Re: Get a hobby
Or better yet, involves immersing your fingers in pineapple juice for long periods of time...
Posts by Zippy's Sausage Factory
766 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Mar 2008
Yorkshire cops have begun using on-the-spot fingerprint scanners
Monday 12th February 2018 15:06 GMT 
It was also at pains to emphasise that prints "are automatically deleted from the device once they have been checked".
Er, what? I'm always suspicious when someone takes pains to answer a question they weren't asked. Always reminds me of the "what's under the carpet? Ha ha, it's not a dead body." "Nobody asked you what was under the carpet" type of gag...
You can find me in da club, database full of faces… but this ain't privacy watchers' jam
Friday 2nd February 2018 16:04 GMT 
Why do I get the impression that these sort of apps will become mandatory nationwide and then there will be a central database and every single use of the app will be tracked... and then maybe the app will become mandatory for all clubs. And then they can start the racial profiling of clubs again* and start targeting the "undesirable**" ones for closure...
* The forms you had to submit to the Met used to ask for the racial grouping of the clientele, I believe.
** I use this word only so I can remind you of Nat King Cole's response when moving into a new house and a white neighbour told him they didn't want any "undesirables" moving in - "if I see any, I'll let you know"
$14bn tax hit, Surface Pro screens keep dying – but it's not all good news at Microsoft
Thursday 1st February 2018 16:21 GMT
Re: Nobody ever got fired
"Nobody else has anything remotely as good as Active Directory"
Although, speaking as a developer who has written some stuff against Active Directory, it's nasty.
AD feels like a fudge, built on top of a compromise, painted to look like a marketing document but held together round the back with duct tape.
The parts of it that work do, sort of, work. But that's because the admin interfaces hide a multitude of sins. When you actually start writing code against AD, you start to notice the can of nasty, parasitic, diseased worms underneath, all of whom seem to want to kill you.
(Six years AD free... six years AD free...)
Govt 'comprehensively ignored' advice over NHS data-sharing deal
Terror law expert to UK.gov: Why backdoors when there's so much other data to slurp?
Suspicion of villainy leads Facebook to ban cryptocoin ads
A Dell/VMware acqui-merge? Good luck landing that, big Mike
Tuesday 30th January 2018 17:10 GMT
Could we please have a computer manufacturer that considers making fast, reliable, solid products its "secret sauce"?
I mean, being private is all very nice and all and I'm sure being able to do things that wouldn't wash if you had the SEC breathing down your necks every 90 days is all well and good, but your repair guys know where I live. In fact, I'm sure they even know the names of our cats by now...
UK.gov mass data slurping ruled illegal – AGAIN
Firefox to emit ‘occasional sponsored story’ in ads test
Monday 29th January 2018 19:18 GMT
Re: Bye Bye
Nice idea, but Palemoon doesn't have all the features that are baked-in to the bigger browsers like Firefox and Chrome.
Some of the "selling points" of Pale Moon are exactly that it DOESN'T have these features - newer sync (less secure than older sync), any support for DRM, Australis, etc...
(Disclaimer: Pale Moon has been my main browser for well over a year now...)
You can't ignore Spectre. Look, it's pressing its nose against your screen
GitHub shrugs off drone maker DJI's crypto key DMCA takedown effort
New Sky thinking: Media giant makes dish-swerving move on Netflix territory
Microsoft whips out tool so you can measure Windows 10's data-slurping creepiness
Cold calling director struck off for ‘flagrant’ breach of duties
Wednesday 24th January 2018 12:32 GMT
Re: There was a time...
Indeed.
I once had a letter from HMRC asking what I was doing for four months because they'd not had any contributions on my behalf for that time. I assumed at the time it was a mistake rather than anything sinister, and I never heard anything more about it, but maybe that was a mistake...
Death notice: Moore's Law. 19 April 1965 – 2 January 2018
Wednesday 24th January 2018 11:03 GMT
Re: Two words...
Cat's don't like being stared at.
One of our cats has a thousand-yard stare and will try to outstare you given half a chance. The only thing that can distract her from that is food. (The probability that these two are related is likely).
Another of our cats, if you stare at her, she'll jump on you, walk up your chest and come and lick your nose. Or bite it, if she's in that sort of mood. (The presence or absence of purring isn't actually a clue, either, it's just if she feels like biting you...)
UK competition watchdog: Fox's takeover of Sky 'not in public interest'
29 MEEELLION iPhone Xs flogged... only to be end-of-life'd by summer?
Crappy Christmas! Dixons Carphone dials back profit expectations
Monday 22nd January 2018 12:04 GMT
Maybe this is part of the trend of people just buying a phone and doing a sim only deal with their network, rather than dumping themselves in debt for years. There's an awful lot of cheap, but very usable landfill-price level Androids out there now. You can order a halfway decent Android off various web shops for £50 nowadays...
