Posts by Tim Almond 255 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Oct 2008
I've not used it, but look at videos on using SqlMap and I am certain a 15 year old who is a bit into computing could have done it.
Like nearly all hacks, there's not some David Lightman level of hacking going on. It's nearly always someone leaving a port open or a SQL Injection attack. The idea that the government needs to protect incompetent twunts like Sony and TalkTalk is risible.
It's clear that her whole attitude is one of being slopey-shouldered about taking any responsibility. Her attitude to the hack not only is to view it as not her problem, that TalkTalk is the victim of a crime, but her interview on Newsnight had her pulling a load of whataboutery about how many other cyber attacks there were.
And it's not like this is Laura Ashley you're running. I might understand if someone selling soft furnishings seemed to be clueless about data, but data is your bread and butter at an ISP. You shouldn't even have any systems with SQL injection in such an organisation, because you should have figured out a mitigation strategy that can be applied globally (like using an ORM) and sometime in the past decade, that should have been a priority.
I'd love to know who does their IT. What's the odds it's some outfit that bid the lowest price stuffed full of guys from Bangalore straight out of college?
I still install IrfanView as my image viewer because despite certain other improvements, the developer has stuck to keeping it small and fast. It's something like a 2mb installer, and you click an image and *boom* it's there. You click using the built-in viewer in Windows, you're waiting a few seconds for it just to load.
The problem with abstraction is that you can just end up moving the problem and burying it deeper. Abstraction costs in many ways that people don't understand, and most people do not think too hard about the risks and costs of massive levels of abstraction.
I've decided that I'm going to rewrite my personal website away from Wordpress. Because at this point, it's just this massive, unmanagable beast. I added a new page to my site and noticed it appeared at the end of the menus. So, I moved it in the menu editor. And it didn't move. Now, where's the problem with this? In the theme I'm using? Server side? Client side? In Wordpress? So, fixing it means digging through a load of PHP or JS code to find the answer. In that time, and all the times in future that I might need to do that, maybe it'd just be better to rewrite it as some .htm pages and some .inc files for the headers.
Over 20 years ago, I built a piece of code that showed a customer's summary in a place I was working. And I know from someone still working there that it's still used. It's had a few changes because of bugs and enhancements, but it's still there. As I built it as a separate function from the old mainframe screen, someone stuck a different thing in front of that function and it now produces XML and that gets used by the website. It's been through so many bits of bug fixing and enhancement that all their stuff just works. Throwing it away, when it works, even with higher costs of enhancement would be nuts. You'd be starting from the same place that I was at 20 years ago, and I promise you that it would have more bugs than the current version.
Almost everything can just be improved upon today. If you've got an old VB6 system, you might want to rewrite it because of getting hold of people or the software, but I know places running on code based on .net 2.0 and they do so because it just works. I know a framing shop that run a DOS application for calculating frame sizes. Because it does the job.
Reading this chap's bio, it seems he's never actually worked in corporate IT.
The only reason for dealing with this is to discourage others from doing the same and spending the whole defence budget on strippers. In reality, $96K is "who cares" money in government. I can think of far worse ways that governments spend far more than that. What did it cost us to arm and train some anti-Assad rebels in Syria who just handed over their gear to ISIS at the first opportunity?
"There are films I've bought on DVD (and a couple on Blu-ray) that have only been watched once and I wonder if it's worth it"
Rent first time, unless you can't get it on rental. The cost of an extra £3 for 10% of your films that you want to watch again is much cheaper than £15 on 100% of your films, 90% of which you could have spent £3 on. And by the time you want to see them again, they'll have fallen from £15 to £7 anyway.
You have to look at Amazon or Netflix like a restaurant. You turn up, you get some stuff to eat the chef offers you. He'll probably tell you to clear off if you ask for prawn cocktail and crepe suzette if they aren't on the menu. But as long as they have caesar salad or waffles, you'll be happy, you'll find something to eat. No Hot Fuzz, but you can get Scott Pilgrim vs the World on Amazon. No Throne of Blood, but you can watch Seven Samurai.
