* Posts by heyrick

6566 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Dec 2009

Imagine being charged to take a lunch break... even if you didn't. Welcome to the world of these electronics assembly line workers

heyrick Silver badge

Re: "the cost of which would be automatically taken from their wages"

"the detail about breaks, responsibilities, being required to work in other locations, etc, and you're not actually required by law to get it until you've been in post for 2 months"

Can you provide a pointer to this law? Because that all sounds remarkably like changing the terms of an employment contract.

heyrick Silver badge

Re: "the cost of which would be automatically taken from their wages"

Actually, the EU waffle says exactly this: Member States shall take the measures necessary to ensure that, where the working day is longer than six hours, every worker is entitled to a rest break, the details of which, including duration and the terms on which it is granted, shall be laid down in collective agreements or agreements between the two sides of industry or, failing that, by national legislation. [ https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1414674219132&uri=CELEX:32003L0088 ]

In my country (France) and my sector of work (argoalimentaire) it's a half hour for shift workers (7h30 worked normally) and 45 minutes for daytime workers (7-8 hours worked depending on who) and more for management types (usually an hour but very flexible, but they get away with it as they're paid a flat rate for seven hours a day and usually work an hour or more in addition to that).

Boffins' neural network can work out from your speech whether you'll develop psychosis

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Language?

Obvious conclusion: both sides of government are not fit for purpose.

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Language?

"Or you can speak clearly and get your message across."

Brexit means Brexit.

Very short. Very concise. Very devoid of meaning.

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Reddit

Or the current pretenders to be Prime Minister?

Ahhhhh! What year is it?! Users left without direction or clue after Google Calendar 404s

heyrick Silver badge

Not quite yet...

The desktop version has some events, but not all.

The mobile version has only one day highlighted (instead of about 15).

That's better than it was (see post below!), but not as it should be yet.

heyrick Silver badge

Seems to be working just fine for me

<stares at app with completely empty calendar>

Atari finally launches its VCS console. Again.

heyrick Silver badge

Re: How to choose a gadget...

"There's probably about a dozen gaming consoles in this household"

I have a PS2. That I got in a boot sale. Which is okay for GTA3 and Project Zero, when plugged into an LCD monitor (from a boot sale) via a composite to VGA adapter (from Amazon). Entire outlay probably less than one contemporary game, but as has been noted above, real life has a bunch of commitments that involve monetary dispense. Should I get an oil change for the car? Or should I buy a game? Food? Electricity bill? The ever rising cost of petrol? All take precedence over "a game".

I'm glad you know how to spell (always useful) and that you can afford a dozen consoles. Not everybody is the same as you, but some of us at least have enough integrity to stand by what we say and not post as a/c...

heyrick Silver badge

Re: This is about retro and nouveu combined

"The point made in the article contrasting the hardware performance is totally irrelevant"

The point made about hardware is extremely relevant. You don't need 4GB of RAM, 32GB of storage to do retro. My Pi, with a dinky SD card, puts in a perfectly acceptable emulation of a Sega Master System for the stuff I grew up with. Recycle or share an old monitor and keyboard, you're looking at an outlay of maybe thirty quid. Unless you happen to have a Pi, in which case it's retro for free.

It's also relevant because, as noted, you can get better for less elsewhere. It's a lot of money for a platform that's overkill for retro, and not quite enough kill for modern gaming. And the problem is that if it's seen as a bit of a dead duck, the games companies you mention may just not bother. Leaving the user with what? Regrets?

This Free software ain't free to make, pal, it's expensive: Mozilla to bankroll Firefox with paid-for premium extras

heyrick Silver badge

Re: OSS isn't Free Software

"the second is free as in beer"

Unknown concept - beer ain't free...

heyrick Silver badge

Re: OSS isn't Free Software

"Essentially your browser is supposed to act as a "smart terminal", sharing some of the work load."

A great factor in what's happening may well be because the browser of today is dealing with stuff that wasn't even considered possible when hypertext was devised. Google Docs, for instance, a full GUI word processor in a browser.

