Posts by Ptol

AI hiring bias? Men with Anglo-Saxon names score lower in tech interviews

The standards required for a B.Eng engineering degree are defined in the Washington accord. An international standard where courses are accredited and assessed frequently. What does vary considerably around the world is the scope of coverage and the level of detail taught in specialised subjects when the children are in their final 2 years before university.

The UK specialises children at age 16. I spent 2 years studying maths, chemistry and physics - full time. Nothing else. as a result the specialist subject knowledge for the entrants at university in the UK is considerably above those that i would expect from an 18 year old in New Zealand, where even in their final year at school, they are still studying across a wide range of subjects.

Re: You can't add arbitrary data to remove bias.

yes, but please, for the love of all that is holy, choose staff with sottish accents from the east cost of scotland. Last time i was in scotland was just under 20 years ago. I was installing medical equipment into the homes of people with COPD around Paisley (Glasgow). I couldn't understand the patients, they couldn't understand me. Thankfully i was escorted by a very nice practice nurse from dundee who spent the whole day translating.

Re: You can't add arbitrary data to remove bias.

Actually, i disagree.

Repeated long term studies have consistently shown that diverse teams out perform teams filled with the most technically capable people that money can buy/find. The critical criteria is that teammates need to have sufficient skills to contribute to the team performance, and that the team values listening to the thought processes of everyone on the team - and their different perspectives.

Amazon worker – struck and shot in New Orleans terror attack – initially denied time off

Not in the UK

No, the UK social protections are pretty weak.

if you are unable to work for illness or accident, your best bet is that your employer gives you paid sickness leave. Thats usually available for 1 month in a professional job. For a min wage role with a small employer, you might only get statutory sick pay, which is about the same level as unemployment benefits - but that also requires you to have contributed enough national insurance contributions over the previous 3 years.

unemployment benefit is a fixed rate with extra contributions for paying rent in some circumstances. paying mortgage interest only kicks in after 12 months.

Seeing a french national going though the redundancy process in england was painful. they had no real understanding of that the company was doing, what that would mean to them, or where they needed to go to get the help that may have been available to them as it was pre-brexit

.

NASA's X-59 plane is aiming for a sonic thump, not a boom

Flying ultra long distance....

Flying from New Zealand to Europe is brutal. Take off from NZ, fly for 7 hours and then look at the in flight map, and you still have not reached the west coast of Australia. It's only another 10 hours to get to Doha / Dubai / Abu Dhabi. Qantas flights from Sydney to europe are planned to be premium economy as the cheapest option. With business for those spending someone else's money. On this 22 hour flights, there will be 2 complete crews being paid for the entire flight, but only able to work for half the time.

So, replace a 19 hour flight from Christchurch to Dubai (currently done daily by Emirates on a a380, with a fuel stop in sydney) with a supersonic plane that does the flight in 9 hours. You only need 1 crew, so staff costs have dropped 75%. Yeah, fuel costs have increased, and the less annoying sonic thud is going to be heard by emu's and kangaroos rather than people. You just need a supersonic ultra long range plane carrying 300 people. Even if the middle east to europe leg is flown subsonic, I'd pay a premium economy price for a 9 hour economy seat, in preference to a 19 hour premium economy seat.

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

"Does any organization ever have any rules in place for differentiating between two people who share the same first, middle and last name as well as date of birth? "

Yes, I've implemented systems to automatically identify entry details against a person on the database. The approach I follow is this:

1. Have a long set of questions that will filter people such as first name, year of birth, postcode, etc...

2. Have a minimum number of questions that must be asked.

3. Work along the list of questions till there is only one entry in the database that matches.

4. Then ask one more question.

Its the most robust approach I've found sofar.

Rigorous dev courageously lied about exec's NSFW printouts – and survived long enough to quit with dignity

From my understanding, the official secrets act is a UK law, that applies to everyone. However, there are sections that either escalate an offence in severity and/or specifically only apply to people who have signed the official secrets act.