One tip: 2nd hand DVDs and BDs on Amazon. I got the 2nd hand blu ray of Die Hard for
Right now, it's a $30K car with all sorts of problems about range and charging. Fancy getting the family down to Provence? It's about 600 miles. Driving legally, you can do it in a long day from Calais with petrol stops and hour breaks every few hours. With a Tesla? You'll be stopping after 265 miles. For 9 hours to recharge. And then stopping after another 265 miles. For 9 hours to recharge.
Does this add up? How many cab fares do you have to sell to make a decent ROI on $41bn? At 5% that would be $2bn a year, and they only get 20%, so they have to sell $10bn in taxi fares, or say, 600 million trips, and that's after all the costs of running it. And assumes no competitors come along.
How big is the global market?
The smart bit is kept separate. I only bought my Smart TV because it was the cheapest 32" Samsung TV with 3 HDMIs. The smart TV is nice. But I'm under no illusion about eternal support. At some point, Samsung will switch that off, and it'll be a dumb screen. And I'll need a Fire stick or an Amazon-enabled blu-ray player for £50.
"Currys call it 'enhancing the customer experience"
I cannot understand how the Dixons group stays in business. I've got decades of stories of bad experiences from friends and co-workers. I've helped a few dodge the bullet of their upselling after they didn't immediately buy and asked my advice (found them a PC from Dell that did what they needed at half the price). I know people who put their laptop in for repair and were still waiting for it a few months later. Yet somehow, the effect doesn't seem to spread and people still seem to shop there even though their friends had a bad time.
£50 for an HDMI? I remember Comet trying to sell a friend a gold-plated SCART lead for £30 in the early 2000s. Tip: Poundland.
"AWS's Glacier storage starts at $0.0100 per GB. Then you add to this uploads and transfers to different AWS regions and out of AWS to the “internet”. Upload and retrieval requests start at $0.050 per 1,000 requests and transfers between regions at $0.020 per GB.
Oracle charges for storage plus data transfer: $0.026 a month per GB for the first TB and free for the first GB per month, going up to $0.120 per GB a month."
Can anyone explain to me how Oracle are 10 times cheaper?
I'm running at about 7mbps at home and I've tried monitoring it and the only time I hit it is when downloading large games off Steam or things from MSDN subscription.
If you're watching a movie, it's 2mbps. If you've got 20mbps, it's still 2mbps. Websites are nicer, but it's not exactly a deal breaker to get a webpage in 3 seconds instead of 1.
The biggest benefit of fibre seems to be that upload speeds go up from about 400kbps to 1mbps.
I think it was Tony Benn who opined, "if we could have full employment killing Germans (during the war), why can't we have full employment teaching/healing/mending roads etc., etc."
Why not indeed?
Which shows just what a monumental cretin Tony Benn was. We had to have everyone working hard because we were fighting a war and trying to keep people alive. And it was a miserable existence of rationing and curfews and limited opportunities.
So, here's a challenge. As Benn is no longer with us, perhaps you can answer it: show me a country that aimed for full employment that doesn't have people and businesses trying to get the hell out of it.
"The Rochester area had Xerox and Kodak doing quite well. The whole WNY economy was doing well.
Then came the various "Trade Agreements" that gutted these good paying middle class and entry level jobs and sent them out of the county. My job at GM went "south" as did many others and the plants have long since been mothballed or demolished. In their infinite wisdom, they tax empty facilities at the same rate as occupied facilities here. If there is no building on the property then the taxes are greatly reduced, therefore they demolish empty facilities rather than try to find new occupants. This effectively prevents new companies from filling in where the old ones were."
1. People don't need photocopiers, and if you're going to invent the modern computer (Xerox PARC) don't give it away. Jobs was on record as saying that Xerox could have been IBM.
2. Anyone want Kodak around? Technology killed them. I can take a thousand photographs at nearly zero cost. This is better.
