* Posts by Kubla Cant

2803 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2010

UK contractors planning 'mass exodus' ahead of IR35 tax clampdown – survey

Kubla Cant

Re: hyperbole?

the important part for many freelancers is that big companies are now refusing to employ freelance staff at all

Relax. They've been trying to kick the contractor habit for decades. Give it a year and they'll be on the hunt again.

The annoying thing is the way this plays into the hands of "consultancies". For the past year, I've been working on a body of code created by a well-known "consultancy". The "consultants" seem to have been a mix of incompetent and totally bonkers.

Kubla Cant
Joke

ringworm - a common complaint amongst my colleagues at the time, due to some weird things that lived in and between dusty pages of books

I think you'll find that's bookworm.

Kubla Cant

Re: Anonymous Contractor

I was on a total 'salary package' including pension, holiday, NI, tax, take-home pay etc of just over £25k, a contractor doing *exactly the same job* was on just over £45k.

If the contractor's job was exactly the same as yours, why didn't you look for a contract and add £20k to your earnings?

And what line of work was this? There can't be many competent contractors earning £45k.

You want a Y2K crash? FINE! Here's a poorly computer

Kubla Cant

Re: Same as Audits

Try entering the Battle of Hastings, 1066, as a date in Excel, it borks.

So that's why the English lost!

Beware, Tesla might take away your car's autopilot if you buy its vehicles from third party dealerships – plus more news

Kubla Cant

Re: Always read the software license terms and conditions

Apparently the car was sold at auction to the dealer by Tesla. Tesla had been compelled by a California "lemon law" to accept it back from the original purchaser because of a well-known fault. So there isn't really a previous owner.

But it seems that the car had Autopilot when Tesla auctioned it and when the current owner bought it. It was disabled by a "software update".

Hey GitLab, the 1970s called and want their sexism back: Saleswomen told to wear short skirts, heels and 'step it up'

Kubla Cant

Re: Short skirts

Cocktail attire for women is specifically dresses that end above the knee

WTF? Is Poe's Law applicable here?

Kubla Cant

Short skirts

I wonder if there's a semantic issue here. It's possible that "short skirts" might have been a maladroit way to say "not ball gowns and not trousers", but it ends up sounding like an injunction to show lotsa leg. While the decision to tell the women what to wear is inexcusable, the resulting furore has been worse because of the implied request for a sex-show.

Kubla Cant

Cocktail casual

Presumably whatever you wear to drink cocktails in. For people getting rat-arsed on the sofa in front of the TV, I'd guess that means just about anything (or nothing).

Kubla Cant

Re: bah, humbug, and it's the 60s, not the 70s.

Well said. But I doubt that it will appease the growing community of people whose main goal in life is to be offended.

Oi! You got a loicence for that Java, mate? More devs turn to OpenJDK to swerve Oracle fee

Kubla Cant

Re: Oracle drives non-java uptake

In the mean time, we start with languages that compile to JVM, but aren't Java. Then we get a VM that isn't Java and the whole world moves away from Oracle

Unfortunately, a big attraction of JVM-targeted languages* is that they can use Java runtime libraries. The bare language is of limited use. If Oracle succeeds in establishing that its API is proprietary, then using library routines, even in a re-engineered version, is going to cost.

* Some, at least. Not sure about Scala.

Contractors welcome Lords inquiry into IR35 before tax reforms hit private sector but fear it's 'too little, too late'

Kubla Cant

Re: Too Late @Charlie

What is your country of residence and/or taxation if you are on board a ship in international waters for over 6 months of the year?

To some extent it depends on your home country. Some jurisdictions consider you liable for tax even if you're never in the country.

I remember reading about a plan to build a kind of floating island for super-rich tax exiles. It would make sure they were never in one tax jurisdiction long enough to be liable. I suspect the project foundered because there's no point in being super-rich if you have to spend your life at sea, and the idea of being cooped up with other plutocrats is deeply unappealing.

