Posts by Natalie Gritpants Jr

Consultants' eyes light up as UK.gov dangles £4bn over 6 years for 'large-scale digital transformation programmes'

I don't think I've ever gone shopping knowing what I'll spend and not knowing what I'll spend it on. Oh, hold, on. I remember being given a couple of quid at the seaside amusement arcade. I spent every penny (very quickly), I expect the people behind this feel the same as I did.

So I’ve scripted a life-saving routine. Pah. What really matters is the icon I give it

Re: Try living in a building...

Serves you right for being posh. Get a number and your life will be so much better. Amazon don't care that you can afford to own Hill View Cottage. Our's has a name and it doesn't help that the OS maps use the medieval version of the name, and it doesn't help that there are 4 abodes down a 1/4 mile drive numbered 5,7,9,11 and the numbers at the top of the drive go 1,3,13,17, but deliveries are easier now we just use the number. Hermes are crap though and always pretend we are out so they can deliver the next day yet still be paid for quick delivery.

Beer glass full of Nutella

Bumble fumble: Dude divines definitive location of dating app users despite disguised distances

Take a tip from the audio engineers. Adding a random number (0.0 to 0.99999) and then using floor() is probably better than round().

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

Re: Stone dead....

I'm still here. Not as well paid as banking contractors, but doing well in the ASIC/FPGA sector. It's real project based work, so the clients are not scared of HMRC as the contract will end with the project in a few months or maybe even a year.

Re: If HMRC had to take the GOV offenders to court? how would that work? particularly the DoJ?

I expect it's all rather friendly and not at all ike it would be with HMRC vs a real trading company. The result is: department budget has to be increased, but oh look, HMRC has more money coming in than expected, and it may get to set precedent in the courts

Giant Tesla battery providing explosion in renewable energy – not as intended

Those building look very close together

I though Australia had plenty of space, so why pack the building so close? Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but maybe future battery farms could have bigger fire breaks between.

Iranian state-backed hackers posed as flirty Scouser called Marcy to target workers in defence and aerospace

Re: Can't believe people

Would you like a job with us? Exciting, overseas travel, expenses, Aston Martin. We'll be in touch, just accept our invite.

'Login infrastructure issue' blamed as sustained Xero outage threatens payrolls

Bad idea to have 100% of your business running on one cloud

Perhaps it's a bit much to expect accountants to add this up, but you could use two different clouds and only have half the impact of an outage twice as often, and still keep working on some clients.

Thinking about upgrading to Debian Bullseye? Watch out for changes in Exim and anything using Python 2.x

trac is removed but coming back soon

You may want to wait for 11.1 if you use trac, or upgrade from Buster.

I no longer have a burning hatred for Jewish people, says Googler now suddenly no longer at Google

For most people more words are better, longer words too. Not me, even though I can come across as rude/curt/grumpy/terse.

Happy 'Freedom Day': Stats suggest many in England don't want it or think it's a terrible idea

Not to be a pessimist, but another lockdown would be the best outcome for a new variant that the vaccines are ineffective against.

Ordnance Survey to take a poke at Pokémon-style gaming with outdoorsy AR adventure

Just because your data is valuable, it doesn't mean you should monetize it

The OS organization seems to have been taken over by rejects from the RIAA that want to squeeze the maximum income from their trove of data. Data paid for by the British taxpayer for centuries, relevant only to the British people (and those planning to invade). The data should be made freely available with no copyright attached. I'm sure the government won't cut off their funding as it is a useful service, but it seems to have been skewed by a desire to show how valuable all that data is.

How many Brits have deleted life-saving track and trace app from their phones? No idea, junior minister tells MPs

Re: Google Play Analytics

The best way to find out is to ask people i.e. do a survey. Oh look, the Grauniad did one already. Looks like the numbers have gone down by 30%

Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class

What country is your friend in? I'm surprised that Covid trackers have access to financial information.

Boffins find an 'actionable clock' hiding in your blood, ticking away to your death

Re: Missing Inaction

Here's to the wound that never heals

The longer you stroke it the softer it feels

IT manager who swindled Essex hospital trust out of £800k gets 5 years in prison

"He's appalled by what he's done"

I don't think you can be appalled by your own action, especially as he went as far as setting up shell companies. Feeling guilty and ashamed maybe.

New Yorkers react to strikingly indifferent statue of Elon Musk with cheerful hostility

Re: Genuine question

Obviously it's satire and so is protected as free speech.

