* Posts by adam.c

35 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Mar 2010

Google sours on legacy G Suite freeloaders, demands fee or flee

adam.c

Re: Just great.

+1 for Zoho also. Migrated a friends gmail account on a vanity domain a few months ago when they wanted two distinct inboxes/addresses on the domain - so creative things with rules and sent-as aliasing was too complicated for them.

Tools for automatic inbox migration via imap just worked and then it was just various bits of MX record correction and other account setup like SPF. But as instructions were pretty good it all seemed to just work

Japan's Supreme Court rules cryptojacking scripts are not malware

adam.c

Re: "crypto mining software is not malware"

If you can’t know he has crypto mining software until you visit the site and it activates on page loading with no permission query then isn’t that a different situation.

If I put a notice on my site saying you agree to pay me £10 on landing on the page and £10 every minute you stay on the page (ignoring practicalities of collection FTM), and you have no way to know that until you visit so I’ll always collect £10 from people enticed to my site, IANAL but that seems unenforceable as a contract.

Open source maintainer threatens to throw in the towel if companies won't ante up

adam.c

Not always true

Seems strikingly similar to art. The original artist just needs to (e.g. paint) and may give it away for a meal. Most such art sits around gathering dust, the few reach dizzy heights of financial transactions but the artist doesn’t get any (usually dead by then)

Artist's Resale Right

Sony kills off secret backdoor in 80 internet-connected CCTV models

adam.c

Re: Name the movie...

Hollow Man - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Man

No super-kinky web smut please, we're British

adam.c

Re: Fcuking Nepotism!

Maybe because

Karren Brady (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karren_Brady)

is not the same person as

Karen Bradley, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-blocking-powers-to-protect-children-online

Just a thought - feel free to borrow it as you seem a bit hard of thinking...

'Hot Tech Talent' IT job board ads caught up in sexism allegations

adam.c

Re: Where did I see that thing this weekend?

This one?

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/16/03/20/1826256/research-suggests-cs-for-all-may-mean-lower-pay-for-all

Doctor Who: The Hybrid finally reveals itself in the epic Heaven Sent

adam.c

The Hybrid is Ashildr

Given the following clues.

"The Hybrid destined to conquer Gallifrey and stand in its ruins... is me" - Her adopted name

"The Hybrid is a creature thought to be crossbred from two warrior races." - Vikings and The Mire (via the immortaility chip)

Back to school: Six of the smartest cheap 'n' cheerful laptops

adam.c
Unhappy

Re: One modern trend to mention with Acer/Asus

Also TOSHIBA and HP - was caught by this on a TOSHIBA laptop recently.

Not helped by most review/shopping sites not giving you a screen shot of the underside either.

I have found that http://www.notebookcheck.net are good about providing ease of maintenance/upgrading on laptops they review.

(I seem to recall reading somewhere that consumer models are tending to this, while "business" models are still provided with access hatches.)

Keep up, boyos! 20k Win XP PCs still in use by NHS in Wales

adam.c

Went into LLoyds branch last week to change an account

noticed all their desktops had XP...

Went into Sainsburys the next day, the tills are running XP...

Seems to be a lot of large companies who aren't great at migration planning

IBM to offer breast milk elivery-as-a-service for staff

adam.c

Re: How very civilised of them

"What makes starting a family so different?"

Mainly the fact a lot more people are likely to be interested in doing it than flying a plane or digging a well for an African village.

It's a hard nosed business decision that says making your workplace family friendly is likely to influence a large pool of people who might be choosing to stay or join you.

Whereas a campaign stating they will provide extra paid time off for anyone digging a well in Africa is not likely to affect many people directly - it may however give them a warm and fuzzy PR boost.

Besides, become senior, valued, critical or important enough and organisations do start to offer things like paid MBA's and time off for the CEO to pursue his yacht racing indulgence.

No, Big Data firm, the UK isn't teeming with UBER-FRISKY GIGOLOS

adam.c

Re: It all makes work...

With added Lego...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOA_SUKEZRE

Speaking in Tech: What do you MEAN, US court can demand OFFSHORE public cloud data?

adam.c

Not sure if anyone else has ever asked this...

.. but could we not also have a text transcript?

