Posts by crg the new one

Mid-contract telco price hikes must end, Ofcom told

But 2 years is long term. Imagine being stuck with a provider that only charges your but doesn't provide much (like 90% of ISPs), and you can't get rid of them.

That was me stuck with Sky which charged me for 80Mbps and delivered under 10Mbps (so haven't delivered anything), and I paid even after I moved out because, otherwise, I should've paid don't know how much.

(and yes, I read their T&C before signing, but everybody's T&C is the same, all of them offer the same lame service on exactly the same conditions)

Progress towards 'Gigabit Europe' is slow, with UK also lagging

Re: As usual, apples and oranges

Nope, no, that's a narrative big and corrupt ISPs are pushing.

Take Romania, for example: year 2002, not in EU, very poor country, extremely poor people, not much disposable income but unregulated ISP market (read: no licenses, no artificial lock-in, anybody could provide internet by registering a LTD, operating the next day). Result: there were over 3000 small ISPs that covered not more than a few streets, maybe two neighbourhoods, everybody had several offers to choose from, internet was pennies because of competition.

Over time, those ISPs bought one another, installed fibre by themselves, by 2008 major cities had 1Gbps, currently everybody can have 1Gbps for €9 per month, they choose not to get 1Gbps because 250Mbps is the lowest and good enough.

No government subsidies, only private money, only small company money, 1Gbps by 2008 in a market where only 1% of population could afford the costs, now 98% coverage despite no government subsidies, despite the fact that over 50% of Romanians don't care for any form of internet.

Same thing happened with mobile data and voice: Qualcomm bought an older network there to test their (future, at that time) VoLTE, they weren't interested in profits but wanted to test the tech, offered calls at 1c per call back in 2003-2004, automatically Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile of Romania had to offer the same, otherwise they would've been out of business.

And guess what: they offered the same, they're still offering now, none of them went bankrupt, now unlimited voice and data over 5G with Vodafone is €7.

Yes, that same Vodafone that's here in UK.

I don't believe UK is over 10%,

Everywhere I look on openrent or rightmove, they have that internet checker and it's extremely rare to find a house for rent with access to fibre. In 90% of cases, it says ADSL or CATV.

Why I believe the stats appear skewed and we get 60% coverage is because of the legal definition of "fibre broadband" in UK, which is something like "any lame connection, no matter how slow, if it employs fibre for one inch anywhere in it's whole length", this way basically any ADSL qualifying as fibre.

And now for something completely different: Python 3.12

Re: only language designed by dipshits

Exactly! And still, it's the most popular, which tells you a lot about the average developer. Which then, in turn, should tell you a lot about the average software solution the average developer creates. Yes, total dipshit.

BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

Re: Drat - I will need a new 'phone

Well, to my knowledge there's no vanilla Android, but you can have KitKat (Android 4.4), Lollipop (5.0), Marshmallow (6.0), Nougat (7.0), Oreo (8.0), Pie (9.0), Jelly Bean, Ice Cream Sandwich, Honeycomb, Gingerbread, Froyo, Eclair, Donut or Cupcake.

Privacy sucking all of them, different flavours.

Okay, SMART ePANTS, you tell us how to create network-connected textiles

Airplane mode?

So, if I want to go offline, what, should I pull down my ePANTS?

"Caught with his pants down" gets a completely new meaning.

22 million Brits suffer broadband outage blues and are paying a premium for it

Re: Big city not always better...

Sorry but what you're describing, 60Mbps, is not good, is not broadband, isn't speedy. That should be the lowest by law.

The definition of "decent internet" should be something like 150Mbps on a fibre that can deliver 1Gbps, kind of 10W out of an audio amplifier that can deliver 100W.

Why such headroom? Because that 60Mbps line is a lame ADSL which already struggles to deliver that, and will go down to 1.5Mbps when it will be raining, while 150Mbps over a 1Gbps FTTB will deliver 150 only because it's software limited by the provider, and will never no lower than that. That's the reliability part.

(Speaking from experience, I had 150, 500Mbps and 1Gbps on fibre lines, such fibre has 4ms ping to GCP, AWS and Azure, in day to day home use, even heavy use, you can't say it's only 150Mbps or it's the full 1Gbps. Only downloading CoD MW from Steam makes a difference, as it's 230GB)

> people in the UK typically buy on price rather than speed

Hmm, I believe people in UK typically buy the only thing available at their address, which in 99% of cases is ADSL (so no broadband).

IT needs more brains, so why is it being such a zombie about getting them?

Re: What are IT qualifications for in 2023?

> You find good developers by asking them to supply a complete smallish application they've written as a sample of their work.

