Posts by Headley_Grange

Should Google location data be a tool for cops?

Re: Why Google?

If you've got an iPhone and were using Google maps because the native map app is a POS and you'd failed the turn-off-all-tracking-and-history treasure hunt then it's possible that you'd be included in the search.

Sweating the assets: Techies hold onto PCs, phones for longer than ever

Who Benefits?

As others have pointed out, new PCs offer no practical performance or functional improvement for my uses. Indeed, different PSUs, connectors and interfaces on new Macs will require a significant spend on peripherals and adapters when I eventually upgrade, so I'll be putting it off as long as possible. Phones are just getting stupidly big for no added benefit (for me) and, fingers crossed, I'll be hanging on to my current one for a few years yet until the security upgrades stop.

British monarchy goes after Twitter, alleges rent not paid for UK base

Re: The fundamental problem with the business

London because of the huge catchment area of relevant tech industries and hence talent pool with good transport links for when the boss has a hissy fit about attendance-in-person. Why not a not an industrial estate in London? I've done some work installing kit in a few nondescript industrial estates inside the M25 and many of them are not convenient for public transport and driving is a pain anywhere in London. Commuting is a pain in the arse, but it's much better if the destination is in Zone 1 rather than Zone 4 on the opposite side of the city and a mile away from the tube.

Having said that, it's probably more a case of Piccadilly for the perceived prestige -- and cos they could!

Software devs targeted as British tax authority makes fraud allegations

Re: I think this was always a bit dodgy...

Beat me to it - exactly the same here. I don't know if it's when the tax credits system came in or because someone noticed it but it was mid-2000s and I was PM in charge of a bunch of projects delivering comms kit to infrastructure and defence organizations. The bosses hired consultants from PWC who grilled the engineering teams and tried to put words in their mouths so they could put as much as possible in the "innovation" column. It got silly cos most of the work was just configuring and tweaking our standard kit for customer specific requirements - IP plans, site-specific connector changes, screen overlays, UPS distribution, and most of this was done on the hoof by the I&C team. I bet PWC cost more than the money we got back cos we never went through it again.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: I'm pro SI

You're right, but I don't think it's just a British thing. If the British had managed to formalize imperial measures as a world standard then the French would be using metric today and a load of Jambons would be chucking their toys out the pram about having to buy groceries in pounds and ounces.

Scottish Pint

It can be confusing drinking in Scotland, where a half and half doesn't make a pint.

Fat EVs may cause 'more death on our roads' – watchdog

Re: More mass = more energy, right?

The push for EVs isn't about energy saving, it's CO2 reduction.

US think tank says China would probably lose if it tries to invade Taiwan

Alternative Scenario

Putin sells the kompromat to Xi. With Russian and Chinese help, Trump wins 2nd term. USA doesn't get involved - so no one else does. Taiwan falls to China in a few weeks.

Microsoft to move some Teams features to more costly 'Premium' edition

Re: 'the misery of running multiple tools'

I remember Lotus Notes being pretty integrated - calendar, mail, ToDos and notes could be usefully converted from one to another. However, I don't see similar integration with the Mac apps. There's no native way to convert an email or message to a Reminder or put a Reminder into the Calendar or vice/versa. There's copy/paste and drag/drop, but they mostly just copy text without the underlying data, depending on which apps it's being dragged from and to.

I have a vague recollection that when I first started with Macs there was some integration between Reminders and Calendar. I've written scripts to do what I want, but I think Apple is missing a trick.

Re: vanilla

I disagree. To me, vanilla implies that there are options, like hundreds-and-thousands, raspberry sauce and a flake and alternatives, like chocolate and neopolitan. If you've been good then your mum might let you have some of them.

The CES tat bazaar: Bike desks, AI-powered bird feeders, and the smelloverse

Re: Acer's charging bike

They've had them in MacDonalds for a while - so no need for Cheetos.

Next-gen Qi2 wireless charging spec seeded by Apple

Re: 15W charging is "too slow"?

Happy 2023 - the year when a phone that "already lasts all day" became a good thing.

Citizen Coder? Happiness Concierge? Here come 2023's business cards

Re: "Directors"

In the UK if you are described as a director, say in an org chart, or have "Director" on your business card then it is considered reasonable for people outside the company with whom you do business to assume that you speak for the company as a director and, as such, can legally commit the company. This is whether or not you are registered as a director for the company with Companies House. I assume that's why VP is taking over as the preferred title in many companies here in the UK.

Merc

When I started out I was a Freelancer or Contractor. Then I became a Consultant. If I hadn't already got more business cards than I'll ever use then I'd be an Advisor today.

