Posts by Coofer Cat

Not necessarily a Pi replacement

I suspect this isn't going to make big incursions into the "home DIY tinkerer" market, but it could do well in embedded systems (unless it's in the region of $50 or less, which seems doubtful).

Embedded systems aren't quite as price sensitive, but often have other requirements like security of supply, eMMC (instead of SD card) and wider temperature/power ranges or whatever. PoE would strike me as useful in those situations as well. The other thing embedded folk like is the ability to get things taken off the board - so maybe make it as pictured, but with no USBs and no HDMI or whatever. Embedded folk will likely flash the device once with a Buildroot image, for which they'll need some convenient method, but beyond that, all the convenience of a Raspberry Pi isn't needed. Once flashed the first time, their own application's updates will take it from there (if indeed they update it at all - a lot of stuff doesn't).

This thing may not have the community support of a Pi, and it may not be nearly as easy to home-tinker with it as a result, but it could well sweep up a good chunk of the more professional market. But then again, it's a crowded market (and the Pi does operate there too), so who knows?

I did Digital Systems Engineering at uni (a few decades ago). A number of observations stick with me to this day though...

- All the girls that were in the first year disappeared pretty quickly. I think one or two stuck it out to the end, but in an intake of 60+ (maybe 40 odd by the very end), the gender diversity was pretty terrible (same is true in all the jobs I've had since actually)

- There were a couple of people in the first year who thought they'd just "give it a go". I can't imagine why they thought this was a good idea. Needless to say, they didn't make it past the end of the year

- Ever mentioning you did "engineering" was bad enough, saying "digital systems engineering" or "electronics" was the absolute quickest way to scare off the girl you'd been successfully chatting up for the past 20 minutes. It became a running joke - not "will he get her number?", "will he get a snog?" or anything like that - "how long will she stay after he tells her he does electronics?", and we'd count up the seconds.

From all this, I conclude we as a society have a very poor view of engineers, let alone electronics/electrical engineers. Even the civies, aeros and mechies were no better off (and they were on considerably easier courses). Essentially, the harder the course, the less "we" seem to think of the people doing it. Granted, a lot of them could barely string a sentence together to people they weren't already friends with, and the body odour was at times quite powerful, but those people went on to work on some pretty complex stuff which is now in your laptop, smart phone or watch.

Whatever the problems are, whatever the solutions might be, we have got a very, very long way to go.

The real story - No Rights Employees ("employed for tax purposes")

The real story here is the creation of the "employed for tax purposes", No Rights Employee (NRE).

Once the big companies realise that they can convert their permies to NREs without attracting any HMRC trouble (which they couldn't do with contractors) then we're all up the swanny. A hundred years of unions negotiating working conditions swiped away in a heartbeat. Entire sites, divisions and departments closed on literally the same day as the bosses announce it. People getting fired for getting pregnant - or fat, or arriving late to work. You name it - all possible with NREs.

For public listed companies especially, NREs mean less head count, and that means they can report a higher "earnings per employee" in their accounts. That improves their share price, which improves their chances of (foreign) investment or takeover. The odd contractor having to take an "inside IR35" role might sound innocuous enough, but when you realise NREs are the wedge that will end up selling off British businesses and the assets they own, it starts to look slightly different.

Sigh - same old lies perpetuated...

Repeat after me: Contractors pay a greater percentage of tax than permies. Yes, it's true when you add up all the taxes that get paid, contractors put a greater percentage into Treasury coffers than permies.

Believe it or not, contractors aren't complaining about being forced to pay less tax. They're complaining because "inside IR35", aka "employed for tax purposes" is actually No Rights Employment. All the costs and downsides of a permie, but with none of the benefits and protections.

FWIW, the "no rights employee" is set to become the predominant employment type available in a couple of years. The benefits to (big) business are huge - NREs don't count towards "headcount" in your public accounts filings, so your "earnings per employee" go up by hiring NREs. Higher EperE means a higher share price, which means more foreign investment. So, look out for public listed companies hiring lots of NREs suddenly being sold off to the Americans, Chinese and elsewhere. Oh, and then look out for sites/divisions being shut down overnight because NREs can be fired with no notice or reason given.

