* Posts by J P

217 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Aug 2010

Page:

Chair legs it from UK govt smart meter installation programme

J P
Facepalm

Chair legs IT

I misread this as being some new form of IT derived from furniture components. Which would probably be about right actually...

It’s Adobe’s Creative Cloud TITSUP birthday. Ease the pain with its RGB-wrangling rivals

J P

Re: Non-photo work

Not quite so advanced, but I use PSP7 to create custom Romers/Roamers - little map reading tools, with scales etc printed on them. Simply set your pixels to the right number per centimetre & draw away. Used an Epson printer (now sadly defunct) to tun them off on transparency sheets - far more accurate & useable than commercially sold alternatives, and marginal cost so low that I carry half a dozen spares around with me & hand them out to novice navigators who haven't yet got one at all.

Caterham 270S: The automotive equivalent of crack

J P
Go

A scarily appropriate comparison

Way back when in the BC years (Before Children) I used to sprint someone else's historic racecar. Even without the capital outlay on the vehicle, I worked out that just the fuel, licence, and entry fees made it a more expensive hobby, in terms of "thrill minutes per pound" than a cocaine habit*. No idea how addictive cocaine actually is, but time on track certainly haunts you forever.

*Using figures from the Daily Mail for drug costs, before you ask.

Data centre doesn't like your face? That's a good thing

J P

Re: Critical Business

My brother did some work auditing (in the financial accountant sense) a rather well known large financial sector outfit with its own datacentre(s) - all 3 UK sites were below the water table & in flood risk areas (London, South Coast and another; I forget where). Access to the racks was through a secure airlock (vertical glass tube affair) with scales in the floor - if you weighed more on the way out than the way in it triggered an alarm. [Yes, I know, carry a bag of sand in under your jacket etc]

Unfortunately, the colleague accompanying my brother was quite large - so large in fact that he didn't fit in the tube. "No worries" said 'Security', and they opened up the delivery shutter at the other end of the room - which was quite literally big enough to drive a truck through.

(Of course, the actual audit/stocktake was laughable - all the units' ID stickers/serial numbers were either round the back, or obscured by the locks & cages everything was secured in; they just had to take the client's word for it that this row of identical black plates with flashing LEDs on it corresponded to that set of entries on the ledger)

Are you sure there are servers in this cold, dark basement?

J P

Re: first job

Fail safe systems only fail when they fail to fail safe.

There's an anecdote to the effect that the UK importer of De Tomaso cars employed a related tactic to deal with the reported overheating of the cars in UK traffic - he removed the bulbs from the dashboard warning lights, and owners stopped coming back to complain about the warning light.

Inside GOV.UK: 'Chaos' and 'nightmare' as trendy Cabinet Office wrecked govt websites

J P

Re: Yep - it's terrible

Another tax user here - and one who also has to find stuff in other jurisdictions - the other day it was EU, Ghana, Singapore & Uganda. I found all the legislation I needed on the relevant sites; little bit of URL juggling required, but nothing tricky.

The next day, I needed to get a copy of an HMRC document which I knew, *KNEW*, existed as part of their budget output (I had a paper copy). Took me longer than finding a 50 year old Ugandan statute. The ordering of information is just bewildering. The search function is appalling. (Maybe that's what the "random page" generator is for? Has anyone checked to see if the traditional search link is still there?) How can they have taken something which used to work and made it so, so awful?

I've given up on putting detail into the "what's wrong with this page" dialogues and just point out that it's rubbish. Won't make any difference to GOV.UK, but helps keep my blood pressure just a little bit lower. And sadly, it's not necessarily helpful even if your affairs are relatively simple - see the list of gems here: http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/1796280

SO. Which IS more important to humanity: Facebook, or Portugal?