Some engineers are being paid between $250k and $1m, says salary survey

Follow the Money

Reminds me of the IEE (now IET) wage survey which they used to do in the 80s and 90s. Every year it came out, replete with data, graphs and summaries, and every year it bore no resemblance to the wages any of us were earning - and we were doing OK. The bosses hated it. The main thrust of the survey was that IEE members earned more than non-IEE members, which was odd because when the Thursday Telegraph came out with all the job ads, none of them specified higher wages for IEE members, nor even required membership.

Big Apple locals hire Russians to game New York's taxi system

Re: Sorry in advance

Mac Minnies?

Microsoft patent eyes ads in streaming online games

Re: Please, please, please...

You're right, but paid services - like Sky and some newspaper paid subs - still run ads. The bigger risk is that the likes of Google eventually become essential monopolies and figure that they can charge a subscription **and** run ads as well.

Apple taps brake on self-driving cars, now aims for 2026

Re: No invisible infrastructure

I'm not sure what you mean about "awful eyesight". I bet it would be easy for me to make fake "No Lorries" or 20mph limit signs for my road that would fool autonomous vehicles but they'd require a lot more work to fool humans.

The cubesats lost in space from Artemis Moon mission

Re: Failure rate

You took the words right out of my mouth.

Italy, Japan, UK to jointly launch sixth-gen fighter jet by 2035

Jump Jets Are Go!

Finally, a replacement for the Harrier. I can't wait to see them hovering above a location near to me.

Washington DC drags Amazon to court for 'yoinking' driver tips

Re: Stealing tips

They could also do with legislation that makes it clear that if you use a "contractor" then the contractor's rate must cover all their reasonable employment costs - wage, expenses (vehicle costs, maintenance, insurance, PPE, etc), professional insurances, accountancy fees, holiday, sickness and pension allowances, etc. Any contracts that drive the rate below what would reasonably be expected for such a contractor would be made illegal, as would "voluntary" opt-outs and any other strong arm tactics on the part of the "client" to force the "contractor" to work at employee rates for contractor terms.

Re: Tips?

I'm in the UK. Binmen, postman, paper boy and window cleaner all get Christmas tips.

NLRB slaps down Activision's attempt to stop another union

Re: Can someone explain to a non-American...

I think that the point of the article is that this is not legal. Loosely speaking, a group of workers can be represented by a union if a majority of them vote for it. Activision is trying to make the case that these QA workers don't form a distinct group and so they can't vote to join a union. Implicitly, if they want to join a union they'll have to get the bigger groups, which Activision says they are part of, to vote to join a union, which might be harder to achieve.

Japanese convenience store chain opens outlet staffed by avatars and robots

Re: "the company wants them to engage with customers rather than stay behind a cash register"

And what about the people who get sacked once all the checkouts are automated? They won't have the financial ability to pay for anything. Perhaps you'll let them grub around in your bins for scraps - or would that be depriving the garden of good compost?

Only iPhone 15 Pro models will have higher data transfer speeds on USB-C – analyst

Re: Coby > Apple

And maybe if Apple hadn't patented it, charged third-party devices to use the socket and charged users £25 and up for adapters then it might have become widely used and they could have made a case for it becoming the standard precisely because of its superior physical performance.

Re: Lightning

The transfer speed means nothing if it's the underlying software that limits its capabilities. When (USB) synching between idevices and Mac it takes an age to do the photos because it checks every one of my 10'000+ images for changes instead of having a top-level catalog track changes so it only has to sync changed images. Even if I've not changed or added any images to either device, synching photos still takes ages because of this poor behaviour. It wouldn't matter if the transfer speed went up by a factor of ten - it's crap software. I leave photo-synch turned off and only enable it when I've made changes that I need to synch.

University staff voice 'urgent, profound concern' as Oracle finance system delays payments

Re: Why Does El Reg Have A Picture Of The Assembly Hall Of The Church Of Scotland......

"Oxbridge is being replaced at the apex of UK universities by “Stoxbridge” after St Andrews overtook Oxford and Cambridge at the top of the latest Guardian University Guide."

The Grauniad, 24th Sep 2022

I was the consultant!

"..which required us to interrupt financial processing for a period over summer to allow us to test the system and transfer huge volumes of data.."

I've worked on a couple of ERP replacements and neither required interruption of day-to-day operations while they were being tested - and given they were in FMCG I bet they ran a lot more data than Edinburgh Uni. I can't think of any good reason why they'd need to interrupt the old service before being able to transfer data and test the new one. I can think of plenty of bad reasons for doing so, but I bet sorting out the current mess will cost them more than the savings they thought they could make by not doing proper data validation, testing and parallel running for a couple of cycles before going live.

