Posts by omz13

Meta knows how bad its sites are for kids, say lawyers

Where I live: on one hand, the Ministry of Education has been steadily pushing for ICT in schools (so lots of lovely exposure to tablets)... and on the other hand, the Ministry of Education believes computer and smartphone screens can be bad for health and are implementing measures to address it.

Retail giant Kingfisher rejects SAP ERP upgrade plan

Re: They can't migrate

At what point is it easier to develop your own system than to heavily customize core?

How to bluff your way to AI credibility with the right buzzwords

Re: Senior output, junior salary

There will be no fallout because this will be covered under the “computer made mistake” budget (which is the cost of doing business and still cheaper than keeping senior people on)

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Re: Do they have the means to survive?

And this is the problem with Mozailla… they squander their money on vanity projects and let their core product become irrelevant.

Pornhub lockdown and fact-free Zuckbots – welcome to 2025

Re: I miss the old Register

You can’t separate tech from politics: tech realized they were subject to regulation, and regulation was subject to political whim, ergo time to get political to change the regulations so tech can do what it wants. Throw in some Ayn Rand. Add a dash of Libertarianism. Welcome to 2025. It sucks.

3Blue1Brown copyright takedown blunder by AI biz blamed on human error

Re: A Perfect System

“The only way to win is not to play” was the ultimate message in that movie… sadly, nobody seems to have taken note

So you paid a ransom demand … and now the decryptor doesn't work

Re: Backups!

And even then, there are no guarantees. Having worked in that sector, some of the stuff that happens behind the scenes would make your hair turn white in 10 seconds it is that bad.

Plus, even if a regulator catches somebody doing something they should not, one of the best defences is: we've been doing it for years, and you knew about it (because we did disclose it on our reports if you bothered to read them closely), and you only now raise a concern? Politics, FTW.

Google is a monopoly. The fix isn't obvious

Shopping Mall

Thinking about that shopping mall, there are two states.

Firstly, the owner of the mall can do some things to make money… charge more for prime locations, advertise its location, etc. This seems OK. They are in shop lease business.

Secondly, the owner of the mall could see what shops do well, then decide to get into that action too. They are now in competition with their leases. That does not seem OK. They could do things like increase rates for their competitors stores, or not charge themselves the same rates as those stores. This seems even less OK.

The problem is when to discourage or stop the second thing happening. I’m sure there are those who will say the second thing is perfectly acceptable because capitalism.

Twitter must pay over half a million to unfairly dismissed Irish exec

You think they would check, but they don’t. Many Americans have little idea how the world outside America works, and many assume everything is just like the USA, but with stuff written in not English but some foreign language.

Years ago I was working in Europe for a USA company. One day they decided to close the site. It was a rude awakening when they discovered this thing called employment law, redundancy law, and unions. It took close to 3 years to shutter the site, and cost a small fortune. But, hey, the US side was loosing money, the Europe side was profitable, so clearly they had to close the Europe side and keep jobs in the US side.

British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'

Heck, I'd settle for third class service... can't be any worse than what's on offer now.

Reddit hopes robots.txt tweak will do the trick in scaring off AI training data scrapers

Re: robots.txt is a machine understandable copyright notice

Copyright is separate from usage/licensing rights.

The problem is that the AI bros assume anything on the internet can be ingested into their models for gratis and without any permission asked (or even looked for).

Mastodon delays firm fix for link previews DDoSing sites

Re: There are other clients besides Mastodon

The problem is that, for better or worse, Fediverse is ActivityPub, and ActivityPub is Mastodon. Now, you could argue that the Fediverse is not one protocol, or one implementation of a protocol, but the elephant in the room that is Mastodon has done just that. If you remember your history, VHS was not as good as Betamax, but which one of those “won”? You can apply the same thinking to ActivityPub/Mastodon and Zot/Hubzilla. The problem is compounded because ActivityPub/Mastodon is currently getting all the attention and, more importantly funding.