Have three WINEs this weekend, because WINE 3.0 has landed
Friday 19th January 2018 14:47 GMT
Re: Office 2016?
Be nice if Office 2016 ran well on Windows 10, come to think of it.
(Yes, I did have a five-hour Office 2016 reinstall the other day thanks to Windows 10 updates, in case you're wondering. And I'm not convinced that's solved my issues with Excel crashing, at least I am now able to log into my email again. And yes I am still annoyed about it thank you for asking.)
M&S extends customer support contract with, er, Capita
Thursday 18th January 2018 14:07 GMT
Re: Truth in advertising
C&A still operates in Europe. There's actually one down the road here from me (and it only opened last year).
I also wouldn't compare C&A's modern stuff with what they did ten years ago, it's so much better today. However, I think the reverse can probably be said of most of M&S's clothes these days...
Causes of software development woes
Tuesday 16th January 2018 15:40 GMT
Re: The developer has a role to play too...
"Generically as possible". Yep. I once had a project where a core requirement was to fax urgent reports direct from the computer.
This was 1994, the project was in VB3. After two weeks spent getting that working, they decided they didn't want that, and would print them and fax manually at the end of the day so the managers could check them first.
I was then asked what I'd been doing for two weeks because wasn't it clear that they didn't want that? Well, no - nobody told me that. So why was I two weeks behind then?
Honestly... I wish I was making it up...
Tuesday 16th January 2018 11:31 GMT
I rant and rave at people who advocate agile as being "agile is the way to do everything, you're either agile or you're doing it wrong, agile will solve all your problems", because generally they're trying to solve the wrong problem.
The problem is that "agile" is such a buzzword for management that, like most buzzwords, they don't see past it and believe it's a magic bullet. "Never mind the problems caused by the business, clearly the problem is the developers aren't 'agile'. So we don't have to address our actual problems, just tell IT to be 'agile' and it'll all be fantastic."
A lot of this problem is caused, or at least made worse, by the slew of terrible books about "how to implement agile" that spend most of their time parroting this ridiculous utopian notion that you don't need to do any actual thinking, or make any changes to the any other part of the business, just adopt "agile" software development processes and everything will come right (agile in this case being nothing to do with the agile manifesto, but whatever snake oil training said "agile practitioner" wants to sell you).
And yes, there are organisations who actually make agile work, but they are few and far between as far as I can tell, and I've tended to find that they would probably work pretty well with almost any project management process, for the simple reason that they encourage clear requirement finding and definition in the first place. Which is, let's face it, the thing that actually makes the most difference anyway, regardless of whether you adopt agile, PRINCE2, waterfall, SSADM or any other requirement management process.
UK taxman has domain typo-squatter stripped of HMRC web addresses
Intel AMT security locks bypassed on corp laptops – fresh research
Intel’s Meltdown fix freaked out some Broadwells, Haswells
Friday 12th January 2018 15:54 GMT
Re: Remembering Snowden...
On the other hand, given Spectre requires every app to be partially rewritten, NSA and GCHQ are going to have to recertify their entire catalogue of stuff to check it's no longer vulnerable to foreign intelligence services. I'm guessing that would worry them far more than the loss of that particular vulnerability from their toolkit.
PC lab in remote leper colony had wrong cables, no licences, and not much hope
Friday 12th January 2018 14:42 GMT
Re: Sounds perfectly normal
[SGI cc]
Resurrected an SGI system at work, for fun. I was SHOCKED to find no cc, this must be the only UNIX without one.
Solaris used to be, too, around the mid 90s. I had a boss bought an expensive Sun system and expected us to move our web suite to that (which was written in C++ at the time).
After a few weeks of pleading, he bought the C++ compiler, but not the C one.
As you can imagine, we decided that from now on we were going to start learning PERL. (Yes, it was the 90s and there was this funky new thing called the common gateway interface...)
PowerShell comes to MacOS and Linux. Oh and Windows too
Friday 12th January 2018 10:38 GMT
Personally, I have had to work with many shells over the year, PowerShell included. I hate most of them, and try to avoid them where possible. bash, ash, zsh and csh are fairly annoying, but livable with. Command prompt I can get by in. It's dumb as a rock but it works.
PowerShell, however, makes me want to get very very rich. Rich enough to buy a controlling interest in Microsoft. Rich enough that on my first day I can say "I want PowerShell dead. Erase the source code, fire everyone who ever worked on it and remove it from every single product this company makes. Then go through the corporate website and delete every single page about PowerShell and ever single reference to PowerShell from every other page."
Then, and only then, will any action taken with regard to PowerShell please me.
tl;dr: I don't like PowerShell.
