Posts by Doctor Syntax 42496 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
1a Access their application via a 14000baud serial link for a day.
On a similar note the numpties who select the bags for packing vegetables in supermarkets should be obliged to spend an entire day packing them whilst wearing gloves and glasses which restrict their ability to focus closer than a metre.
@Dan 55
You'd be more convincing if you showed some sign of actually having used Linux. For a start you could tell us which particular GUI it is you're complaining about. Then you could show some indication that you know there are others. Bonus points for telling us which commercial UI you prefer and why.
"WORSE!!!! If you click the X to get rid of it the page you're wanting to be on jumps back to the top so that you have to scroll down and find where you had got to."
Worse still if you're reading it on MythTV where there's no way to click the sodding X. You're left squinting through a letter box shaped slot at the top of the screen. An the next breaking broken news thing comes up on the next page. And the next. And the next. A user friendly designer would say "If we show it a couple of times let's assume they've read it and really don't want to see it again". A really good designer would realise that after being displayed for a few seconds it can bee removed without even needing to click. Anybody from the Beeb reading this?
"This meant that my revenue was taking a big hit even before things like accountancy fees and my role in the company meant I had strange exclusions on expenses I could claim such as accommodation whilst on training courses and these exclusions changed year on year."
I never experienced that as a freelancer. When I was a Civil Servant years previously the exclusions seemed to change from expenses claim to expenses claim. It was part of the mean-spiritedness that prompted me to leave. No, folks, Civil Service jobs are not gold-plated, at least not in the scientific branch. Neither are the pensions.
"However, the issue of skills will only be exacerbated as thousands of tech contractors are set to leave the public sector amid a major crackdown on the tax freelancers pay via IR35."
I haven't been following HMRC's latest wheeze on this but AIUI it will be up to departments in the Civil Service to determine the status of contracts. If so then departments have the solution in their own hands. They can insist on contracts which they can certify as being non-caught. If HMRC insist on doing things differently their loss will be other department's gain.
Why does every product manager, marketroid and sales person think their product sales are crowing exponentially? They're not. They're on a sigmoid curve. And that's a sigmoid curve of the total number of devices in use. In time the sales are bound to drop off and the only sales will be for replacements.
It's happened to PCs, it's happening to tablets.
Expect it and be prepared to move on.
"the only mutual I could see offering a current account was Cumberland BS."
Unfortunately they don't have a branch near me. The only financial institution, mutual or not, left with a branch in my preferred location is now YBS and the idiots, instead of realising what an advantage they had with their Norwich and Peterborough current account and rolling it out to the other brands, decided to scrap it.
Looking to move from the Co-op the best branch available to me now is Santander. I'm really encouraged about their online competence - I clicked on a link on their site and got a 404.
"No - the reference to "TUPE" in the article means the Transfer of Undertaking (Protection of Employment) Regulations, 1981. In essence, it means the contract with the old employer is deemed to be the contract of the new one - starting date included."
I take it you're responding to the previous comment regarding IR35. That comment refers to freelance contractors. Freelancers' employers are their own companies. The do not want to suddenly find themselves employed by a company to whom their previous client has transferred an undertaking (grim term!).
"The prize here is the chance to convert those running UNIX on the Power, RISC and Itanium systems often used in the most resilience-hungry computing environments."
If I were a sysadmin running on one of those environments I'd not be as easily tempted by Linux as I once was. Linux seems to be moving away from being a Unix lookalike. I'd be more interested in a BSD. OTOH I'm not sure about the extent to which commercial S/W has been ported such as the proprietary databases I'd probably still be running.
"The manufacturers don't care because their sales are OK. The sales are OK because the customers don't care either. The customers don't care because when the hackers take over a device they normally take care to ensure that the customer rarely notices anything happening; once in control, some of them even apply patches to stop other hackers getting in."
Seat belts are an example of how this can be made to work. One factor mentioned was that governments mandated fitting (Charles 9 will be along any second to mumble about grey markets). The other factor was the governments mandated using them if you were on the public roads. And we now have the situation where cars are not only fitted with them, in many cases they'll bleep at you if you go at more than a snail's pace without doing them up.
How could we apply such thinking to IoT?
First, we'll need to mandate some requirements such as any default passwords must require a reset at initial startup or after a factory reset and something like type approval for devices which meet the current standards.
