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* Posts by JLV

2252 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013

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Yes! Pack your bags! Blossoming planetary system strikingly similar to ours found by boffins

JLV
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Re: Faster than light not needed?

Coincidentally 1g x 1 year => ~ light speed

365 * 24 * 3600 * 10 = 315 360 000 ie 300000 k/s

The “little fuel” bit leaves me puzzled. Even assuming very high efficiency you need to get your ship’s mass + its fuel to that speed with additional relativistic mass effects (not sure the relation of mass effect to time dilation coefficients). That’s a lot of energy, I think some propose antimatter drives but you still have to produce that antimatter. Then you need to decelerate your way in, more fuel.

Windows will be secure before we can even get to Alpha Centauri, 100x nearer.

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Q&A: Crypto-guru Bruce Schneier on teaching tech to lawmakers, plus privacy failures – and a call to techies to act

JLV
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Re: Bruce telling it like it is!

>>>They can force the companies they work for to abandon lucrative US military contracts<<<

Yes, but China and US arms sales are easy ethics brownie points for an employee of FB or Google*. Slurping up data is more easily rationalized to be not evil and is also sending fat paycheques and stock options one’s way. Plus, in certain circles, data is their dream and birthright. Wanna bet they’re not going to saw off their own branch?

* wake me up when employees at Northrop rebel against selling jets to Prince Mohammed Ben Saw-dissidents-to-pieces.

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Forget that rare-earth element crunch – we can now just extract them from industrial waste

JLV
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Re: mildly radioactive?

what would be really scary is if a bacteria was bitten by a radioactive spider!

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JLV
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Re: REEs, as the name suggests, are difficult to find and mine

This, essentially economic, phenomenon isn’t uncommon. Lithium and titanium, as elements, are also pretty abundant but hard to isolate and/or process into useable feedstock.

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Year 1 of GDPR: Over 200,000 cases reported, firms fined €56 meeelli... Oh, that's mostly Google

JLV
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Black Helicopters

>All power to the French authorities.

Faites attention à ce que vous voulez, car vous l'aurez

ok, maybe in _this_ case...

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Yelp-for-MAGAs app maker is warned there are holes in its code. Does it A. Just fix the problem, or B. Threaten to call the FBI, too?

JLV
FAIL

Given the context, why am I not surprised at the utter stupidity on display?

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Skype for Web arrives to bring the world together. As long as the world is on Chrome and... Edge?

JLV
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Re: Edge?

I have a friend of a friend who does.

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JLV
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With a twist though:

Small company, lets call it S, with limited revenue is bought by big company 1 for an ungodly amount of $$$$$$.

Many question the spend and rational.

Eventually, big write off at company 1.

Trusting in the adage that one is born every minute, company 1 finds company 2, known for having more cash than brains and its desperation to diversify.

Company 2 buys the unloved service, for boatloads of $$$, albeit less than the first purchase, and brings to bear its well-known Muck-it-up skills. That’s where we are at.

Future? Well, company 2 is also known for a tendency to throw its toys away when not many kids play with them. Or when new shiny has caught its attention. Or when it, not infrequently, it has sufficiently mucked up the product. It’s made kids all over loath to trust company 2 new toys...

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Liz Warren: I'll smash up Amazon, Google, and Facebook – if you elect me to the White House

JLV

I hope either the Dems pick an electable platform and candidate. Or the Reps jettison MagaMan. The world really can’t take 4 more years of that $hithead. Literally, as in we really need to get emissions under control.

Re. Warren’s particular position here I find it a mixed bag. Data privacy could be achieved by GDPR like means rather than government management of companies. But I find Amazon the most worrisome long term. A continent with one megacorp handling all consumer retail is pretty dystopian so Sherman Act bears consideration. Mind you, FB n Google might also be blocked from future acquisitions in their fields of dominance.

But it’s got to be realistic economic planning, not something that wins primaries and fizzles out come Nov next year.

oh, and about the Cato Institute? read their position on the buffoon’s wall

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/why-wall-wont-work

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Tech security at Equifax was so diabolical, senators want to pass US laws making its incompetence illegal

JLV

Outrageous!