Twitter is suffering from mad bro disease. Open thinking can build it back better

I'm guessing, but from the train companies' perspective it's easier on Twitter. No subscription lists to create and manage, no GDPR, no mail formats to create/manage - just get a Twitter account, a blue tick and get typing. Many people are suspicious of signing up to mailing lists - even though it's probably no worse than getting a Twitter account.

From my perspective - there's little choice for the trains. I got a gig that required a daily commute and keeping up with delays and cancellations was easiest via Twitter. The timetable app shows delays and cancellations, but doesn't give advice about platform changes or alternative options or non-train related problems which affect the journey. Also, for some reason, it takes ages to load and refresh what must be less than a kB of data. Once I had the Twitter account I added a couple of sports teams to it, but there are better apps for that now. The commuting gig finished a couple of years ago, so I only use Twitter now if I head to town and I'm coming home late and worried about late trains.

Re: What it means to be a republican

It's a clip from a TV series called "The Newsroom" - not a real interview. Sorry, should have made it clear in my OP.

What it means to be a republican

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5GgNov8i4k

Mastadon sounds good for my use-case. I use Twitter to get information fed to me about train services and sports. So, if I've understood Mastadon, this would work OK for folk like me; the train company could set up its own federation, I'd join it and the information about late and cancelled trains would still get to me. It might need more work on the part of the train company to set up an manage, but it ought to work.

I guess that the problem is where the money comes from. I expect that the money which Twitter did make came more from the contentious, argumentative and nuttier bits of the Tweetosphere, rather than people wanting to know the footy score.

Twitter begs some staff to come back, says they were laid off accidentally

Re: some of those being asked back were apparently laid off by mistake

"If it was me, I would be devising the most ridiculous wild goose chase I could imagine for them as payback for the way I'd been treated."

The people you'd fuck off by doing this probably wouldn't have been responsible for the layoffs and, more importantly, they might be reviewing your CV in a few years time at a different company. It's a small world and bridges are best left unburned, in my experience.

Re: This is the way it should work...

If you trust the government of the day - whatever colour - then you're right. However, if you're a bit cynical then "Significant policy changes" doesn't restrict much. You could gut the working-time directive if you wanted and claim that it wasn't a change of policy (the policy to limit working time hasn't changed), but merely a technical update (changing the limit from 48 to 53 hours is merely a technical change).

As for book-burnings - see my crossing post; we probably agree on that.

I'm done on this thread - fun as it is, I think it's gone a bit off-topic.

Re: This is the way it should work...

There's a fair amount of confusion about this. The 2400* number comes from Rees Mogg, who published a list of 2400 pieces of retained EU legislation and suggested that the public might want to vote on what we keep. It's here

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/governmentreporting/viz/UKGovernment-RetainedEULawDashboard/Guidance]

From the site: "Retained EU Law (REUL), is a category of domestic law created at the end of the transition period. It is made up of certain pieces of EU legislation that were ‘cut and pasted’ onto the UK statute book as the UK’s own version of these laws. REUL is also made up of certain domestic laws that implemented EU law and were preserved as REUL on the UK statute book."

So those are the laws the bill is about when it references REUL.

The bill says

16 This Bill facilitates planned reforms to over 2,400 pieces of REUL. To ensure REUL comes to an end in the near future, a sunset of REUL by the end of 2023 has been included in the Bill.

17 The sunset will accelerate reform and planning for future regulatory changes, benefiting both UK business and consumers sooner.

18 The sunset will also increase business certainty by setting the date by which a new domestic statute book, tailored to the UK’s needs and regulatory regimes will come into effect.

19 A power to provide for an extension to the sunset has been included in the Bill, ensuring the efficiency of the REUL revocation process should a lack of parliamentary time, or external factors, hinder progress towards reform of retained EU law prior to the 2023 sunset date.

So, if the bill passes, and the government were to do nothing, all the those 2400* pieces of REUL will lapse at the end of 2023 unless they invoke clause 19 and extend the sunset date. That's the "bonfire" that many people refer to. I don't think it's helpful language and I don't think that UK gov has ever phrased it like that, but even the FT jumped on the bandwagon with "The UK government has invited people to use a new website to identify EU laws they wish to scrap, in a move that would deliver a “crucial boost to productivity”. Much as I don't like him, I can't find any direct quotes from Rees-Mogg about scrapping EU laws and not replacing them (5 minute web search, so I didn't look very hard).

