Posts by Doctor Syntax

Free Windows 10 upgrade: Time is running out – should you do it?

Re: No, just don't

"Marketing people are the most goddamned arrogant, self important assholes you will ever meet."

Why do you think I included the word "intelligent"?

Re: The OP forgot one advantage

"Thumbs up for your enthusiasm, if nothing else."

Thumbs down for it.

Re: Ahem. Actual real user here....

"immediately let it upgrade to Win 10."

Immediately? As in, before reading the "privacy" policy? I hope this ordinary user never uses it for work where data security is an issue because her legal department will throw a fit if they read it.

Re: Mint 18 + WINE

"WPS Office, which has a better interface than Libre Office IMHO....Print quality ... not quite as good with WPS"

WPS. Subscription model? Does it have open standard file formats?

Re: No, just don't

"And they just don't understand why."

An intelligent marketing department, instead of sending out shills to sites like this, would have people read the comments and learn from them.

"For windows 7 support will eventually stop and you'll have to pay for an upgrade"

At that point, if not before, you can put a better OS on it. There are several out there beyond Microsoft-land.

"Boy does that sound like a trap."

No, it sounds like good news if it actually means the end of the rape attempts. The worrying thing is the possibility of a last minute decision to continue the free offer "on account of the demand" (i.e. not enough of it).

Re: Cue people complaining

"Your point is?"

As far as I can see it's "Ooh shiny".

Re: Cue people complaining

"If you work in IT you're just making yourself outdated."

If you work in IT you become very cynical about upgrades. You become very cynical indeed when people try such extreme tactics to force upgrades onto you systems. And, if you've got your wits about you, you read the T&Cs very, very carefully. Just go and read those. If you can't grasp the problem you should take up a job that doesn't require reading skills. Note that I avoided saying "if you can't see the problem" because the problem lies in what's omitted.

"What I love about working in IT is how everybody is in favour of progress"

And, of course, their ability to distinguish between progress and regress.

Re: and after upgrading, to get the FULL Windows 10 experience...

"What a tedious comment."

You said that before. Saying it again really is tedious. Hey Cortana is that you?

Re: Just say no.

"The exaggeration is pathetic."

I take it you're a stranger here. Those of us who are regulars remember Andy's account of the grief it's caused him.

Re: am i the only one resisting this

"Forceware. Absolutely brilliant term."

And it suggests the homophone "forswear". Nice.

Re: am i the only one resisting this

"While closing the deal the finance guy got REALLY pushy about how a lease was the best option for me."

You didn't say "Shut up or I walk."? Why not?

"use the advanced installer to opt out of the telemetry."

How do you know that you're opted out? How do you know a future update won't opt you back in without telling you? How do you substitute a more restricted set of T&Cs than the standard ones? Have you ever read those carefully? If you think you have, read again and try to find any restrictions on what they can take. I would not be prepared to put anything with those T&Cs on anything other than a burner test box.

Re: Windows8.2=10 is a fraud and a scam!

'They have never explained the term "supported lifetime of the device".'

As far as the UK is concerned there seems to be a likely collision with Trading Standards at some point and with the corresponding regulators in other countries with strong customer protection legislation. Maybe not in France if it gets banned completely due to their run-in with CNIL

Diablo conjures up hell of a DIMM: 128GB NAND pretend-RAM summoned

Re: What's the point?

"This will cost an 1) An Arm, 2) A leg, 3) A kidney and 4) the lives of your unborn children."

According to the article it's a good deal cheaper than the equivalent real RAM. That's the point.

IT boss 'set up fake companies to charge his employers $2.4m'

He set up a chain of accounts to try to avoid detection - and then paid it into his own account?

She wants it. She needs it. Shall I give it to her or keep doing it by myself?

Re: Obsessive

With only a little more paranoia you'd be a trainee DBA.

UK employers still reluctant to hire recent CompSci grads

Re: He said the F word

"Apparently once we leave the EU we wont be able to employ Engineering talent from europe in our car factories"

Probably because at least some the car factories here will be run down.

1. They belong to foreign companies who are here because it provides them with a manufacturing base in the EU. Note those words: in the EU.

2. When we leave the EU we won't be providing a manufacturing base in the EU.

3. If we're not providing a base in the EU the owners will make their new investments in countries in the EU because that's what they want.

4. That means that new products will be made in EU countries, not the non-EU UK.

5. When the product lines made in the UK reach end of life there'll be no work for the factories and they'll close. Or maybe made into museums so people can see that a car factory looked like back in the olden days when we had no control over our destiny.