J P

Re: A bit unfair

I tried matching company turnovers to GDPs not long back using wikipedia - while the figures aren't directly comparable, let alone reliable, it was the quickest way to get a feel for a hunch/concern I have that we now have corporate bodies (MNCs, multinationals, call them what you like) which have more economic power than some countries, aka tax jurisdictions. (Someone has also done a similar exercise mapping English counties to African countries - the most heartbreaking statistic I know is that economically we seem to put the same value on DRC (area 905k square miles, pop'n 77m) as we do Devon (area 2.5k square miles, pop'n 750k). )

Thinking about companies again, if taxes exist for the good of society, but the corporate body does not consider itself a part of that society, can we be surprised when the corporate bodies start to operate in their own, rather than the society/tax jurisdiction's interests? Especially if they are "bigger" than the tax jurisdiction...

Our system handles £130bn and it's BUST. Want the job of fixing it? Apply to UK.gov

J P
Coat

Re: no need for it to have been a *successful* integration then?

They've already confirmed it's integration in a public sector environment; the (lack of) success thing is kind of a given.

Caterham Seven 160 review: The Raspberry Pi of motoring

J P

" a kit car weighing 800g..."

Now that's an impressive power to weight ratio - but you must have had to sacrifice a degree of structural rigidity/material to get it quite so light..?

(Finest driving experience - Alpine A110 1600s, 160bhp, no idea what it weighed, but it flew. Literally, when the throttles got jammed while practising for a sprint event; I suspect it will hold the all time altitude record for Curborough sprint circuit. Favourite - 1932 Aston New International. Makes me smile even thinking about it; not quite so "direct" as an FN, and notoriously underpowered, but rewarding in a way that no modern car can even approach)

BOFH: SOOO... You want to sell us some antivirus software?

J P
Stop

Stop it; this is wrong - Friday is BOFH day...

Want a more fuel efficient car? Then redesign it – here's how

J P

Re: LED lighting

As an occasional cyclist, LED lights on cars are a pain. I can cheerfully cycle to the station just after dawn with no lights on across the golf course, through the village, seeing and being seen... right up to the outskirts of town, where there's traffic, and every other car is blinding us all with LEDs. If I didn't have a set of unpleasantly bright LED lamps on the bike I'd be effectively invisible. I'm not convinced that an illuminations arms race is the best solution?

J P

Was the BX the one where after a few thousand units they went back to steel bonnets because of production costs - cue urban myth of proud new owners demonstrating how the plastic bonnet just bounces back when you thump it/sit on it/whack it with a hammer..?

Intel says NO MORE BLOOD PENTIUMS by 2016

J P

Re: robots

There is a greater degree of self interest in there for the MNCs as well these days - those minerals are 'pillaged'; pillage is of course a war crime, but there's a heavy evidential burden to get as far up the supply chain as a chip maker. However, 'pillage' is now a de facto offence predicate for money laundering. Or, in English, if you've got pillaged goods in your supply chain, you're potentially guilty of money laundering, and that's a very real threat for business.

Shameless self promotion klaxon - I wrote a paper on it that you can find at http://www.accaglobal.com/gb/en/technical-activities/technical-resources-search/2014/june/pillage-a-new-threat.html or if you prefer, a rather more digestible blog post at http://blogs.accaglobal.com/2014/07/15/pillage-isnt-about-viking-longboats-anymore-you-could-be-wearing-eating-and-looking-at-it/

Bright lights, affordable motor: Ford puts LED headlights onto Mondeo

J P

Re: Vertical vs. horizontal

IIRC, there is also an issue with reflections from oil/diesel not showing up - mostly an issue for motorcyclists who I understand tend not to use polarised visors for that very reason, but as a car driver it's always worth understanding why the bike ahead of you has changed course/slowed right down (alongside eg white lines & manhole covers on a rainy day)

If Google remembers whom it has forgotten, has it complied with the ECJ judgment?

J P

Re: this probably sounds stupid.

I don't know about DMCA type stuff, but they're certainly already looking at the tax residence of satellites - see eg the blog post at http://martinhearson.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/satellites-in-geostationary-orbit-a-new-tax-justice-issue/ I can't believe it wouldn't be long before they extended some kind of jurisdiction to satellites, even if by proxy based on where the owner/operator is incorporated.

Revealed: GCHQ's beyond top secret Middle Eastern internet spy base

J P
Black Helicopters

So long El Reg, it's been nice knowing you. (I'd have posted AC, but what would be the point..?)