3. Your job at GM went south because GM made lousy cars. Toyota and Honda came along and rightfully ate their lunch.
For simple, text and graphics apps, people are already tooled and schooled in Phonegap. Which will already deploy to a bunch of targets. If you're doing games, you're probably already using Unity. Does Swift work with PC, Xbox One, Wii U, PS4? So, who's going to go through wanting multiple codebases for all of those platforms?
"There are plenty of people who would love to stream Netflix at 4K"
You could stream movies in 4K on dial-up. You wouldn't be able to tell what was going on as the image quality would be so poor, but it would be a 4K image.
Companies like Amazon and Netflix already can't stream at blu-ray quality, which is a sharp, detailed, 2K image. "HD streaming" is little better than upscaled DVD quality. And that's because that's already a bandwidth hog. Some blu-ray players can tell you the bit rate of data transfer, and it's typically anywhere from 20mbps to 35mbps.
You're honestly comparing a public healthcare system with Homes Under the Hammer? You really think we should view The Voice as a public good, without which we would feel like a poorer and less decent society? You really feel we need to imprison people for not opting for Masterchef and watching The IT Crowd instead?
You think it's excellent value for money? I think the works of Mark E Smith are excellent value for money. Why doesn't everyone subsidise my purchase of the new CD by The Fall?
It's the lack of anything much that counts as "must-see"/"must-hear". I'm not sure they were much better when I was a kid, but at least there was the odd nugget in there. The last thing I enjoyed on the BBC was episodes, and that's a show that was created by a couple of Americans and co-produced with the BBC.
I've set more stuff on Five than I have on the BBC on my PVR this year.
"and how many programs do Sky actually make?"
Who cares? Starbucks aren't growing coffee beans in Colombia. Tesco isn't milking cows. My local shoe shop doesn't have a cobbler out the back.
All that matters is whether people like what they give people, and you know, there seems to be a lot more love for Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire than Tumble.
Explain to me the morality of people facing threat of imprisonment because they don't want to pay for Strictly while watching the X-Factor.
Whether you think it's good value or not is irrelevant. Should we be threatening people with imprisonment for the equivalent of buying Pepsi without throwing some money at Coca-Cola?
There's a few things that the BBC does that genuinely count as "public goods", things that the market won't provide. Things we'd like people without money to have, like CBeebies to help educate their under-5s. In which case, should we expect the poor to pay for that? Or should richer people be paying for it.
And personally, I find little worth watching or listening to. Comedy has been reduced to cheap panel shows, midweek broadcasting has been stuffed with cookery shows and soap operas. Other than Episodes (an American co-production), Parks and Rec (American), QI and Only Connect, most of their output is very average. It all has high production values, but the content is generally pretty weak.
The problem with 3D printing is that a lot of people looked at the ubiquity of printing and assumed that 3d printing would be a thing. But normal printing is very flexible, from photographs to hotel reservations to invoices and reports.
I need some wood cut to particular dimensions. Am I going to spend thousands on machine to cut that? Well, if it's my job, but if it's a one-off, I'm going to upload the designs and pay someone to laser cut it and post it to me. That's why I'm quite sceptical about this being a big selling item.
It's worse than that. It isn't even a "licensed Mac". Try uploading to the app store with an old mac, like one running Snow Leopard. Application Loader won't run on it, the latest XCode won't run on it. And you can't upgrade it past Snow Leopard because reasons. Then there's Apple's gatekeeping rules including "not useful" (sorry, not your decision).
I did a small app in Phonegap and we've dropped iOS. Android? Completely different experience. £30 to sign-up for life. Develop on anything. Make it look how you like. Don't include malware or porn but beyond that, it's your app.
We pretty much decided that it wasn't worth it and so are only doing Android.
"But the programme is very negative about that language, almost as if it’s a bit too easy after the mathematical basis of Fortran."
That's the whole point - you want languages and tools that make Getting Stuff Done as quick and reliable as possible. COBOL feels out of date today, but the reason it ran millions of lines of code in industry is that it was a really easy language for data processing.
