Posts by Doctor Syntax

Wet, wild Mars stripped off by hot young star, left barren and red faced

"President Donald Trump signed a bill last Tuesday, pledging $19.5bn in NASA funding covering the budget for 2018 and including human exploration of Mars as a priority."

Someone told him about the possibilities of a golfing resort?

Confidence in £70m customs system has 'collapsed', warns Treasury Committee

On 25 November, 2016, the project was rated "Green", meaning it was "successful" and "on time". But by 31 January, it was rated "Amber/red", meaning it faces "major risks" and "urgent action".

Could that have anything to do with the IR35 changes?

New plastic banknote plans now upsetting environmental campaigners

"reminds me of a system I once worked on."

In my case it was reporting for an ice-cream etc. manufacturing plant. The one that got me was the item "Tiramisu tanks". They made tiramisu in tanks?

Going on site required white coat and industrial steel-toecapped shoes. The white coat was no problem for an ex-scientist but they might have objected if they'd known where it had been previously. The shoes had to be bought but came in useful for years as gardening shoes but were universally referred to as the ice-cream factory shoes.

"But you can counter simply asking if they want to go back to wool or linen undergarments, T-shirts, and so on."

But your dedicated vegan environmentalist is probably entirely clad in artisan-woven nettle fibre.

The only solution...

...tallow from a cow that died of natural causes.

Re: best solution!

"Keeping with linen implies cotton"

It implies linen. Different plant, different part of plant, different biochemistry.

"How will other people complain if other oils were chosen instead?"

Rape seed oil (canola across the pond) would probably find objectors to complain about about Monsanto, GM & pesticides.

"the equivalent of 300 football fields of rainforest per hour is cleared for the planting of palm trees"

Plant 300 actual football fields for palm trees (a much better use for them), use such oil as is needed for the notes and sell the rest. It might help pay off HMRC's bill for substituting Crapita for freelancers.

BOFH: The Boss, the floppy and the work 'experience'

After receiving a disclosure like that I suppose James is now rolled in carpet under a layer of quicklime.

Forget robot overlords, humankind will get finished off by IoT

Pavement cyclists are easily dealt with. An umbrella whose tip accidentally finds its way into the spokes of the front wheel. For good measure you can abuse the bloodied cyclist lying on the pavement for damaging your brolly.

Don't fall for the AI hype: Here are the ingredients you need to build an actual useful thing

You forgot one of the most essential elements. A hip brand name.

Facebook, Google, etc: Yeah, yeah, we'll work on the nasty stuff about bombs – but we ain't doing no backdoors

"Censoring these group's network is not actually hard if you know their process."

That's legislator's thinking.

Do you want to know what really happens if you do that? If so, read the following very carefully.

They will change their processes.

WONTFIX: No patch for Windows Server 2003 IIS critical bug – Microsoft

"many really outdated software are left in operation, sometimes because you have no choice (i.e some specific machinery)"

True, but if you're also giving it an internet connection you're doing it wrong.

IT contractors behind IR35 calculator to leave HMRC... because of IR35

"Unions and Employment Equivalency"

Admittedly my experience of this is from 30 years ago but there were separate groups of general service, scientific and engineering. There were differentials between them. When I first joined PTG (engineering) were at the bottom of the heap. They then got an increase because of difficulties of recruitment which left scientific grades at the bottom.

I don't know how IT fitted into that group - it might be that S/W are in general service and PTG is restricted to chaps with screwdrivers and soldering irons. But in principle, unless things have changed radically, there would be no problem with a set of scales to make recruiting IT on realistic salaries.

The real problem would be the thought that they might get near, let alone above, general service grades who, as far as I could see, were interchangeable as they were all equally unqualified for any work they might be given.

Re: Travel expenses

"What will actually happen is those contractors will have to move closer to London"

Today's contract might be in London, in three months time the next contract might be in Glasgow. Yet another misconception of how contracting actually works. Meanwhile if BigCo has an employee based in York and wants them to spend 3 months working on a London contract will there be any ban on paying that employee's expenses? The whole issue is down to a failure to see the need for a level playing field for small business vs big business.

Re: easy pickings

"b) I don't have enough cash to lawyer up and take them to court"

Aren't the PCG or whatever it calls itself these days taking on defence cases or aren't you a member?

Re: ???

"how can it take 250 people to write a simple interview based webapp that runs through some rules and spits out an 'employed' or 'self-employed' answer?"