Now, as for an unofficial strike - not through choice - there simply isn't enough work around for all the contractors to get a gig. As such, a lot of us are going to sit it out for a couple of months in the hope we'll find something in the meantime. Again, much less money for the Exchequer, but that doesn't seem to be a concern for them.

"Good with money"?

I asked HMRC via Freedom of Information what it's cost them to mount these legal proceedings. They know what they spent on external lawyers (ie. quite a bit), but can't say what it cost them internally to investigate, build the case, go to the tribunals etc. Apparently they don't use timesheets or any sort of project accounting.

So in short... if someone inside HMRC wants to bring one of these cases, it doesn't really "cost" anything. They might spend a million quid to collect a thousand, but they wouldn't ever know that - they'd just come back to the office with the thousand pounds and celebrate "coming out on top". So expect more frivolous law suits to take place.

Your hard earned tax being well spent - not on the NHS or schools or whatever else you care about - but on HMRC employees and their laywers. Great.

I'm sure there's a way to get QWERkY into this...

Charge Apple for it!

We should charge Apple for all 'lost revenue' from all this copyright infringement. After all, it's their computers that get used to watch it all.

In fact, we should also charge Intel, because without their chips, we wouldn't be infringing on copyright.

Why ISPs can ever be considered 'profiting from' copyright infringement, even after notification is beyond me.

Daft

It's funny how we don't need a cartoon to tell kids not to rob banks, isn't it?

If IP laws weren't so crazy stupid, then we'd all be able to understand them and would abide by them quite willingly. The fact they're complex, and have some non-intuitive aspects to them is precisely the problem that needs solving. There's no point having a law, no matter how well meaning, if no one can understand it.

For my money, a TSDB is good for 'telemetry' and ELK or similar good for log aggregation (more like a SIEM). For all that to work out though, you need to have some idea of what's important. Most application log files I've ever seen are loads of "just in case" information because the developer knew that at some point in the future (s)he would have to debug a production problem using nothing but those logs. IMHO, there's justification for most apps to have a general log for all the usual chatter (which you don't bother to index), and an 'audit' log which contains just the things that have happened (eg. 'user logged in', 'user requested statement', 'user made a payment' etc). The audit log wants to have no personally identifiable information in it though - anonymised data only (and even then only sparingly).

Sadly, non-functional features generally get pretty short-shrift in most commercially driven organisations. I'd imagine the beauty and simplicity of the log files would be pretty close to the bottom of the non-functional priority list. If it's not there in day 1, you're never going to get around to doing it.

Slack is half-way decent, so big corps queue up to kill it off

In my day jobs, I can use a total of: Slack, Lifesize (which has chat), Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams and quite probably a couple of others (one place I worked at used IRC).

Out of all of those, Slack is pretty good, IRC is plain and simple but effective and the others are all awful. I wonder if the purveyors of the others though "we've got to be different, so lets take all the good stuff away"? They're so terrible as to be unusable - pick up the phone or send an email instead.

Since Slack has a large user-base, it's obviously ripe for a takeover. All those lovely users to assimilate into one's own crappy platform - too much temptation to bare, I expect. The thing is, if it goes anywhere near Microsoft, then there's no way it'll be allowed to carry on as it is, it'll have to be subsumed into an inferior product. If Amazon get it, then there's a chance it might stay quite good, at least for a while.

Either way, Slack, we love you, and we'll be sorry to see you go :-(

$390?

Seems a bit steep for a Raspberry Pi + LEDs. FWIW, it looks like a nice implementation of the idea, but it's questionable how useful the idea really is, especially at this sort of price. I'd imagine it should be more like a 'seems fun, give it a go' sort of price.

I've often wondered if instead everyone needs RGB fairy lights around their monitors, and if you're the one that broke the build, yours go red. You could integrate stink sensors to shame the one that dealt the deadly blow too. You could go further and nominate someone to do the tea round using the same mechanism. When it comes around to annual reviews your boss could announce the amount of bonus you got by colour changes. The list goes on...

Ebay? Are they still around?

Does anyone use Ebay seriously any more? The web experience is so horrifically bad, all I can assume is that they've bought an AI to see if even a machine can figure out how to navigate the site.