Microsoft holds nose, shoves Windows into Android, iOS boxes

adam.c

Premium only supports Remote Desktop as a client. To be able to access your PC, you;d need at least Professional

LOHAN cops a faceful of smutronyms

adam.c

Shall

We

Abort

Lohan

Lest

Orbit

Will

Start

Apple seeks techies, designers to revive iWork office suite

adam.c

A wave of cynicism washed over me..

.. and I had the same thought also.

Be nice occasionally to see an honest job advert - "would suit unambitious mid level dev who requires some direction but generally won't break anything or be too fancy with their designs"

I'm sure Dominic will pop along to tell us why recruiters feel the need to push every job as once in a lifetime, top gun challenge.

Learning about chip design from Silicon Roundabout

adam.c
Devil

Why don't we have a Nathan icon?

Rule of Thumb - if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, it's probably a duck, except using s/duck/wanker/g here

And that bit of regex probably exceeds his total hard technical knowledge)

Please god, someone go along to him for a chat and ask pointed questions about silicon wafer purity, doping, lithography, anything....

Miley Cyrus hacker let off with probation

adam.c

Just a thought...

If she was indeed 15 when she took the photo and sent it to another individual - wouldn't that make her technically guilty of

1) producing child porn

2) distributing child porn

like the various sexting cases which have been reported and prosecuted in the past?

If so, it's interesting there seems to have been no moves to charge her unlike less "celebrity" youngsters

DRM-free music dream haunts Apple's app-store lock-in

adam.c
Thumb Up

Says it all

http://theoatmeal.com/blog/apps

Sleazy Aussie 'hot babes' network goes MIA

adam.c
Flame

"if it was reversed the reaction would be different" - that's not hypothetical

What about http://tubecrush.net

Where 55% of their readers thought it was harmless fun

http://www.london24.com/news/transport/debate_tubecrush_hot_men_site_fun_or_sexist_1_869780

Flame - cause I see a flame war on the way.

What Carthage tells us about Amazon, Fukushima and the cloud

adam.c

Feels like a cross between CDO's meets Big Four scenario :-)

You think you've diversified your risk by using several different suppliers for your various services, until the day comes you find out they've each moved all their IS infrastructure into one of the few big cloud providers, one of which has just suffered an outage....

What's the odds some bright(?) spark at CloudA is already pricing an entry level cloud hosting package which is actually a slice of competitor CloudB's larger package.

ACS:Law fined for data breach

adam.c

Looking at some of the numbers quoted in this interview...

I'm highly skeptical that he could have burnt through all the cash and assets mentioned.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8110261/Are-you-a-middle-class-pirate-This-man-wants-a-word-with-you....html

£1000 is a joke given how directly and personably responsible he seems to be have been found for the inadequate security provisions.

I'd like to know how this "self certify my abiilty to pay" works as I'd love to use it on my next tax bill.

Adobe, Apple, Google hit by wage-fixing case

adam.c
FAIL

"I'm confused" - try reading the article again

"Secondly, if someone from Pixar applied for a job at LucasFilm, then LucasFilm would inform Pixar. And thirdly if either firm made a job offer, the rival company would not try to better that offer."

Gee - let me think how this could play out badly for the peon.

The second point could make things more difficult for the employee if they decide to stay and their manager has decided they're no longer worth rewarding or investing in due a perceived lack of loyalty.

The third point would seem to be a restraint on an employee finding their true market value by preventing an open auction for their talents to occur.

I'm sure others can describe further scenarios...

'Thickest burglar' leaves passport at scene of raid

adam.c
Thumb Down

Flawed

If not sure what this Fibonacci approach to sentencing is meant to achieve and how.

If it's meant to make the threat of prison more intimidating since the stakes are higher then I don't see how it would affect this guy. He'd been in prison 23 times - cumulatively he must have spent a great chunk of time out of society anyway and it didn't seem to deter him. In fact other posters have pointed out it possibly made him more likely to offend through being institutionalised.

Isn’t this similar to the 3 strikes type of approaches tried in other countries – did they work?

You could try making the conditions less appealing and increasing the deterrence potency – e.g. if you gave every inmate a harmless but painful electric shock every day ala Pavlov, would that strengthen the resolve never to re-offend?

Also isn’t this just going to increase the prison costs – I don’t see outsourcing to India or Siberia as a low cost option, why are they going to do it except for the opportunity to make a profit?