The act of signing is definitely used as evidence that you should have been aware that you are breaking the official secrets act, if you are later found to have breached the law.

Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it

Re: "Hairy jumper"

never used to be scared of spiders, and then i visited Australia. Spiders the size of your dinner plate that don't spin webs, they actively hunt food. Cornering one yo catch it is a bad idea - they will run at you, they can jump and they also have a pretty nasty bite.

Take a 14-mile trip on an autonomous Scottish bus starting next month

Re: Likewise, look at the mess of e-scooter hire

Scooters are perfectly legal in the UK. You just need to create a company, have the company buy a scooter, then rent that scooter to yourself at a rate per second, then pay VAT on the hire charge, and pay corporation tax on the revenue, and you can then pay the profits out as a dividend back to yourself, accounting for any residual income tax that may now be liable.

On the plus side, a 4000 watt scooter can easily out run a british bobbie.

Here's a fun idea: Try to unlock and drive away in someone else's Tesla

Re: Is this your car, Sir?

In New Zealand, my car insurance covers the car for any driver. If i name a person as a driver on the insurance, it knocks NZ$ 400 off the excess in the event of a claim. Car insurance here is much simpler because there is no personal injury aspect to it, it is simply about repairing cars and stationary objects. ohh, and car insurance is optional. If i'm hit by an uninsured driver, then my insurance company will take them to court for the accident costs and collect the money from their wages over the next 5-10 years.

What about the personal injury and medical costs? In New Zealand there is universal accident cover for everyone in New Zealand. ACC will cover your health costs, rehabilitation and lost earnings - even if you stow away on a containership and break your leg jumping onto the harbour dock in Auckland.

There is no pain and suffering compensation, we are made of tougher stuff, and just get on with it. :)

Apple complains UK watchdog wants to make iOS a 'clone' of Android

You missed the point

Depends which choice you are talking about. I choose to buy an iphone because i don't want to make hundreds of little choices about which app is going to provide my keyboard, or handle my voicemail, etc. I don't want to have that choice because i will then start tinkering, and tinkering means that sometimes something gets misconfigured, and then I have to tinker some more, just to get my phone or my banking app to start working again.

No thank you. If these choices are important to you, buy an android phone thats designed to allow you to do this, rather than break my phone.

IT manager's 'think outside the box' edict was, for once, not (only) a revolting cliché

Re: Just Packaging

I sooooo want to buy an escape divider. Just for giggles

War declared on bosses using 'omnipresent surveillance' tools to quash union efforts

Re: NLRB one more reason voters in Muruca will crack down on UNION JOE

I think you are mistaking correlation with cause/effect.

I think its more likely its the industry mix that is defining the boom/bust difference, not the workers rights. If businesses can only survive long term by suppressing working conditions, then those businesses deserve to go bust.

How one Ukrainian software maker planned for survival as invaders approached

Re: Feed the troll, Tuppence a bag...

He is informed.

The Russian state media has been feeding him information relentlessly for the last 20 years. It is not his fault you get your information from alternative sources.

Personally i find that the British TV Channel 4 provides the best curated news content, and it's often interesting to see the differences in emphasis provided by Al Jazzira and fox news on major stories.

I am most worried when all three are taking the same editorial line.

Please pay for parking – CMOS batteries don't buy themselves

Parking law changes

Be careful about following advise from old forum posts about private car park tickets.

Many years ago, the law was ambiguous. Car park enforcement businesses were operating in an environment where a properly prepared defence and counter suit, well presented at court would defeat them every time. Then someone poorly presented their case, lost - and their case was taken to appeal, with a well funded legal team. That set a precedent that made it much simpler to present cases in district court.

However, some point around 2015-2016 a specimen case was taken to the UK Supreme Court to get an overall ruling. There were some aspects of the specimen case which greatly favoured the private parking lobby, but even still the judgement was exceptionally favourable to the private parking industry.

As a result, I would advise against following any strategies published from before the Supreme Court ruling, that have not been properly tested afterwards.