That still doesn't mean that Mozilla doesn't appear to be going out of their way to piss off established users in order to try desperately to be like some other browser instead of playing to their own strengths. I too have disabled automatic updates as I'm sick of stuff randomly breaking. I choose Firefox exactly because of the range of useful extensions that it offers (and the fact that the mobile version doesn't bugger up text sizes in an attempt to be clever, like Chrome). But if stuff keeps breaking, well there's two choices. Stick with a version that works, or find something else. Maybe that explains the dwindling share?

You're responsible for getting permission from subjects if you want to use Windows Photos' facial recog feature

heyrick Silver badge

Am I the only one to have noticed that the two examples are children?

Plus their ages, too. Just a tad creepy...

The FCC has finally, finally approved a half-decent plan to destroy the robocall scourge... but there's a catch

heyrick Silver badge

that are significantly lower that what you will actually have to pay

I guess this is the "joy" of living in a country where it isn't a legal requirement to advertise prices including all taxes. The price I see is the price I pay...

It's official! The Register is fake news… according to .uk overlord Nominet. Just a few problems with that claim, though

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Cockwomble in Chief

Sorry, but there is one massive flaw in your post.

I doubt that any sane rational person would perceive Trump as anything better than a racist delusional sociopathic misogynistic asshole, however sticking a bullet in his head is pointless.

Why? Because Trump being... well, Trump... It's not a surprise to anybody. A decade ago The Simpsons had Trump as President because he was the absolute worst person they could think of.

The problem, and the flaw, lies not in the miserable excuse for humanity that is currently being fawned over by our so-called leadership. The problem and the flaw lie in the 62 million who voted for him, and the millions who still seem to think he's a good guy. Yes, he is enabling scum and yes, he is making this world a darker place with every international treaty he tears up because America Fuck Yeah.

But is the problem really Trump? I don't believe it is. The problem is the ones who voted him in, who may well vote him in again, and it's pretty much the same sort of mentality that has paralysed Britain with the wishful thinking known as "Brexit". That's where the problem lies. Not in the baboon that is temporarily elected leader.

heyrick Silver badge

Re: I am tired of you bringing up Trump for no reason.

You do realise that you're replying to an anonymous coward? The troll face is there for a reason.

And, in this case, if a person wishes to make such assertions and not have the integrity to put their name to it, then it's not something worth bothering with.

Can't quite cram a working AI onto a $1 2KB microcontroller? Just get a PC to do it

heyrick Silver badge

Re: There's this book.....

I completely agree. I believe that courses teaching programming (of any serious fashion) should include a stint with something like a BBC Micro (Apple2 for Americans), something where you can actually probe and observe every single signal to understand how it actually works. None of this "little black lump of magic".

It's also a good exercise in demonstrating 20 bit (five byte) floating point numbers on a machine where the processor has only two registers and an accumulator, no FP, no multiply, and treats everything that isn't an address as an eight bit value.

heyrick Silver badge

sports just 2KB of RAM and 32KB of flash storage

Don't knock devices because their specs appear to be puny.

The entire Minitel terminal was built around an 8051 device with a 16K ROM, 256 bytes of RAM, and an 8K screenbuffer RAM (for the video chip), and an amazing V.23 modem!

Sunday seems really quiet. Hmm, thinks Google, let's have a four-hour Gmail, YouTube, G Suite, Cloud outage

heyrick Silver badge

Android told me that my GMail password was incorrect

Because Android is stupid and doesn't understand that one failure to connect after a dozen successful connections is more likely to be network issues and flakey signal rather than "oh look, the password has suddenly changed".

I ignored the message, watched some stuff on Prime, went to bed. It was all working when I got up...

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

heyrick Silver badge

Re: PIN locks

"as you press the right ones the door will open"

Our one at work is like that. Four buttons, any order. And maybe 200 people go through that door per day, so it isn't hard to see which four buttons to press.

Sometimes I think "security" is mostly an illusion to make people "feel" safer.

Jeff Bezos finally gets .Amazon after DNS overlord ICANN runs out of excuses to delay decision any further

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Once upon a time ...

it does beg the question.

Um. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Once upon a time ...

" very bad agenda on their list of things to do"

Uhhhh... Isn't that standard business practice these days?

heyrick Silver badge

Re: cultural imperialism?

"Amazon (the company) is named after the Amazon basin."

