Posts by Robert E A Harvey

Al Queda porn?

I'd have thought that in this context 'porn' would be copies of "Guns & Ammo".

No thanks

For years PeeCees cost a thousand quid 'cos thats how much shops wanted to take off folks. Now its Tellies. Snag is, there's nothing on the box so worth watching as to justify paying that much.

I think I'll walk my dog instead. (Hmm. a thousand quid will buy a whole bunch of dried dogfood. If I don't buy this tv I could afford a third dog...)

"& forget"

does this mean MOD staff will be leaving these on trains instead of laptops?

Is it a leak

Is a witness report by someone not part of the team a "leak"?

I don't think so.

Dear Glod

Does no-one test anything any more? I don't understand how exponential consumption of finite resources can even happen? Did the code not have any form of load limiting?

When I was in mainframe land one of our 6-monthly jobs used to be to test the disaster recovery plan. We took the weekly tapes to the place that would hire us an IBM in a trailer, and timed how long it took to configure the hired gear (following an already prepared checklist), load the tapes, and run 1000 terminal-based transactions. Part of my job was to measure the current drain from the generator while we did that, and the fuel consumption.

Any new system installed, hardware or software, was given a resilience test. We would turn bits of it off and make a timed log of what failures occurred when, and what the consequences were. At weekends during the year we would repeat those failures on the production system and ensure there were no significant deviations in the timing or propagation. We would look for failure to centrally diagnose or report failures, and any such 'hole' had to be demonstrably fixed within a month. (even if this sometimes meant another red lamp over the operator's console and a long cable)

Every single bit of kit deployed had a failure policy, ranging from warranty and maintenance contracts to a minimum of two ways to continue production without it. We used to test the users, too, to make sure they knew how to find the failure policy and use the alternatives.

Managers have to lean that difficult != unnecessary, and that expensive != unnecessary.

I seem to be alone

in wondering what is the point at all in publishing this 'research'.

I see the company would benefit from his initial advice, but I can share their concern about subsequent publication. How would they know all users had patched?

What value does the wider community get from knowing the entrails, rather than the existence, of this vulnerability? OK, if it is novel then some anonymous details might help other programmers, but otherwise I reckon blurting the works is no more than self agrandisment.

Even though I am very doubtful about the publication idea, If it were me a polite request to defer and a bottle of champers would be infinitely better than raising the landsharks. That does smack of management-by-panic.

Know what you get

I suspect that someone buying a phone from a supermarket is an experienced user and already knows what they want and need.

Leaving the witless to wander unaided into the den of fools run by most telcos, who would pay less if they could for an even spottier youth.

And so a feedback loop forms. The people who need technical support end up buying from the suppliers who are demonstrably the worst at providing it, and so the spiral of death develops.

And it becomes easier to buy from supermarkets.

I'd accuse tesco of cherrypicking the easy customers and leaving the expensive ones to the competition, just like with everything else. But in this case I have no sympathy for Ono or Vodalone or minus3 or the rest of them, so:

* Good on yer Tesco.

* Where is my Aldi phone?

60 days

So google will get paid on the day, while LargeCo will continue to pay all its SmallCo suppliers on 60, 90, 120 day T&C?

Nice.

do we care?

All computers are fast enough, its only a browser, and given how many people they employ, it would be remarkable if M$ did not turn out some good code now and again.

My complaints against M$ have rarely had much to do with the code, particularly their compilers. It's the politics and marketing that gt up my nose.

I don;t see that a benchmark like this is anything but flamebait.