Posts by Headley_Grange 2206 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Feb 2010
Sophisticated is an interesting word. In English it used to mean "corrupted, adulterated, tampered with" (my OED from 1954). It changed some time in the latter half of last century to mean whatever it means today - elegant, complicated, modern, whatever.
Seems that the sophisticated attack made GiantPay's systems more sophisticated.
In the mid-80s we did most of our computing - circuit analysis and the like - on a VAX with a dot-matrix printer for the occasional print-out. Then we got an IBM PC (45MB disk!). It was funded by a customer project but the printer we needed to produce decent reports would have to be bought by the company. The boss was famously tight and instead of approving the req. for the HP LaserJet he presented us with a floppy with a near-letter quality driver on it and told us to use that for the reports and get the print-room to copy them onto decent paper and bind them. The dot-matrix printer was in his outer office next to his secretary (as they were called then). We only had to print one multi-page report before she went and told him to either move the printer or buy a quieter one. Moving it would have cost almost as much as buying one, so we got our LaserJet.
The problem is that if they write the spec for the new system before they do everything else then they'll have to stump up the full cost of the system and, more importantly, the full cost of any changes they want to make cos they wrote crap requirements in the first place. My experience of government projects is that they get developers/suppliers contracted on projects with a low spec. (and hence low price). This has two advantages - they look like they've got a good price and any cost growth will likely fall on a different administration. Then, they try to grow the requirements without paying the full cost by using a range of techniques, the main ones being threatening suppliers with not getting future contracts, using delaying tactics to drag the contract out at the suppliers' expense (££ and reputation) or going legal very early and pointing out that going to court would be more expensive than just doing the additional work.
But if recruitment's being done properly then HR have very little to do with it. The PM and Engineering/Technical Lead write the role description, the job description and use them to derive the person spec. from which should translate into qualifications, experience, personality, etc. Only then do they start to talking to HR who do little more than check that it complies with legislation and put it out to agencies. Any ads should be run by the PM/Eng/Tech first and HR should be taking a back seat at interviews, letting relevant team members interview them. Once the tech team has decided that someone is a potential then that's when HR do the reference checking, background, security, etc. before possibly going to second interview. That's how it used to work when I had a proper job and anyone trying to hire by letting HR do most of the heavy lifting will reap what they sow.
"I'm a white, straight, over-40 male."
Then you've had 30+ years benefiting from the racism and sexism that pervades society and our industry. It's probable that for some of the jobs you (and I) have had there were better qualified/experienced women or non-white people available, but they were screened out by a society, education and work culture that was (and still, mostly, is) sexist and racist. At least there's something positive behind the affirmative action that might be holding you back as opposed to having your UCCA form or CV chucked in the bin just because you were black and/or female.
When I first had responsibilty for recruitment we ran ads in the tech. and national press (remember Thursday's Telegraph?!) and we'd get hundreds of CVs. There were barely enough hours in the day to open the envelopes, never mind read and evaluate them. I once needed three engineers (different disciplines) and remember going home with 75 CVs to read - and that was after HR had whittled the initial response down to 25 per post. Agencies were the only practical way, and building up relationships with a couple worked - or it worked for us in the sense that we'd get half a dozen CVs most of which resulted in interviews and the posts being filled.
It's been going on for ever. Years ago, before t'internet, we'd put out a job ad in the press and loads of the CVs we'd get through agencies would play the ad-wording back. We ended up having a word the main agencies and, effectively, giving a couple of them all our recruitment with the agreement that they wouldn't dick around with applicants CVs or coach them for the interviews.
@Potemkine!: Years ago I would have agreed with you, but now I really struggle with what's happening today and why. There are some very well educated people who are ardently anti-vaccine or believe that Trump won or that the Earth is flat. I think that the problem today is that the concept of an expert has all-but disappeared. I don't need an expert for anything today because I can educate myself - i.e. go online and watch a few vids and I'm set.
In my parents' times there were experts and trusted sources and they were listened to, respected, believed - obeyed even. I think that in the UK certainly there's been an element of democratization that has changed things for the worse. People used to sort of know their place - there was a concept of authority - police, doctors, teachers, the BBC, and people respected and trusted them. Now that's been diluted and, today, 7+ years of medical training is given the same credence as 20 minutes watching videos and reading Wikipedia and Facebook. Maybe the problem is that knowledge had been democratized but understanding hasn't - we've all become dilettantes.
Just make it illegal for the press to tell lies instead of relying on expensive libel laws. So when the Express runs the headline "Stubborn Macron demands EU orders UK to accept hated fishing deal" the editor either has to have proof that Macron made such demands. If it turns out that he's simply pointed out that all parties have to abide by the agreement that was made, then the editor of the Express goes to jail for a few months.
