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* Posts by andy 103

622 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2009

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£42k for a top-class software engineer? It's no wonder uni research teams can't recruit

andy 103
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Re: It is almost as if the company does not test things properly before unleashing them on the world

Re Linkedin - you're only shooting yourself in the foot. Nobody else cares about your view.

In the same way as you can despise Rightmove, Zoopla, Purple Bricks etc. The problem being it's about more than just what you think and good luck if you're trying to buy (or indeed sell) a property and think none of that comes into it. It's where _loads of other people_ come to buy/sell property.

In a similar manner, in 2021 Linkedin is where people find work, network with others (who might not even be in the same geographical region). It's where opportunities are. It doesn't matter if you think it's an "old boys network". The reality is, that's where a lot of opportunities exist and new ones get created. If you don't want to be part of that, it's only you who will lose out.

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andy 103
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Re: IT person

@Paul Johnston agreed, but it's still better than the "default" pension arrangement at a lot of private companies which is for them to provide the absolute bare minimum.

I also think - generally speaking - the work/life balance in private companies can be worse. But there are exceptions to the rule and it's not as black and white as my comment my sound.

11 0
andy 103
Facepalm

IT person

"A full-stack, commercial-grade software developer is a different set of skills to the person who fixes your printer when it's broken."

This. 100% this.

As you've alluded to in the article, universities simply see these people as "IT staff". How do you think they know the value of a software engineer if they don't even understand what that person does? How do they then define "top-class"?

I've worked a software engineer for over 20 years and from what I can see at the moment there's a clear reason that you can find 6 figure positions. A lot of developers and software engineers - frankly - aren't particularly good, or as good as they claim. A lot of work has been created off the back of substandard work being done by incompetent developers. Those developers are typically the ones who blame "management", especially when it often comes down to their own narcissism and/or inability to work with other people.

Most university positions are graded. But - they sometimes offer benefits such as more generous pension schemes and a better work-life balance - than the private sector. Sometimes - not always. As such, the private sector is always where the highest paid positions will be. It's unlikely this will ever change in academia unless or until Universities are better educated (irony alert) about what these people actually do in 2021.

But the Universities are not the only ones to point the finger at. The average salary in 2021 in the UK is still under £30k. Many software engineers simply rely on their "years of experience" yet haven't learnt or progressed their skills during those years. They see private sector salaries and feel they're worth more money simply on the basis of their experience, when it's the results and - ability to work with other people effectively - that actually matters. A £40k salary for these people - who are in abundant supply - seems quite reasonable.

33 2

CompSci boffins claim they can recreate missing lines in log files

andy 103
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WTF?

Re: correlates data *from other sources*??

@JDX interestingly you weren't able to elaborate on what the point of it actually is. Followed by a comment from yourself 2 hours later "Struggling to see quite how this works."

Oh dear.

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andy 103
Stop

correlates data *from other sources*??

"Recreating" lines isn't really accurate then. All they're doing is getting data that has already been recorded from other sources and then trying to work out where it fits into a file with "missing" data.

Why is time, energy and effort being spent on these bullshit activities?

The three authors couldn't find a tool to recreate missing events. So they built one that correlates data from other relevant sources.

If the data is already there, then the actual real problem is that some people don't know where it is.

I can't envisage this being used in any serious or critical application. Imagine if flight data recorders worked on this premise. We'll just try and guess the sequence of events so we can put everything into 1 convenient file, rather than having the prerequisite knowledge to determine them accurately... Fuck off.

14 1

MySQL a 'pretty poor database' says departing Oracle engineer

andy 103
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Re: PHP is somewhat responsible for MySQL’s uptake

@Mike Pellatt

I'm talking about what is *already out there* though.

When you look at figures - take Wordpress - there's something like 450 million installations in production. You're talking about a similar number of MySQL databases (even if you ignore staging/development environments used to create them). Whilst not an exact science the number is in the millions from that ONE application alone.

When you factor in other PHP apps like Magento, or frameworks like Laravel/CakePHP you can see how that number will get into the billions.

Unless somebody is going to replace all those *existing* sites/applications... clearly they aren't. It's already out there and that's due to MySQL being used as the default database on all of those applications.

