* Posts by I am the liquor

447 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Oct 2013

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Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

I am the liquor

Re: Thales is pronounced Talis

Perhaps they should take a leaf out of Hyundai's book, and commission a TV ad campaign to express how narked they are about people mispronouncing their name.

UK tax agency's digital services not good enough to take strain off phone lines

I am the liquor

Re: Tax nonsense

It is all there, but they don't make it easy to find.

A good starting point is to go to the HMRC guidance and regulation page, and search for "manual".

https://www.gov.uk/search/guidance-and-regulation?parent=hm-revenue-customs&keywords=manual&organisations%5B%5D=hm-revenue-customs&order=relevance

British businesses told: Compliance with EU AI law will satisfy UK guidance

I am the liquor

Re: RE: And yet they did

They did not do the thing that about which you claimed "And yet they did."

The Reuters article does not say the EU wanted to limit the power output of kettles, it says that some people fear that. The Full Fact article is not terribly well written, but it is saying that not all of the 29 product categories would be regulated based on power output.

It takes a fixed amount of energy to boil a quantity of water. Reducing the power used does not change that; if anything, energy losses would be greater. The EU wants to reduce the energy consumption of appliances. Reducing the power consumption of a kettle would be counter to that goal, so they would not and did not consider that.

I am the liquor

RE: And yet they did

They did not. You've read the European Commission's study on the matter? No, of course you haven't. You've read the Daily Mail's lies about that study, and chosen to believe them, despite the fact that those lies should have been quite transparent, for the reasons already explained.

I am the liquor

Re: Hold your horses!

"electrical products where it wants to see lower energy consumption"... yes, they came up with all sorts of ideas about how to reduce the energy consumption of kettles. You do understand the difference between energy and power, don't you?

I am the liquor

Re: Hold your horses!

No, reducing the power of electric kettles was never suggested in any EU consultation or legislation. It was a fiction created by the UK right-wing press, one contributor being Stephen Johns in the Daily Mail.

Of course the idea of it would be daft, anyone with a bare passing grade in O-level physics can see that. The people whom the EU commissioned to study electrical appliance efficiency were not barely-passing O-level students, they were engineers and scientists with Masters' degrees and PhDs, and they never suggested such an idea. In fact if you read the original Stephen Johns article, he doesn't actually say that they did. He just sort-of implies it. That his readers chose to believe this nonsensical fiction speaks to the blindness of their prejudices.

Google Maps leads German tourists to week-long survival saga in Australian swamp

I am the liquor

Re: What’s truly amazing…

Probably took the signs down in 1940 to confuse the Germans, and never put them back!

I am the liquor

Re: If only there were some sort of handy backup.

I don't know if Neil is a Brit, but if he is, it's easy for us to forget how spoiled we are by the national treasure that is the Ordnance Survey.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

I am the liquor

Firing people on Monday?

We find it's always better to fire people on a Friday. Studies have statistically shown that there's less chance of an incident if you do it at the end of the week.

Preview edition of Microsoft OS/2 2.0 surfaces on eBay

I am the liquor

Re: Worth noting the discovery that made OS/2 1 redundant

The AA battery-powered HP 200LX also used an 80186, or at least a copy of one.

Survey: Over half of undergrads in UK are using AI in university assignments

I am the liquor

Re: ChatGPT is good for poems not statistics

ChatGPT doesn't understand maths, that's clear. What has surprised me, when asking it similar questions, is how good it is at producing an answer that, although wrong, looks plausible: if you didn't bother to check the maths, you could easily take its answer as valid. So it's not doing the calculation - if it was, it would produce the right answer - but it's not churning out random numbers either.

Fairberry project brings a hardware keyboard to the Fairphone

I am the liquor
Angel

Re: The Blackberry Passport...

I'd guess the answer would be to agree common protocols. You can do end-to-end encryption between different VOIP clients that support SRTP. Why not the same for messaging clients.

I am the liquor

Re: The Blackberry Passport...

For the providers designated "gatekeepers" under the EU's Digital Market Act, it's not a request, it's an obligation.

The problems may not be easy to solve, but they have to figure it out somehow.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/29/eu_mandated_messaging_interop_paper/

That runaway datacenter power grab is the best news for net zero this century

I am the liquor

Re: Zero

Politicians love banning stuff, apparently oblivious to its ineffectiveness as a tool of policy... but it's not the only lever available.

Tax would be one option. I'm sure some clever economists could devise an international regime of tax on profits from internet services, such that the only viable ones would be those that generate genuine value, or that someone is prepared to run on a non-profit basis.

Extreme privacy controls - legal or technological - would be another. No doubt most of those sites that the OP was referring to are the sort where the user is the product. If privacy controls were so tight they couldn't monetise their users, a lot of them probably would be gone tomorrow.