Anyway, this all hinges on whether, in the words of a former minister,”Prison Works”. The article shows that for this guy it doesn’t and I’d like to see numbers on how many it does. Without raw data, you can’t determine if you’re putting resources into a cost-effective solution – is it worth tripling the prison bill to get the crime rate down by 2% ? The bulk of crime being committed by a small core of repeat offenders would appeal to a different solution than a profile which described most criminals as low-level habitual

Side-questions

1) If someone committed consecutive 4 crimes with raw sentence tariffs of 1 year each, do they get 1, 2, 2, 2 or 1, 2, 3, 4 years – I guess the 2nd as your argument is that the prior *assigned* sentence didn’t work?

2) If the initial conviction is found to be unsafe, will they be able to claim compensation for the subsequent accumulated years?

adam.c

DailyMail/Guardian - fight!

I think the concerning thing is that situations like this show how sometimes prison isn't enough - either as a deterrent or a rehabilitive solution.

F.F.S 23 times! - as other posters point out, he's unlikely to change his ways now, the betting money is on containment and control - do you tag him 24/7, issue some kind of control order?

I confident in the States he'd be banged up for life by now under a 3 strikes law - not that I think they're a road we necessaily want to go down.

Disclaimer - I, and most of my city resident friends and acquaintances, have been burgled at least once and I don't know a single person who didn't feel the violation of their personal residence was at least as significant than the monetary loss and wouldn't have cheerfully taken a baseball bat to the offender given half a chance. So part of me thinks for violating 23 peoples peace of mind, spending the rest of his life on Rockall with a monthly food drop wouldn't be inhumane.

.

Council loses USB of patient records

adam.c

Title, title, who's got the title.

I must confess that when I saw the badly formed para closing tag - </p - I initially thought it was some kind of emoticon representing the mental shortcomings of the user who can't handle operating an encrypted USB stick - something like a dunce cap paired with a tongue sticking out in extreme concetration.

Google opens curtain on 'manual' search penalties

adam.c

Whats the alternative?

I'm neutral about Google, but I am curious about what people see as the alternative outcomes?

Search is worth big money as a business, which means it will attract other competitors (Bing, Yahoo) and other approaches (Wolfram Alpha). If Google tweak or alter their results/algorithms to the point where people feel they're not useful or relevant, then a superior solution will step into the breach - that's how they got their foothold remember - by building a better mousetrap.

However, as far as I can see it boils down to the fact that there are only a certain number of results that can appear on the first page and there will always be more peple who feel that slot belongs to then than can be satisfied.

The above commment is a perfect example. In the days of the yellow pages, you'd pick a business from a local directory. Nowadays the net provides you with a global customer base but it also means you're competing in a global supplier pool.

What is there about that business that makes it *more* relevant than the ones appearing above it? I accept the point about adwords, but page rank has been shown to be a valid way to sift results. I can't see how a solution where searching for an source of specific items returns a page of global suppliers randomly organised is superior.

Think about the pre-search-engine days - you'd be relying on people guessing your URL or you spending money to buy the single relevant URL for your sector to be found. Propose your vision of a better solution

Give us a clue what you make and I'd be interested to play with seaching criteria to see what scenario would mean you appear as one of my top three results.

Bank scorched by stupid Facebook policy

adam.c

I flagged this story to TheReg yesterday...

And I think they missed one of the best bits - which is that the bank hired a "social marketing manager" a year ago.

So presumably this wasn't a policy formulated by HR and lawyers who don't understand the InterWebs - it had input by an "expert"

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/CBA-Facebook-Twitter-social-media-pd20110203-DPW35?OpenDocument&src=rot

No wonder CompSci grads are unemployed

adam.c

Here's my title

Something occurs to me which a few people have mentioned in passing but I think needs bringing to prominence.

1) The size of the IT/CS field has changed but I'm not sure expectations from companies & recruiters have quite tracked reality. Consider the job adverts mentioned where they ask for

* literally impossible amounts of experience in certain technologies (or specific versions thereof)

* fail to understand the similarities between different technologies (If you're looking for somebody with experience of Oracle and the role isn't a DBA, it is such a big leap to consider somebody with experience of DB2 or SQLServer or even a different version of Oracle?). Even more bold, want C# developers, why not consider experienced Java developers - not that big a learning curve.

