Posts by Kubla Cant 2807 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2010
To help simplify coding, Java SE 8’s Lambda is coming to Java EE 9.
What does this mean? Lambda expressions are a syntactical feature of the Java SE 8 language (and lots of other languages, of course). Java EE is a set of standards, frameworks and libraries, but the language used to create JEE applications is... Java. So lambda expressions are available regardless of the JEE version, as long as you're compiling your application code with Java 8.
Have I missed something?
Oddly enough it's the eurosceptic countries like the UK and Denmark that have implemented the largest number of EU directives in national law
That's why they're Eurosceptic.
In the EU, the Germans like plenty of rules, the more unreasonable the better. The Club Med countries don't care whether you have a lot of rules or not, because they ignore them.
The problem is that the best experts are all hired by the multinationals.
It's essentially an endless churn cycle. Tax experts spot a loophole and advise their clients to exploit it. The government acts to close the loophole, but by the time they do the tax experts have a new loophole ready.
The only way for a country to ensure it gets a fair slice of a multinational's tax is to levy taxes at competitive rates. That way it becomes the haven where the taxes are eventually paid.
The trend seems to be to mix a high level scripting language with a low level language.
For very small values of "trend". There are currently 6 out of 14,500 jobs on JobServe.com that require Lua.
Seriously, the world that Java (and COBOL) development mostly serves is more interested in consistency than the latest whizzo idea.
It goes against the grain to cite Google as an example of virtue. But it's the biggest ad publisher on the web, and it got that way with unobtrusive, text-only ads. Most of the search engines that plastered their pages with annoying display ads are dead.
Maybe there's some kind of lesson here.
This is an excellent reason to use node.js
This is the second post to suggest node.js as an alternative to Java. It's a category error, and it implies a degree of ignorance: one is a server/platform, the other is a programming language.
I thought the milk tray man was George Lazenby?
No. George Lazenby was Big Fry.
IIRC the ad said "Big Fry comes into town..." and featured Big Fry with a massive chocolate bar on his shoulder. I'm guessing this ad was produced by a team that had just enjoyed a long lunch and had to have something ready for a client presentation at 9:00 tomorrow.
Of all the carnivals in the world, why is the Notting Hill carnival always referenced without an article? Not "a carnival" or even "the carnival", just "Carnival".
The self-important implication is that this is the original and best, the Platonic ideal of all carnivals. In fact it's comparatively recent and derivative. If it's because "Carnival" is supposed to be a festival like Christmas or Easter, then shouldn't it be celebrated before Lent?
If you were asked to deploy a Linux desktop across your enterprise, would you run for the hills? I would.
This is certainly the conventional wisdom. But people are more adaptable than you think. During my too-long career in office environments, I've seen the non-technical staff learn to use MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT 3.5, NT 4.0, XP, Windows 7, to say nothing of the disruptive changes to Microsoft Orifice.
a German umlaut can be replaced with an "e" after the other letter
This can be quite annoying. If you're searching for, say, hotels in Rösenheim, you also have to check Roesenheim and Rosenheim. If you're searching a sorted list, will it be near the start of "Ro-" or near the end, or wherever "Rö-" collates?
I once had a very excited woman ring me up from that bank and tell me I had too much in my currant account and the bank would give me 1.25 percent interest if I put it into a savings account.
At least she gave you a raisin for using the savings account.
@AC Password strength meters should work like this:
"Well, your password is WEAK, so we won't allow it until you bring it up to standard."
Instead of:
"Well, your password is WEAK, but okay..."
Since the article points out that password-strength meters are useless, this seems like a pointless suggestion.
Thumbs up to the initial letters method.
I favour lines, couplets, or even stanzas from poems or Shakespeare plays. You can include punctuation, it's far more memorable than horses, batteries and staples, and it's moderately incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't know the source quotation. If numerics are required, it's easy to add a bit of 1337 substitution.
For example: Nadwh,nafn,4hcttrwh - long and obscure, yet absurdly easy to remember when you know the secret. You can probably guess it, but it may take a while.
"Good morning, Miss Jones. You certainly look nice today!" is an indefensible punishable offense of sexual harassment if Miss Jones perceives it to be!
It's worse than that. The guidelines say "perception of the victim, or any other person". Even if Miss Jones likes the compliment, even if she blushes and says "Thank you kindly, Sir. Fancy a quickie in the stationery cupboard?", it's open season for anyone within earshot to get the Police round and have you cuffed before you've finished that second cup of coffee.
An interesting article in The Spectator (paywall, probably - extract below) recently pointed out that "Hate Crime" is unique in requiring no evidence. So how come it costs £2.1m to investigate?
