Posts by Headley_Grange 1857 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Feb 2010
At the turn of the century I worked for a company that was going through the List-X process. In the run up to the preliminary audit, IT were working flat out on their processes, procedures, training, etc. One of the major findings of the audit was that there were too many doors into the building.
In the 90s I managed products with embedded code and the company discipline around comments was lax because the customer never got to see the source. We had a particularly awkward** customer QA, Pete, on one product and he could be a right-royal pain in the arse, which was frequently referenced in comments along the lines of "Pointless trap for an impossible error to keep the Pete-the-f***ing-pedant happy", and so on. What we didn't know is that the contract had a customer code-review option in the contract which Pete called up as part of final acceptance and we handed it over without even checking it ourselves! You can imagine the rest. No one was formally disciplined cos they'd have had to put the whole of SW engineering on a written, but stern words were had and it did result in a change in SW procedures on comments.
** i.e. good.
"It seems that Rust appeals to a more axiom focused developer who feels the grubby business of computation is rather beneath them, and would rather something else handle it."
Rust might appeal to companies who think they can shorten or even skip some bits of the software development process because Rust will take care of stuff they used to have to manage with reviews, testing and, you know, good SW engineers. I can imagine some of the people I've worked for coming back from a conference jolly all fired up with "this new language that's going to take 20% off our development costs because you can't write bad code with it" speeches.
"Google now forces AI Overviews on search users, whether they want it or not."
They also provide
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
for users who don't want the AI summary. Set it up as the default search. It's easy in FF but in safari I use an extension called Customize Search Engine to do it.
No - according to Trump they have a deficit everyt time they buy something and the seller doesn't buy something back from them. They have to make their own cheese, but unless the farm they buy the milk from buys their cheese then they'll have a deficit with the farmer.
""DPP Law holds the Law Society quality standard, Lexcel, and is Cyber Essentials certified. This demonstrates our commitment to robust standards in both legal practice management (Lexcel) and cybersecurity (Cyber Essentials)."
I like this. It seems to impy that if I go to court for speeding I can use the "I can't have been speeding because I've got a driving licence" argument.
"If the boards of corporations had an additional fiduciary duty of care to consider the impacts of their decisions on their employees, their customers, the communities in which they operate, the environment, and the long-term value of the business, the world would be a much better place."
In the UK they sort of do, although you wouldn't believe it and I don't think any directors have been brought to book for treating themselves and the shareholders much better than everyone else.
Companies Act 2006 Section 172: Duty to promote the success of the company
(1)A director of a company must act in the way he considers, in good faith, would be most likely to promote the success of the company for the benefit of its members as a whole, and in doing so have regard (amongst other matters) to—
(a)the likely consequences of any decision in the long term,
(b)the interests of the company's employees,
(c)the need to foster the company's business relationships with suppliers, customers and others,
(d)the impact of the company's operations on the community and the environment,
(e)the desirability of the company maintaining a reputation for high standards of business conduct, and
(f)the need to act fairly as between members of the company.
(2)Where or to the extent that the purposes of the company consist of or include purposes other than the benefit of its members, subsection (1) has effect as if the reference to promoting the success of the company for the benefit of its members were to achieving those purposes.
(3)The duty imposed by this section has effect subject to any enactment or rule of law requiring directors, in certain circumstances, to consider or act in the interests of creditors of the company.
Xi's too bright to do that, particularly since Trump is fucking it all up by himself at the moment. The Chinese will strengthen existing trade and forge new markets until they're in a position where they could care less about the US at which point they'll be ready to strike the US economically whenver they choose. I know some are saying that in 4 years Trump will be gone and we just have to wait him out, but they the people voted him in on these policies and there are people in the wings who are just as mad and will have learned a lot from what Trump is getting away with.
All true but massively exacerbated by the fact that many companies are owned by financial institutions in faraway countries who have nothing invested except money and they are in it for only as long as they can take money out. The companies they own are, to them, just a set of numbers on balance sheets and P&L accounts and they're happy to dump on them the debt they use to buy them so they don't pay tax, and then pay dividends til the money runs out. After that they don't care what happens.
