Posts by a pressbutton

Subcontractors working on CityFibre's £45m Derby rollout threaten to 'rip up tarmac' in dispute over payments

and for those reading this in 2 years time ...

People who believed govt announcements.

people who believe govt announcements.

ZTE Axon 30 Ultra: Strong effort from an entity-lister, but your tiny child hands may struggle

Re: Battery Capacity

I call for a new El Reg standard conversion

and propose "No. of Sonic the Hedgehog power ups" per Ah

Now that China has all but banned cryptocurrencies, GPU prices are falling like Bitcoin

Re: Phew that was close!

"Dear sir, please accept this piece of paper as an IOU from our government, backed by nothing of any value, except a promise to tax our citizens if we fuck up too badly."

... that is what a currency _is_ worth

In my case,

-I pretty much have to be paid in GBP

-and pay for things in GBP

unless the local shops all start accepting BTC and my $employer starts paying BTC and BTC is as easy as paper money (it isnt and never can be) GBP it is.

The usability of local currency may fall to the level of BTC in parts of Africa / S. America, but probably not.

My more likely bet would be the Chinese offer the Yuan as a replacement (with _conditions_ as they like control and do not like BTC) . Taking another step towards making the Yuan a replacement for USD.

Toshiba engulfed by scandal again — and the prime minister is implicated

Re: Wow...

I am sure the number of serious disagreements between Cos in Japan is not that much less.

So, there is probably a job not called 'lawyer' / 'judge' and a process like 'arbitration' that achieves the same end.

Does anyone know what is?

Ex-Brave staffer launches GDPR sueball in Germany over tech giants' real-time bidding for ad inventory

Re: Previous approach

Advertisers somewhere will know if contextual performs as well as personalised.

I did a google search

It said ask Amazon

UK government bows to pressure, agrees to delay NHS Digital grabbing the data of England's GP patients

Re: 1st July, 1st September

hm.

Harding taking over ...

Time to download your records

a) so they will be accessible to your GP

b) so you know what some script-kiddie will be sniggering over when there is a leak

China announces ‘crackdown’ on Bitcoin mining and trading

Re: Ponzi

You and I and probably most readers do not 'get' BTC

It is easy to point out that

- given the price gyrations

it is not a store of value

- given the inability to support the same level of transaction flow as a 'real' currency, and that it is not acceptable in a good fraction of the world (china), and that if you try to pay someone BTC in a powercut, unlucky, and that as ~70-80% of mining is in china and therefore open to a 51% attack,

this is not a currency

We come from countries where currencies have been pretty dependable for a v.v. long time.

However if you are from China, or India or Turkey where the currency is not stable, the govt has close controls and at short notice, some types of cash have been redefined as 'not cash anymore',

you do want something you can anonymously keep and send abroad and pay for stuff that you do not want your govt to know about

If you are in Europe this generally = drugs and guns - and about 40% of BTC spending - as in buying something that is not another currency - seems to be that.

In other countries that can be just about anything from spare car parts to artwork to antibiotics - but usually used as a way of evading taxes and other country-specific legalities.

Is that a good thing?

It makes me think whoever invented BTC was against the concept of govt and rules and things like everyone driving on the left - or right, but not both

Tesla Autopilot is a lot dumber than CEO Musk claims, says Cali DMV after speaking to the software's boss

Re: I don't get it

After 6 years, I am just about able to accept that an auto gearbox is better than me except when

I am going downhill

It is snowy or icy

I am going too fast towards a corner

and possibly other times.

Elon says you need the 'Cry Freedom' upgrade if you want autonomy.

And that will come real soon, currently targeted for the eleventieth of julember

39 Post Office convictions quashed after Fujitsu evidence about Horizon IT platform called into question

I hope there is a full public enquiry

From reading this

https://lawyerwatch.wordpress.com/2021/04/23/the-post-office-where-were-the-lawyers-post/

it looks like the Post Office and (hopefully) a number of senior staff are (hopefully) in deep trouble

excerpt

The first Clarke advice is dated 15 July 2013. In it Mr Clarke set out the duties of an expert witness and the prosecution’s disclosure duties (noted above). He came to “an employee of Fujitsu, Gareth Jenkins, [who] had provided expert evidence as to the operation and integrity of Horizon” in a number of cases. In his witness statements Mr Jenkins had said there was nothing wrong with the system. Clarke’s advice was that, “Unfortunately that was not the case, certainly between the dates spanned by the statements….” And,

