* Posts by Lysenko

986 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jan 2015

German Firefox users to test recommendation engine 'a bit like thought-reading'

Lysenko

Re: Poxz on both of their houses

Yes, syphilis specifically, however in the mid-16th century that was not yet a common disease. Shakespeare's audience would have understood smallpox as the intended reference, though it works just as well if you assume "French pox" (syphilis).

Lysenko

Re: Poxz on both of their houses

Just "Pox", or "plague" in the original. It's from Romeo & Juliet. Distinguishing between (small) pox and (bubonic) plague wasn't necessary for the imagery to work so "pox" became popular as it was the more common disease.

VPN logs helped unmask alleged 'net stalker, say feds

Lysenko

Re: Location, Location, Location

I'm fairly sure that a VPN based in FSB jurisdiction is out of reach of any American TLA unless there is a tempting quid pro quo on the table (which is unlikely in the current climate).

Storage pizza from The Register's wood-fired oven

Lysenko

Re: Other types of storage and Pizza!

A roughly circular puddle of some suspiciously red/yellow viscous liquid, embedded with small fragments of something that might (or might not) be food and definitely appears pre-masticated and partly digested? Yeah. It's Pizza.

Oracle’s automated database is a minimum viable release - analyst

Lysenko

It's a trap ...

... obviously. Freeing skilled staff from mundane tasks is going to fundamentally be about freeing Oracle DBAs from the payroll entirely, thus reinforcing lock in and setting the stage for lucrative consulting deals because such companies will neither have the skills to port elsewhere nor maintain their client side systems independently.

Microsoft silently fixes security holes in Windows 10 – dumps Win 7, 8 out in the cold

Lysenko

re: I still can't figure out why THIS person *FELT* that 2D FLATSO TIFKAM...

She has form in this area. She was also behind the execrable "ribbon" nonsense in Office.

What shocked Verizon more: The Yahoo! mega-hack or that it runs AIM (for not much longer)?

Lysenko

Re: we hear ICQ is still going strong – as is IRC, of course.

I'm old enough to remember Eternal September which lead to "A$$holes Online" becoming the standard interpretation ;)

Lysenko

we hear ICQ is still going strong – as is IRC, of course.

... not to mention Signal, Wire, Discord, Telegram, Slack, Skype etc. The problem with AIM wasn't that its core function went obsolete, it was that it never had any real traction outside North America.

Let's go live now to Magic Leap and... Ah, still making millions from made-up tech

Lysenko

Re: The biggest Theranos Red Flag was it's Board

The pervasive problem with all of these cash graveyards is the implicit belief that Jobsian "reality distortion fields" can defeat science. They can't. If any founder of a science based startup regards Jobs as a role model - run.

Debunking Theranos never required anything more sophisticated than popping down to your local hospital and asking an MLSO if it is possible to get reliable diagnostic information from microliter, trans-dermal blood samples. It isn't. Blood is insufficiently homogeneous and with such a small sample significant contamination from the surface of the skin is inevitable. You can get crude estimates of a restricted number of highly soluble compounds that way (diabetics and glucose, for example) but little more. You don't need PhDs or Nobel Prizes or CDC Presidents, you just need to ask someone whose actual day to day business is blood sample analysis.

The startup I'm waiting to see is the specialist Law Firm dedicated to locating, debunking and financially eviscerating these farcical scams and the credulous VCs who fuel them.

Lysenko

Re: Procedure as normal

When you read this:

“Impossible” is not part of our lexicon. (uBeam)

You should know you're in trouble because you are dealing with someone who thinks (s)he can precisely define the position and momentum of a subatomic particle while exceeding the speed of light in a vacuum. It therefore follows that this person is either:

a) the greatest scientific mind in the history of the species.

b) a delusional idiot.

Essentially, if you don't see a place for the word "impossible" then you don't believe in mathematics, or science or the human understanding of reality itself. Can you use an insanity defence in a civil lawsuit? Is that what this is about?

Russia, America dig into tug-of-war over Bitcoin laundering suspect

Lysenko

It's obvious which he'll be going for...

