Posts by Shady

Small Brit firms beg for 'light touch' as only half are ready for digital tax reforms due next month

Re: Sombody in there understands something about Free Software...

Well, accountants will need to recoup some income once all the contractors are forced inside IR35 and into using umbrellas from April 2020...

That marketing email database that exposed 809 million contact records? Maybe make that two-BILLION-plus?

Re: easy pickings

If it uses Flat files, XML, JSON, YAML, Redis, Mongo, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, C#, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Cobol, Visual Basic, BrainFuck or MSX Basic, and it runs on ARM, AMD or Intel Hardware, under Suse, RedHat, FreeBSD, RiscOS, AmigaOS, ReactOS or Qnix, on Laptops, Raspberry PI's, Atari ST's, Blades, Dell Power Edges or Sinclair calculators, hosted behind Dynamic DNS at home or co-located, then it qualifies as being Cloud, Enterprise and AI.

At least according to some of the marketing types I've had to work with.

UK banking was struck by one IT fail every day for most of 2018

Re: IT Failure?

Hanlon's razor almost definitely applies here

Amazon triples profit to $11.2bn, pays ZERO DOLLARS in corp tax – instead we pay it $129m

Re: "That makes me smart"

Dividend taxation was introduced to punish small businesses and one man bands (contractors) who had the temerity to play, quite legally, within the existing tax rules.

The aim was to get those legitimately outside of IR35 to pay a similar amount of tax as those inside, seeing as they'd failed (up to this point) to score any significant IR35 victories. It was a grudge tax.

Army had 'naive' approach to Capita's £1.3bn recruiting IT contract, MPs told

Indeed

Indeed.com? JobServe? Surely one of these would be willing to sell a re-skinned site?

Is there a "half-joking" icon available?

Thanks to UK peers, coming to a laptop near you in 2019: Age checks for online smut

...they do not deal with overseas providers...

Forget about VPN's, differing methods of delivery or obfuscation - surely this statement alone, assuming that (finger in the air) 99.99% of all porn accessed in the UK is hosted overseas - renders this ridiculous 'thing' (it's barely meets the requirements to be called a plan) infeasible?

Someone must have explained to some minister, at least one minister, that one can view webpages served from a computer in a different country?

What a meth: Woman held for 3 months after cops mistake candy floss for hard drugs

It might not have been underneath the "floor", afterall, what's underneath the floor of car is the road.

More likely this was found in the spare wheel well, or under a carpet, or if an older car, wedged into a seam underneath a seat, which by very loose definition any cop could say was "hidden under the floor", and which any non-pedant would probably agree.

Have you got kids? And a car? If so, how thoroughly do you clean your car? I've only got the one son, just short of his 12th birthday currently. I traded in a 3 year old Volvo V40 just a couple of months ago. I emptied it every week of junk, I valeted it myself thoroughly every few weeks, and got the local guys to valet it even more thoroughly every few months, but you would not believe the amount of shit one can find beneath almost any loose fitting flap or fairing.

A few years ago I traded in a car (coincidentally, also a Volvo), and though it was almost ready for the scrapper, I valeted it myself, and then also had the local guys valet it for me too, to remove any "evidence". A few weeks later I started getting hounded by the guy who'd bought it at auction and blamed me for buying a car with a faulty clutch. He'd got my number from a torn scrap of MOT invoice that must've been buried so far inside the car I assume he'd had to strip the car down to component parts to find it.

The point is, cars, even when well looked after and regularly cleaned, are black holes for any crap that enters them, especially if you have kids.

Talk in Trump's tweets tells whether tale is true: Code can mostly spot Prez lies from wording

Right or wrong, truth or lie, fact or fiction....

... it's all pure, unadulterated bollocks.

What the #!/%* is that rogue Raspberry Pi doing plugged into my company's server room, sysadmin despairs

Re: easy pickings

I left a small IT company about ten years ago, and went back about three years ago for a short term contract.