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andy 103

PHP is somewhat responsible for MySQL’s uptake

I alluded to this in another comment but the “LAMP” stack - the last two being MySQL and PHP - has a lot to answer for.

So many web applications use PHP and all the common ones (Wordpress, Magento etc) as well as frameworks (Laravel etc) either use or “strongly support” the use of MySQL as the database of choice.

You only need look at the numbers of applications and sites running on LAMP stacks to understand how ubiquitous it really has become.

The developers who cut their teeth on these simple CMS/e-commerce projects then know MySQL and so when building bespoke applications that’s their DB of choice. Unfortunately they don’t know it well enough to know the pros/cons of other choices. Ask a lot of LAMP stack developers about Postgres and you’ll get the reply “yeah I’ve heard of that”. And so it continues.

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andy 103
Meh

For relatively simple use cases - of which there are so many - MySQL just works

There’s a huge number of people who use MySQL who don’t care or know any better.

Think of all those PHP applications (hello Wordpress, the most widely used web publishing system) or e-commerce platforms that also use it (Magento etc). Nobody using these applications cares about the difference. This also cascades to people building their own DB applications who think 1 million rows is “a lot”.

Yeah there are some projects where the difference matters but for I’d say well over 50% of MySQL users there’d be no benefit of changing.

17 2

The Omicron dilemma: Google goes first on delaying office work

andy 103
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Pint

Re: Safely reopen?

@Def

"As soon as the first cases in the EU were identified the entire continent should have been closed. All cases traced and isolated. Two months, we would have been done."

This is the most Wetherspoons-like solution to a problem I've read in a while.

Enjoy your 13th pint of Abbot ale, Frank Gallagher. Maybe you should be PM as well then we can simplify everything to a level where everything will be fine forever.

6 1
andy 103
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WTF?

Re: Safely reopen?

@Def

Close all borders ...

How exactly do you think this would help?! Yes, if you did do that (and all the other things you said) you may well reduce the number of cases significantly. The real problem - YOU CAN'T DO THIS FOREVER.

In the same way if you banned all drivers from driving for 1 month, you can bet that month would have the lowest number of road accidents! See previous point about you can't do that forever.

Given that Covid effectively started with one person passing it to one other person (2 people at that point) and then spread globally, as a result of normal human behavior, good luck if you think you can stop that happening again even after some kind of long global lockdown. Hint: this is why it didn't go away after previous lockdowns! Fucking idiot.

14 3
andy 103
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Facepalm

Re: Safely reopen?

@Paul Crawford you've completely missed the point with this -

Try telling that to friends and families of the 170k-ish dead in the UK, on indeed those still suffering from "long COVID".

The example I used of people who died in road traffic accidents also results in friends/families suffering. It's also "preventable" if you go to some extreme such as banning everyone from driving. There are so many "preventable" ways in which people die. To broaden your mind have a look at how many people in the entire world don't have access to clean running water, and the deaths that causes.

avoiding dying before it is absolutely necessary is kind of a human goal.

The point here being - why are we being so restrictive of what people can/can't do when it comes to this cause of death specifically?

The number of 170k and indeed the global figures aren't really as significant as they sound when you look beyond your own back yard and have a think about how other people in the world die, or what from. Furthermore these people have done for many many years with no restrictions or real intervention. 1800 people died on UK roads in 2019 but we didn't ban people from driving because the overall impact would be extremely significant and to that extent we're accepting of 1800 people dying from that. See also the approx 25,000 who were seriously injured on roads during that period. We're fine with that. No real restrictions, just keep driving folks. Why's it ok there but not with Covid?

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andy 103
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FAIL

Re: Safely reopen?

"The number of people trapped under lorries is pretty stable"

To put this into perspective that's just ONE example of how people die. In the UK in 2019 (before Covid was prevalent) there were approx 1800 deaths on UK roads.

The number of deaths "due to Covid" by which we can only realistically count those with no underlying health conditions** in the first lockdown was around 4400.

Now, bear in mind road traffic accidents are just ONE way in which people can die...

... the figures are already a complete joke. It's like suggesting nobody should drive on roads because some people might die. In this case the number of "some people" is significant (1800 / 4400) from ONE type of possible way of dying which is "preventable" (if you stop everyone else driving).

