Posts by Doctor Syntax

US Republicans bash UK for tech tax plan

Re: International norms

"The UK already has full powers to cut down on tax evasion, and it's good to see that it is starting to do so."

This is where we need to discriminate between evasion and avoidance. Evasion is illegal so obviously the UK has full powers at its disposal. Avoidance, which is the case here, is the use of legal means to reduce tax. That means that the only powers available to a govt. not happy with the tax take are to huff and puff but let the avoider carry on, change rules on existing taxes, introduce new taxes or, in the case of multinationals, reduce tax rates so as to make the country a more attractive place in which taxable income can be realised. The last is only really workable for a small economy such as Ireland or Luxembourg but not, at present, the UK. A new tax seems to be the most workable of the others.

Re: International norms

"there's a massive tax evasion exercise going on"

Evasion or avoidance?

"The ongoing global dialogue on the digital economy through the OECD framework should not be pre-empted"

Is any particular country slowing down the OECD process by any chance? If the US thinks the OECD route is the best then surely they'll respond by ensuring it's speeded up, wouldn't they? Wouldn't they?

UK banking TITSUP*: This time it's Clydesdale and Yorkshire banks

Clydesdal...

..."working on a fix, which one Twitter user imagined thus:"

Disappointment. I was expecting something more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq_LX8HXg4c

Facebook sets Linux kernel tools free

Re: Hmm, usually when a company does that...

"let's give it to the community so they can maintain it for free"

But has Linus accepted into the mainstream kernel?

Who's been pottering about with kernel code?

"The software allows bytecode to run in response to specific events for the purpose of modifying and extending kernel behavior."

Just what everyone needs - send bytecodes to your somebody's kernel and get them executed with, presumably, kernel privileges.

Memo to Mark Sedwill: Here's how to reboot government IT

As the UK does not have a scheme of 'identity', its administrative law does not rely upon one, making the idea of an 'online identity verification' irrelevant as well as conceptually dubious

Combine this with an earlier sentence in the same paragraph in the evidence:

Setting aside debates over the nature of identity and its “proof”, the ability to assert it incontrovertibly “online” is in doubt.

Thank goodness somebody gets it.

"A lot of commentards seem to be missing one of the Professor's main points"

Missed it? I can't see much evidence that they even read it.

Re: IBM?

"But he might of been in IBM when they were good."

On the other hand he might have been in IBM when they were good.

Re: Hmmm....

"I'm a tad cynical that letting the academics at the problem is going to make it any better.

From the point of view of an outsider looking in, the three things you need for 'digital transformation'..."

I take it you didn't actually go to look at the evidence to the committee. It wasn't so much that they were doing "transformation" wrong, more that they were doing the wrong thing:

Many public administrative functions such as assessing the needs of benefits claimants are not amenable to online self-service. Consequently, policy implementations not suited to this approach (such as Universal Credit and CAP-D – see my evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee) became highly contentious and problematic as GDS insisted on using the wrong tools for the job. Public sector bodies are not entrepreneurial businesses — almost the opposite as they must follow their founding legislation impartially and consistently. The data they collect and use is determined by their legislative base. Government departments are structured around the policy and legislation assigned to their Secretary of State by the Prime Minister. None of these entities are changeable (“transformable”) at the whim of their managers.

Your idea of being able to "stand on toes" and "have the authority to make changes to the legacy" is exactly what they were trying to do. But the "legacy" includes legislation that only Parliament has the authority to decide and policy which is the PM & Cabinet's responsibility That, according to the Prof. is where they went wrong/

Re: Simple solution.

"Don't let any civil servant use anything more technologically advanced than tracing paper and crayon."

As far as the Civil Servants in GDS were concerned I though that was about the level of technology they were suited to. It looked as if that's what they'd used & then turned it over to a few kids to convert into HTML etc. The real Civil Servants were, I suspect, a good deal frustrated with all this and probably capable of doing a much better job. Make no mistake - this thing was driven by politicians for whom tracing paper and crayon might well have proved too challenging.

Check this out: Radisson Hotel Group 'fesses up to 'security incident'

Re: "Loyalty" Cards

The cashiers always give me dirty looks when the phone number associated with "my" rewards/loyalty account is the same one I just overheard the customer in front of me blurt out.

If you're going to do that sort of thing do it properly. Look up their customer services number before hand. That way their marketing can learn something useful about their customer service.

