Posts by Doctor Syntax

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'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.

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

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

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.

Re: Forex, speed of connection etc

Isn't it latency at least as much as bit-rate that matters in high speed trading?

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.

Just another of those "It seemed like a good idea at the time" marketing initiatives.

How about forwarding them to [e-mail]

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.

Re: that's a pretty difficult thing to achieve

I think you may have lost track of the reason for this discussion.

"The UK’s app is still being tested"

The costs of NIH.

Re: Future of this

"the right opportunity to rethink"

The first steps to that would need to be both big tech and govts taking steps to gain trust. As they've all shown themselves to be untrustworthy that's a pretty difficult thing to achieve.

There’s no new normal coming for PC sales, just the boring old normal of a long, slow decline

Re: Why would you buy a PC when you can buy a Mac?

Is a Mac impersonal or is it not a computer?

Five Eyes nations start new club for competition regulators and paint target on digital giants

Re: I await with baited cynicism...

Don't confuse intent with success.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... a pair of black holes coalesced resulting in largest gravitational wave we've seen

Re: Gravitational waves?

"What's that in linguine ?"

The chef couldn't find it so we don't really know.

Intel, Apple, Cisco, Google sue US Patent Office – Tech police, open up!

Re: Long term

OTOH they have a massive incentive to rubber stamp them because of the fees.

The way to reverse this would be to make them liable for all the challengers' costs on successful challenges.

There might even be an argument for making them liable for the holder of the failed patent on the grounds that is the patent had been refused initially they wouldn't have made the failed attempt to assert it. However covering the costs of trolls ought not to be supported by public policy - best just to return their fees.

ByteDance says it will abide by China's new export laws

“personalized information push service technology based on data analysis"

Based on the sort of "your might be interested in" garbage the usual web souks* push at me I'd not expect the absence of this to make it any less valuable.

Perhaps this "valuable" technology could just be licensed. The licensing terms and audits could be based on those used by the successful purchaser for their own business software.

* to use standard el Reg terminology

Facebook rejects Australia's pay-for-news plan, proposes its own idea: How about no more articles at all, sunshine?

Re: Klaatu Barata Nikto!

"a newspaper coming out that is just a copy of the previous days competitor newspaper"

Not quite that but newspapers did make a habit of digging out odd stories from other papers. As the late Patrick Cambpell put it, "re-rehensilising some Bosnian peasants".

Dell: 60% of our people won't be going back into an office regularly after COVID-19

Re: Remember Marissa Meier

She ran a really successful business or something didn't she? I remember now. It was something.

Re: So the next logical step is...

face-to-face meetings may be the "gold standard" of interaction

My recollection of face-to-face meetings to start projects would be to look around, spot the two or three people you'll end up working with to deliver the project (i.e. those you've worked with successfully before), those who will get in the way, those will sit there doing neither and wondering about the new faces. The ones you'll work with you can work with by any means of communication. The oxygen-consuming obstructions will operate mostly through other meetings. The inert ones will get their time wasted by the previous group assuming they do stuff when they're not in meetings. The unknowns are only of value if they turn out to belong in the first group.

Gold standard? You can keep it.

Re: So the next logical step is...

"Many more people lose jobs. (Aside: do office workers realize how many people even a smallish restaurant employs?)"

I live in the country. I don't need to go into a city to help give employment to workers in smallish restaurants. I was about to say I can't remember the last time I went into a city other than to ask awkward questions at a Building Soc AGM - then I remembered. Summer of 2018 we took the grandkids to the Titanic exhibition in Belfast; even that's not really in the city centre. Before that? Must be years.

Re: salaries that vary considerably depending on which country you work in;

The reason cost of living isn't the same everywhere is because the notion of cramming thousands on office jobs into the same small area raises the cost of living for all those who work there. Commuting costs and the cost of housing because everyone wants to live as close as possible to cut down commuting time are the main drivers. Take out that distorting factor and cost of living can even out.