Posts by Dominion

Your emotionally absent pic-snapping partner's going to look you in the eye again

Are the flashing lights a signal that I can rip the bloody things off someone's head and stamp them into the ground?

Can you spout digital bollocks? London is hiring a Chief Digital Officer

Exciting?

Does it say anywhere that the role is "exciting"? If it's not "exciting" like every other role then I'm not applying.

iPhone lawyers literally compare Apples with Pears in trademark war

Are trademark applications expensive? I'm thinking about registering as many trademarks as possible with a fruit based logo just to see Apple's lawyers frothing at the mouth.....

Stop asking people for their passwords, rights warriors yell at US Homeland Security

You're using social media right now ?

Lloyds Banking Group to hang up on call centre staffers

Didn't they offshore the call centre once before, and bring it back when it was a complete unmitigated disaster?

NetSuite-nourished Oracle: SaaS margins will go up to 80%

Margins

If they can make 80% then I'm damn sure I can carry on with a traditional on-premise solution for considerably less.

Road accident nuisance callers fined £270,000 for being absolute sh*tbags

They should also force the offender to disclose where they bought the data from, and the seller should also be prosecuted for selling it.

Video intercom firm Doorbird wants $80 for device password resets

Re: Idiots Of The...

I'd buy you a pint, but I've long since spent the 12 quid I saved by not having a doorbell on beer for myself...

If we must have an IoT bog roll holder, can we at least make it secure?

Which way round

Will it report if the toilet roll is installed incorrectly with the loose end at the back?

Sports Direct hacked last year, and still hasn't told its staff of data breach

Re: Sports Direct introduces new staff uniform.*

Don't worry, it'll have had a 75% off tag slapped on it when it was packaged...

Biggest Kodi sweep: Brit cops nab five, bag some dodgy sticks

If it's all about intent then everyone who is connected to the internet could be deemed to have intent. Opportunity to download Kodi, opportunity to download plugins, opportunity to download content.

Information on smart meters? Yep. They're great. That works, right? – UK.gov

Re: estimated net "benefit" of £5.7bn by 2020

I can't ring up and demand a credit, because I refuse to sign up to a fixed monthly payment - so I'm never in credit, but by doing so I'm forced to pay higher tariffs. This fake market will be one of the first things to get smashed up when I'm put in charge around here.....

Re: estimated net "benefit" of £5.7bn by 2020

The benefit to ME is paying an accurate bill monthly (or quarterly) without having to dick around taking and submitting readings myself. Once everyone has smart meters the con trick by the energy companies to give the best rates to fixed monthly payment tariffs is gone. I object to paying estimated bills, or a fixed amount based on a forecast that is invariably inflated when the technology to pay accurately based on actual usage is available.

Anyone know how much energy companies have got banked from people that have overpaid?

Tobacco giant predicts the end of smoking. Panic ensues

All about the money....

The big tobacco companies missed the boat on vaping and are now looking for a new cash cow to prop up their bank balance?

UK.gov has 18,000 IT contractors on its books due to dearth of skills

G4S ??

Apple drops dongle prices to make USB-C upgrade affordable

Re: How on earth

Why should I use SD cards for landscape. Will my photos not be as good if I use compact flash?

Your weekends may be safe, admins – IT giants tout 'zero outage' tech

Re: "Your weekends may be safe"

You allow cleaners near rooms housing servers? You deserve every call out you get!

Citizens don't trust UK.GOV with their data

Re: I dont trust the government...

Interesting that you said "screw in a lightbulb". The outsourcer bid for that job, but on commencement discovered that the old bulb was still in place. As this work was out of scope the costs tripled....

'We already do that, we’re just OG* enough to not call it DevOps'

Re: Wrong, wrong, wrong!

Deal

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

"first establish the baseline cost of following the “old” way, like staff’s pay, tooling, and the expected cost of fixing screw-ups"

...and then give the work to Developers who don't have years of experience in Ops, and only spend a very small percentage of their time focused on Ops resulting in way more screw ups to fix?

OpsDev would be a better idea because Ops deal with real production issues and know how it needs to work in the real world. In fact... I'm off to patent OpsDev. Or is it copyright.. Or should I release it under GPL?

How about the author arranges actual comment from organisations that have used DevOps successfully, noting IT estate size, number of staff involved etc... Because all I'm seeing in this rag is marketing bullshit, although given it's written by a "marketer" it's hardly surprising.

Olympics bans GIFs

The 'amateur' argument is a bit bogus, but some earn a lot more than others. The IOC earning the most obviously.

Nice to see the IOC has its finger on the pulse again. Bans gifs but allows druggies to take part. #rio #olympics #2016 #clueless

HMRC research finds 'resistance' to proposals to shift contractor tax compliance burden

Re: How hard can it be?

I just need to figure out how to calculate graded tax so higher earners pay more without allowing them to offset it against another company employee paying a lower rate (spouse / child / dog etc...)

Figure that bit and it's a sure fire vote winner....

Re: Ethical tax compliance

Sorry, but that's a load of crap. If you choose to pay every penny you earn at the point you earn it instead of keeping some back to pay yourself "holiday pay" and "sick pay" then that's your problem. You are your own employer. So if your employer (yourself) isn't paying you holiday pay and sick pay then look in the mirror. There's your problem.

Re: How hard can it be?

In my Utopian world, tax free allowances will be scrapped, and the rate of tax reduced to reflect it. Maybe I'll continue with child tax credits for the first 2 children, after that it's your own lifestyle choice. Then it won't matter who pays the tax, it will always be paid at the same rate.

The expenses issue is a bit more difficult for an off the cuff policy statement - I'll get back to you on that one. Something like... If you commute to the same place 3 days a week or more then lets's face it, that's your permanent place of work so tax deductions won't be permitted.

