Posts by Lee D

True story:

Went to a Ford dealership to buy a new car.

Asked the for base model, no extras, no I don't want that, no, just the base model, honestly, just the base model, is that the base model, no, just the base model, etc.

Got shown to a car, after much upselling.

Touchscreen in-car entertainment, climate, bluetooth phone connection with Internet / emergency message alert if the airbag goes off, text message reader, voice recognition, satnav, etc. etc. etc. electronic parking brake, electronic dashboard, electronic tyre pressure sensor, electronic side-mirrors (auto-fold, etc.), electronic cruise control, etc. etc. etc. TWENTY ONE BUTTONS on the steering wheel to navigate two different screens (entertainment/dashboard HUD).

"No, I said the base model."

"Sir," said the salesman dryly, "this IS the base model".

I'm afraid that other manufacturer's were no different. £50 on a tablet/satnav built into the console is lost in the noise and apparently what people want. Didn't come with a fecking spare tyre, though.

Re: There's nothing illegal in writing the code

"God, how was I supposed to know it's against the law to create software expressly designed to detect emissions testings in progress as opposed to normal driving, and then explicitly enable a mode never enabled under any other circumstances, which drastically reduces the car's performance for seemingly no reason whatsoever?!?!?!!"

Er... yeah... right.

There's some grey area, in some circumstances, but you're required to know and do your job, which includes querying dubious things like this. I mean, personally, I'd be getting that request in writing, documenting that code in explicit detail, and recording who told me to do what when. If it's legit, no problem. If it's not, I'd expect to see some objection to my doing that, which would no doubt end in the phrase "I suggest you never mention such features ever again to me, or anyone in my department, and by the way, I have read-access to the code repositories." If they sack you for that, damn he could have nailed them to the wall and just the settlement would be millions, let alone HE would have been the one exposing the scandal (i.e. good guy) instead of someone else revealing it and him going to jail.

I have refused requests as part of my job. I have stated "that's illegal". The issue has never been pressed in such circumstances. Because people know what that means - it means "go for it". Get another mug to do that for you, and watch me take him down with you. Try to sack or discredit me, and watch the shitstorm that results. Or go away, never ask again, and the answer's no.

Re: Teaching IT doesn't have enough money

Same as in any subject, IT is no different.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.

However, that's not the reason. The reason is that - in nearly 20 years of working IT in schools, private and state, primary, secondary and beyond - I have met precisely two people who actually know the first thing about IT. As in, unsupervised, they could go through an install wizard without messing things up.

One was a former industrial control programmer.

One was an astrophysicist.

Literally, everyone else I see who teaches IT or computing in schools has NO CONCEPT of IT whatsoever. I know, because I deal with them every day.

If they code, they code in Scratch. Mostly, they can't even do that. They have no grasp of computer science (distinct from "computing") and no grasp of modern computing.

It's not to do with the other people all going out to industry, it's to do with having to put up with the nonsense of being a teacher, and keep up with IT, from a base of "I know how to use Ctrl-C, aren't I clever?".

I manage the IT for a private school with the first of the above as the "head of ICT", i.e. teaching IT (the other is my own brother...). We get a lot of stuff done that most people can't even dream of working IT in schools. But that took a long time to find. Over 20 years, I have had everything from a "Head of VLE" who actually didn't know what a VLE was ("It's like Google, isn't it?"), to the youngest teacher / mug in the school who, each year, got the role palmed off to them and they could barely log on themselves. Repeat next year, next year, next year, etc.

It's not that you can't be IT and teach, it's that a) You wouldn't want to teach (I briefly considered it after uni, but worked in a school for a while and quickly changed my mind) and b) the things that you are made to teach, and shown how to teach, are dull, out-of-date, poor-practice, had no relevance to modern computing (even with the new ICT curricula) and certainly won't be at all useful to the kids anyway (but then, I grew up on BBC Micros in school, so it doesn't really matter, that last bit).