There would, of course, have to be a parody exception for the Reg's Super Cali......... headlines.
The insurmountable problem with garage blocks in older housing estates isn't lack of power, it's the fact that they are too narrow for today's cars. Anything bigger than a Fiesta in mine means exiting out of the hatchback.
I never use mine and most of the others are empty so I'd be all for knocking them down and replacing them with charging spots, although that would probably cause more problems than it solves with people hogging them and fly tipping in them.
"Why on earth Ordinance survey would be involved..."
OS has recently cottoned on to the fact that it has competitors and that it also has a shed-load of data that it needs to exploit pretty quickly before it becomes obsolete and/or too expensive to maintain. Hence this, the recent OS "Hackathon" and the Pokemon-style game as reported by el Reg recently.
"These are the people who miss the office"
Maybe, but there are others.
For me there are, broadly, two kinds of work. There's the fun bit, the "real" work, the work that you set out doing at 8am, suddenly start to feel a bit peckish and realize it's 4pm and time has flown. It doesn't matter where I am when I'm doing this sort of work - it absorbs me and my time and it gets done no matter what.
Then there's the less interesting work - documentation, reviews, approvals, progress updates, etc. It's important, but it's not fun. When I'm at home and I've got this sort of work to do then I become massively productive: the kitchen floor gets mopped, the windows get cleaned, the shower curtain gets washed, the stringy bits get untangled from the vacuum cleaner head and, if the work is enough of a drudge, I might even do some dusting. I really need to be in work, at my desk when the dull work needs doing.
The optimist in me thinks this is a great idea. I see the future as bright, golden uplands of happy workers with truly flexible working and results being more important than office seat-polishing hours.
The pessimist in me sees a great deal of risk. Companies discover that their workers are as productive working from home as they are in the expensive office, so they start to sell the offices and make home (or wherever, they don't care) working the only option. Then, if location doesn't really matter, they can locate wherever is most convenient for them - cheap property, lax regulation, cheap wages, etc.
CEO personally overseeing? I bet that's really helping the poor bloody workers. Whenever I've worked on projects that had someone like the CEO personally overseeing the work it simply added two or three pointless meetings to the day, usually outside work time just, you know, to show how hard we were working.
I disagree ever so slightly. Capitalism optimizes itself to maximize profit by delivering what customers value - i.e. what customers will actually pay for. If customers valued clean air, clean water, good working conditions, environmental policies, etc., then they would prefer companies that prioritized those things even if they had to pay more for their products. Those companies would then make more money for their shareholders, and their competitors would have to change or go out of business. That's capitalism. The reason we need regulated capitalism is largely due to the hypocrisy of us, the customer. While most of us would say, for example, that the environment is important, if it means paying more for stuff or waiting longer for it to arrive from environmentally responsible companies then principles go out the window.
Today's customers want the cheapest thing, delivered the quickest with no delivery charges and today's capitalism has optimized itself to do just that.
Same here with MacOs, unfortunately. I like FF and use it most of the time, mainly cos it has a couple of add-ons that I find really useful. The downside is that a couple of times a week I have to drop out into Safari to get a website to display. Running FF in troubleshoot mode and turning off tracking blocking doesn't work. I've spent a while trying to find out what's going on, but no luck so far. It's annoying.
Are you sure? Is it hilly where you live?
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Sinclair-C5-Sinclair-front-brake-caliper-assembly-039-ready-to-fit-039-/203458141961?hash=item2f5f0cdf09%3Ag%3AVwUAAOSw-7ZgpBin&nma=true&si=Bj4e7d8UCb8EHx71QhiLbPWdr2E%253D&orig_cvip=true&nordt=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557
I've still got my Cambridge Scientific calculator. The power switch went a bit dodgy after only a couple of months, but it didn't deteriorate any more after that and the calculator is as good as it was in the 70s when I got it. Mine must have been a second version because my mate got one a few months before me and the numbers wore off the keys of his after a year or so, which has never happened to mine. I remember it being a battery hog and having to use alkaline batteries, which were quite expensive on paper-round money!
Replaced with an HP-11C when I got my first job - which is also still going strong and runs for ever on 3 button cells.
Something I've not been able to work out from the coverage so far - does NSO retain some control over it's product after they have sold it? The seem adamant that many of the phone numbers on the lists which the press have published aren't targets, which implies that they have knowledge of their customers' targets. I sort of find this hard to believe, but also can imagine that they'd want to keep some sort of control of the product, given how dangerous it could be if it got into the wild. Then again, if everything went through their servers that could bring its own dangers!
