So... this is all you do all day is it?"

"Most days. Other days Carl or Peter does it."

"Carl or Peter?"

"Yeah, we work shifts - because the market never sleeps."

"So let me get this straight. You don't have any servers, you don't have any real work - AND THERE ARE THREE OF YOU - so you just make problems to keep yourself in a job?"

"Yep, That's pretty much it." //

A minute of silence passes, then finally the geek cracks. There's no server hardware. Nothing. Over the last five years the entire company operation has moved into online services - theoretically leaving our geek with no job.

"So what do you... do all day?" the PFY asks.

"SOME days, I'll take a complete snapshot of our cloud infrastructure," he says.

"Once a month you mean?" the PFY surmises. "So what do you do with the rest of your time?"

"I, um, manufacture outages," he admits.

"Manufacture outages?"

"Yeah, I'll light up the RED lamp on a server and, uh, take a cloud service offline."

"Why?"

"Because then they'll call me and get me to fix it. I'll bring them in here, fire up a linux laptop with the Matrix screensaver, edit a JPEG with a Hex editor, pretend to find a virus signature or an internal consistency error, then 'fix' it and bring the service back online again."

It seems so simple now that he says it.

Years ago, when I read The Mythical Man-Month, I found lots of stuff which I already knew from other sources. However, there were also new things in there, despite the book being from 1975. One of them was:

The Surgical Team

Mills proposes that each segment of a large job be tackled a team, but that the team be organized like a surgical team rather than a hog-butchering team. That is, instead of each member cutting away on the problem, one does the cutting and the others give him every support that will enhance his effectiveness and productivity.

This is a very interesting pattern for organizing a software development team, but I never found it described in any other Software Engineering book, not even mentioned anywhere.

Why is that?

The Common Charger Directive demands that a "USB-C receptacle" be equipped on "radio equipment" that is "equipped with a removable or embedded rechargeable battery" and "can be recharged via wired charging." If it has a battery and can be powered by up to 240 watts through a USB-C connection, it's generally subject to the EU's USB-C requirements. The directive applies to devices "placed on the market"—sent to a distributor or buyer—after December 28, even if they were initially designed and sold before that date.

Laptops get until April 2026 to comply, but most other things—phones, tablets, handheld gaming devices, computer accessories, and wireless headphones—will have to be powered by USB-C to be sold inside the EU from now on. //

In addition to simply demanding that a USB-C port be present, the Directive requires that anything with "fast charging"—pulling more than 5 volts, 3 amperes, or 15 watts—enable the USB Power Delivery (USB PD) standard. This should ensure that they properly negotiate charging rates with any charger with USB PD rather than require their own proprietary charging brick or adapter. //

The EU's celebratory post on X is heavy with replies from doubters, suggesting that mandating USB-C as "THE charger" could stifle companies innovating on other means of power delivery. Most of these critiques are addressed in the actual text of the law, because more powerful devices are exempted, secondary power plugs are allowed, and wireless largely gets a pass. "What about when USB-D arrives?" is something no person can really answer, though it seems a vague reason to avoid addressing the e-waste, fragmentation, and consumer confusion of the larger device charging ecosystem.

In the high-stakes world of semiconductor manufacturing, Europe has unveiled a groundbreaking achievement that rivals the cost and complexity of an Airbus A350. This state-of-the-art machine, meticulously assembled by a team of 250 engineers over six months, stands as a testament to European innovation in microtechnology. With ambitions to capture a significant share of the Chinese market, this marvel could reshape the global semiconductor landscape.

Since its inception in 1984, ASML has been at the forefront of semiconductor lithography. The company’s latest creation leverages Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) technology, a bold move that has paid off handsomely. EUV lithography allows for the precise etching of intricate chip patterns, essential for the next generation of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. According to industry leaders at the International Semiconductor Association, ASML’s commitment to EUV has not only doubled its revenue in the past five years but also set new standards in chip manufacturing.

The new ASML system promises to revolutionize microprocessor fabrication by reducing transistor sizes to an astonishing 1 nanometer.

The 20 most-commented-on tech support columns from On Call's first 500 instalments

Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's weekly column in which we recount readers' reactions to the drudgery of digital duties. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "John Smith" who once worked for a very large bank. No doubt you've never met anyone with such an unusual name.

LY Corp's QA team struggled to manage projects while wading through prolix posts

Questions raised as one of the world's largest PC makers joins America's critical defense team

Have you ever had a teacher who was very smart but terrible at teaching? An expert who used so much jargon you could not follow their explanation? This is called the “curse of knowledge”, a term coined in 1989 by economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber.