No, YOU find good developers that way, but 90% of architects and tech leads who carry those interviews can't read two lines of code.

And, more and more, lead developers tend to be people who only managed to go through the university but aren't really technically-minded (best example being a buddy of mine who, while being a senior, expert .NET developer, refused to try to fix his blog because it's in PHP, not C# or Java, the stuff he knows), and such people tend to know a single way, their way of doing something, or using something, thus being unable to correctly evaluate how good or bad other developers are. If the candidate doesn't arrange the variables alphabetically, he/she's out.

(no joke here, I've been working in such organisation)

Architects nowadays only "design" rectangles and arrows on a board, they can't possibly evaluate code. Tech leads are, usually, developers who weren't good developers so... Then developers themselves: 90% of code reviews I see (in projects done in corporations) are superficial, about naming conventions and spaces between methods, obvious bugs and stupid bad code goes unseen. You can't expect such lame devs to correctly interview, evaluate or hire good devs, they will only hire losers like themselves.

From browser brat to backend boss: Will WASM win the web wars?

Re: Utterly Pointless

And I so hate all the stupid "technologies" that, over the years, wanted to bend the browser into looking like a desktop app, from Flash to ActiveX to Silverlight to... To OOB, a thing they came up with to run Silverlight out of browser.

So it wasn't in the browser anymore, was an app looking 100% like a desktop app, had it's own icon on desktop, had an uninstall entry, but was still web-based?

WTF was web based about it anymore?

Now with WASM... So it runs in the browser but doesn't let you interact with any textbox or form button in the page, won't receive an onchange event from a drop-down, won't display a pixel and, more recently, you don't need a browser cause you run it on the server.

Why is it called "W"ASM anymore?

Aerial cable tangles are still being strung up, but carriers are slowly burying the problem

Internet in Romania cca 2003, colorized

That was Romania (not as many wires as in those pictures but still) between 2000-2015, the competition was fierce, there were over 3000 ISPs in the country, 4-5 willing to get a wire to your window by tomorrow morning.

I remember having 50Mbps in 2004, then buddies of mine who were still living there got 1Gbps by 2006 or 07 (yeah, imagine that).

Quality internet was always a commodity in that country, I just checked now and 1Gps costs less than £8 per month.

(when Vodafone offers 1Gbps plus 160 TV channels for £12 there)

Microsoft makes some certification exams open book

Re: Would about do it for me...

But the idea behind Microsoft Azure exams isn't to teach people anything useful, to verify real skills, but only to create more Azure evangelists, to sell more Azure, for these wannabe developers to know how to achieve something only by using Azure resources, to be useless for anything else.

Most of new, young IT people aren't tech-minded guys, they do that or the other because they've learnt that particular thing they're doing, their skills aren't transferable. With these courses and certs, Microsoft taps into this new world of people who will only do how they've been told to do it, they "learn" Azure so Azure is the only thing they know, nothing else.

Like Windows was back then: a person learnt how to use Windows, they ended up using Windows all their life.

Re: In the short term, it'll increase pass rates. In the long term, it'll make for a better exam.

Strangely, I managed for 30 years without any cert, only now I need certs.

It used to be easy to prove my skills, the interviewer used to be a technical person but not anymore, now from recruiter and agent to project manager, tech lead and architect, nobody can evaluate my skills.

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

Can't use plain text, I challenge anybody to reply to a recruiter in plain text.

And images... How do you reply in plain text to a recruiter inviting you to apply to a lead developer role paid 45k on the basis that he thinks you're a good fit, and it's an opportunity? You need images for that, words can't express the anger.

Core-JS chief complains open source is broken, no one will pay for it

There's a new trend in hiring

So Accenture, who won't write a (very buggy) line of code unless you pay them millions, now are asking candidates for open source projects they've contributed to, and want to see their open-source GitHub. Same for Cognizant, Atos and many others.

So they ask their clients for millions to fix the bugs they themselves introduced, but expect developers to already have offered their work for free in order to become employees?

Weird.

Microsoft switches Edge’s PDF reader to pay-to-play Adobe Acrobat

I don't understand why we still use PDF

I mean... PDF is hard to work with (from a developer perspective), it's stuck to one format (paper) and can't re-flow on other mediums (like HTML.

OK, I get that some docs need to be read-only or preserve the A4 format, but only some, not all. Why do we have to pay to edit, sign or save to other format?

Yeah, I know there are niche tools to do all that for free, but the fact that they're niche proves the point.

