Posts by Lotaresco 1501 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2007
"2: Project consultant had created an insane admin password, that was prone to being mis-entered by anyone of the two imaging teams & three deployment teams & frequently locking the account out six times a hour."
You were password sharing? You deserved to come to a bad end.
"Corporate - largely based on maximising shareholder value."
If only that were true. Corporate is largely based on telling enormous lies and rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic in order to massage the bonuses of the senior management team. It does not maximise shareholder value to tie companies down with unsustainable levels of debt. Yet this is a standard tactic for CEOs looking to acquire businesses to give a false impression of growth. See "Fred the Shred" for example.
All UKGOV/Territories and dependencies are being forced to reduce the number of contractors they use and to hand over work to civil servants. There's also a recruitment drive to persuade talent to take up a job as a civil servant. This is producing the expected results, the people who actually know how to make things work are leaving/have left. No one with any talent will ditch what they are doing to take a permies salary with the limited holidays, Dilbert pointy-haired boss bullsh*t and general mandarin quackery of the civil service. So the people they have are sitting down with copies of ... for Dummies books and trying to make sense of things. With no actual experience of doing the job the results are predictable.
"But planning ways to do it, but not actually do it, is always interesting."
"So long as you do it on your own. Do it with someone else and it's conspiracy (IANAL, obviously :-))"
Where I work it would be a frequently repeated team exercise. If we don't try to think like criminals how can we protect our assets?
"I used to work for a shitty company (fuck you Evesham Micros)"
I used to work not far from Evesham Micros. One of my colleagues bought a custom PC from them and it didn't work, mostly because the assembly had been done in a hurry and several connectors weren't properly seated. I offered to fix it for him but he took the view that Evesham built it so they could fix it.
It's a long story so I'll cut to the important part. After months of trying to get them to fix it, he kidnapped one of the Evesham directors by inviting the director to his house to discuss the matter and then locking the door and refusing to let him go until he got a cash refund.
Hmm, the prison residents seem to be well catered for, phones that are small enough to poke to sunshine-free areas that feature a voice changer so that it's possible to continue harassing those witnesses.
Two phones both on Vodafone. One is unaffected, the other has a phantom £350 charge for 1GB of data. However that data was used earlier in the month, the account includes 16GB/month and is capped at €50/ month.
I’m working in Europe, unable to contact Vodafone via their support number, online chat or the phone app.
Spectacular clustermess.
"To be fair, the light year is probably a difficult unit for Joe Bloggs to relate to"
The BBC has its own standards for length, volume, mass and electrical energy. These are the London bus, Olympic swimming pool, elephant and home respectively.
I'm surprised that this article did not give distances to the stars in terms of the London bus.
"the obligatory $1. "
The problem with that is that Shanks would then be stuck with Palmer's costs. That's the problem with most libel cases - the damages are usually a token unless it was a particularly nasty form of libel but a billionaires lawyers will present bills for (at least) hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Knowing some minimal details about what he did would be useful. The CMA seems to be loose enough that if someone were to access pictures via someone's profile that have privacy set to public without the express permission of the owner and makes/retains a copy that it could be argued that was illegal under the CMA at the lowest level "unauthorised access to a computer". OTOH if the court has established that he actively hacked the accounts to get private images that's pretty much business as usual. Not that this sets a precedent either way since it's a hearing in a Magistrates' Court.
"the only paths to removing Johnson are the government resigning (which it won't), Johnson resigning (which he won't), or a no confidence vote in the House"
You missed one. Since Johnson does not command a majority in the house it is clear that he has no mandate to govern. The Queen can therefore request that the other parties organise to form a majority with a nominated leader who will become Prime Minister. Normally this coalition would be lead by the Opposition. If they manage to agree a coalition the Queen can appoint the leader as Prime Minister.
The Queen is said to be investigating this option and looking at precedent for removal of a failing Prime Minister.
"So now a sitting Prime Minister can be overruled by the Judiciary"
There's no "now" about it. The Prime Minister has always been subject to the law. You are simply showing that you are ignorant of the constitution. If things worked as you imagine a Prime Minister could commit murder and not face judgment in court. Even in the days of the law being made by the crown, the monarch was bound by the law as much as their subjects were. This is the sort of thing that we had Civil Wars and beheadings to establish.
"So you agree, the Supreme Court did indeed devise a new standard, thus introducing into law something which wasn't previously in place."
You are twisting someone's words in an attempt to claim that they agree with you. The Supreme Court states clearly the precedent for limitation of prerogative powers, in this instance the Case of Proclamations which establishes that prerogative powers are limited by law. This is not making new law it is an exercise of extant law.
Using your approach to this, since you quote the precedent you are clearly agreeing with the SC that there was no introduction into law of something that wasn't previously in place.
"The Attorney General has just stated clearly in Parliament that the Supreme Court does have the right to create a new law, and that they have done so."
The AG is mostly performing a backside covering exercise. He wants to have people believe that the Supreme Court made a law and therefore the advice he gave was correct at the time he gave it until the evil Supreme Court came along and changed the rules.
If you read the judgment you will see that their Lordships carefully spell out the laws and legal precedents that guided their decision. It's too tedious to repeat here but it was a thorough, forensic, examination of the facts and the conclusion was inevitable. As witness the fact that it was unanimous. There is no creation of a new law, there is simply the application of the best legal minds in the country to determine what constitutional law says on the subject of the power of the Prime Minister over Parliament. The law makes it clear that Parliament is sovereign.
You can read the judgment here. I recommend that you take time to read it. It is not overly long and it is written in clear, concise English as Supreme Court judgments always are. All of the objections raised here are considered and dismissed.
"The courts are the wrong place to be doing this"
We have a general election. Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime Minister. His first act is to prorogue Paraliament. Then he sets our to nationalise all property in the UK with no compensation payments. He then nationalises all companies and forces companies that have intellectual property rights to surrender those rights for free to the government.
You're telling me that the Supreme Court should not adjudicate on the legality of his actions? You actually want to live in a dictatorship where the Prime Minister can rule by diktat?
"which has already been fatally undermined by peope like you, who have trashed the social contract that democractic votes are based, ie , that the losers accept the results."
I only take lessons on democracy from people who can spell democracy or democratic and who actually show a clue that they know what they are talking about. There is no requirement in a democracy for people who lose a vote to accept the results. If this were so, then the endlessly whining quitters should have shut up way back in 1975 when they lost by a landslide. But they didn't they plonked on about it for the next 41 years and are still plonking on about it 44 years after the vote. It is quite astonishing that those screaming "democracy" seem to think that it means that everyone must do what they want. It doesn't mean that and it never has.
And this is before we get to the fact that Western democracies are, for the most part, representative democracies where the people elect someone to represent their best interests not where they elect a puppet to carry out "the will of the people". That term "the will of the people" being of course the rallying cry of the National Socialists.
"There is a minority who either abuse the system or misunderstand the rules, and similarly there are a small number of clients/"employers" who do the same."
One of the clients that abuses the system wholesale is HMRC. They have huge numbers of contractors at Telford and they have exempted them from IR35 even though they do nothing but work for HMRC and have done for not just years but decades. I'd PMSL if HMRC were forced to pay all the employers' NIC they have dodged over the years.
"The vast majority of IT contractors are in fact either employed or self-employed"
There are very few self-employed contractors, largely because in a previous round of stupidity IR forced them to set up limited companies. That was a bizarre response to individuals who had passed the tests set by the IR to be able to declare that they were self-employed being told that IR would ignore the fact that they passed the tests and would treat them as "disguised employees" IR then offered the advice that contractors should form a Limited to be considered a "legitimate business".
The vast majority of contractors are therefore employed, employed by the companies of which they are directors and shareholders, not by their clients. IR themselves prove this by how they handle the issue of supposedly unpaid employers' NIC. If, as alleged the client is the employer then it is clear that the client should pay the NIC, pensions contributions and all the other employee benefits that the client avoided by using a contractor. Instead the IR takes the NIC from the contractor's company therefore confirming that the contractor's employer is that Ltd Co. not the client. Hence the contractor always was a legitimate employee of their own company.
Of course IR want their cake and eat it so they just grab the cash and the client profits.
"Or maybe, I will show you two medium-sized projects of mine. And that letter notifying me that I was accepted into the PhD program in mathematics."
OK, first prove to me that the microcode of the system you are running your code on is error free. Good luck with that.
As to your second statement, that's reading awfully like "BA Calcutta (failed)". I'd be more impressed if you had been awarded your PhD and had about 30 years experience before you started to tell me that you can create error free code. And even then I'd want to know that the entire stack was error free, not just the sprinkling of fairy dust you put on top of the sewage layer cake.
"It does indeed rely on evaporation/condensation cycles. Some explanations and a sketch of the chiller there:"
A closed-cycle version of a cooling tower with a vacuum to help things along on the evaporation side. It looks typically German engineering (i.e. more complicated than it needs to be) since it's not getting much of a thermal advantage over the performance of a cooling tower.
I used to work at a facility, a wind tunnel, that had to dissipate MW of heat. This was done using evaporative cooling - similar to the cooling towers seen at power stations but in a more compact form. The same systems are available as HVAC systems that can cool from an ambient of 35C to 25C. These systems work well but take a lot of maintenance. The water has to be purified, filtered and treated to prevent legionella.
Here's some manufacturer's bumf on the subject.
"The square flash cubes that rotated were called Magicubes. They didn’t use an electric current to fire"
There were two types of flash cube, electrical and mechanical fired. The mechanical ones were the later version. Here's a photo of a Westinghouse pack of flashcubes that were electrically fired. Note that they are marked "Use with battery operated cameras".
"Then tell them they really should invest in neutrino shielding."
My home is on a hill with a view towards INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratory. We had visitors who had driven to our home from Rome and had seen the signs in the motorway tunnel for INFN and asked what it was. I explained that it's primarily a neutrino detector and that it's used to detect neutrinos from the sun and also a beam of neutrinos generated at CERN.
The female visitor asked what happened to the neutrinos then. I said well we're along the path so mostly they travel through this house on the way back out into space. She screamed like a steam whistle and fainted. Her SO had to lie her out on a chaise longue where she had a fit of the vapours about being "irradiated" and wondering how long she had to live. They left soon afterwards.
The leaving was an unexpected bonus.
I worked for a pharmaceutical company. After three years in post my boss told me to get my CV out and polish it up. I could use him and another HOD as referees and they would give me help to polish my CV and get a good job. I was shocked, I thought I was doing OK in the role. He told me it wasn't me, but HR had just told him to cut back on travel expenses. No more business class travel, no more hotels unless they were on an "approved" list which was short and composed of budget hotels mostly without restaurants. He then said his experience was that as soon as a company starts to trim minor expenditure like travel it's a sign that it has already slashed other budget elements to the bone and beyond. In short it was time to leave before the inevitable happened. We all took his advice and we got decent jobs with his help. Two years later that company was closed down.
The surprise with DXC isn't the slashing of budgets and staff, the surprise is that it's lasted this long.
BTW, I applied the expense rule when HP started to trim budgets and left them years ago. Thanks once more to my boss thirty years ago who taught me a useful lesson.
Me: This government IT system is riddled with problems, including some gaping security holes that the pen testers haven't noticed.
Project Sponsor: I want to replace the input clerks with software robots.
Me: Fix the basic system first. At the moment the clerks are trapping data errors that would cause problems if they were added to the database.
PS: Like what?
Me: Multiple spellings of the same name meaning money goes to the wrong person, other non-unique identifiers and attempts by the public to "game" the system.
PS: Those flaws have always been there, we can work around them. I want the robot up and running ASAP.
I left. I suspect that the robot was added to the system and is now happily working in GIGO mode.
The first time that I encountered BASIC was at school in 1970. Since the school couldn't afford a computer we had to write our code onto coding sheets and post them to UMIST where they were typed onto cards and run. Then the university would return the printed output and cards in the post. It took a week for the turnaround. Imagine the thrill of opening the envelope and finding "Syntax Error on line 10" as the output.
Two years later I managed to get my hands on a PDP11 and an ASR33. Oh the joy!
"I know, such a single-entendre bunch, I mean, do they know how much sitcom humour they've just thrown away by not also having it possibly refer to a) ciggies b) small sticks of wood c) odd pork derived foodstuff?"