FTFY

Europe to push new laws to access encrypted apps data

Maybe bringing https://www.searchinternethistory.com/ to politicians' notice might concentrate their minds a little (or concentrate their little minds).

I look forward to Věra Jourová leading by example and doing a Clarkson. She wants to expose the EU population to having all their online security compromised. She should compromise her own to show how safe it is by telling us her banking, email and any other online credentials she has.

"Except the comment was on Amber Rudd - who is the Home Secretary. "

Which comment? Yours seems to have been the first in the thread to mention her. The article primarily deals with a speech by EU Justice Commissioner Věra Jourová.

Samizdat no more: Old Unix source code opened for study

"Comp Sci departments and others around the world can work with a newer Unix than 6.0"

They've been able to do that for a long time. V 7 code was open-sourced years ago.

Don't believe the hype: UK's £455m Government Digital Service lacks a clear role – fresh audit

However, and as a major plus for all of us techies, I understand that there's still plenty of money to be made from the use of sealing wax, string, and various other adhesive substances, in an attempt to try to cross-reference the various population-scale databases that exist within the UK.

FTFY

IBM: Those 2 redundancy schemes? We need to 'improve margins' and right quick

"No one was ever fired for buying IBM"

I'm sure fund managers can be.

Home Office accused of blocking UK public's scrutiny of Snoopers' Charter

Re: Google Maps/Streetview - Westminister Bridge.

"They are getting invasive now, aren't they."

Give them an inch and they take a mile.

"you've got to wonder whether or not Amber Fudd actually *knows* what's in that document, much less understands it."

She doesn't need to. Her Perm Sec will have assured her that they're fine; "these are codes of practice that Harrods would sell you".

Re: It’s Too Late

"A neighbour came over to me as I was gardening – and I explained I was retired – they then asked if I was going to become a trader."

Maybe your laptop was latching onto his wifi.

ICO fines Flybe, Honda for breaking data rules. They were, um, trying to comply with GDPR

"Block them - how?"

1. Get your own domain, or maybe an email provider who can provide you with your own subdomain.

2. Set up a separate alias/address for each firm you have to do business with such as your bank.

3. Every few weeks set up a new alias/address for one-off contacts and tear down the old one.

4. Each of these addresses gets directed to a single mailbox you you don't have to check all of them.

5. If any of these addresses leak you can tell which one. Be ruthless about tearing down the address because it isn't going to affect the rest of your email. If the correspondent gets in touch by some other means to complain make it an educational opportunity. Or change supplier.

6. It also helps to spot the fakes. If banking phishing mail doesn't come addressed to your banking email address it's immediately obvious even if they've hit the right bank name by accident.

This deals with most situations. There are exceptions. Amazon, for instance, seem to insist that communications from market place vendors go through themselves whilst others don't have that much wit. Paypal is one such. They pass the purchaser's email address to the vendor. Most don't spam but one or two do. What makes that particular situation doubly bad is that the email address is also the logon ID; that's right Paypal hand half the customer's login credentials to every vendor they buy from. Maybe there's an el Reg article in that?

It just goes to show that some marketing muppets are unable to manage the digital equivalent of keeping their dicks in their trousers.

Ex-broadband biz 186k hit by major outage

"bittitan can make it a shit load easier"

But not when the service you're moving from is down.

Oracle doing due diligence on Accenture. Yep, you read that right

Oh bugger!

My main pension's outsourced to Accenture.

Your internet history on sale to highest bidder: US Congress votes to shred ISP privacy rules

On sale to the highest bidder?

You have a very limited view of the venality of the average corporation.

On sale to al of them!

Oxymoron alert.

"Won't make this development weaken Privacy Shield even further?"

Further weakening Privacy Shield?

Nuns left in limbo after phone line transfer hell

It sounds like the usual call centre operation. Something fails so they repeat. With the same result. And it will keep on failing until someone escalates the problem. It really is in the call centre's own interests to have an escalation procedure of its own. If the customer ends up escalating it to the regulator it can get expensive; kudos to the nuns for doing that.

Manufacturers reject ‘no deal’ Brexit approach

Re: @ Hans 1

"Falling back to no special deal and going back to WTO rules will still be fine for the country and free us up."

The pixie dust view.

"My fear is a special deal where we lose what has been won, our exit from the political union the EU."

Reality seeping through. At some point you're going to cotton on to the real killer. That will happen and we won't be part of the decision-making process. The control that could be won back was an illusion.

