Posts by JetSetJim

Re: Bar Stewards

I suspect some policies can be referred to as long as they are easily available. Others may need to be in the contract, the set of which may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

> one months salary for each year of service, in the case of redundancy

Assuming you are UK based - redundancy is a tricky one and I've seen the same scenario in places I've worked. There is not usually anything in an employment contract determining redundancy pay - this *can* be varied. However, if the same terms have been offered for multiple rounds of redundancy then such terms can become an implied contract. Also, if someone has been refused redundancy on the more favourable terms, but at a later point is up for being made redundant, then the terms cannot be reduced, and also terms must be the same for all folks being made redundant. Lastly, that "month per year" is the maximum amount awardable by a tribunal, and so there is no point any employee contesting being made redundant as they won't get any more cash.

Companies will try and cover their arses with standard messaging about "we are looking at what terms to offer, and they may vary from last time", but suspect it's a bit difficult to vary for larger companies due to the above - in theory as long as they say it's evaluated specifically each time, then they can vary the terms.

All the above is not legal advice as IANAL, it's what I've cobbled together having been through 10 years worth of cuts prior to finally succumbing a few years back

Re: What HP did to ME....

Possibly it's all in the legal definition of the wording of what HP wrote about the award...

Re: Bar Stewards

I suspect part of that contract states "pay will be according to current HP(E) policies kept by HR and available on request", rather than bundle loads of "policies" (some of which may not be relevant) into the contract verbatim. Shitty, but equally he/his lawyer were clumsy in their discovery

Re: Some people...

> Its quite clear that the product has a bug that simple testing would have showed up

Personally, I think it's more a loophole in conflicting usability requirements leading to undesired behaviour, and it's not entirely obvious that this needed to be a test scenario.

QA engineers need to have nicely warped minds to break things, and IANAQAE....

> Windows regularly mixes up desktop icons if you plug and unplug external displays.

If all the external displays are of the same resolution as the built in display, this doesn't seem to happen (as often?). Equally, I've seen people having mixed success in Windows remembering docked settings, even if I rarely have trouble with it (occasionally it fails to detect external displays, or detects them and renders the wallpaper, but does not let me move the mouse/windows on to them - fixed by unplugging & replugging in the dock)

> What idiot thought that was a good idea?

Some idiot probably thought "the user has customised their screen contrast and brightness settings, so I will store them and re-use them when next powering on so that they have the best experience of this device possible, and don't curse the Cult of Jobs for having to re-do the contrast and brightness settings every time they switch on"

A different idiot possibly thought "At the login screen, only the alpha-numeric function of the keyboard is needed - let's load the bits of the display driver (and linkage to keyboard keys) that controls brightness when they've logged in - it might even be more secure"

British designed, made, supported product

Of all the vendors, the following springs to mind:

A) Motorola, now defunct, did a lot of design work in Swindon for many years. Unfortunately, bad strategic decisions (coincidentally some involving a partnership with Huawei) sank that ship. Remnants swallowed by Nokia-Siemens before being axed.

B) Alcatel-Lucent also had a design bit in Swindon, partly subservient to France, of course, but it was there. Swallowed by Nokia, axed

C) Nokia used to have a design function in Camberley, near J9 of M25. Not sure of its fate.

D) Panasonic have/had something in mobile networks in the M4/3 corridor, no idea what though

No idea about any Ericsson presence

In short, there used to be a lot of mobile network infrastructure expertise in the M4 corridor. Shame the toilet flushed on it in the race to get the lowest bidder

The key bit was "that we felt was wrong". Lots of wiggle room there.

Saying that ,a good cogent defense, and more thorough than anything Cisco have provided.

Re: Unfair comparison

lol - inside the ring road, but can't really walk to city centre shops (certainly not with the kids)

Re: Fibre loophole

New connections to a house already have this much as subsidy - if you build a house and ask for a connection, up to this much money comes from the govmt (perhaps via BT, not entirely sure) and the rest has to come from your pocket. At present, this much money is used to subsidise the connection for the current level of universal service that's mandated to match (basically voice plus shit dsl)

One would hope they default to deploying the fibre that's wrapped in copper, so that if/when the exchange it's connecting to ever gets upgraded it would be simple to upgrade to FTTP for these builds, but that might require a bit too much forward thinking

Re: Unfair comparison

> And significant parts of central the UK would fail the new pledge.

FTFY. Looking to move into moderately central oxford, so I check the "BT availability". It says:

"Your download speed range: 8Mb - 16Mb. Your Stay Fast Guarantee 4Mb, Upload speed 1Mb"

First time I've come across this "Stay Fast Guarantee" - A USwitch article implies a dedicated team will be monitoring this KPI on your line, tweaking it to make sure it's reliably this level. Unfortunately, it also states:" if BT's engineers aren't able to resolve any problems and get speeds back to where they should be within 30 days of a fault being identified, customers will be able to receive up to £20 off their bills, and will be able to claim this up to four times a year if any issues persist.", which seems a bit shit as (a) it assumes it's due to a fault, and (b) if the line is just shit they'll just shift the goalposts down. Also, (c) just £20? and just 4 times a year? and needs to be 30 days?

