* Posts by I am the liquor

427 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Oct 2013

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Concerns that £360m data platform for NHS England is being set up to fail

I am the liquor

Re: Data grab

I think hoola has a point though. GPs were always "privatised," but they were not always "privatised in this way." There's a world of difference between an LLP owned by the GPs (or dentists) themselves, and a large corporation serving hundreds of thousands of patients with the cheapest service they can get away with.

Meta slammed with eight lawsuits claiming social media hurts kids

I am the liquor

Re: The other part of autopilot safety...

They ought to be measuring the overall performance of the system, including the human, as long as the human is still part of the system. If the AI never crashes, but the human crashes more when they're forced to take over, then the AI hasn't achieved any safety benefit.

EU lawmakers vote to ban sales of combustion engine cars from 2035

I am the liquor

Re: Before people panic

And crucially, it sets a goal that the people setting it will never have to deliver on. The failure to meet it will be someone else's fault.

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

I am the liquor

As far as I can see, there is not.

The Commission has reserved the right to executively alter the specifications "in the light of technical progress." But that looks rather like a chicken-and-egg situation, doesn't it. They won't allow a new connector until someone's created one, and no-one's going to create a new connector that's not allowed.

Enshrining a specific connector in law seems like a mistake. We're now stuck with USB-C for good or ill. A better idea would've been to allow any connector that meets some standard of non-proprietary openness.

IBM ends funding for employee retirement clubs

I am the liquor

Re: 1/5 of the total payroll

If you want to know the true profit per employee of a company like 3i, you really ought to include the employees of the companies they invest in. They're the ones who are really generating the money, not the employees of 3i itself.

I am the liquor

Re: Warning: Old-Git Post

The Quakers took it to the extreme, certainly, but a lot of Victorian industrialists shared those paternalistic ideals to some extent. When I first entered the world of work, most of the biggest employers nearby were companies that had started as family businesses in the 19th century, and they all had really nice sports & social clubs, with sports pitches, bowling greens, bars and function rooms... one even had a rifle range. All of those are gone now, sold off for housing development.

Safari is crippling the mobile market, and we never even noticed

I am the liquor

Frames? Bloody luxury! In my day, the only tags we had were ˂p˃, ˂a˃ and ˂blink˃, and we had to type them directly into the output stream of the WWW daemon every time it recevied a GET request.

Dell's rugged Latitude 5430 laptop is quick and pretty – but also bulky and heavy

I am the liquor

Re: You're whinging about a 6.5 pound laptop?

If it's a Thinkpad, there's a tiny hole on the back that you can jab a paper clip* into to cut power from the internal battery.

* or for those too young to remember paper clips, a SIM card removal tool.

IBM ordered to pay $105 million to insurer over tech project's collapse

I am the liquor

Re: "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM"

They sold most of what nobody ever got fired for buying to Lenovo years ago.

The Register gets up close and personal with ESA's JUICE spacecraft

I am the liquor
Thumb Up

Re: Life resembling art again?

Came here expecting very first comment to be a 2010 reference; was not disappointed.

First Light says it's hit nuclear fusion breakthrough with no fancy lasers, magnets

I am the liquor

10^18

Good luck to them, but if they've figured out how to make 50 of something they need 10^18 of, I'm not getting my hopes up just yet.

Vital UK customs system outage contributes to travel chaos at its borders

I am the liquor

Re: @Spaceman9

In the same way that you "surrender" to your family when you choose to settle down and have kids.

That's a pretty convincing argument actually, I think you just flipped me from remain to leave.

I am the liquor
Joke

Re: a clique of aristocrats

Thank goodness it's not the 18th century any more. Imagine living in a country where a clique of aristocrats screwed over the little people and ran everything for the benefit of their own fabulously wealthy friends and family.

Prototype app outperforms and outlasts outsourced production version

I am the liquor

Re: But Pareto...

The classic 90/10 rule... 90% of the features take 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% of the features take the other 90% of the time.

UK Home Office dangles £20m for national gun licence database system

I am the liquor

Re: How much????

Something that deals with "170,000 licence grants, renewals and variations per year" hardly seems like a "large-scale database" does it. I could see low-mid 6 figures for this but £20 million is a boondoggle.

Research casts doubt on energy efficiency of 5G

I am the liquor

Re: Jevons paradox

You're countering your own argument when you say "by far the biggest contributor to data use in recent years has been the ubiquity of wifi." You're saying having access to a bigger pipe led people to put more stuff down it.

Users complain of missing data in UK wills search service

I am the liquor
Happy

Re: Special characters

Well good news John, P455w0rd36 is in fact not in any password breaches known to haveibeenpwned.com.

