Posts by Azamino

Wanted: IT manager for UK government agency – £60k

Levity!

Who says that El Reg doesn't do levity any more?

If this is true " like all modern government departments, .... its dedicated staff can carry out their duties ..." then we only have old gov't departments.

TBF I did briefly work for the public sector myself, I applied for a permie job which I didn't get but ended up going back to that role as temp'. The poor sod they hired had received far too little training and disappeared on some variety of leave of absence. The hours were fantastic, I left on time every day etc and, hard to believe as it was 1994 not 1894, we had a tea lady with a trolley!

America's National Science Foundation tells DEI, misinfo studies: You're fired

Re: Institute for Pure American Physics

I get the gist but please, zero was discovered / invented on the Indian subcontinent, popularised by Brahmagupta and then found its way through China to the caliphates and then Europe. Science tends to be a collaborative effort.

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

Re: "English language keyboard license"

Well I'm guessing that your kb would come with a Kernow licence, Korev.

Decent lager, I can buy it in my local Asda in E10, but it doesn't seem the same when you have not spent a day by the sea.

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

"How do you explain magnetic fields around a helical filament to people who dispense bowling shoes for a living? " Yeah, that's the condescending, smart Alec, tosspottery that I remember from working in the early 90s. Tech guy turning up to fix a problem without stopping to explain the cause so that when the error was repeated they could score another easy ticket.

BTW - They may not be up to speed on physics, but the guys slinging bowling shoes still have a job. Can the same be said for the armies of service tech's that used to exist?

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Re: How?

@ the anonymous former contractor. Yes, the company pays tax on profits as it is the legal entity etc but as a one man band who owned, operated and delivered the services sold by said company…. it’s not a stretch to say “I would be paying “.

We lost the battle on IR35 but I have given up on raging about it. I went PAYE, slashed my hours back and took to being a permie like a duck to water.

Re: How?

You have got to be trolling us with a Gary "Best Trader at Citi" Stevenson video!

Rebuilding infrastructure is expensive and if the Gov't borrows too much money to fund it then the bond markets will hit them with higher interest rates which could lead to crippling inflation.

As far as taxing the rich goes, well in 2024 the top 1% of income tax payers accounted for 29% of the income tax raised. Investment income is treated differently but if not in an ISA or SIPP wrapper you are going to pay hefty taxes too. If I was still contracting I would be paying 25% corporation tax and then another 8.75% (basic rate), 33.75% (higher rate), and 39.35% (additional rate) on any dividends.

Address the core UK problem of low productivity, stop choosing cheap labour over investment in automation and the economic outlook might change.

It looks like IBM is cutting jobs again, with Classic Cloud hit hard

Spotted a mistake there...

Not sure how it happened but "trimming teams on older products," should read "trimming teams on older staffers,".

How NOT to f-up your security incident response

Re: "having a current incident response plan that is [...] regularly rehearsed

I contracted for one of the larger European banks in the noughties and once a year we would schlepp over to their Business Continuity site on a weekend to practise failing over from the 'live' site in the City. We would make live a handful of BBG terminals, connect to DataStream and have a bunch of juniors login to PC's and run thru' a tick list of tasks. The senior management didn't really engage and their running joke was that it was an elaborate scheme on our part to generate some easy overtime (and to be fair it was pretty tasty day rate).

Want to play billionaire for a day? This app lets you rent your own armed goon squad

Re: Uber with guns

Nah, you're thinking of the MoD Plod.

Robot dogs learn bomb disposal tricks in trials

Re: Be careful what you say!

Very good shout, his Cabin Pressure series is back on BBC Sounds. I remember listening to the series as Benedict Cumberbatch's career rose in parallel with his character Captain Crieff's, it was a marvel, and rather touching, when his character headed off to greener fictitious pastures while the actor became a Hollywood star.

WFH with privacy? 85% of Brit bosses snoop on staff

Jiggler

Putting my optical mouse on top of an analogue clock laid flat on the desk was always sufficient to keep my PC awake back in the day, the moving seconds hand providing all the movement necessary.

Smile! UK cops spend tens of millions on live facial recognition tech

The land will still be there, no one is going to buy up Ambridge and ship it overseas! If land is sold it will give those tenant farmers a chance to buy it and own their futures for a change, rather than living hand-to-mouth, sweating the land with chemicals to maximise yield at the expense of its long-term health.

Nonsense on stilts

If your return on investment (ROI) is less than 1% you don't have a business, you have a hobby. Maybe a great hobby, a really useful one that helps other people, but its still a hobby.

Despite the poor returns farmland is incredibly valuable and you do not need to be Adam Smith to work out why!

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to eject hundreds more workers

Re: RIF ye not...

In every organisation you will have a mix of 'drivers' and 'passengers' and people will move between the two archetypes. Fingers-crossed that the fickle hand of fate will land on the third category, the 'stowaways', who only exist to add friction to every process.

