Posts by IHateWearingATie 682 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2008
The suggested products from Amazon actually turn out to be useful, and not just more versions of the things that I have bought already.
"You recently bought a table - here's a list of other tables that you might like. We would suggest some chairs, but that would be too useful."
.... I seem to remember a very ambitious manager in the USA created something and tried to get it to be officially adopted. It was doing the rounds in the early 2000s - I suspect in the USA as a serious thing, in the UK it was sent as a joke.
Don't have a copy of it unfortunately, but it was as bad as you imagine
US courts tend to take a very wide view of what is in their territorial jurisdiction. The best assumption you can make is that if you have a map with the USA marked on it in your house, or know what the capital of the USA is, their courts will assume they own your ass.
Hah! I can well imagine that was the case. Lucky is the techie who hasn't worked at an org that isn't so much behind the curve as using a telescope to see the curve accelerating away from them.
In 2001 at a certain public sector organisation I was still coding updates for a user interface running on Windows 3.11. I bet they thought of Netware still as newfangled technology.
I seem to remember from my dim and distant contract law lectures that the original case law on this is from the late 1800s and relates to a price being wrong on a watch in the shop window.
Invitation to treat, offer, acceptance I think are the three stages. Prices on a website are generally held in the T&Cs to be an invitation to treat.
When was the last time you got to a petrol station and found that it was closed / broken so you had to go somewhere else (as opposed to just having to wait longer as a couple of the pumps are broken) ?
My main car won't be replaced with an electric one until reliability of charging points is such that them being broken is really rare. My mate has a Tesla, and his experience is that it would be a real pain running an electric car without the excellent Tesla only charging network.
In my day to day transactions (e.g. getting paid by my employer, buying groceries etc) I have no use for a currency whose value can vary in such a large way day to day and week to week. Does inflation devalue my currency? Definitely, but its not Venezuelan proportions where I could lose half the value of my wage a week after being paid it.
I remember my wife telling me about the awkward conversation with a client about a "customs charge" for some product they were trying to get in to Turkey (this was way before the advent of the bribery act). Trying to avoid the use of the word bribe in the conversation, the client took ages to realise what she was on about, arguing that that particular class of products should be immune to customs charges under Turkish law. The conversation mostly focused on the wide latitude that customs agents had in Turkey to apply 'additional customs charges' that had to be paid in cash to secure an 'expedited customs release'.
I was working at a giant global company when that happened (2013 I think). The number of idiots doing a reply-all (to all 150,000 employees) saying "Please remove me from this list" or "Please don't reply all" was amazing.
It started at around 5pm UK time and took till 8.30pm before IT pulled the plug on the mail list.
Currently on a Virgin Media 200/20Mb package - I could upgrade to the 500/35Mb but really don't see the point.
Early lockdown with both me and my wife working from home and the sprogs doing their schoolwork didn't tax it too much, so don't see the point in anything faster for me at the moment. I'm sure that will change in the future, but for now I'm not doing my best to help the overall average speed increase.
Just how naughty have you been El Reg, when Gizmodo buying a stolen phone and writing about it only gets them a 2 year Apple Ban, when you are in the perma-banned category?
Did you stamp on St Steve's kitten or something? Tell Tim C he was holding the phone wrong in a press interview? Suggest that some Apple products might be a tiny bit overpriced?
"Any other shit cliches you want to wheel out while you're logged in? Maybe something about haggis or .."
Ah, haud yer wheesh as mah mither used tae say.
No really, she did. Apparently I moaned quite a bit as a kid. Now a parent myself, I must say its a very useful saying.
Looking at some of the pages, its like that editor read some Broons cartoons in the Sunday Post and decided that they could speak Scots.
If you don't use it, then you shouldn't care. However, quite a lot of businesses (including the one I work for) have moved to buying Apple laptops for their workforce on the basis that you could also run x86 Windows apps when needed.
Without that, there are two choices. Stop buying Apple laptops that can't run x86 Windows apps easily, or move the apps to Mac. Stopping buying Apple laptops is a much cheaper option and in some cases legacy x86 Windows apps won't be able to be practically ported.
Am I the only one gutted not to have thought of this first? Admittedly I would have pitched it at around £70 as £300 feels like its way beyond the point of maximising revenue, and I would have soldered a few random components on there to throw people off the trail...
Ethics - I've heard of them.
My guess is because section 7 is looser than the limits placed under 49 (3) of RIPA:
A disclosure requirement in respect of any protected information is necessary on grounds falling within this subsection if it is necessary—
(a)in the interests of national security;
(b)for the purpose of preventing or detecting crime; or
(c)in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom.
versus (from schedule 7):
An examining officer who questions a person under paragraph 2 may, for the purpose of determining whether he falls within section 40(1)(b)—
(a)search the person;
(b)search anything which he has with him, or which belongs to him, and which is on a ship or aircraft;
(c)search anything which he has with him, or which belongs to him, and which the examining officer reasonably believes has been, or is about to be, on a ship or aircraft;
This is typical public sector thinking - great being the enemy of good.
The extra information they are after will be very very useful in lots of situations, but they have missed the glaring issue of privacy. It could cause far fewer people to sign up, meaning that it misses what it is meant to do in the first place (apparently you need at least 60% of the population to use it for it to be effective), and we can pretty much guarantee some kind of snafu to allow access to the data for people we don't want to access it.
Most frustrating.
"Next up is the common requirement to log into multiple accounts, trivial with Slack. "
I need this. As with most Microsoft things, it doesn't quite work right when you are working on a laptop linked via active directory linked to my employer, but trying to access mail, MS Teams etc via a log in that my client has given me. This has never quite worked for web access (weird behaviour when clicking links etc) and now the same thing is happening in Teams, where even if I create a meeting request in my client account, behind the scenes MS Teams thinks that it is linked to my employer's AD account.
Frustrating.
(My employer uses Slack rather than Teams - first time I opened it was when I started working with my current client!)
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