In South Korea the new normal future of work is ... a 52-hour work week! (Down from 68)

0.84 will cause problems in looking after the elderly if it becomes a global trend. 0.95 for a few centuries, then back to 1 would reduce the population to something more sustainable. Unless you want us to go extinct. If your countries R rate is too far below 1 you will have to allow immigration is large numbers in order to look after all the oldies.

Nominet is back to 'the same old sh*t' says Public Benefit campaign chief as EGM actions grind to halt

Re: Nominet's handing of EGM voting data to a market research agency, Savanta

"mundane domain name registry" with a £5m per year surplus that was going to charity. I can see the attraction.

Facebook granted patent for 'artificial reality' baseball cap. Repeat, an 'artificial reality' baseball cap

Ahem, big fan of the baseball cap here, but only in strong sunlight. I twist them around so the peak points at the sun and gives maximum shade to my face/ears/neck depending on which way I'm facing. Plus, it's ironic when I wear one.

Post-lunch snooze plans dashed as the UK tests its Emergency Alerts... again

Works via mobile reception

So it will have problems reaching those on a west facing beach beneath with no mobile signal. Not good if a piece of the La Palma falls into the sea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja_tsunami_hazard

Now that China has all but banned cryptocurrencies, GPU prices are falling like Bitcoin

Re: Phew that was close!

"IOU from our government, backed by nothing of any value, except a promise to tax our citizens" - which is precisely why it has value, that and the fact that most currencies have an army backing them that will not let another currency just pop up and replace the incumbent.

Deluded medics fail to show Ohio lawmakers that COVID vaccines magnetise patients

Re: Struck off?

My sample size of one indicates that osteopaths are 100% ok. Now this lunatic has brought the score down to 50%.

The one I know that does good likes to pint out the difference between osteopaths and chiropractors by saying to compare the car parked outside their practice. He drives a tatty Land Rover, the chiropractors around are all in posh Mercs. That seems to be a good measure of how effective you are at getting your patients to a point where they no longer need you, or how good you are at convincing them they need to come back every week.

PrivacyMic looks to keep your home smart without Google, Alexa, Siri and pals listening in

Re: misses the point

Not sure about TV as I watch recordings with MythTV, and it skips commercials. You are, however, absolutely spot on with commercial radio, back in the days before podcasts I used to turn the radio off for 5 minutes three times an hour as channel skipping was pointless. Even the ads were synchronized, so hopping off a MacyD ad just got you to the same ad - aaargh.

'Universal Processor' startup Tachyum unveils full-system Prodigy emulator ahead of sampling later this year

The cynic in me suspects they are having problems building a performant ASIC and need to get something out in order to get another round of funding. No-one expects FPGA performance to match ASIC but having an FPGA demonstrates that you are not just vapourware.

Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

Re: What causes this?

The clue is in the acronym: content denial network

Seagate finds sets of two heads are cheaper than one in its new and very fast MACH.2 dual-actuator hard disks

Re: Reduced testing time

Maybe I'm more paranoid about data storage than Seagate. I would have thought that testing the drive would mean testing that arm1 can read what arm0 wrote and all the other three combinations. You might be able to do write0-read0-read1, the write1-read0-read1 but still it means the test takes twice as long a single arm disk.

Or is there no ability for one arm to read the other's data? In which case a 30 TB dual arm drive is really two 15 TB conventional disks jammed into one package in a RAID0 format. If that is the case then the only advantage is space and power saving and no speed advantage.

FYI: Today's computer chips are so advanced, they are more 'mercurial' than precise – and here's the proof

Re: Error detection

You can configure some ARM cores this way and crash on disagreement. Doubles your power consumption and chip area though.

Apple to summon staff back to the office in September

Re: Bonkers approach?

Apple control-freakery doesn't just apply to their customers

Former IT manager from Essex pleads guilty to defrauding the NHS of £800k

Not sure how payroll records helped here, the Companies House records must have fingered him as director and signing authority. His big mistake is trying VAT fraud, those people can search anything.

Arm freezes hiring until Nvidia takeover, cancels everyone's 'wellbeing' allowance

Re: Flim Flammery

"the majority of the workforce resigns" and Cambridge Science Park turns into The Hunger Games.

All that Lego has a purpose: Researchers find that spatial memory improves kids' mathematical powers

Re: Lego and origami

I still have my Dad's Meccano set in a box. It includes a small paraffin fired boiler and tiny piston that can drive cogs and chains. If you hold down the safety pressure relief valve you can get your windmill to go into overdrive (don't worry about the speed of the rotating steel windmill blades, they don't go all the way through a pencil).