Too bad it's been burned now!

But yes, as Len described, once a password has appeared in a breach of plaintext passwords (probably pinched from some site that stored them in the clear or used weak hashing), then it's in every password-cracker's dictionary. If they lift a database of password hashes from a site where you used one of those passwords, then they will decrypt it via a dictionary attack, even if an expensive hash function was used in that case.

Apparently haveibeenpwned has a dictionary of "hundreds of millions" of exposed passwords. So in cracking terms, any password that's in that list, no matter how long or complex, is reduced to about the level of a 5-character alphabetic password (380 million combinations).

I am the liquor

It's great that people can still make money building stuff like that. Should make a lot of us here feel more secure in our jobs!

I am the liquor

At which point you start to think they might as well get rid of the password completely, and make the password reset process (probably an emailed token) the logon process.

I am the liquor

Re: Special characters

The real answer is for the sites not to enforce composition requirements, which has been the official CESG/NCSC guidance for some years. Specify a minimum length - nothing more in terms of composition - and then check the password against a dictionary of known weak or compromised passwords, is what they should be doing.

JavaScript survey: Most use React but satisfaction low

I am the liquor

Re: Frameworks

I think that's a good call. For all the shortcomings of languages like JavaScript or of inexperienced programmers, they're secondary issues; I'd agree the number 1 barrier to maintainability of systems is choice of dependencies.

Everything has dependencies of course, but if you've stuck rigidly to "dinosaurish" dependencies like, say, Oracle or MS .Net, or something defined in an ISO standard, then the chances of your code still running in 10 or 20 years are good. If you've machine-gunned your system full of random stuff off NPM or NuGet, then chances are not so good.

I am the liquor

It probably is, though to a vastly lesser degree. A lesser degree for two reasons: 75% is not 93%; and "toxic femininity" is not the same problem as "toxic masculinity".

I am the liquor

Thanks for illustrating the problem.

I am the liquor

It is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy though. Finding yourself the only woman in your class or office is likely to be a discouraging situation to many.

I am the liquor

Re: Frameworks

It's fine that the code quality is terrible. A couple of years into the future, the framework that it's all written on is no longer flavour of the month, and most of the hundred other dependencies that were dragged in are no longer maintained at all. What's the point of building maintainable code on top of such a house of cards? Consider it disposable from the start. Throw it away and build a new one. Building code that'll be runnable and maintainable for a decade or more is such a 1990's concept.

Ponzi scheme sounds about right.

Fibre broadband uptake in UK lags behind OECD countries

I am the liquor

Re: HS2 or FTTP?

As long as we're not all smears of carbon on the pavement, it's doing what it's supposed to... or, at least, you can't say it's failed. I hang old AOL CDs round the garden to stave off the nuclear apocalypse, and to be fair, the empirical evidence for the success of that strategy is equally strong.

I am the liquor

While the kids are waiting for their game download, you could distract them by holding a torch under your chin and regaling them with spine-chilling stories about the terrors of R Tape loading error.

Car radios crashed by station broadcasting images with no file extension

I am the liquor

Re: GIGO for the goddesses sake!

If there even is a standard that covers this, which there probably isn't. More likely Mazda's developers just made a wrong assumption that a JPEG file name will always end with .jpg because they usually do. Presumably other manufacturers' software was displaying them correctly.

I am the liquor

Re: GIGO for the goddesses sake!

Yes quite. You have to wonder how Mazda's software would stand up to someone who's actually trying to break it.

UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

I am the liquor

Re: Tory Government Promises the Impossible

What's the betting the next press release promises to get it done by 2030.

I am the liquor

Re: Dead Cat

It's a law of the internet. Any post criticising the grammar or spelling in another post will itself contain a spelling or grammar mistake. And thats definately true.

Privacy Shield: EU citizens might get right to challenge US access to their data

I am the liquor

Enhanced privacy shield

Great idea. Wait for your data sharing agreement to be struck down by the courts, then just repackage the same old shit, with a few ineffectual changes and a different name, and you have another 2 years of business-as-usual while Max Schrems chips away at that one. Seems like that could work indefinitely, or until Max is worn out, whichever is the sooner.

Machine learning the hard way: IBM Watson's fatal misdiagnosis

I am the liquor

Re: One doesn't imply the other

Home in.

I am the liquor

Re: Watson

What colour tray would you like your dinner served on, dear? And shall I turn on the TV?

£42k for a top-class software engineer? It's no wonder uni research teams can't recruit

I am the liquor

Re: How many people do you manage? None? In that case, it's £42k a year'

Pretty much every software business error that Fred Brooks wrote about in the 1970s is still being made more often than not. Including the one in the title of the book. Most project managers I've mentioned it to over the years had never heard of The Mythical Man Month.