AI-driven booze bouncers can ID you with face scan

I am the liquor

A golden age of under-age drinking

So how long, do we think, before 14-year-olds discover that they can buy booze with impunity by wearing Groucho Marx glasses or drawing a face on a potato?

'Birthplace of Amazon' on the market for $2.28M

I am the liquor

Put it in the garage

If I were Jeff Bezos, and I'd seen season 4 of Silicon Valley, I'd buy the place, dismantle it, and reconstruct it inside my new, much larger garage.

Polish train maker denies claims its software bricked rolling stock maintained by competitor

I am the liquor

Re: Hackers entering GPS coordinates of OEM repair shops to prevent trains from failing?

The alternatives would be "honest mistake, accidentally pressed 'release to production' instead of 'delete' on experimental code written purely for research purposes"; or throw a "rogue engineer" under the bus with the "a few bad apples" excuse. Though the latter didn't go so well for VW.

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

I am the liquor

Re: "facial age estimation"

Hopefully someone is already working on a device driver that mimics a webcam, but just plays a video of the current Home Secretary on a loop. That should solve the problem for your youthful-looking friend.

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

I am the liquor

I'm sure we can come up with a new verb. Twitter is to tweet as X is to... xcrete?

I am the liquor

Re: X11 logo?

The blue on the X seems to be rgb(29, 155, 240), which might be "celestial blue" or "dodger blue" according to google - either of which would be apt in some way.

Concerns that £360m data platform for NHS England is being set up to fail

I am the liquor

Re: Data grab

I think hoola has a point though. GPs were always "privatised," but they were not always "privatised in this way." There's a world of difference between an LLP owned by the GPs (or dentists) themselves, and a large corporation serving hundreds of thousands of patients with the cheapest service they can get away with.

Meta slammed with eight lawsuits claiming social media hurts kids

I am the liquor

Re: The other part of autopilot safety...

They ought to be measuring the overall performance of the system, including the human, as long as the human is still part of the system. If the AI never crashes, but the human crashes more when they're forced to take over, then the AI hasn't achieved any safety benefit.

EU lawmakers vote to ban sales of combustion engine cars from 2035

I am the liquor

Re: Before people panic

And crucially, it sets a goal that the people setting it will never have to deliver on. The failure to meet it will be someone else's fault.

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

I am the liquor

As far as I can see, there is not.

The Commission has reserved the right to executively alter the specifications "in the light of technical progress." But that looks rather like a chicken-and-egg situation, doesn't it. They won't allow a new connector until someone's created one, and no-one's going to create a new connector that's not allowed.

Enshrining a specific connector in law seems like a mistake. We're now stuck with USB-C for good or ill. A better idea would've been to allow any connector that meets some standard of non-proprietary openness.

IBM ends funding for employee retirement clubs

I am the liquor

Re: 1/5 of the total payroll

If you want to know the true profit per employee of a company like 3i, you really ought to include the employees of the companies they invest in. They're the ones who are really generating the money, not the employees of 3i itself.

I am the liquor

Re: Warning: Old-Git Post

The Quakers took it to the extreme, certainly, but a lot of Victorian industrialists shared those paternalistic ideals to some extent. When I first entered the world of work, most of the biggest employers nearby were companies that had started as family businesses in the 19th century, and they all had really nice sports & social clubs, with sports pitches, bowling greens, bars and function rooms... one even had a rifle range. All of those are gone now, sold off for housing development.

Safari is crippling the mobile market, and we never even noticed

I am the liquor

Frames? Bloody luxury! In my day, the only tags we had were ˂p˃, ˂a˃ and ˂blink˃, and we had to type them directly into the output stream of the WWW daemon every time it recevied a GET request.

Dell's rugged Latitude 5430 laptop is quick and pretty – but also bulky and heavy

I am the liquor

Re: You're whinging about a 6.5 pound laptop?

If it's a Thinkpad, there's a tiny hole on the back that you can jab a paper clip* into to cut power from the internal battery.

* or for those too young to remember paper clips, a SIM card removal tool.

IBM ordered to pay $105 million to insurer over tech project's collapse

I am the liquor

Re: "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM"

They sold most of what nobody ever got fired for buying to Lenovo years ago.

The Register gets up close and personal with ESA's JUICE spacecraft

I am the liquor
Thumb Up

Re: Life resembling art again?

Came here expecting very first comment to be a 2010 reference; was not disappointed.

First Light says it's hit nuclear fusion breakthrough with no fancy lasers, magnets

I am the liquor

10^18

Good luck to them, but if they've figured out how to make 50 of something they need 10^18 of, I'm not getting my hopes up just yet.

Vital UK customs system outage contributes to travel chaos at its borders

I am the liquor

Re: @Spaceman9

In the same way that you "surrender" to your family when you choose to settle down and have kids.