My email (username) and password still worked. Worse still, the network manager at the time had enforced the use of the company name as password because he was fed up of dealing with reset / forgotten password attempts by the peasants.

Behold, the world's most popular programming language – and it is...wait, er, YAML?!?

.docx is the most popular and robust programming language

It's used to configure and control Human Runtime Containers, and is capable of advanced instruction including loops and subroutines.

A completed .docx full of rambling flowery prose (the technical term is called "Bullshit") is called either a "Memo" or "Press Release". It is important to name Subroutines using Buzzwords to avoid Namespace Collisions with actual meaningful human language.

It has the advantage that a Human Runtime Container can parse even badly written code within a .docx, but there is a danger that a badly formatted .docx created by a C level human operative may cause the Human Runtime Container to suffer a Bullshit Overflow Exception.

Can your rival fix it as fast? turns out to be ten-million-dollar question for plucky support guy

Re: recompense?

It was a small box. And it was probably an unwanted box from the previous Christmas.

Re: recompense?

This is (in part) what drove me away from being a permie - I was never responsible for an 8 figure order, but certainly helped to win high 6, maybe even an occasional 7 figure deals on a regular basis, as illustrated:

Sales Eloi would often come along and say "I want to demo this (absolutely fucking stupid idea, but looks flash) to a potential client next week - have it ready by then".

"Not possible" we would say.

"But I've already promised the potential client (and I've already told the CEO* you've volunteered)" said expensively dressed Sales Eloi before shooting off in his delivery-mileage M5, to wine and dine said customer at a nearby Michelin-starred restaurant whilst us Developer Morlocks would put in yet another 10-15 hours of unpaid overtime, only to be rewarded with a shared box of Quality Street whilst Sales Eloi booked yet another 5* holiday to Monaco / Mauritius / Miami with his forthcoming commission.

*The CEO was extremely KPI driven, so Eloi's, as net-contributors to company coffers were a valuable asset and deserving of their rewards, but Morlocks, as a pure expense, were a drain and only barely tolerated.

This just in: What? No, I can't believe it. The 2018 MacBook Air still a huge pain to have repaired

When I studied electrical engineering at college, the lecturer once detailed the difference between TTL and CMOS logic chips, including how easily susceptible to ESD CMOS chips were.

He rolled it around in his hands and plugged it into his breadboard. It still worked.

He vigorously wiped his feet on the carpet, taking a couple of laps up and down his work area, before plugging it into his breadboard. It still worked.

He then passed 48V across it for a few seconds from his bench PSU (the chip was rated at 3.something to 8,something volts, IIRC) and it STILL worked.

Feeling embarrassed now, he started up his desktop Van De Graaff, blu-tacked the chip to his discharge wand and zapped the thing with 200kV. THAT got the result he was after.

Amazon is at this point a money-printing cloud machine with a grocery store in the parking lot

Re: easy pickings

"Tech stocks as a whole have been generally down this week in the US - although Microsoft was all right."

Intel shipped i9 in volume, and their stock has fallen.

AMD is doing incredibly well (for them), and their stock fell off a cliff

Amazon almost doubled earnings, and their stock plummeted

And Microsoft royally fucked up the latest Win 10 update and came out unscathed.

This is why I'm not a successful trader.

Boffin: Dump hardware number generators for encryption and instead look within

For best performance...

.. the author of the code really should have cached the output.

Activists rattle tin to take UK's pr0n block to court

Re: The gubmint know, because their advisers have told them, that this will fail as intended...

Wank Tax? Spank Bank Tax?

The future of humanity: A Bluetooth ball hitting your face – forever

Remember when Pokemon Go suddenly became a thing and idiots ran off cliffs....

...if only - my wife and I, after a long and tortuous (for me) morning of shopping, decided to visit Cafe Rouge in the Trafford Centre for a quick meal.

Whilst we were there, a constant stream of, erm, tourists, made their way through the restaurant to our table, stood there poking their phones for a few seconds, then wandered off. Must've been easily a half a dozen before we even got our drinks, and another dozen or so during the meal.