On the one hand, up to 55 years in the Federal Gulag

On the other, conviction under either Article 159 (Swindling) or 160 (Embezzlement) of the Russian criminal code ... maximum sentence, 2 years (plus fines and asset recovery). Worst case scenario, they try him under Articles 272-274 (Computer Misuse offences) in which case he could get a maximum of 5 years.

He's also permanently immune from extradition once he's back in Russia because Russia doesn't do that, ever (the Constitution prohibits it).

Royal Bank of Scotland customers say digital services gone TITSUP

Lysenko

Re: Coincidentally....

Sampson House used to handle a lot of routing. At one time (I'm out of date) spiking it would have forced at least seven DCs to re-route ... though I have no idea if that involved retail traffic.

Lysenko

Coincidentally....

... (or not), there happens to be a power outage in SE1 at the moment which is the postcode area for Sampson House.

How bad can the new spying legislation be? Exhibit 1: it's called the USA Liberty Act

Lysenko

Yes, yes, but you would go down wrapped in your Gadsen flag muttering imprecations about "cold, dead hands" and they would rename Hayseed, Nebraska as "Thermopylae" in your honour and your name would live on through eternity as you whisper from the ageless stones and .... damn, sorry, I seem to have been mugged by a comic book...

Lysenko

10 Glocks won't help you if Uncle Sam decides to drone you.

Drones and missiles are expensive. Much cheaper to park a Vietnam era APC on the lawn. No American (legally) owns a weapon capable of defeating that so no American owns a weapon even slightly useful for "defending Liberty". Perfectly adequate for murdering police and civilians though, or (preferably) suicide.

Lysenko

Do they seriously think that giving these Constitutional Abridgement Acts newspeak names fools anyone? What am I saying? Of course they do ... and they're right. The Departments of Love and Peace managed finagle an act called PATRIOT (the first time I heard of it I assumed it was The Onion).

They can even get away with the obvious doublethink implicit in contending that metadata is simultaneously innocuous and an essential investigative resource. It cannot be both! If it were truly innocuous it would, by definition, be utterly useless and there would be no point in collecting it. How in the name of Zeus can the voters be so sanguine about evisceration of the 4th Amendment and yet get so agitated when it is pointed out that the Militia clause means the 2nd only provides for the National Guard to possess firearms? Do they seriously think that owning a Glock is a greater guarantee of liberty than shredding this sort of Orwellian legislation?! What am I saying? Of course they do...

Amazon, Azure, Google will eat all the IT. Google, let us be your cake fork, pleads Nutanix

Lysenko

Re: Big Three Blinkers

In a word, yes. Even the shills at Gartner admit that AliBaba is a bigger IaaS player than Google as this very organ recently reported.

It isn't restricted to cloud either: WeChat and QQ Mobile rival WhatsApp and FarceBorg Messenger for number of users (fewer, but same ball park) despite making no effort to market themselves in the "West" (it's "East" to them, obviously) and getting next to no press coverage as a result.

Russian spies used Kaspersky AV to hack NSA staffer, swipe exploit code – new claim

Lysenko

Re: The tag line

The first one is roughly analogous to: "If my Aunt were a man she would be my Uncle." and assorted other idioms puncturing excuses of the form: "We would have succeeded if not for [something absolutely fundamental]".

The second is an jab at foreigners misconceptions and misrepresentations of Russia, ironically referencing the image of a "towering, majestic Cranberry Tree" when such a thing is an absurdity since cranberries come from small bushes.

Lysenko

"The men and women of the US Intelligence Community are patriots;"

That's uncalled for. I have issues with some of the stuff they get up to, but labeling them all vicious scoundrels is going a bit too far.

Microsoft Edge shock: Browser opts for Apple WebKit, Google Blink

Lysenko

Re: Microsoft need to accept that they are not the only game in town anymore

How about being able to run SQL Server natively on macOS?

Somebody upthread mentioned rounding errors. macOS servers?? Now that's a real rounding error. I didn't even know such things existed until about a week ago when someone mentioned there may be a relict population clinging on in the US education sector. In any case, VMware Fusion already exists to deal with obscure edge cases like this (I'm assuming you were thinking of developers, not actually running a production DB in a Mac).