The police’s ‘Hate Crime Operational Guidance’ now stresses that the victim’s perception is the deciding factor in whether something is measured as a hate crime. No evidence is required. ‘Evidence of… hostility is not required for an incident or crime to be recorded as a hate crime or hate incident,’ the guidance says. ‘[The] perception of the victim, or any other person, is the defining factor… the victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception.’ So you don’t need actual evidence to prove hate crime, just a feeling. The police are discouraged from asking for evidence.
I find that if I want to leave a forum comment, but have to have a Facebook login to leave one, then what I wanted to say was probably 1) not worth saying 2) to the wrong audience.
A site that uses Oauth to have logins processed by other sites such as Farcebook isn't necessarily endorsing Farcebook or subscribing to Farcebook's standards. It's not uncommon to offer several proxy authentication routes.
Having said that, I dislike Oauth because it's such a pain to code with, and I'm suspicious of the way it provides a single point of security failure.
My old Sony audio centre has a remote control that allows you to open the CD drawer without leaving your chair. Even after 20 years I have a low success rate throwing CDs across the room and into the drawer, and there seems to be no way to get them out remotely. I suppose a remote-control vacuum cleaner would be useful for that.
...I'm highly unlikely to actually find anything with a 30" waist...
But try buying casual shirts, and you won't find anything that isn't slim-fit. Most shirts cling like a corset, and are quite uncomfortable to wear for a day. I confess wear 32" trousers, but I don't think I'm very fat. I can only assume the fat bastards are also pigeon-chested.
The headline started an interesting train of thought about the more traditional Nigerian-style email scammers.
Do these scammers have rock-solid malware protection? I've seen sites devoted to stories of stringing these guys along, and sometimes even getting money out of them. It would be so much better to disable the systems they work on by replying to them with infected attachments.
The very best USB device was in a preposterous TV series called London Spy.
When the gay spy was murdered in the attic, his boyfriend found a USB stick hidden inside a laptop*. But the USB stick was locked! You could tell it was locked because it was contained inside a shiny combination lock barrel**. He took it to a locksmith, who told him he couldn't open it without the combination***. Eventually he guessed that it was 0001 because of something the late spy had said.
* Laptop computers always have plenty of empty space inside.
** I remember those locks from my schooldays. Kids used to secure their bikes with them, but anyone could open them by feeling for the notches in the mechanism.
*** See icon.
There seems to be a time of year, or perhaps a type of weather, that prompts pigeons to stand around in the road, sometimes in crowds. They seem reluctant to move, and if you're driving at any speed you're highly likely to hit one or two. This year I noticed it about three weeks ago.
I thought MS was desperate to get everyone to install Windows 10, but to judge from my experience, they aren't. I decided to give Windows 10 a spin, so I imaged my W7 disk and burned a W10 install CD (not enough space to upgrade).
Problem 1: no sticker on the laptop, so I have to download a 3rd party tool to read the licence key.
Problem 2: MS doesn't accept the licence key (from a Samsung laptop running OEM Windows 7) so I delete some files and try an upgrade installation.
Problem 3: Upgrade fails because Windows 10 does not support my graphics adapter. FFS, it's Intel integrated graphics on a 4-year old machine! On this basis, Windows 10 won't install on 80% of home computers.
I've been a software developer for over 30 years, and I've worked in agile* development for at least the past 5 years. So this article should be about stuff I'm very familiar with, but that's not how it reads. It's like when you're questioned about development skills and practices by recruitment agents - they talk the talk, but there's something funny about their gait.
* Or should that be Agile?
The other day I ordered a phone battery from Amazon. The battery fits inside my phone and that fits in my pocket, so there should have been no problem getting it through the letterbox. But in the event I had to waste Saturday morning travelling to a depot to collect a 6in x 8in box.
I have a laptop that's running Windows 7, and I've been wondering what to do. I don't especially like Windows, but it's occasionally a nuisance not to have a copy. Here's my plan:
Boot off a Linux USB and take an image backup of the Windows 7 disk.
Upgrade to Windows 10.
Take another backup of the disk.
Install Mint.
Create VMs of Windows 7 and 10.
Back in the day, there was a good deal of dismay in the contractor community when Red Dawn Primarolo introduced IR35. I initially shared that dismay, until I read an article by an employment lawyer that described the history of attempts by Inland Revenue (HMRC's predecessor) to prove employment status. Mostly they were trying to prove that somebody was an employee, but occasionally they were trying the opposite. Either way, they lost just about every case. Even with IR35, I don't think they've enjoyed much success since then.
Unsurprisingly, HMRC's preference is for a system where they decide who pays tax as an employee, without reference to any pesky rules.
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