Not that getting the push early is necessarily a bad thing, back in the Dot Com days those let go early tended to get the enhanced payouts while the poor slobs who poured heart and soul into a sinking start-up got statutory payouts.

Wanted. Top infosec pros willing to defend Britain on shabby salaries

Wanted. Top infosec pros willing to defend Britain on shabby salaries

You forgot Option C, spend a 15 years contracting and then quit with a BTL portfolio paying the bills.... or has IR35 killed that off?

BOFH: Boss's quest for AI-generated program ends where it should've begun

Oh the sentiment!

"That's why I'm so pleased to be much nearer the end of my career than the beginning."

That sums up what I so, so, so often want to say to the bright young things trooping thru' our doors with their emerging tech. It'll be great, but I should much rather not be a part of it.

Red team hacker on how she 'breaks into buildings and pretends to be the bad guy'

Re: "We had found the credentials for their corporate Wi-Fi network in the trash [...]" Seriously?

My shop offers a 'coffee shop' wifi network for staff to use with personal phones and client equipment. It is blocked from the corporate network and has the usual restrictions on gambling sites etc and 12ft.io but otherwise pretty open. Reception hands out passes that last 24 hours to visitors, sounds like it was something similar that the author found in the bins.

I would be happy not to read stuff like "hijack the amygdala", distracting bored office workers really isn't that difficult.

UK government's bank data sharing plan slammed as 'financial snoopers' charter'

Re: What is all this self-assessment?

I decided to call it a day and wound up my limited company just before IR35 was expected to kick in (COVID knocked it back, but I was living several time zones away by then). Every year since I have received an automated email asking if I need to fill in a self-assessment, I give the same answer and no one ever responds... until the next email a year later.

ServiceNow root certificate blunder leaves users high and dry

Re: ServiceNowt.

If there is any kind of penalty for missing an SLA then folk are going to game the system. When, or if, the ticket winds it's way back to them the clock gets reset, giving them have a second chance to fix it within the agreed service level. Obviously bouncing tickets around like this is deeply inefficient but that is what ITIL has left us with.

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Working at Sainsbury’s in the late 1980s we had a lady pop in every Saturday afternoon (when the store was at its busiest) to demand a refund or exchange on a bottle of corked wine. Obviously the bottle was empty because she ‘had poured it out for all her friends’.

The first few times we gave her a bottle to get her out of our hair but then grew wise to it. It always struck me as petty and not a great use of their time.

Windows NT on a whole new platform: PowerMac

Ah, Windows NT

Despite spending a wasted fortune on Novell CNA training and exams etc that there NT4 paid my mortgage. Not very happy days at the time but in hindsight it all turned out rather nicely.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

What did the mechanic say when you took it to be fixed? I mean, you have tried to get it fixed haven't you?

Well overdue

If I hire an electric scooter in Bath the speed is capped depending on where I am, the same tech' should be applied to more dangerous vehicles.

Driving can be fun and if you especially enjoy speed book a track day and see how you compare to the track record for your age, vehicle class etc.

We've banned Chinese telco kit and drones. Next: Mountain bikes?

Re: Its our loss

Be very wary of exaggerating the impact of the cost of labour in manufacturing. Automation has led to ever fewer tasks that require a persons input on the production line. Ford's plant in Dagenham for example directly employs fewer that 3,000 people yet generates over £2.5 Billion in exports (Ford's own figures). With the exception of the rag trade* numbers employed will only go down.

* 15 years ago there was a very promising German idea of using glue that replicated stitching, but it didn't come to fruition.

Asda IT staff shuffled off to TCS amid messy tech divorce from Walmart

Re: Query

I was TUPE'd twice in the very early 2000's and while core benefits were respected our conditions diverged sharply from those who remained directly employed, ie no pay rises until our salaries matched those of our new colleagues. I did not hang about at the first firm but the new job went the same way with the same bloody outsourcer!

Query

How confident is the author that the Asda staff are being offered a choice of TUPE or redundancy? TUPE always used to mean that the job is not disappearing, just a switch of employer so there is no requirement to offer redundancy.

Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch cleared of all charges in US Autonomy fraud trial

Fly on the wall...

I should have loved to see the reaction of Sushovan Hussain to the news that his boss walks (albeit after a huge amount of money spent on legal fees) while he spent five years in chokey!

IBM spin-off Kyndryl accused of discriminating on basis of age, race, disability

Re: Bad KPI

As the excellent Livingafi wrote years ago, in IT support ABC stands for Always Be Closing!

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

Pretty sure that the pedestrians were struck by the drivers of the vehicles involved, unless these were the genuine self-driving article. Shocking how society ducks assigning responsibility for bad driving, always putting blame on victims or insisting that the sun was dazzling the driver. Imagine a world where knife crime sentences were reduced because the victim wasn't wearing a stab proof vest, that is where we are in the UK with driving offences.

Re: Research finds pedestrians don't pay attention when crossing road

Of course you have Anon ....

