Posts by Loyal Commenter

Re: The whole activation scheme for a lot of stuff drives me nuts.

I don't think I've quite got components in my current PC that came from my original beige box PC which I owned as a student in the '90s, but that's only because FDDs and ISA slots aren't a thing any more, and most MOBOs don't come with IDE slots either. I'm pretty sure some of the components are getting on for two decades old though, such as USB headers and the like, and some of the HDDs in there. The main driver for upgrading most of the components is when the MOBO needs replacing for one reason or another, which usually necessitates replacing the processor and all the DIMMs because the older memory isn't compatible. Anyone want to buy 16GB of DDR3?

Trtigger's broom indeed.

MS's main revenue stream is now SaaS, which is pretty hard to pirate. This is why they make it hard to find and buy a copy of Office 2019, much preferring to lock you into "Office 365".

Older versions of Office didn't even need a key. IIRC, you could activate them with 1111-1111-1111-1111, or something similar.

Re: FFS. You cannot blame everything on brexit.

Germany wasn't the only country to experience hyper-inflation in the 20th century either, so calling this "German race memory" isn't exactly accurate. Austria, Greece, Hungary and Poland all had hyperinflation around the same time. It's largely Greece's fiscal irresponsibility before they joined the Euro, and dishonesty around how much debt the country had that led to the Greek financial crisis of a few years ago. Whilst I don't particularly agree with the response from the ECB of enforced austerity, it's not like the UK didn't have the exact same neoliberal economic policies over the last decade. This isn't a problem that is unique to the ECB, but it is one that comes around when political ideology takes over from economics, which itself isn't exactly a discipline that is free from murkiness and false assumptions.

Re: FFS. You cannot blame everything on brexit.

If you think criticism of the Euro was a valid reason for the UK to leave the EU, then I suggest you look in your wallet and see whether it has Euros in it.

Before our free movement was taken away, I had the privilege of travelling freely to several countries inside the EU, and also within the common market but which are not EU members. Some of these countries have the Euro (France, Italy, Germany, Greece, Spain, Portugal), some do not (Czechia, UK, Iceland). The utility of the Euro is a matter entirely for those countries that use it.

Re: FFS. You cannot blame everything on brexit.

The fiscal policy of the ECB had no bearing on us whilst we were members; we weren't members of the ECB or Euro. Tey may be valid criticisms of those institutions, and I'll not claim they are perfect. However, these were used as arguments for the UK leaving the EU, and they just weren't valid because they were totally inapplicable.

It's a bit rich to accuse the EU of having right-wing social policy when our own country has the most right-wing government in living memory. A government who are currently talking about removing regulations that protect workers from exploitation, and most recently decided that it is fine to do trade deals with countries that commit genocide. The EU members, on the other hand, are making quite loud disapproving noises towards Hungary and Poland exactly because their social policies do not align.

I'm not going to claim the EU is perfect; no system is. However, it is founded on cooperation (and compromise) which is better than the alternative which is competition and conflict. I don't think it was ever well explained to the people of this country why compromise is a price worth paying for peace and prosperity.

Re: FFS. You cannot blame everything on brexit.

Indeed, 1 and 2 manifestly exist (although I've never seen any in the 2 category that were particularly convincing*, or which didn't apply more generally to our own system of government**, and which didn't seem like a reasonable trade-off for the benefits gained), and number 4 is becoming more apparent by the day. Some concrete examples of 3 please, or can we safely strike that one from the list?

In the 1970s, when we originally joined what was then the EEC, the UK was known as the "Sick Man of Europe", and joining the bloc literally saved our economy. That name is going to be applicable again really soon, and in more than one sense, if you look at the most recent weekly COVID death figures published today which give us "world-beating" mortality figures.

*I've seen plenty of whining about the ECB, the Euro, the Schengen borderless zone (but oddly, never the other aspects of the Schengen, like the police data sharing), all things which clearly did not apply to the UK when it was a member with its OPT OUT.

**Such as the "bureaucrat" argument, which conveniently ignores the fact that the EU has around 30K civil servants, as opposed to the 300K in Whitehall, and one of the points of 28 27 countries working together is to reduce bureaucracy through economies of scale.

Anyway, some examples of 3 please. Anyone? You, behind the tumbleweed?

Re: Go on....

When I were but a young'un, it was a case of get any job you can, and in my case, it turned out to be Equinox on Novell Netware (shudder). I was asked now to do anything with that now, I'm not sure that I could remember a single thing about it. And that's the way I want it to stay.

