* Posts by Ken Rennoldson

28 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Feb 2007

Postgres pioneer Michael Stonebraker promises to upend the database once more

Ken Rennoldson

Re: Stop day dreaming - get back to work

That's not a bad point as there are two issues that need to be resolved, state and identity. Do they resolve into a single problem?

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Ken Rennoldson

The size of the New York Fraud Trial penalty forces Donald Trump to accept the position of Head of Ethics at X, working with Liz Truss as Head of Forecasting. The resultant reality distortion field is then applied to Tesla cars rendering them invisible to speed cameras and kick-starting the Eco-Boy Racer market.

Local governments aren't businesses – so why are they force-fed business software?

Ken Rennoldson

Re this comment "But freed of commercial secrecy and competitive distrust, state agencies are free to talk to each other and build ideas together – in fact, that's essential. ", there is a precedent for that. National Statistics organisations (such as the ONS in the UK) tend to have unique requirements looked at nationally, but a lot of commonality with each other internationally. So there is a lot of collaboration on standards setting and sharing of open source material.

The challenge for local government is finding ways to promote that collaboration and turn it into implemented solutions in what is frankly a very cash constrained environment.

The UK's bad encryption law can't withstand global contempt

Ken Rennoldson

Re: Does this mean the browser?

That is a fair point and of course the likes of WhatsApp make the point they can't see what is in the traffic. But depending on how the legislation is worded/interpreted, it could be taken to mean all HTTPS traffic has to be provided with a back door for the Gov (& hence the whole damn world).

We know this legislation doesn't make sense. That doesn't mean the consequences can't be even worse than we fear.

Ken Rennoldson

Does this mean the browser?

If it does mean the browser and HTTPS is blocked ('cos it's end to end amiright) then as a nation we are doomed.

Frankly, it is equal to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

Ken Rennoldson

Re: I

Of course it doesn't need AI to think you're dead:

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/mar/07/barclays-dead-pension-bank-account-phone-energy

But it does add to the potential for mistakes like this - with severe consequences - to happen.

Save $7 million on cloud by spending $600k on servers, says 37Signals' David Heinemeier Hansson

Ken Rennoldson

Re: I

From a development point of view cloud is much simpler. Need a new development sandbox - run the Terraform script (other infrastructure scripting languages are available). Need a message queue, or an RDBMS, or an in-memory database. A few clicks and they are there. OK making such things production ready is more work, but it really improves developer productivity.

If you have a stable environment without much in the way of development, then that's a different scenario. But from where I am, cloud is a big enabler because of the services on offer. It's not all about the tin.

Computers cost money. We only make them more expensive by trying to manage them ourselves

Ken Rennoldson

Re: Overpromising

The answer is figuring out at the start how you walk away from the contract. And some organisations will be better at that than others. Key is ensuring there is as little data held locally as possible - Dropbox, OneDrive etc will go along way here. So if replacing an individual laptop is as simple as sending out a new one, changing contracts becomes easier.

But then I'm writing from the UK - not NZ and I can appreciate the local market may not work like that.

I'm diabetic. I'd rather risk my shared health data being stolen than a double amputation

Ken Rennoldson

Re: Respectfully

There is a point about who the data goes to. As one respondent put it: Universities - good, Insurance Companies - DoublePlusUngood (I paraphrase a tad!).

So forced sharing with folk who are interested (and can only be interested) in it as bulk, anonymous data is I think justifiable. But it must be kept out of the hands of anyone with an interest in de-identifying it and would very happy for swingeing fines to fall on organisations that did that - or obtained the results. Such as insurance companies, employers etc. Not sure about which side of the fence I would put big pharma, perhaps I would be cautious and start them off on the wrong side.

I'm not saying there aren't flaws in this argument, but could there be a middle way through here?

How not to train your Dragon: What happens when you teach an AI game sex-abuse stories then blame players

Ken Rennoldson

Re: I

Seriously, can you imagine trying to explain to the police that you weren't interested in Child Porn? And trying to explain how it appears that you are? Suppose the ML moved on to generating images based on the text. This article raises some pretty fundamental issues.

