Posts by Nick Ryan

Re: You have to wonder

The mayhem would really depend on what the USB devices actually were... USB storage devices containing unpleasant or unwanted content or USB killer devices that would discharge a huge burst of electricity into the USB port?

I find it unlikely that it will include any notions regarding data protection or trust.

Re: in other

Which is why fines such as these should be directly applied to the person, or persons, that is the owner of the company. Otherwise they'll just have creamed off the illegally gotten money and can just apply the fine to a disposable organisation.

Re: What was I thinking?

I remember the marketing manager/co-owner of a place that I worked at utterly red faced when she walked up to me and showed a flyer that we had sent out the week before to promote one of our products with a special offer:

Buy 5 for the price of 6.

We had to laugh at that one, not least because none of us had noticed it but also because absolutely none of the recipients, even those who called to take advantage of the offer, mentioned it either!

What's particularly notable is that despite some odd standing-on-head-and-clapping implementations within the VCL, the layout engine that it exposed by default was considerably superior to almost anything I've come across since. Yes, it caused some nasty redraw issues but in general it was stable as hell. Working with variable display DPI resolutions in an appropriately designed form using the VCL was almost easy as long as the interface was constructed in a sensible manner and dynamic code didn't make assumptions.

Re: Wishful thinking...

Very much...

PowerBI has/had a lot of potential as an interactive reporting system but is riddled with really dumb implementation issues and strange absences of functionality that would be consistent with other part of it and the editing interface is incredibly poor in many places but quite good in others, just to add to the frustration. After all pulling data from a Microsoft SQL server database using a Microsoft Connector into Microsoft PowerBI one would hope that the data would make it through un-mangled. Unfortunately such a hope is dashed upon the shores of Microsoft's endemic incompetence.

Report Builder is quite good by way of a non-interactive reporting system but has an interface so bad in places that often the only way to fix anything is to quit it, load up the XML file in a suitable editor and both fix the stupid and manually enter the values and configuration required.

As for Crystal Reports... maybe sometime closer to the dawn of time it didn't feel like it was developed by a room full of vindictive monkeys mashing their keyboards trying to produce something that was so large, bloated, unwieldy which also delighted in as many weird inconsistencies as possible that it was usable... but I just can't remember a usable version any more.

Re: Please, no

The TOC has to be somewhere and the beginning of a stream, as in the container, is a good place for it. The end certainly isn't and it's not particularly efficient to repeatedly include it within the content either.

If video or audio is streaming then a TOC just cannot exist because one does not know the exact length nor the exact data offset within the stream(s) that would be referred to in the TOC. Just like how you couldn't write a Table of Contents in a document and not have to go back and fill in the page numbers after you've written the content.

Re: Pointless

It was never the UK's problem.

/Sigh. Get your head out of the Daily Express.

The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic is an international border. Just like the border between mainland UK and France, just without the sea in between. As the UK is no longer a part of the EU, it is a foreign and therefore there is a hard border now.

That implementing, or even considering, a hard border between NI and the Republic was one of the most retarded things that even the belligerent fuckwits slobbering around the UK parliament could come up, while carefully promising two mutually incompatible situations: a) there would be no customs border between NI and the republic and b) there would be no border between NI and the remainder of the UK. That an international agreement was had that softened this stupidity was pretty much a miracle, however the arch cretin Frost who came up with this, touted it as an amazing thing, is now blaming everyone else for this international agreement, that he wrote and signed, and blaming the EU for sticking to their obligations within this international agreement, that he wrote and signed.

This is not down to the EU. This is down to the gross incompetence and wilful belligerence of the UK government.

Re: Car :easing and patches

The data compression for fax was Run Length Encoding (RLE) therefore any patches of solid black or solid white were very efficiently encoded. The absolute pits was dithered black/white sections to make grey.

I'm reasonably sure that later fax transmission encoding did include better compression schemes that coped better with dithering, however I suspect as these were not supported by lots of existing fax machines they didn't take off much and it wasn't long before email became much more prevalent.

It feels like the only reason that utter technology luddites like solicitors only stopped using faxes recently because of covid lockdowns. Their reasons for continuing to use fax were all total and utter nonsense, of course. For example, "security"...

Re: Compatibility?

I was wondering this too. There are quite a few examples of high end GPUs being connected to RPis, the issue appears to be only of Intel's making and nothing more.

Re: Isaac Watt

Even odder way to spell Thomas Newcomen.

Re: printer drivers that require ADMIN access

it's a problem with Microsoft at the root cause of it all.

Not that this excuses the printer manufacturers from developing some of the worst abominations of software developer this side of Samsung, but Microsoft really did not help whatsoever.

