Posts by matthewdjb

Umbrella company Parasol Group confirms cyber attack as 'root cause' of prolonged network outage

Brookson, SJD, Nixon Williams confirm hacking.

140,000-plus drivers sent $60m in compensation checks after Amazon 'stole their tips'

easyJet b do something similar. They waived flight change admin fees, due to Covid, but the new flight will be charged considerably more than if you purchased it directly. They simply add the admin fee they would have charged to the price of the first flight.

I changed two flights to two new ones. At the same time I bought two additional identical flights. The first leg of the changed flights was over £130 more expensive than the additional. easyJet of course deny any wrong doing saying they don't have a published price.

Judging by the way your face lit up, my inbox just got more attractive

Yeah. We know. Dabbs mentioned it in the article.

Sir Clive Sinclair: Personal computing pioneer missed out on being Britain's Steve Jobs

ZX80 for me. Learned to program in it. Then a ZX81, and learned Z80.. still programming (but getting paid for it) 40 years later.

You want us to make a change? We can do it, but it'll cost you...

Re: Screw-up?

I'll check.

Hacking the computer with wirewraps and soldering irons: Just fix the issues as they come up, right?

Re: Anyone

Calipers? I just 'ad an 'ammer. To flatten them 0s into 1s.

Another UK government limb that can't get IR35 right: Court service pays taxman £12.5m

They should appeal. All the way to the supreme court!

Hey, AI software developers, you are taking Unicode into account, right ... right?

People have been using such tricks to try to bypass moderation on the forum I moderate for years.

Automatic temporary ban. To start with.

The trouble with trying it on the Times automotive automoderation (for example) is that some begger is going to report it to the humans.

Ch-ch-ch-Chia! HDD sales soar to record levels as latest crypto craze sweeps Europe

Re: Chia

Oh the ironing of commenting about the waste of social media

The world is chaos but my Zoom background is control-freak perfection

The clued up didn't get bookshelves. Simply bookshelf wallpaper.

Revealed: Perfect timings for creation of exemplary full English breakfast

Re: abbreviated, with substitutes

One other word. Andouillette. Piggy goodness in a tube. Offaly good

A floppy filled with software worth thousands of francs: Techie can't take it, customs won't keep it. What to do?

Ideas and information. Far more dangerous.

VS Code acknowledges its elders: Makefile projects get an official extension – and VIM mode is on the backlog

Copy line to the next? Select, Ctrl-c,ctrl-v.

People are used to what they're used to. Sometimes what they're used to is slower compared to modern applications. But having used vi(m) for years, I doubt it's really more effective than modern editors.

Anyway, as a developer, I spend more time thinking than I do typing.

Really smart syntax checking in the editor. That's what I want.

People actually write novels about DevOps – and an author spoke about his take at Dynatrace's Perform event

Nah. Does it syntax check?

Looking for the perfect Valentine's gift? How about a week of retro gaming BBC Microlympics?

Re: Right on Commander!

Elite dangerous is great. If you get stranded, you can sort people in real life and they'll come and rescue you

I played for a year when it came out. Haven't touched it since. But I recall docking is not that difficult.

Severe bug in Libgcrypt – used by GPG and others – is a whole heap of trouble, prompts patch scramble

Have these guys never heard of clean code?

buf_cpy

What's wrong with copyOfBuffer?

Transcribe-my-thoughts app would prevent everyone knowing what I actually said during meetings

You poor innocent fool

He who controls the minutes controls the meetings.

No one remembers what was agreed.

So long as you're not too unsubtle, you can choose the decisions that were made.

Signal boost: Secure chat app is wobbly at the moment. Not surprising after gaining 30m+ users in a week, though

Audio notifications. How quaint.

That's it. It's over. It's really over. From today, Adobe Flash Player no longer works. We're free. We can just leave

Re: Best thing to happen...

Floppies? Loading programs from cassette and tape player.

Or typing hex into the hex loader from a magazine listing.

Exonerated: First subpostmasters cleared of criminal convictions in Post Office Horizon scandal

Not just private eye, but also computer weekly.

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: Stockpile your popcorn

So sorry for bringing intelligence into the conversation.

If only...

Astronomers get more than they bargained for, as Mars probe InSight's instruments detects solar eclipses

Re: Stähler must be my age

No, he's Swiss.

5 Swiss francs is about the thickness of a 50p and worth about £4.

An irritating itch down the back of your neck? Searing midsummer heat? Of course, it can only be SysAdmin Day

Re: Colonies of sysadmins have a single queen

ODFO

;-)

Re: Since when was ...

Sure. That's what they want you to think.

Trump's bright idea of kicking out foreign students unless unis resume in-person classes stuns tech, science world

“We hope that most schools are going to be open, and we don’t want people to make political statements or do it for political reasons,” Trump said.

So instead he's going to force them to open for political reasons.

Linux kernel coders propose inclusive terminology coding guidelines, note: 'Arguments about why people should not be offended do not scale'

If the underlying issues prompting this idea were to be resolved, no one would be calling for this change. Therefore, it seems to me to be clearly necessary.

Do Baptists get offended when they visit Geneva and see statues of Calvin who used to drown their ilk? No, because the issues behind that are long resolved.

Barclays Bank appeared to be using the Wayback Machine as a 'CDN' for some Javascript

It's really simple. Some drone from cognizent/infosys/tech Mahindra or whatever muppet outfit they've outsourced to, googled for the resource, found it at the archive and used that. Because they're like that furniture retailer - Sofa Kingdom.

Infosys denies former head of diversity recruitment's accusations of racial bias and visa fraud

Of course it's not their (written) policy.

