Posts by Mark 65

Re: A debt's a debt!

...and a lesson in why you should run your economy a little better. Still, they may soon get the opportunity to make a profitable loan the other way.

Re: "I have to say Excel is one thing Microsoft got right."

@Gio Ciampa: You sound like you have fallen into one of the many traps of the less experience Excel user. Part of the art of using Excel is knowing the pitfalls. Typical use within banks for calculating complex derivatives will make use of a crappy little calculate button and having auto calculate turned off. The code behind the custom button with manually re-calculate the workbook by processing the worksheets in a set order to optimise the time taken.

Also, unless using solver or performing repeated what-if iterations I'd recommend using something like R with the data.table library for large data sets or Python. Either of these can be used separately or through XLL add-ins. The advantage being the separation of code from data - something that is the bane of every expert brought in to fix Excel issues.

Re: Logic?

Motor vehicles can also be dangerous, and so training is mandatory to drive one on the public highway. But I don''t have to pay the DVLA to renew my driving licence every year.

Jesus, don't go giving them ideas. You point out missed revenue and they'll start trying to collect it.

Re: Build statues in honor of Linus

Maybe Google needs to take a page out of THEIR handbook, and NOT sit there whining and trying to make EVERYBODY ELSE on the planet "do it THEIR way".

Sounds like another large company trying to muscle in and do a RedHat. Is this dude the security world’s Poettering?

How's that make sense? Do they only allow you to use a rearview mirror while in reverse too? It is the same view and no more distracting.

I believe you are legally mandated to have 2 of the 3 rear view mirrors intact and usable. TV screen, not so much. If I were looking at my in-car entertainment touch panel whilst driving and had an accident I would expect to be prosecuted for driving without due care and attention. Same goes for someone doing the same with the Tesla screen if not performing a reversing manoeuvre. I would not expect the same if I were checking my rear view mirror. One is deliberately placed within your field of view whilst driving so a quick upward flick of the eyes can check it, the other is down and to the side and considered a distraction.

Re: Woah, BT still had an open defined benefits pension scheme?

I'm not sure why you (OP) got the down votes as you seem to be stating the obvious. Such schemes were always poorly thought out and were overly generous. You would need to reserve a massive portion of an employee's remuneration to allow for such generosity. The only people that now get such schemes are politicians because they want them and you and I and future generations pick up the tab.

I also agree with your thoughts regarding the union. I recognise they are there to protect the rights of the workers but at some point you butt up against the viability of the employer. If you want to see an example of this look for historic articles where the Australian unions representing car manufacturing workers used to crow about the deals they'd made for better pay. How's that working out for their members?

Re: "When it's political, technology cannot do anything."

"800 or so total programs "

While I do understand that there are quite a few software packages that need to be run locally (architectural ones, for example) I just dont understand how they can end up with 800 programs.

Wouldn't surprise me if most of those 800 programs were just spreadsheets.

Try to sell those Ethereum and you'll find the market is nowhere deep enough to handle it and you will get almost nothing back.

Interesting. Is there anywhere you can observe liquidity and market depth on any of these "currencies"?

In years past it would be tin-foil hat territory and it can be equally well assigned to incompetence, but it would seem to be awfully convenient for the various 3 letter agencies out there. More-so if it had been kept under wraps. Will this spell the end of such dual controls or will the World just quietly ignore it whilst updating their status?

Re: Litecoin

Or cash.

Re: 15 years of bookmarks?

And from looking at the list I have they are decidedly temporal. I think there could be plenty there that could face a cull.

Re: To be fair

I assumed it was petty cash for when she next visits her overseas territories in the Caribbean.

Except the crypto money doesn't have all the costs underlying "regular" money operations like regulations and reimbursement.

There is a hardware and power cost associated with processing transactions. The reason it is so high is likely "whatever the market can bear". After all, you have no oversight body to regulate costs as that was the choice you made.

Re: Is everyones WTFometer going crazy about now?

Not sure it was BYOD. It seems to be more of "take shit home you really shouldn't and store it on your Windows PC". Not like there isn't precedent for shit going missing from their network before.

Re: EU competition rules

What constitutes the "precious"? Tax revenue? Or just power over everyone?

Re: Software audits for small businesses

How does that work? I have a small business, for example, and they threaten me with a software audit. I tell them to go fuck themselves. What's next? If I'm not volume licensed or under some extra special licensing deal what can they do? They can't even stop me acquiring licenses as they flog them through 3rd parties. The only people they can threaten are the volume and other discount licensing schemes.