Look for Radisson to be recruiting a data protection officer soon. It looks as if they don't have one at present.

Apple's launch confirms one thing: It's determined to kill off the laptop for iPads

Re: Future ARM laptops

"one of the kids has an MBA"

I put that sort of thing down to bad parenting.

IBM sits draped over the bar at The Cloud or Bust saloon. In walks Red Hat

Re: Clouded vision

"For starters, RHEL is not free. It's pay-to-play."

Any payment is an advance payment for the services. If you don't want to download the free source and compile it yourself Centos, Scientific Linux & maybe others will do that FoC so it's not necessary to pay for it unless you want the services.

This decision "speaks to the overall rationale for this megadeal", said Indraneel Arampatta, analyst at Megabuyte.

And what does the overall rationale have to say in reply?

McAfee says cloud security not as bad as we feared… it's much worse

Re: So who's buying all these unsecured cloud instances?

"by the time you DO see the light"

....it's someone with a torch (flashlight) bringing you more work.

Official: IBM to gobble Red Hat for $34bn – yes, the enterprise Linux biz

Re: IBM is to FOSS as oil is to water

"Hence we got Apache, Postfix"

Apache & Postfix are from IBM?

Re: Goodbye Centos

"Centos is owned by RedHat now."

RedHat is The Upstream Vendor of Scintific Linux. What happens to them if IBM turn nasty?

Re: Less pessimistic here

"This is a hostile takeover"

Nobody's claiming that. A hostile takeover would be one opposed by the board. The hostility predicted is on the part of the employees and nobody ever took their position into consideration in a takeover.

If you're in the UK, warehousing, especially cold storage.

Re: innovation and work culture

"what is sure is that they will buy a lot of talent."

And what do IBM do with talent?

Re: At least is isnt oracle or M$

"The OS is from Linus and chums"

Some of those chums (can that number really be called chums) work for RH.

So now it becomes Blue Hat.

Will systemd become standard on mainframes as well?

Assange catgate hearing halted as Ecuador hunts around for someone who speaks Australian

"he's being very very stupid, shitting on the people who are keeping him out of the clutches of the US government"

Don't they realise what a privilege it is having him shit on them?

Re: Downvoted ..

"sharing a prison cell with someone who is friendly but not kind to chaps who treat women or cats badly"

His friend Sandy?

Re: Downvoted ..

"Two years ago he might have been a person on interest in the US, but under the new regime anything Obama did is wrong so Julian's going to be free to go."

I suspect it's the other way round. The previous administration would have had the wit to realise the biggest punishment they could inflict would have been to ignore him. I think the current administration lacks wit.

Re: How are they breaching his human rights?

"I think you meant appendage"

That would be the case for the rest of the male mammal population. Your're dealing with someone special here.

Sorry friends, I'm afraid I just can't quite afford the Bitcoin to stop that vid from leaking everywhere

Re: But Why?

"It can't be the same person... can it?"

It'll be the same person selling the list and text to 50+ hopefuls. Guess who's the real scammer and the real scammed.

Re: Apparently, I've won the Lottery

"Two Million Seven Hundred Great British Pounds Starlings"

I know starlings form big flocks but I'd no idea the problem had got so bad. Where do they all roost?

Re: Racist?

"Why can't straight white guys just be civil and realise not everyone got handed a golden ticket at birth?"

Not meaning to upset you but there are those who will automatically take anything said by a white male as being suspect. No, let me rephrase that: who will automatically assume anything thought by him will be suspect even if he harbours, let alone voices, no such thoughts. Such an approach is, of course, just as sexist and racist as that of which the victim is being accused and it's appropriate to point that out, along with the casual ageism which usually accompanies it

Your implied assumption that every straight white guy got handed a golden ticket at birth* is just an example of this. White male children from poor families in the UK today are reported to be the most disadvantaged in terms of educational outcomes. It's contrary to that applied assumption but it would be equally wrong to assume that each such child will inevitably go on to become an illiterate benefits dependent.

*Speaking personally I grew up for the first 14 years in a house which had no electricity, no mains drainage, initially no mains water, few books, not enough bedrooms for the three generations of extended family it housed and in which the cooking facilities were a double gas ring and a C19th coal-fired range replaced eventually by a second hand 1920s model. Could have been worse, many were. While the competitive Yorkshiremen is an amusing sketch there was an underlying reality.

Re: Damn

"offering to sell them £5 notes at a discount"

In reality I expect it was only the attached film crew that stopped him from having his collar felt. It could be a way of cashing in on forgeries.

