hire a female CEO when the company is collapsing

I discovered today that the tactic is called The Glass Cliff.

Dump these insecure phone adapters because we're not fixing them, says Cisco

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The security on many of Cisco's (earlier) voice endpoints is dire. The fun thing is that so many of them are still in use. Just pop into John Lewis and see what phones they use. The good ol' 7911.

Microsoft may charge different prices for Office with or without Teams

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Re: Deja vu all over again

Nah, education has A1. It's got most applications - but they're only usable via a browser.

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Joke

Re: Deja vu all over again

BMW used to charge their customers for removal of ashtrays and lighters in their cars.

Whereas indicators are still an optional extra on German cars.

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Re: Whilst they're at it

Whlst our users like OneNote, our Office 365 admins hate it. They're always complaining about how weird and fragile it is.

Modular finds its Mojo, a Python superset with C-level speed

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It's all about choosing the right tool for the job. Is a dynamically compiled language like Python going to be as fast as hand crafted assembler? No. Is writing code in Python faster & easier than writing in assembler? Yes.

To be clear I'm not saying everyone should switch to writing in assembler. You write in a language that's appropriate to the problem space you're working in. Python is a good general purpose language but it's not always the fastest language at run time. The problem with general purpose languages is that people expect them to solve every problem well.

Python still has the strongest grip on developers

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We looked at the 68000 when I was at Uni. Only a year or two after I'd left, it was clear the 68000 series was dying and x86 was winning. Yes, there were other processors such as SPARC, PA-RISC, Power but they were niche and very expensive so out of the reach of the hobbyist.

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Re: Speaking of Flask...

It's not that Django or Flask are insecure, just that they're not designed for serving static content. You put your static content natively in Apache/Nginx and then also use Apache/Nginx to provide a proxy front end to the Python app. Apache/Nginx can then run multiple instances of the Python app to further improve performance for your end users.

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Sort of reminds me of the days when it was assembler or nothing.

I used to do 8-bit assembler. I did look at x86 and ran away in horror at how awful the instruction set was. I'd like to find some time to play with ARM assembler as that looks a lot saner.

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Re: PHP (8)

PHP was designed for writing web applications, so finding it easier than languages that weren't designed from day one for witing web applications isn't surprising.

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I've been working with Java since Java 1.3 and over the past couple of years have been making more use of Python. (All my new projects are in Python)

I agree that type safety is an opt-in after thought in Python and I miss the strong type safety of Java, but I feel more productive in Python - especially for smaller projects. I also like the way packages are handled in Python by Pip & VirtualEnv.

I use the Jetbrains tools for both Java & Python programming and I can assure you that Pycharm is not a glorified notepad.

(NB - Not paid to promote Jetbrains, just a satisfied customer)

Fed up with Python setup and packaging? Try a shot of Rye

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LWN has a series of articles on work on packing in Python.

Biden proposes 30% tax on cryptominers' power bills

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Re: Snake Oil

Grady at Practical Engineering has a good explaination of what happend:

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Mushroom

Snake Oil

Crypto mining is just snake oil and should simply be banned.

Unlike your iPhone, Apple's batterygate controversy refuses to die

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If Apple were trying to hide the problem with the battery, I would sympathise with claim. But according to the article, Apple offered a free battery replacement to all affected users. So I'm not sure what leg Mr Gutman has to stand on.

Boffins claim to create the world's first wooden transistor

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Complements A&A's Wet String ADSL.

China again signals desire to shape global IPv6 standards

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Re: Dodgy stats

Have you checked your home broadband connection? Many UK ISPs have been quietly providing IPv6 for some years now. Sky is one of the biggest that I'm aware of, but they're not the only ones.

US watchdog grounds SpaceX Starship after that explosion

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Re: I suspect

It does look like the flight termination system failed too.

In one of Scott Manley's video analysing the launch, he says the flight termination system did work: It just didn't work how people thought it would.

Scott believes the flight termination system just pierced holes in the tanks with the expectation was that this would be sufficient for the rocket to disintegrate.

Elizabeth Holmes is not going to prison – for the moment

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If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.

If you don't get open source's trademark culture, expect bad language

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I suspect the person who came up with the implementation forgot (or didn't know) who has power in open source. The top people in open source actually have very little power. The power is in all the contributors & supporters. As these are volunteers, you can't order them to do anything.

A classic is what happened with Libre/Open Office. Oracle tried to force one thing and everyone else said "Nope", walked away, forked the code and LibreOffice was born (almost) overnight. A few years down the line, LibreOffice is the default and OpenOffice....?

SpaceX's second attempt at orbital Starship launch ends in fireball

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Re: Complexity ≠ Reliability

When they were desiging the Harrier jumpjet, they realised the safest design was having just one engine rather than multiple.

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Re: Starship hasn't had the most successful history?

Not too good according to pictures on Twatter.

UK pensions dept hands Softcat £250M for Microsoft subscriptions

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Headmaster

This is a very simple "If you want to buy Microsoft software, you can just get one quote from Softcat and job done". This contract isn't about what is the best word processor/email/etc.

Child-devouring pothole will never hurt a BMW driver again

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I thought the procedure for getting the local council to fix a pothole was to draw an image of a penis around the hole?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-48068866

UK government scraps smart motorway plans, cites high costs and low public confidence

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Smart Motorways, dumb drivers.

The problem with "Smart" motorways is that drivers don't obey the red "X" indicating "Lane Closed". If the government implemented a policy where if you drive through a red "X" sign, your car is crushed, that would soon educate people about the rules of the road.