Believe me there are some idiots out there of all nationalities. Maybe the means and location by which you meet Americans i.e. ones that have passports and travel perhaps, eliminates the segment of society that was being targeted.

Re: Oh dear ...

To me DevOps is click to deploy whereby the action is fully automated and reproducible such that if it works in Dev and Test/Staging then you can have a high degree of confidence that your production release will go smoothly. It should never be about rapid release without adequate testing.

Re: Interesting

FB still frequently gets hold of things I've browsed in a supposedly different sandbox.

That's from fingerprinting you as a user. There's a website you can go to which will inform you how unique you are as and endpoint. Think about it this way...

1. You visit a site from whatever browser on a machine and look at shit.

2. Most pages have the Facebook "like" nonsense included which will have the fingerprinting code. It creates a "unique" id for you.

3. You browse other shit on other sites.

4. A "unique" id is created the same way on these other sites and likely matches that in (2).

5. Related shit thus gets served.

Re-identifying users is where a shitload of effort gets spent as that is key to the money making machine. The more info you can link to being from the same source the more your dataset is worth. Whether they create one id or a series of ids of escalating uniqueness I cannot say, but what I can guess is that they're pretty fucking good at it.

For the curious, try this site across your various usage patterns - sandboxes on same machine, different browsers etc. Bare in mind they are just showing one part of the re-identification world.

https://panopticlick.eff.org/

Re: Smart Devices?

Problem is we are rapidly moving towards the point where you cannot get a dumb alternative. Admittedly we don't seem to yet be so fucked that you need to provide a connection or these things won't work at all so a certain amount of idiocy is required.

The issue I have is when manufacturers don't allow alternative access. For example, Daikin air conditioners offer App control of their split systems via: direct phone to unit; phone to unit via LAN; or phone to unit via external Daikin portal. This at least gives you the option of having control without allowing access from the portal which IMHO is just a giant honeypot waiting to be hacked.

For a lot of IoT devices access is strictly via the manufacturers portal and that is the disaster waiting to happen.

With LAN access at least the savvy can block external outbound comms but have control via a VPN link from their phone back to their network.

Re: You're designing an internet fridge.

I was wondering why you'd need 60 fps on a fridge. So what if HTML can't manage it, it's a fucking fridge.

Re: Why is it...

Everyone's sorry when they get caught.

Re: The beauty of the GDPR: protection of personal data is a Right for European citizens

Thankfully UK gov has confirmed they will fully implement GDPR.

and likely waive the fines

Re: XMPP?

Genuine question here...

Even if you are using an inter-operable protocol such as XMPP can you enforce the security standards across it i.e. If people are using Signal for example they can have reasonably faith that the developer of the app has made a best endeavours effort at ensuring you have security end-to-end in transit and at rest. If you had Signal conversing with WhatsApp could you have the same level of confidence that one end of the chain wasn't poorly implemented?

There is a slight rub with putting the "users and consumers" first - they have to be efficient ones. One problem I have encountered time and time again is companies and workers that have inefficient and illogical processes that are an artefact of how things used to be and their mantra of "that's how we've always done things". Their unwillingness to adapt over time leads to software that needs to fit with a bad workflow and then becomes part of the problem rather than the solution. The culture of a company is most often its problem, the software just a manifestation of it.

Re: From Wikipedia

The article mentions a bug but in a post-Snowden World was it incompetence or intent? I mean, the NSA have foisted one flawed encryption mechanism on us (Elliptical Key weakness) and have been observed trying with a new one but got called out on it. Snowden's releases showed that they have form paying for flaws to be inserted in systems, so why not?

You can infer the likely outcomes from the statement that he is willing to return to Russia.

Re: Limited access

I think your average building site was more likely to contain a well thumbed copy of Razzle.

Re: "10.30 GMT (0930 UTC)"

From Google...

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is time at the Shepherd Gate Clock, at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, UK. GMT stays the same all year round, no Daylight Saving Time ( DST ) rules apply. London time is now BST (British Summer Time) or GMT+1

Re: Defeating Draconian laws

Before coming to the UK, I do a secure erase of my laptop SSD

Seem to recall reading an article that said not to do that as it'll shorten the life of the SSD due to all the wear levelling and such that happens. Better to have an encrypted disk whereby a quick format will do the same by removing the encryption key - depending on your choice of OS.