* Posts by Missing Semicolon

1737 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Nov 2013

Barnet Council: Outsourcing deal with Capita has 'performance issues'

Missing Semicolon Silver badge

Re: I've said it before ...

The issues include "management instability" which is probably PHB-speak for "people getting hacked off and quitting" or "people leaving before the job kills them"

With outsourcing, at least the day-to-day management is done by people with a small clue. The problem now is rapacious account-managers, whose job is to maximize on-going revenue.

Facebook Fake News won it for Trump? That's a Zombie theory

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FAIL

Oh, not again....

... another polemic on "shenanigans with a post-vote realisation of the terrible mistake that has been made".

Just suck it up, and go with the vote of the people.

No side on the HRC/Trump election or the Brexit referendum told much truth. The difference perhaps was that the "nice" side told more subtle and carefully-researched lies.

And with one stroke, Trump killed the Era of Slacktivism

Missing Semicolon Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: net neutrality

Sigh. It's not "technical prioritization" that we care about. It's financial prioritization.

ISPs would dearly love to charge for their infrastructure twice - once to you, the end-user, and once to the content-providers. So Netflix must pay for the bits they send to the ISP, and you must pay to receive them. This causes several problems - it's a high barrier for new entrants, for a start.

We don't want "bandwidth for free". We want "the bandwidth we paid for".

UK NHS 850k Reply-all email fail: State health service blames Accenture

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Unhappy

"reply all" the basic CYA

In many organisations, if you don't "reply to all" on anything important, your mail will be ignored - especially if it involves the recipient putting themselves in danger of being responsible for something.

Without "reply all" you have no email trail in the boss' inbox to prove that the other numpty dropped the ball, not you.

Tech Trump: Silicon Valley steps into the valley of unhappiness

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Unhappy

Re: Tax holiday for big people

That's just a general argument against taxation.

Companies can exist because of the services provided by the State. They should be paying for it.

It is also anticompetitive that a local business has to pay all it's taxes, but a "global" (pah!) business gets to skip a load.

Missing Semicolon Silver badge
Mushroom

Tax holiday for big people

That's the one thing he would do that would really grind my gears.

I really loathe the cynicism implied in a) keeping offshore profits offshore, and b) borrowing against those profits to pay dividends, in the certain knowledge that every 8 years a Republican President will give them a free pass to bring the money home.

It's so well-known that this is how it happens that the Markets don't price offshore profits at a discount. They assume that they will get repatriated at a nominal rate.

Trump's taxing problem: The end of 'affordable' iPhones

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FAIL

Check the salaries offered.

I get job offers occasionally. Many are for skilled positions, requiring several years' experience in the discipline required. The salary (allowing for inflation) is less than I started on fresh out of uni.

This has been true for a while.

So, the ability to outsource basic Engineering tasks has depressed the value of the work. So, surprise surprise, hiring is difficult from the local pool, as the salaries are generally poor. Fewer people bother acquiring the skills - there's no point, as the salaries are set at outsourcing rates.

That's the long-term cost of "globalisation"

We're going to have to start making changes or the adults will do it for us

Missing Semicolon Silver badge
Alert

Significant whitespace? It's a shame, then...

.. that the only sane alternative for Perl, for doing what we used to to in Perl*, is Python.

* Perl no longer works for me. When you need to install a Perl module (that really ought to be part of the vanilla distribution) and the candidate is a) at version 0.1.45, and b) causes CPAN to spend the next 30 minutes downloading and compiling much of CPAN.org (also at V0.something), you get worried. When the C modules that are compiling also cause screeds of warnings of the "mismatched prototype/uninitialised variable/dodgy cast variety, worry is no longer enough, and concern is required.

Brexit judgment could be hit for six by those crazy Supreme Court judges, says barrister

Missing Semicolon Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Wasnt one of the " reasons" for these referendum reasserting the soverignty of Parliament?

Yeah - but we didn't vote for them to go "actually, it's too hard , we want to remain in the cushy, no-responsibility status quo ante". The request that we be governed by our own government kind of implies that the Government doesn't get to decide not to do it.