Of course stopping everyone from driving isn't a solution. In the same way locking down, waiting for a vaccine per variant, or permanently work from home until it's "safe" isn't a solution either.

** because they would have died anyway, in much the same way anybody could die "in future" due to a road traffic accident.

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andy 103
WTF?

Safely reopen?

He said Google would wait until the New Year to figure out when campuses in the US can safely reopen for a mandatory return.

Sorry, how does that work? This virus is here to stay. It will mutate, and there will be variants.

The current plan of "lockdown or impose restrictions whenever there's a variant or spike" isn't really a plan. See also: a vaccine per variant.

The world really needs some clarity on this, and yes, some people dying is actually an option. When we went into the first lockdown there was a dramatic reduction in the number of road accidents - due to the fact people weren't rushing on congested motorways to get to work. There were improvements to the environment for the same reason. These two things alone have effectively "saved" some people's lives.

People show horrific footage of others dying of Covid and struggling to breathe. Why haven't we been showing footage of people trapped under a lorry on the M6 for decades then? That doesn't sound like a pleasant alternative to Covid in my view.

How long are we going to go on with this nonsense of any death from this virus must be prevented? Why this virus specifically, and why not all other things which cause people to die?

It's absolute bullshit. Nobody is leading the way with this, and there is no "safe reopen(ing)" of anything, ever.

29 8

Pension cold-calling financial services biz cops largest ever fine from UK data watchdog

andy 103
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FAIL

Re: £750 per referral, about £1 per person fine

@Ian Johnston - you seem to be missing a key point that the only people who care about the conversion rate are EB. Nobody else, especially the regulator who has imposed the fine cares or even knows what the conversion rate was! What it amounts to then is the regulator saying - "if you choose to contact 107,000 people *illegally* it will cost you £1.31 per person you contact".

If EB were prepared to pay £750 per converted lead, we all know damn well they would have got more than £750 out of that in the long run - otherwise they wouldn't bother. The fine therefore is disproportionately low. Irrespective of the conversion rate, the "cost" (fine) of the sum of the illegal activity (contacting 107,000) people is £1.31 per offence. They have not been fined against their unknown conversion rate, clearly.

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andy 103
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Re: Fine

Everyone talking about the conversion rate is missing the point. It doesn't matter what the conversion rate was - even if it was zero. Nobody except EB cares what the conversion rate is. The real point is that the regulator who has imposed the fine has essentially said "the cost of illegally contacting 107,000 people is £1.31 per person". That sends the wrong message.

2 0
andy 103
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Re: £750 per referral, about £1 per person fine

@Ian Johnston it's not a meaningless comparison. Of course there's no way they'd get a 100% conversion rate.

But the fine is still proportional to the number of prospective customers who were contacted in an illegal way. Therefore the fine per lead (converted or otherwise) is still in the region of £1.31 per illegal correspondence.

Given the company were prepared to pay £750 to acquire any converted lead the "charge" (fine) for contacting customers in this way is disproportionately low. If the fine had been £750 per person contacted - converted *or not* - that might have sent a very different message.

We also know that if they were prepared to pay £750 for acquisition there was a lot more than that amount in it for EB in the long run. You wouldn't even need a big conversion rate before the £140k "cost" goes from red to black. The summary being - this fine is not much of a disincentive for people to try doing the same in future.

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andy 103
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Re: £750 per referral, about £1 per person fine

@talk_is_cheap yes, and shockingly that maths still works out in EB's favour.

EB are basically saying the _minimum_ a converted lead is worth to them is £750. You can bet they'll be getting more than £750 in commission from pension providers, if they're prepared to pay that to acquire customers in the first place.

To be told there is an additional cost (a fine in this case) of around £1.31 on top of that £750 is a drop in the ocean. It's not exactly a disincentive for people to not bother trying the same thing.

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andy 103
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Re: Fine

Absolutely. If they're paying £750 per client as a referral fee, you can get some indication of how valuable that lead is to EB Associates.

Answer: more than £1.31 per client!

The people who impose these fines don't really seem to grasp this extremely basic premise. It's a negligible "fee" for getting caught out.

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andy 103
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Joke

Re: in other

FC associates? Aren't they part of the GD holding group?

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andy 103
Facepalm

£750 per referral, about £1 per person fine

See title.