It’s a cognitive bias that occurs when someone incorrectly assumes that others have enough background to understand. For example, your smart professor might no longer remember the challenges a young student faces when learning a new subject. And the expert might overlook the need to simplify concepts, assuming everyone knows what they know. //

You can avoid the negative effects of the curse of knowledge by constantly questioning your assumptions as to how much exactly your audience knows.
Curse of Knowledge - Mitigating Strategies

• Get to know your audience. Try to know how much they know. If you’re talking to a friend or colleague, assess the extent of their knowledge before starting your explanation. If you’re talking to potential customers, ask a few questions before starting your sales pitch.
• Simplify your language. Don’t hide behind jargon and complex terminology. Use simple language and clear examples to make your point easier to understand even with limited knowledge.
• Use storytelling. Stories can make information more relatable and memorable. Relate complex concepts to familiar experiences. Analogies and metaphors can also make abstract ideas more concrete and understandable.
• Show, don’t tell. A picture can be worth a thousand words. Instead of a lengthy explanation, see if you can create a visual, a graph, or an illustration that conveys the same content in a more accessible way.
• Engage in active teaching. Encourage questions and discussions. Pause at every step to ensure the person is following. By engaging your audience, you can better gauge their level of understanding and adjust your explanations accordingly.

What’s great about simplifying your explanations is that it reinforces your own knowledge. If you can’t explain something without using complicated jargon, you’re probably not as familiar with it as you think. Making the effort to explain concepts in simpler terms ensures you truly understand them.

What are they and why do they matter. //

In fact, every display you’ve ever seen only shows a small portion of the colors that your eyes are capable of perceiving. That portion is what’s referred to as a “color gamut.” A color gamut refers to the range of colors within the visible light spectrum that the display is capable of reproducing.

It might not seem like there are colors missing from your display, because you see approximations of most colors, but there are certain colors that simply can’t be shown. For a simple comparison, SDR (standard dynamic range) TVs are capable of displaying over 16.7 million colors—more specifically, there are 16.7 million unique combinations of the 256 different levels of red, green, and blue that the display can produce.

An HDR TV, on the other hand, is capable of at least 1,024 different levels of red, green, and blue each, for over 1.07 billion unique color combinations. This dramatically expands how much of the visible spectrum that displays can reproduce. But it also means that all the content that you see on your display—every show, movie, or video game—has to be created with those new color options in mind. ///

Computer monitors

Technology Consulting

We know not all the needs of your church fit into one of these buckets. We want to help you with all the technical needs of your church. Anything from guidance on AV and camera equipment, to network setup or delivering video messages to classrooms. We have helped meet the technical needs of over a hundred churches and would like to help you as well. We do not charge any consulting fees at all. We are not a vendor, we are your ministry partner.

The catastrophe is yet another reminder of how brittle global internet infrastructure is. It’s complex, deeply interconnected, and filled with single points of failure. As we experienced last week, a single problem in a small piece of software can take large swaths of the internet and global economy offline.

The brittleness of modern society isn’t confined to tech. We can see it in many parts of our infrastructure, from food to electricity, from finance to transportation. This is often a result of globalization and consolidation, but not always. In information technology, brittleness also results from the fact that hundreds of companies, none of which you;ve heard of, each perform a small but essential role in keeping the internet running. CrowdStrike is one of those companies.

This brittleness is a result of market incentives. In enterprise computing—as opposed to personal computing—a company that provides computing infrastructure to enterprise networks is incentivized to be as integral as possible, to have as deep access into their customers’ networks as possible, and to run as leanly as possible.

Redundancies are unprofitable. Being slow and careful is unprofitable. Being less embedded in and less essential and having less access to the customers’ networks and machines is unprofitable—at least in the short term, by which these companies are measured. This is true for companies like CrowdStrike. It’s also true for CrowdStrike’s customers, who also didn’t have resilience, redundancy, or backup systems in place for failures such as this because they are also an expense that affects short-term profitability.

But brittleness is profitable only when everything is working. When a brittle system fails, it fails badly. The cost of failure to a company like CrowdStrike is a fraction of the cost to the global economy. And there will be a next CrowdStrike, and one after that. The market rewards short-term profit-maximizing systems, and doesn’t sufficiently penalize such companies for the impact their mistakes can have. (Stock prices depress only temporarily. Regulatory penalties are minor. Class-action lawsuits settle. Insurance blunts financial losses.) It’s not even clear that the information technology industry could exist in its current form if it had to take into account all the risks such brittleness causes. //

Imagine a house where the drywall, flooring, fireplace, and light fixtures are all made by companies that need continuous access and whose failures would cause the house to collapse. You’d never set foot in such a structure, yet that’s how software systems are built. It’s not that 100 percent of the system relies on each company all the time, but 100 percent of the system can fail if any one of them fails. But doing better is expensive and doesn’t immediately contribute to a company’s bottom line. //

This is not something we can dismantle overnight. We have built a society based on complex technology that we’re utterly dependent on, with no reliable way to manage that technology. Compare the internet with ecological systems. Both are complex, but ecological systems have deep complexity rather than just surface complexity. In ecological systems, there are fewer single points of failure: If any one thing fails in a healthy natural ecosystem, there are other things that will take over. That gives them a resilience that our tech systems lack.