Of course, no one's suggesting that the government will do nothing before the end of 2023, but there's a view that there aren't enough civil servants working on this in order to review and replace all the REUL - the Grauniad article below has a couple of quotes to this effect. The government could just assimilate a lot of the REUL or extend the sunset date - the bill allows for that both of these. Note also that the Brexit treaty limits what we can do in some areas, like employment law, to prevent the UK reducing regulations which would allow us to compete on "unfair" terms with Europe.

My view, for what it's worth, is that it's a bad and pointless bill overall. There's a need, as Peter2's first post highlights, to separate UK law from the EU court and case law, but the rest of the bill is pointless; REUL legislation could stay on the books to be dealt with in some sort of priority order and that priority shouldn't be based on whether or not it came about because of our membership of the EU. If we're going to change employment law then the EU-derived elements are less important than zero hours, employee definitions, IR35, etc. in my opinion (other opinions are available).

* they've just found another 1400 laws that will also need to be covered by this bill. See

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/nov/08/government-finds-extra-1400-laws-scrap-rees-mogg-brexit-bill

Re: This is the way it should work...

@Peter2 - The elements that you quote are reasonable in terms of taking CJEU and its case-law out of UK law. However, there are more worrying aspects to the bill.

If the bill were simply, as assumed by many, a means of getting rid of EU legislation and replacing it with our own then that would be sort of OK. We delete the EU employment laws, write our own and parliament gets to debate, modify, amend and approve them. However, the bills states:

45 This Bill simplifies the status of RDEUL, ensuring that all RDEUL is treated as equivalent to domestic secondary legislation, thus clarifying that it may be amended in a similar way.

This means that the EU laws that we decide to retain (RDEUL) will not follow the parliamentary process which primary legislation would follow - committee stages, first/second readings, amendments, etc. They simply need a minister to change them and a committee stage to confirm that they are being changed in line with the act that covers their status as secondary legislation - i.e. this act. So, we could decide to retain EU employment laws, safety laws, consumer protection laws, ...... etc. and then a minister could make sweeping changes to them now, or at any time in the future, and parliament can't amend or modify it - it only gets to vote on it. This isn't about playing to the Brexit crowd, it's about removing huge swathes of law from parliamentary oversight.

Re: What's the problem with WARN?

Anyone else find it odd that there are no Twitter or ex-Twitter employees on the forum with information about what's actually happening?

Re: Modest proposal.

I dunno. Instead of reading Who-Me? about inadvertently leaving the -r at the end of a hurriedly-pasted command, you could pay to watch it in real time.

China reminds world shock and ore can hurt tech supply chains

Re: The problem is

I think that the Chinese might just have spotted this risk. They are massively focused on Africa and doing the ground work now in soft diplomacy, trade and support because, as well as being a huge source of raw materials, it's a potentially huge marketplace for goods and services across the board.

Minecraft's 'first luxury goods collection' features real-world $3,000 Burberry coat

Blockheads Don't Wear Burberry

They've got womanly breasts under pale mauve vests

Shoes like dead pigs' noses

Cornflake packet jacket, catalogue trousers.....

But no raincoats.

Union meeting BT shareholders today to discuss strikes, pay rises

Re: No sympathy for either side

Beat me to it. Since spring I've had 4 visits to sort out my dodgy line and all the people who turned up were great. Happy to spend time, great comms - they called before disconnecting me and they all gave me their mobile and said to get back in touch if it wasn't fixed. They fixed the fault eventually (about 6 intermittents in the line between me and the cab).

The process to get a call out was similarly OK - between the SMS thing and the help staff somewhere in Ireland even a curmudgeonly old git couldn't find anything to complain about.

Pointless?

Most shareholders don't give a toss about the company and what it does. All they do is look at the ratios and decide whether to buy, hold or sell. By now the savvy ones will have factored in the potential of strikes and pay rises. Even worse are the parasites with shorted positions hoping for more strikes so the share price drops.

AI recruitment software is 'automated pseudoscience', Cambridge study finds

Re: @Ian Johnston

And opportunity shouldn't be a privilege either.

"there seems to be an implicit assumption that diversity is always a good thing"

The aim of diversity policies isn't just to get a different view - it's to reverse the historic "white and male only" recruitment practices which were the norm and, in most industries, still are. In the UK and US a CV with a white-sounding name on it will get more call backs than the same CV with a non-white-sounding name in most industries, including ours.

Re: I guess "Competence" isn't a consideration. . . .

"Whatever happened to hiring the most qualified candidate ???"

Nothing, it's just that for many companies, still, the qualifications include "white" and "male".

Re: Human-like AI

Q: "You are at a drinks party with people you don't know. How easy do you find it to talk to them?"

A: "How many drinks have I had?"

This is a real example from an interview I had in the 90s.