750 x 107,000 = £80,250,000 (total for referrals)

140,000 / 107,000 = £1.31 (fine per referral)

Not every referral would result in a lead. But as long as the value of the lead was more than £1.31 to EB Associates they'd be happy.

Not bad financial sense on their part.

27 1

Lenovo ThinkPad T14s: Impressively average, which is how corporate buyers like it

andy 103
Thumb Down

1920 x 1080

1920 x 1080

Wow. On a machine costing over a grand.

The 2560 x 1600 Retina Display on my 13" Macbook makes anything else less appealing on screen resolution alone. Yes you can hook it up to an external monitor but given it's a laptop with a _small_ screen, it's nice if that screen has a resolution that's commensurate to 2021 standards.

19 12

Economy class: AWS points set-your-own-cap Fleets service at cloudy desktop apps

andy 103
Stop

The browser is still the limitation

"As opposed to a virtual server instance, AppStream delivers one interactive graphical desktop-type app at a time, accessed via a web browser rather than..."

And therein lies the problem.

Although we've come a long way there are still a lot of limitations when it comes to building and working with apps that have to run in a browser. A good case in point is that what these cloud services have been built on has relied on (and still relies on) running software locally. There are still so many applications which you could never write to work in a browser environment and I can't see that changing any time soon.

0 0

Sheffield Uni cooks up classic IT disaster in £30m student project: Shifting scope, leadership changes, sunk cost fallacy

andy 103
Facepalm

This is why the world runs off spreadsheets

You're building all these views and processes and you get all of the problems that you would do with conventional software development, [however] you just don't have any of the standard tooling that makes your life easier while you're doing it.

So much I could write about this. Most applications used by large organisations are simply unfit for purpose. The reason that so much data is siloed in spreadsheets and sent round by email is because - shockingly in 2021 - this is still one of the most effective ways to get data in front of people that need to see it. This then introduces a massive problem because there is no single source of truth. People assume what they've been sent or have in their Inbox is always "correct".

When you have terabytes of data it goes without saying that the majority of people who use that data only need to see / work with a portion of it at any given time. A lot of these systems are designed without any consideration of end-users in mind. So when they need to get that data in front of them they simply export portions of it that are needed (even if that export involves manually copying/pasting data). They then manipulate it using Excel or some other such tool and send it on via email because, well, how else when the system itself doesn't even produce the reporting people need.

the old system could not support the new data standards, but that was never promoted to management.

Even if it was, they wouldn't care or even understand what this means. As long as it's presented as a financial figure, the lowest value will always win.

But as work began developers realised it was connected to so many other legacy systems – with little or no documentation – that this was not going to work

Documentation and handover costs money. See previous point.

This happens in _so many_ organisations it's frightening.

15 0

What do you mean, 'Microsoft doesn't care about Windows on Arm'? Here's a cheap, underpowered test rig

andy 103
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Re: Seems like an afterthought

@Steve Davies 3 In Apple’s case it seems to be that they understand why having a vested interest in developers making decent software for their platform is a good thing. They’re essentially subsidising developers on the basis it benefits Apple over the long term. I think that’s a smart move. Apple already knew the point and future of M1 before they decided to offer the developers kits. Microsoft are doing it backwards.

On Microsoft’s part their equivalent to this is - we don’t give a shit if any developers even bother with Arm for our platform. If those developers really really care, they can buy this crap hardware out of their own pocket. And oh yeah it’s non refundable because we’re not really bothered about those people. We’re unsure what the future of any of this is so don’t want to go global, we’ll restrict this poor offering to the US market.

It’ll be interesting to see the outcome but on this basis I think Apple may just do a lot better.

5 0
andy 103
FAIL

Seems like an afterthought

The reason that Apple's M1 developer kits are decent is because Apple is wholeheartedly behind M1. They fully understand what it is, why the market wants it, and are committed to it. They've communicated this well to the world.

It seems in this case Microsoft are doing their usual thing of having no real clue of where things are heading. Putting out 1 piece of sub-standard hardware on only their US site shows this. It's not something they believe is "the future". Then again, they never really understood how The Internet would be the future, as demonstrated by their countless failings from Online Services in Windows 95 onwards.