We need deep complexity in our technological systems, and that will require changes in the market. Right now, the market incentives in tech are to focus on how things succeed: A company like CrowdStrike provides a key service that checks off required functionality on a compliance checklist, which makes it all about the features that they will deliver when everything is working. That;s exactly backward. We want our technological infrastructure to mimic nature in the way things fail. That will give us deep complexity rather than just surface complexity, and resilience rather than brittleness.

How do we accomplish this? There are examples in the technology world, but they are piecemeal. Netflix is famous for its Chaos Monkey tool, which intentionally causes failures to force the systems (and, really, the engineers) to be more resilient. The incentives don’t line up in the short term: It makes it harder for Netflix engineers to do their jobs and more expensive for them to run their systems. Over years, this kind of testing generates more stable systems. But it requires corporate leadership with foresight and a willingness to spend in the short term for possible long-term benefits.

Last week’s update wouldn’t have been a major failure if CrowdStrike had rolled out this change incrementally: first 1 percent of their users, then 10 percent, then everyone. But that’s much more expensive, because it requires a commitment of engineer time for monitoring, debugging, and iterating. And can take months to do correctly for complex and mission-critical software. An executive today will look at the market incentives and correctly conclude that it’s better for them to take the chance than to “waste” the time and money.

Of all the recent trends in automotive technology and design, the adoption of capacitive controls over mechanical switches and buttons—particularly on multifunction steering wheels—is among the most deplorable. One can see the appeal to the designer—slick-looking fiat panels trump dust-attracting seams, for starters. The bean counters love them, too—it takes less time to install the subassemblies, and that means a little more profit per car. It's just that they suck. And now, some Volkswagen drivers say capacitive buttons are to blame for their car crashes.

"What do you mean by routing flapping?"

"Well, say you're catching the tube home to Slough."

"I don't live in Slough."

"Don't you? Well let's say you do. So your plan is to walk to Tottenham Court Road and ride the Central line to Ealing Broadway, change to Elizabeth Line and ride that to Slough."

"I.."

"But on the way up Oxford Street you encounter a group of Vegan Crossfit enthusiasts who are in a piano accordion ensemble. After consulting the internet and not being able to find a local gun shop you're going to avoid the hippies and maybe leg it to Farringdon where you can ride the Elizabeth line direct. On the way there you encounter an old school mate who convinces you to have a quiet pint, which turns into eight quiet pints, a curry and another pint - at which point you find yourself, inexplicably, at Snaresbrook with a road cone under your arm. And it's late. You jump on a central line train not caring WHERE you're going to change at, so long as you're heading in the general direction of Slough."

"I don't live in Slough."

"Yeah, but say you did – and you need to get home. You're back on the Central line, you rest your eyes for a second and wake up at West Ruislip. You quickly consult the tube map and think maybe you could stumble to Ickenham and ride the Picadilly to maybe North Ealing and maybe run to Ealing Broadway and maybe get on the Elizabeth line. You manage to get to Ickenham, rest your eyes and wake up in Cockfosters and find the tube is no longer running. You try and find an Uber driver, but for some reason there isn't anyone remotely local so you walk for an hour and eventually find a minicab company that's still open who take you on a sightseeing tour of unfamiliar roads, dropping you halfway home because that's when your cash runs out. You see a night bus, only you're a bit turned around and get on the wrong one, rest your eyes for a moment, then wake up at St Paul's Cathedral at 4 in the morning. You walk to work, sneak past security and sleep in your office."

"And... that's what's happening to our network?"

"No, that's what happened to the PFY three nights ago."

"What's this got to do with the network? Do we need new network switches with better routing to stop this happening? Is that what you're saying?"

“That’s when we first noticed it, with Woody.”

“[Larry Cutler] was in that directory and happened to be talking about installing a fix to Woody or Woody’s hat. He looked at the directory and it had like 40 files, and he looked again and it had four files.”

“Then we saw sequences start to vanish as well and we were like, “Oh my god”

“I grabbed the phone… unplug the machine!”” //

“Let’s put the witch hunt away. We’ve got to get the show back first. Let’s not go spend a week of our time trying to kill somebody. Where’s the movie?”