This AI is full of holes: Brit council fixes thousands of road cracks spotted by algorithm using sat snaps

Kubla Cant
Black Helicopters

The ulterior motive

Anyone who has tried to get compensation for damage caused by potholes will be familiar with the excuse that "We are not liable because we inspect the road for damage on a regular basis". Although this sounds feeble, I understand that it's a legal escape route.

Sending people out to inspect roads is expensive, and it may be difficult to cover enough roads to avoid liability. But if you can say "our AI inspects every road in the area continuously", then you don't have to pay anybody.

The fact that so-called AI systems can never explain their conclusions may work against this, but most people don't know about that.

Kubla Cant

A hollow voice says "Plugh"

The saved money will be plowed back

What does "plowed" mean in Blackpool? Is it something you do with a plough?

Iowa has already won the worst IT rollout award of 2020: Rap for crap caucus app chaps in vote zap flap

Kubla Cant

Re: Don't blame the users for the app failure

the Labour leadership should just be elected by Labour party members

Doesn't this facilitate the entryism that plagues the Labour Party? ISTR that when Corbyn was elected you could join for about £20.

Ah, night shift in the 1970s. Ciggies, hipflasks, ADVENT... and fault-prone disk drives the size of washing machines

Kubla Cant

Re: How to treat removable pack drives

Two carpenters. One using a drive as a saw bench to cut a 4x2 down. The other using the second drive as a rest to knock old nails out of another piece of wood. We looked at each other and silently went elsewhere.

People may be wondering why they didn't warn the carpenters that they could damage the disk drives and ask them politely to work elsewhere. Remember this was a national newspaper in the 1970s., and the carpenters were surely members of SOGAT or NATSOPA or the NGA. Any suggestion that there might be a better way of doing things would probably result in no paper the following morning.

(I worked at Times Newspapers in the 1970s, before the 12-month shutdown and the move to Wapping.)

Very little helps: Tesco flashes ancient Windows desktop on Scan-As-You-Shop device

Kubla Cant

If Datawedge is the program these scanners are running, as Lee D says above, then the desktop shortcut suggests that it's a demo version. Naughty!

It's also interesting that the scanner thinks the time is 4:15 AM.

Will Asimov fix my doorbell? There should be a law about this

Kubla Cant

Infographics

The infographic of what you're allowed to flush down the toilet seems to be missing two obvious things. I can see how they could (distastefully) depict one of them, but the other might be a challenge.

I can't resist the opportunity to complain about infographics in appliance instructions. Thousands of years ago, early civilisations were able to get by with pictograms, but life was simpler then, and the most sophisticated domestic appliance was a saddle quern.

Eventually, humanity progressed to its present technological zenith, largely as a result of using alphabetic writing, featuring words and numbers. Just as well, since we now have to understand how to use complicated things like a smart egg tray and a wifi connected electric kettle.

But whenever I unpack some new appliance, I have to decode the instructions from a set of badly-drawn pictures. It's like being on the receiving end of somebody trying to explain the theory of relativity through the medium of expressive dance.

Google says its latest chatbot is the most human-like ever – trained on our species' best works: 341GB of social media

Kubla Cant
Pint

Re: Broken by design

Do you know why it's convincing AI? Because it's roundstanding in its field!

Like its Windows-noob-stabilisers OS, Zorin's cloudy Grid tool is Linux desktop management for dummies

Kubla Cant
Headmaster

Re: Latin is still killing me

No. "Sans" means "without" in French. In Latin the word is "sine", as in "sine qua non".

"Forgetica" isn't a Latin word anyway. It grafts an English verb on to the back end of "Helvetica", which is the Latin for "Switzerland", but is better known as a Swiss font.

So the font should be called something like "Sine Oblito", but that would spoil the feeble joke.

Beware the Friday afternoon 'Could you just..?' from the muppet who wants to come between you and your beer

Kubla Cant

Re: The obvious get-out phrase...