This story to me isn't really about the hardware, it's about Microsoft's classic half-arsed approach when they're clueless about the future of something... something in this case which could possibly have a very big future for everyone else.

It made me laugh when somebody above posted "Second hand 950xl hardware is easy to find on eBay.". No shit it's easy to find. Another afterthought (Windows + mobiles = fail). Nobody wanted it, that's why!

11 4

It started at Pixar. Now it's the Apple-backed 3D file format viewed as HTML of metaverse

andy 103
Stop

The metaverse can kiss my balls*

All the problems going on in the world and we're focusing on bullshit like this.

It's a strange set of priorities for the human species to put such time, resource, energy and effort into essentially allowing us to live inside a Pixar world.

No thanks.

* My real, non-virtual balls

19 1

Behold, Eclipse's open-source software defined vehicle project

andy 103
Stop

They couldn't make an IDE so I doubt this will be a success

See title.

2 2

Facebook sues scraper who sold 178 million phone numbers and user IDs

andy 103
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Mushroom

Re: Scraping

It's quite worrying how poorly educated Reg readers are.

What do you think is being indexed exactly? robots.txt tells search engine crawlers whether or not they should index content - content which is accessible to anybody, i.e. on public web pages - not behind a login or stored in a database that's otherwise inaccessible except for authorised/authenticated users. A Google bot cannot get around a login screen (hint: it doesn't have any credentials to enable it to log in!).

The only way that Google could "scrape" phone numbers - with reference to this story - is if there was a publically accessible web page (or pages) on Facebook which listed out individuals phone numbers. There isn't. To see somebody's phone number you have to be:

1. Logged in

2. Either a connection, or the user has set their phone number to "public", which isn't even the default setting.

In any case (1) still applies and a Google bot cannot index phone numbers on peoples Facebook accounts.

It really does concern me how Reg readers make posts like they know what they're talking about. Go and actually try it if you think otherwise. Google your phone number and see if there's anything on the domain facebook.com for it. (There won't be).

If you're going to be really pedantic about it indexing the names of people's profiles, there's even a setting in Facebook where you can stop search engines indexing your page.

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andy 103
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Re: Scraping

That isn't how robots.txt works. It tells search engines whether they can index *publically accessible* content on a website. Unless there's a page which is readable to anybody which lists all users phone numbers, robots.txt simply isn't involved in this equation.

0 1
andy 103
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Re: So Facebook are actually in the right here, for once

I have not consented to it.

This is exactly the point I was making. It's called a loophole. You personally do not need to consent to Facebook having your number, in order for them to obtain it. Because the people who are asked to give consent are the ones who are giving it away. But it's funny how people such as yourself point the finger at Facebook, when it's actually their "friends" who are knowingly and willingly giving Facebook that data.

The loophole works because whilst your phone number is yours, the people (e.g. your friends / neighbours) who have your number stored in their phones are the owners of that data - and the ones who are consenting to it being given away. If those people did not give consent for Facebook to have it then yes that is illegal.

But nobody ever blames the people who have actually given it away... it's easier to say it's Facebook's fault.

As far as I am concerned, that should be illegal under GDPR

It isn't, and that's what you really have a problem with.

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andy 103
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Re: So Facebook are actually in the right here, for once

Yes, but from a legal perspective they don't have to give a shit.

If you give somebody your phone number and they store it in their phone, you don't each agree to a set of legal T+C's about what that person may or may not do with your number. If they want to write it on a wall of a public toilet and say phone this number for sex what are you going to do about it? You've given them your data but there's no legal basis to restrict what they do with it...

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andy 103
Stop

So Facebook are actually in the right here, for once

There'll be a lot of Facebook-bashing since this is The Reg but this is actually one instance where I'm on their side.

There's no "presumably" about "presumably so they could contact them on Messenger rather than through other means". When users do this, they are knowingly supplying their entire contacts list to Facebook and it's clear from the Terms (that nobody has read) that that's what they do with the data. Last time I looked there were over 1 billion people who use Messenger on at least a monthly basis - that's quite a lot of people!

There's scraping where you're telling people what you're doing and they're agreeing to it..... then there's scraping and selling data illegally. In this case Facebook have done the former whilst this moron has done the latter.

