* Posts by davenewman

494 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2008

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Council claims database pain forced it to drop apostrophes from street names

davenewman

Election management database

They were probably refering to their elections management database, not their GIS database. There are several which just stuff anything in the fields without escaping characters. In Oxford, every ' is replaced by a grave accent ` . So there is a St Mary`s ward in their database. I wrote a Perl script to fix that (and the strange address fields) in CSVs of their electoral register.

Virgin Media fined £50,000 after spamming 451,000 who didn't want marketing emails

davenewman

As an alternative to fines, the entire board of directors on Virgin Media have to spend a day in stocks being pelted by rotten vegetables. Let them personally share in suffering.

You forced me to use this fancypants app and now you're asking for a printout?

davenewman

That's why I use the NHS app rather than the one my doctors use.

Thanks, Sir Clive Sinclair, from Reg readers whose careers you created and lives you shaped

davenewman

Kenyan businesses ran on the Sinclair QL

As it was small enough to smuggle in when there was 160% duty and sales tax on computers, as President Daniel Arap Moi had declared the only purpose of a computer was to put secretaries out of work.

A complete direct mail marketing company ran on the QL. While I wrote a timekeeping programme for the Nairobi Round Table 24 hour pedal cart race. It had multi-tasking assembly programs controlled by a QL BASIC one.

Even before that, the university microelectronics course that trained the first ever computer technicians in the country used a lab full of Sinclair Spectrums - connected to a cassette recorder via an amplifier and cooled with frozen tetrapaks of milk.

Council culture: Software test leads to absurd local planning SNAFU

davenewman

The Old House at Home was one of the pubs catalogued in the former website sheppeyscum.com, which rated all the pubs by how soon fights broke out each evening.

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

davenewman

Re: 11 stone..

What about flights that arrive before they leave? (Having crossed the international Date Line)

Four women suing Google for pay discrimination just had their lawsuit upgraded to a $600m class action

davenewman

To put a stop to sex discrimination, just condemn the bosses who discriminated against the opposite sex to a forced sex change operation. Then they will have other things than company profits on their minds.

To have one floppy failure is unlucky. To have 20 implies evil magic or a very silly user

davenewman

Re: The endless story

Remember Murphy's second law.

A piece of equipment works in inverse proportion to the number and status of people watching.

Prince Philip, inadvertent father of the Computer Misuse Act, dies aged 99

davenewman

Is there a competition for the most tasteless comment? My entry is:

Another racist bites the dust.

davenewman

Re: 8 days where no laws can be passed.

I thought the NI Assembly had beaten the Belgian record?

Now that half of Nominet's board has been ejected, what happens next? Let us walk you through the possibilities

davenewman

Re: The bottom line?

How id $3.70 fleecing their customers?

Perl-clutching hijackers appear to have seized control of 33-year-old programming language's .com domain

davenewman

Re: I remember when "whitehouse.com" was nicely changed to a pr0n site

Actually, whitehouse.com was the domain of Whitehouse magazine, named after Mary Whitehouse the leader of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, an anti-sex campaign.

Watt's next for batteries? It'll be more of the same, not longer life, because physics and chemistry are hard

davenewman

Re: Why terrifying?

It has been done in a trial in Denmark of swapable batteries - managed by a man from Norn Iron.

And swapable packs for motorcycles have been around for a while.

I built a shed once. How hard can a data centre be?

davenewman

Was that before the School of Management moved in or was it further along the Mews?

Realme 7 5G: Parents, this is the phone you should have got your kids for Christmas

davenewman

Re: I grew up with PAL

I can change my monitors to 30, 50 or 60 Hz, straight from KDE system settings, with the computer knowing about it.

Well, on the bright side, the SolarWinds Sunburst attack will spur the cybersecurity field to evolve all over again

davenewman

Re: But don't forget.

Weren't a few election systems affected by the Solarwinds attack? And doesn't that show a way for hackers to fix elections - even worse is all voting is online.

iPhone factory workers riot over unpaid wages in India

davenewman

There is a long history in Britain of rioting workers. Bristol is famous for it. It only stopped when we had strong trade unions.

YouTube is going to splash adverts all over your videos, and won't pay creators unless there's a big enough audience

davenewman

So random adverts will appear over the videos of political parties and candidates - perhaps from their opponents or even right wing nut jobs.