Splunk hits Oracle's Larry where it hurts: His failure to win America's Cup boat race

Lysenko

You didn't think they invented the relational database did you?

Codd only got as far as a book, System R was a research project and Ingres was essentially early open source. Leisure Suit read Codd, tried to copy System R (failed - couldn't reverse engineer enough of it) borrowed some Ingres concepts and then added his special sauce (commercial sales with Byzantine and aggressively enforced licensing).

I'm told "valid" Oracle based systems exist, but I've never actually seen one. Every Oracle system I've encountered (every. single. one.) would have been improved by canning Larry's cash extraction stent and replacing it with PostgreSQL, HANA or even MS SQL Server or DB2 in some cases (I'm only discussing cases where ACID is essential - NoSQL generally just abbreviates to "No").

HPE: Cloud Server WILL survive... we just need someone else to buy 'em

Lysenko

I wish Mystic Meg would just cut to the chase. She doesn't want to make anything or design anything or even deal with the messy business of "customers" ... she cares about nothing besides quarterly earnings.

She should sell everything, invest the resulting cash pile in Bonds/Gilts/Treasury Securities (maybe a real estate portfolio) and stop wasting everyone's time pretending to be a technology company.

Onwards to Valhalla: Java ain't dead yet and it's only getting bigger

Lysenko

Re: @HmmmYes

Objective-C, from NextStep-> OSX can hardly be called a a niche, can it?

In a word, yes. There are about 700 million iPhones out there. That's a niche. Why? Well, there are about 50 billion ARM processors, 12 billion PICs, 5 billion MIPS (I can't be bothered to look up x86) so that's 700M out of 67B ~= 1% (one percent). Calling that a niche is charitable - it's more of a rounding error.

Facebook, Google, Twitter are the shady bouncers of the web. They should be fired

Lysenko

Re: Err .... aren't you somewhat glossing over...

Remember the fun-and-games with the Swift Boat Veterans a few elections ago?

Yes, and I can see how you could challenge that, though probably not prevent it. However you can't prevent:

"Gangs of drug fueled ferals [sic] Polar Bear hunting in Houston!!!" or "BLM thugs playing the Knockout Game with residents of retirement community!!" or "PizzaGate!!!"

... and that sort of thing is unstoppable without repealing the 1st Amendment and fundamentally re-framing the parameters of freedom of speech.

A better target (IMO) would be to legislate away the "person hood" of corporations. That doesn't require a constitutional amendment and would at a stroke, boot huge quantities of corruption and bribery out of the system - which is, of course, why it won't happen. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas. What they do is deflect attention from the real issues (Koch Brothers, Goldman Sachs) onto scary monsters living under the bed.

Lysenko

Err .... aren't you somewhat glossing over...

Congress shall make no law ... ; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; ???

Yes, there is the "shouting fire in a theatre" issue, but it is settled law that Incitement to Racial Hatred and assorted other offences under the Discrimination and Race Relations Acts (if this were the UK) are Constitutionally protected speech in the USA. It doesn't say anything about "socially acceptable" speech or a "fair, balanced and accurate" press.

Obviously the Constitution only constrains the Federal Government, so FarceTwitGram+ can invent their own rules if they want to, but compelling them to do so runs face first into the 1st Amendment. You can argue that the SVR (FSB does domestic spying) isn't protected by the Constitution, but that is trivially easy to circumvent unless posting privileges are restricted to American citizens only (and even then, finding stooges wouldn't be hard). What you clearly cannot do is filter out information just because it is factually wrong or racist or anti-semitic or well .... This guy has had his own TV show for years!

Google finds 200m more people to advertise to in a single day

Lysenko

Google recently added eight new Indian languages to voice search, [snip] and Urdu joining Hindi.

When spoken (i.e. "voice search), Urdu and Hindi are dialects of the same language. Urdu is simply Hindi written with the Arabic alphabet instead of Devanagari. The same politicized nonsense occurs in Europe when the Serbian and Croatian dialects languages are discussed, and for much the same reasons.