Stop teaching kids that copy/paste from Google images into word is "computing", or especially "computer science", it's not. Nor is putting a loop flowchart icon into a piece of Lego software. The bar is set FAR TOO LOW still, and as such all the interesting stuff is completely out-of-syllabus anyway so decent people can't be bothered to spend their lives just teaching taht.

Re: Model error.

I'm afraid that Sunday trading laws are very medieval.

Non-24-hour opening, is very 20th Century.

It's ridiculous that the bread counter closes so you can't get fresh bread after work, for instance. Same for the pharmacy and everything else in-store.

Stock shortage of obscure items, I can forgive, but the other day I wanted to buy a small petrol generator and literally couldn't find even the cheapest of them in four different HUGE DIY stores. Amazon had 20 models, most on next-day delivery.

Amazon are really dragging us in the Star Trek age, and I can't fault them for that. That nobody else is trying to compete is sad, they are only ever playing catch-up when they could actually make in-roads before Amazon get there.

It is ludicrous that I can order a huge piece of machinery and have it on my doorstep (or workplace, or friend's house) in a matter of hours. I can't even get that from a hire shop (which are closed for the majority of the day anyway).

Re: Model error.

My suppliers hate Amazon.

Much as I hate to say it, they can't just sell me a product any more.

They have to make up by giving me something I can't get elsewhere - service, support, warranties, actually coming and talking about what I want, etc.

Much as it's economically dangerous to put all our eggs in one basket, there's nothing stopping someone else doing an Amazon, but nobody is. My workplace spends hundreds of thousands each year on Amazon alone. When you just want THAT... that product THERE... they are invaluable. Especially if you want it quick.

As I have to tell my suppliers, you can't be cheapest. Don't try. I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in those that can give me something else, something that Amazon themselves can't sell me.

Re: Client support, we've heard about it

Other staff have just the same responsibility to learn how to continue to do their job, be reasonable, respectful, and proportionate to the problem at hand, as we do.

I'm afraid that the words "I'm sorry, I'm not very good on these things, I don't know how... could I book some time for you to show me so I don't have to keep bothering you?" are frighteningly rare, despite being quite sensible, reasonable, realistic and actionable (I will move heaven and earth to do this for you, if you ask like that).

Instead it's "all IT's fault", we "shouldn't change things" (I'll just tell Microsoft that, I'm sure they'll listen), it's "not working", it's "stupid that we have to do this", etc. etc. etc.

Sorry, but it's a two-way street. If you refuse to learn, I can't make you drink at that water. It's not my job to ensure you want to continue doing yours, and part of your job is/was/should be keeping up with the processes necessary to do your job.

In the same way I don't expect you to blame me because I'm not up on the intricacies of the double-entry bookkeeping system and ledgers, I don't expect you to automatically understand how to write a Junk Mail filter in Outlook. But you can be damn sure that if it becomes a required part of my job, I'll be a damn sight more respectful and will INSIST on learning the tools I need to use rather than just expecting someone else to do it for me.

Wrong on just about every count.

SSDs have a concept of trashing individual sectors (It's called TRIM) which most hard drives never had. If you TRIM a given sector (which modern OS will do automatically when it's not needed any more because you deleted files), then it gets overwritten, which means it's gone forever (yes, forever... yes, even on hard disks. No, magnetic history doesn't exist. There's £1m waiting for you if you can prove it.

Nobody has claimed it).

However, everything from background sector reallocation on error, to automatic sector-refreshing, to copies still present in temporary locations on an abrupt power-off, to literally everything from Shadow Copies to even temporary files in your OS mean that you cannot "securely erase a single file" on any modern hard disk or SSD. Ever. Not without literally being the people who made the hard drive.

It's beyond the scope of a drive to know the filesystem format it's holding, and just as tricky on an HDD as an SSD, and it's not its job, so it has no idea where that file went or which bits were left somewhere.

That's up to the OS and the OS alone. And most OS are not built with this in mind at all.

Solution: Don't try to securely erase single files, it's not trivially possible at all, never has been. Encrypt the whole drive and don't give out the password. Trash the whole drive if you can't afford for someone to read a file on it.