“Obviously, five minutes in the meeting, you’re all sweating and red-faced. And somebody will say, “Let’s go kill somebody and lynch them. Now,” says Jacob, “I support lynching on our agenda. But, number one is, just get the movie back and work on Buzz and Woody again. We’ve lost our friends.”

With this many man-years, or even man-decades, worth of work on a project, the temptation to find someone to blame, to expend effort on hunting down the person responsible, is intense.

But that kind of negative thought process doesn’t help anyone and it just removes focus from what matters most: moving forward. //

Instead of dwelling on pinning the blame or lamenting the loss of time and effort, the team made sure to alter the backup strategy so that something like that didn’t happen again, and it went about making up for lost time. //

The thing that I take away about these experiences is that the spontaneity of the communal support speaks to the culture of Pixar the rest of the time. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen all of a sudden. You can’t have a disaster and instantly develop this kind of community and camaraderie.

It has to seep out. It has to be in the soil. You don’t just plant it and watch it grow in a day. It has to be cultivated over time, as it obviously was at Pixar.

Before smartphones, we had PDAs in our pockets. Palm did them best.

One year prior to Anthony's excavation, Adam Banks wrote for Ars about the benefits of adopting cloud-based tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP). You adopt a cloud-based business management software to go "Beyond Excel." "If PowerPoint is the universal language businesses use to talk to one another, their internal monologue is Excel," Banks wrote. The issue is that all the systems and processes a business touches are complex and generate all kinds of data, but Excel is totally cool with taking in all of it. Or at least 1,048,576 rows of it.

Banks cited Tim Worstall's 2013 contention that Excel could be "the most dangerous software on the planet." Back then, international investment bankers were found manually copying and pasting Excel between Excel sheets to do their work, and it raised alarm.

But spreadsheets continue to show up where they ought not. Spreadsheet errors in recent years have led to police doxxing, false trainee test failures, an accidental $10 million crypto transfer, and bank shares sold at sorely undervalued prices. Spreadsheets are sometimes called the "dark matter" of large organizations, being ever-present and far too relied upon despite 90 percent of larger sheets being likely to have a major error.

So, Excel sheets catch a lot of blame, even if they're just a symptom of a larger issue. Still, it's good to see one no longer connected to the safety of a human heading into a turn at more than 200 miles per hour.

This is a full posting of the short story by Arthur C. Clarke. It is titled “Superiority”. “Superiority” is a science fiction short story by Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1951. It depicts an arms race, and shows how the side which is more technologically advanced can be defeated, despite its apparent superiority, because of its own organizational flaws and its willingness to discard old technology without having fully perfected the new.

Evil AuditorSilver badge
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Re: Needless!!
jmch: I would have thought...

Exactly, you would have thought. And hence you wouldn't have moved the rack in the first place.

2 months
John Sager
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Re: Needless!!
Yes, another example of Chesterton's Fence.

2 months
BebuSilver badge
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Big Brother
Re: Needless!!
《Yes, another example of Chesterton's Fence.》

Or in Terry Pratchett's canine latin of Discworld

"Si non confectus, non reficiat" - family motto of the Vetinari.

《standardized perfection》

Any useful standard ought to be prefaced with the Patrician's motto.

When you think about the essential (and insane) concept of perfection anything, process or system etc once it obtains perfection must necessarily be unique to the particular instance which I would think is the antithesis of standard(ized.)

Standardization is formalizing the art of the possible not aspiration to perfection. Engineering v Theology. :)

Antoine St Exupery probably had the most sensible approach to perfection:

"Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher." -Terre des Hommes, 1939.

Here, in the extreme, perfection would be the complete absence of anything - the (philosophical) void (sans vacuum fluctuations.) He was more practically claiming a minimalist approach to design would be more likely to lead in the direction of perfection.

Tucker Carlson detailed a “classified briefing” that took place Tuesday with officials from the Department of Justice in attendance, as well as Ocasio-Cortez.

“In a classified briefing this afternoon, attended by officials from the Biden Justice Department, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that Elon committed ‘election interference’ in 2022 by ‘changing the algorithms’ on X to alter the results of the midterms that year,” Carlson posted on X.

X CEO Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter in 2022 after the satirical website The Babylon Bee had its account suspended for months, responded to the post, saying “Actually, I made the algorithm open source and neutral to all parties, but of course that is ‘election interference’ by her standards.”

AOC’s ire is misdirected. It’s not like Musk suppressed a bombshell report weeks before the 2020 election or shut down the Twitter accounts of journalists and White House officials who posted the story. But she’s right that the people who did that — and who have weaponized Big Tech algorithms in a host of other ways to control discourse — are guilty of “election interference.”