* fail to understand the differences between technologies - hiring a C++ developer to work on your trading system, doesn't mean you automatically get somebody who can admin your database and design your web UI also. Which brings me onto my next thought...

2) If you consder other professional fields such as law and medicine, nobody questions the concept and value of specialisation. If I have a heart problem I see a cardiac specialist, not a dermatologist. If I have a company contract dispute, I don't see a divorce lawyer. Most people accept this as a valid approach. I would agree that keeping your skills up to date and possessing a curiosity about the field are valuable attitudes - but I do wonder if this willingness to turn our hands to any problem solving doesn't cost us some perceived respect when non-technical people assume it must be easy since we could do it.

Which brings me to my final point

3) All this love of the field and continual updating of skills and training is fine. But how much of it is on our own time and expense and not our employers? How many lawyers do you expect practice litigation in their spare time, or doctors perform surgery on friends and family members to try out new things or even accountants play at bookkeeping for fun when they get home just for their love of the field. I'd imagine they normally get this kind of training and development on their employers time and dime. Google's idea of 20% personal time to experiment is great, but how many companies are brave enough to do that?

Canadians form adulterers' privacy campaign

adam.c

@Nigel 13

From the original news story, she claims that after her husband found out, he left her.

This caused her such emotional distress that her work performance suffered.

Then her company fired her for poor performance.

I suspect that the concept of remoteness under law may kick in here for her.

Britain's bank slashes tech jobs

adam.c
Paris Hilton

To be fair

He is technically correct.

You could be investing in new tech to improve the productivity of the *existing* workforce - do more with the same number of people and avoid having to hire more.

Doesn;t always have to be "do the same with less people".

Paris - because she's a "do more with people" kind of girl

Senior IT officials among top paid civil servants

adam.c

My Google-Fu tells me

National Union of Public Employees

City Police still using Terror Act to bother photographers

adam.c

Where does it say his phone was returned?

Sorry - it's just that various comments refer to his phone being returned, and I can't see where that information is coming from?

Tory twit accused of touting shanghaied tot shots

adam.c

He has even more form than mentioned in the article.

* Claimed for astrology software on expenses.

* Believes homeopathy can treat HIV and malaria

* Believes scientists disagree with him over alternative medicine because they're "racially prejudiced"

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/thesword/2010/04/science-party-debate.html

* Accepted a bribe to ask question in commons

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2055369.stm

How he has a majority is beyond me - wouldn't surprise me if he thought dunking for witches was a much maligned approach

Twitter bomb hoax man changes plea

adam.c

Is the guy an idiot - almost certainly by anyones definition.

But as a counter argument to the people saying it's a waste of police time and the case should be thrown out.

1) It's his choice to plead not guilty, prolonging the case and wasting court time and money, to an incident which he previously admitted to.

2) If you're one of the people who has their trip/holiday b*ggered up because of a need to investigate a suspicious parcel (idiot forgot luggage) or verify a suspected threat (idiot makes bomb related comment) - I suspect you may not be so charitable and forgiving.

3) It's easier to find a needle in a haystack, if you cut down on the idiots tipping more straw on top - and comments like this persons are adding to the pile.

I do think jail time is probably not the best sentence for him - esp if it's suspended (which negates the deterent in my opinion) - but a hefty fine would concentrate his mind wonderfully

He could do the right thing, admit he was an idiot, plead mercy and walk away from it with a valuable lesson for the future about the consequences of being a kn*b

Intel: Just 3,000 employees run Windows 7

adam.c
WTF?

Am I missing something in the demands of "Road Warriors" jobs

"Road warriors - sales people and the like - got a new PC every two years, she said. Engineers had to wait three years,"

Why does somebody who presumably only needs to run office apps need a 2 yearly upgrade when the employees running more demanding VLSI design apps, emulators, simulators, compilers, etc have to wait an extra year?

It's the same old story in software, every company I worked has simply bought desktop boxes as people joined, meaning the new marketing hire gets a quad core 4GB machine, while the dev who joined 2 years ago is still making do with a dual core 2GB box. The obvious solution of repurposing the dev's box to marketing doesn't seem to happen.