I'm quite a placid person, normally don't say boo to a goose, but towards the end of lunch as another of these tourists started making their way towards our table I stood and before he quite reached us, told him in my most manly voice, a red face and a pointy finger, to Fuck Off - which he did with haste and a horrified expression.

If they'd just stood near the table, I might not even have noticed them as it was incredibly busy, but these guys were literally rubbing their crotches against my and my wife's chairs as they stood there, completely oblivious to the people who were mere inches from having genitals rubbed against them.

The waitress scuttled over after my outburst, and helpfully explained that our table was a "pokey thing battle playground thingy"

There are very few times in my life when I've felt utter, white-hot rage - this was one of them.

Insecure web still too prevalent: Boffins unveil HSTS wall of shame

Please be aware that looking at dailymail.co.uk through an insecure connection may enable hijackers to replace content such as bile loaded thinly veiled hate-driven articles with well-researched, unbiased stories, and you would never know.

You have been warned.

'Moore's Revenge' is upon us and will make the world weird

Re: easy pickings

Butt how would this work? Do you mean by their arse-print? Or, by poaching from the technology that can identify an individual by their gait, the seat could identify the patron by, erm, "trajectory"? And you could probably infer the worst if the recognition database was called Starfish...

2 + 2 = 4, er, 4.1, no, 4.3... Nvidia's Titan V GPUs spit out 'wrong answers' in scientific simulations

Re: Repercussions...

Ah, so that's what preemptive execution means then?

Sysadmin held a rack of servers off the ground for 15 mins, crashed ISP when he put them down

Co-location

Reminds me of a time about 15 years that our "nominal CTO" changed colo hosts to a cheaper provider, and we just had the servers shipped there. The colo wired them up, switched 'em on, and gave us a call to tell us they were running.

One day we had cause to go on-site there (needed to install a new hard drive or some such), and we were, given the monthly cost, shocked but not surprised to find our servers supported by milk crates in a disused outdoor dunny at a semidetached house in Leicester, with cables running in through the air bricks that had been creatively enlarged (read - smashed through).

Although we'd never had an issue with reliability or connectivity, the servers were moved pretty sharpish to a more reputable host.

Virgin Media skulks in disused public toilets

Even more likely, just when you've finished, and your marriage absolutely depends on the ability to flush, you'll get "There is a high demand in your area, Flush is not available right now. Please try again later"

'Please store the internet on this floppy disk'

Re: Stolen Focus

Blizzard Vision by Phase 5, attached to a PPC 603e / 68060, 8 meg of EDO for the accelerator, driving a (very expensive) Mitsubishi truly flat CRT at 1280x1024 non-interlaced.

MUI looked amazing. Photogenics, Imagine 4 and Tornado 3D were fantastic, and Quake was... responsible for many late nights.

I made my student loan go a very, very long way, along with a seemingly (at the time) limitless credit card

Re: Stolen Focus

I used to have a fully pimped out Amiga 1200 - PowerPPC accelerator, Permedia 2 graphics card, 4 gigabyte hard drive - it absolutely ran circles around my mates early Pentium with 3DFX2...... If the accelerator hadn't burned out, forcing me to break 'er up for spares, I'd probably still be using it today, even if only for minor tasks.

One of the design guidelines was that a notification or alert should never steal focus, and combined with other features it was a lovely, fluid UI to use.

Focus stealing on Windows still utterly, utterly, pisses me off to this day. It's just plain rude.

Serious question - can anyone recommend any utility / setting to prevent this on a Windows PC, that won't install browser plugins / ad bars / mining software alongside it?

Special delivery: Pizza, parcel-slinging drones inch closer to reality

I'm waiting for the "Sky Crook" drone. It follows the Amazon drone around, and after the Amazon drone has dropped off a parcel, the Sky Crook moves in and scoops it up before the recipient has collected it from their lawn.

The Amazon drone records video providing proof of delivery, the hapless recipient is left out of pocket and considering forking out for CCTV cameras after claiming the delivery wasn't made.