Bloody entitled Establishment. I get tired of being told it's all a big mistake, and we'll get back to normal soon, and sod the "knucke-draggers".

Arch Linux: In a world of polish, DIY never felt so good

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Meh

Re: Nice distro, but..

Centos? I use it, but there's too much Poettering for my taste.

Uber, Lyft drivers shamed for 'racial bias' by uni eggheads

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Re: Unregulated service behaves in an unregulated manner

The motive isn't material for the discrimination case. The business can quite legally say "I refuse to serve you because you're just winding me up". They can't say "I refuse to serve you because what you want is against my religion"

Stress me, test me, vex me ... boffins seek Hall Effect in frustrated magnets

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Happy

Love the experimental rig

Real boffin-grade hot glue and gold wire!

WebAssembly: Finally something everyone agrees on – websites running C/C++ code

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Mushroom

JVM, JavaScript Sandbox, Flash container

All methods of running remotely delivered code "securely", and all subject to malware attacks that break the sandbox and infect the host machine.

So , now we take an existing sandbox (JavaScript) and make it do new things it doesn't already do, running chunks of native code. Of course a whole new class of vulnerabilities will be discovered!

Even Java, with it's virtual machine - which means that the browser never runs native code, but a bytecode, is riddled with holes. In theory, every bytecode when executed can be checked. Apparently that is not enough.

Useless idiots.

Google man drags Emacs into the 1990s

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Boffin

Re: zx80 -> ZX81

The screen bounce on key press was, as you say, a consequence of the Z80 doing the screen rendering. Well, actually, it was being the display address counter - the ULA did the actual bit-shifting into the modulator.

The ZX81 had "slow mode" where the screen refresh was done under interrupt. Now the screen didn't bounce on key press, but the machine ran dog-slow as it only spent 20% of it's time actually running your program.

The technology is ancient - there's a summary here: http://laughtonelectronics.com/Arcana/KimKlone/BrideOfSon%20KK%20Lancaster.html

Smartmobe made 'intermittent bright flashes and a hissing noise' in Biz class seat

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Angel

Re: QANTAS

Maybe Quantas' seats have particularly phone-shaped crannies in them that get smaller when the seat is adjusted?

Let's praise Surface, not bury it

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linux on new devices-help!

I have a beautiful asus t400chi. It's tolerable with win8.1, sluggy and broken with win10. But there's no linux build for it.

Spain's iPhone killer actually a rebranded Xiaomi – new claim

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Unhappy

Re: Damn, you peeled off the sticker

We weren't allowed to do anything about it. Such "protectionism" isn't allowed. Except if you're French. Or German.

Cisco president: We've lost to AWS et al on the public cloud

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Happy

You live in a sad, declining civilisation..

... you are looking down.

What do you see?

Yahoo! halts! email! forwarding! to! outside! email! addresses!

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FAIL

Verizon should just walk away.

As the Yahoo email business is now dead.

Why? Well, the bad guys have millions of account logins, many of which will be for "zombie" accounts that the original owners have forgotten about. So they will be used to send spam and phishing mails, which at the moment will evade spam filters as they are from a "legitimate" mail server. When everyone gets fed up, and either blacklists yahoo.com mail, or up-scores the spamminess in their spam filters, the Yahoo users will find that their mail is never delivered. Sorting this out would take years.

Heads roll as Qihoo 360 moves to end WoSign, StartCom certificate row

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Thumb Up

Astounding

A bunch of executives screwed up, and got fired!

How refreshing!

Social media flame wars to be illegal, says top Crown prosecutor

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Flame

And so, a whole new class of crime is created

... by administrative diktat.

Democracy? Freedom? Free Speech? Ship sailed.

1984 just inched a little closer.

Disney aims for Netflix. If the deal was made, it would shoot itself in the foot

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FAIL

Logic? No need.

It's all about doing The Deal. The bigger the better.

The consequent destruction of value is somebody elses problem.

And with Netflix being a really big deal, the slippery slope from "Netflix by Disney" to "Disney Netflix Channel" to boring irrelevance would take, what 5 years?

These diabetes pumps obey unencrypted radio commands – which is, frankly, f*%king stupid

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Should Computer Misuse Act offences committed in UK be prosecuted in UK?