Upvote for a well thought out post, however... The company names itself after the basin?

I always thought it was simply the shortest normal word that contains both A and Z (upon which the smile arrow thing points - from A to Z).

Buffer the Intel flayer: Chipzilla, Microsoft, Linux world, etc emit fixes for yet more data-leaking processor flaws

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Nice explanation but....

"It's everywhere, and drives me potty"

+1 billion

You'd think they'd think we'd know what a processor looks like...

Double-sided printing data ballsup leaves insurance giant Chubb with egg on its face

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Yeah, no

"assume the security company gave a flying f about digital security,"

Maybe more practical to spend a free half half to work out who some of these reports are referring to, and simply forward the info to the relevant people with a covering message. That might start a useful ball rolling.

Firefox armagg-add-on: Lapsed security cert kills all browser extensions, from website password managers to ad blockers

heyrick Silver badge

Nice show, Mozilla, well done

I'm incandescent with rage (as I'm British, that means I'll be mildly sarcastic) as the first I knew about it was when a tonne of spam tabs opened up and apk files (I'm using Android) I never asked for started to download. After some Googling, I discovered the reason for the cause, and I'm shocked (shocked, I tell you, SHOCKED) that Firefox is stupid enough to think that a suitable action upon failing to install an update is to simply mark the add-on as "disabled because" rather than anything halfway intelligent like rolling back to the previous (known working, so don't check it again bellend) incarnation of that add-on.

Thankfully the fix was simple - change xpinstall.signatures.required to false to get the add-ons back up and running, and then change extensions.update.enabled to false so it won't try to auto update again (because if it bloody left things alone, I'd never have noticed).

Doing this means my slightly older (v60.something) version of Firefox can also download add-ons from the repository without having to be forced to update to the latest version (released to cure the cock up; though the fact that EVERYBODY now has to go update their version of Firefox, it's almost too easy to come up with a bunch of conspiracy theories)...

Personality quiz for all you IT bods: Are you a chameleon or an outlaw? A diplomat or a high flier? Vote right here

heyrick Silver badge

I chose outlaw

Because there was no "bugger off and leave me in peace" option.

It talks about social extroverts. As usual it misses introverts. Those people who don't want to be the life and soul of the office and who don't want to chase endless promotions. While other types are having their dramas, we're the ones that turn up on time (sober, too), get our work done quietly, and then go home. We're the ones that all the loud people never notice (thank God, no we absolutely do NOT want to go to a "do" on Friday night so actually thank you very much for NOT asking). But it would be nice, just for once, to have this category listed on a poll.

Boeing boss denies reports 737 Max safety systems weren't active

heyrick Silver badge

to begin cutting and pasting their views....

It's Moomins what did it. I told you them little bastards was trouble.

Oh, wait, what were we talking about?

FYI: Yeah, the cops can force your finger onto a suspect's iPhone to see if it unlocks, says judge

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Biometrics do not protect

"The problem with biometrics is that you cannot switch them off."

Huh? Until I registered my finger and eyeballs, my phone didn't know my "biometrics", and it's just as easy to undo this setting.

Yes, I use "biometrics" on my phone, because if somebody is paying attention they can watch a password being entered, so I'd consider using a stronger password system around co workers to be a security risk; while a finger or eyeball is sufficient to unlock the phone and hard enough to be faked by the people I wish to keep out of my phone on a day to day basis.

Anything else arrives (it won't, I'm utterly uninteresting) then the simplest way to disable all of the "biometrics" is to simply switch the phone off (long hold power button, tap screen, it's literally five seconds) upon which point anybody wanting access will need both the SIM unlock code and then the password.

I use "biometrics" in quotes because I feel there is a difference between unique biological identifier, and something good enough for domestic use that shouldn't screw up you with anybody else in the same room...

heyrick Silver badge

can be compelled to disclose information that the government already knows

That sounds like a pretty broad definition. If a device containing already known information is accessed, who determines what is in fact already known and what is "oh juicy!"?

Thanks to the NASA InSight probe (and British tools), you can now listen to the sound of a Martian earthquake

heyrick Silver badge

Quakes on Mars?

I thought the planetary motor (core) had stopped, shouldn't that mean tectonic movement has basically stopped? Or are the rumblings the sounds of stuff hitting it on the other side?