A fête worse than death: After struggling to connect into SAP's SapphireNow online shindig, we were all 'rewarded' with a Sting concert

Re: SAP Deployment.

Been paying my bills for over twenty years. What's not to like?

Bite me? It's 'byte', and that acronym is Binary Interface Transfer Code Handler

When the same user needed his two passwords reset. For the fiftieth time. We set the first to Head and the second to Dick. To be fair he took it with good grace.

My test string in ROSCOE was 'hippopotame'. Obvious but inoffensive. Mostly.

ALGOL 60 at 60: The greatest computer language you've never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree

Re: Algol 68 is not ALGOL 60

I remember attempting a C compiler using that book. Did enough to pass the course but never finished it. It was hard!

Re: No love for CORAL 66?

In memory processing. We loaded our entire billing system into an alpha with a whole 2GB of memory. The billing run on the vax would take two hours. On the alpha, two minutes. (and then it still took five hours to print out the bills).

If you don't LARP, you'll cry: Armed fun police swoop to disarm knight-errant spotted patrolling Welsh parkland

Re: Bird mask may have had some effect

Also transmitted by person to person contact, if pneumonic plague developed.

(Doomsday, Connie Willis)

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Spacecraft with graphene sails powered by starlight and lasers

Re: Calling Isaac Newton...

No need to build a laser.

Fit a bunch of superconducting squares in orbit around the sun, and use that to make the sun lase.

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Re: And what about the people ...

I think we must have the same dad.

As Brit cyber-spies drop 'whitelist' and 'blacklist', tech boss says: If you’re thinking about getting in touch saying this is political correctness gone mad, don’t bother

It's a bleedin' whitewash.

Grab a towel and pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster because The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is 42

Re: That Robot ...

I can own up to that.

UK contractors planning 'mass exodus' ahead of IR35 tax clampdown – survey

Run away.

I did that twenty years ago. But it's interesting that the same story was around when ir35 was mooted back in 1999/2000.

The difference this time is that the clients have the liability which makes it harder to fight.

The changes to contractors are that those on Ltd companies will need to pay more NI. Including employers out of their fee, as dividends, already under attack, are no longer possible.

So far that puts them on an equal footing with existing umbrella company users.

Where the bite is, is that many contractors work long distances from home for relatively short periods of time.

They will no longer be able to pay the expenses out of pre-tax income, and it is that which will hit clients, as they'll find it much harder to find contractors. This will in turn impact permies, as the clients turn to cheaper options, like folk from India, thus further hastening the demise of British IT experts.

B-but it doesn't get viruses! Not so, Apple fanbois: Mac malware is growing faster than nasties going for Windows

Re: It's an obvious target, no?

Do keep an eye on whether you're getting regular updates to your OS. Apple are notorious for letting their products fall out of security updates without telling anyone..

Gee, S/4HANA. Just what I always wanted: Customers are wary of what's in SAP's sack

Re: Is it just me, or is the idea of forcing people to the cloud adding to the issues?

There's no forcing to the cloud. You can on premise s4hana where you have complete control.

Customers in 'standoff' with SAP over 2025 end of support for Business Suite: Who'll blink first?

It's not an upgrade to s/4hana. It's a migration. So some customers I'm aware of are considering migrating away from SAP completely, since they've got a migration project on their hands anyway.

Boffins hand in their homework on Voyager 2's first readings from beyond Solar System

Re: Gravity...

"Look at a photon, it is divisible, it can be split between slits in a slit experiment. So its made of multiple parts"

It isn't, it can't and it isn't.

IT contractor has £240k bill torn up after IR35 win against UK taxman

HMRC aren't wanting contractors to pay the same tax as employees in the same position. They're wanting contractors to pay more - in the form of employer's NI contributions.

Chemists bitten by Python scripts: How different OSes produced different results during test number-crunching

Order!

Unless the type of the returning parameter explicitly specifies the sort order, the sort order of the returned data is undefined.

A very important basic fact.

I am astonished at the number of people who think that an SQL SELECT will return records in the primary key order. In a relational database, the sort order is undefined.

I don’t know, apathetic bloody chemists, I’ve no sympathy at all.

IR35 blame game: Barclays to halt off-payroll contractors, goes directly to PAYE

Re: Last year I've been working for Infosys/Proximus in Brussels

Switzerland have set aside nearly 4000 work permits a year for British workers, if/when Brexit happens.

Anyway, being from a third country doesn't seem to restricted the influx of folk from India.

You know SAP's doing a great job when a third of German users say they 'have no confidence in it'

I've made a lot of money out of SAP being a bit crap. I see no need for it to change.

Btw, the clue is in the name of the programming language. ABAP means in German "Allgemeiner Berichts-Aufbereitungs-Prozessor". While this is generally rendered in English as "Advanced Business Application Programming", an alternative would be "Common Report Application Programming". Or CRAP.

What do you do for a living?

I'm a CRAP programmer.

Yes, I think you probably are.

Are you who you say you are, sir? You are? That's all fine then

I think you'll find the systems are implemented by people earning not very much either. Hence the quality.

Can you download it to me – in an envelope with a stamp?

Re: Deliberately obnoxious

That reminds me of the Big Train sketch (Do you speak English?).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxUm-2x-2dM

Re: Deliberately obnoxious

I watch LOTR in a Swiss cinema. French and German subtitles generally, but when Elvish was spoken, up popped English subtitles.

The time a Commodore CDTV disc proved its worth as something other than a coaster

Re: One wonders

It wasn't a record. It's was a CD.