As for the Raspberry Pi, I've yet to hear of anyone learning programming with one. More than anything they seem to get used as media servers. And if you want to teach your kids to program, you've already got a PC, download Notepad++ and teach them Javascript and then move them on to Python, PHP or C# later.
Apple are just awful in terms of support.
I need to build a Phonegap app. So, I acquire an old Mac Mini off a mate. Install Snow Leopard, a 3 year old OS, and it can't install the latest XCode. And I also can't upgrade the machine to Mavericks, either.
By comparison: the latest Visual Studio will run on XP, a 14 year old OS. Yes, it'll probably run like a dog on an old XP machine, but you should have that option.
My answer to "do you know agile?" is "what do you mean by agile?".
It's a meaningless buzzword, covering everything from well-managed, reasonably well-specified solutions with rapid prototyping and rapid releases and a strong emphasis on automated unit testing, to "throw it live and hope".
The thing this clearly failed on, one of the most valuable aspects of agile, is rapid prototyping. One of the drivers of agile over waterfall is rapid prototyping - the users get to see the system as early as possible and continue to be involved during the development stage. And that's the real end users, not some bureaucrat, but the poor sods that have to use your digital disaster.
But, hey, it's not their money. No-one will get fired for this.
I'm not much of a Jobs fan, but I think his talent was having a customer's perspective, and not letting things out of the door that weren't good for customers. Both of these products aren't.
Apple Keynotes have always been a lot of marketing hype, but at least the products generally delivered for their customers. When I'm abroad, I charge my laptop in a hotel room, and have my phone charging off the USB cable. The solution for Apple users to that now is to have 2 chargers - one for your iPhone and one for your Mac. Or a £65 box to carry as well as your Mac. Maybe Apple users will just accept that, but I think a lot of people might think that slightly bigger laptop, but with ports is better.
Whatever else I think of Jobs, he wasn't a me-too person. Smartwatches are, from what I can tell, gimmicks. And gimmicks don't do your company reputation good. It might be that what you sold someone was what they asked for, but if they don't derive value, they'll feel cheated.
"The critical fact is, there is no one on earth that can reliable predict which one out of the 5 will succeed and which 4 will fail. "
That's not the way it works. It's more about risk assessment - how much are we investing, what do we think we are likely to get from it, and best/worst case estimates. Quentin Tarantino makes a lot more films than Terry Gilliam because Quentin Tarantino generally has hits and Terry Gilliam doesn't. You might lose your shirt on the next QT film, and Gilliam might make another Time Bandits, but the information you have is that QT is probably a better place to put your money.
"Football is NOT a 'market' in a traditional sense because fans are 'captive' to their team and would not be paying to buy, for example, a replica shirt of a rival team."
But you could not choose to go to football, not bother with it much, and not buy a replica team.
I'm not much of a fan, but I used to go and see Northampton Town play. then the terraces disappeared, prices went up, and I stopped enjoying it so much. I still keep an eye on what they're doing, but I'd rather spend my money going to the pictures or on a new PC game. An evening seeing Tosca is cheaper, and you get a bar at half-time.
Not seen either, but from what I've heard, these films are not about nerds, they're just about a character pushed into a standard Hollywood (and more specifically Oscar-friendly) narrative.
The BBC made a decent film about Hawking called, Hawking, about 10 years ago, that is a mix of the man and his work, with some stuff in there about the creation of the universe, big bang and enough to make anyone who was curious to delve into the work of people like Penzias and Wilson.
The Oscars overlooked the really good nerd movie of the year, Interstellar, a movie people will be watching long after most of the Oscar bait that gets nominated.
You don't get this shit with Apple because you pay a minimum of £749 for a laptop, and at that price, there's plenty of profit margin. If Apple tried to sell a £300 laptop, they'd be stuffing crapware on it too.
It's really a problem that infests so much of life, that people buy on price rather than value. You can get a £379 Thinkpad Edge from Lenovo and at worst you can describe the pre-installed stuff as "maybe useful", like an Office trial, or a copy of Picasa. And they're solid machines. But a lot of people will look at that next to a £239 Dell Inspiron and go for the Dell.