Gartner's hype cycle turned upside down to assess Brexit

When Gartner tell you it won't be as bad as expected you should really start to worry.

Tight-wad Apple repair techs swapped our damaged iGear with used kit – lawsuit

'equivalent to new in performance and reliability.'

What part of "equivalent" didn't they understand?

Google tests its own quantum computer – both qubits of it

"'Quantum Software Engineer' is a job title"

I think I've known a few of those. They only make progress in very small jumps and when they've finished they don't know whether it works.

UK's digital strategy must account for Brexit, say MPs

Re: Did you just think about this?

"no one had a plan for the result of the referendum to be 'leave'."

I think several did.

A good many of the leavers took Cameron at his word, that he'd stay on, so their plan was to leave it to him. That one's obviously failed.

The rest are just waiting for their plan to kick in, namely, magic happens. Was that a unicorn I heard or just one of next door's bullocks?

"We recommend that the government sets out in its digital strategy the implications of withdrawal from the European Union, in reference to specific, current EU negotiations relating to the digital economy,"

Yes, now we've got greater control by deciding to exit we'll simply be able to decide what we want and then dictate that to the cowering remnant of the EU. It'll all work out perfectly.

HMRC research finds 'resistance' to proposals to shift contractor tax compliance burden

Re: How hard can it be?

"If you're commuting from e.g. Bath to London, the train season ticket will cost you £10,000 a year. A contractor can pay that out of pre-tax income, whereas an employee (even a short-term one) simply can't."

And if the headcount gets cut 3 months in it'll be the freelancer's head that's first in the queue - or maybe it'll just be enforced rate cuts.

The essential point about using freelancers is that it enables the engager to transfer such risks to them. It's the taking on of those risks (including those which might need professional liability issue) that differentiated between being in business and being an employee.

"If HMRC came up with one, single, simple and straightforward set of rules for everyone - no exceptions"

I have an alternative scheme. Everyone has the same tax rates but the stability of the job is viewed as a benefit in kind and taxed accordingly so if you have a nice steady job with long term prospects, say working in HMRC, then you pay accordingly. The honourable friends should be OK with that; after all they can be turfed out at the next election so their job security is much less than Sir Humphrey's. I always reckoned that if the PCG had started a campaign for such an arrangement IR35 would have been dropped PDQ.

@ Preston Munchensonton

I wonder what your experience of freelancing is. It's essential to have a contract for services, not a contract of service, AKA an employment contract.

It's a good while since I retired but after IR35 came in I made sure I had non employment terms. It helped that I had a number of direct contracts and very few through agencies. However there were many reports of contract problems. One situation was that the agency would issue business-like contracts to freelancers and employment-like contracts with the engagers and got a precedent set by taking a guy to tribunal who was so ill the hearing had to take place in his home so it didn't get properly defended.

The consequence is that the engager is able to load the risks onto the freelancer so that in the event of a downturn or a project being canned they can be dumped without any redundancy payments but are in danger of being taxed like a permie with all the permie protections.

The problem is HR drones who don't understand the difference and CBA to find out. If they had the responsibility for ensuring proper B2B terms they'd simply get a different set of boilerplate clauses and that would be the end of the matter.

"public sector employers"

The term "employer" is prejudicial here. The better term in "engager". If a freelancer contract is fit for purpose then the engager should not be an employer. Naughty HMRC.

If the burden were shifted to them engagers - and agencies - would have a simple solution: ensure that all contracts were unambiguously contracts for services. It's what they've been told for years but they couldn't be arsed to sort themselves out.

Bosses at UK infosec biz Quadsys confess to hacking rival reseller

That's a great thing to have on your CV when customers are looking for a trustworthy security vendor.

Microsoft delays Azure updates so you can catch up with the cloud

Re: Funny because Azure is the "legacy cloud"...

Legacy IT is what keeps the business running that brings in the money that pays (inter alia) for new developments. Experienced sysadmins know this. Inexperienced ones will discover it and become experienced. (Who cares about what the hipsters know?) Disrupting the smooth operation of that legacy is very expensive.

Historically MS have been simply pushing the burden onto in-house admins; the disruption simply hasn't been on their radar. Now they're discovering for themselves that it's not just a matter of installing new shiny every couple of years or so.

Re: Analogy

"will you be kicked out onto the streets, along with all your possessions?"

Or will you be kicked out without them?