I will miss my FTTP from Gigaclear, think I'll annoyingly have to move to Virgin Media (unless they unbundle???)

Yup - when I got my Synology box I got a bit frustrated with the DLNA server not authenticating so I could restrict the availablity of different categories of tv/films to my kids. Very annoying.

Presumably this "hack" also allows for someone to interfere with a wired TV, as long as it's addressable from the wifi network. If it's on a network, it's dlna discoverable, which means this should work.

Many of us did, I'm sure. I wonder how many didn't, though, that could have been located this way.

It doesn't take a huge amount of processing to geolocate a call, and I've no objection to the emergency services accessing such information to help save lives.

I do object to bounty hunters accessing it to earn a living, the question should be asked how to make this harder/impossible without getting in the way of real emergencies

The article seems to imply that this was abusing the warrantless request system, which is supposed to be used in the case of risk of injury or loss of life. Not sure I'd want to introduce the delay of getting a warrant into this use case...

> Each 3D scan is split into “volumes”, and each volume is labelled as cancer-positive if the patient underwent a biopsy or other forms of surgery and was diagnosed with lung cancer, and cancer-negative if the patient was free from the disease a year after the scan.

As I read that, this is the training data and is effectively "Truth" and the "volumes" were given to radiographers and the AI to give a cancer evaluation. Then the false positive and negative rates can be assessed and compared. If this is the case, then in theory it's possible for the AI to beat the radiographers, with the assumption that the scan gives sufficient information to make that judgement (which it probably doesn't as cancers probably don't necessarily grow predictably).

At least if the AI matches radiographers performance, and if the training set actually is sufficient for training an AI properly, it might give confidence that the radiographers know as much as they can know about diagnosing cancer based on these scans. If they were different (i.e. AI was better) it would then be an interesting study to find out why they were different to see if more knowledge could be accrued.

I would be loathe to rely on a black box for a cancer diagnosis unless it can actually point to things and say why - I think I'd always prefer some human oversight, at least for a while yet...

Re: Continuous Integration vs Donald Trump

> How are they going to do this?

FTFA:

If you've got a Huawei phone in your pocket, you can still get updates to your apps but future devices shipped by the world's second largest handset maker will not get access to the latest Android operating system or Google services like Play Store, Gmail and YouTube.

So, basically when a new IMEI registers with the Play store, "Computer says no". Also, at the very least, Android has the following to query further device information:

System.getProperty("os.version"); // OS version

android.os.Build.VERSION.SDK // API Level

android.os.Build.DEVICE // Device

android.os.Build.MODEL // Model

android.os.Build.PRODUCT // Product

But, antri-trust/anti-competitive lawsuit in 3, ....

You can always install something like Blokada (3rd party app store required) which effectively runs an in-phone VPN to allow for a hosts file to block the Google domains. The only downside is that in some places it doesn't work (e.g. when I'm on a corporate WiFi some APs block VPN traffic) so you have to switch it off and no doubt some of your data then flows to Google

Re: Shocked ... Shocked ...

> The insane belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of reasons will somehow work for the benefit of us all.

"We stand behind our actions as being both appropriate and consistent with our values" - two not inconsistent statements...

Re: My 3 steps to avoiding robocalls.

No idea, but it will be an inbound international call, and not an in country number, so would hope that raises more of a red flag to the victim.

Could possibly have procedures to block calls from operators in foreign countries that don't play a more active role in blocking this white, perhaps under gradual escalation to avoid over enthusiastic blocking

Re: My 3 steps to avoiding robocalls.

The first thing that should be done is to remove the ability to spoof your number. That would stop a lot of it. I get calls from around the country, ask with the same "calling about the accident you had you were innocent of", or "calling about your workplace accident" recordings. All have spoofed numbers.

Add some security and authentication to all calls please!

Secondly, enough with the fines. Most are ltd companies, so if their accounts are empty nowt can be done. Make directors of companies that break the law criminally liable and put them away

Re: Journalist my arse

We've got BREXIT NIGE

Re: Journalist my arse

FREXIT is the French equivalent of Brexit

RIC, is a referece to a demand for referendums in France - the Citizens’ Initiative Referendum - that wants (some) govmt policies put to the people before implementation. Similar to what exists in Switzerland. I think there may be procedures in place already, but they've not been used (or some people want them changed to be more widespread - see https://www.france24.com/en/20181217-france-yellow-vests-battle-popular-referendum-RIC-citizens-initiative-macron-philippe)

Re: 'tis the Merkin way

There's free ones listed, not £30/year