Bloke breaking his back on 'commute' from bed to desk deemed a workplace accident

The world can be very different from the UK / USA

Thats nothing, ACC in New Zealand would cover full medical, rehabilitation expenses and 80% lost income for a drunk tourist arriving from overseas tripping over the step from the plane onto the airbridge at Auckland airport.

Literally, everyone physically in New Zealand at the time of an accident is covered. We are talking private medical cover standard of care too, none of the "come back in a month if its still a problem" or "refer you onto a queue thats 18 months long" kind of non care that that happens in the UK with the under funded NHS.

Big challenge with hardware subscriptions? Getting what we need, not what someone else wants us to have

But at the end of a lease, the leasing company owns the equipment, not you

Hang on, have i just read that leasing hardware is good, because at the end of the lease you can keep the item and not replace it? who let the work experience kid write this article?

Apple beat Epic Games 9-1 in court. Now it's appealed the one point it lost

Prices are not driven by cost, but by peoples willingness to pay them

Whether apple takes 5% or 50% of in app store purchases doesn't really make much difference to me as a consumer. In the same way I don't care if they pay $1000 a month to rent their office or $50,000 a month.

Pricing does not work that way. Companies will price according to how much customers are willing to pay, in sufficient volume to maximize their long term revenue. There might be some short term price differentials whilst the market adjusts to what ever the true value of payment processing really is for an app store item, but in the long run, this will not move 25% more cash into end users pockets, it will probably move it from apple's shareholders to another set of shareholders.

Texan's alleged Amazon bombing effort fizzles: Militia man wanted to take out 'about 70 per cent of the internet'

Re: Christian Militia Terrorist

I can think of a few... There was Guy Fawkes - a dangerous revolutionary catholic, motivated by a desire to restore a catholic monarch to the English thrown.

The KKK were / are a religious order that terrorised people that did not believe in their white racist view of god.

Top doctors slam Google for not backing up incredible claims of super-human cancer-spotting AI

Diagnosis as a service

Surely if Google published a webservice that you could submit a sample and receive a non clinical assessment on that sample, then we could effectively run an extended trial of this service over time.

That being google, one could still wonder whether the service software and model data remain constant over time, or were constantly being "improved"

Why cloud costs get out of control: Too much lift and shift, and pricing that is 'screwy and broken'

Lift and shift to the cloud

Lift and shift has so much to answer for.

The economics, the operational controls and the observability between on prem and in cloud are so different that any project is planning to do a lift and shift for economic reasons really needs questioning on their planning and decision making.

Once you have done a lift and shift, you are locked into paying for peak capacity, paying for rewriting all of the operational controls and observability layers just to keep your existing customers happy. Then you find that you have peak capacity issues, and the only way to solve them quickly enough is upscale (burn money on the amazon fire). Getting the time and resources to then do the actual engineering to turn an on-prem product into a cloud product doesnt suddenly get funded properly - its budget gets swallowed up to keep the illusion of this great cloud product there in the customers eyes. All of the cloud features that are needed in the MVP product are all support tickets, for someone to do manually, because they were features that could be done by the customer when they had the software in their own office network.

Hold on to your hats, Net Neutrality version 2 is on its way courtesy of Trump and the FCC's moves on Section 230

Americanisation of the internet

If the USA want to tear themselves up over their idealistic view of free speech, and the consequences that their laws enables, I'm all for leaving them to it.

However, please make sure that bun fight stays within the borders of the USA and doesn't affect the rest of the world. In the UK the websites are only protected from liability if they do not remove it within 24 hours of being notified that it is libellous or illegal. Not that I have ever seen Facebook remove reported content that is illegal in the UK for being racist hate speech under the race relations act.

Accounting expert told judge Autonomy was wrong not to disclose hardware sales

Re: Hardware on the Accounts

I think I'd walk away too...