And to the frayed ends of material or rope. Fag ends are the frayed (useless) ends of rope or cloth. Fag ends for a cigarette stub came before the cigarette became "a fag" it's a back-formation since a fag end obvious comes from a fag.
"Perhaps we should suggest it to the Americans who enjoy executing people who are only guilty of being black in the wrong place."
Someone got their before you. James Blish the author of "They Shall Have Stars" which features the Dillon-Wagoner Graviton Polarity Generator, known as the spindizzy, mentions the use of exposure to high-level atomic waste as a method of execution. Alaska's Senator Bliss Wagoner is executed in this manner for diverting public funds to the research programme to develop the spindizzy, starting with the construction of a bridge on Jupiter as a testbench for gravity research. It also features an early discussion of drones and telepresence. The Senator himself explains that the method of execution was chosen to instil fear into the public, but that in actual fact it's relatively fast and relatively painless.
"If you travel down country roads, and see the hedgerows and trees looking like they've been in a fight with a tank, all splintered and torn, you're probably looking at the results of one of these."
That look is the result of poor equipment and poor maintenance and infrequent cutting. Done properly a flail cutter (the things used for hedges are different to the things used for cutting grass) leaves a perfect finish. But the hedge needs to be cut at least a couple of times a year. Stingy landowners have the hedges cut once every five years and that means having to cut through large branches resulting in the splintered look. The council maintains very few hedges, usually only the ones that confine land owned by the council.
"I would guess that a flail mower is a drum with lengths of chain hanging from it, that use brute force to cut things instead of a single spinning blade."
As the owner of a flail mower (and the tractor to power it) I have to say that you are a bit wide of the mark. Chains don't feature in the design because they tend to break creating a danger of flying shrapnel. There's a rotating shaft fitted with bearings. In the UK flail mowers tend to have flimsy "Y" or "J" shaped blades that are bolted to these bearings. They scalp the vegetation and can be knocked out of the way if they hit a rock or large branch.
Italian and Japanese flail mowers tend to be much more rugged and have hammers that look a little like an old fashioned adze with a sharp leading edge. These devices can be regulated for height and are capable of cutting wood up to about 50mm in diameter. Same bearing arrangement but the mowers are designed to achieve a lawn finish even when cutting grass up to 5ft high.
The underside of the mower looks like this: Flail mower hammers.
"Until, of course the service stops, and your library disappears."
I don't worry about having a library for a streaming service, because as far as I'm concerned streaming is just a variant on broadcasting but with the advantage that I can watch it when I like rather than when the programme is broadcast.
There are some things that I want to keep (rare) and for those it will either be Blu-ray or a download. That's where iTunes has been useful, their catalogue includes lots of rare and difficult to source movies and TV shows at (mostly) reasonable prices. I would be ticked off if Apple decided to prevent access to the stuff I paid for. Although that's easy to circumvent these days since de-DRM apps are fairly widely available.
I heard yesterday that this change won't affect Windows users since Apple is keeping iTunes on Windows.
"Since then I've been using CopyTrans."
Ooh that's handy. I used to use Senuti but I've no idea if that works these days. Thanks for the tip.
With three iPods for me, and one for SWMBO, and over 80GB of music I don't want to lose it. I'm already ticked off by the disappearance of the iPod from the store. The iPhone app doesn't cut it.
Isn't it the iTunes app that's about to be killed off, not the service? That is, all the iTunes store backend will remain to support the new apps. This is roughly similar to the BBC's awful Sound/iPlayer split. What I can't tell is for how long the current iTunes which has DRM'd content that has been paid for will continue to work.
"They are still way too top heavy. Too many men in suits who know sod all about life on the ground."
That was also CSC's major problem. A bunch of lightweights who enjoyed swanning around at "The Pavilion" with lattes (or rather "LAR-tays") in hand fatuously repeating some buzzword they had just heard. When it came to understanding the customer and how to meet the customer's needs they were clueless. They also had a policy of side-lining or getting rid of real talent. This was because real talent could spot the glaring holes in the "plans" and pointed out things like "You're not going to build a datacentre like that for that budget." and "The customer isn't able to accept commercial cloud delivery because they are a government agency constrained to using G-cloud, they told us that in the tender."
There were nuggets of talent at CSC, but they were like pea-sized gold nuggets in a dump truck full of pig poo.
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