Even when Microsoft eventually bothered to put in place standard TCP/IP print driver port, the printer manufacturers (who would typically make a room of monkeys mashing keyboards look like a highly talented room of developers) still needed to support the older OSes. As a result they are not going to create what would essentially be entirely new drivers to link to the new MS provided print driver port and maintain these separately to the support for older OSes. Some did, of course, but not many and they also were highly unlikely to go through their back catalogue of printers and create new drivers for all of them.

You missed "non-executive"

I had similar with Netflix, they insisted that I had an account with them and that I signed up with them despite me never having done so and having never gone through any email verification process but was still receiving account emails. Then they stated that because I didn't have an account with them that they couldn't talk to me or provide support... /genius

Re: Cisco commands are live too

The scenarios that can bite a long time after are those that can really be hard to track down as a result.

For example, the difference between live and stored configuration. Make changes to the live configuration and test to make sure that it works. Then forget to save the running configuration. Nothing bad happens until an unspecified period of time later and the system is restarted for whatever reason and it reverts back to the previous, stored configuration and things stop working.

Re: NHS Data Slurp As A Threat

From memory thirty was the published average for the number of dwellings covered by a single post code.

Re: Can't get my head around this concept

It's because the UK is not like the US where there is absolutely no worthwhile data protection laws in place at all. As a result, the UK must change to ensure that they are similar.

Similar to the NHS. It's utterly wrong that people in the UK can be treated and recover from injuries and as a result society as whole benefits where the "American Way" where if you can't afford it you can damn well die in pain or live in discomfort or debt for the rest of your life is so much better. For those who can afford it and are charging for it.

Tell me about it...

In a previous life I had to fight insanely to get a back up system approved. Nothing too fancy, just a basic, working back up system for all of the office server content.

It was rejected multiple times because of the cost, which was no more than few thousand (it's amazing what one can do on a budget) and because they didn't see the value in something that they wouldn't immediately use.

The next proposal I included the approximate salary of all employees, applied a few metrics to the amount of "work" that they do that involved the shared server data and extrapolated this out into the value of the "work" stored on the office servers over a short of period of time and compared this to the cost of the backup system.

Rejected, again, of course but this time with the added threat of an investigation into my estimation of the staff salaries and how this was a privacy violation! A privacy violation based on guessing average salaries based on recruitment adverts...

About a year later two drives on the central file server crapped themselves within a day of each other taking down the entire array and preventing any work from happening in the company. We weren't allowed to keep spares of these and therefore while we immediately ordered a replacement for the first failure, before it could even be delivered the second drive failed.

The backup was approved the same day... a day too late of course.

Re: Proper Job

Betty Stogs was always a good choice beer too.

Re: Moving to Agile working

Agile should really be considered to be smaller, incremental and easily testable changes rather than large horrible very occasional updates to systems that are shite for years before a sudden large update that require many more weeks/months of tests to go finally test. Keeping updates to smaller, focussed areas and combine this with sensible compartmentalised code (hahahaha) and smaller updates should be less painful and easier to plan into normal operational workload.

Or, alternatively, use it as a buzzword bingo bullshit term about offshoring to cheaper, and unfortunately not always as good quality, technical labour.

The article almost reads that due to marketing fuck ups, other departments have to cut their head count. No mention of similar head counts in the marketing departments that cost the organisation so much in fines.

This website sucks, full of americans, is american, and doesnt like it when criticism comes their way.

Utter sociopaths

This is a very broad and vague comment. Which website? The MOD online application website or The Register (which technically is English, not American although everyone is pretty much welcome as long as they can read or write English, even reading or writing American is passable enough).

Yes, there's how to do it and then there's how it's done. Often different. Even more of a mess in a hybrid environment, particularly a hybrid older environment.

It could have been done in a simple, transparent and wholly documented manner... unfortunately this was Microsoft and it was created at a time when they were still intentionally screwing with and obfuscating their own file formats to ensure that competing software couldn't use them.

Re: Which is why Texas

From what I understood, the supreme court had no option but to accept the State legislation because there was no legal basis for them not to. As in the State legislation was written very carefully - it's almost as if the backers of it had a lot of resources to pursue their medieval agenda.

This does not mean that the medieval-esque ruling cannot be challenged, but the supreme court was not the place to do so at the time.

Re: Anyone surprised?

While chunks of the underlying implementation did come from BSD, Apple utterly broke so much of it that it's really not a valid comparison to consider that MacOS is BSD - it really is not.

The video or mock up doesn't show the moon and I suspect that without this predicting solar eclipses (moon in between Earth and the Sun) just won't happen.

Sadly I suspect the lack of the moon will be a major downside in this design - not that I could see how it could easily be done in Lego at that scale.