..or grout cleaning?

If you never thought you'd hear a Microsoftie tell you to stop using Internet Explorer, lap it up: 'I beg you, let it retire to great bitbucket in the sky'

Kubla Cant

Re: Annoyingly....

IE 11 is the only browser I've got that plays nice with java serverlets still. Everything else has thrown them by the wayside.

Eh? A Java Servlet* is a purely server-side component. I can send anything you want to the browser - text, HTML, binary data.... It just sends whatever you program it to emit.

If some browsers are having problems with a servlet then there's something wrong with the way it's been written.

* assuming that's what you mean by "serverlets "

Kubla Cant

Re: Just as soon as you release a stable alternative...

I've set up screen reader software for the blind in the past, and it's always been a shit-show anyway!

Sounds like you should give the job to somebody who knows how to do it.

Clunk, whirr, buzz, whine. Shared office space can be a riot and sounds like one too

Kubla Cant

Computer says "If you must"

Quite a few years ago I had a PC where the CPU temperature was linked to the speed of a noisy cooling fan. Whenever I asked it to do something strenuous like a compilation it would make an aggrieved moaning noise as it woke up, followed by the sound of a mighty rushing wind. The complaining got so bad that I was reluctant to ask too much of the computer.

South American nations open fire on ICANN for 'illegal and unjust' sale of .amazon to zillionaire Jeff Bezos

Kubla Cant

Why does a river need its own TLD?

No disrespect to the Amazon, but I'm not aware that it's usual to give a river its own TLD. Are they all going to get one? Can I use .ouse, since the Ouse is just across the street (and may end up in my kitchen if it keeps on raining)?

Kubla Cant

Re: Surely the South American countries have a prior claim

Books are made from conifers that are grown as a crop for paper-making. Trees in the Amazon forest are chopped or burnt down to provide space for things like beef pasture and soya cultivation.

The delights of on-site working – sun, sea and... WordPad wrangling?

Kubla Cant

Re: Norton Commander

I seem to recall using the DEBUG utility to patch binary files in MS_DOS and Windows. It's apparently not available in 64-bit Windows.

Copy-left behind: Permissive MIT, Apache open-source licenses on the up as developers snub GNU's GPL

Kubla Cant

Unless it's a rescue, anyone who buys a cat or dog from a pet shop deserves to be screwed.

Indisputably. But it would be tricky to make it clear within the limited scope of a cartoon that the man was buying from a reputable breeder or a rescue centre.

There's a long history of cartoons showing castaways on desert islands that are nothing but a small mound with a palm tree in the middle sticking out of the sea. I think people should be warned that most desert islands aren't like that, and that you couldn't survive long on such an island.

This is also a system for GPs, right? UK doctors seek clarity over Health dept's £40m single sign-on funding

Kubla Cant

Re: what is a GP?

they're usually all booked up weeks or months in advance

I can usually get an appointment with my GP in England within 24 hours, though I usually make a point of telling them that it's not an urgent problem. I guess I'm lucky to be registered with a well-run village practice.

By way of contrast, a friend who couldn't get an appointment with her GP went to an NHS Walk-in Centre. They told her she seemed to be in serious need of treatment, but she would have to come back at 6 o'clock. When she did so, she was told that there were no available consultations (but they agreed that she seemed to be in serious need of treatment).

So much for the on-demand Walk-in Centre. She ended up in A&E.

Shhhhhh: Fujitsu bags another £12m from Libraries NI as bosses fail to bookmark replacement

Kubla Cant

Loadsa money

NI received a £1bn payout to induce the Ulster Unionists to support Theresa May's deal. The recent agreement to resume government from Stormont appears to have been facilitated by further bungs. I don't suppose the library service sees much need to economise.

15 years on, Euroboffins finally work out what it took to send the Huygens Titan probe into such a spin

Kubla Cant

Re: New Reg unit?

The author is just clarifying the shape for the hamburger-eating Reg readers who don't know what a circle looks like.