"Next time somebody has a billion to spend on "green" energy, could somebody at least work out where in the world it could be most effectively spent? Please. If the available money isn't spent efficiently, then we might run out of money having barely kept up with growth."
There's a group called the Copenhagen Consensus that does precisely that. And their outcome was that with $75bn to spend, things like adding micronutrients to poor people's diets (eg iron supplements), malaria treatment, immunisation, TB treatment all come far above climate change.
Take a look at Google Play. I've bought movies on my phone and streamed them via Chromecast to a TV and they were fine (only a 20" TV, haven't tested it on a larger one). Also offline/online tablet watching.
Amazon don't just do packages. You can also rent films (not sure if you can without the package).
There's also Wuaki, but their terms aren't as good as Google. You only get the film for 2 days, where Google give you 30 days to watch, and then you have to watch within 2 days. And their "buy" are actually "rent for 3 years".
Sky store is fine, but the range is quite limited.
There's also Knowhow, who I haven't tried on principle as it's run by Dixons/Currys.
And if you like arthouse stuff, there's Curzon Home Cinema, although I'm personally impressed with the range on Blinkbox.
I've bought almost nothing from Blinkbox (or anyone else) for that reason. I bought The Raid because it was little more than a rental price (and it's highly rewatchable), but you're dependant on others with streaming. If Talk Talk bring the shutters down on the service because they can't make it work, what happens to your film library?
Plus, blu-rays are cheaper than buying HD streams, better quality and have a load of extras.
That said, I've enjoyed Blinkbox rentals. Tesco made a service that for me was better than Amazon Instant, and I hope that Talk Talk keep it as good, but they hardly have a good reputation for internet.
I can't really get that worked up about the abuses they found. I'd rather do what they're doing than work in a coal mine. They had a worker who was told they had to work a couple of 7 day weeks, someone said he was tired after his 16 day shift and someone else fell asleep on a break in his shift. I've heard worse stories about the video game industry.
In my experience, young men (especially young men living away from home) will take every bit of paid work you throw at them. And really, if you hate it, leave. This is pretty far from the worst job in China and there's plenty of people breaking their backs in paddy fields that will take the job.
But it's not about whether something has doubled in efficiency, it's about how useful that doubling is. What does that actually equate to in terms of the economic savings to passengers? How does that compare to say, the difference between the 1950s and the 1970s when in the 1950s, passengers were having to stop off in Newfoundland and Ireland for fuel and it took around 20 hours?
It's like say, DVD vs Blu-Ray. Everyone switched to DVD because it was so much nicer to watch, cut down storage, didn't break so easily. But most people I know haven't upgraded to Blu-Ray yet. It's nicer, but not so much that they care much about spending money for the extra resolution.
Of course, if people had then died, he'd have been complaining that NATS had been irresponsible.
In the grand scheme of government screwing up, this hardly even registers with me. I've had delays of a couple of hours waiting for a train and no-one at the station seemed particularly bothered.
A huge amount of offshoring is because companies struggle to get people.
I'm not sure what this maths initiative is designed to achieve. More teachers doesn't mean more coders.
What we really need is a respected coder's certificate.Something that you can go to an employer and say "look, I can build code". A year's course in a local technical college - learn the fundamentals of computer science, how to code in a modern OO language like Python or Java, how a relational DB works, and then build a CRUD website that is both marked, and can be viewed by prospective employers. Something kids leaving school at either 16 or 18 can do.
And no, that doesn't cover all computing needs. I'd still need to take a Java guy and get him to convert to C#, to learn jQuery and AJAX. But at least I'd know he understood things like data structures and OO coding, which are a springboard to almost all other software development.
There's nothing really wrong with them, but I'm rather dubious about certs without experience. I've met people with a few years of SQL and the certs and they're very good. And the certs may mean they cover stuff they don't normally and broaden their experience.
But a load of MCSEs just book learn.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
