Posts by Andy00ff00 50 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Mar 2014
And mostly I still do. However I once worked with a blind programmer, and had an eye-opening conversation regarding line length limits and how TABS-for-indent are really desirable.
I'm not trying to open the argument, just saying it's always interesting to listen to other perspectives.
(In addtion, he also used text-to-speech, and as a result was really good at catching typos and spellling errors).
It's very easy for us techy folks to point out the flaws in every approach, and take potshots at ministers - who are indeed clueless but hopefully to some extent follow the expert advice available to them.
But.... there IS NO perfect solution. We have to compromise somewhere between total economic lockdown for a year or so (expensive), lift all restrictions (a fair few people are going to die), or a range of imperfect mitigations to keep the infection rate down.
Obviously *I* could write a better app than $lowest_bidder, and probably you could too, and actually in this case I'd be tempted to go with Apple/Google's joint effort globally.
But if you're going to sneer about one aspect, be it security/privacy/whatever, I'd be genuinely interested to know realistically what your proposal is, and projected costs/death rate.
It's all very well for those of us who've spent 25 years in IT to make snide remarks.
If you think you could do better, feel free to do your civic duty, take a 50+% pay cut, go and join the police, and improve things.
Yes I'm sure the force has its faults - like every organisation. But there are a lot of good eggs doing a good job that I couldn't do if I wanted to.
What's happening is, they're pushing physics and error-correction technology in an effort to make it cheaper (oh, and the usual industry attempts to get the engineering done as cheaply as possible - overstretch the good guys, minimise testing etc).
All standard engineering tradeoff stuff. QLC might actually suit most consumer workloads OK - where the SSD is usually only part-filled and rarely overwritten anyway. Enterprise drives have different optimisations (overprovisioning, MLC, ...).
You should be aware that Very Similar Stuff happens on spinning rust. It's not simple either - they do things like orient the molecules vertically to squeeze more in a small space, but again they know that the physics is on the margins so they store a lot of ECC data. However in the small-% of times it has to rescan the media, you incur 5ms for the disk to spin.
Love the turn of phrase in the article, had me giggling.
However I instantly thought of one application area. Music synthesisers (do they still call them that) do (at least used to 20 years ago - I'm a bit out of touch these days) model instruments mathematically, in effect to recreate the same sound you get from piano strings, woodwind instruments etc.
Not that they're likely to have much call for path 3485656438598587: "Big ben chime", but in general the more they know about the physics, the better the result.
And then people in their 40s who used to play instruments might have a mid-life crises and go and buy some hugely expensive Nord thingy, and stimulate the economy. Hmm....
Difficult call - without further information.
This is my beef with disattached directors, unreasonable IT policies, salary review policies, bonus formulae, etc. etc.
Any such one-size-fits-all policy will never take account of creatives, encouragers, workshy-prats-who-play-the-rules-game etc.
I'd rather just work for a good boss who knows what's going on. It may not be fair, it may not scale, I may even be slightly poorer. So what?
I have worked with people who took way-too-long lunch "hours" playing games, but could be relied upon to work very late nights to support customers. Inconvenient, but still useful.
In the case of this team, I would want to know more about their general attitude and delivery. Backups not run etc. - it *sounds* like they should be fired. But their manager should have been more with it.
Hey, I'm browsing El Reg now - when I should be working. But I'm worth it.
Those of us that write windows device drivers have suffered with this for a while. You get the best results* with an EV certificate, which only comes on hardware key. When your build server is locked in a server room, or is a VM, or whatever, suddenly everything becomes harder than it needs to be.
I like the approach taken by one of the major consultancies:-
https://www.osr.com/nt-insider/2016-issue1/today-in-driver-signing/ (see figure 6).
* a full description of when a non-EV certificate is acceptable is omitted for the sake of brevity and sanity.
I'd like to see a computer play "EU referendum", a game where calculation and intelligence plays no part. Instead there is a fast-changing strategy which depends on what the tabloids print that day, but the result is predetermined because everyone has made up their minds already.
The computer that shows true "intelligence" when it loses will then blame its opponent on multiple counts of scaremongering, rhetoric etc., claim the vote was skewed and demand another referendum in the near future.
This piece has been here for over five hours, and no-one has asked whether the star destroyers still run XP??
And more tangentially, I always wondered how enormous trans-national organisations could take decades to design a fighter aircraft, and Saab create the Viggen on a shoestring. Obviously there's a lot I don't know about the detail, but does make me wonder if a well-funded company with a few decent engineers and less politics might have had more success than BAE.
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