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FAIL

He committed a serious offence in the USA

That is, making Federal security organisations look like fools.

There is no defence, or mitigation possible, as any attempt to do so compounds the offence.

As Chelsea Manning is finding out.

Ericsson’s patent pool is far from the new start the IoT needs

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Mushroom

Invention is dead

It seems to me that anyone with an Arduino and a GSM modem can soon get themselves in a lot of hot water by doing fairly obvious things.

Sage advice: Avoid the Windows 10 Anniversary Update – it knackers our accounting app

Missing Semicolon Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: "operating system updates end up disabling the framework"

Don't forget that Sage had no version that worked with Windows10 for many monthas after the official launch of Win10. Even though the previews had been available for months before that. They really had not started until enough customers complained.

HP Ink COO: Sorry not sorry we bricked your otherwise totally fine printer cartridges

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Happy

Re: I took my home printer to the tip a few weeks ago.

Best combination is 2 printers.

1) Brother laser as above. Cheap to run, nice output

2) For those just-got-to-be-inkjet moments - an HP multifunction (4502). Why? It prints only a few pages a month, so the price of the cartridges is not an issue. Plus, when it dries up, I can just put fresh ones in. HP seem to reduced the head-drying-up problem.

Missing Semicolon Silver badge
Happy

Re: No more HP

... plus, Brother Lasers are very refillable. Have a look at http://www.urefilltoner.co.uk/ .

Before Bitcoin, digital cash was called Beenz – all that's left is a T-shirt

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Happy

Sun Microsystems

Massive hold-all in green with purple writing. Propoer Sun logo and everything. It's been used for all sorts over the years.

I occasionally wonder if I ought to have looked after it.

Avoiding Liverpool was the aim: All aboard the world's ONLY moving aqueduct

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Unhappy

Re: Don't forget Anderton Canal Lift

Ruined.

It used to be an elegant thing of counterweights, and before that the two caissons moved in opposition. By ensuring that the decending one was slightly fuller, the amount of motive effort required to operate the lift was minimal.

After the "restoration", each caisson has a single, modern hydraulic cylinder. The two sides are independent, and the lifting is by having a sodding great electrically-powered oil pump lifting all those tons of water. It works, yes, but it's now rather a full-scale working model than a restoration

Forgive me, father, for I have used an ad-blocker on news websites...

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Happy

I have no ad-blocker..

... yet I see no ads.

I have Privacy Badger. That merely asks sites not to track me, and block those that do so against my wishes. The fact that this blocks virtually all adverts is merely an unfortunate byproduct.....

EU U-turns on mobile roaming fees: No 90-day cap after all

Missing Semicolon Silver badge
FAIL

Somebody else's money

Which is what the Commission is using to buy some post-Brexit goodwill from the populace.

The fact that the result will be increased consolidation in the market (to cut the cost of roaming) and you can easily see that the days of the £10 SIM with oodles of data and minutes will soon be over.

One way or another (by multilateral price increases, or reduction in competition) we will end up paying for it.

Three outsources staff to Capita

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Unhappy

"customers want to engage digitally by default"

That my be the case, but they cannot do that if they are trying to spend less money. So cancellations and upgrades will always be done by humans, as it is perceived that there is a greater chance of making an up-sale.

Which is bad news for us, as it will make cancellation harder. The human on the other end is on a bonus to keep your custom - that can lead to bad behavour.

Missing Semicolon Silver badge
Unhappy

Glasgow centre?

I've heard of it, but never spoken to them. Unless the staff are all trained to speak with an Indian accent.

Poor buggers. 2 year's notice of redundancy then.

Sigh.

BT's Wi-Fi Extender works great – at extending your password to hackers

Missing Semicolon Silver badge
Happy

Re: Why didn't they spend some time testing the product before releasing it?

Well, for example, shipping it round to Pen Test Partners, and saying "oi! break that!"

IPv4 apocalypse means we just can't measure the internet any more

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Unhappy

Re: And who told you I want to be measured?

