Posts by Doctor Syntax

SMEs to UK.gov: We need vouchers for tech and training ahead of final Brexit curtain falling

Re: Hmm

I don't think there's any evidence that all those campaigning for leave* had any idea what to do after the vote. Cameron was going to stay on and run it. Where was the essential planning before the vote? Where were the impact assessments? Where was the cost/benefit analysis?

Vote Leave were caught in the headlights by winning and then being left to deal with the reality of it. They still are. That's why they're "dicking around" in your words. It's all they've ever done. Their one hope is that, arguing form a position of extreme weakness, they can persuade the EU to give them a safety net.

* Those that actually believed they could win which I'm not convinced with all of them.

Re: More than vouchers needed here

"unelected bureaucrats like Cummings and Tony Abbott"

Unfair to bureaucrats. Bureaucrats have competence in doing things according to procedures. The procedures might be badly designed and the results in appropriate but they're predictable and competently followed.

Re: More than vouchers needed here

"proposed legislation to override parts of the withdrawal agreement"

Probably Cummings told his puppet to be more disruptive. Nothing like a bit of disruption for making Johnny Foreigner cave in.

Classy move: C++ 20 wins final approval in ISO technical ballot, formal publication expected by end of year

Re: Too large and complex

There a huge body of software written in C and its derivatives (including Java). How do Smalltalk and Eiffel compare?

China proposes ‘Global Initiative on Data Security’ forbidding stuff it and Huawei are accused of doing already

The more effective option would have been to offer to share whatever information Huawei, Tik Tok etc have with the US providing the entity is is torn up. I'd guess a quick acceptance which should tell anyone in doubt about US motives all they need to know.

"China did not assign the enunciation of this idea to a lowly functionary"

There's nothing to stop anyone in this position becoming a lowly functionary at very short notice. That isn't unique to China. Just ask Philip Hammond or any of the others effectively thrown out of the party by BoJo. Or any of those exiting the revolving door ot the Trump administration.

UK Home Office seeks suppliers: £25m up for grabs to build database to keep track of crimelords' ill-gotten gains

"It is now, however, reaching the end of its useful life as it is not conducive to modern expectations of electronic data capture and subsequent analytical filtering and manipulation.”

Translation: It's outgrown Excel.

Digital pregnancy testing sticks turn out to have very analogue internals when it comes to getting results

Re: Way back in the mists of time <wavy lines> ...

"The automated system is reproducible, reliable and has greater throughput than a human being."

And doesn't require a steady supply of female toads. (Yes, that was the basis of testing decades ago.)

Re: Surprised?

"surely it’s not beyond the abilities of the manufactures to make the little blue line a bit bolder?"

One of the first things you have to learn in biological science is accommodating to natural variability. There won't be some fixed number of micro-moles per litre to be relied on. I've no doubt the test strip manufacturers already have an optimal product.

Re: "It's not yours"

"It's twins!!"

And one of them's yours.

Re: Low tech is too old tech

"Start blaming the people who cannot consider making people in moderation."

In quite a few advanced" countries, i.e. those with advanced consumer economies, reproduction is running below replacement level.

Microcontroller, interfaced to display. You just know somebody's going to start hacking these to re-purpose them into some completely different gadget.

The Honor MagicBook Pro looks nice, runs like a dream, and isn't too expensive either. What more could you want?

Re: And the software?

Just install Linux.

US ponders tech export ban on SMIC, China's biggest chipmaker

Re: SMIC might be a "law abiding citizen"....

"if international creditors take fright."

Or one of them decides enough is enough and its time to start handing out punishment.

Brexit border-line issues: Would you want to still be 'testing' software designed to stop Kent becoming a massive lorry park come 31 December?

Re: It will never happen...

abject proof?

Re: So little time and so many disasters

"You guys are royally screwed."

Now tell us something we didn't know!

Re: If

"The importance of shipping and trade to the economy of the UK, an island nation, has resulted in the establishment of a large number of ports around the coast, which are very diverse in terms of size and type of cargo handled."

A hair's breadth from "world beating". Hubris.

Re: It's rude to keep the drugs to your self, pass the duchy 'pon the left hand side..

"I don't see how you could be this bad at work and retain one's job"

Fixed 5 year contract and sole skill being ability to bluff jib interviews.

Re: It's rude to keep the drugs to your self, pass the duchy 'pon the left hand side..

"A waterfall development process, with an immovable deliverable date"

And, as yet, no statement of requirements.

Re: I am sure Boris will be on holiday when the $h1T hits the fan

Not everything. Sensible decision making comes to mind as one exception.

Re: Testing? Are you having a larf?

"the trucks would be booked with the ferry company with no ferries"

If you think about it you'll realise they had a good idea - get another port ready to handle traffic.

No ferries? No problem. How many big companies own the premises they operate from? How many companies own their company car fleets? They lease them. Same with ferries.

Re: How hard is it really?

"Seller cried even more when I requested that they replace non-functioning electronics."

Probably spammed you to leave feedback.

"It might be November before we see a public beta test.”

Or, as gov.uk seem to think of beta, before we see it in production.

Re: How hard is it really?

"DHL, UPS, Parcel Force, (FFS even) Amazon, can happily send, track and deliver across borders and continents (so taxes, tariffs, etc.) with relatively little friction."

So they can. The problem starts when you have to work out where they delivered it.

Your truckload of toilet paper might be no closer than the Goodwin Sands. Check the photo the drive took to prove it.

Re: Brexvid-19

Time to stockpile tar and feathers. There'll be a need for them on Jan 1st.