3 31

Canon makes 'all-in-one' printers that refuse to scan when out of ink, lawsuit claims

andy 103
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Joke

Re: HP or not HP that is the question.

before the paper

This made me laugh. You can get 500 sheets in Tesco for under £3. I wouldn't worry, it'll only add under 1p to that cost.

1 2
andy 103
Stop

To be fair all *home* printers are shit

When it comes to *home* printers there are essentially 5 big brands (HP, Canon, Epson, Brother and Lexmark**) and all have flaws.

I have a new HP DeskJet which came pre-supplied with a deliberately small cartridge that runs out after printing about 10 documents. There's a massive sticker on the front which is trying to get you to sign up to their "Instant Ink" service. No. I don't want to subscribe to printer ink and I worry about people who do. The suggestion of using third party (cheaper) cartridges? Well I bought 2 of those (black and colour) and the black one prints streaky even after going through all of the alignment and cleaning processes on the printer. It's all well and good saying the print yield is 10x that of the HP branded ones but if it prints nothing you can read it's useless.

I've had printers from all of the other 4 brands and every one has failed to be a decent investment. All have ended up in landfill.

I'm tempted to buy a second hand office/industrial laser printer - there must be a lot of these knocking around since the closure of offices.

When people complain about printers it reminds me of when they complain about airlines... "I'll never fly Ryanair...". Ok, you've got a choice of about 2 others to get to your destination. There isn't enough competition and all home printers are crap as a result.

There is definitely a gap in the market for a new printer manufacturer that makes:

1. Reliable printers that last more than a year

2. You don't need a mortgage to buy ink. You buy said ink on your terms (not a subscription service).

3. Works as an old fashioned "offline" printer. None of this subscribe to inks, send messages to HQ about your printer crap. Local wifi access to the printer fine, but nothing wider than that.

4. Set up has been designed for an 80 year old. It doesn't have some 800 Mb "app" to connect it to your device/network.

** Arguably Lexmark is a workplace/office printer brand these days

8 2

And finally... Oracle bags £25m ERP deal to replace East Sussex County Council's SAP R/3 system

andy 103
Joke

Budget breakdown

At a guess...

£10 million for project management

£10 million in expenses such as taking people out for lunch to discuss the project

£5 million for "misc costs"

About £10 to tell council staff the spreadsheets they all send around via email are being replaced by a system. A system which will not stop staff sending said data around by email with Excel attachments.

5 1

We have some sad news about Facebook. It has returned to the internet after six-hour mega outage

andy 103

Where did 50% of people find out?

I read a worrying statistic a while back claiming 50% of people use their Facebook feed as their primary source of news. If this is the case how, if at all, did those people find out what was happening? They couldn’t even ask on Messenger or WhatsApp and you know very well that’s what most of them would be using as their main message service.

When I read that those services were offline it reminded me of a quote from Never Mind The Buzzcocks where Mark once said, “we’ve lost many musicians this year…but sadly that list is nowhere near long enough”.

5 1

Even Facebook struggles: Zuck's titanic database upgrade hits numerous legacy software bergs

andy 103
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FAIL

Re: Facebook's key motto...

I can take a project from embryonic to mega-buster

It's exactly this sort of bullshit I'm talking about. Go on, name your project that has 2.8 billion users and virtually zero downtime in ~16 years?

I very much doubt I'm alone in that on these forums.

Agreed, it's full of people who also criticise yet never seem to be able to mention an equivalent/better thing they've done themselves. Primarily because they haven't, and can't.

It just seems that FB let it run away a bit too much.

... and yet, it continues to work without any significant problems.

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andy 103
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Re: Facebook's key motto...

As I said in my first post people are quick to criticise Facebook. I bet none of those people would have the skills to create something that went from a bedroom project to being able to concurrently support billions of users and hold nearly 2 decades worth of data for all those people.

Generally speaking Facebook is very stable and that is _incredibly_ hard to achieve when you have over 2.8 billion users. Even if only 50% of them were active that's way more than your average application. The sort of people who criticise them generally don't even have 1 million users on their own platforms.

I'm yet to see an example of anybody who has taken something from an amateur project and scale it to what it has become. Granted it's somewhat annoying when the use-case is for the Karens of the world to share posts about how disappointed they are at their local school... but the tech and processes behind it is nonetheless very impressive.