Fat-fingered admin downs entire Joyent data center

J P

Re: Jheez, poor bastard. :\

Perhaps someone high up at Joyent has themselves had the fat fingered moment of dread, and recognises the value of experience...

There's a similar thing with discharged bankrupts; they are statistically the least likely people to go bankrupt (yes, again). Despite which, they are also one of the groups that finds it hardest to get bank accounts. The test is of course administered by bankers who have not themselves gone bankrupt.

Beam me up Scotty: Boffins to turn pure light into matter

J P
Coat

Re: Cart before the horse?

Surely all you need to convert the pie-in-the-sky to the pie-on-the-table is gravity? (Well, and making sure the table's outside obviously.)

Quick Q: How many FLOPPIES do I need for 16 MILLION image files?

J P

My father used to write operating systems for IBM mainframes back in the late 60s/early 70s. 3 or 4 years ago, he bought a new hard drive - maybe longer, IIRC it was 80 gigabytes & cost him just north of £100. What struck home was the calculation he did on how much it would have cost him to get access to that much memory back when he was working for a living - it came out at something like £19m. To hire, for a week, cos that's how it used to work in those days. Yep, things have definitely changed. (His other pet peeve is musical Christmas cards, which have more computing power than the first system he ever used - and took up an entire room).

eBay slammed for daft post-hack password swap advice

J P

Re: ebay's password policy ...

Not to worry; as long as you've bookmarked this page you can always come back here to copy & paste it.

Achtung! Use maths to smash the German tank problem – and your rival

J P

1930's Aston Martins started with the month production started as a letter (A for Jan, B for Feb etc) then a single digit for the year of the decade (2 for 1932, 3 for 1933 etc) followed by the actual chassis number for the model, and a suffix letter for type. So eg C2/201/S is short chassis 201, built in March 1932. G7/722/L would be long chassis 722, laid down in July 1937. However, they don't seem to have built the chassis in order - so we have H7/717, C7/719 (5 months earlier) B40/720, (3 years later) F9/721, (back a year) A9/722, A7/730 B7/736 (finally moving forward again) and so on. Even if you spot the lack of repetition of 3 digit numbers, you'd still be caught out as there were frequent jumps to the next hundred when a new model came out/new owner bought the company. (The earlier cars up to number 74 were much easier; S for sports and T for Touring with no indication of date. Apart from MS1, a polished chassis built specially for motor show display. Subsequently though the number 273 appeared on at least 3 sets of records, but does not appear to have ever actually left the factory.)

Please work for nothing, Mr Dabbs. What can you lose?

J P
Mushroom

Re: Absolutely and Schools

Couldn't you just file them all under C for Chemicals? Or save time, & stick them all in one jar labelled (briefly) "compound"?

Behold! World's smallest 3D-printer pen Lix artists into shape – literally

J P
Coat

Re: Bah! Old news

*under* the sun? I think perhaps I could suggest one new concept you might like to consider...

Did a date calculation bug just cost hard-up Co-op Bank £110m?

J P

Re: Does it have to be every 365 days?

Presumably you mean "last statement +360", not "every 360 days", given that the underlying information relates to periods of 365/366 days? But yes, simply aligning the annual statements with whichever month they get produced in would appear to make sense *to anyone outside the post room* ; as previously noted, sending them before the statutory due date shouldn't be an issue.

But large organisation mailing processes have to be seen to be believed; one of the UK's largest has a mail room 1 mile long. They have to stagger mass mailings, as Royal Mail don't have enough trucks to load all their envelopes in one go. And one day we suggested to them sending a particular notification out by manually processed recorded delivery - they don't do many of this particular item, and it was causing significant issues for the (non)recipient if it went astray. They looked at us as though someone had suggested inserting a live stoat into every envelope before despatch, and the item was minuted "for further consideration".

'Please don't make me spend more time with my family...'