“that Mr Jenkins had been aware of at least two bugs which had affected Horizon Online since September 2010, one of which was still extant and would not be remedied before October 2013, but had failed to say anything about them or about any Horizon issues in his statements. He expressed the firm opinion that if Mr Jenkins had mentioned the existence of the bugs, that would undoubtedly have required to be disclosed to any defendant who raised Horizon issues as part of his or her defence.”

/excerpt

... so it can be shown the Post office was corporately aware by June '13 knowingly incomplete evidence had been given and evidence of innocence had not been disclosed to the defendants by the post office lawyers.

There was also a reference in the article to the Post Office layers deliberately destroying evidence that pointed to innocence.

I hope the CPS looks into this and sees there is a case of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice across a wide range of people in the PO and Fujitsu at all levels.

... and how on earth did or does a private entity get to prosecute anyone for anything other than civil (contract law) issues. This is why we have police (and PACE ) and the CPS

This looks like a widespread conspiracy

Pentagon confirms footage of three strange craft taken by the Navy are UFOs (no, that doesn't mean they're aliens)

Re: Clearly a flock of seagulls

Weren't they on top of the pops in the 80s?

Irish privacy watchdog sticks GDPR probe into Facebook after that online giveaway of 533 million profiles

"why birthdays and marital status is held"

...So you can target your adverts a bit less inefficiently?

Oracle vs Google: No, the Supreme Court did not say APIs aren't copyright – and that's a good thing

I think MS Clippy outlines what the harm might have been,

or perhaps the Michigan law that defines fornication (sex outside of a legally sanctioned marriage) as a felony

Beloved pixel pusher Paint prepares to join Notepad for updates from Microsoft Store

Re: MS Paint has never been so bad

This is what greenshot does - lets you take a screenshot triggered by one key press, launches an editor so you can highlight AND blur (GDPR) and saves all screenshots to a dir.

W3C Technical Architecture Group slaps down Google's proposal to treat multiple domains as same origin

Re: the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG)

Perhaps a picture of the Spanish Inquisition?

- unexpected and funny

Post Office awards Fujitsu a £42.5m contract extension for the IT system behind wrongful subpostmaster prosecutions

According to the Private Eye,

POST WASTE

Trashing its own reputation and mistreating sub-postmasters in the long running Horizon IT scandal has so far cost the Post Office a quarter of a billion pounds.

... it looks like it will cost more to cover up and then pay the lawyers (oh, and a small amount to the many victims whose lives have been ruined) than it would have cost to write a new system.

A floppy filled with software worth thousands of francs: Techie can't take it, customs won't keep it. What to do?

Re: A cigarette letter was produced with a flourish

You will tell that joke only once.

Vegas, baby! A Register reader gambles his software will beat the manual system

where I used to work the Mgt were grateful AND carried on billing the 3 days until contract renewal (some years later) as it was a fairly painless place to cut costs.

Samsung updates chart-topping A-series Galaxy smartphones with a few more bells and whistles – even topping the S20 FE

FM radio

I thought the older A series had an FM radio - that used the headset as an antenna - I take it it has gone?

Re: No headphone jack?

actually some of the better USB C dongles have a DAC that is noticeably better than the built in one (i have a hidiz S8 and can hear the difference on a note 8 in a blind test) and you can plug a preferred wired headset into that - so if you are after high quality, that is a better path than the 3.5 jack.

... but it costs and it eats battery, which is not the target market here.

Millimetre-sized masses: Physics boffins measure smallest known gravitational field (so far)

Re: From which we can conclude

Definitely not pete.

Unless the earth has grown a beard and has taken to homebrew over the last year or so.

Huawei CFO's legal eagles take HSBC to court in Hong Kong to obtain evidence against US extradition

To those who do not do colloquial UK English

This is a joke about Trump.

OP should have used a joke alert icon

... or maybe not.