How's that we rely on a weird document format and pay Adobe for features that are standard and free in order file formats and tools? How's that many other companies tried to replace PDF (Microsoft comes to mind, I forgot their file extension, was around Windows Vista) and none managed to do it?

Think of this file format, several files in a zip (similar to docx): one HTML for the content, one CSS for styling, one XML with attributes to indicate if the doc is strictly A4 or can be displayed on any medium, then signatures, hashes and certificates to allow checking how original the doc is, packed together in one file. Viewers and editors for HTML are easy to build for any platform (due to open source efforts like Chromium), the doc itself would be easy to read and work with on servers, would allow read-write fields to be completed by other people... Everything PDF does and more.

Why is that nobody managed to get rid of PDF and Adobe? What is it so special and complicated that we still depend on Adobe?

I don't understand why we still use PDF

I mean... There are tons of document formats (from HTML

Bank of England won't call it Britcoin but says digital pound 'likely to be needed in future'

Quidcoin

Quidcoin sounds better, and Q with 2 lines through it (like £, $ or €) is not already taken. At least I hope.

Epic payment: Fortnite maker pays record $520m to settle FTC case

I'm pretty sure it's like this:

- the Settings, Account, Registration or whatever Buy screens and user flows are all fully configurable down to ordering of buttons, prompts and notifications

- developers build that, other business guys configure them after consulting with their legal team

And everything is configurable specifically because Epic may need to quickly change that or the other in some country because of such court decision.

Developers are not to blame, the business guys are to blame. And those lawyers who have no moral code.

Financial authorities fine UK bank nearly $60m for platform migration disaster

What points of failure, let me guess: static variables used as "per-user" caches, test plans that never tested with more than one server and one user, no concern of what happens if the next request of the same browser goes to a different web server, everything coded like the whole system is gonna be used by a single user?

(at that time I was hired to fix exactly the same kind of errors, people seeing other people's data, but for a water supplier. You won't believe what kind of s#it a large supplier delivers for £5.5m)

Study finds AI assistants help developers produce code that's more likely to be buggy

Re: Lower barriers to entry

No, it requires no curiosity nor mental capacity anymore. It used to be like that, developers to be technically minded, but not anymore.

There's been an inflation of developers, everybody and their mother is working in IT now, the quality is very low, these new developers aren't concerned with security, they don't automatically see that that code is bad.

Nowadays it's normal the supplier to deliver the software solution with bugs, then also normal to work on fixing those bugs for a year, new bugs being introduced in this process.

What's also normal:

- developers to be over-concerned with code style in their reviews, and not observe the obvious bugs or security problems

- developers to be more "focused" or "niched", which is a fancy term for being limited, not interested in any other tech stack, language, OS or cloud

- architects to be non-technical

- unit tests to cover as much as possible in order to get nice indicators in that whatever tool/board, but the tests being very dumb and not actually testing real life situations

- developers checking in code that doesn't break the build but was never tested, because (they say) testing is for testers to do

- developers unable to deploy to any servers, unable to install those servers, but needing DevOps for that

- developers not understanding that the next web request may not get to the same server and may not find their static variable populated, or find it populated with a different value

- architects not understanding that that software, as it is, won't automatically be scalable if you put it in VMs in Azure, nor magically become "microservices" if you put it in Kubernetes

So, please... It's obvious that you need no brain to become a software developer nowadays. All you need is, maybe, a diploma.

Openreach offers more wholesale fiber discounts, rivals call foul

Re: Admission

Please don't buy the "fibre is expensive to implement" thing, cause it's extremely cheap.

The same Vodafone from UK offers 1Gbps in Romania on £10 because, if it's more expensive, everybody would buy it from the competition.

So: I'm Romanian, Romania has had fibre since, don't know, 2006, was installed by private companies with no government help, and those companies installed it knowing that, at an average income of £300 per month, nobody would pay more than £5 per month, so it can't possibly cost much to install.

IPSE: More than a third of freelancers have quit contracting since IR35 reforms

I won't pay a bit

So both the agency and client expect me to work using my own 3k hardware and 2k software installation, they all expect me to have MSDN subscription with Visual Studio at least Pro (so 500 per year), to pay 320 per month for a 1.5m professional insurance, to ensure (through contact) that I'm 100% available for 6 months while they may end the contract anytime without any notice, to not only end up not being paid but to actually pay back damages if I do something wrong... And you want me to pay taxes like a permie?

Sorry but no, I won't pay a penny.

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

Gigabit? That's history

Poor countries in Eastern Europe had 1Gbps 10 years ago, not in some spots but everywhere in any city, on GBP 9 per month. With no government investment but simply due to competition, something that doesn't exist and will never exist here in the UK