Re: My guess as to what actually happened

This is pretty much exactly what I have been saying, to which the responses have been along the lines of, "you must be some sort of Guardian reading remoaning snowflake libtard" (I paraphrase, it doesn't look like CJ has got here yet). I strongly suspect this is yet another of the amazing benefits that brexit is giving us, but some seem to enjoy keeping that cosy wool pulled over their eyes for that little bit longer.

Of course, we have no evidence that this has anything at all to do with the "b" word, but then again, reading between the lines, Priti Patel hasn't exactly been quick in coming forward with an adequate explanation, or indeed one that says, "this has nothing to do with brexit"...

I wonder if we will ever get a proper technical explanation of what has happened here. In theory, the purpose and workings of such a system should be public knowledge, even if the data held in it is not. The absence, or vagueness, of such an explanation in itself suggests something is being covered up, and it's not a step too far to conjecture that this is because it may be embarrassing to the government.

Re: The fickle finger of blame...

I suspect the rationale being given for not previously being able to remove data would be along the lines of not being able to identify the records to remove in historical data. The reasonable response would be, "well, start recording the information you need to be able to do this in future," so that any new data can be subject to such cleansing requirements.

It's a bit like the argument for technical debt in legacy software - you might not have the resources to go back and completely re-write stuff that was written in the '80s in COBOL, that is working, but is unmaintainable. However, you sure as hell can follow best practices with anything new you write in a modern OO language that supports SOLID.

Re: The fickle finger of blame...

True, you can't blame everything on brexit, but we have left data sharing agreements with EU-wide policing, which would affect systems like this, and the timing is spot on.

I've no evidence that this is the cause, but it does fall into the "puppy sitting next to a pile of poo" category.

Re: Go on....

Unless they are using the Adabas SQL gateway apparently. Adabas is not a RDBMS I'm familiar with, but Google is your friend (in this context).

Re: Go on....

As a matter of course, I would generally write any DELETE statement as SELECT * first and check it returns the results I want.

Then, before running it, select the contents of the affected table(s) into backups, along the lines of SELECT INTO TABLENAME_20210119 * FROM TABLENAME.

Then, where practical to do so, start a transaction before running the DELETE and only commit it if I get the expected number of records reported. I say "where practical" because you might not always have the tempdb space available.

Of course, if you do actually want to zero out a table, you should be using TRUNCATE anyway, unless you have a particular need to be able to reverse the transaction log.

Re: Go on....

My money's on forgetting the WHERE clause in a DELETE statement. I've seen a couple of people manage that one.

Re: 400,00 up from 150,000

If government IT overruns are anything to go by, you can probably whack another 0 on the end of that.

Re: The fickle finger of blame...

I'd speculate that the thing that someone might have accidentally changed might relate to new requirements arising from political decisions to no longer being part of EU-wide policing, and the requirements to remove data relating to EU citizens outside of the UK that arise from that.

This would also explain why the likes of Priti Patel have been so vague about what the actual cause was, because the long-and-short answer is her and her brexity cohorts.

Re: the loss relates to individuals who were arrested and then released with no further action

Whether the "b" word is a good or bad thing is entirely moot in this context. The PNC will almost certainly have held data obtained from EU data sharing agreements, to which we are no longer party. I find it very unlikely that the EU agencies that provided that data would not have required it to be no longer held as part of both the "oven-ready" withdrawal agreement, the transition period for which expired at the end of December, and also the trade agreement rushed through parliament with very little scrutiny in the dying days of 2020.

So, the only question here, is whether someone screwed up applying those new rules, which given their likely complexity and the short timescale between when the exact details were known and when they had to be applied, seems like a reasonable hypothesis.

Re: the loss relates to individuals who were arrested and then released with no further action

I'm not a copper, but I'm pretty sure the normal course of an enquiry goes along the lines of:

1) Find any leads.

2) Follow those leads to find suspects.

3) Eliminate any that obviously didn't do it.

4) hopefully end up with one, and find enough evidence to prove they did it.

If you "accidentally delete" the records of having done steps 2 and 3, and you haven't got to step 4 yet, then you pretty much have to go and do those steps again. If nothing else, it's a waste of police time, and a potential massive inconvenience for those people who had previously been eliminated.

Re: Backups

Databases are good at replaying transaction logs onto backups, it's true. They're not so great at retrieving those transaction logs from a room full of smoke particles if your server has gone up in flames though, which is one of the purposes of backups.