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

Re: The owner has two Ferraris. They have that kind of money

Friend of mine had a childhood dream to own a Ferrari. After years of saving, he achieved his dream and bought one. Second hand. Looked wonderful. Sounded wonderful. And during summer he’d drive it around. His girlfriend at the time wasn’t impressed as it was the most impractical car around (too small to hold a bag of shopping, pain to park, and everybody looking at you like you’re a bell-end). One thing most people didn’t know was the insurance was a killer and he could only keep it on the road for a month, two max, per year. And because it wasn’t driven all year around, whenever it went for a service there was always something needing attention because it hadn’t been driven enough. And the cost of servicing was insane. When I see somebody in a Ferrari I always feel kinda sorry for them.

IT consultant fined for daring to expose shoddy security

Re: Not Surprised

Triple tap please

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

To say not pretty is understatement.

IT needs more brains, so why is it being such a zombie about getting them?

Re: Professional qualififcations

I was CITP. In all my decades of experience I can count on one finger the number of employers/agencies who expressed any interest in that.

I’ve worked with a handful of people who were CITP and they pretty much said the same thing.

Now, this could be due to the weird and obscure circles I’m in, or it could just be that nobody gives one iota about CITP.

What counted more was the type of projects you’ve worked on and how broad your experience is (which is a better indicator of continuing education than SFIA).

UK flights disrupted by 'technical issue' with air traffic computer system

Re: Third world.

world leading f-up and world class f-up; ftfy

Google Go language goes with opt-in telemetry

> Whatever you think of Google as a whole, there are definitely smart people there who do care about privacy.

But were the smart people the ones coming up with the proposal?

They should have defaulted to opt-in instead of opt-out (and when pushed the “but other people are opt-out” response was somewhat lame). The discussion to persuade them to do opt-in really felt like an uphill battle against a de facto thing they were going to do regardless. Part of it may be cultural because the USA has no concept of privacy compared to the rest of the world, especially the EU. Part of it may also be because nobody ever thinks what could possibly go wrong, or how could this be abused because unintended consequences and the best laid plans of mice and men, etc.

Techies ask PM to 'prepare UK chip strategy as a matter of urgency'

Re: 25 years too late

I remember that time very well, and it yielded me a nice career in computing. I’d say that such programmers were successful despite the government, who then and now, could not tell a computer from a box of eggs.

Just 22% of techies in UK aged 50 or older, says Chartered Institute for IT

Re: Tick-box recruitment not helping!

Funny you mention being CITP for many years and having to explain it to recruiters, etc. Same here. In 20 years I only had one person who recognized what those 4 letters meant… and that person turned out to be the first client I had to take legal action against for short-changing me on an invoice! I gave up BCS membership and CITP as it seemed to be pouring money down a drain.

How not to test a new system: push a button and wait to see what happens

Re: in a word YES

No safety cover on the switch?!… that is just asking for it to be “accidentally” pressed

In Rust We Trust: Microsoft Azure CTO shuns C and C++

I remember when the next thing to revolutionize the world would be Java.

And then it was .Net.

Apparently now it’s Rust.

Oh the churn that is chasing shiny things instead of writing solid code.

Microsoft fixes Windows security hole likely widely exploited by miscreants

Re: how else would they force you to buy a new one every couple years.

My iPhone won’t be getting updates now… after 6 years of solid use… which is not too bad. Some of us don’t need to upgrade every year or two.

API rate limits at the core of Elon Musk’s decision to ditch Twitter

"Twitter has provided only a pdf copy of Goldman Sachs' final Board presentation."

Musk is complaining that its not in Word or PowerPoint format? Or did Twitter give him a PDF because they locked it so it had no print or export enabled.

More popcorn please. This show is going to run.

Apple's new MacBook Air: Is the jump to M2 silicon worth another $200?

> Whole lot of hype

Yeah, right. Explain to me how my M1 Mac mini is twice as fast as my fully spec’s Intel Mac Book Pro which cost twice as much is “hype”. The reality is, bang for buck, the M1 outperforms Intel.

For kicks and giggles I occasionally do a complete world build of the system I’m developing. M1 literally takes half the time… and that’s on a boring M1 not a M1 Pro/Max/Ultra, where the time would be similarly reduced.

The reality is M1 really does deliver.