Nitwit has fit over twit hit: Troll takes timeless termination terribly

'His disproportionate influence died the moment "Account suspended" appeared.'

Not entirely. It seems to have got him a 2-page article on el Reg. Perhaps the better option would have been to have ignored the whole incident.

TalkTalk: 9,000 broadband customers did the walk walk last quarter

Re: Waiting for a FTTP availability @ home and end of TT contract

"BT Openreach must get their fingers out and roll-out FTTP a lot faster to replace half-arsed FTTC already!"

Are you prepared to pay for them to dig up the road and whatever else lies between you and the nearest point where they can connect to existing fibre maybe even lay more fibre from the exchange if necessary? If not, who do you think should pay for that? And who should forego their FTTC installations whilst you've commandeered a gang of diggers to do that?

Re: Chuggers

"He seemed a bit surprised when I said that."

Probably the only ones they can successfully recruit have no idea to start with and then get put through an induction that tells them how wonderful the company is. Take it as an opportunity to explain at considerable length, and clearly audible to passers by just how dreadful the company really is. Ensure that the name TalkTalk is mentioned at sufficiently regular intervals so the passers by are in no doubt who you're talking about.

Re: Faulty Router, Compulsory New Contract

I think that says as much about your FiL as about TalkTalk. If that had happened to me (assuming I'd been a TT customer) it would have accelerated the walk walk.

BT internet outage was our fault, says Equinix

Re: Feeling the Heat

"I think its unfair that TalkTalk are trying to blame them for this"

Issuing a statement blaming someone else needs to be a core competence there.

Are they called uninterruptible because you shouldn't interrupt them and they go wrong if you do?

Microsoft ordered to fix 'excessively intrusive, insecure' Windows 10

Cut to the chase - how many % of global turnover can they fine them?

Question: What's missing in Microsoft's data science professional degree?

Re: ACID

"Nobody cares about the client/salesperson/sales order/HR table referential integrity that RDMS obsess about."

In order to play about with your large scale data sets you need a working business to pay the bills. A business that sells goods and services. If there isn't someone to obsess about ACID qualities in the database* that supports that business then your big data is going to get its budget yanked from under it and will, in any case, be pointless.

*The database may well be providing the data sets in the first place.

UK.gov digi peeps hunt open source chief

Re: Cheers to the Lawyer from Lima

Upvote and thanks for the link. An excellent read.

Re: Common standards

"But who hasn't rocked up at a new job, taken one look at the legacy code, and decided to burn the whole lot and start again?"

Sometimes just running it through the C pre-processor pass was enough. Some people had strange ideas about using macros.

Re: Hmm....

"What could go wrong running HMRC, DWP, DVLA on shareware?"

A lot. Which article were you commenting on? This one was about open source.

Web meltdown: BT feels heat from angry punters

"Wasn't TCP/IP designed to avoid problems in the event of nuclear war?"

That was my reaction as well. I suppose design is one thing, implementation is something altogether different. You need those redundant routes and routers and they all cost money.

Re: Peering Problems

"At the moment, BT would just appeal to the EU and it would be overthrown as there's a similar problem in Germany with Deutsche Telecom."

And if OR were to be split off how long do you think it would be before it was bought by Deutsche Telecom, or Telefonica - or maybe SoftBank?

US govt is in, EFF told to take a hike in post-Safe Harbor wrangling over privacy and EULAs

Hi ho, hi ho...

... It's off to [E] Court [J] we go.

So if he comes down on the side of Schrems that's OK and if not he's just handed out grounds for an appeal. Splendid!

ASUS first Asian PC maker to warn of price hikes... in 2.5 months

Re: The Brexiteers were

"Stop crying."

Say what you will, I think there'll be a market for stickers saying "Don't blame me, I voted REMAIN" in a few months time.

IoT baby monitor style hacks still a threat

Re: Still?

"Pity that some agency like this can't take action against the suppliers/manufacturers."

Some agency could if they wanted to. Underwriters' Laboratories could include it in their testing.

Maybe some other Agency doesn't want them to.

Drone bloke cuffed after gizmo stops firemen tackling forest inferno

Re: Good

"if they're too stupid to consider how their actions might harm others"...they're probably stupid enough to try it themselves. You can't beat stupid.

UK's climate change dept abolished, but 'smart meters and all our policies strong as ever'

"he UK hasd a significant influence on creating the EU legislation in the first place"

But we'll still have to follow it if we want to retain the same trading rights with the EU. But it's all about control, isn't it?