Tor Hostile

Try browsing a Cloudflare-backed site via Tor and you'll be presented with a Capcha and a "copy this crap into the box below". I've found that nine times out of ten, doing so with the utmost care and attention, it fails to convince the server than I am indeed a human. Whatever it needs to succeed is apparently not provided by the Tor network plus a locked-down browser.

I'm sure none of that will have any bearing on investment or indeed IPOs. However, the proliferation of Cloudflare isn't going to be a good thing for the privacy aware folks of the world.

Is it just me...?

Maybe it's just me, but Paypal is horrible. In their (recent) TV ads they claim it's simpler than using your credit card to pay for stuff, but it really isn't. Firstly you seem to have to change your password every 10 minutes, and now I've hit some limit which means they're going to bill my card up to 5 quid to 'verify' it's mine. Their website is an awful maze of impossibility and they seem to need you to jump through far too many hoops to do anything useful.

The only reason I have a paypal account is because ebay needed one. I've ditched ebay because almost everyone on it is flaky, so have little need of Paypal now either. If they make their service genuinely easy to use, I guess it might be useful again, but right now I can't see it happening.

Your thermostat needs to be a datacentre!?

I've used a Drayton Digistat 3 (with TRV valves on radiators) in my last two places - they're simple, single zone thermostats. The are 'smart' in so much as you can set the temperature for a specific time. We generally just turn ours down by a couple of degrees at night and times when the house is likely empty. It's pretty easy to push the "up" button if you're cold (and in a reasonably efficient house, it only takes maybe 30 minutes to get warm again). Having done lots of individual room temperature measurements, and other such geekery, this set up works remarkably well.

For an upgrade, there are a handful that don't need 'clouds' to work (Heat Genius is my current favourite). Nest, Hive and these lot don't need to be told your every move to have weather-reacting temperature control. Indeed, a house that needs that probably just needs some extra insulation.

It seems to me that if your thermostat needs a huge datacentre to work, then you're doing it wrong.

This and that...

This is nothing new (by 20-30 years or so). However, also nothing new is that 'marketing' knows not what it is, nor what it wants. Today it's "x" tomorrow it's "y". IT doesn't move to that drum, so it seen as being 'slow' or 'obstructive'. However, most of what 'marketing' wants actually doesn't move that fast either - one's "SEO" doesn't change overnight, neither does one's "social media score", and even less anything in meatspace.

Marketing, being who they are, are very convincing to the Cxx folks. IT, being who they are, not so much. If your Cxxes are shit, then Marketing will get their way and will rule the roost for a period of time. During that time, all the decent IT folk will leave, the company will most likely go down the shitter and eventually the Cxxes get replaced until balance is restored.

The only companies that succeed in the long term understand that Sales, Marketing, Finance and Engineering/R&D/IT have to exist in equal measure. Sure, one may dominate for a short period, but over the longer term, they all have to have an equal place at the table.

Let the OLED wars rage on...

I like the look of all this. I'd like a flat OLED TV, 4K optional. I'd like it in the 35" sort of area, and without any sort of 'smart'. If someone would make one of those, I'd buy it tomorrow (even if it was expensive for the size).

Er...?

I sort of wonder why anyone would want to compete with a low-cost solution like Galcier. I mean, lets say you get a couple of big customers off Amazon, you only get a few dollars of revenue from it. I wonder where the return is - surely any reasonable sized user is encrypting everything they put there, aren't they? If it's just about contribution to costs (as it is for Amazon), then fair enough, but spending time and money 'competing' seems contrary to this.

In my case personally, I pay about $2/month for at-rest data in Glacier - by the end of the year, they might be taking $10/month off me, if I go crazy. I'd happily move my encrypted blobs of data somewhere else, and actually having some choices of destinations helps me out, but a price war of any kind isn't likely to make much difference to me, and probably isn't worth the dev time to change.

10 years later...

I remember Dyson saying the were coming out with a robotic vacuum cleaner over 10 years ago. It was going to be called the DC06 (I even found a link from 2004 here: http://www.gizmag.com/go/1282/). Thankfully, they've pulled it down from the £1000 proposed price tag. I expect this'll be rather good (although probably noisy).

Chip & Pin?

Why bother? Why not just make chip & pin work properly? I mean, if you could C&P a payment in seconds, not several minutes as it is in most places, then all this wouldn't be necessary.