It depends on what the vision for the country is. There was a great xkcd yesterday likening Trump's tariff calculation to buying pizza. I buy pizza regularly from the same pizzeria but they buy nothing from me so there's a huge deficit and the pizzeria needs to be punished with tariffs. To extend this analogy, what do I do? Every time I buy a pizza I double it's price and put the difference in bank. Eventually I'll have saved enough to buy a pizza oven, the big paddle thing, wood, ingredients, etc. and with practice I might be able to make pizzas just as good and then I won't need to buy pizzas from the pizzeria. Independence - yahoo.
This is what Trump is assuming will happen, but it's only a good idea if I want to spend my time making pizza, and the pizzas will be more expensive making them one at a time so I won't even recoup my costs unless I scale up and run a pizza business, which means giving up my job as an engineer who earns a decent wage for a three-day week to become a pizzeria proprietor earning a bit above minimum wage for a 100 hour week. Now I could conceivably consider this for pizza - I eat a lot of pizza and I know how to make it - but I've got an even bigger deficit with Tesco and I'm buggered if I'm going to start making my own baked beans and bog roll.
So, back to the vision for the country - assuming Trump's plan works it might not be a bad idea to bring high-tech manufacturing back to the US but he's put 37% on Bangladesh. Does the US really want to try to compete with people earning a few dollars a week making teeshirts and shoes? Whatever industry he brings back to the US will suffer from massively higher wage costs and hence prices, meaning that they'll only be saleable in the US and companies like Apple will have to maintain their offshore operations to compete in the rest of the world.
https://xkcd.com/3073/
I've noticed this too. It seems to be industry-standard to assume that a home uses about a kW. I average out at about 5kWh/day - an average use of about 200W, but if the oven's on and I boil the kettle and grill some bacon then that's going to be nearly 10kw peak. I guess it's more about load management and a new power station slots into a grid of supply designed to managed peak loads and the 1kW per household average is what the grid can support, including peak demand. I assume that now people stream instead of all watching at the same time then the Coronation Street ad-break peak is much less of a problem
How was this possible? Places I've worked that have low-level classified docs on the network have disabled USB ports and off-network file transfer with higher classifications only being accessible behind locked doors on specific machines on an air-gapped network. Unless GCHQ leaves them open to fish for idiots it's incomprehensible that someone could just download stuff to a phone and walk off site.
It might just be that the world's too uncertain a place now to make big decisions like this. As the schism between Europe and the US grows the likelihood of Europe isolating/protecting itself by passing more laws about data storage and processing increases. Only a fool would try and predict what Trump might do either pre-emptively or in retaliation. It would be sensible for anyone looking to make major international investments to hold off a bit to see if things settle down to more predictable levels of madness.
Data - our data - and its processing and use is such a big part of what the government does that it shouldn't be farmed out to anyone. What it needs is a professionally-staffed civil service IT organization, paid at market rates, to plan, develop, roll out, maintain and support the IT that we the country and people need. The bollocks about civil service rank and pay scales is just that because it's avoided for every discipline in every department by hiring consultants either as individuals or companies. Each wave of new consultancy brings a new, different view based on fashion or our-latest-product and we end up with silos of obsolete-before-first-use, disjointed, dilettante-led IT services which costs shit-loads of money and simply doesn't deliver anyhing.
</rant>
Bit like me. If I need a script to do some bulk editing of Playlists in Mac Music I search the web, find some snippets that do something similar and then modify them a bit to work for my use case. They work, eventually, but you wouldn't employ me to write deliverable code.
The priority notification thing first surfaced in a recent update to iOS Mail where it AI'd new mail into categories like Primary, Shopping, etc. When I say "AI'd" what I mean is that it filled many people's Primary list with junk and scam mails and just left a whole bunch of people a bit annoyed. I'd sort of looked forward to this cos it sounded similar to a feature that Blackberry had about ten years ago ("Impossible without AI!", I hear them cry) and it was quite useful for categorizing mails. I turned the Apple feature off after using it for about a day. I've been using Rules in Mac Mail for years and they are more than adequate for flagging and organizing my mail boxes. I certainly don't need a 9GB download of AI to improve it.
