Posts by Lotaresco

' "How do we delete our customers from the system?". Our f**kwit designers said "You don't, because you never asked for that facility." '

It's not the designers who were f*ckwits.

HTH.

Re: Nothing new for Sicily...

Not just Sicilly. I live (sometimes) in the mezzogiorno. The local road mender is a friend and I've had him do work for me in the past. He has two standards of work. That done for friends will last a lifetime. That done for the state won't last through winter.

Re: Cost of AMD CPU In General

"Is there something about AMD i am missing - and why don't vendors use AMD more ?"

They seem to use AMD quite often. The thing you need to check is TDP in the specs. Some AMD CPUs gobble electrons, although they have been getting better recently.

Re: Nobody needs more than 640K of RAM.

"Pity that Thatcher sold off Inmos."

one of my friends is the guy who wrote Occam. Even he admits that Inmos was going nowhere.

Re: Gamers?

I can't remember the exact words, unfortunately, but he did say something about it during a TV interview with Sue Lawley back in the late 80s. It was in a discussion where he explained Microsoft philosophies such as "New releases are not there to fix bugs, they are there to add features" and he mentioned that either 640K was not a barrier to software development or that 640K was adequate for the intended use of a PC. If I recall correctly this was about the time of the release of the first extended memory boards and of a version of Lotus 123 that demanded the extra memory. It was also the time that the business unit I was in flipped to using Macs with 4 or 8 Mb of memory and Excel because 123 was creaking at the seams.

Re: it's not ... anonymised... is it?

'It's not "anonymised", it's "decontextualised"'

It's referred to in the trade as "de-identified" data. It's actually very difficult to do, because any information that could be used to identify an individual needs to be obscured in some (non-reversible) way. There's a good paper on the subject that explains how the Census data was handled, but I'm danged if I can find it at the moment. I'll provide a link when I can find my notes :-)

"Even the US will have to respect GDPR if it wants to handle data on European citizens."

And will be subject to the ECJ, something which Weak and Wobbly May has claimed will not happen to the UK after Brexit. Another U-turn looming there.

Re: Twat

"If I worked with someone who spoke to me like that, he'd get it back ten times worse. Every time. And no, I wouldn't shut up."

No, like every other keyboard warrior you'd sit there and squirm, snowflake. Because every hard man on line is pathetic in RL.

""I am not quite satisfied with ..." instead of "Now that was a monumental fuck-up. Just fix it.".

I asked on a previous project which f*cknugget thought that the design was fit for purpose. It turned out to be the CEO who had been a developer once, long ago. He thought he'd done something clever by "taking charge" and demanding that the development team do things his way[1]. He was in the room at the time. He was furious and told HR to get rid of me.

There followed the amusing "He's not employed by us, he's a contractor" which turned into "Then terminate his contract" and ended with, "We can't do that, the customer insists that he remains on the team." Ha bloody hah!

[1] Transmitting lots of sensitive personal data unencrypted because it saved having to build a new web service. A real Talk Talk moment.

Re: wrongo

"there will be a "USS Donald Trump"..."

Given the US emphasis on eco-friendly fuels for naval propulsion in recent years (as in the Dripping Driven Destroyer) it would make sense for the USS Trump to be powered using LNG so that the vessel can fart its way out to sea.

Re: All very Orwellian.

"The government is completely clueless and has absolutely no idea what it is doing with regards to encryption or IT, they have no advisers and absolutely no one who understands anything."

Whereas I can understand why you would think this, based on the woeful performance of government ministers, it's not true. UKGOV has available to it some of the best advice from some of the best people in their field in the world. People who are listened to by foreign governments which deeply appreciate the insights offered. UKGOV of course has access to the full, uncensored, advice which is more useful than that information made public.

So, why are UKGOV projects not the best run, most effective, most secure in the world? The answer is simple, not only do the ministers (MA PPE, Oxon or Cambs) not understand the advice given, they think that they know far better than those funny "technical" people. Hence the ministers do their own thing, ignoring all advice given. The end result is the usual circle jerk. As long as the country is run by people who have never done productive work, who have no appreciation of science and technology and to whom manufacturing is a dirty word there's no hope of getting anything sensible out of them.

"Actually Fly-in Amber has publicly demonstrated that she couldn't actually remember her briefing properly so it's obvious she never understood it. Hashtags."

#stupidrudd

"I'm sure CESG have ensured that Amber Rudd's computers and communication devices are secure"

I'm sure they haven't. Largely because they don't exist and haven't since Francis Maude had a hissy fit that they dared to tell him that he couldn't put official government paper on a tablet that he had bought himself. The new broom in government speaks against encryption with the GDS mantra being that security is bad because it prevents "information sharing".

Re: Not for me, thanks all the same...

"The main one being they let too many people into the club for political reasons and now they are in a financial shit-hole as a result."

Is that why the rest of the EU is out-performing the UK?

UK economy falls to bottom of EU growth league

Thanks Brexiters.

Re: BMW

"Of all the drivers on the road, it seems that it's those saddled with a Vauxhall Insignia that are most filled with loathing of their fellow man."

Oh look, that flushed an embittered Insignia driver out of the woodwork.

Re: Will we ever reach the real level of human-like driving?

"Robotic road rage would be awesome."

This robot is working on it.

Pepper the robot, with an attitude problem

Re: BMW

"Never underestimate the capabilities of a driver who expected a company BMW or Audi and got a Mondeo instead."

Of all the drivers on the road, it seems that it's those saddled with a Vauxhall Insignia that are most filled with loathing of their fellow man. I'm guessing that the Insignia is the punishment car. You can guarantee that the car that swoops onto a motorway and into lane 3 without looking or use of indicators will be an Insignia. Once there the driver will never leave that lane. Not even if he has an ambulance 3 inches off his rear bumper with all the blues on. The drivers also seem to think that their asthmatic diseasel engine makes their car the equivalent of a Ferrari 430 and they will force a queue of traffic to build up behind them as they try to wrestle the car up to the 90mph that they prefer to drive at, taking a glacial epoch to do so. But they get there eventually so they can feel proud that they are going faster than anyone else.

Re: Destroy the culture too

"Just because many people use a technology in a bad way, doesn't mean you should get rid of it. "

So you haven't understood the problem with Flash then, have you? It's not "people using it in a bad way". It's the problem that Flash is a buggy mess of insecure code that compromises the security of both servers and clients. It's a foul mess best done away with.

Do you own a lumberjack shirt despite living in the heart of the Crapital?

Re: FFS

"Let it fucking die."

Indeed. I've no idea why you have so many downvotes for that. I can only assume that some bearded hipster "web designers" have managed to get in here, somehow. The faster that Flash goes, the better. All we need to do is to make sure that no one bleeds into the coffin.

Re: Lawyered up

"thing that the company is most paranoid about is brand and reputation damage"

Err they do know that have an entirely shit brand and reputation, don't they? Customer service at Currys/PCW is, always has been and will probably continue to be shit. That's what their reputation is and their "brand" is recognised as a warning that they are to be used only for "distress purchases".

My experience, bought a TV from them because it was one day faster to get it from Currys rather than get it from Amazon and although more expensive at Currys, not that much more expensive. Opened the box and screen was damaged. Returned to Currys for the most awful support experience, ever. Firstly a one hour wait to get anyone to look at the TV. Then another hour of being accused of damaging it myself. Then another hour as they refused to honour their SOGA responsibilities followed by them refusing to replace it unless the manufacturer agreed to pay the costs. Ignorant staff claimed that this was essential. It isn't. Eventually replaced only when the manufacturer agreed to indemnify Currys.

Shameful, awful and the default standard for customer "service" at Currys. You even have to wait to pay for goods because the tills are not manned. And then when somebody appears they try to sell you shit you don't want and turn business purchases into a nightmare.

Re: it makes more sense to not have FTTP

"I am currently waiting to see how reliable overhead FTTP is."

It depends on many factors. How stingy the supplier is factors heavily. If they use armoured cable then it may survive but the costs tend to make that uneconomic. The details of the site are also important. Trees grow back after being cut and eventually the branches waving in the wind damage the cable. We have outages of power and telecoms because of that. As mentioned before passing trucks cause cable to whip around, particularly if the cable is hung over the road rather than along it.

If the hedges/trees are kept neatly trimmed and the cables aren't over a road that's heavily used by trucks and if the cable has a steel support cable as well as the plastic sheath then there shouldn't be a significant problem.

On private lines you could monitor the line quality and improve resilience by using a multicore cable and putting an OTDR switch at each end so that in the event of a break or degradation the switch uses another pair in the bundle. Sadly no service provider is going to go to those lengths for a SOHO user.

The sort of cable we use for this sort of work is £2,000 per km and service provider flinch at those costs.

Re: Available but not realistic

"any links to those 100mbs fibre products that can only be used upto 80 mbops?"

No, because to get such a link you have to enter the details of your premises into the supplier's coverage and speed web application. You can try it for yourself if you like, at the site of the rural broadband initiatives suppler, Callflow UK. There you will find that they advertise 100Mbps then state "Up to 80Mbps Download & 20Mbps Upload ".

Seriously, why would I bothered to lie to you about this as you seem to be implying?

Re: Don't shoot/kill the messenger...

"Reading the comments here...boy, so much misinformation."

Yes, most of it coming from Anon. Cowards who snipe at others.

If you're worried about your network traffic being transmitted over copper, WTAF do you do within your premises? Someone was complaining earlier that 1 ft of copper would make 5km of fibre irrelevant. I wonder how he, it has to be a he, connects his PC to his home network?

"maybe, at 100Mbps+ G.fast signals over copper, not a chance."

Oh right, I must be imagining the Gb over copper network on UTP we already have then?

Re: it makes more sense to not have FTTP

"And in reply to Lotaresco, they don't have any fibre flapping around in the air, they perform "micro-trenching" which just means digging a little trench not-very-deep."

If only you understood more than the limited amount that you do. You can't trench across a road without disrupting traffic, this costs money and takes time. It's more usual to do this using a mole so that there's no need to break the road surface. This isn't as cheap as cable providers like. It makes sense to provide cable via trenches in urban areas where adoption rates will be high enough to pay for the work.

However, if you bother to look in rural areas you will see that the cable duct runs down one side of the road (only) meaning that you need to reach premises on the other side of the road somehow. The solution used by *all* providers in rural areas is to run a cable up the nearest pole and then from there to the premises. If you bother to look you'll see that the cable flaps about. A lot.

This is what most rural roads look like. Notice how the poles are on the opposite side of the road to the housing.

Rural Telecoms

Also if you don't bury fibre sufficiently deep under a road, it will break because those trucks pound the road. One way to do traffic monitoring is to bury a fibre optic under the road and monitor the deflection.

Heck but I've only been designing networks for a few decades. What would I know, eh?

Re: Available but not realistic

"Do you really want to rely on a decent 4G connection, when the school bus is late and there are a dozen teenagers waiting at the bus stop outside your premises?"

Given that there's no bus stop, no pavement, the area doesn't have more than a handful of teenagers and we're in the centre of a National Park plus there's no 4G at ground level but a strong signal on the roof of our premises because it's a tall building so we can put 4G aerials on the roof and use a DSL/4G router so that in the absence of 4G we can fail over to DSL, no I'm not really concerned. YMMV.