Admittedly, if you want that sort of level of protection, what you need is a mirror of your server, and log shipping to keep it in synch. Again, not so useful if your DR mirror has gone up in flames because it was situated in Buncefield. This does, of course beg the question of why anyone would situate their DR facility next to something as potentially explodey as an oil refinery.

Re: More lies and deceit from the Police ?

The PNC is old and creaky - I mean the clue is there in the word mainframe. I'm entirely unsurprised that it has proven to be impractical to retro-fit GDPR into something written several decades ago in a niche language.

Blame the government for failure to provide adequate funding for a replacement though. "The party of law and order". Pffft.

Re: the loss relates to individuals who were arrested and then released with no further action

I suspect, but have no evidence, that the normal process had had to be "adjusted" to cope with the changes to data sharing with the EU and that "adjustment" was done in a cack-handed fashion, most likely because the requirements weren't known until the very last moment, and it had to be done at some point between Christmas and the New Year by some poor sod who would have preferred to be drunk.

Re: Backups

GDPR has specific exemptions for law enforcement.

Re: A revolutionary new idea

Wanna buy an old phone?

No, the battery doesn't work, and the labour costs for a replacement cost more than the value of the phone.

Yeah, it'll be a cheap eBay Chinese knock-off battery because the originals aren't available to buy.

Hello?

Oh, he's gone.

My old HTC-10 was a great phone, but after a couple of years, the battery wouldn't hold charge for more than about 10 minutes, so it had to be permanently plugged into a power bank. I tried my best to find someone who could do a battery replacement. Of the various phone repair places I tried, only one would take the job on, and then they couldn't get the replacement battery. It would have cost me £50 to get it done if they could. HTC quoted something silly like £80-90 to send it off to their service centre. That's a significant portion of the price of a reconditioned one, and only about half the price of a new one at the time.

Okay, so maybe HTC aren't a great example, because they aren't a major player in the phone market any more. Which is a shame, because over the years they have made some pretty good phones, and have been in the game almost as long as Apple, and longer than Samsung. You might get better luck with battery replacements for those brands, but it does sound like they try to make them as hard as possible, with lots of glue, so the odds are if you get it done at a cheap phone repair place, you'll end up with something else not working, like the GPS aerial being detached, or the phone's case being damaged because they're harder to open than Pinhead's puzzle box.

Re: A revolutionary new idea

I suspect the real argument for not making easily replaceable batteries is planned obsolescence in order to drive sales of new phones. At over £1k a pop for today's flagships, and a battery life of somewhere between 18-24 months, that's a fair revenue stream that they won't want to be cutting off.

Re: A revolutionary new idea

One argument for the "sealed-in" battery is that it makes it very hard to make a phone waterproof if the battery is removable, which is one of the selling-points on high-end phones. However, I'm sure this isn't insurmountable, for example, giving a battery compartment a separate waterproof seal. The problem arises though, that you are then relying on the user to not damage the seal when opening the battery compartment, and there is a trade-off between how good that seal can be, and how easy it is to open the compartment to replace the battery. I'm sure there's a sensible compromise somewhere with a removable back-plate that needs a specialist (or at least some effort) to open, but underneath having a battery which is easy to unclip and remove, rather than something glued in place underneath other components.

Re: Fluorescents...

In the early days of digital TV, I had a Philips set-top box (It was quite small, and I reckon could have been made smaller if the back of it didn't need to have a SCART socket on it). It was slow, the software buggy, despite the fact that it only had to manage to display the EPG and let you pick a channel, and it died after about a year of use. I used to have an old Philips LCD monitor that someone gave me as an emergency spare, kept in storage before it got taken to the local recycling centre. Whenever it was turned on, it would emit a loud high-pitched whine (I'm led to believe this is due to cheap electrolytic capacitors). I think it was only a couple of years old when I got it.

So, yeah. Blacklisted.

Re: Fluorescents...

...I have a feeling it may have been a very old and large, unshielded CRT monitor...

Re: Fluorescents...

In the office where we used to work, one of the directors had his office at the end of ours. I was sat in the corner near the door to his office. On the rare occasions he would come in (he was mostly out with clients). He would go into his office and turn on his PC, something in there would make a "clunk" sound and my monitor would turn off and on again from whatever EM pulse it was sending out. I was sat a good 5 metres away, behind a stud wall. I have no idea what it was that was causing it, but it seemed to be only my monitor (a cheapo Acer flat screen) that was affected. I'm glad there was nobody nearby with a pacemaker.