J P

Best in class: We've redefined the class to include us and people doing worse than us

Market leading: We're not going to say where to though

UK.gov: NO MORE tech deals bigger than £100m. Unless we feel like it

J P
Black Helicopters

GCHQ's new spy tech won't go through the books as a tech deal though; it'll be badged as a new underground swimming pool for No 10.

Bloke hews plywood Raspberry Pi tablet

J P

Re: We did question his use of plywood

A friend who builds rollcages for competition cars recently had to contact the MSA to check how to proceed when installing a rollover hoop to a vintage car with 19mm ply floor - standard MSA regs call for welding the cage to the floor. The MSA confirmed that all you have to do is bolt the plates in rather than weld them; the wooden floor is actually stiffer & more resilient than the pressed steel in moderns.

It's not gold in the frozen hills of Antarctica, my boy, it's DIAMONDS

J P
Windows

Re: Good time to invest...

"At the same time they invented a new colour 'diamond white' which was associated with only the highest value diamonds."

I have heard of 'Diamond White", but not quite in that context.

MPs blast 'alarmingly weak' management of one-dole-to-rule-them-all

J P

One thing the PAC haven't factored into the overall cost is the fact that HMRC had to rush their RTI implementation in order to meet the DWP's (now discredited) timetable. That in turn had knock on effects for every single employer in the country, not to mention payroll bureaux. And of course because HMRC had to rush something they'd been wanting to do for ages, it isn't as good as it should have been, but we're stuck with it now. So there's another cost to taxpayer and business of the botched UC project.

Bacteria-chomping phages could kill off HOSPITAL SUPERBUGS

J P

So that's who bought the tech then...

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/1287589

Do you trust your waiter? Hacked bank-card reader TEXTS your info to crims

J P

Electronic POS kit seems to be one big playground for the crims at the moment - use cash & they'll hide the takings from the tax man ( see http://www.oecd.org/ctp/crime/ElectronicSalesSuppression.pdf ) Use a card and they'll just rip the cash direct from your account - and the OECD report suggests that there'll be no shortage of willing recruits in eg the restaurant trade to give themselves a 'heads we win, tails you lose' attitude towards choice of payment method as well. Monday afternoon, and already I'm depressed and cynical about the nature of the world we live in. Thanks guys...

iPhone 5S: Fanbois, your prints are safe from the NSA, claim infosec bods

J P
Pint

@ chr0m4t1c

I'm sure you're right about the hardware/data motivation for thefts - outside of Hollywood, I can't really see thefts being based on the contents of the phone; it's going to be the resale value of an unlocked handset that motivates the average junkie. So if the means of unlocking changes, the pattern/method of thefts may change.

The worry of course is how they go about unlocking the handset, and that's what got me thinking. It may be that the gummi-bear solution works, but if that's the case then (as other commenters have pointed out) the NSA is going to be the least of any fanbois' worries once the shell of the phone is covered in their prints. However things turn out, the 5s is bound to sell at a premium, and that will in turn enhance the incentives to get hold of a saleable example, by hook or by crook.

Thanks also for taking the time to check on the Mercs story; glad to know I was only vaguely divorced from reality in my memories; I hadn't realised it was as long as 8 years ago... I'm slightly less thankful for you reminding me just how old I am :-)

J P

Re: Boring

Bricklayers often have problems with fingerprint recognition too - so no point them queuing up for the new iShiny then.

J P

So does this mean muggers will now have a second use for the bolt-croppers they use on bike locks - taking the finger along with the phone? (Presumably there's scope to change the print that the phone recognises, so you wouldn't have to actually sell it with the original owner's digit once you'd reset the authentication)

IIRC there were some unpleasant incidents in Hong Kong when Mercedes brought out a fingerprint authenticated car, so while I'd hope things wouldn't go that far just for a phone, it does raise fears for how lowlifes might try to get around the tech...

Smartwatch news: Sleek-but-vaporous timepiece promised by... NISSAN?

J P
Coffee/keyboard

Re: This is awesome!

"impromptu motorway sculpture"

Well thank you so much; now I'm going to have to dig a spare keyboard out of the cupboard.

J P
Coat

Hmm - this comes out on Monday morning... I think I know what they spent Friday afternoon doing after they got back from the pub.