P.S. Almost all drives have "Secure Erase" commands on their drive interfaces. They work per-drive but also cannot remove from damaged or reallocated sectors reliably.

P.P.S. If you want to trash a drive, any drive, just throw it in a big fire until it's just ash. Anything else is really just snakeoil and messing about, no matter what the technology. No, overwriting it a billion times doesn't guarantee anything if the firmware decided to keep a copy of an old broken sector around that it transparently replaces with one from its stock of spare sector.

Re: So for personal backup...

Tape drive - too expensive, especially if your tape drive burns in a fire and you're just left holding your backup tape.

Blu-Ray - too small. Stupendously small, in fact. Too slow. Restoring from a bunch of them will take forever.

Cloud - better have a REALLY good Internet connection and be happy for everything to be offline at random (and the most inconvenient) times.

Go with drives: a small home NAS and a USB.

Literally, one of the backup tiers in my workplace, is a bunch of cheap NAS boxes (they can do iSCSI, etc. but we just use them as a file dump for the secondary backups). Cycle one off-site every now and then, and you're done. Restore times at 2Gbit/sec (LACP), or use the files/VMs direct from the storage with the iSCSI functionality if you want.

I'd have a cheap NAS for day-to-day backup, dumping photos, running services, remote access on your smartphone. And then a bunch of cheap external drives as "backups" at regular intervals, stuck in the loft, at a friend's house, etc.

Re: SSD is fine - while it works

Sorry, hard drives give no more warning than SSDs. I have a bunch of Seagates supplied as part of a RAID array to attest to that. One day, they just stop working, no SMART warning, just dead.

And neither failing should affect any kind of even semi-professional storage. Maybe your laptop dies at home, but you have backups, right? Backups are not the domain of business alone, if you value anything on your computer. The reinstall of Windows alone would cost £50-100, so spend £50 on a complete backup of everything and press the button on it once a month.

SSDs also have good lives on them. I've put them in schools, in heavy-use clients, and no I didn't even bother to turn off swap or turn on all the RAM-cache nonsense for them. Straight swap, HDD for SSD, with the same image, as an alternative to trying to upgrade RAM in machines locked to 4GB max (not OS, 32-bit motherboard limits).

They are all ticking along nicely, nowhere near their write limits (every time I run the numbers again using the real-world usage, it comes out to 10+ years still, and we replace every 4 anyway), and not had a single failure. P.S. I buy the cheapest, unheard-of brands. ADATA anyone?

The only place that worries me is exactly what this article states - high-end servers and write-heavy tasks, where SSDs are not well suited and everything has to be send over a Gbit connection anyway (so why rush?). In clients, they are perfect, and provide ENORMOUS speed boosts for a good price. A price that, if they fail, who cares.

All I want are larger ones. For network clients they are fine, but storage grows all the time and it won't be long before the 128Gb cheapies are no longer viable for clients. They don't even need to exceed SATA speeds (hell, some of our machines are limited to the old SATA speeds and still an SSD makes them FLY). Just storage matters.

I want the £100 1Tb SSD that operates at 500Mb/s read/write. I would literally buy them by the dozen for my workplace, and for myself.

And at that price, they are no more likely to fail or cost me money than an £85 decent Western Digital boring basic HDD version of the same size.

To be honest, HDD is dead except in high-end write-loads. Everything else should be SSD already. I am frustrated how long it's taken to get to the point where computers are actually being supplied with SSD, and even more so by the lack of storage capacity while we focus on "but we're now 20 times faster than SATA if you use this interface that nobody has in their home machines and needs all kinds of adaptors to be backwards-compatible".

Gimme a cheap, large, SATA SSD drive. Hell, make it 3.5". I really don't care. When it dies, I'll buy another to replace it unless it's still in warranty, like I do hard drives. I'd expect at least 5 years out of them, I'd be happy if it's warrantied for 2 years, which I don't think it at all unreasonable.

Re: Game designer Pete Cooke knew about this 30 years ago!

Yup.

Shame about the sequel, though.