Posts by alain williams 2469 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
look after their own.
There are plenty of crap solicitors around. Some act so as to increase what they charge you. Others do not seem to know what they are doing, eg when buying a house nothing happens and both sides blame the other for the delay.
There are also some good ones. It is hard to tell the difference until you have been through the case.
In theory backups should be cleaned as well, but in practice that is usually not practical.The important thing here is putting the deleted data "beyond use". So it might still be on a tape/... but it cannot be accessed through normal use/mechanisms.
Be careful what you sign, contracts aren't just for fun.
Often the first time that you see the contract is after you have accepted the job and told your current employer that you are leaving. If, at interview, you ask for a copy of the contract you will probably be labelled a troublemaker and not be offered the job.
Contracts should be published along with the job advertisement.
by the way that these things are described ?
OK: I understand numbers like: frequency, cores, cache but what is the difference between: a desktop processor; a business system processor; a server processor ?
These differences might well be written somewhere but it is not easily found and described in an obvious way.
Also: what is the difference between, say, a Ryzen 9 5980HX and the AMD FX-8150 that is on my desk ? (ignoring easy to understand frequency, cache, cores, ....) I suspect new instructions to help with video decoding, AES (Rijndael encryption), ... but finding mention of these is almost impossible.
This is something that El Reg could explain or point to and would be much more useful than telling me how fast it runs World of Warcraft - or some other game that I have zero interest in.
And: CPU frequency is useless when comparing different architectures (AMD, Intel, ARM, Power, ...) so how about something like SPEC ?
I do understand the need to occasionally do something illegal when, overall, it is of benefit to society.
The hard part is keeping them** honest, ie not acting in their own interests or the interests of whoever is powerful today. Judicial oversight can help but the judiciary can be corrupt or naive - we have seen that many times.
What we need is for all to be revealed when a particular investigation/... is done and/or after 20 years or something. It may help to keep some of them** honest - knowing that their acts will be exposed to sunlight, it will also help to phrase future legislation if bounds have been overstepped.
** Whatever "them" means in various contexts.
In the UK is 7 - but until they reach 18 (the age of majority) they can cancel at any time as it is presumed that they do not understand the implications of entering into the contract.
So: if a minor cancels - will TikTok/whoever have to delete all information that they have learned about the child ?
What about personal information gleaned about someone who has not entered a contract, be they minors or not - think facebook shadow profiles which probably take copies of personal data out side of the UK/EEA which is illegal. Facebook is fighting the Irish data protection authority over this - so it probably does move data out of the EEA.
Others are just as bad or worse, start with Google.
I doubt that many really implement Art. 17 of the GDPR (right to be forgotten)
The richer that China gets the more confident that it will be and believe that it can get away with this sort of thing. This case is internal to China, but it is exerting its might beyond its borders.
We are so incredibly short sighted. We think that we are saving pennies but are unaware that we selling our futures. Eg Amazon is entering pharmacy, it will kill much of retail pharmacy in the UK, along that we lose thousands of skilled, well paid jobs replacing them with minimum wage warehouse grunts; Amazon will put our prescriptions into its marketing database and use this to try to sell us more stuff and destroy more other businesses.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the more complicated your setup and customizations, the more trouble changing is, and the more you will realise the differences.
This is the key and this is why I liked CentOS - I put a lot of work into getting the machine exactly as I want it and, by and large, not have do much sysadmin for 9 years (other than installing completely new stuff).
I have upgraded from CentOS 6 to Debian 10 on my desktop ** most of it was not a problem, some details were hard; over and above running s/ware a decade newer.
** To get a decent desktop manager - which Gnome 3 is not.
I have friends who do temporary work in the NHS, eg a few months pregnancy cover. They were one of the first to be hit by IR35; things like not being able to reclaim travel and accommodation when working at a hospital too far from home for a daily commute. The result is that they are more pickey at what gigs they will accept and are moving away from the NHS.
I suppose that the real problem is that these temporary workers are not donors to the Tory party.
As long as we get our e-bling, clothes, etc cheaply should we care if workers in other countries are mistreated ?
Someone was arguing with me that "this is how capitalism works - not our concern."
I think that we should care, profit is important but commerce should go further than that. Companies like Primark have slavery statements largely because they began to lose sales, they still need to do more. Action on Uighur forced labour in China is starting.
Apple and other tech companies need to follow suite. Concern for other humans must not stop at national borders.
Why is the children's commissioner worrying about encryption when there are far more relevant things for her to worry about - things that she could actually do something about.
IMHO it is nothing other than misinformation that she was ordered to utter by someone higher up in the UK government. You know: Trump does not have a monopoly on generating fake news.
I recently upgraded my desktop from CentOS 6 to Debian Buster as CentOS 8 had Gnome3 as the desktop - Debian gave me the choice of the Mate desktop. So the lack of a desktop that I like has let me avoid having to upgrade twice in 18 months - phew!