Now we can make it illegal to connect such a device to the internet* (you can have as many as you like on your intranet, just don't let them leak out).
Alongside that we make the ISPs responsible for their nets: they become accessories to anyone exposing a rogue device.
The consequences?
ISPs care so they'll deal with customers, cutting them off the net if required.
Customers care because they lose their internet if they expose a rogue device so they'll take care to buy type-approved devices.
Manufacturers care because sales of un-approved devices are falling (even in the grey market) because the intranet market won't be big enough to sustain them and, if everyone is having to manufacture to the same standard, there's no price advantage.
*Shodan has demonstrated that these devices can be located.
"SQL does have at least one massive Achille's heel - self-referential data, like parts-of-part"
Oh dear. I wish someone had told me that before I wrote one of those. Especially with the fun complication that one part at the bottom of the assembly could have a serial number and that that serial number would apply to each part above it.
"I want to save data and I want to save it now. I dont want to define a new row with int or VARCHAR or define how large the table can be."
Don't we all? But the rest or us want to be able to find it again and to have it consistent when we find it, especially if multiple people are saving related data. We also have multiple people wanting to access the same data.
However there's always the much under-rated cardfile.exe which may do just what you want.
"councils have been eliminating discretionary spending as their budgets have shrivelled."
They still find money to fund events such as the Tour de France and its bastard offspring the Tour de Yorkshire. Of course those earn column inches for the senior councillors. If only the local paper had asked the council leader for a quote every time something closed and put his photo alongside it, whether he replied or not, we might have had more libraries still open.
GDPR stuff [is] mostly garbage written by the same idiots who with stunning naivety brought you such hits as 'Safe Harbour' and their follow-up smash hit 'Privacy Shield'
I think it's largely written by the group who were severely critical of that garbage. In fact, ISTM that it's the response to those that's finally worked its way through the legislative process.
"a new communications data independent authorising body"
Looking at the tender this seems to be a very vague entity. Will it ever make it out of the still-thinking-about-it stage? Working on it will maybe keep the CJEU quiet until Brexit at which point they'll hope the problem goes away. Cynical? Moi?
"It is well-enough established that a person can be compelled to produce a key to a safe but not a combination."
We're getting a little off-topic here but...
I don't have the key but I know where it is. Can I be compelled to tell? Likewise if I know who has it?
There are probably precedents but from past experience I can imagine the jury being cleared out of court and much debate and flourishing of law books between counsel and judge over which precedents apply in the circumstances of the case.
"The poster seemed to be suggesting that anyone over 50 is less likely to have been exposed to IT technology - not that their age made them less competent generally. That seems reasonable."
Even if we disregard earlier stuff such as the Apple II, Trash-80 etc, someone aged 50 this year would have been ~14 when the IBM PC was introduced. And I know people born in the '20s & '30s who can find their way round PCs (and have worked out how to download Open- or LibreOffice because that's what they use).
" I remember people of my parents' generation born round the start of the 20th century who had never adjusted to an understanding of electricity or radio."
That would be the same as the older members of my parents' generation. I never met any of my aunts, uncles or their friends who had the slightest unfamiliarity with either.
"On the other hand, they don't care how many pictures he showed to his sister, but how many are on his drive."
It could be that they've been deleted in which case there are none although it would then be unlikely that he'd withhold the password if he did remember it.
"Even if it was considered proven that there are pictures on the drive, for _correct_ sentencing you would need to know how many exactly. And these photos come from somewhere, so they might help the police catching the distributor."
If they were more concerned to catch the distributor - well, the USA is the land of the plea bargain.
"BUT, and this is the key thing, regardless of whether that evidence is sufficient to convict the defendant or not, it doesn't somehow provide justification to remove the defendant's Fifth Amendment rights."
I'm not saying it would. Quite the contrary in effect as if there's eye-witness evidence to convict then the whole argument about passwords is irrelevant.
"Judges are partly to blame for this -- they are typically over the age of 50, have a limited understanding of technology"
This is just ageist bollocks. I'm over the age of 70. I've been using computers for nearly 50 of those years starting with FORTRAN about 1970. I know a few 80-90 year old friends and family who use computers regularly. I wonder how old you are and what understanding you have of the law or, come to that, of those older than yourself.