Universal Credit CRUNCHED: Dole handouts IT system to be rebuilt

J P
Unhappy

Dammit. I had _second_ week in September in the office sweepstake on the date they admitted it wasn't going to work.

NSA gets burned by a sysadmin, decides to burn 90% of its sysadmins

J P
Big Brother

"There were no mistakes like that at all."

The mistakes we made were in employing humans to do the work. We shan't be doing that again.

Tax dodging? It's harder to do - and rarer - than you think

J P

Re: 100% tax

Read Dickens on profit - "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." Bring that back in spades for the business making a loss if you tax all income/turnover at a fixed percentage, instead of acknowledging that they don't even have enough cash to pay their own employees, let alone other peoples.

Not even gonna go there on the arguments about sector specific rates based on average profit margins; VATs used in the flat rate scheme (nearest current proxy) range from 4% to 14.5% [see http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/vat/start/schemes/flat-rate.htm#5 ] Administering that sort of thing as the sole form of business taxation in a way that doesn't drive small business to the wall (no economies of scale) and encourage all big business into high margin sectors would be just as complex as the current system, with all the joys of the transition into the bargain.

J P

Re: Permit me to take a stab at it...

It's a good stab, and I think you've badly injured the concepts...

But seriously: - what you're proposing is a hybrid wealth/income tax. Immediate reactions:

- How do you value private/non-traded shares?

- How do you 'value' dividends (paid or declared? Before or after WHT/imputation impacts?)

- The 'presence' section looks like, and would face the same issues as, 'conventional' formulary apportionment

- Targeting shares/divis is a good way to go for non-distortionary revenue raising (google 'taxing the maximand') but denies you the behavioural regulatory function of tax, ie R&D tax breaks etc. Policy makers do seem rather wedded to that side of things, at least in common law jurisdictions.

Overall - I'm not sure it's feasible starting from where we are as a *replacement* for existing CT, but it would be an interesting complement to it, perhaps phasing in more and more as it beds in and improves in operation?

J P
Boffin

Debt v Equity & hybrid instruments

Generally a good overview - but the point about interest recipients being taxable, potentially leading to higher overall taxation is a touch disingenuous.

Interest income may be taxable but returns on equity typically aren't - and a loan note which converts to shares if not redeemed after a fixed period may well be a debt in the hands of the 'return payer', but equity in the hands of the 'return recipient'. So clever structuring can exploit the differentials in accounting treatment to reduce taxes (although scope for it is shrinking; the typical DCLNs which were so popular a few years back no longer work in the UK for example). Goodness only know how you'd handle the impact of that kind of thing on the group accounts underpinning the formulary apportionment beloved of unitary taxation advocates, but so far they haven't even explained how they'd make capital allowances work.

Boffins, Tunnel Tigers and Scotland's world-first power mountain

J P
Thumb Up

A useful and nicely written piece - gives me another reason to try to arrange a family holiday in Scotland

Now you can be the NSA: Snoop on a Google Glass hipster with a QR code

J P

Life imitates art - anyone else ever read Snow Crash..?

BAN UK tax breaks on patented tech, fumes German finance minister

J P

http://www.accountancyage.com/aa/blog-post/2281392/colin-uk-tax-rules-patently-unfair-say-germans

Jokes of no more than 2 lines

J P

What's the loudest noise in the jungle?

A giraffe eating cherries

J P

Why do monkeys paint their testicles red?

So they can hide up cherry trees.

J P

What's green, whistles and turns red at the touch of a button?

A frog in a liquidiser, pretending it doesn't care.

J P

What's green and turns red at the touch of a button?

A frog in a liquidiser.

Police 'stumped' by car thefts using electronic skeleton key

J P
Coat

AC out of habit @AC 01:56 GMT

So at least now we know you're a nun...

My bleak tech reality: You can't trust anyone or anything, anymore

J P

Re: Biometrics?

Biometrics are fine until someone manages to replicate your verification data. I'm reasonably good at thinking up new passwords; I'm less good on replacement eyeballs.

Page: