Posts by steamnut 247 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2015
Ever since that much-hated lady, now a dame, called Dawn Primololo announced IR35 is has been an example of misplaced legislation. It has never addressed the stated problem of employees quitting on a Friday and rejoining the next Monday as a contract supplier something they called "disguised employment".
And the problems keep coming....
Who benefits from fining a public organisation anyway?
Surely it is the strangest of ironies that we do a deal with Japan when one of their largest companies, Softbank, recently decided to list one of "our" companies, ARM, on the US NASDAQ?
After ARM and the Welsh company Newport Wafer Fab which has been bought by the Chinese, there is nothing left to offer.
And £1bn does not even get us a seat at the table of semiconductor manufacture.
With comments like "heavily adapted with complex customisations which are failing, and proving hard to fix." you can already see that this will be a support nightmare. You can see why SAP wants it's users on a standard platform.
The other comments like "Therefore, this comes with a single point of failure." and "process automation in SAP had been lost in Oracle" also do not bode well for future cost savings.
This really is a dogs breakfast where the winners have been SAP and Oracle and the losers the local rate payers.
This suspect equipment sits on networks that are under our management. And we, very possibly GCHQ, have the means to capture and monitor the traffic. Surely, any traffic with Chinese IP addresses could be detected and the payloads captured?
If we have the means to capture and decode dark web traffic to intercept drugs cartel intel, then we must be able to see if China really does receive our telecoms traffic. And, if they don't, then a vast amount of money is being wasted.
Clearly the "very deep investigation" was not deep enough. The failure of three out of the last eight flights of Vega and Vega-C must be both embarrassing and expensive.
You do have to wonder if the ESA project is trying to outcompete Space-X in order to get the paid-for launches for Europe.
With Virgin Galactic (ok one failure to-date) and Blue Origin playing in the same space then they need to get more successful launches under their belts soon else the business will go elsewhere. If they do fail then the whole project is doomed as the money will dry up.
With Microsoft's record I would hope that "automatic updates" is a feature than can be disabled else The Register's going to full of tails of woe. Get the strap-lines ready...
A few years back I had a lot of XP systems semi-bricked due to unstoppable updates requiring reboots. Never again I said and I have been Linux ever since.
When I load a seemingly small program that requires .NET runtime I never cease to be amazed at the size of the thing. And it seems to get bigger with each release.
Next, I predict will be retraction the so-called EU chip foundry project. The chip industry has just seen what a bad knee jerk reaction they made.
Those of us with grey beards will be tut tutting as we have seen it all before. Remember the 4K DRAM crisis to which the UK Government created the funds for Inmos. By the time the chips were ready the world had moved on to 16k chips.
Well, you have only got to look at the basic scenario which is a complicated and much modified system being "converted" into a SAP S/4 HANA system which has be plain vanilla.
Like other companies and councils already on this painful SAP route we are expecting to see lots of stories from Leeds with the headlines - delayed, over budget, review etc.
You would think that Meta, aka Facebook, would be more careful, bearing in mind their appointment of Former deputy prime minister and Yorkshire Liberal MP Nick Clegg as their president?
He gave many speeches on citizens' rights as an MP and Liberal Party leader.
As a liberal MP Clegg would abhor any abuse of citizen's personal data without their consent? Clearly, if you give someone a big enough pay-check they throw their moral values in the bin.
This all sounds like a good idea that they are selling us. Or is this a cunning way to re-use partially failed memory chips?
The non-binary idea is plausible but it could be the memory makers are sweetening their bottom line by using chips that, in a binary world, would have been consigned to the scrap bin.
Those of us old enough to remember EPROMS and static ram chips will know that this is not a new idea.
The piece says that the database is for just 136,000 properties. And it costs a cool £22 billion a year to maintain? The supplier must be rubbing his hands with glee.
And Landmark's work to-date consists of just 140 webpages that can be used to enter information about property assets.
Someone is taking the Pi$$ for sure. If you can get paid so much for a web page then count me in.
I understand the potential security problems with imported Chinese equipment but how far is Biden going to go? This is starting to look more like protectionism than technology concerns.
And we will be the ultimate losers as the US/EU alternative chip farms are still only at the "how big a grant do we get?" stage and that will make some chips scarce and more expensive.
What Biden is creating is technology inflation and he is misguided if he thinks it will support the US industries in the long term. And, in two years he could be gone with Republicans in charge again.
As a recent user of Matodon, now with my own server, I wonder how a completely federated network design is going to respond to the US DoJ?
Will I be expecting an email I wonder?