>legislation that establishes a national uniform standard requiring private entities that collect and store PII [personally identifiable information] to take reasonable and appropriate steps to prevent cyber-attacks and data breaches

This type of governmental overreach and overregulation is what’s KASA (Keeping America Small, Always). Credit scoring companies bring a much-appreciated vital service to the public and self-regulation is best at promoting the continuing innovation that is vital to developing cross-sector financial synergies. A vote for this is a vote for China and the hippy next door.

Besides, what are you going to do? Jail us? For not looking after some pretty basic data on just a few people that fully consented to being in our systems. What’s going to happen to those poor little folk? They’re going to be ID thefted, you say? Hah! They’ve probably put the same data on Facebook anyway.

If a fine must be levied, purely for appearance sake, it should be 100M $ One Million Dollars!!!

Our campaign contributions IT security specialists will contact your congressional staffs to establish the best practices for security theatre safeguarding the public interest.

Might we also suggest that credit reporting agencies be “regulated” by the FCC since the honorable Ajit Pai has, wisely, devolved telecom telecommunication information service oversight to the FTC? After all, we did our best to communicate private sensitive data to unknown external parties so that makes us telecommunication companies.

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You have the right to remain on-prem, but you should really head for the cloud, UK plod told

JLV
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Re: "But are they competent enough?"

Part of that, apologies for the politics, is, _IMHO_, directly linked to union membership. On one side, seniority is paramount there and there is no incentive for a worker to leave, one of the main ways folks acquire new skills: by varying jobs. On the other side, you can’t layoff an insufficiently or inappropriately skilled unionized employee and your pay scales may not allow retaining star employees.

In most cases, heavy public sector unionization is “just” an extra cost burden on tax payers. With IT, due to its ever-changing underpinnings, it’s a real barrier to having skills in-house.

P.s. just to be clear: I am not against unions in dangerous occupations or in industries where the employer/employee relationship tends to predatory employers. Neither remotely applies to the public sector.

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JLV
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Re: Seems the right call

> orange panda

Hey, show little bit of respect please.

Pandas have fur, not toupees.

Pandas eat a, not very balanced, diet of bamboo. Tweet-head, not very balanced, of burgers.

Pandas have a (too) chaste sex life. Buffoon never met a porn star he wouldn’t $hag.

Pandas are cute. Stormy’s already given her take on MagaMan’s looks.

Pandas’ coloring is subtle, compared to the UV’d One’s strange industrial glow.

Pandas are, comparatively, intellectually curious.

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Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster

JLV
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Re: Wow

I shave cuz mine comes out scraggly and uneven.

If the Taliban imposed Sharia (as Quebec, Wisconsin and Sarah Palin wisely sought to prevent) I would surely be shot for offending the faithful.

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JLV
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Re: We have surely reached peak beard.

You know there’s a beard bubble when your shoeshine boy has one.

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Armor Games admits all its users' deets slurped in database mega-hack as site moves to repair chink

JLV

something they got right though

>Thankfully, the data haul did not include first or last names, credit card data, addresses or phone numbers. But only because AG didn't hold that information in the database.

Whatever else they messed up, at least they got that right. If you don’t have it, you don’t need to protect it. A good reason to use external payment providers, IMHO.

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Prodigy dancer and vocalist Keith Flint found dead aged 49

JLV
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Re: Smack My Bitch Up

And you really felt the need to communicate that why again?

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JLV
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Unhappy

Re: Smack My Bitch Up

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/11/theresa_may_teresa_may_twitter_fail/

album: Experience.

Major bummer to start the day. RIP.

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It's not your imagination: Ticket scalper bots are flooding the internet according this 'ere study

JLV
Black Helicopters

Beware easy one-size-fits-all solutions

I often go to gigs where I’ve either picked up a ticket through Craigslist or I just buy one from someone at the door whose buddy can’t make it.

A strict CC-used-at-purchase policy would not work for me, nor the people offloading an unwanted ticket. These aren’t sold-out Ariana Grande (horrified shudder) $500 tix. They’re $60-70 tix for indie rock bands at 500 seat venues. Scalping? Not much, though I am sure the TicketMaster-run markup insider websites do their best to fleece us.

Solutions nuking the Ariana Grande or Kathy Perry scalpers need to avoid penalizing listeners of non-shite music.

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In hilariously petulant move, Apple shuts Texas stores and reopens them few miles down the road – for patent reasons

JLV
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Re: Perhaps an empty gesture

Yup. Venue shopping aint what it used to be:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TC_Heartland_LLC_v._Kraft_Foods_Group_Brands_LLC

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JLV
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Regardless of what Apple is up to, I find it rather strange to read, here of all places, an article in any way sympathetic to the troll-friendly juries of East Texas. This particular district having long promoted itself as a haven for some of the worst parasites in the patent troll ecosystem.

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Tech industry titans suddenly love internet privacy rules. Wanna know why? We'll tell you

JLV
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Re: laws of this nature need to be enacted by U.S. Congress

Guess states’ rights are only right when they’re the right rights, eh? Even for the right.

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Now you've read about the bonkers world of Elizabeth Holmes, own some Theranos history: Upstart's IT gear for sale

JLV
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yes, we miss those articles.

Can I also nominate Star Citizen for coverage? $250m of crowdfunding, 8 yrs, no game yet.

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JLV
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doubt that. the people whose $$$ she scammed are mostly well-connected and not black as well.

gotta give the appearance of probity. a few (richly deserving) examples of stern justice like her and Madoff avoid deeper scrutiny of things like:

- overpaid CEOs with all up-, no down-, sides in their pay packages

- financial advisors whose incentives - selling you products with high MERs - clash directly with your interests

- the overemphasis of financial companies as opposed to companies that actually make things or deliver services.

So, no, I’d bet she’s going down.

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JLV

Who else is getting ‘Orange is the new black’ vibes here? She’ll definitely improve her jail’s sartorial and attractiveness average.

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Linus Torvalds pulls pin, tosses in grenade: x86 won, forget about Arm in server CPUs, says Linux kernel supremo

JLV

interesting.

Nowhere near clever enough about hardware to opine about it. But, from working with SQL at an ANSI-SQL level, being forced to think beyond your particular underlying flavor actually is beneficial in terms of abstraction and code quality. If you're going to do cross/multi-platform, it behooves you to unleash the full fury of your integration tests on whatever system your dev team is NOT using. I've seen this happen before, wandering off your dev RDBMS for your QA RDBMS means a very low rate of platform-specific bugs. Doing QA on DEV platform => deadly.

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Chrome ad, content blockers beg Google: Don't execute our code! Wait, no, do execute our code – just don't kill us!

JLV
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Re: Why bother?

I agree, my main browser is Firefox and its RAM hogging has been a disgrace forever.

I find Vivaldi uses much less RAM than either Firefox or Chrome (tally up those per-PID RAM grabs of Chrome's, always instructive). Which is odd, considering Vivaldi's also a Chromium-based browser. Makes one wonder what Chrome uses all that RAM for, if it's not a built-in shortcoming of their engine.

(Disclaimer: was always a bit put off by hardcore Opera fans insisting theirs was the one true way. But Vivaldi's so far delivering rather well)

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JLV
Black Helicopters

This puts MS's decision to abandon Edge in a whole different light, especially if, as I understood it from this article, Google's push is about getting this into the Chromium, the open source precursor to Chrome, rather than limiting this cynical ploy to their Chrome implementation.

True, Edge and IE won't be mourned much, but monocultures, especially the likes emanating from Google (or FB) are not especially beneficial to individuals, companies or developers.

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JLV
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In other news, Mr. Wolf, in charge of lock manufacturing, isn’t keen on high strength locks being made available to Mr. Sheep, deeming them a potential risk in case of fire in the sheepfold.

Icon cuz.

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WWW = Woeful, er, winternet wendering? CERN browser rebuilt after 30 years barely recognizes modern web

JLV
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Re: Works fine...

+1 I agree with you that there is some truly awful CSS out there. And that the people who created that ebook need a new career (would streetsweeper be over their skill?).

But if we are to take the idea that digital documents are to replace paper ones, what are the non-CSS candidates to minutely specify display formatting? Postcript, Latex, PDF? The first 2 are not easy to wrap your head around (and have that pesky habit of embedding format into content). The 3rd (a wrapper around Postcript calls, wasn't it?) is a security mess. Oh, and it needs to allow for multiple display device sizes and capability.

By all means, call out tar and feather the offenders in the bad CSS gallery. But if someone wants to ban CSS, then I believe they ought to provide an alternative. And telling all of the rest of us to just go back to reading documents in ASCII form? Well, that's good and well for them to say, and they are welcome to that attitude. I resent it when they try to foist on me however. It's one thing to be a curmudgeon or a Luddite and jokingly, or seriously, spurn technological solutions used by others. It's another entirely to take one's rant seriously and try to impose one's views onto others. Never works well in our industry.

@JohnFen - CSS wasn't mean to replace <table> in its actual, correct, semantic use. But it was developed partially in response to the needs evidenced by pages using <table> extensively to position content that was not semantically cell-like in nature. Replacing a real table with CSS is daft (but can be done to an extent), doesn't mean CSS is overall a failure.

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JLV
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Re: Works fine...

So, I know it's fashionable hereabouts to criticize CSS and that my opinion will be as welcome as a Polish plumber at Jacob Rees-Mogg's fox-hunting shindig. But IMHO you are blaming bad workmanship on the hammers rather than on the carpenters.

I don't claim to code html by hand. I ain't no flannel&Birkenstock-wearing vegan hipster either and, though I never used punchcards, one of my college buddies did during his internship (at Raytheon, might explain Patriot's dud performance in Gulf War 1). My background is database and code generation. In my case, I introspect SQL table structures, generate html templates on the fly and then throw SELECTs into them to render data in nice little html tables. Add a column? Don't really care, the template will be regenerated and it will just work.

I've always been told how important it is to separate data from its representation and formatting. CSS allows me to do precisely that. For example I can class the appropriate <td> or <th> with a ".key" class indicating this fields is a key field for that (SQL) table. And the visual representation can be left to someone fluent in CSS. Table sizing and placement? Ditto.

Defining a formal formatting domain specific language is hard and, IMHO, CSS is mostly pretty successful at it. A lot of non-HTML programs allow user-defined formatting via... CSS because, well, it makes sense. That's not to say CSS's easy, that I am good at it or even that I would want to be.

I also notice that a lot of the newer website DO render with all JS turned off and that the days of Flash-only or JS-only abominations are receding (NoScript makes me well aware of those). More and more we are seeing progressive enhancement instead: view-only works just fine with JS turned off . One interesting trend is the use of static website generators to replace Wordpress and a large part of what enables this type of approach is being able to rely on CSS to precisely define what a site looks like.

Not everyone has adapted and a lot of web devs and designers are still building crap sites. On that we both agree. But the top of the crop _are_ impressive at working with their medium. Certainly they, and their stack, impress me a lot more than J2EE devs and their stack.

But, hey, if you want to insist on moving kids offa our lawns, that's cool by me too.

</rant>

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JLV
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Cue a certain commentard about NO 3D FLATSO AND NO STUPID JAVASCRIPT!!!

Seriously, that is an iconic piece of tech. Esp considering how many times folk before Sir Tim broke their teeth on hyperlinking concepts and overdesigned intellectual masturbations inspired by the original Vannevar Bush vision.

And even the rendering shortcomings need context: imagine forward-reading most other tech data formats 25 years and 4 versions ahead. Most software struggles at backward compatibility on past formats.