Been there, done that, when its small bits of kit - and you make a few extra crumbs along the way. Generally for the customer they are wanting to buy something but the actual supplier is not a preferred supplier, so they come to you, their friendly prefered supplier, on the basis that paying an extra $50 saves them the hassle of spending 2 weeks getting yet another preferred supplier agreement in place through purchasing, and they want the kit this week. That makes business sense.

When its a $500k order though, that needs multiple layers of signoff and will have the purchasing team involved. they are coming to you because they cannot buy direct. Perhaps they couldn't get the credit terms, perhaps they have maxed their credit limit with that supplier. Without knowing with 99% confidence why they cannot go direct, this ain't a runner.

Finally, theres the downside consequences of doing the deal. As the smaller business, you will inevitably need to pay the 500K to the supplier before you receive the 550K back from your customer. Is 500K a small enough sum that it wont affect your cash flow? What happens if your customer then doesn't pay your invoice? can you swallow the loss?

This kind of a deal only makes sense if it's small enough that it can go bad with you holding the loss, and you can shrug your shoulders and carry on. Perhaps $1K at a time.

ICANN extracts $20m signing fee for $1bn dot-com price increases – and guess who's going to pay for it?

So, if enough top level domain registrars got together, and set up a parallel root DNS registry, then ICANN would lose its monopoly, and then have to consider genuine reform.

You leak our secrets? We'll leak your book sales, speech fees – into our coffers: Uncle Sam wins royalties fight against Edward Snowden

passport != citizen

Its common enough for people waiting trial for significant crimes to have to surrender their passport. By cancelling his passport whilst he was in transit in Moscow, the US made it much more difficult for Snowdon to choose his country of exile. The US seem quite happy for him to return back to the USA. in fact i think they have a bed waiting for him.

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

Software Engineer nearly losses the war....

Knowing someone who worked with the engineer responsible for the royal navy warships being unable to defend themselves in the falklands war- its very possible for software engineers to make design decisions that have life / death consequences.

Lets just say, having a plane appear in the middle of the radar area could be a sign of a glitching system that needs a reboot - but it could also be a sign that it was following the terrain and has just popped up from behind a hill. When there's a hill involved, having all of the ships defences doing a simultaneous reboot had some pretty disastrous consequences.

20% of UK businesses would rather axe their contractors than deal with IR35 – survey

Re: If you're going to treat contractors as employees, kiss the VAT goodbye.

HMRC only receive VAT from the end sale to a non VAT registered entity. However that VAT money flows all the way back up the supply chain, as everyone pays the VAT on their sales, minus the VAT they paid on their costs to HMRC.

Re: Dangers of moving from outside to inside IR35

When i graduated University, i did 3 months at a school helping out the IT manager. It was great secops training. My favorite rule was no deliveries accepted between 2:45pm and 3:45pm. More than one lorry driver has been seen chasing kids with boxes down the street.

FYI, we're now in the timeline where Facebook decides who is and isn't a politician on its 2bn-plus-person network

In the world of Boaty Mc Boat Face, I can see Adriel Hampton becoming an elected politician. What a great way to run your campaign!

Her Majesty opens UK Parliament with fantastic tales of gigabit-capable broadband for everyone

the american cable TV companies blocked us getting fibre 25 years ago....

Yes, and the only reason why we need legislation to get fast broadband is because a previous Tory government prevented BT from rolling out nation wide in the name of competition.

Well, said competition cherry picked the most profitable areas, then they all merged into one company and used their cable monopoly to do just enough to be competitive against BT, but didnt have to try that hard because they had got laws written restricting the services that BT were allowed to deliver.

Careful now, UK court ruling says email signature blocks can sign binding contracts

interpretation is important - a digital certificate means only one thing for certain. the contents can be verified as are they the same or different to the contents at the point of signing.

It is possible to place other interpretations on the meaning of the signature such as it was the signer that created the content, or that the signer is in agreement of the contents, but these are mere interpretations, the signature alone is not proof of intent at the moment of signing. Context matters.

I think this article was reading way too much into this. It's not an appeal court reading, so its not setting any new precedent - and it is applying the law as it currently stands.