Here's how we got persistent shell access on a Boeing 747 – Pen Test Partners

Re: Run old systems for better security

This. It can't be that hard to keep old exploit methods around, can it? I'm pretty sure the TLA professionals would. Far from being positive PR, this just tells me that PTP prefers shiny-shiny to useful-functional, and you shouldn't use them to test your infrastructure.

Proposed amendments to UK Finance Bill target rogue umbrella companies ripping off contractors after IR35

Wouldn't it be simpler to just get rid of NI

and tax all income (including dividends) as income? The law-makers don't seem to get that the more laws you make the more loop-holes there are and there are a lot more smart people looking for loop-holes than law-makers.

Google to revive RSS support in Chrome for Android

The problem with really useful free stuff

is that if it can't be used to make money the big companies will actively try to replace it. RSS is one example (anyone can run TinyTinyRSS on their own computer and get a nice ad-free news reader that works well on a mobile or desktop web browser) but there are others that are under attack e.g. FLAC

Android 12 beta lands bringing better personalisation, speed upgrades, and some privacy tools borrowed from iOS 14

Was hoping to get album art back on the lockscreen

but no mention of that anywhere.

Apple announces lossless HD audio at no extra cost, then Amazon Music does too. The ball is now in Spotify's court

Re: Since it is lossless

If all you do with it is to play it in a CD player, yes you are the last person on earth to do that. When I buy a CD I rip it to FLAC so that I can enjoy it easily wherever I am. I'll buy lossless digital preferably as it's less damaging to the environment and this system from Apple and Amazon may provide a way to get it. I hate the idea of subscribing to music and the Apple/Amazon way may be subscription, so I'll be stuck buying plastic CDs.

Since it is lossless

Can I record the stream to get a personal CD quality copy I can keep forever? How many can I stream in the free 3 months? Obviously I won't as that would breach copyright, I'm asking for a friend.

US declares emergency after ransomware shuts oil pipeline that pumps 100 million gallons a day

Re: Lessons learnt? I doubt it.

It was not difficult to make a card that would cause a reboot on certain mainframes. There was a Boroughs machine at Warwick Uni in the early 80s that was susceptible (allegedly). Scatter enough of those in the pigeonholes used by students to submit their jobs and the computer will slow to crawl until they are all found.

Known software issue grounds Ingenuity Mars copter as it attempted fourth flight

Re: Have you tried switching it off and on again?

Landing always succeeds, the following operations may fail.

Home office setup with built-in boiling water tap for tea and coffee without getting up is a monument to deskcess

Re: it's a joke right?

Ghost-farmer

New systemd 248 feature 'extension images' updates immutable file systems without really updating them

Haters gotta hate

I'm OK with systemd. I think it is better at keeping a system in good nick than init-scripts. It can be hard to find the right man page but at least everything is documented in detail and Google usually has a quick answer.

I have a little set-top-box pc that has a read-only root I update by rsyncing the main server root file system and then having a dozen or so symlinks to handle the unique files and files that have to be write-able. Those symlinks are created by a script in the initramfs image (very painful to debug) so the vanilla boot procedure works normally. This new feature might be usable instead given that systemd has a very powerful and customizable dependency system.

Nominet ignores advice, rejects serious change despite losing CEO, chair, half its board in membership vote

Put your money where your mouth is

If you have a .uk address move it somewhere else.

IBM, Red Hat face copyright, antitrust lawsuit from SCO Group successor Xinuos

Re: Ah shit ...

Obviously they think it is worth it. Their mistake is thinking there is a chance of success.

State of Maine orders review of $54.6m Workday project as it alleges delivery failure and threatens cancellation

There must be a better way to build these systems

It was done 30 years ago probably in COBOL on a mainframe that probably has less compute power than the average PC. I think the problem word in this instance is 'comprehensive' as it tells the vendor that you don't know what you want, but you think you can afford the best.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson reluctant to reveal his involvement in the OneWeb deal

Re: IT in Spaaaaaaace?

You probably won't have to wait long till it lands in your garden.

Ticker tape and a binary message: Bank of England's new Alan Turing £50 must be the nerdiest banknote ever

Any idea where I get one of these

Do I actually have to go outside and visit a bank?

Chairman, CEO of Nominet ousted as member rebellion drives .uk registry back to non-commercial roots

Re: Employment law still applies

Directors don't have employment rights.

Chancellor launches £500m business software subsidy in the UK. What's 'approved' software then?

Re: Sounds great

So about £300 per year for what I used to do for free. All because using copy-paste is bad whereas doinking your data through layers of commercial software is good.