That's a pretty convincing argument actually, I think you just flipped me from remain to leave.

I am the liquor
Joke

Re: a clique of aristocrats

Thank goodness it's not the 18th century any more. Imagine living in a country where a clique of aristocrats screwed over the little people and ran everything for the benefit of their own fabulously wealthy friends and family.

Prototype app outperforms and outlasts outsourced production version

I am the liquor

Re: But Pareto...

The classic 90/10 rule... 90% of the features take 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% of the features take the other 90% of the time.

UK Home Office dangles £20m for national gun licence database system

I am the liquor

Re: How much????

Something that deals with "170,000 licence grants, renewals and variations per year" hardly seems like a "large-scale database" does it. I could see low-mid 6 figures for this but £20 million is a boondoggle.

Research casts doubt on energy efficiency of 5G

I am the liquor

Re: Jevons paradox

You're countering your own argument when you say "by far the biggest contributor to data use in recent years has been the ubiquity of wifi." You're saying having access to a bigger pipe led people to put more stuff down it.

Users complain of missing data in UK wills search service

I am the liquor
Happy

Re: Special characters

Well good news John, P455w0rd36 is in fact not in any password breaches known to haveibeenpwned.com.

Too bad it's been burned now!

But yes, as Len described, once a password has appeared in a breach of plaintext passwords (probably pinched from some site that stored them in the clear or used weak hashing), then it's in every password-cracker's dictionary. If they lift a database of password hashes from a site where you used one of those passwords, then they will decrypt it via a dictionary attack, even if an expensive hash function was used in that case.

Apparently haveibeenpwned has a dictionary of "hundreds of millions" of exposed passwords. So in cracking terms, any password that's in that list, no matter how long or complex, is reduced to about the level of a 5-character alphabetic password (380 million combinations).

I am the liquor

It's great that people can still make money building stuff like that. Should make a lot of us here feel more secure in our jobs!

I am the liquor

At which point you start to think they might as well get rid of the password completely, and make the password reset process (probably an emailed token) the logon process.

I am the liquor

Re: Special characters

The real answer is for the sites not to enforce composition requirements, which has been the official CESG/NCSC guidance for some years. Specify a minimum length - nothing more in terms of composition - and then check the password against a dictionary of known weak or compromised passwords, is what they should be doing.

JavaScript survey: Most use React but satisfaction low

I am the liquor

Re: Frameworks

I think that's a good call. For all the shortcomings of languages like JavaScript or of inexperienced programmers, they're secondary issues; I'd agree the number 1 barrier to maintainability of systems is choice of dependencies.

Everything has dependencies of course, but if you've stuck rigidly to "dinosaurish" dependencies like, say, Oracle or MS .Net, or something defined in an ISO standard, then the chances of your code still running in 10 or 20 years are good. If you've machine-gunned your system full of random stuff off NPM or NuGet, then chances are not so good.

I am the liquor

It probably is, though to a vastly lesser degree. A lesser degree for two reasons: 75% is not 93%; and "toxic femininity" is not the same problem as "toxic masculinity".

I am the liquor

Thanks for illustrating the problem.

I am the liquor

It is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy though. Finding yourself the only woman in your class or office is likely to be a discouraging situation to many.

I am the liquor

Re: Frameworks

It's fine that the code quality is terrible. A couple of years into the future, the framework that it's all written on is no longer flavour of the month, and most of the hundred other dependencies that were dragged in are no longer maintained at all. What's the point of building maintainable code on top of such a house of cards? Consider it disposable from the start. Throw it away and build a new one. Building code that'll be runnable and maintainable for a decade or more is such a 1990's concept.

Ponzi scheme sounds about right.

Fibre broadband uptake in UK lags behind OECD countries

I am the liquor

Re: HS2 or FTTP?

As long as we're not all smears of carbon on the pavement, it's doing what it's supposed to... or, at least, you can't say it's failed. I hang old AOL CDs round the garden to stave off the nuclear apocalypse, and to be fair, the empirical evidence for the success of that strategy is equally strong.

I am the liquor

While the kids are waiting for their game download, you could distract them by holding a torch under your chin and regaling them with spine-chilling stories about the terrors of R Tape loading error.

Car radios crashed by station broadcasting images with no file extension

I am the liquor

Re: GIGO for the goddesses sake!

If there even is a standard that covers this, which there probably isn't. More likely Mazda's developers just made a wrong assumption that a JPEG file name will always end with .jpg because they usually do. Presumably other manufacturers' software was displaying them correctly.

I am the liquor

Re: GIGO for the goddesses sake!

Yes quite. You have to wonder how Mazda's software would stand up to someone who's actually trying to break it.

UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

I am the liquor

Re: Tory Government Promises the Impossible

What's the betting the next press release promises to get it done by 2030.

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