Dogs
I've owned dogs for many years.
40 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Dec 2017
Are you claiming that an official press release containing information that may affect the value of a company isn't covered by investor protection laws? I'm not in the US (and IANAL) but if that's the case then how come Elon Musk's tweets have caused so much ire?
I worked for Burroughs/Unisys and one day an engineer told a story. He'd been called by an irate bank. I won't name them but in those days you were unlikely to find a branch south of Hadrian's Wall. One of their customers had complained that the atm had failed to issue the tenner. A long argument ensued: the engineer defended his machine, explaining that such a situation was impossible.
Years later he was uninstalling the machine in question. Tucked away underneath he found a tenner. Rather than reopen old wounds he secreted it from the premises.
I visited a Unisys plant once that was close to releasing a new version of software to configure a communications controller. There were signs all round the plant asking employees to spend a given day trying to break the software in any way they could.
I stll think a formal script is necessary, but maybe it isn't sufficient.
It seems to be a fiull house: keeping personal data in the sensitive category without it being necessary (so far as we can see); keeping it in an unencrypted spreadsheet, then mailing it to world+dog.
I bet the person responsible has had little or no training in data protection and GDPR.
I really hope they informed the ICO before this was published.
I seem to remember the scenario you suggested - caller in Devon, call centre in Scotland, ambulance despatched from Birmingham - was exactly the problem. For some odd reason there was a feeling that a Scottish call handler might, just possibly, lack local knowledge.
But you made your anti-union point.
What could possibly have gone wrong with a huge Government IT project, outsourced to a private contractor? The track record of suck projects had been so good recently.
"HMRC say they will reclaim Gift Aid from the donor if not enough income tax had been paid to offset it. That implies they correlate a charity's claims with the donor's tax records .... "
It does, but they don't. All the charity collects for a Gift Aid claimant is their name, address and the date of their declaration. No DoB, NI number or wany other easy way of linking to a tax account. In fact I've long thought that HMRC seem to have no interest in policing the scheme.
A mainframe computer, Burroughs 4700, late '70s. We rented out time to users who needed extra capacity for routine batch jobs. One user, a London discount house, was famous for its attractive computer operators.
One morning one of said attractive operators come out of the machine room to say they had a problem: their work was taking much longer than usual. I went in and saw immediately that the array of lights indicating the system state was static. The computer wasn't actually doing anything.
The second thing I saw was a handbag resting on a long key labelled stop/run.
I was thinking the same thing about 'permanently' deleted emails still being recoverable. For a certain number of days the user can recover the mails themselves through the Outlook UI. After that, but for quite a long time, an admin with Powershell magic can still recover deleted mails.
As to those who whitter on about people needing to keep old mails for regulatory reasons, Exchange will enforce that for you, no need to concern the user.
I understand why the broadcasters want DAB. They control all the masts and can cram more channels in the spectrum. But what's in it for me?
I can use FM, which sounds better than DAB and which degrades gracefully, or I can use the Internet, with a hugh choice of channels (including small players who can't afford a slot on a DAB multiplex) and sound quality comparable to DAB.
What's the use case for DAB?
There are still plenty of pairs of signal boxes linked by telegraph on the UK's railways. Signallers communicate with each other by means of single-strike bell codes then use block instruments to track and repeat the status of the line: whether it's clear, occupied or the default status of line blocked (indeterminate).
I was at a Telco in southern China, during the rainy season. We were working on a fairly beefy mainframe that had a short message service centre installed on it.
The heavens opened at lunchtime, just as we crossed the road to the restaurant. A mighty thunderstorm rolled over, with sheets of water running along the road and constant lightning. Unsurpisingly, the lights went out. We weren't bothered. The customer's a telco, their power supply won't be affected.
Once the storm subsided a little we swam back across the road. As we expected, the computers were all up and running. What we didn't expect was the cacophony of warning beeps due to overtemperature.
Yes, the aircon wasn't on the UPS.
Didn't really matter as the service wasn't live yet, but a timely reminder.
Correct.
Burroughs used to have a 4GL called Linc. In the early days it had no graphical development environment, everything was specified via text files.Then a colleague of mine developed a way to graphically describe LINC components. He called it Direct Input of Linc Definitions Online. And sold it to several companies.
Marketing weren't too impressed.
"Not having folding money in my wallet is a good disincentive to not pull out my plastic cards."
I find the exact opposite.How else can you make the beer come from the other side of the bar when the cash has gone? Oh have I misunderstood? There are a lot of negatives in your sentence for so early in the day.
Yes, we are all different people. I find contactless easier to control than cash, because every little transaction appears in my bank account.
"Apps that get installed into a users profile don't go anywhere near the system32 folder."
But any system admin would prevent that from happening, ot at least prevent the installed application from running, using tools such as Software Restriction Policies or AppLocker.
Problem is an increasingly large number of vendors who should know better choose to distribute software that is designed to work like this (I'm looking at you, Autodesk).
"Does this apply to Music? Could the music that I’ve ‘bought’ from iTunes disappear because they lose the rights to it..."
Much of mine has disappeared. Apple say you can download music you've bought as often as you like, but there are weasel words along the lines of 'so long as we still sell it'. Many of my purchases were made when replacing my vinyl catalogue, so there was plenty of 70s stuff with titles like 'Diamond Dogs 2015 remaster'. Once 2015 ended the title of the product on sale changed to '2016 remaster'. At that point if you lose your local copy, you're well and truly stuffed, as I discovered.
"AC because at the place where I work, central IT does MITM with https. I've tried explaining to people that the padlock which shows when they log into their bank at lunch break does not mean they have a secure connection with the bank, just a secure connection with work's proxy and that IT can potentially log and see everything they do online, including usernames, passwords and potentially sensitive information such as bank statements and that whether or not you trust IT do be sensible with these logs, what happens if there's a breach and the logs are stolen, and "meh" is exactly the reaction I get, followed by placing an Amazon order for a couple of hundred quid."
The web filter I'm most familiar with, Smoothwall, has a builtin category of sites, mostly banking, which are exempted from https mitm inspection. Sure, you have to trust your IT folks not to override this but I'd have thought most companies other than those needing very high security would realise that it's in everyone's interest to allow their employees this amout of privacy.