ATC typically has backup power for however long it would take them to "clear the skies" - i.e. make sure that everything inbound is diverted somewhere. It's typically an hour, but might be a bit longer in busier airports with less ability to divert. There's no point in it being any longer than this unless everything else in the airport is on backup power, which is pretty unrealistic.
When I started work in the 80s, if you were taking classified documents off site for a meeting they had to be carried in an specific kind of briefcase which you had to sign out from security and they'd ceremoniously put the docs in it for you. It was nothing special, an old-fasioned looking briefcase with two buckled straps and a beefy brass lock, but it always struck me as odd cos anyone carrying one stood out like a sore thumb to those in the know. I always felt I should also wear a bowler hat when I used them. They were phased out in the 90s I think.
"No matter how clearly you signpost the emergency exits, most people when evacuating, will try and get out the way they came in."
Many years ago I went to a concert. It was all seated and as I went in security told the woman in front of me that she had to walk back and round and go to her seat down the other aisle. She got annoyed and had a bit of a "my seats just there why can't I..?" hissy fit at the security bloke. He said something like "if there's an emergency then people will go out the way they came in so if we get you trained on the way in you're more likely to survive on the way out." She shut up and went back the right way.
I guess it's in the mind of the beholder. The article's author seems to want an iPad as a more portable laptop. However, I bet that many iPad users are like me - they take an iPad as a more useable iPhone when they're travelling and don't want to lug a laptop around. From this perspective my 1st gen iPad Pro is fine.
Years ago an engineer who worked for me went for an interview at a government place which he wasn't at liberty to reveal any more details about. They loved him but when they found out what he was earning they told him they couldn't afford to take him on. The job he was going for had a fixed civil-service grade and pay that couldn't be changed and it was dead-men's shoes all the way up. The interviewer admitted that the only selling point he had was that people were virtually unsackable and the pension was fantastic. Unsurprisingly the guy didn't take the job.
This will always be a problem in the civil service where salary is dependent on grade which is often dependent simply on time served** without messing up. In the real world you pay what things are worth. I've was a line manager and project manager in electronic engineering in the UK for 20 years and in every one of those years I had people working for me who earned a lot more than me and it never bothered me at all. My success, pay and bonus were all dependent on how good my team were and some of them were bloody good and got paid accordingly.
**perhaps with some flexibility based on which school you went to.
This is why I love the el Reg forum. I don't really understand this post other than "somebody could have made things easier/better (allegedly)" but I've added it to my RSS feed and look forward to a pleasant day reading some informative back and forth knowing that there won't be a load of name calling and other poor BTL behaviour. And I might even learn something.
"spatial memorization design" could also be problematic. The fact that a road was a 40mph limit last week doesn't mean you can assume it's still a 40 limit just cos you've not seen a sign. "It's always been a 40, your honour, how was I to know the limit had changed" isn't a defence you can rely on on court.
The problem is the limit they've put on their understanding. They know they don't need master keys to all the safes because with today's tech they can break into any safe in the land. It might take time and explosives but they know it can be done so they're not bothered. So they clearly understand the, effective, unbreakability of today's encryption and hence they want a backdoor. I think they also understand the impact of the key becoming public but what they choose not to understand is the inevitability of the key becoming public.
All true, but the printer still works and it has a good resolution scanner and prints A3, both of which are useful to me. When I find I'm using it more than normal I run a cron job to print a test page every morning which keeps the heads clear and probably uses less ink than running the cleaning routing every few days. When it eventually gives up the ghost or they stop supporting drivers I'll look at a laserjet.
I've blocked my Epson from direct contact with the web with the router's firewall, blocked all of the dozens of packages it installs using a software firewall and deleted the Epson updater app just in case. I still suspect the printer of shenanigans because it seems to need head cleaning more than it used to do but that could also be due to age and the fact that I no longer print very often.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