9 7
andy 103

Didn't know they were still using MySQL

When Facebook was originally built - early 2004 - it was a fairly basic PHP application which used MySQL for all storage (user profiles etc). I don't think it used anything else except maybe memcached or possibly Redis for caching.

I doubt MySQL would scale to hold all of the user data that it now needs to. What are they still storing in MySQL and what other storage technologies are they using? There must be an absolute myriad of data especially given that you can pretty much go back to when you opened your account and find posts.

People are quick to criticise Facebook but the way in which they've scaled that is nothing short of incredible.

12 5

Windows 11 still doesn't understand our complex lives – and it hurts

andy 103
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Re: Browser sessions don't work as you've described

@sictransit what steps are you following to do that in Chrome?

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andy 103
WTF?

Browser sessions don't work as you've described

"I know of no system that allows different simultaneous workspaces with their own IDs, nor browser that allows the same with tabs"

How are you expecting that to work in a web browser? Each tab is using the same browser session - they don't have a "separate session per tab" feature, and that would be annoying as hell if they did. Imagine if you'd signed into Gmail and then had to login separately to Google Docs, Google Sheets etc... per tab.

This is why if, for example, you wanted to login to 2 different Gmail accounts you'd have to do it in 2 separate browsers, or a separate Incognito mode browser window. You can't be logged in with 2 separate accounts under 1 session.

I'm not sure what you're expecting here but this seems to be a lack of understanding of how sessions work.

9 29

British Airways data breach lawsuit settled: Airline coughs up potentially millions to make sueball bounce away

andy 103
Facepalm

saving a Windows domain admin username and password in plain text

I'd be willing to bet if you went deep enough into literally any enterprise/large organisation on the planet, you'd find something equivalent to this.

The trouble with this is that it only becomes known _after_ it has caused a problem. The person or personS who were responsible will never be held to account and in some cases not even known.

As much as these large businesses have thousands of pages of information security policies - getting them working in practice and enforced is a completely different matter.

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New mystery AWS product 'Infinidash' goes viral — despite being entirely fictional

andy 103
WTF?

Reading between the lines of recruitment bullshit

You see this on LinkedIn all the time.

Adverts that say things like "we're looking for a frontend PHP developer...". Oh, so a backend developer that also has knowledge of frontend technologies? Or a frontend developer who knows a bit of PHP?

The reality is usually that the company asking for the candidate wants somebody who can do "any work" they have, and/or doesn't really know what they need. The recruiter - generally - has no idea of the difference between backend and frontend tools, and doesn't care, as long as they get their commission. Somebody has already alluded to this when you get people asking for 5 years experience in something that hasn't even existed for half that time. Amongst many other giveaways such as a real lack of understanding of where the technologies fit into a particular stack or toolchain.

Exactly the same principle comes when you get a new or "cool" technology. Not so long ago it was Kubernetes and Docker. So many adverts asking for people with experience of it. What were these companies doing before they had it, and why did they suddenly _all_ need it simultaneously? Oh yes, because it's a bandwagon on which you must jump otherwise your company will fade into obscurity? Well if you know as little about what you're advertising for as to how to run a company, it may do just that.

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The M in M1 is for moans: How do you turn a new MacBook Pro into a desktop workhorse?

andy 103
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Re: Why only M1? Also applies to Intel Macbook's

@John Robson - this seems to have become a bit pedantic although I think you missed the point I was originally making.

My current set up of a 2020 Macbook Pro and an iPhone 12 cost me about £2000. Anyone spending that shouldn't even have to spend "only" £20 more to get... connectivity. I never recall having this problem on older Apple laptops (my 2015 Macbook Air being a good example) or even cheaper PC hardware.

If it's "only" £20 then Apple can fucking well throw one in the box - at trade prices it would be pennies for them. But no... have to be bastards for the sake of it. I like Apple hardware but stuff like this really is insulting.

Incidentally this wouldn't happen with anything - or from anyone - else. Imagine spending £2k on a washing machine to then be told, oh if you want to connect it to water/power you need to spend £20 on an extra adaptor? Literally nobody would.

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andy 103
Reply Icon
WTF?