Return-to-office mandates had senior employees jumping ship

Re: Not surprised!

"IT is among those where old people are considered as experienced and valuable"? Which country are you working in, because my experience across the USA and the UK is completely different! Old heads are viewed with suspicion as they don't imbibe the koolaid with the enthusiasm of the youth and that is before considering the HR actions at firms like IBM.

Mars helicopter sends final message, but will keep collecting data

"Ingenuity's rotors were damaged by an unknown event."

First signs of locals resisting the gentrification of their planet?

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

Re: Wouldn't suprise me

My experience was a little different to that described above. My situation came about at the end of dotcom, a large multinational bought out our tiny unit and I was surplus to requirements. I was left more than a little bit miffed by their intention to enforce non-compete clauses in my contract while ignoring other clauses which benefitted me.

I saw a specialist lawyer for 30 minutes (which was free) and it then briefly threatened to get serious before the firm agreed to honour my contract and pay the costs I had incurred. Far from being marked out as a trouble maker it placed a marker against my name as someone who could be trusted to stand-up for the firm, customer or team.

ChatGPT? Sure, I've heard it. But is AI coming for my job?

My shop is pushing the line that AI will not take your job, it’s your colleagues using AI who will takeaway your job!

Wikileaks source and former CIA worker Joshua Schulte sentenced to 40 years jail

Re: the list is growing

Is there a single proven example of an American asset being killed or captured due to WikiLeaks?

None were linked to Bradley Manning - https://www.courthousenews.com/military-fails-to-link-leaks-with-any-deaths

eBay tells 1,000 employees their days at company are numbered

I'm still in the wrong business

A net profit of $2.04 billion on a reported revenue of $7.55 billion?

Now that is a very nice margin, 27%. Or approximately $200,000 of profit per employee, who will be rewarded in the now traditional fashion.

Will AI take our jobs? That's what everyone is talking about at Davos right now

My interpretation of Filippo's point was that the reduced hours worked in the 20th century were due to collective action, people campaigning and politicians legislating, not the tech itself. Happy to be corrected by Filippo if I have the wrong end of the stick.

Be honest. Would you pay off a ransomware crew?

Nuance

As a mortgage free, lean FIRE, permie it’s an easy answer to say don’t pay. Roll back a decade to when I was running my own firm and heavily mortgaged… it would be a whole other ball game.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto stolen after Ledger code poisoned

Re: I'm sorry, what was that?

Number Go Up, heh heh ...

Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

Re: Not difficult

If your plumber is spending 80% of their year servicing your boiler you probably need a new plumber!

X fails to remove hate speech over Israel-Gaza conflict

Re: Xitter has problems policing hate speech ?

"... they have to own what they say." Hmm, wind the clock back 35 years for how that worked out in the former Eastern Bloc, or nip into modern day China, Saudi Arabia etc to to see the impact it has on their citizens.

Props to you for walking the walk and posting under your own name rather than a handle.

BOFH: Monitor mount moans end in Beancounter beatdown

Bells!

Quasimodo orders a whisky,

Bells alright? asks the barman

Quasimodo - Mind yer own business!

I'll get me coat...

Robot mistakes man for box of peppers, kills him

That is certainly not the position I was expecting form someone with the handle Bloodbeastterror.

‘How not to hire a North Korean plant posing as a techie’ guide updated by US and South Korean authorities

"flooded the global marketplace with ill-intentioned information technology workers"

Looking out for the "ill-intentioned" doesn't really help does it? I worked in IT for 25 years, mostly banking, and I cannot remember any other type of worker lasting more than a couple of months!

My bosses were invariably trying to lock our customers into disadvantageous contracts while using the wrong software on minimally viable hardware. I much prefer the idea that they were fiendish degenerates making deliberate choices than well-intentioned incompetents making cock-up after cock-up.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Re: "Think of the children" is so last year...

You might want to look up Isla Bryson aka Adam Graham and re-think that last sentence AC.

Google launches $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers

No chance

Post IR35 the only way to make any serious coin in the UK is by working multiple gigs (>3) simultaneously at home. You can't maintain that illusion working from someone else's office!

Re: Possibly unpopular opinion, but...

> Except for people with families, perhaps?

There will be plenty of examples where the families will be more than happy with the arrangement!

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Re: Thermodynamics would like a word

It would have had to be one hell of an hallucination considering that the object was caught on his aircraft's cameras. An optical illusion sounds more likely but would that not have been figured out by now?

Nothing to see here

Nothing worth seeing on this rock since Waldo "D.R." Dobbs and Ernest Errol Quinch re-arranged the continents.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/comics/2000adstrips/drandquinch/drandquinch01.shtml

Boss such a tyrant you need a job quitting agent? It works in Japan

See handle

Yep, I can relate to this having lived and worked in Japan for a Japanese firm. Putting in my notice was excruciatingly awkward, and I was a foreigner for a local it has to be worse.