Re: I am sure Boris will be on holiday when the $h1T hits the fan

"Dido Harding will come riding her white charger to the rescue"

The lorries can all be parked up in a car park that doubles up as virus testing centre about 150 miles from Dover.

Re: I am sure Boris will be on holiday when the $h1T hits the fan

Very likely but Perugia still counts as across the channel - and in the EU.

Re: Stockpile your popcorn

Coronavirus has dealt them a get out of jail card. Whatever goes wrong can be blamed on that, not Brexit.

Astronomers get more than they bargained for, as Mars probe InSight's instruments detects solar eclipses

NASA

Now & Always Something Amazing.

Re: Provided this is repeatable...

"it's a normal limit for calibrators in ultra quiet environments"

Presumably Mars is a fairly quiet environment. No buses going past. No big electric motors starting up. No telephones. Nice.

Surprise! Voting app maker roasted by computer boffins for poor security now begs US courts to limit flaw finding

"I get that you're trying to be conciliatory"

Moi?

I can't see anything wrong with Voatz position - providing, of course, that they're* then on the hook for consequences, civil and/or criminal, if the product gets hacked in ways that the unauthorised testing could have brought to their attention.

* They including the management in person as well as the company.

Salon told to change ad looking for 'happy' stylist because it 'discriminated against unhappy people'

Re: "developers, developers developers"?

I can think of times where stoic was quite a useful attribute in any aspect of IT.

Cummings has been rather out of the limelight since he discovered it didn't show him up too well* in Barnard Castle. I don't know whether he decided to keep out of sight or whether he was told.

* Not as well as he'd have liked. Only too well from another point of view of course.

Re: They have a point.

Successfully suing someone would make you happy.

Re: Me and everyone else

It's not personal. QA have a them and us attitude to everyone.

What is it with DWP and their precursors? My direct experience of them is limited but does extent back more than 50 years and is consistent with stories such as this. Is it simply self-perpetuating ineptness - the inept rising up a management structure of their peers and recruiting more like themselves? Or is the the Civil Service filtering recruits, the flyers going to Treasury and FCO whilst those who didn't even make HO end up in DWP?

Old and busted: Targeting servers and web bugs. New hotness: Pwning devs with targeted poisoned stacks

"This was not a hack of the Twitter production system: this was a hack of Twitter employees using classic social engineering tricks,"

The employees exploited had access to the production system. In my book that counts as a hack on the production system.

Anyone else noticed that the top countries for broadband speeds are well-known tax havens? No? Just us then?

The community partnership should have researched things a bit better.

Re: Measuring what's easy to measure, not what's significant

"speedtest.net likes to have a testing server inside the ISP as close as possible to the customer."

ISPs like to have a speedtest.net testing server inside as close as possible to prospective punters.

Re: US broadband is still better than the UK ersatz

Ah yes, London == entire UK.

Google declares Maps COVID-19-ready after retraining it on pandemic traffic – or the lack of it in some areas

Add 14 days for journeys from various countries to England and the various devolved countries of the UK.

When low-balled projects go bad: Scottish pensions agency starts £10m procurement to buy the system Capita could not

"work" is a dubious concept if data that should be in parameters are hard-coded.

I have been in a similar position with a client. They were offering a service which processed data received via XML. I could see that one coming. The XML documents were going to be sufficiently large due to large numbers of work orders in each that they would bust the machine's memory if they were processed as a whole. A SAX parse would process the document an order at a time and throw it into the rest of the system with no problems but does need to have the element names hard-coded.

The solution was to run the incoming data through XSLT (Saxon can handle the file sizes to do that) and rewrite it into a dedicated namespace which is what the SAX parser used.

Next customer with a similar job but their own XML schema - no problem, just change the stylesheet. Give or take some minor tweaks (back-compatible) the core could remain common to multiple contracts.

As I've said before, I've worked on a couple as sub-contractor to sub-contractor and they turned out OK. I've retired since then so obviously can't comment on how things have turned out after that.

Not Invented Here.

They're probably taking a leaf out of the Downing Street playbook. It's got to be world beating. If it's world beating it can't be the same as the rest of the world is using so have to cobble up something new. Stir some overconfidence in there and they believe their own hype. The rest of us can see exactly where that's going.

Re: The problem with public tenders...

I like the idea but failure rate could be a bit tricky. Functions A, B & C were delivered but not D & E. Function G wasn't in the original but the client added it later and insisted that F was delayed to make way for it. All functions of different complexity and value. What's the failure rate?

But largely just a subset of tax legislation.

With a million unwanted .uk domains expiring this week, Nominet again sends punters pushy emails to pay up

Re: Dear Nominet...

"Failing that, merge all the co,me&org .uk domain registries with the TLD, so that a single purchase buys&renews access to the four UK domains."

Sounds like a good move for the cybersquatting business. I have a geographically-based .org.uk address registered with no fuss. I have no interest at all in any of the others. The .co.uk is being squatted by someone who probably registered as many of the unclaimed contents as possible from a gazetteer and has been for some time. Anyone who wants that is going to have to come up with whatever he wants to charge.

COVID-19 tracing without an app? There's an iOS and Android update for that

Re: Wifi sniffing

"a mask can reduce the quantity of virus-laden crud you breathe out and reduce the amount of virus-laden crud you breathe in"

The former more than the latter I'd expect. By the time they comes to be breathed in the droplets will have shrunk by evaporation.

I'm old enough to remember that the term used to be "filterable viruses", i.e. (not very well characterised) infective agents that could pass through filters.

The article confuses "England" with "the UK".

That's just HMG policy and has been since the BoJo/Rees-Mog tendency took over the Tory party.