It now looks like me and my customers are going to have to go the same way on servers.
This very same Big Tech will happily use this business process outsourcing to increase profits (reduce their costs).
If they were really concerned about citizen's rights then they would threaten to get their outsourcing elsewhere. As they are not one can deduce that their main problem with the Internet chokehold is that it might be used to block some of their web sites.
Got through to Argos who were very good about it ...
That is because Argos are sane guys who have people who you can 'phone/email. Recently I received a set of things in the post from Ebay, opened the package before I realised that it was addressed to Kevin, not Alain, so I could not put back into the post, ... no way to contact Ebay without spending money or registering an account (which I won't do) muppets!
This is the cause of a lot of problems. Basically it is a company that does not want to perform its due diligence on sending out email. They are trying to bully the rest of the world into operating as they want us to. Why should I do a lot of work because they do not want to pay the cost of doing it themselves ?
As far as I know there is no special legal privilege in such an email address, so I will reply to say "No I do not agree to XXX". I keep a copy of the email that I sent. This is somewhat akin to me sending them paper mail/letter to one of their offices - how they route it internally is not my problem.
Yes: we all hate it, but without it other will find it hard to use what you write. Others cannot see the inside of your head and grasp what, to you, is completely obvious. This is also a security issue: others might get your creation to work, but not having understood some undocumented subtlety leave some door wide open.
This is not just a problem of FLOSS code.
Some do have excellent documentation, eg jQuery
They also noted that Oracle Database on-premises has a reputation for being "expensive and difficult to manage,"
They forgot to add "more secure". You might misconfigure access but if it is only visible from within the organisation then you are less likely to be the next Talk Talk or Equifax.
I know that many software vendors are pushing cloud because they get to charge more fees that way - but not everyone wants cloud.
minimum tax bill as a percentage of turnover, not profit
I wish it were that simple. There are many businesses where profit is genuinely very low, either because there is very low markup or their costs are large. The trouble is how to codify in tax law ways of artificial costs - it is easy to see what they are but hard to codify in a way that a smart tax accountant cannot evade.
All the way from shifting profits to Ireland (Microsoft, Google, ...), to inflated royalty fees to subsidiaries in lower tax countries (Starbucks & more), to the business being owned by your wife who lives in Monaco (Philip Green)
Blocking that is what noscript is good for. Has the beneficial side effect of blocking facebook, etc.
Unfortunately: some web sites just do not work when I block 3rd party JS - so I usually just go elsewhere. I'll allow JS from a payment processor that I recognise, but rarely much else. When will web developers recognise that they are losing their customers business, or are people like me rare enough for them to not worry ?
Once 'master' 'slave' loose their meaning as people do not understand them, whatever new words to describe the relationship (eg 'maker' 'doer') will have to be applied to human relationships so that kids can understand history books.
At that point there will be a brouhaha and 'maker' 'doer' will be banned because some people do not like them.
Changing the words that we use is, ultimately, futile.
All the examples black/master/... that I have seen are English words. What if speakers of other languages complain about terms that offend someone in their language ? Presumably we will have to blacklist those words as well ... oh, errm, I mean add those words to a non-use list.
The important thing is intent: the automotive engineer who, working on brakes, coined the terms: master cylinder, slave cylinder had no intention of alluding one man (sorry: person) being subservient to another.
Many of these things only get updates until the next model comes out; the rest do not get updates at all.
Then there are those that need a fixed server - when that is shut the kit becomes a brick.
These problems must be addressed - probably the best way is by allowing third party firmware -- but that will not happen as the vendors want to keep you locked in and then have you buy new kit.
This is kind of related to what the right to repair people (rightly) want.
She says it best "Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?"
OK: it is a slight misquote, but still
Back then it was fears that Huawei would spy on us on behalf of the Chinese government. These allegations where probably hyped and are about the same as Cisco does for the USA government.
Today I feel that the argument is changing. China is increasingly being seen to be the bad actor/bully boy [think: Hong Kong, Uighurs muslims, ...] its increasing economic might boosts its confidence that it can get away with bad behaviour. So there is an argument that its economic wings should be clipped before it gets worse. Excluding Huawei is part of that. I am not saying that the West does not behave badly, but I could carry a placard down Whitehall (in London) saying "Bollocks to Boris" and safely go home; I would have a different fate if I carried a picture of Winnie the Pooh in Tiananmen Square -- that difference is important to me.
Two years ago I was saying that we should buy Huawei; today I am inclined against that.
I purposely wipe out all traces of local storage, cookies, browsing history, ... before I go shopping just to prevent the industry trying to leverage anything aabout me in the prices of goods.
Even better: run up a virtual machine and go shopping in a clean browser.
This is what I do when I am comparing prices. See what there is (eg hotels) using a price comparison site and then book a room with the hotel directly -- which saves them the 20% that a comparison site would extract.
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