We've read the Mueller report. Here's what you need to know: ██ ██ ███ ███████ █████ ███ ██ █████ ████████ █████

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Please just give it a break

"Some of us enjoy a little political analysis."

Some of us skip some of the articles "of lesser interest" and just head straight to the comments.

Supreme Court of UK gives Morrisons the go-ahead for mega data leak liability appeal

heyrick Silver badge
Stop

Should companies be on the hook for criminal employees' doings?

Logically - YES.

They requested the information, they held the information, they failed to provide mechanisms to stop somebody grabbing it all, not to mention the question of vetting the employee access, functional restrictions and/or oversight.

This has to result in a Yes verdict, otherwise every data breach from that day forward will be a case of "rogue employee, nothing to do with us".

A quick cup of coffee leaves production manager in fits and a cleaner in tears

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Cleaners...

"its really hard to belive that "cleaners" can be that stupid"

My first job (instant start, weekly pay, do that while looking for a real job!) was doing cleaning in a comp in the afternoon. Yes, I can fully believe the horror stories. The people I worked with would have found it a struggle to smoke and walk at the same time.

heyrick Silver badge
Happy

Re: Until...

"everyone on his row was relying on his UPS which lasted mere seconds, if that, before it crapped itself and also died."

Brilliant. Upvote.

heyrick Silver badge

Re: When Urban Myths Come True

"most convenient plug socket for the cleaner's vacuum cleaner"

Strange. At my place of work, the important computer kit is plugged into bright red sockets (they're wired through some sort of UPS). Anybody plugs ANYTHING in there without authorisation, it's a disciplinary offense, even the high ups know that hooking up phone chargers is NOT okay.

French internet cops issue terrorist takedown for… Grateful Dead recordings?

heyrick Silver badge

Easy amendment

Content takedown requests that can be clearly demonstrated to not be "OMFG terrorists AARGH" will count as a mark against the agency reporting. Too many negative marks, not enough positive marks, the agency will be labelled "vexatious" and all subsequent requests will be ignored.

Simple.

Free online tax filing? Yeah, that'll soon be illegal thanks to rare US Congressional unity

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Oh, it's a new tax year here in the UK

"Oh, hang on, no, don't need to."

They're finally getting around to implementing "impôt sur revenue" here in France. The amount payable (based upon last year) is deducted monthly and everything is supposed to be simplified.

My cow-orkers were surprised when I told them about PAYE and how I'd been doing that my entire working life in the UK.

Apple disables iPad for 48 years after toddler runs amok

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Three year olds can't read

Junior (infant? I don't remember) school sucked hard. The teachers were absolutely adamant that I'd HAVE to read a book with big type, simple words, and a picture on every facing page. You'd think that was the insult. No, the insult was that I'd go home and make my way through John Wyndham's books and upon reporting this to the teacher, she replied quite affirmatively that I did not and was making stuff up.

That was the first of many years of dealing with piss poor teaching staff that shouldn't have ever been qualified to go anywhere near somebody else's children. It's amazing how when you don't fit into some seemingly arbitrary pre-defined category, this justifies bullying, rudeness, and in some cases entirely random "you have been marked down because...". I wonder, now that autism and ADHD are known things (they weren't when I was young, autism back then meant the severely autistic, and hyperactivity was considered intentional misbehaviour rather than interactions with chemicals such as food colouring), is it any better? Or have the assholes that enjoy bullying children simply found themselves different targets?

heyrick Silver badge

My daughter hacked mummy's iPhone age <18 months

Nurture that - there's a future BOFHette in the making right there...

Are you sure you've got a floppy disk stuck in the drive? Or is it 100 lodged in the chassis?

heyrick Silver badge

Re: One, OK, hundred, I have my doubts

"Perhaps the biggest disruption was moving to WordPerfect"

At my place of work we had a brief foray with Linux and one of the office suites (it didn't work out, back to Windows).

Anyway, it became readily clear who actually understood what a word processor/spreadsheet was for, and who was completely and utterly lost because the stuff they expected to find "here" (menu, icon, etc) was in a different place. Some of them were even like "the fourth option down on the menu on the left does this" rather than reading it and noticing that maybe it's now the sixth item down...