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Twilight of the sundials: Archaic timepiece dying out and millennials are to blame, reckons boffin

JLV
Trollface

four unambiguous numbers

How are 4 numbers unambiguous, absent the AM/PM qualifier? Or the, rare, sanity of 24 hour timekeeping? And don't get me started on the 11pm (11:59), 12 am (12:01), 1 am (1:01) “logic”.

https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-1752,00.html

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A once-in-a-lifetime Opportunity: NASA bids emotional farewell to its cocky, hardworking RC science car on Mars

JLV
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Re: Thanks Opportunity!

Speaking of xkcd, I’m probably the last person in the know, but:

https://xkcd.com/1928/

seems relevant, unexpected-positives-wise. might sound clumsy, so rephrasing: awesome.

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JLV

A good book about the fanatical level of engineering,detail and planning going into remote probes is

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01K3NA0C6

$$$, but might get lucky at your library. better-cheaper-faster is addressed and so is manned-vs-remote.

well-done and unpoliticized, Space is a magnificent endeavour and comparatively cheap. hats off to everyone involved.

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Hungover this morning? Thought 'beer before wine and you'll be fine'? Boffins prove old adage just isn't true

JLV
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Edit: on a Canadian Tylenol bottle warning says “may cause liver damage if: you take more than 3 or more alcoholic drinks every day”.

So... whatever on the “malarkey”, I really wouldn’t chance it. Keep in mind, the new warnings were resisted by its manufacturer and I assume they had studies justifying their resistance. You might be quoting one. Still got applied.

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JLV
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> malarkey

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracetamol_poisoning

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322813.php

https://www.healthline.com/health/pain-relief/acetaminophen-alcohol

they all say: little alcohol and tylenol => no problemo.

given the subject being discussed here, what do you think we’re talking quantity-wise, genius? i'm pretty sure alcohol warnings are currently on tylenol-only meds here in Canada.

Tylenol’s not my choice in general, no. I won’t avoid it if prescribed. But I also won’t use it as a boozing relief given this potential risk.

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JLV
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i wish :(

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JLV
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water + aspirin

don’t Tylenol - the active ingredient reacts badly with alcohol present and harms your liver, something pharma resisted warning about for years.

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Uncle Sam to its friends around the world: You can buy technology the easy way, or the Huawei

JLV

Good thing the Soviets were always shit at hardware and civilian tech, otherwise that would have been interesting.

This Huawei thing is weird in a way. Why all the fuss about one company if it’s the country you’re worried about? Do they want to limit spying? Limit Chinese encroachment on higher value tech? Send a message to Xi to start normalizing/rule-of-law-ing the way his country approaches IP? Play make-a-deal with bargaining chips? Get another casino license? Start a policy of China containment (because it could be perceived thst way)?

I don’t necessarily disagree that putting China on notice to somewhat behave is needed. But I’d feel a lot better if a more stable, huuugely more smart (genius is shooting way too high here), more consensus building POTUS was in charge. Obama’s pivot to the Pacific was somewhat clearer in intent, for example and even Dubya’d probably be an improvement over Trumpo in running international relations (imagine Trump in charge on 9/11, getting his cues from Ann Coulter and Fox n Friends).

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It's OK, everyone – Congress's smart-cookie Republicans have the answer to America's net neutrality quandary

JLV

i don’t understand the argument. net neutrality is all about the ISP not prioritizing different packets to a subscriber based on their origin.

it’s not about disallowing subscribers to pay more for higher bandwidth or lower latency. ie if Border Patrol needs higher speed Mexican webcams (doubtful in the first place) then net neutrality doesn’t stop them signing up for a higher tier service.

Who voted for these morons again?

p.s. though i don’t know the details “kids watching video means no telephone” is not necessarily true. QOS limits per application class might be allowed : i.e. “prioritize voice traffic over video”. but not “prioritize in-house VOIP over Skype”. anyone know about that?

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Reliable system was so reliable, no one noticed its licence had expired... until it was too late

JLV
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Re: Remember Y2K?

A buddy went to Tahiti to fix banking COBOL Y2Ks and never left :-)

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German competition watchdog tells Facebook to stop combining user data without consent

JLV

Excellent work, Germany. I don’t begrudge FB (which I don’t use) their existence, nor their advertising. But this obsessive snoopiness about activities happening outside of their core platform really has to go.