Flying taxis? That'll be AFTER you've launched light sabres and anti-gravity skateboards

Kubla Cant

Re: These kind of ideas go back a long way

They shifted all of the shelves around too for unknown reasons.... That used to be the practice of supermarkets

In an exquisite refinement, a local Tesco has moved things to different aisles, but they haven't changed the hanging notices at the end of the aisles.

Kubla Cant

Re: These kind of ideas go back a long way

He [Charles Glover, proposing Kings Cross Airport] said that city-men would be encouraged to fly between meetings

And there we have it. Why are we all zooming around the country, at great expense in time, fuel and carbon emissions, to do things that can easily be done remotely?

About 25% of my working day is spent commuting, and I don't think that's unusual. When I get to work, I sit in front of a computer and type. Some days, my interaction with my co-workers is limited to "Good morning" and "See you tomorrow".

Working from home? My experience is that employers start off enthusiastic, but after a while they start to get twitchy and demand bums on seats unless there's a cast-iron reason for WFH.

Kubla Cant

Re: "Lightsaber"

In some cases, maybe. But a lot of US spellings are the result of a half-baked "rational spelling" craze in the 19th century.

On the other hand, English English has had its spellings mangled by half-baked crazes for exotic spelling (e.g. "dette" became "debt" because the Latin "debit*" root - dunno what happened to the "i"). So it's quite possible that the "*re" words are a Froggy affectation.

What was Boeing through their heads? Emails show staff wouldn't put their families on a 737 Max over safety fears

Kubla Cant

Also worth reading Destination Disaster from the same decade, which covers the Paris DC10 crash. Short version: the DC10 cargo door tended to blow out, but McDonnell Douglas were in financial straits, so the FAA was induced to soft-pedal demands for rectification.

Hey kids! Ditch that LCD and get ready for the retro CRT world of Windows Terminal

Kubla Cant

Microsoft Program Manager Kayla Cinnamon

Is that a person or a desktop environment? Genuinely confused.

Is it a make-up mirror? Is it a tiny frisbee? No, it's the bonkers Cyrcle Phone, with its TWO headphone jacks

Kubla Cant

What can you expect from a company with a stupid name like "dTOOR "?

Improved Java support poured into Microsoft's Visual Studio Code – will it be enough to tempt developers?

Kubla Cant

Like @Zippy, I can't imagine what MS stand to gain. They're putting quite a lot of effort into a product that's free, and that is an entrant in a fairly crowded field. One nice thing about VSC is the frequent and, in my experience, issue-free updates.

My impression was that VSC's original target was Typescript development. It's still rather better for that than IntelliJ (though that may be because my copy of IntelliJ is a couple of years old).

Interesting to see that NetBeans is still a thing. In two decades of Java I've only worked at one site where they used it.

I'm the queen of Gibraltar and will never get a traffic ticket... just two of the things anyone could have written into country's laws thanks to unsanitised SQL input vuln

Kubla Cant
Facepalm

'Twas ever thus

I know Gibraltar is a small place, but I'd guess that its utilities such as power, water, drainage and highways are built and maintained by professionals. But when it comes to software, they seem to have entrusted the job to a moderately talented schoolkid.

Long-term Linux Mint: 19.3 release unchains the Gimp, adds HiDPI, is kind to your older, less-beefy kit

Kubla Cant

HDMI and Audio

Surprising to hear of problems in this area.

I'm running a fairly ancient version of Mint (not at home, so I can't check, but probably 17.?). It has no trouble running two screens, one HDMI, one DP. And it plays HDMI audio (atrocious sound quality, but that's down to the crappy speakers in the screen). Switching to analogue output is simple enough, as the audio properties app is accessible via the volume control in the system tray.

A couple of years ago I had a sudden motherboard death in the middle of some important work. I shifted the system disk into a spare computer that was pretty dissimilar, and I don't recall any problems with video or audio.