Anyone know?
Bollocks. When I was a kid the NHS was barely a decade old. When the doc told my mum it was time for my polio, measles, whooping cough and mumps vaccines she didn't go to the library to find a million reasons not to vaccinate me. She didn't wait until she'd been to the beetle drive that week to canvas the views of her friends. She listened to the doctors and, thank God, got me vaccinated and was grateful that she didn't have to pay. There was no hesitation when it was time for my TB vaccine because she knew people who'd died from it and she thought that a hole in my arm was better then coughing myself to death. There's a good chance that I wouldn't be here today if my mum and all the other mums since then had been as much of a twat as some people are today.
Nothing's changed from a medical or scientific point of view since those days over half a century ago. All that's changed is that in the past ten years or so people have access to much more information and some of them seem to give as much weight to the web equivalent of a bloke down the pub as they do to doctors. If it weren't so fucking serious it would be funny and if it only affected their lives then it wouldn't matter to me. Even ignoring the arguments about herd immunity and responsibility to one's community, a death never affects "just me". It's a devastating impact on a family to lose a parent, child, sibling, spouse - with results ranging from mental health issues to poverty and destitution. When the cause of this potentially-avoidable death is an opinion formed by reading shite on the web instead of listening to doctors then that is abuse.
Good work - and maybe not surprising. Releasing good code is expensive. I guess that an analogy is safety critical development (SIL, SW01, DO-178, etc). These standards don't just focus on development, coding and testing, but on the company environment and processes that surround and support them from design concepts to in-service support. It makes SW development in these environments expensive, a bit less fun sometimes, and it makes it much harder for a director to shout "just fucking release it or we'll miss this quarter's numbers".
I don't think we'll ever see security equivalents of these safety standards, partly because of the expense but mainly because of today's expected rapid turnover of product and introduction of new features.
"Why is that? There's no good reason for it."
They make money from it and they don't care about anything else. They've already got insane amounts of money that's unspendable in a dozen lifetimes but, apparently, that's not enough for them and a few deaths here and there apparently don't matter as long as they continue to make money. The anti-vaxxers are also more profitable than normal people because they are more gullible and therefore susceptible to ads.
@Version 1.0: that might have been the case up until a short while ago, but insurance companies are starting to back away from cyber security. AXA France recently stopped underwriting ransom payments. Other companies are now excluding ransom payments from their cover and the cost of premiums is rising. The security requirements for getting insured are increasing in some sectors, which can only be a good thing.
I think we'll soon see the end of organizations having poor security and relying on the insurance pay the ransom to get their data back.
7805 plus loads of silver mica caps ;-) ?
It's power source is solar and batteries, so the PCU shouldn't need any big caps for taking low AC out. Most of the spike and noise caps will be local, rather than at the PCU.
Having said that, if it landed on my bench for repair then checking and replacing the caps would be top of the list if nothing else was obvious.
I don't know if the UK is struggling. I had my vaccines and they appeared on the NHS app a few days later. I've got Covid passes on the NHS app on my phone and I've downloaded pdf copies which, like you, I've copied to cloud accounts and also printed out just in case. One thing I don't understand is that the UK passes are only valid for a month, after which they have to be downloaded again. I assume it's in case policy changes or they discover something about vaccine efficacy.
Given that the NHS app uses QR codes for both the travel and event passes I assumed that there'd be a corresponding reader or app that could validate them, thereby making fakes much more difficult. However, a quick Google around didn't reveal anything that can be used by pubs, clubs, etc., and there's nothing obvious in the Apple app store, so I don't really understand how this is going to work properly. The passes can be downloaded as pdf., for printing out by users without a smart phone, so once you've seen one it's trivial to mock up a fake.
Maybe the validation app/reader is a work in progress?
It's not just low pay, which is why I wrote "labour costs". It's also the fact that the workers don't get holiday pay, sick pay, p/maternity leave, weekends off, fire doors, employment rights, etc. The main savings in offshoring work isn't the salary, it's the fact that the employer has no overhead costs related to worker rights and safety.
Western governments will never address it because the main cause of it is that we, the consumer, choose the cheapest product with the fastest delivery and we don't give a toss if it's made by a 13 year-old girl who should be in education instead of working 70 hours a week in a dangerous sweat-shop for a few dollars. Even if the UK government were able to put massive import duty on goods made by workers who don't have the same workplace standards and protections that UK workers get (or, at least, used to get before zero hours and contracting out) then UK consumers (voters) would be angry because they couldn't buy cheap clothes in Primark and throw them away after a couple of wears.
BTW - I infer from your post that you think that the vision of a shopless society is a good thing. I think it's a very, very bad thing.