Australia approves national database of everyone's mugshots

Lysenko

Clearly essential...

I mean when you have 25 million people crammed cheek by jowl into a country only twice the size of Western Europe (pop. ~= half a billion) then it is vital to keep a close eye on everyone because ... errr ... immigrants, terrorists, Ned Kelly ... errr ... sheep ... country is clearly full up ... where did I put my thorazine?

HPE server firmware update permanently bricks network adapters

Lysenko

Re: The good news...

In the old days I seem to remember that you would have a jumper on the PCB to prevent such mischief

In the old days SysAdmins usually knew what a jumper was. Many could even follow instructions like "pull up lines 5 and 36 with a 1k5 while applying power" and might even own soldering irons.

Mozilla extends, and ends, Firefox support for Windows XP and Vista

Lysenko

For the second time in 24 hours...

But not too dangerous for ... [snip] ... POS machines galore

WinXP Embedded and POSReady are not end of life and won't be until mid-2019.

Legacy clearout? Not all at once, surely. Keeping tech up to snuff in an SMB

Lysenko

Slightly off the main topic but...

Not that they all do the updates, mind you: I have an entertaining photo I took the other day of the Windows XP crash screen on a well-known retailer’s Point Of Sale terminal …

WinXP POSReady isn't EoL until mid-2019 so the fact that they're still using it in mid-2017 isn't really evidence of being "behind" with anything.

Nothing matters any more... Now hapless Equifax bags $7.5m IT contract with US taxmen

Lysenko

Re: Nothing matters any more...

Work started on York Minster Cathedral in the year 1220 and it was finally completed 1472 -

Since you picked that example, it is maybe appropriate to consider one of the reasons it took that long: the black death. Scoot back to 1350 and watching the news will bring you doom and gloom about roughly half the population of Europe being exterminated over the course of 5 years. Nothing in modern times comes even remotely close. Add both World Wars together and you get a body count in the same ball park, but given the greater population the mortality percentages are vastly lower.

What effect did death and destruction on that unimaginable scale have on the survival of humanity? None. It probably beefed up average immune system efficiency a bit and it certainly undermined the feudal system, but overall it wasn't even a scratch. Even the Cathedral eventually got finished.

Lysenko

Re: Nothing matters any more...

Read Darwin. "Survival of the Fittest" (best adapted) means there is are no such thing as "rights" in existential terms. Individuals and species have the power to survive or they don't. War, genocide, exploitation, murder, rape and slavery are tactics evaluated solely in terms of effectiveness in ensuring genetic continuity. A species would only be "better" than us if it had the capability to appropriate the resources we consume for itself - i.e. it would need a greater propensity for genocide than us.

In terms of human society rights and morals obviously exist, but it is an (arrogant) error to project that anthropocentric echo chamber onto "life" in general. The Human species will survive precisely because it is vicious, deadly and intelligent. That's very probably why we are the only apex predators with no other members in the same Genus - Neanderthals and Denisovans just weren't lethal enough to survive.

Lysenko

Re: "Totally did not insist"

... and somewhere, not a million miles from right in front of everyone, there is an (ex)CEO who should have been ensuring that they had a working CTO. If you're going to get paid 1000x more than people at the coal face then that comes with 1000x the personal responsibility. Heroic rewards can only be justified by heroic effort. If you don't fancy 120 hour working weeks with one vacation per decade then don't sign up for the job.

Lysenko

"We don't care that we're making decisions based on data gathered questionably, stored insecurely and demonstrably accessed by criminals."

The Income Reduction Service demonstrating once again the sort of breathtaking arrogance, contempt and lazy incompetence that goes hand in hand with giving any bureaucracy "guilty until proven innocent" powers.

Oracle VP: 'We want the next decade to be Java first, Java always'

Lysenko

Re: "Java [..] is the number-one programming language"

Java Cards run a very restricted subset of Java, but by all means include them and lets go with Oracle's marketing figure of 3 billion devices running Java? There are 50 billion ARMs out there, 94%+ of which obviously aren't running Java. That's just one architecture. Add in the 12 billion PICs, 5 billion MIPS, God knows how many x86 and Java/JVMs are clearly way below 5%.