A Notepad nightmare leaves sysadmin with something totally unprintable

Kubla Cant

Re: Printer drivers: still cruddy after all these years

the company telex (yes, we used telexes for external communication)

Not so unusual in companies involved with shipping. In the 90s I had to install a system that enabled desk-top users to send Telex messages (and faxes) from a central server. When creating a little editor that transformed ASCII into Telex-compatible text, a former seaman on the staff told me that Baudot code was based on semaphore.

From Soviet to science fiction icon, the weird life of Isaac Asimov 100 years on

Kubla Cant

Re: frustrating genius

That's my recollection, too.

SF is a curious genre. I was addicted to it in my early 20s, then I suddenly lost interest. From time to time I read a rave review of a new SF novel and I give it a try again, but I can rarely get beyond the first chapters.

It's always DNS, especially when you're on holiday with nothing but a phone on GPRS

Kubla Cant
Angel

GPRS? Luxury!

It was a long time ago*, about 9pm, and the development team had been in the pub since 6pm. In walked a completely sober project manager, who said "There's a problem with $SYSTEM at $CLIENT. Can anyone help?".

The result was a crowd of tipsy developers standing round a VT52** connected to the client site over a 1200 bps modem. The system with the problem was fairly old, and nobody there had ever worked on it. We managed to come up with a solution, but unsurprisingly I can't remember what it was. We did some of our best work when drunk. Fortunately systems were simpler in those days.

* I can't be bothered to work out the year, but it was before mobile phones, Internet and even LANs - all the terminals were wired back to the machine room with RS232 cables. PCs just about existed, but a serious software company wouldn't have had such things.

** An obsolete terminal, even then. It had suffered so much screen-burn that it was hard to make out the characters.

Capita unfurls new consulting arm. Hmm, what shall we call it?

Kubla Cant

What in the world would you consult Capita about?

How to screw everything up?

Kubla Cant
Headmaster

Re: There is no such verb as "to ink"

I'm afraid verbing nouns is a standard feature of English on both sides of the Atlantic. The thing that's annoying about "inked a £46m deal" is that it's a classic example of the journalistic version of elegant variation.

Cheque out my mad metal frisbee skillz... oops. Lights out!

Kubla Cant

Re: Cheques still relevant... at leastt for someone

I use cheques to pay things like parking tickets. It's a small comfort to imagine the extra work for the payee.

Hold my Bose, we can do premium: Sennheiser chucks pricey wireless cans at travellers

Kubla Cant

Noise cancelling

their noise-cancelling technology, which effectively drones out external noises like cars and aeroplane engines

So they replace the drone of the engine with a drone of their own? No thanks.

Seriously, though, cancelling engine noise seems to be the easy task for noise-cancelling headphones. I want some that can cancel out speech.

JavaScript survey: Devs love a bit of React, but Angular and Cordova declining. And you're not alone... a chunk of pros also feel JS is 'overly complex'

Kubla Cant

Re: Doesn't paint JavaScript in the best light...

I suspect that part of the problem is the way the browser environment blurs coding skills with presentational talent. High-end sites will have UX specialists and graphic designers, though it's still a coder's job to get the concept on to the screen. Many sites make do with coders who have some sense of design.

FYI: FBI raiding NSA's global wiretap database to probe US peeps is probably illegal, unconstitutional, court says

Kubla Cant
Headmaster

Willfulness?

evidence of willfulness regarding the tax returns

Strange use of "willfulness". Are Americans supposed to complete tax returns in some kind of trance, with no exercise of will involved?

Who's that padding down the chimney? It's Puma, with its weird £80 socks for gamers

Kubla Cant

Re: Socks?

Yeah, but Germans wear shoes on their hands instead of gloves (Handschuhe), so they probably can't tell shoes from socks. I always thought they missed a trick not calling socks Fusshandschuhe.

Kubla Cant

Re: A pair of slippers.....?

More like "Active Gaming Pants"