A contractual agreement requires 3 things to exist. They are:

1. A defined offer. (I want to buy that land)

2. Consideration in exchange for the offer. (in exchange for £175k)

3. Acceptance of the deal.

In this case the judge found clear and unambiguous evidence of all three.

reading the case details as linked, the email signature part was just one of the items of evidence referenced by the judge to show that the offer was accepted. It's not clear that the email signature alone would have done so, in the absence of the other details.

We're all doooooomed: Gloomy Brit workforce really isn't coping well with impending Brexit

Teresa May's Brexit Deal

I can remember much talk about people making big money with VAT missing trader fraud, shipping goods in and out of the EU repeatedly. Be really easy to do this between Dublin and Belfast and the UK's border solutions....

Margin mugs: A bank paid how much for a 2m Ethernet cable? WTF!

Bit pedantic, but with HDMI cables, there is an electrical standard that needs to be met at both ends of the cable, but nothing about the cable length. Cable length is one of the more important things that effect a cables ability to meet the HDMI standards...

A well manufactured and quality (an is built in a reliable, repeatable and tested way) using some exotic materials is the secret to getting a 10-15m HDMI cable that actually works.

Now that's integrity: Bloke sinks 7 beers, turns himself in. Cops weren't looking for him

7 bottles of bud is about 3 1/2 british pints, but if he was worried about a parole violation, drinking beer is a parole violation in large parts of the USA - so that's what got him locked up...

The gig (economy) is up: New California law upgrades Lyft, Uber, other app serfs to staff

Its about time....

There is a place for independent, self employed professionals, providing consultancy services to multiple customers. However companies have turned this into an employee lite kind of employment. Governments have been fighting back for a couple of decades because it affected their tax revenues, but its only because of the huge number of voters that are now involved that governments are starting to look at the potential for abusive working arrangements.

Let’s face it, even as a highly skilled IT contractor, you take work at the rate of pay, working at times and in the style directed by the end customer.

Female-free speaker list causes PHP show to collapse when diversity-oriented devs jump ship

Mostly missing the point...

Diversity on a team is really important. But diversity is not really about the obvious things that vary, the things you can differentiate within meeting someone for 30 seconds, such as their skin colour or their gender identity. Having people with different perspectives on life, different view points, and ensuring that all of the viewpoints are considered on their merit (and not majority group think mentality) is what actually matters.

What i look for in potential recruits in addition to sufficient tech skills are people that are around 85% similar and 15% different from the current team. That way they are similar enough to fit in, but bring something new to the team too.

Here's to beer, without which we'd never have the audacity to Google an error message at 3am

I've had a couple of bosses in my early career that would take me out for 3 pints before setting me off on some complex programming stuff. I'd consistently get the core of a complex problem implemented in an afternoon, and spend the following morning dealing with the compiler not recognising my genius (aka syntax errors)

You can easily secure America's e-voting systems tomorrow. Use paper – Bruce Schneier

There's a long history of paper based voting systems being hacked too. Slipping in extra ballot boxes prefilled with votes for your prefered candidate is as old as the hills, along with plenty of modern variations.

WTF is Boeing on? Not just customer databases lying around on the web. 787 jetliner code, too, security bugs and all

"If the threee networks on the plane are physically connected in any way, then there is the potential for flaws that allow the isolation between them to be broken. This does raise the question of why you would have any connections between an avionics system, a business network, and an entertainment system. Surely the only cast-iron way of securing the avionics is to have that system completely isolated from the others. What are the use cases that require those networks to interact?"

My reading of this marketing fluff was that it was quite likely to be one physical network with VLAN tagging. and QoS to ensure priority for the mission critical packets at the switch. Hopefully none of the seat area wiring are connected to trunk ports...

The inevitability of K8s: Pivotal CEO describes the pain and benefits of technology transition

"Who calls their child "Rob Mee"?"

-- Mr Blind?