Car trouble: Keyless and lockless is no match for brainless

Re: You ended up with a Nissan Puke? Unlucky!

I personally refer to it as a Nissan Joke. Or, perhaps even worse, a Micra 4x4.

Wanna get started with practical AI? Check out this chap's Rubik's Cube solving neural-net code

Exactly 54 moves

It always takes me exactly 54 moves. This is the number of coloured faces I have to peel off and re-stick.

SpaceX releases Pythonesque video of rocket failures

Was this really released by Space X?

Or is it a North Korea propaganda film, intended to strike fear into the heart of the evil imperialists dogs by showing the power of their mighty dongs?

Unloved Microsoft Edge is much improved – but will anyone use it?

330 million active devices?

I didn't realise there were 329,999,999 web developers checking that their latest app could run on SatNad's PC.

Smart meters: 'Dog's breakfast' that'll only save you 'a tenner' – report

Re: easy pickings

I suspect this post could be thumbed up by approximately 28 million households.

10 minutes of silence storms iTunes charts thanks to awful Apple UI

Re: Not limited to iPhones

I once went to a dealer to get a map update DVD for my 2005 vintage Volvo S40. This was about 2008, and the maps were already so out of date the Sat Nav wasn't capable of getting me from Derby to Tenby without the motorway. At all.

£600 they said.

I only want the discs, and then only for the UK if that's an option, I said, perhaps naively.

Six Hundred Quid they said. 500 + VAT.

Six Hundred *Fookin* quid for a disc? Said I.

A trip to Halfords and £250 later I had a better, faster Tom Tom and my pop-up in-dash sat nav never popped up again.

Tech giants warp eco standards to greenwash electronics, rake in cash

This thread is in serious danger

of reaching Peak Daily Mail

Programmer's < fumble jeopardizes thousands of medical reports

Re: Markup language

So the MacArthur's, MacGregor's and MacLean's were shit outta luck then? As are my ancestors, the MacPollen's.... No hard feelings, you deserve one of these for even attempting that task.

AES-256 keys sniffed in seconds using €200 of kit a few inches away

Genuine Question

Could this be defeated by running a randomised workload when encryption / decryption is taking place? Perhaps even perform parallel decryption / encryption using nonsense keys and nonsense data, lock-stepped to the genuine task.

Or, if the server if sufficiently shielded, would an RF white-noise generator defeat the snooping?

PC rebooted every time user flushed the toilet

As Dump hits the Sump, Pump leaves user resting on his Rump as PC Slumps

See title

Hacker exposed bank loophole to buy luxury cars and a face tattoo

The Daily Mail.

Pick a day. Any day.

Software dev bombshell: Programmers who use spaces earn MORE than those who use tabs

Maybe...

... it just takes an additional 2.4 years to type all those extra spaces.

No joke icon. Not joking. I'm a tabby.

The Big Blue Chopper video that IBM might want to keep quiet

Re: errr

"Care to point at *any* meaningful sacrifice made by her?"

She appears to have sacrificed her reputation in pursuit of a payday.

'My PC needs to lose weight' says user with FAT filesystem

On a similar note....

My (non IT literate) brother was once trying to save a picture to a floppy disk on my my Amiga. "The file is too big" he complained, after dragging the picture icon over the floppy drive icon. "How big is it?" I asked. "About this big" he replied earnestly, holding his thumb and finger about an inch apart..... (sigh...)

Faking incontinence and other ways to scare off tech support scammers

Re: easy pickings

Ha, reminds of a old website long ago where you could enter a "friends" details - whereupon they'd receive a very authentic looking email from the FBI (this was 20 odd years ago) informing them that they had been monitored viewing very illegal pornography and they would be contacted shortly....

I did this to my (normally) very jovial, ebullien, porn-loving friend whilst he was sat close by so I could monitor his reaction. He looked so close to death I never dared own up.