And while you’re at it it, the same arguments about forced agreement and power imbalances applies to Win 10 telemetry.

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London's Met police confess: We made just one successful collar in latest facial recog trial

JLV

Anyone else feel that ‘strong and stable’ as a slogan has a whiff of not entirely pleasant associations? Say 30s-ish. Not that I am making any real comparisons there, just seems like an unfortunate soundbite.

Fortunately, neither really applies.

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Apple solemnly agrees to pay France $570m in back taxes, turns to camera, gives us a wink

JLV
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Re: "mes amies"?

Oh, je n’accuserai meme pas l’extreme gauche de la stupidite des ami.e.s ;-)

https://english.stackexchange.com/a/55

notice the bit about the “long history of criticism”. People could still say that, 9 years ago. Now, you’d be hung for daring to voice displeasure at unnatural linguistic contortions to assuage the professionally outraged.

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JLV
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Re: It's not bullshit

You’re right, but the complex shell games around inter-subsidiary pricings have been around forever. I remember 3M France, in 1992 at a conference, getting, very gently, joshed at by _friendly_ businessmen that they deserved congratulations for not making any profits with their (large) French operations.

Im pro free market, against excessive taxation and pro free trade, but multinational companies really shouldn’t be able to game tax rates that blatantly. It’s not healthy in the long run and shenanigans like this is why losers like Trump or Tsipras get elected.

So, yes, close those loopholes.

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I won't bother hunting and reporting more Sony zero-days, because all I'd get is a lousy t-shirt

JLV
Trollface

Oh, come on, stop picking on Sony.

It’s not like they’ve ever been hacked. Or ever put users at risk by using rootkits.

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Six Flags fingerprinted my son without consent, says mom. Y'know, this biometric case has teeth, say state supremes...

JLV
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Re: So I gather

> A photo on the season pass will be far simpler

exactly. how were season passes done 20 yrs ago?

nostalgia’s not always a good thing, but is zero need for this kind of police state behavior from corporations who will then guard your private data as fiercely as a horny teenager guards his virginity.

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The Apple Mac is 35 years old. Behold the beige box of the future

JLV
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> 2000 more bloated

oh, pls.

we now have systems that can run database servers, application servers and multiple sundry microservices on one machine and OS. and reliably so, at least for dev. we can install new services and utilities promptly and reliably from the shell. yes, even on Windows, with Chocolatey. we have advanced scripting capabilities via bash (or even, shudder, Powershell)

that’s true with Linux, Windows and macos.

try doing that with DOS, Windows 3 or macos 8.

does the term “collaborative multitasking” remind you of anything?

does to me.

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JLV
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Re: Typical el Reg

Hey, I’m an Apple user and I dearly wish they’d lower their price. No issues with El Reg poking fun at them :-)

The biggest gripe I have isn’t their base prices, because that could, by some, be argued to be due to exceptional this or that engineering (or the pleasure of not dealing with Windows).

No, what gets my goat is how extra we pay for each SSD or RAM increment. That’s _easy_ to compare with after market prices.

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Straight outta Blighty: Readers, if you were a tech billionaire, what would you do?

JLV
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Re: brexit sentiment question

gotta say, for a mainstay of progressives (to the point where i find it cloying), the CBC here is colonized by hordes of nutwing Trumpy commentards.

they shut down commenting on stories involving Indians. each one generated a cesspool of racist comments, every time

post Trump win, I head there, expecting “woe on us, Hitler is nigh”, like from actual people here. nope, instead: “hey maybe that’s what we need here to shake things up”.

during our massive summer forest fires here in BC, Albertan comments: “screw those welfare hippies, serves them right for blocking our pipeline”.

anyway, to a lesser extent “eff them, take back control from lying Brussel”s a sizeable chunk of the Brexit comments I see on BBC. which given the site’s actual position seems odd. it’s not like CBC or BBC == Fox.

was just curious.

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