Uncle Sam's treatment of Huawei is world-class hypocrisy – consumers will pay the price
Thursday 11th January 2018 18:16 GMT
Re: Gooles phone operating system
When I lived in Hull the Hull Daily Mail* launched a tabloid called "Now Then".
I'm guessing they might have renamed it given more recent events.
* Actually more like the Times in reporting style than the Daily Mail, and more like the Independent in political affiliation, if I remember right.
Thursday 11th January 2018 18:12 GMT
Re: Facesaving indeed
*ahem* We're not forgetting Ken Thompson's famous Turing Award lecture here, are we?
Cortana. Whatever happened to world domination?
Wednesday 10th January 2018 17:12 GMT
It would be negligent not to point out what a great thing Microsoft has squandered.
Microsoft has a habit of squandering good things, and pushing mediocre (and sometimes bad) ones quite hard. This isn't a new thing, either, it's been like this for ages. In fact, I can't even remember when it started...
Cryptocurrencies to end in tears, says investor wizard Warren Buffett
Thursday 11th January 2018 11:14 GMT
If I follow what he's saying, the rampant speculation in BitCoin won't end well. I don't know whether there's a peak BitCoin market, but it's possible it's been and gone, possible it hasn't. So he might be right.
The reason he makes more money than most people is that he usually invests for the long term - businesses that are resilient and pay dividends. He's not your traditional stock market speculator, which a lot of the financial press seem to ignore.
Which is probably why he knows very little about BitCoin. But I assume he's seen markets getting overheated by too many gold diggers, which is what BitCoin looks like right now. Usually that doesn't end well, so I think he's making what looks like a safe prediction now.
Adrift on a sea of data: Architecting for GDPR
WikiLeave? Assange tipped for Ecuadorian eviction
Wednesday 10th January 2018 11:51 GMT 
I wonder if is this going to be horrible for Trump and uk.gov?
If he IS a Russian agent, if he's arrested, Wikileaks can start dumping kompromat on a daily drip drip drip basis, can't they? Or another "insurance" cache appears just before he leaves, maybe?
My suspicion is Trump might just pardon him for everything beforehand, just in case...
Paris, again, because this needs a "WTF is going on" icon...
Mystery surrounds fate of secret satellite slung by SpaceX
FCA 'gold-plates' EU rule, hits BYOD across entire UK finance sector
Monday 8th January 2018 14:23 GMT
Yes, but...
Isn't recording someone's phone calls without consent illegal under data protection legislation? So if you record any employee's private conversation without their consent, someone submits a data subject access request and they're not flagged as part of that conversation, then you now have two problems. Which will come back to bite you if they find out, and report you to the data protection people, of course...
Now if it only has to be capable of recording every conversation, but only record work-related ones, how do you tell which is which?
I see lawyers. Rich lawyers, walking around. They don't know they're about to get rich, yet...
(Paris Hilton because I'm totally confused about this and I suspect she would be too.)
It gets worse: Microsoft’s Spectre-fixer wrecks some AMD PCs
GIMPS crack whip on plucky processor to find largest prime number
US Homeland Security breach compromised personal info of 200,000+ staff
Thursday 4th January 2018 16:34 GMT
True. Something can be criminal when done with the best of intentions. And something truly evil can be perfectly lawful, of course.
I was (somewhat ham-fistedly) trying to suggest that this looked, to my eyes, more like it might be someone trying to be helpful rather than someone trying to make a fast buck on the side.
No doubt we'll hear more when the unlucky dev/would-be darknet kingpin* gets 20 years.
* delete as applicable.
Proposed Brit law to ban b**tards brandishing bots to bulk-buy tickets
Wednesday 3rd January 2018 17:09 GMT
Here in Portugal they sell tickets in Worten (the nearest thing we've got to Dixons/Currys to me within walking distance) and on BlueTicket. Weirdly we don't seem to have this problem here as far as I can tell. Maybe the fact that most of the secondary seller sites aren't owned by the primary sellers has something to do with that?
UK Foreign Sec Bojo to tell Kremlin: Stop your cyber shenanigans... or else!
Missed opportunity bingo: IBM's wasted years and the $92bn cash splurge
Liberty Global's sale of Austrian biz paves way for Voda merger plans – reports
Ubuntu 17.10 pulled: Linux OS knackers laptop BIOSes, Intel kernel driver fingered
Friday 22nd December 2017 15:14 GMT
Re: If you want Ubuntu laptops there is System 76.
@Baldricck In answer to your question, Care to get them to supply me with a UK keyboard layout? I usually use this sort of thing: https://www.amazon.co.uk/English-Transparent-BLACK-Stickers-Letters/dp/B015HL95ZM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1513955608&sr=8-1&keywords=laptop+keyboard+stickers+uk
Biting the hand that feeds IT