Or imagine the adverts that could be shown for 30 seconds over a video for a charity campaign.

Ordnance Survey recruits AR developer to build 'geolocated quests' to help get Brit couch potatoes exercising outdoors

davenewman

Just follow the advice from the German government YouTube videos.

The revolution will not be televised because my television has been radicalised

davenewman

If only there was some mythical way to get your computer to record only the programmes that interest you? One in which you look through the list of new titles and pick the ones to record - just one or maybe the whole series. Then later you choose to watch some of the ones you picked.

Oh there is. MythTV and its imitators.

FCC sucked deeper into partisan politics, Trumpism: Nominated commissioner sparks conflict-of-interest row

davenewman

State rural netification

There is an Internet policy that would win back rural voters to the Democrats. A massive rural netification programme on the scale of the rural electrification programmes like the Tennessee Valley Authority. These would be state run to take back control from the cable companies. Once every rural town can work remotely, they don't have to lose all their young to the big cities.

Hey Reg readers, Happy Spreadsheet day! Because there ain't no party like an Excel party

davenewman

My first spreadsheet error was saving on top of the program disc instead of a different disc when using someone else's copy of Visicalc.

British Airways fined £20m for Magecart hack that exposed 400k folks' credit card details to crooks

davenewman

Well, since we need to drastically reduce the number of flights to save the planet, we need to make a lot of airlines close, starting with the most expensive ones.

To stop web giants abusing privacy, they must be prevented from respawning. Ever

davenewman

Re: a series of food and drug laws in the United States

The food laws worked. They no longer adulterate flour with alum and other white substances.

The drug laws worked until Congress voted to make it illegal to buy generics at a lower price. In the rest of the world, governments invite tenders from drug suppliers, achieving discounts for quantity.

Nominet refuses to consider complaint about its own behaviour, claims CEO didn’t mean what he said on camera

davenewman

Complain to charity commission

As Nominet is set up as a charity, complain to the Charity Commission.

UK privacy watchdog confirms probe into NHS England COVID-19 app after complaints of spammy emails, texts

davenewman

Heavily advertised online

The NHS Covid-19 app keeps coming up in adverts in mobile games (Andoku in my case). So the number of installations might also be affected by that.

Microsoft forks out $3m in back pay settlement to make Feds' hiring discrimination probe go away

davenewman

Why is it impossible to prove? There have been plenty of studies where the same c.v. was sent in under a European name and an African-American name and only the one with the European name got invited to an interview.

And it is not an impossible data analysis task to do a factor analysis of criteria correlated with hiring, including all the qualification and demographic data. The Government can certainly do that.

Take your pick: 'Hack-proof' blockchain-powered padlock defeated by Bluetooth replay attack or 1kg lump hammer

davenewman

Re: Confessions of a bolt cutter

My (motor)bike is too big to get through the front door. So I use a disk brake lock with an alarm and a chain.

TCL notices lockdown has made tablet market a thing again, tosses out pair of cheapish 'droid fondleslabs

davenewman

€299 isn't cheap

I have bought good Chinese Android tablets on eBay for £100 before. There is plenty of choice from suppliers with UK or EU warehouses.

Putting the d'oh! in Adobe: 'Years of photos' permanently wiped from iPhones, iPads by bad Lightroom app update

davenewman

I have a complete backup of photos on a Blu-Ray disc. It is now unreadable.

Someone please have mercy on this poorly Ubuntu parking machine that has been force-fed maudlin autotuned tripe

davenewman

Why translate? There hasn't bee a comment from amanfrommars in this thread.

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

davenewman

Re: Elected Members

Many councillors are more at risk of the Council Cabinet reading their emails than any external security risks - especially opposition councillors. So they minimise the use of official council email.

It's been five years since Windows 10 hit: So... how's that working out for you all?

davenewman

I like Windows 10 - inside VirtualBox

I have to print to a Riso leaflet printer, which only has a driver for old Windows and Macs.

So I print inside a virtual Windows 10 inside Kubuntu. It works better than a virtual Windows 7.

If there's a lesson to be learned in these torrid times, it's that civilisation is fleeting – but Windows XP is eternal

davenewman

Tell us the story

of the prosthetic legs and the rest of the flight.

