Posts by Doctor Syntax 42665 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I see your "Ahem" and raise you a "Kids today".
You are since my day (72-86). The possibility that things had changed and I CBA following them is why I put in that disclaimer.
I can assure you it was the case back then. Not a single contribution taken during that period, just a lowered salary to account for the lack of contributions being taken.
"By January, it was clear the service was seriously failing"
The original reports indicated that it was failing at go-live. If Capita manglement believed it would work the only explanation is a reality distortion field greater than that in Microsoft. Hernandez still seems to be affected by it - or perhaps he's hoping it extends to the board and shareholder.
Let me explain something very basic about civil service pensions. There is no pot. It's essentially a Ponzi scheme*. Things may have changed since my day but there wasn't even a contribution as in normal pension schemes. It was effectively a salary sacrifice scheme which meant that the salary, and hence the final salary, and hence the pension based on the final salary was less than if it had been a regular contributory scheme. But I digress. There is no pot. Like any Ponzi scheme pensions are paid out of current income, in this case tax.
As there's no pension pot could you explain how it could have been stolen?
For completeness, everyone else's retirement pension operates in the same way. National Insurance doesn't build you a pension pot, it's just a form of taxation. HM Treasury has a dread of taxation being ring-fenced in this way. So much so that they coined a word for it, hypothecation. A hypothecated tax sounds so alarming nobody who didn't actually know what it means would want it. Just as NI payments don't go directly and accountably to running pensions, NHS etc because that would be hypothecated, so Vehicle Excise Duty doesn't go to building and maintaining roads.
As a matter of interest could you quote the law against utter incompetence under which they could be charged and which of which conviction would attract a hefty fine?
You might think such details matter. They do. They're you're protection against also being fined for something such as utter incompetence about understanding how the law works.
"One file type, one file handler: the word processor, the spreadsheet editor, the email client. So you end up with a very slick UI that can only do a limited number of tasks"
You have, of course, just described the sort of computer usage which is just about universal. The rest of us are just a fringe market.
"so why would you buy a Lisa?"
Because it was so clearly the future. And had the price been affordable it would have been. I doubt there were many who read the original write-up in Byte who didn't think "I want one of those." until they saw the price.
If it had been made affordable for buyers the correspondingly greater sales must surely have made it affordable for Apple as well. However I think the Mac was Job's blessed project in which case it didn't stand a chance of being allowed to compete.
It's a very odd bit of wording. What does "concerned" mean? At first sight it might mean that such a member of staff sent it but given that it was for analytic purposes perhaps it meant that it was the staff member's work that was being analysed in which case if they were identifiable from the contents then they're also one of the victims.
AIUI (item in another place) the withheld payments are the total payments due until they can meet the KPIs so currently they're working for nothing. As to reputation, this seems to be something really new. They're hitting the people who make the decisions, at least those who are about to retire, and friends and colleagues who have retired.
The scale must be a bit less but the complexity of the NICSP must be quite similar as there'll be people who worked under one or more of: the NI service before direct rule, under direct rule when we were all under the NI Office (although there were still departments) and the current NI government arrangement. Perhaps they could lend some advice.
I think SoP is don't bother looking, there will be and they can claim innocence if they haven't looked. This time it's going to cost them, withheld payments now but a toxic reputation in the Civil Service when civil servants will be making reconsolidations about future contracts across the whole of HMG.
"This isn't about stepping back from the cloud; it's about recognizing that cloud is now part of our critical infrastructure and designing, governing, and investing accordingly."
Given that the first part of the article is essentially saying that https://xkcd.com/2347/ could be redrawn about cloud structure being propped up be some small rack unit somewhere in an obscure DC how does one design without stepping back?
"new Sovereignty Check, co-developed with the Technical University of Munich, saying that digital sovereignty is now measurable. "
I wonder if they've taken into account all the W11 sites visited monitoring that the latest Scattered Spider case has revealed. It might give added impetus to replacing PC OSes and, for good measure, avoiding Agent P's contributions.
It appears to be systemd that is responsible for putting machine-id in /etc so my Devuan laptop doesn't have that. A quick check in /var/lib/dbus revealed that machine-d there was created at boot time. There was also a machine-id with a random-looking suffix on the file name and different contents from 2022, possibly dating from the current version OS install*. Deleting that didn't cause the sky to fall in. I then made a copy of machine-id and rebooted. The new version differed from the copy but not as completely as one might expect for a random string of that length, there was a matching sequence of 5 characters close to the end.
So it looks as if there's a semi-permanent machine-id that can be safely deleted and another than can be replaced at boot time but the contents of the latter do not appear to be completely random.
* Comparison with a more recently updated Devuan laptop suggests this is the case.