@ Anonymous Coward

The secure perimeter we now all have with ISP-supplied routers (no more USB cable modems, yay!) is the reason why the crims have now moved to the client-based penetration attempts.

Take the perimeter wall away, and we're back to 1993.

Missing Semicolon Silver badge
Boffin

Re: And who told you I want to be measured?

@ Nanashi

So, What happens when the various devices in my house talk to the Internet? Right now, they all appear as one address, so that Google (say),or my ISP, has no idea what's inside my LAN

My understanding is that V6 allows a version of the LAN address to get out as the return address for the connection. So the manufacturer can be detected, and the number of different addresses used from my subnet gives an indication as to how many devices I have.

I don't want that leakage.

VW Dieselgate engineer sings like a canary: Entire design team was in on it – not just a few bad apples, allegedly

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Happy

Wasn't Michael Winterkorn an engineer?

Before he was VW CEO?

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Holmes

Re: re the relevant employees go to jail

So, the "desgn team" kept it all quiet for years from senior management? Seems a little far-fetched....

Oracle happy to let Apache Foundation adopt NetBeans

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Happy

Netbeans simplicity

I like the way that a project is free-standing, and defined by a small, visible set of files (aside from the actual source code). It will also build a project in a different file location from where it was originally created (with a modicum of care).

When you are checking code in, it's vital that only environment-non-specific files, and files that constitute source, get checked in. This is vital when branching a project. When I've looked at Eclipse-based IDEs, the range of files that are needed to define a project seem to be ill-defined, and the chances of making a project portable is very slim.

Plus the "Workspace" concept in Eclipse/IntelliJ etc is an absolute crock.

Luxe cable crimper

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Happy

This is definitely news, even if it is a promo.

Anyone who has crimped a normal RJ45 plug (the cheap ones) knows how hard it is to get a good crimp. The necessity to unwind the green pair and put them on either side of the blue pair makes for a fiddly job.

This replaces the hard-to-crimp connectors with a compact easy-to-crimp one, plus a bunch of adaptors.

Nice.

Does anyone know of a cheaper way to get easy-crimp plugs?

'Jet blast' noise KOs ING bank's spinning rust servers

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UK will be 'cut off' from 'full intelligence picture' after Brexit – Europol strategy man

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Happy

Fog in Channel

... continent cut off.

Hello, Fortinet? Could you patch these vulns please?

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Trollface

Ah, there's the problem...

... using PHP in the web front-end.

Adobe reverses decision to kill NPAPI Flash plugin for Linux

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Stop

Re: Hello BBC

Well, if you don't want to pay for the copyrighted content, don't watch it.

Not fair otherwise.

Spinning that Brexit wheel: Regulation lotto for tech startups

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Re: Your Spanish mate

So how did the Spanish Government prevent their energy companies from being taken over by German companies? I thought such intra-EU protectionism Was Not Allowed? (cf., EDF, Deutsche Post, etc)

IPv4 wealth redistributed

Missing Semicolon Silver badge

Re: Remember an IPv6 numer? And not use DNS?

DNS only works in the office if DNSMasq or its equivalent is configured. Many non-linux/bsd office firewalls don't do it.

IBM swings axe through staff, humming contently about cloud and AI

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FAIL

Warning to IBM customers

Don't expect to get any support of any use.

Expect the people who understand your requirements to vanish unexpectedly.

Be wary of products becoming poorly-maintained.

Don't bet the farm on IBM.

Lenovo's tablet with a real pen, Acer's monster laptop, Samsung Galaxy S3 watch

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Happy

Re: How about a normal gaming computer?

... it would be a wicked transportable workstation. All that RAM and SSD would make it fly for all sorts of devel task. Plus the (no doubt) awesome screen would be good for high-end CAD.

And there would be a degree of ironic cachet to pulling out that bonkers monster in a meeting with other techies!

Tim Cook: EU lied about Apple taxes. Watch out Ireland, this is a coup!

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Facepalm

Re: Pass me the Kleenex

"...the EU was seeking to expand its powers over national governments..."

It already has. What was the Maastricht Treaty, the Treaty of Lisbon, etc all about? The primacy of EU law over member state law is already established.

That boat sailed decades ago.