Re: "muat have missed a random site in the early days."

"As lots of companies want a more private one. I need a public, private, personal, and then company independent and/or throw away ones. Looks like there is a hole in the market for a product there!"

It's a market niche but not a hole as there are several mail service providers who will provide domain and email hosting facilities. Just set up a series of addresses all forwarding to one inbox. Make some long term use case specific (bank, family and friends etc.) and a throw away one that runs for a few weeks and then gets torn down.

Re: Racist?

"this week's column"

I thought you'd decided your column couldn't possibly have appeared in the video.

The D in Systemd stands for 'Dammmmit!' A nasty DHCPv6 packet can pwn a vulnerable Linux box

Re: Old is good

"Theo de Raadt bollocking him every other week"

As infrequently as that?

Re: Meh

"debootstrap --arch amd64 --variant=minbase ascii /devuan http://deb.devuan.org/merged"

My idea of a clean reinstall is boot from optical drive/USB stick, reformat and install.

Re: how did it get to this?

"init scripts look a bit antiquated to me and they seem unforgiving to beginners"

Init scripts are shell scripts. Shell scripts are as old as Unix. If you think that makes them antiquated then maybe Unix-like systems are not for you. In practice any sub-system generally gets its own scripts installed with the rest of the S/W so if being unforgiving puts beginners off tinkering with them so much the better. If an experienced Unix user really needs to modify one of the system-provided scripts their existing shell knowledge will let them do exactly what's needed. In the extreme, if you need to develop a new init script then you can do so in the same way as you'd develop any other script - edit and test from the command line.

Re: Old is good

"refusal to accept patches to let it work on non-Linux Unix is just plain nasty."

Who would want to run it on non-Linux Unix systems? I can't imagine any of the BSDs wanting such a thing.

Re: Meh

"FYI, there may be pain on the Debian Jessie -> Devuan Jessie -> Devuan ASCII path."

Providing you've got /home and as many of /opt, /usr/local and /srv that you use on their own partitions why not go for a clean reinstall?

'BMW, Airbus and Siemens' get the Brexit spending shakes

Re: BMW and Airbus have more to worry about...

"Thers no brexit angle to that behaviour"

Read Len's post again. The Brexit angle makes it a damn sight easier for the Belgian company to buy and strip the British one than vice versa because it has a bigger home market and isn't in a self-damaged economy. There's no sign yet of the magic fairy dust that was going to make the post-Brexit British economy so powerful.

Re: BMW and Airbus have more to worry about...

"Furthermore, their domestic market has taken a hit as buyers have tightened the purse strings."

It's taken a bigger hit than that. Its domestic market has shrunk from 28 countries to one.

Re: Oblig

"Those factories in Malaysia don't build themselves."

Nor those in Singapore.

Re: "Keep calm and carry on"

For many people it was seen as an opportunity to stick two fingers up at "the establishment".

And after all, it wasn't binding so nothing bad could come of it.

Re: "Keep calm and carry on"

"JRM has said that the decision was taken before we even had a referendum, and is not because of Brexit."

It's always a good idea to consider what's actually said and what's not actually said. Cameron had already been forced into conceding a referendum after the 2015 election. Where does the decision fit in between that concession and the actual referendum?

Re: "Keep calm and carry on"

"I don't think the treaty has any provision for that"

OTOH is there any provision for not rescinding such a letter. Obviously there's no precedent either way.

"she'd probably need parliament to approve the rescinding."

It might be Parliament telling her to rescind it.

Californian chap sets his folks' home on fire by successfully taking out spiders with blowtorch

As regards the evolutionary psychology, I think the significant adaptation is to remove anything that looks as if it could be an ectoparasite. Spiders have the misfortune to look like bigger and nastier (more legs) versions of fleas and the like so the beneficial reaction goes into overdrive.

The best way to screw the competition? Do what they can't, in a fraction of the time

Re: Karma

both unethical and unprofessional

"we managed to throw out the effing cable"

That can't have been easy.

Re: "Ethernet is so much better"

"Nobody has yet mentioned Token Ring."

For Nick Kew: http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-05-02

"One of my regrets is not keeping hold of samples of various bits and pieces over the years"

There's a series on YouTube about renovating an Alto. One of the episodes is a visit from the Ethernet inventors who arrive with a box of various interface bits & bobs none of which can weigh less than a couple of smartphones.