With hundreds (and climbing) of servers located in many different legal entities I think that the crims already have an alternative. With Tor already in wide use the horse has already bolted.
I am sure that you will hard to find a video camera that does not contain Chinese logic in it.
Even if you make a camera from scratch using, say, a Raspberry Pi, the processor and network chips are of Chinese origin.
We sleep walked into this situation and it will be costly to get out of it.
This reminds me of the early days of software licencing. Problems with validation, lost keys, paid-for but did not work, second hand sales, licence transfers etc etc. all left users very frustrated and angry.
I use, and supply, a used servers and I wonder how this is going to play out? Will a processor with licenced features enabled still have those features? If licences have lapsed will the CPU just lock-up? What about software the requires a licenced feature to be enabled but isn't - what then?
If we think the Wintel conspiracy is over then wait for Microsoft to use the "can't live without" features in their software which will force users to pay Intel a bit more than they budgeted for.
It's a minefield and, hopefully, AMD will use the debacle to get more sales.
It is the Aussies fault that they were complacent about their own security systems. If my house is burgled then, if I have poor locks or no CCTV, it is my fault that I made it easy to break in.
The problem is Aussies still think that they live in isolation like it was before the Internet. They have to realise that the Internet does not respect geographical boundaries.
If course they could adopt the model used by Russia and China where everything is filtered....
Under the guise of inflation and energy price increases this is the bait and switch in action. Too late and too expensive to revert to on-prem so you have to suck it up.
On-prem energy costs can be mitigated by installing solar panels on the roof, or even the car park, which is half empty with a lot of folks working from home.
Making companies purchase new hardware just to run the latest software is no longer ethical. Withdrawing support to further pressure companies to do this is also out of order. It creates unnecessary landfill just to line the coffers of $soft and Intel.
Apart from one machine, we have migrated away from Windows to Linux. Except for two apps we have managed to live without it and they now run in VirtualBox under Linux. However, even those apps are now saying that they will run on Win 10 & 11 only.
When will this end?
With the recession causing a slow down in chip purchases could this be a risky venture now? Spending all that money and taking on a debt for a plant that will not be profitable for many years seems like betting the farm to maintain industry dominance. If it backfires then it could put them back many years. Maybe then they will ditch that horrible and over extended X86 architecture.
I wonder if this is just a ruse to get software developers to use "Intel only" features and instructions so that it creates an advantage over AMD? Yes, the software vendors can write instructions that get around the special instructions on non Intel processors but the ploy may well tempt some cloud vendors to take a closer look...
It beggars belief that seemingly basic errors still happen today.
Surely the writers of the test harnesses should cover all possible states and use cases without exception? And then another team, that only has sight of the requirements specification, writes another testing suite.
The cost of a lost mission makes a few software engineers' salaries chicken feed.
Replaceable batteries is not an easy task.
Apart from extracting the custom shaped battery pack from the vehicle in an easy and timely manner, just imagine the H&S issues with 400 volt (or more) high amperage connectors on flying leads in the hands of minimum wage numpties? Stand well back!
I met the Elliott 803 at college and it was pivotal in me choosing a career in computers. I never knew the connection to Barron. He was a genius for sure and the whole Transputer project had so many things that were revolutionary about it that, only now, have we finally "got it". Sadly missed.
It is a bold statement - "delivering world-class silicon by the end of next year." - but, it really is just loud words and is not achievable.
Similarly, the grand EU "save the IC world" plan will just suck in lots of Euros and, by the time it is producing anything saleable, the IC world (and TSMC) will have caught up to the point where there will be oversupply again.
And, I wonder, are India still receiving UK Foreign Aid? If they are then this RSC-V plan, along with their Space Program should be enough to convince the UK Government to turn the aid off. There are far more deserving countries out there.
I was just two days into an MOD contract and opened the "XXXXXX Specification Document". There were lots of pages marked "this page intentionally left blank" and paragraph sections with TBA in them.
It was reminiscent of the Blackadder scene where they are planning to go around the world. Melchett says: "“Blackadder, here’s a map of the known world (hands over blank parchment)… fill it in as you go along”"
On my project I was given a fairly complete section to code and told not to worry about the rest for now. At every point where an API call was required I made something up and updated the specification document. It was coding by the serendipity method.
Demo was my first ISP. Initially on dial-up (US Robotics squawk squawk), then eventually ADSL. I stayed with them until Vodafone bought them. Vodafone were not going to support FTTC so I migrated to Zen where I have been ever since.
The good thing with Demon was the technical support which was located in UK and manned by technical people that knew what they were doing.
So sad to lose a genuine pioneer from those days.
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