It'll be much clearer when I'm appointed President and I can start implementing these policies....

How hard can it be?

Simplify the tax system and merge employee NI and tax so that everyone pays the same rate of tax, regardless of whether income is paid as salary or dividends and all this nonsense instantly goes away.

The only downside is all the HMRC staff that will be out of a job. Ah wait.... I've just spotted the issue with making it simple...

London's contactless ticket payment system for sale in £15m deal

Transport for Greater Manchester

I never understood why TfGM splurged a load of money to Atos when they could / should have been able to take a copy of the Oyster payment system, which seems to do the majority of what they wanted?

It seems crazy that there's not a reuse of a seemingly proven system?

Capacity planning in an age of agile and on - demand IT

I'm sure the Reg keeps telling us that DevOps fixes all this shit?

HMRC dangles £10bn in outsourcing meat before hungry SME hounds

What SMEs aren't geared up for is spending millions of pounds over many months or even years, bidding for the work.

Professor slams digital efforts of 'website-obsessed' government

Digital Technology?

Yay for VMS!

EU referendum frenzy bazookas online voter registration. It's another #GovtDigiShambles

Re: Too stupid to vote

There'll be another train, possibly tomorrow. There won't be another vote,

Too stupid to vote

Anyone who left it until 10:40pm on deadline day to register is quite frankly, too stupid to be allowed to vote.

UK web host 123-Reg goes TITSUP, customer servers evaporate

Re: so in summary..

The Heart balls up also took out VPSs according to the comments on the Reg story back in February.

So who should I host with?

Genuine question, but which providers are better for small websites? Fasthosts are rubbish, Heart lost an entire DC a month or so back.... 123-Reg are now proven to be incapable.... Who is actually any better?

Top new IoT foundation (yeah, another one) to develop open standards

Re: IoT - Has it's time passed?

I get the lighting bit, but not the heating jibe. It means I can turn the heating on as I leave the office and have a warm house when I arrive home, without wasting gas by having it come on based on a timer. A light doesn't take time to come on so there's no value to it being controlled in the same way. It's true that we survived without such things for many years, but that's true of pretty much everything.

Heart Internet in 22-hour TITSUP after data centre power stuffup

Surely you just deploy a new server and (if necessary) restore from backup? Although I admit, backups are a very old fashioned recovery method these days...

You get what you pay for...

I've had a couple of sites knocked out, which was at best annoying as I wanted to get some updates done yesterday, but given the amount I pay I'm not going to lose sleep over it. I've seen far worse screw ups with customers that pay far more than Heart or it's re-sellers charge. Just amazed that some of those screw ups never made it to The Register!

Get out of mi casa, Picasa: Google photo site to join Wave, Code, Reader in silicon hell

Re: My Tracks too

iGoogle was another really useful Google product that got binned off.

Send tortuous stand-up ‘nine-thirty’ meetings back to the dark ages

Re: 5.30 Friday is worse

You mean you actually accepted those meeting invites? <shudder> They come from two types, young and eager, desperate to impress the managers that are optional invitees and won't attend anyway, and those that work from home, so a 5-30pm conference call isn't an inconvenience to them, and sod everyone else that is office based.

BT dismisses MPs' calls to snap off Openreach as 'wrong-headed'

Re: New Zealand has done it.

"Most UK homes"

I'd genuinely like to see the numbers of homes that have Virgin Media cable available. I'm in a reasonable sized town in the middle of the country with Virgin Media nowhere in sight.

How to help a user who can't find the Start button or the keyboard?

I have all of these call, several times a week. From my aged mother!

Asda slammed for letting vulns fester on its cyber shelves

Re: For? Serious?

It's a new language that The Register are developing for their contributors. Still, it's not as bad as the article yesterday by Marcus Gibson

Gov must hire 'thousands' of techies to rescue failing projects

Digital

"Digital"..... For fucks sake! Somebody sack this moron.

Southend-on-Sea splashes £1.5m on hybrid cloud data centre

I was with them all the way until they said they were going to outsource running it from 2019. It's ludicrous to build something internally with the intention of outsourcing it a couple of years later.

HSBC online customers still in the cold after hours-long lockout

Re: Just say ...

24 hours per day, 365 days per year

It's a shame 2016 is a leap year with 366 days!

IT bloke: Crooks stole my bikes after cycling app blabbed my address

Sure, but one for cars would be more use as they tend to cause more deaths when jumping red lights and mounting pavements.

North Wales Police outsourcing deal results in massive overspend

"Supposed", "Expected", "Thought". Looks like this is simply not understanding the services being outsourced, and not having full costs agreed when signing up. I'd wager that the overspend is being charged for work that wasn't identified at contract bid / acceptance stage. A quick Google tells you who the "unnamed" supplier is.

IT infrastructure on demand? Yeah right, say devs

FTFY

"Developers remain completely out of touch with the needs of IT operations"

Is actually closer to the truth. Time and time again we see solutions that cannot be deployed to production environments because the slap dash "sandpit" servers that were used for development is using OS builds that are not representative of a properly secured and hardened production server. If IT operations are "utterly out of touch with what developers, users and businesses actually need", it's because developers, users and businesses don't have a plan or a strategy to enable their work to be delivered, and didn't think about flagging up their requirements in a timely manner.

We turn Sonos PLAY:5 up to 11

Re: Marantz MCR510?

I mostly agree with you - I'm sat here listening to mps3s off my NAS through a Sonos Connect hooked up to a Marantz amp and AVI speakers, but the Sonos Play 1s that I have are great for dragging round the house as required. The amp / speaker combo, not quite so...

Does the Marantz MCR510 have an iPhone / Android / Windows app?