The question is therefore what all those processors actually do run? I refer to the answer I gave some moments ago.

NB: Yes, a lot of early PICs will have been programmed directly in assembler. That doesn't shift the overall numbers in any material way.

Lysenko

Re: "Java [..] is the number-one programming language"

ARMs are not usually programmed in assembler any more than x86s are. Even PICs and MSP430s are mostly programmed in C these days.

Lysenko

Re: "Java [..] is the number-one programming language"

His argument, apparently, is because of the number of thingys that run it, essentially.

Even on that basis the argument is completely bogus. The number one programming language is C, end of discussion. There are probably enough washing machines and TV remote controls in the world to outnumber JVMs, and that's without taking into account that every JVM is itself a C/C++ program.

Microsoft shows off Windows 10 Second Li, er, Mixed Reality

Lysenko

Re: TIFKAM redux...

Most of us still use keyboards with key layouts that are a design solution to the problem of mechanical typewriters jamming up.

Most of us still use an alphabet designed for engraving epitaphs on rocks with a chisel. Steering wheels were borrowed from ships and haven't evolved in any meaningful way since they were first adopted (except for power assistance allowing them to get smaller).

Just because a solution is old and entrenched it does not necessarily follow that it needs a rethink, particularly when it is ubiquitous. One can argue that Kanji is a more efficient encoding scheme than the Latin alphabet but it won't make the slightest bit of difference. That is a solved problem. You can evolve fonts and over time maybe work in some pictograms like "emojis" and ";)", but "radical rethinking" is a counterproductive waste of time.

Lysenko

AR in an office .... VR is just too anti-social for the office

It's an artificial dichotomy really. VR is just AR with the augmentation dialled up to 100%. The potential to provide a fully re-skinned version of reality, transmogrifying your own PHB into the PHB cannot be overlooked or, indeed, resisted.

Lysenko

TIFKAM redux...

We didn't want to just build a new OS, we wanted to build a deeply human way of operating

Cars steered by joysticks again. Operating a PC is a solved problem and has been for decades just as operating a car has been a solved problem since the invention of the steering wheel. There are niche uses for other approaches and I'm sure all the VR stuff is brilliant for CounterStrike, but for 90% of purposes "innovative user interaction paradigms" simply obfuscate things. MicroWriter, Dragon Dictate, Eyeball Tracking ... they were all meant to revolutionize the way we use PCs and they all comprehensively failed because they were attempting the equivalent of inventing a new alphabet for English or (worse), devising Esperanto. Cars require steering wheels, PCs require keyboards and English requires the alphabet I'm using right now.

Oath-my-God: THREE! BILLION! Yahoo! accounts! hacked! in! 2013! – not! 'just!' 1bn!

Lysenko

Oath...

a profane or offensive expression used to express anger or other strong emotions.

An uncharacteristic outbreak of factual accuracy from the branding strategists...

MH370 final report: Aussies still don’t know where it crashed or why

Lysenko

Re: If you found the plane it wouldn't bring the people back.

I return to my second point: the wreckage would have disintegrated on impact and isn't going to be substantially recoverable even if the approximate point of impact is isolated. There also isn't the slightest chance of flight recorder beacons still being operational.

Finding ships is difficult enough and those are designed to maintain structural integrity in water and create significant magnetometer readings. A strewn field of shattered fragments, much of which which has some degree of buoyancy is a completely different proposition. You are essentially looking for the engines rather than the fuselage which are both much smaller and unlikely to tell you anything useful even if found.

Lysenko

Re: If you found the plane it wouldn't bring the people back.

But I still think it is a disgrace that the airline and governments concerned will not continue to fund the search for the wreckage, to allay all doubt.

Doubt about what? That they're all dead? There is no doubt about that. You can lose an aircraft in the middle of an ocean but you can't smuggle one into an air defence perimiter and on to an airport undetected and you're not going to be able to determine the cause of the crash even if you locate wreckage because it will be disintegrated and mostly irrecoverable. So, what doubt are you trying to resolve? The possibility that the plane was teleported out of the air by space aliens?