That said, putting the c&p device into my phone and letting me 'beam' the outcome of the authentication to someone else sounds like a good idea. Prepaying to make an account is a non-starter though, as is needing an 'app' for every goddam company in the world.

I'm unconvinced at the moment, so won't be an early adopter, and quite possibly will only do it when literally everyone is doing it and the guy down the corner shop doesn't like cash anymore. We'll see...

Thin Margins

I used to work for one of the "tech giants" (not mentioned here, but you know them). They used to work on tiny margins - each of their (aggregated) millions of users generated something like $10 a year in revenue, so it only takes one phone call and that user starts costing the company money. Hence, they try to dissuade users from phoning them. My point is that just because they own and run thousands upon thousands of servers doesn't mean they're making so much money they can offer the personal touch to every one of their millions of users.

The likes of EasyDNS probably don't make a load off each domain they sell/operate either, but as a customer who pays them directly, they have a clearer relationship and responsibilities to you. If they have to charge you $11 instead of $10 to run a domain, then you're probably happy to pay the increase, knowing they're going to answer the phone to you.

That said, post mortems are a significant weakness in IT generally, and the "tech giants" are no exception. In their defence, because they do run thousands of machines for millions of users, it's not always obvious what the exact problem was, or indeed what internal policies to change to mitigate the problem until days, or even weeks later. Still, one is left wondering if "better late than never" might be of benefit.

As a micro-anecdote, yesterday at my current employer we had a dev box fail, knocking out a load of users. This is just one, straight forward, self-contained machine with a handful of users that are across the office from us admins. Even now, we can't give a clear post mortem of what went wrong, and not for want of trying - we have genuinely spent some time looking into it. Sometimes even simplicity isn't a basis for being able to provide decent post mortems. Sometimes sh1t just happens.

Not one-size fits all

If the government can stop running hundreds of Exchange servers and instead centralise those into the "cloud", then that's great news for us tax payers. There's a nice bit of cost saving which oughtn't be too much of a strain for the departments involved.

What I wonder about really is the multi-million pound projects to put government workers paylips on the intranet, or do all your employee HR functions online, or *shudder* put all of the public's medial records on to some electronically accessible solution. These are all 'custom' applications, which have thousands of hours of consultancy and development behind them. This is also where I suspect the lions share of wasted expense comes from. I can't see this G-Cloud really helping there.

All said and done though, getting anything centralised and cut the duplication of effort has got to be a good thing.

9 months

I once worked with someone how said "you can't have a project here that lasts longer than 9 months". The idea was that it forced projects to be quick - otherwise they got out of date before they were delivered and cost too much,etc etc.

Could We The People mandate something similar for governments? That would stop them spending a billion quid on a pile of crap, and force them to do reasonable sized increments instead.

Either way, this will go the same was as the poll tax, passports, ID cards, the NHS computer system and countless others. Governments can't do IT (well, they can't do procurement at all, but it's most obvious in IT).

Shrewd

These sorts of things are going to happen more and more. Facebook's hit the top, and is on the way down as it fights one battle after another, with or without lawsuits. It's no longer a social media service, it's a litigator.

Zuckerburg is actually very shrewd. We all thought he was bonkers turning down deals that would have seen him personally gaining billions. However, if he IPOs the company as rumoured next year, he'll make way more than that. He also gets the "kudos" of being able to say "it grew and grew while I was running it, and it fell into a steaming pile of turd once public shareholders got their hands on it". Clever indeed...

TalkTalk Billing

I was an old Freedom2Surf customer, who got bought by Tiscali and then TalkTalk. I tried TalkTalk's "business class" service, but it was awful - slow speeds, terrible phone service, and hopeless support. I've been super-happy with Plusnet ever since (because weirdly BE said they couldn't take on customers who didn't have a BT landline!?).

Even several months later, TalkTalk keep sending me invoices for £0.00. They really are hopeless.

As for 3 - I've found them to be pretty good. You can't activate global roaming while you're abroad though, which is annoying. But other than that, they've been pretty good (nothing like O2 who I found to be hopeless, and unilaterally blocked half the internet "to protect the children", even though those children can't legally have contracts).