Re: Why only M1? Also applies to Intel Macbook's

@John Robson - The first line of my post - the bit about TWO Thunderbolt ports - is a copy/pasted version of what's under "About this Mac". It's not like I need confirmation though since I can see it only has 2 Thunderbolt ports.

The only other port is a 3.5mm headphone jack.

So either:

- Use 1 for the monitor + 1 for the keyboard/mouse = 2 ports used

- Use 1 for the charger + 1 for the keyboard/mouse = 2 ports used

- Use 1 for the charger + 1 for the monitor = 2 ports used

If you can make those numbers add up any other way please let me know.

Unlike my older Macbook Air there is no separate/dedicated power port; charging is done via a Thuderbolt 3 (USB-C) charger that was supplied by Apple with the laptop. Have a look at "What's in the box" on https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch-space-grey-apple-m1-chip-with-8-core-cpu-and-8-core-gpu-256gb#

The reason you can do it is because your model has 4 ports... not 2! I'm guessing it's an earlier model.

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andy 103
Facepalm

Why only M1? Also applies to Intel Macbook's

I have a MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Two Thunderbolt 3 ports). Intel i5.

In my home office I have a single Samsung HDMI monitor and a keyboard/mouse that needs a USB adaptor to connect. This means I can either:

1. Charge my laptop and plug in the monitor (via a separate HDMI adaptor), but not connect my keyboard/mouse

2. Not charge my laptop (use it off battery) whilst also being able to use my monitor and keyboard/mouse.

The problem is when the battery runs out none of (2) works. I can either use my monitor *OR* my keyboard/mouse whilst it's being charged!

Imagine if I'd also bought an iPhone 12 and wanted to charge that via my shiny Apple laptop. Oh yeah, I did.

The irony of this is that my 2015 Macbook Air doesn't have this problem. I can connect it to power, use the keyboard/mouse and connect it to my monitor (via a Mini DisplayPort - HDMI adaptor)... and still have a 1 spare USB port.

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Japan assembles superteam of aircraft component manufacturers to build supersonic passenger plane

andy 103
Reply Icon

Re: What baffles me about Concorde

"Maybe traveling at this speed made no sense in the first place"

It depends where you're travelling to and from. If you were going from the UK for a beach holiday in Spain then no, it wouldn't make any sense. But if you wanted to go half way around the world being able to do it in, for example, 3 hours instead of 9 definitely makes sense. When you factor on travel times at the start and end of the journey especially, cutting down that flight time really is advantageous because you're less weary from travelling for so long.

The only thing I can see being different now to say in the 1980 and 1990's is business customers where you would essentially have to go to another country to "see" somebody whereas now you can just get on Zoom.

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andy 103
Meh

What baffles me about Concorde

My grandparents flew on Concorde once, in the very early 1990's. They did it for a milestone wedding anniversary as a treat. What baffles me is that they were born in a time when it wasn't even possible for people to fly to destinations, they then went through the 1970s(?) period where there was an huge increase in 747's and the like to get to destinations around the world. They then flew on Concorde. That was taken out of service just over 10 years after they flew on it... Now it's not possible to travel from London to Canada (that was the trip they did) in the time they did.

It seems to me like we've really taken a backwards step. I've watched the programmes about how Concorde was a financial loss, but a lot of that seems to be due to political shenanigans and terrible project management as opposed to the actual technology.

Everyone moans about budget airlines letting the great unwashed go to places for £20 after spending more than that on booze in Wetherspoons at the airport. There are about 2 million millionaires in the UK alone as of today. What's the missing piece here? Surely there is a market for this?

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Apple settles with student after authorized repair workers leaked her naked pics to her Facebook page

andy 103
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Re: "Apple believes everyone has a right to privacy"

"Nobody has the right to drive my car away if I leave the key in it. But I'm definitely not going to do it."

That's exactly my point. You shouldn't do it, but even if you did, it doesn't mean all of a sudden you're in the wrong and the person who stole your car has done something acceptable because you indirectly gave them that opportunity. You didn't consent to your car being taken, and the thief taking it has committed a crime.

In the same way, somebody giving a technician their passcode or access to their device, doesn't mean that they have implied the technician can do whatever they want with that person's data. Giving them access doesn't mean you're in the wrong because - even by doing that - it doesn't imply they're ok to "do whatever they want".

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