IBM: Customer visit costing £75 in travel? Kill it with extreme prejudice

Re: Hmm

You don't know the meaning of the word "stingy"

Back when I were perm (Yorkshire accent required) a colleague was required to deliver and install a server from Derby to somewhere near Tyne and Wear and used his own car, looking forward to claiming his 40p / mileage allowance, thinking he was going to make a little extra beer money.

His car broke down on the way back and as he didn't have breakdown cover had to join the AA at the roadside, who couldn't get his car going so had to flatbed him home.

Upon learning this, our mutual boss decided to calculate his mileage based on the outward journey and the portion of the return journey before the breakdown occurred.

As tight as a cats arse, that one.

User loses half of a CD-ROM in his boss's PC

Faulty drive

When I upgraded to a (very cheap, unbranded) 52x drive from a 6x drive I felt chuffed - up until the point I ejected the disc. It was still spinning at - I suspect - 52x speed. Thought it was goingto take my bloody head off, and the disc was definitely not readable after breaking against the wall.

Boffins gently wake the Large Hadron Collider from annual hibernation

...installing a new beam dump in the Super Proton Synchrotron...

As an IT guy, I just call it "going for a download". Particle physicists have way cooler scatology.

Male escort forgot pregnancy protection, scores data protection instead

Re: easy pickings

Butts are extra (sorry)

IT contractors behind IR35 calculator to leave HMRC... because of IR35

Re: easy pickings

Because I think you'll find one or both of these reasons to be true: #1 The "mega-large-non-tax-paying consultancy" is a major donor to the Conservative party. #2 A conservative MP, peer or other party member, or a friend or relative of aforementioned MP or peer, is on the board of the "mega-large-non-tax-paying consultancy"

Kids these days will never understand the value of money

Re: A few years back

"Realtime" via an app doesn't exist, at least for HSBC. I can't comment on other banks. I've gone cash-only since Christmas, in part because I couldn't figure out where £200 - £400 per month was going.

When making a purchase I'd check my balance - plenty of funds - make the purchase, then get a text at 6pm. Overdrawn. Check phone and anywhere from £50 - £500 in transactions have shown up.

So, transfer cash from main account to my account and everything is balanced. But then I get a text at 7am the next morning saying I'm overdrawn again. And it's not like this was caused by purchases made yesterday, some of these purchases were made a week ago!

So for me at least, realtime needs to be *actually realtime* - If I'm going to rely on my app to tell me what my available funds are, it has to be up to the second, no exceptions.

As it is, going cash-only is something I've been intending to do for some time, and I regret not doing it sooner - I give myself "walking around money" every Friday, and when it's gone, it's gone - I am disciplined enough not to draw more cash if I run out, and learnt to stretch the cash I have in my pocket, and I'm about £300 / month better off for it

More tech companies join anti-Trump battle, but why did some pay for his inauguration?

Re: It is a muslim ban

I doubt geography is his strong point. He probably doesn't know where Indonesia is on a map, how to spell it, how to pronounce it and couldn't tell an Indonesian from a Sylvanian

Why does it cost 20 times as much to protect Mark Zuckerberg as Tim Cook?

Re: Wow!

...and if you got shot, you were just dodging bullets wrong.

Millions of Brits stick with current broadband provider rather than risk no Netflix

Re: There's also a value to keeping your email address

That you still use to login to MySpace....

Re: Lack of useful customer data to blame

Are you watching via a smart TV, STB or games console? I'm with Virgin, and iPlayer does not work for me at all when watched either via Tivo or the Samsung smart telly - can't even show SD, never mind HD.- buffers and buffers and buffers until iPlayer itself says "can't play this content". Completely unwatchable. However, watching iPlayer via XBone is silky smooth and the UI extremely responsive. All the devices are connected via WiFi and are around ten feet from the Virgin Superhub which is in a different room, otherwise I'd have used wired connections. Virgin does not get off though - I think it's the shitty Superhub as even my Echo is unable to stream music without dropping out (even if only for a second or so). Many people buy a dedicated router and just use the hub in Modem mode, and I plan to buy one soon myself.