(that is me on a park bench once the parks are open)

Surprise: Automated driving biz finds automated driving safer than letting you get behind the wheel

Re: Different defects

I left a french hotel at 5am to catch a ferry (near le mans)

Pulled right out of the car park onto the left lane.

Voice from the back "are you really trying to kill us"

Happily no-one in sight either way.

For the next 5 years small things took great delight in pointing out when I was trying to kill everyone.

(apart from that time, happily, incorrectly)

It happens. I got lucky.

Complete Garbage

"The automatic auto firm recreated 72 fatal crashes in 91 simulations, putting the Waymo Driver in the role of both the initiating driver and the responding driver for accidents involving two vehicles. And in the simulator at least, the company's software outperformed the humans involved in the recreated incidents."

This means precisely nothing. If you replaced me with someone who does not drink alcohol at times when I was about to go drinking (a friday), chances are that person would not get drunk as often as me.

What is omitted is that that replacement prefers class C drugs on Saturday.

You need to test the entire driving history. That is path dependant to the extent you cannot reliably test. I hoped the el reg journo would pour a big smelly bucket of sarcasm all over this.

The last sentence helped - Waymo is still working on driving in snow. ®

Hoped for more though.

Netflix reveals massive migration to new mix of microservices, asynchronous workflows and serverless functions

Re: English-only Option Please

but the south korean soaps are awesome - especially the ones with ghosts in

HPE urges judge to pick through Deloitte-bashing report it claims demolishes Autonomy founder's defence

Re: report demolishes Lynch's defence ... not sure.

The analogy of MOT cert and Auditor sign - off is closer than I thought it was.

report demolishes Lynch's defence ... not sure.

(I am not a lawyer)

I get my car MOTd. Something bad happens and it also turns out that with the benefit of a lot of hindsight that the car should never have passed the MOT.

I do not see that as my fault, it is the garage's and I have every right to depend on that statement.

Unless HPE can prove that Autonomy actively told an untruth to Deloitte, and that untruth caused Deloitte to sign off the accts, dont see how this makes much difference.

If they can prove that, they can show Autonomy have a case to answer without needing this report.

Strikes me as the 'look at all these documents, something in there means he is the bad guy' approach to prosecution.

Perhaps there is a commentard who actually has more than just an opinion out there who can correct me.

Drag Autonomy founder's 'fraudulent guns' and 'grasping claws' to the US for a criminal trial, thunders barrister

Re: They're a weird mob.

Are you thinking of the US version of the World Wildlife Fund?

Re: Due diligence

My memory says you are correct and also one person who pointed this out was 'let go'

My bad! So you're saying that redacting an on-screen PDF with Tipp-Ex won't work?

Playing 'Smack my Bitch Up'

I was more considerate and quietly read a JG Ballard novel - one of his best imo.

Re: The Weekly Cultural Moment

You would not notice that condiment consciously

UK Test and Trace chief Dido Harding tries to convince MPs that £14m for canned mobile app was money well spent

I thought this is what the House of Lords is for - a place to put people like her where that cannot do too much (more) damage

Perl-clutching hijackers appear to have seized control of 33-year-old programming language's .com domain

Perl6

I understand Audrey Tang (heavily involved in Perl6 and other open source Perl things) is now a Govt minister in Taiwan.

Lenovo reveals smart specs that let you eyeball five virtual displays, with strings attached

Re: Strings attached

I would hope that the glasses can detect the screen you are focusing on, render that at 1080p and the rest drop to 192x108.

America says banks can now transact using so-called stable crypto-coins. What does that actually mean?

Why not just notarise a ledger, and be done with the proof-of-work?

... you mean like a normal bank account?

Deloitte's Autonomy auditor 'lost objectivity' when looking at Brit software firm's disputed books, says regulator

I had a quick google in the responsibilities of Auditors

Liability of auditors

The class of people to whom auditors can be liable for negligence is fairly restricted. In the Caparo case (PLC, 1990, I(1), 61) the House of Lords decided that auditors of a public company owe no general duty of care to shareholders or members of the public who rely on the accounts when dealing in the company's shares. The House of Lords also confirmed that auditors owe no duty of care to lending banks even when they are already creditors of the company at the date of the auditor's report.