Li-ion battery 'price-fixing' case settled with bonus fury over lawyers pocketing eight-figures

The US legal system works perfectly for the lawyers... why would it change?

Class actions, and insolvency are two examples of the US legal system where there is a pot of money legally due to a third party, and the lawyers involved are effectively set a target of how much money to spend.

In a class action, the lawyers are taking on some business risk, but they are in control of that risk. They decide how much effort (i.e. cost) they spend on the case, and they are the experts in deciding in the case is winnable, and the risks involved. Why not allow them a 1.5x multiplier to allow them to get it wrong 1 in 3 times.

In insolvency, there is a pot of money for the lawyers to spend, and any they don't spend goes to the people who are actually out of pocket. How often do the lawyers stop spending money before the pot is empty?

What Huawei to go: Hundreds of Chinese tech giant's US workers to get pink slips – report

Re: @AC

"the USA fingerprint all air travellers whether they have commited a crime or not"

"I don't know about international flights, but this isn't true for domestic flights. I fly on a reasonably regular basis and have never once been fingerprinted."

It is US immigration law, so it happens on arrival to the USA. However, the USA is unusual in that there is no concept of transit. Most countries you can fly into the country and remain air side -to catch a flight onto a third country without needing to cross the border. However, this is not possible in the USA. If you are on the Air NZ flight from london to Auckland, you need to get off the plane in LA, enter the USA (including finger printing, having a valid US visa (or visa waiver) and then leave the USA to get back onto the same plane to continue your flight.

White House mulls just banning strong end-to-end crypto. Plus: More bad stuff in infosec land

Re: Governments don't like to think of themselves as repressive

"And finally, governments in settled democracies would have an awfully difficult time actually stoking up large scale repression. They'd need the police to go out and do something they'd know will be very unpopular"

The Miners strike in the 1980's showed that the UK police are surprisingly happy to be the government enforcers. Good pay rises above inflation, plenty of overtime, no accountability and a selective blind eye and media quite happy to tow the government story and respin stories in deceptive ways all led to a police quite happy to use violence against peaceful protests.

Oracle AI's Eurovision horror show: How bad can it be? Yep. Badder

The official campaign for Oracle to enter Eurovision 2020 is needed

Heck, calling Oracle a european country is not much more a stretch than including Australia

Hi! It looks like you're working on a marketing strategy for a product nowhere near release! Would you like help?

* Hardware

* Software

* Treeware

* Vapourware

Here's what Autonomy told its salesmen they were allowed to do

recognition of a sale at 100% for a software license required it to be for at least 2 years, and paid upfront? Sure sounds like trying to boost the sales figures for now, without ensuring the money is still coming in to cover the promises made for 18 months time.

Tech giants get antsy in Northern Virginia: Give us renewable power, there's a planet to save... and PR to harvest

Re: Money Talks

If they really wanted renewable power that reduces CO2 rather than virtue signalling they would be pushing for nuclear power generation.

Nuclear power It has two desirable properties. The volume of fuel needed per megawatt of electricity is pretty low, and the pollution produced is easier to collect and put into deep storage than CO2.

However, it is not a renewable energy source. It takes a source fuel, converts it into a waste fuel, and produces pollution - not really the definition of renewable.

Boeing big cheese repeats pledge of 737 Max software updates following fatal crashes

Correct definition of a stall

it is the break up of laminar air flow over the wing that defines the point when a wing stalls, not its air speed.

BT 'UK's most powerful Wi-Fi'? Why, fie, for shame! – ads watchdog

Re: Most powerful wifi?

Having been involved with city wide wifi for a short while, there were benefits in boosting the signal power on the mesh channel on both access points to obtain a higher bandwidth on the mesh traffic.

Doing the same for the access channel results in lots of people thinking they should be able to connect to this good signal, but the AP cant hear them reliably enough. Drains battery of devices constantly sending repeat packets that are never acknowledged, or worse, thinking it has a connection, so doesn't use your telco GSM, but is not reliable enough for real use.