I guess some people are taught concepts, and others are taught exactly what they needed to know and nothing else.

Oh, yeah, when we went back to Windows we'd finally ditched XP. Cue new software, same as the old, but with everything in different places. Much more head scratching and "this isn't the same as I remember it" comments.

heyrick Silver badge

Re: One, OK, hundred, I have my doubts

"she cannot do that because we cannot buy the ribbons for her typewriter any more so she cannot type up the certificates any more"

It's not because she is stupid. Rather the opposite, she is a public sector worker coming up with creative excuses to avoid having to do any actual work.

Disclaimer: I live in France...

heyrick Silver badge

Shiela is okay...

...but you want to watch out for Jim and Fred.

The completely rational take you need on Europe approving Article 13: An ill-defined copyright regime to tame US tech

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Expect the best but recent history tells us even the worst is being hopeful.

"Even this site censors posts without others being able to see the post or why it was censored,"

They have a set of house rules that they expect to be followed. There was a time when every post had to be approved before it became visible.

You may consider this a form of censorship, and perhaps it is, but since this is a private website they are completely free to reply "You're in my house now, bitch!" and delete every thirteenth post because it's the first Thursday of the week. See? Can't even get them for discrimination there...

heyrick Silver badge

Incoworkable (a mash up of incoherent and unworkable)

"You get a shiver in the dark, It's raining in the park, but meantime:"

Sultans of Swing, Dire Straits. Copyright, and not to me.

There are many ways to defeat automated copyright checks. I'm sure you've seen YouTube videos in a frame, flipped, colour inverted, or whatever other idea somebody things will sneak it through the existing filters.

It'll be interesting to see what/how this can actually be implemented. But the basic fact is, user submitted copyright will always be a potential minefield, and even with humans rather than algorithms, how can they be expected to know everything to be able to judge whether or not something is acceptable? The only workable solution here is simply to kill all user submitted content. Somehow I don't see that working...

And just to make the point: "どれ程までの痛みに耐えたの".

Koe, Chihiro Onitsuka.

What bugs me the most? World+dog just accepts crap software resilience

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Sage

Ooh, so would that explain why my previous job (using SagePay), depressingly frequently people got other people's wages, or nothing, or entirely arbitrary amounts that even the bean counters couldn't figure out...? I'm glad we ditched that.

heyrick Silver badge

My new Audi A5 has a passenger window which goes down at unexpected times,

Take it back, demand a refund.

If they can't get something like a window right (and appearing to need some convoluted way of "fixing" it), how can you be sure that the engine management isn't going to freak out when you're on the motorway? Or better yet, cars like Audi have numerous airbags that include complex mechanisms to determine when to fire and how much inflation to apply. Given you can't test this, and you REALLY need it when you need it, can you trust such a system on a car that can't even manage to keep a window closed?

Buffer overflow flaw in British Airways in-flight entertainment systems will affect other airlines, but why try it in the air?

heyrick Silver badge

Re: "I was not probing [..] because I didn't know the existence of any vulnerability at that time."

Not knowing what you might trigger.

Calm down, this isn't the Daily Mail.

If his dicking around with his entertainment system affected any other part of the aircraft (from flight control to toilet flush), the entire airline should have their permission to fly revoked...

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Unwise

lock IFES

tag passenger as 'prat'

invoke ejector seat mechanism...

SPOILER alert, literally: Intel CPUs afflicted with simple data-spewing spec-exec vulnerability

heyrick Silver badge

Huh?

exploited by malicious JavaScript within a web browser tab [...] An attacker therefore requires some kind of foothold in your machine

There's a bit of a difference between malware that a user got tricked into running, and "just some JavaScript" that could be hidden in any number of websites... Script blocking is good (I do it as a matter of course) but more and more sites are broken without some degree of scripting, so it's still going to be a potential problem.

'Occult' text from Buffy The Vampire Slayer ep actually just story about new bus lane in Dublin

heyrick Silver badge

Re: pro-Buffy flame war.

"somewhat mystified by the implied strength of feeling in the "this dross" remark in the article"

Well, it's not as if we have a few hundred channels of quality programming these days...