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: 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Re: Extroverts hate it

"Remember that extroverts recover from stress and get their energy by interacting with people face to face."

They don't recover from it. They just offload it.

Re: I would hate to own commercial real estate

"the lack of contact with your co-wokers"

Also the lack of contact with micro-managers.

I've been retired for years now. So I miss all those things you mention. Grrrrreat"

Re: I would hate to own commercial real estate

In city centres income per square (unit of choice) for commercial purposes will be far greater than that generated by using the same building for residential purposes, particularly if there is a stipulation for "affordable" rent.

You're assuming there's still going to be a market for all that commercial square footage. The essence of this entire thread is that there might not be. In that case those who change tack quickly will lose less than those who continue to base there policies on the assumption that income per square for commercial purposes will be far greater than that generated by using the same building for residential purposes.

Re: I would hate to own commercial real estate

"why you wouldn't want to buy some Lettuce off Amazon"

I get it out of the garden. Yet again I have a glut of it...

Re: I would hate to own commercial real estate

"working from home will be considered by the tax office to be a benefit "

Working from home involves costs to be set against income for tax purposes.

Re: I would hate to own commercial real estate

"when the mass evictions and foreclosures start,"

If people are being evicted or foreclosed because they can't afford rent or payments because of COVID 19 where do the landlords and lenders think they're going to get new tenants and buyers once the limited amount of slack has been taken out of the market? From other people who also can't afford rent or payments because of COVID 19?

Those who are able to afford to rent or buy will be in the driving seat. They'll be able to drive property prices down.

Landlords and lenders would be far better off, assuming the tenants/borrowers have been OK before, coming to arrangements and being prepared to write off some lost income.

Re: I would hate to own commercial real estate

"If rent dropped to say mid 90s levels and they've bought or refinanced a building in the past 25 years they are still going to be in trouble."

Whatever they do some of them are going to be in trouble. Call it overshoot, call it a property bubble, whatever. It's taken this to start bringing home to people what should have been obvious for years now - the growth of big cities has exceeded rational limits. Their time has gone.

Re: I would hate to own commercial real estate

"Fewer people will want to live in the big cities if they're working from home and commute time is no longer a factor. You can live just about anywhere so long as you have decent broadband."

Not everyone will be working from home. Mixing residential and business would make it easier for those whose employers are dedicated to presenteeism to avoid commutes.

AFAICS the growth of cities has been in overshoot for a good while now. Simply getting people into work in big cities has been a major headache for years, not helped, at least in the UK for town planning policies which, for more or less the whole of the post-war period, have been dedicated to separating residential end working zones. Just to add insult to injury for those condemned to long commutes, they were then blamed for causing congestion.

It's time to rethink. Don't build more offices in cities. Look at the possibility of shared work spaces in the peripheral towns. Move as many of those who continue to work in cities and are prepared to live there into converted ex-offices. And accept that even then there will be redundant space there.

China trolls Trump with tech export rules changes that could imperil TikTok sale

Re: but he's a late comer.

Who says he didn't know how to run a casino?

It sounds more like the banks that lost out didn't know how to run banking.

Re: Why buy it?

"They only want the userbase"

So does Trump. Some of those users pissed him off. If they'd used Faceter to do that a few national security letters would have identified them.

Re: The whole thing is a mess

"gives an authoritarian government open access to a lot of data"

Remember in all this that a forced sale would give that access to a different authoritarian government. Don't discount that as a motive.

Funny, that: Handy script for wiping directories is capable of wreaking havoc beyond a miscreant's wildest dreams

Makes a change from the Unix version.

Re: My contribution ...

"most of /usr was toast.... everyone's user directories"

The halcyon days when /usr was for user directories instead of being filled up with stuff that should be in /bin, /lib and the like!