The accountancy profession has given Caparo a mixed reception. On the one hand they welcome the restriction of their potential liability - and have since settled most claims out of court rather than testing the decision - but on the other hand they acknowledge that the audit is of little practical importance if so few people can rely upon it.

... and it seems you need to go beyond simple negligence to get an auditor on the hook.

Re: I imagine replies will be moderated for legal reasons...

Clearly that downvote was voted by a voter who shouldn't have voted or was dead or was out of state or the signature did not match.

We need an open and transparent audit of that downvote.

Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1 Gen 8: No boundaries were pushed in the making of this laptop – and that's OK

Re: I'll be definitely interested!

+1 the last 'thinkpad' that a proper keyboard. Still miss it.

I now have a dell that is ... ok but mostly by virtue of being attached to a docking station with proper KVM.

Of course after 9 months of being plugged into the mains 24/7 the battery is not what it was. And it is not removable without disassembly.

I expect this will be a common issue. And this is why no user-replaceable battery should be an automatic deal-breaker for any business.

Elon Musk says he tried to sell Tesla to Apple, which didn’t bite and wouldn't even meet

Re: Both SX and Tesla have come a very long way in 2 years

Buy, buy buy, bye bye is not a stock tip but perhaps a sensible strategy?

... actually it is a stock tip but much much more importantly part of a deep commentary on the nature of time

The nightmare is real: 'Excel formulas are the world's most widely used programming language,' says Microsoft

Re: Next August 29th...

If we raise the CHILD ourselves and it has approximately the same physical embodiment as a baseline human, would you consider it to be human?

Re: Next August 29th...

I am a brain in a meat vat.

I think I am sane ... but I use the word I too often.

I suspect you are the same.

Re: Next August 29th...

At 2:61 you see a runtime error.

Re: "it is going to be happening"

What Mr Monet Said

And I will explain why:

I work on a large, complex, CRUD app with bits that interface to banks and govt (regulations...) that has (at least core database) been around since mid-80s

$client_ish_facing_consultant (me) talks to $client and is told "we need to do $clever_thing "

when? $real_soon.

$client_ish_facing_consultant talks to dev team "we need to do $clever_thing " by $real_soon.

Is told no chance because no resource|these are not clear reqs|complicated|have you thought of(*)|fine can do by $some_later_date|fine can do by $real_soon

I have come across fine can do by $real_soon less than 10% of the time.

Easy to have a pop at dev team. Not intended to be. Just that they are committed well into the future and do not have the budget to keep staff 'free' for the contingency that $clever_thing by $real_soon job actually happens.

... so I make it happen and sometimes this is Excel / VBA.

Excel may be v.v.v. slow and quite evil but (like javascript) is ubiquitous and generally does not change much.

Now it is done there is not appetite to re-implement in core - client wont pay and there is a big list of $other_stuff_to_do and dev team have limited resource....

(* thought of the fact that what you want breaks the core... ...and the day will come but not yet)

So the use of Excel/VBA has tended to grow over time and indeed I will go further and say that this will carry on growing until something else that fills the same need becomes widespread.

EU says Boeing 737 Max won't fly over the Continent just yet: The US can make its own choices over pilot training

Re: Very wary

I hope you do not live under a flightpath...

Election security fears doused with reality: Top officials say Nov 3 'was the most secure in American history.' The end

Back in the 80s a small but consistent number of people believed in ghosts and UFOs

Not so many now.

Back in the 00s a good number of people believed that Iraq had WMD

Not so many now

In the 20s a small but consistent number of people believe that Trump woulda won but for fraud

1. Give it 10 years

2. I really hope the negative consequences of beilief do not keep rising.

Somebody's Russian to meddle with UK coronavirus vaccine efforts, but GCHQ won't take it lying down

Re: Say no more, Squire

Enjoyable/Exhilarating/Enriching/Exhausting/Evil

Makes me think of a gartner magic pentangle

Makes you wonder where you would put the FAANGs (and Oracle)

Re: If you can't join the pun fun ...

Always stalin the best lines

Biden projected to be the next US President, Microsoft joins rest of world in telling Trump: It looks like... you're fired

Re: One down ...

Actually I thought the icon indicated where he thought some votes were found :)

Re: compared to Trump he's an elder statesman

Well, cat videos are _really_ popular