Former UK Labour deputy leader wants to know how the NHS's contact-tracing app will ensure user privacy

davenewman

Do as Estonia did

The app should report back to the user all the times someone accessed their data, with name, date and purpose.

That is what the Estonian identity card does. Two-way transparency.

Maybe there is hope for 2020: AI that 'predicts criminality' from faces with '80% accuracy, no bias' gets in the sea

davenewman

I wonder what kind of theory they put in the paper to explain how faces affect criminality (or vice versa). And why the first reviewers did not ask for one.

Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length: macOS shifts from x86 to homegrown common CPU arch, will run iOS apps

davenewman

Safari still bad a video conferencing

One reason fewer people use Safari on the desktop is the problems people often get when running video conferencing systems on it - particularly the ones that don't have their own client but use WebRTC. as I found out when running an 800 person conference in Hopin.

Couple wrongly arrested over Gatwick Airport drone debacle score £200k payout from cops

davenewman

They should have asked as part of their compensation for the Chief Constable to be locked up in police cells for 36 hours (under an alias).

Whatsapp blamed own users for failure to keep phone number repo off Google searches

davenewman

How soon until the first GDPR complaint?

Barmy ban on businesses, Brits based in Blighty bearing or buying .eu domains is back: Cut-off date is Jan 1, 2021

davenewman

Actually, quite a few bureaucracies can invent self shooting guns. Case in point - US gun laws and the high levels of injuries at home.

All-electric plane makes first flight – while lugging 2 tons of batteries aloft

davenewman

The problem is that they haven't redesigned the plane to make it much lighter.

Aren't they already using an electric plane between 2 islands in the Orkneys, where the flight is only 5 minutes long?

Fancy watching 'Bake Off' together with mates and alone at the same time? The BBC's built a tool to do that

davenewman

Re: He made one mistake

It isn't so much watching us as making sure we have paid the licence fee and are in the UK.

Oracle faces claims of unequal pay from 4,000+ women after judge upgrades gender gap lawsuit to class action

davenewman

To get CEOs to take discrimination seriously, we need a law that has personal consequences - such as a forced sex change operation for CEOs who discriminate against women.

Nine million logs of Brits' road journeys spill onto the internet from password-less number-plate camera dashboard

davenewman

Sheffield is one of the (mostly Labour) councils who have used the Coronavirus crisis to delegate all powers to the CEO with no oversight at all from elected councillors (except the leader of the Labour group). Oxford is another. The Stalinists are taking over in local councils (as opposed to Conservative Ministers in Whitehall shitting on us).

Microsoft decrees that all high-school IT teachers were wrong: Double spaces now flagged as typos in Word

davenewman

Your PC is not a typewriter

Was the title of a book in the 1990s. The author pointed out that with proportional fonts, the way to make text look good is to use the conventions of typesetting rather than typewriting. So only one space after a full stop in proportional fonts, 2 spaces in monospace fonts. (Word know which font you are using.)

Work from home surge may work in Wi-Fi 6's favour, reckons analyst house

davenewman

The problem is the pipe

All domestic Internet connections have a maximum upload speed a fraction of the download speed.

Shouldn't the ISPs be sending out online updates to increase the upload speed (even if it means decreasing the download speed)?

New York Attorney General probes Charter over claims it forced staff to work in offices amid coronavirus pandemic

davenewman

They should interview the CEO in a hospital. Everyone except the CEO wearing PPE.

Lockdown endgame? There won't be one until the West figures out its approach to contact-tracing apps

davenewman

Re: many European nations hesitated when it came to instituting lockdowns.

Since health is not a competence of the EU, but strictly that of national governments, it doesn't matter what the European Parliament or Commission does.. The EU is as powerless to intervene in this crisis as Donald Trump is against the state governors in the USA.

SAP decides one head is better than two in a crisis, parts ways with co-CEO Jennifer Morgan

davenewman

It is simpler than that

They got rid of the woman because they want a jerk in charge. The point of having co-CEOs is to stop fools rushing in to quickly.

In a crisis, which is the bigger risk - getting it wrong or doing it slowly?

Don't Zoom off elsewhere: Google plugs video-chat service Meet into Gmail as user eyes start wandering

davenewman

But if they just do it for people paying for GSuite, it is hardly a big market. It should come to everyone with a Google account.

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