Chocolate beer barred from sale after child mistakes it for chocolate milk

Ken Rennoldson

I'm not a fan of the overly sweet stuff, but Youngs Double Chocolate Stout hits the spot. A vanila note to the stout without being sweet or overpowering. I've tried a few where the brewer has turned the dial to 11 and the result is only usable in cooking. Or for emptying a pub if that's all you're serving...

Visual Basic 6 returns: You've been a good developer all year. You have social distanced, you have helped your mom. Here's your reward

Ken Rennoldson

Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure...

UK.gov wants mobile makers to declare death dates for their new devices from launch

Ken Rennoldson

Just a mo but 'Gov-backed consumer org Which?' is a tad wrong isn't it? Thought they were independent.

UK carriers open their wallets as regulator Ofcom doles out more slabs of 5G spectrum

Ken Rennoldson
Happy

Another Reg Standard?

Is there a case for adding Test and Trace to the Reg Standards. Either directly in the Money Category or create a new "Waste of Money" category. So a Dominic Cummings pay rise would be about 0.0000013 of a Test and Trace.

For every disastrous rebrand, there is an IT person trying to steer away from the precipice

Ken Rennoldson

Of course there was the Pick operating system developed by Dick Pick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system

Ken Rennoldson

Re: I

I still remember the typo in the company advert for a new Anal/Prod to joint the team....

As hospital-based infections set to rise, best not change the vendor behind the system that tracks them, hm?

Ken Rennoldson
Go

Re: I

Ordinarily I would agree, but even if it was easy to move from, right here and now with Covid I would not take that chance. It's not about changing software. It's about the people who use it and changing the way they work. At some point that will be exactly the right thing to do, but if what is in place is working well right now and the NHS is short staffed - why make life harder than it needs to be?

It's National Cream Tea Day and this time we end the age-old debate once and for all: How do you eat yours?

Ken Rennoldson

Both are wrong. All good fresh scone needs is butter. If it's not a good fresh scone, feel free to put lipstick on the pig!

Morrisons tells top court it's not liable for staffer who nicked payroll data of 100,000 employees

Ken Rennoldson
FAIL

Re: Depends if decent efforts at data security made by Morrisons

I'm with you on this. The risk of people doing bad things is part of any decent organisations concerns and steps should be put in place to mitigate it. As always there's a trade off between oppression/bureaucracy/trust etc. But locking down USB ports and monitoring for excessive data transfers seems basic to me.

I bet they protect against staff pinching stock!

Dutch bicycle company pretends to be television company

Ken Rennoldson

Fishtanks

A story from many years back was a fishtank company having a similar delivery problem, no matter what packaging they used. Their answer - no packaging at all a breakages disappeared to almost nothing.

Ex-Microsoft craft ale buffs rattle tankard for desktop brewery

Ken Rennoldson
Coat

So the new term for Brewers Droop is Microsoft....

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Ken Rennoldson

Peeple can't slag you off in VR son.

Ken Rennoldson

You mean Jeremy Corbyn really is Labour leader?

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Ken Rennoldson
Coat

JC, phone home

APPLE set to Air PLUS-SIZED iPAD – claims mag

Ken Rennoldson
Coat

Roast Pork....

... with Apple Sauce!

G-Wiz electro-car fracas leaves Top Gear blubbing

Ken Rennoldson

If you really want to cut down on emissions...

... fix a six inch spike to the centre of every steering wheel. Speeds (& hence emissions) would drop just a tad. And wouldn't all the drivers become courteous!

Frank plots US Internet gambling ban repeal

Ken Rennoldson

What are the odds...

...on getting the bill through? Anyone running a book on it?

Vague and ambiguous use cases

Ken Rennoldson

Misuse of Use Cases

I wouldn't dream of giving a developer either of the two examples given to work from. I would expect the use case to evolve from type 1 to type 2 - but for the testers , not the developers. the developers would be working with sequence diagrams, class models and possibly state diagrams specifying with much greater precision the required functionality. The type 1 use case remains though, as a non-technical view of how the system works.