Re: Doesn't really make sense

Utter nonsense. All phones use ecosystems created by US companies. They dominate the online world.

Yeah, yeah, and the US invented the motor car, TV, radio, apple pie, hot-dogs, denim...

Except, of course, none of those things is true.

Re: Doesn't really make sense

Exactly. Xiaomi makes very capable phones for sub £200. Apple's phones cost £1000 on top of that. It smacks of protectionism.

The last phone I bought was a Xiaomi Redmi Note 9. I paid around £170 for it at the time; I see they are now going for £150. It might not have all the latest bling of the newest iPhone, but I've not found any problems with it, or anything it doesn't do that I want it to. Add to that, that it is dual-SIM and has removable storage (although sadly, not removable battery), and reportedly doesn't mind being dunked in water (I'm not going to try that) and I see no need to spend the extra £1000 on something that will get the exact same uses.

I'm not about to start using their "Xiaomi Cloud" though. I suspect that's more likely to hoover up personal data than Facebook and Google combined.

Re: The problem

Other instances during this administration where those in charge have failed to use the word "terrorist" where it applies spring to mind.

For example, where a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd and killed a peaceful protester. If I remember rightly, The Orange One, on that occasion, claimed there were "very fine people on both sides". He has also been quite vocal in labelling "Antifa" as a "terrorist organization", despite the fact that being opposed to fascism doesn't either make you either a member of a fictitious organisation or a terrorist. The cynical might suggest simply that an anti-anti-fascist is a fascist.

Of course, if you take any crowd of people, there are going to be some "bad eggs". BLM was (and is) a massive movement, on the simple grounds that most people can see that racial inequality, not only in America, but also elsewhere, is a serious problem. It doesn't take a lot of looking around to see that the vast majority of violence at BLM protests was orchestrated by the far right counter-protesters, or by those in power. A good example of this is Trump himself using riot police to move a non-violent sitting protest from in front of a church, with force, so that he could have a photo-op holding a bible up. A book, which, whatever you might think about its contents, is almost certainly one he has not read and taken in.

So, yes, there was some violence associated with BLM protests, including some impromptu statue-dunking in this country*, but it is self-evident that the majority of BLM protesters have been, and continue to be peaceful and respectful. Contrast this with a rioting mob last week, where there may indeed have been some non-violent protesters, but there were also a large number of thugs, some of whom had gone prepared to enact acts of violence. I don't recall BLM protesters chanting about executing people. The two things are just not comparable, and by trying to equate them, you are putting yourself firmly on the side of the fascists.

*With regard to the Colston statue; I have been quite clear throughout on this matter that those who tore it down and threw it in the docks in Bristol had to be treated equally in the eyes of the law, which means, unfortunately for them, arrests and criminal damage charges. Justice is blind etc. Personally, I think the statue should have been put into a museum of slavery a long time ago, and it is to this country's shame that we cover over inconvenient parts of our history. Failure to learn from the mistakes of history means we are doomed to repeat them.

Re: Fired for “patterns of behavior”

The sketch in question is on youtube and is easily found. I'd recommend watching it if you've not seen it. Other chestnuts include "Loitering with intent to use a pedestrian crossing".

Re: And yet for 4 years all we heard was how the Russians stole the election.

I notice he has been very quiet about how well brexit is going as well.

I'm thinking about getting myself a "Project Fear was right" T-Shirt made up...

Re: The problem

I think the usual term for those in a failed coup, or an armed* attack on a seat of power is terrorist.

If BLM protesters had assaulted the Capitol, or someone of a Middle-Eastern appearance (or the wrong subset of Abrahamic faith) I'm sure there would have been no hesitation in using the word.

*The attackers might not have used guns, but I did see footage of at least one using tear gas on the police, a secreted pipe bomb was found, and Nazi Jamiroquai had a fucking spear. I read reports that at least one "protester" had abseiling gear, used to abseil into the chamber, and a good number of them were militiamen, so it's pretty evident that at least a core of them went there with clear intentions, and to some degree, they were cloaked by a crowd of useful idiots.

Re: Fired for “patterns of behavior”

Other ones were, "smelling of foreign food" and the classic, "walking around with an offensive wife".

Re: The problem

I'm just waiting for the "hashtag" #notallnazis to start trending on… Oh, wait, he got banned didn't he?

Re: Another story from Douglas Adams?

The phone sanitisers are currently boarding the B(rexit)-Ark, but won't be here for some time because the Ark is stuck at Alpha-Centauri with incorrect paperwork.