To improve security, consider how the aviation world stopped blaming pilots

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If you've never made a mistake in your worklife, you're either lying or have never done a days work and I'm not interested in employing you.

(Of course, if you've never done a days work and are applying for your first ever job...)

Benchmark a cloud PC? No way. Just trust us, they work, says Microsoft

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Re: Benchmarks are important sometimes..

I've got a small niche piece of software that needs a full-fat MS-SQL server. I took a look at running the SQL in Azure as I didn't want to have to manage a MS-SQL server. I think the cost break-even of on-prem Vs Azure SQL was 13 months. No brainer.

Tesla Semi, out since December, already facing a recall over brakes

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Re: Trucked

The Engineering Explained video I linked to above also mentions that something like 80% of trucks journeys are never loaded to the maximum legal weight for a truck. So sure, a BEV can carry slightly less than a diesel/petrol vehicle, but for many (not all, just many) use cases, that's perfectly fine.

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Flame

Re: Trucked

Here is my citation on the plausibility of Elmo’s truck by Engineering Explained: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvg_i0GE0Vo

As I’m too stupid to see the obvious flaws in his maths & logic, please explain the issues so I can learn and be a better person.

Drones aim to undo Ukraine's landmine problem

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Pint

De-mining takes a lot of skill and shed-loads of bravery. Lots of pints to those involved in de-mining conflict areas.

Parts of UK booted offline as Virgin Media suffers massive broadband outage

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Headmaster

A notspot networker at wavemobile raged on Twitter that they'd had a "sleepless night thanks to @virginmedia and ZERO information or apology..."

If you're in a life or death occupation, then you should have more than one 'net connection at home so this should not have affected your work. If you're not on life-or-death duties, then get a life and put things into perspective.

Bank rewrote ads for infosec jobs to stop scaring away women

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I've been on several seminars/courses about writing job adverts/descriptions: Shock horror, the lessons the Aussies have just learned have been best practise here for the past decade.

Judge grants subpoena to ID Twitter source code leaker

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So Twitter's lawyers are obviously going to be cautious in adding additional parties

The lawyers paid by Elmo? I doubt it.

Nostalgic for VB? BASIC is anything but dead

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Re: Xojo all the way...

it's very stable and simply works, so whilst there is a plan to move over to something C based

Why? As you say, it works, so why recode it?

Boeing Starliner's 1st crewed trip to the ISS delayed again over battery overheating risk

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How much money must Boeing be losing with Starliner? Surely it can only be management stubborness that's keeping the Starliner project running? Any sane company would have walked away by now.

How Arm aims to squeeze device makers for cash rather than pocket pennies for cores

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Happy

I wonder how much ARM would get in royalties on a Raspberry Pi Pico

Europe's right-to-repair law asks hardware makers for fixes for up to 10 years

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Whilst I applaud the right-to-repair, there also has to be the equivalent of a "right-to-use" i.e. No doing a Google and after 18 months shutting down the servers whiich allow your device to work. (I'm not even getting into the whole software update debate. I'll leave that for others.)

Enter Tinker: Asus pulls out RISC-V board it hopes trumps Raspberry PI

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Joke

Don't forget the gold connectors for maximum speed!

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Flame

Re: Look up StarFive 2

And what about the price...?

$100.

Not quite the same as a RPI.

China debuts bonkers hybrid electric trolley-truck

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Re: European Pilot

(Obligatory?) Tom Scott video.

Microsoft and GM deal means your next car might talk, lie, gaslight and manipulate you

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Mushroom

Or, if a diagnostic light pinged on the dashboard, the driver could ask the assistant whether it needed immediate attention

If you need to ask the car if the warning light is important, you're whole UI is broken.

Car designers really need to walk across the metaphorical street and speak to the aviation industry on they decades of research of user interfaces and human factors.

Brit newspaper giant fills space with AI-assisted articles

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Re: Will anyone notice?

Adblock Plus is available in the iPhone and does a fairly good job.

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Re: The ship sailed a long time ago

There's a good Tom Scott video talking about truth and facts which is what's being discussed here. (It is a bit long, but worth it)

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Megaphone

Re: Videos

I've avoided the El Reg videos as I thought they were typical corporate/YouTube rubbish. Maybe you need to do a bit more PR on them...?

Switchzilla revisits training and cert tools with looming debut of 'Cisco U.'

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Mushroom

the best of Cisco’s existing training content

The same Cisco content that:

* Assumes America is the only country

* Is written for software/hardware Cisco shipped years ago

* Practicals that don't work if you follow them to the letter (Or on the current software/hardware)

* The onerous T&Cs that say if the trainer dares to use their own version of the course[1] with all the errors corrected and based on current software/hardware verions they get struck off.

[1] I'm not saying the trainer doesn't pay Cisco its dues for running the course.

Meta confirms decentralized Twitter rival in the works

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Twitter still has around 450 monthly active users

To be fair, how many of those 450 million users know of the man-child's actions? Sure, it's heavily reported in the tech press, but in the mainstream press? Nowhere near as much.

Musk said Twitter would open source its algorithm – then fired the people who could

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Mushroom

Twitter god-king Elon Musk

I could think of many adjectives to describe Elon. None would approach God or King. Few of them would be positive.

£2B in UK taxpayer cash later, and still no Emergency Services Network

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Re: ESN services vs network

Or pagers.

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Re: It should never have been planned as it was.

Big bang switch over/roll outs are inherently dangerous and should be avoided.

And the bigger the project, the bigger the bang is going to be when it goes wrong. (Because it will...)