Re: Welcome to Trump.UK

"CONTROL"

So, your shift key does work some of the time.

Re: The CTA has to end

"This would seem to be much the same as the control system at the height of the troubles."

I doubt it.

In any case the border always had a fuzziness. In some cases it was straddled by farms and, IIRC, even individual buildings.

Re: "no deal better than bad deal"

"Of course, if they don't think a good deal is achievable, they could save themselves time and resign now."

Given what they've convinced themselves of already I don't see how this could possibly apply.

Re: Fake news and hyperbole and scaremongering

To which side were you addressing that remark?

Re: Welcome to Trump.UK

We should make sure that when "tired of expert" people are injured, no experts are available to treat them.

I thought we had.

Re: Welcome to Trump.UK

"like it or not England would likely vote them off and enjoy the savings"

Something we agree on. If we'd had the vote last time round they'd have been gone. But it wouldn't have suited Salmond's ego - too much like being thrown out.

Re: Welcome to Trump.UK

"He gambled the entire country for the sake of party politics and to cement his own position."

Probably a serious mis-statement of his thinking. The right-wing eurosceptics were a menace for decades. He would have expected to win and thus not see it as a gamble. I think it was a ploy to get the eurosceptics back into their box. It didn't work with all the ominous consequences you mention. If it had you'd probably have been praising him for a brilliant out-manoeuvring of the Gove faction and UKIP.

Re: Welcome to Trump.UK

"Scotland will leave the EU, either as a part of the UK or, if independent, on it's own, and will have to apply to join and suffer the time and requirements that takes, including, creating their own currency."

They already have banks that issue their own bank notes (ignoring for the moment that the UK tax payer owns a substantial slice of that).

"but we will still be covered by the ECHR."

It would be nice to think that. One thing that's been a preventative factor there is the Good Friday Agreement. Unfortunately that's unravelling before our eyes. And May would clearly like to ditch the ECHR. She probably can't believe her luck.

Re: It'll be fine

"Again, that's fine, the EU is not a big export partner for the UK and it's not like those exports will cease to exist merely lose volume."

I regularly drive past a specialist shipping packer. Not the sort of place that shoves stuff in standard containers. They deal with the big one-off jobs, the sort you see as wide loads on the motorway (some of those wide load escort vehicles are hanging around from time to time).

No doubt the businesses that use this firm sell to a world-wide market. But at present the EU won't really be an export market for them - it's their home market. And they're going to lose 28/29ths of that. The sad fact is that a lot, maybe a majority of the employees of those specialist firms probably voted for Brexit. Will they wish they hadn't in a few years time?

Re: It'll be fine

"You need to re-read Article 50 from something that isn't the Daily Fail or The S*n."

Good luck with trying to get them as far as para 3. There were some showing up here when the court cases were on who clearly hadn't read, or maybe read and not understood, para 1.

Miss Misery on hacking Mr Robot and the Missing Sense of Fun

I've no intention of watching it. It can't possibly live up to Verity's review.

CompSci boffins propose scheme to protect privacy in database searches

Re: So SELECT * FROM *

"Sounds a huge waste of time and resources against a very unlikely real world scenario."

Unlikely? It happens all the time. It's how the likes of Google work out how to show you ads for stuff you bought last week. They've still not worked out that the information they glean from it can go stale PDQ.

The shortcoming of this whole scheme as far as I can see is the the people who'd need to make this work are the very people who wouldn't want it to work so it's not really going to happen. Anyone who wants to offer a search service where they don't know find out what the user was looking for has a much simpler solution. Don't look.

Re: But is this not security through obscurity?

"That's the point that maths turns into magic as far as I'm concerned..."

...and where the load goes through the roof as the DBA is concerned.

FYI Docs.com users: You may have leaked passwords, personal info – thousands have

The cloud..

..the gift that keeps giving.

UK Home Sec: Give us a snoop-around for WhatApp encryption. Don't worry, we won't go into the cloud

Re: Oh, Oh. Another Home Secretary Gets the GCHQ Power Point Session

"The Human Rights Act is a UK law passed in 1998....Pity the Home Secretary doesn't do some reading before opening her mouth."

Yes, but the current PM has been wanting to repeal that ever since she was Home Sec. She's not going to want a Home Sec going against that. Don't pity Amber Rudd; she was doing exactly what was required of her.

The main thing that was stopping May was being in the EU.