We're in a business that likes to think of itself as fast-moving and forward-looking. I suppose it's inevitable to have an element of being doomed to repeat the mistakes of history.

Leaked footage shows British F-35B falling off HMS Queen Elizabeth and pilot's death-defying ejection

I am the liquor

Re: Ooops!

An old friend used to recount a story about accidentally driving his armoured vehicle over his rifle, rendering it suitable only for shooting round corners. Fortunately he was in enemy territory during a hot war (Iraq, the early 90s one), and got issued a new one with no questions asked. Apparently there'd have been hell to pay if he'd done the same on Salisbury Plain.

China plans to swipe a bunch of data soon so quantum computers can decrypt it later

I am the liquor

ln -s /dev/urandom MySecretz.zip

Happy with your existing Windows 10 setup? Good, because Windows 11 could turn its nose up at your CPU

I am the liquor

It's not CAD you need processor power for these days, it's running all the shitty javascript on sloppily designed web sites.

UK watchdog fines two firms £270k for cold-calling 531,000 people who had opted out

I am the liquor

Re: Reporting calls

The terminating telco doesn't need to immediately block the route; they pass the info upstream and wait for the originating telco to cut off the subscriber. If the originating telco doesn't do so, then whoever's downstream of them has to cut them off. And ultimately, yes the terminating telco in the UK would have to cut off the inbound route, if the intermediate telco on that route has not dealt with nuisance calls upstream of them.

Clearly none of them are going to do this voluntarily, especially when they're all taking their cut from all these calls. International treaties and legislation will be required. Or at least the threat of legislation, if the telcos can't collectively get their house in order.

If it's ITU rules that are preventing anyone addressing this problem, then maybe the ITU is the organisation that should be tasked with solving it.

How many low-code products does an enterprise software biz need? Ask SAP, it's just swallowed another one

I am the liquor

Re: Almighty mess

Frankly, it started going downhill with COBOL.

Machine-learning model creates creepiest Doctor Who images yet – by scanning the brain of a super fan

I am the liquor

Re: Someone with access to an MRI machine has misunderstood machine learning again...

You see that Eddie The Eagle Edwards? That's you that is.

ThinkPad T14s AMD Gen 1: Workhorse that does the business – and dares you to push that red button

I am the liquor

Re: Terrible keyboard positioning

Back in the days when carpal tunnel syndrome seemed like a major health crisis, having your wrists higher than the keyboard was reckoned to be the safe way to type. You could get a squidgy wrist rest to put in front of your keyboard to raise your wrists to the correct angle.

Now everyone uses laptop keyboards, with this built-in wrist-rest design, and you hardly hear about carpal tunnel syndrome any more. Coincidence?

I am the liquor

Re: Personal hobby horse warning

It makes one nostalgic for times when one could use "one" as a pronoun, without one having to be a member of the royal family.

I am the liquor

Re: Vile

It's not for looking at, it's for working on.

If you want something to work on, by all means use a Thinkpad.

If you want something to look at, I recommend a tree or some clouds.

I am the liquor

Re: It is why I buy Thinkpads

I think when Matthew said "it’s not something you instinctively want to use," he really meant to say "it’s not something I instinctively want to use."

Clearly the reason they still have it is that there are enough customers who will never buy anything other than a Thinkpad because of it.

UK network Three hikes pay-as-you-go rates by 400% to push punters to buy 'bundles'

I am the liquor

Re: PAYG is no longer PAYG

They're probably just realigning themselves with the market. Their new price is in line with the likes of Tesco and Asda at 8-10p a minute. Vodafone/EE/O2 PAYG tariffs are 30-35p a minute! They really don't want PAYG customers.

I am the liquor

Re: PAYG is no longer PAYG

You can still do normal PAYG, you don't have to buy the 1-month bundles/add-ons. Your cost per minute will be higher now if you're on 3, but you can still choose to pay just for what you use, subject to a minimum usage level of one chargeable event per 180 days to keep it alive.

That's it. It's over. It's really over. From today, Adobe Flash Player no longer works. We're free. We can just leave

I am the liquor

Where can you see lions?

Leave.EU takes back control – and shifts its domain name to be inside the European Union

I am the liquor

Re: My irony metre --------------------->

I think you'll find it's now an irony yard.

We take a look at proposed Big Tech regulations in the UK: Heavy on possible fines, light on enforcement

I am the liquor

Re: Maximum fine £18 million

To be pedantic, the minimum maximum fine is £18m.

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