Nailing a cloud project without killing Bob boils down to not being a tool

Lysenko

Re: All well and good but...

I suggest studying how the Civil Service deal with such matters. For all the bad press they get, they are experts at neutralising clueless twits which is how the country managed to survive politicians. The most basic tool in the armoury (besides watching "Yes Minister") is to get everything in writing - particularly when you are being ordered to implement a "courageous" policy with huge attendant risks.

You wouldn't want the poor chap to be passed over for the credit after all, so make sure he signs (on paper) the document enumerating exactly what could go wrong and crediting him, personally, with the vision and fortitude to ignore the naysayers, laugh in the face of danger and pull the trigger.

Home Sec Amber Rudd: Yeah, I don't understand encryption. So what?

Lysenko

Next up ...

... physicists!! Aircraft keep crashing causing the deaths of hundreds of innocent travelers, including (think of the) children and physicists just callously sneer and flatly refuse to change G !! They cooked up the gravitational constant in the first place so they should damn well change it when democratically elected authorities tell them to!!

Oh, and anyone mentioning one time pads and the fact that a 128Gb thumb drive of random junk gives you a lifetime of absolutely uncrackable point to point encryption is publishing information likely to be useful to terrorists. You have been warned ....

Java EE 8 takes final bow under Oracle's wing: Here's what's new

Lysenko

Re: Java is still big

What, in your opinion, makes VS superior to the jetbrain IDEs?

@Wulfhaven

I should point out I don't use IntelliJ per se, I use Android Studio and PyCharm, which are both IntelliJ derivatives.

Visual Studio is far faster than JetBrains stuff (I wonder why!?) and integrates everything in one IDE rather than the weird feature discontinuities that appear between WebStorm, PyCharm and CLion. If you open an Angular 4 component or JSX in PyCharm there are some things that don't work as they would in WebStorm and it gets worse if you're working in C at the same time. IntelliSense works better than JetBrains equivalent (particularly for TypeScript), as does automatic on the fly reformatting, particularly of HTML. There are also more/superior resource handling tools and plugging in external compilers (e.g. NXP and TI toolchains) works more smoothly. What VS doesn't do is run on Linux or support Kotlin as effectively (unsurprisingly), so if I'm targeting Android or using a gcc toolchain I'll use JetBrains.

Mostly I'm working on Industrial Control (IoT to hipsters) so I'm tracing code/data from embedded microcontroller sensors (C/C++) through several consolidation and processing layers (Python/C#) to drawing graphs on screens (TypeScript/Kotlin) and I don't want to swap around between different IDEs.

Lysenko

Re: Java is still big

C/C++ are archaic rubbish....

... and are the languages Java Virtual Machines are written in, along with most key desktop applications like MS Office and PhotoShop all significant web browsers, database engines, web servers, operating systems, device drivers etc. etc. ad infinitum.

Java (more accurately, Kotlin) is great for developing Android apps and vertical LOB stuff for "Enterprises" but the closest it has ever come to mainstream PC software is probably Eclipse or IntelliJ which are both vastly inferior to Visual Studio. Oh, and to round it off - write me something in Java for an STM32 with 48k of RAM. I didn't think so.

Forget the 'simulated universe', say boffins, no simulator could hit the required scale

Lysenko

Re: So basically...

If the Universe is simulated the the laws of physics could be as well so entropy might be an artificial "problem". Once you allow the possibility of a simulation then the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle might just be an externally injected random number generator and entropy might be a deliberate inversion of a natural tendency towards greater organization.

Un-Delled SonicWall beefs up firewall to wrestle ransomware

Lysenko

Well at least they have a sense of humour...

The NSA 2650 firewall enables threat prevention....

Bad news! Astroboffins find the stuff of life in space for the first time

Lysenko

Re: Word Salad vs Gobbledegook

It means that Chloromethane can be synthesized by non-biogenic means (not news) and that this appears to occur more frequently in space than anticipated (news). Since there is plenty of UV light to drive the reaction and no shortage of Chlorine, that implies that there is plenty of Methanol/Methane around with no biological origin.