Posts by Number6

Re: Nowadays, they don't even pretend

HMRC owed me ten quid. They sent me a cheque :-)

OK, at least five lager drinkers out there :-)

I think the BBC probably try to balance the complaints, so if they get roughly equal number of complains about being too left-wing or too right-wing they assume they're in about the right place. Where their sense of balance is skewed is in giving equal time to crackpots and nutjobs who have plenty of hot air and very little credible backing (I'm not talking politics here, that would be too easy, more science).

Re: @Number6

The problem is if the call comes from a SIP provider. (E.g. Vonage)

You just treat it as withheld if you don't trust the source. If the SIP provider has robust policies in place that make it very difficult to spoof a number then you allow their CID through. If they don't then you block it. For many years (it may still be true with more justification now) that was BT's excuse for not passing on international CID, that they couldn't guarantee its accuracy. We ended up in the situation that if a call entered the country on a BT-terminated cable then it would present as INTERNATIONAL, if it came in via Mercury (remember them?) then you'd get a proper international CID displayed.

I believe the logo had to be at an exact 23° angle. Heaven knows why.

Probably to compensate for the axial tilt of the Earth.

Re: 844TB of data from 12 flight hours

It depends on what you're sampling. Cabin temperature changes fairly slowly so you'd probably sample that once a second at most. Engine performance may well be sampling lots of data points every millisecond. Fuel flow, fuel temperature, combustion temperature, exhaust temperature, pressure at various points in the engine, RPM. Then there's all the other flight parameters, other system parameters (battery volts, bus bolts, system load, hydraulic pressure etc). It wouldn't surprise me if there's not a video feed in there too, for modern aircraft.

Most of the time it isn't needed, but if something goes wrong, then having access to detailed data from the critical period leading up to the incident may be really useful.

Re: Whatever happened to...

Ethics is down near the bottom right corner, just above Kent and to the right of London.

Re: Fall Creators Update

What do you even need that still requires a local install? SAP, Oracle, Salesforce... all the business software is browser based and generally SaaS. There are a few outliers like Photoshop and IDEs, but they are working on it.

The performance of some of this stuff is dire, especially if someone has failed to put in enough bandwidth and someone in the office decides to download some large files (or puts a bunch of stuff on to Google Drive or Dropbox and everyone else's machine decides to synchronise content). A lot of technical stuff is still local, electrical tools such as OrCAD/Altium/Allegro, plus the mechanical stuff (Solidworks/Pro-E) because it's highly graphical and a browser is not going to cut it.

I've worked in a place which used SalesForce and it was hilarious watching the panic when it went down for a day a while back. I've worked in places which use on-line stuff that is painfully slow. I much prefer to run stuff locally, where outages and security breaches are entirely of local making.

That's right, I have never really embraced the cloud. My software is owned by me, in that I can keep using it (without upgrades, admittedly) without having to pay anyone else any more money, unlike all this SaaS stuff.

Re: Good one...

If he's got a first class ticket then it's probably quite a comfortable way to travel, plus he can use his laptop to work. Beats driving from Hertfordshire to Kings Cross (almost) any day.

It can take longer occasionally. It's a much larger place and very often smaller banks and credit unions have an agreement with a larger organisation to act as a world-facing portal for them (potentially reduces the amount of infrastructure and staff you need), so there's an extra step. This may have changed in recent years, one place I use now manages same-day stuff when it used to take a couple so perhaps they've cut out the middleman.

Had I been an employee, I think at some point I would have looked around at what company assets I could remove, to be redeemed when the money arrived in my bank. However, if it was a building with a few desks and PCs then that probably wasn't a viable option.

Re: To anyone outside the US this seems pretty strange

At least BT would validate your claimed CLI and default to something valid if you tried to spoof it. It would also tag on digital lines how much of the presented number it would vouch for. No idea if this is still the case.

Methinks VoIP gateways should be required to properly validate credentials before putting calls onto the wired telephone system, and perhaps the SIP (and other) protocols need to be updated to have a secure key exchange to allow verification of the caller ID. You can choose to omit the verification if you want, but then you'll come through as withheld. Any gateway with the power to inject CLI would have to meet the standards, and any that didn't would be assigned the default gateway number or at least a number from the valid range assigned to that gateway rather than any number the caller felt like using.

Re: It's about birds?

Nope. I was thinking the same thing, a report of a happy event from the El Reg Amsterdam office.

Since this should be a controlled document...

That's assuming a lot. Given the general level of competence demonstrated, either it was controlled inasmuch as it was written and never revised, so there was never a need to do change management, or their control process was along the lines of "use the document in this directory, it should be the latest version", which happened to have global write privilege.

Re: It really is like a war ...

They could embed content server side, then you'd have to identify the ads from the content of the ads.

I wouldn't mind that so much. If it's done server-side then they're not running potentially malicious code on my machine. I block adverts because of all the JavaScript and the fact that malware can arrive by that route, it's a security issue at least as much as an ad issue. The problem with embedding it server side is that it means the server has to work harder and it scales less well on a busy site. If they call in adverts from a different host then they'll still get blocked by some means because there will be something with which to identify the ads, so they have to host the whole thing on the same server as the content.

Re: SQL => Sequel

Working on radar systems back in the days when secretaries still did typing for their bosses, we had a new one make reference to a microwave sauce.

Re: @AC - company email addresses

As for the travel log, they're really going to be looking at places like Iraq or suspiciously long visits to jumping off points to ISIS like Turkey.

Hmmm... I've travelled extensively to a country with a fair bit of gun violence and a repressive police force that will often shoot first and (doesn't) ask questions later. I wonder if they'd use that against me?

As for recording travel, when I had to compile such a list I just went through the stamps in my current and expired passports. I approve of countries that give both an entry and exit stamp, makes the job so much easier.

Re: Grrrr

Taxpayers should be on the hook for government mistakes, they have the power to vote out those in charge and really ought to be more concerned about the quality of the candidates put forward for election. I have no objection to individuals being prosecuted for blatant negligence though, although there should be robust checks in place to make it hard for an individual to screw up.

Re: So innovative

Google and Apple like it cos it moves the operators one step closer to being a dumb pipe, this is another attempt to put the brakes on that on T-Mo's part.

They need to adopt the approach slowly being forced upon OpenReach in the UK - infrastructure provider (pretty much the dumb pipe) terminating at the telco/ISP of your choice. So T-Mobile would morph into two parts, the airtime provider and the content provider. It would be even better if the cable operators could be forced to do the same, so you could deal with the part that provided an internet pipe and had them route packets to your choice of ISP as the end point. I use none of the added services of my ISP, they are just a dumb pipe to the internet.

Re: Other media options are available.

Obviously any IT professional would have pulled the data from the cloud if it was known that the bill wasn't going to be paid, but I guess they didn't have one on staff. I guess we'll see a lot more of this sort of thing...

This is probably because the IT professional, if there ever was one, got fired quite early on and if they followed common US practice and escorted him off the premises, he wouldn't have had a chance to either initiate a backup or tell someone else to do it even if he'd been inclined to be helpful..

Re: You'd think after Boaty McBoatface

Yes, I hope someone has proposed Qanty McQantface.

If you look through the list of sites where I've had to reset the password, it's invariably the ones that try to impose a 'one of everything' rule. I guess I could learn to try 'expected password' and 'expected password plus this particular special character' before giving up, but normally it's try the password, try it again more slowly and carefully, then give up before the third failure locks the account.