Posts by Nick Kew 2841 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2007
should be more startups. Unfortunately, the funding models
Actually funding models are adapting quite nicely to support more and smaller startups:
(1) Today far-and-away the biggest VCT in the UK is Octopus Titan, which invests in smaller, newer businesses than any successful VCT has in the past (others have tried, but only managed to lose most of their money and get taken over).
(2) The real new kid on the block is crowdfunding, and that's supporting a whole raft of new entrants.
Silly to generalise like that. Startups take many different paths to success - even if greater numbers end in failure, or bumble along supporting one person cleaning windows, trading on ebay, or flirting with IR35.
Bear in mind that all the Internet giants are startups from the 1990s or later, and some are now among the world's biggest companies. Also that our long-established giants were once startups too.
so adds MySQL, Docker, Java efforts under way too
Oracle adds MySQL, Docker and Java?
MySQL, Docker and Java efforts are under way?
Which is it?
Oh hang on, that "too" confuses the matter further, with the implication that something else has happened in addition to the [whatever] that has happened with MySQL, Docker and Java.
That kind of unparseable headline (in this case subheading) is truly infuriating. Can't someone proofread those things before going to press?
it should be stored as ISO-8601 and translated in the UI
Worst of at least two worlds. Store it as a regular timestamp, then use standard libraries (and locale settings) to present it. In the unlikely event that you have a system that still has a 32-bit time_t, either document it ("recompile before 2038") or grab a library with 64 bits.
These days there's no excuse to mess up date&time: any mainstream environment will provide standard library functions to deal with them. Broken or other nonstandard timedate should only be seen in those legacy systems that didn't get cleaned up in the Y2K purges.
A skillset isn't just one specialist function. Those got automated a century or so ago: c.f Charlie Chaplin "Modern Times". Someone employed in a handyman job (like wiring) might reasonably be expected to be able to deal with another (like plumbing) with minimal guidance based on having general dexterity and at least adequate spatial awareness.
Apply similar principle to your own skillset. The typical Reg commentard is - I would imagine, and yes I'm projecting myself - an IT person with core skills that we're paid for, but also a much wider range of skills in other areas of IT. Even to the extent of being able to sort out someone's Windows or Office problem by playing with the menus and applying an IT mindset, despite being a 100% Unix or Linux user ourselves.
I get the strong impression you have little real world exposure to the day to day workings of the music biz over the last few decades.
Indeed, I have nothing but contempt for the so-called music biz, and no direct knowledge of its day-to-day working. However, I do both listen and perform on a reasonably regular basis. I've also done a little composing, broadcasting and recording, so have a slight level of indirect exposure to some of it.
I'm well aware that copyright abuse happens. I'm also well aware there are lots of stories floating around based on misunderstandings. Nothing posted here enables me to classify your story beyond reasonable doubt as one or the other.
If someone presented a firm case, the Googlers I occasionally encounter are those who work in Free Software. People who believe in copyright but detest its abuse. People who might raise a fuss and would carry weight internally if presented with clear evidence that youtube was complicit in abuse.
P.s. should've said. I could post this where it would be likely to catch the attention of real people at Google (i.e. not the ones whose job is to fob the public off). But before doing that, I'd need sufficient detail not to look an idiot as soon as they ask the kind of questions I'm asking.
Wikipedia lists a lot of recordings of that, some of them a lot older than the one you mention.
One possible hypothesis is that Warner have copyright over some particular arrangement of the song, and spotted that in the video in question. In the absence of more specifics, I couldn't possibly tell.
I checked out the originator of the takedown. Its one of those 3'rd party i.p enforcement companies that are also responsible those blanket DCMA's.
As in this story (which didn't lead to a takedown)!
I'm genuinely curious here: what information do they send you (a blog entry or similar URL like mine above would help)? It it's from a third party, where does Warner come in? Did you check whether the originator was really Warner's henchman, or a third-party abusing their name with no actual connection? Did google/youtube actually take down a video based on that notice? I can well believe Warner would do evil, but there are too many unanswered questions to say for certain that this is an example.
It gets even better than that. At the moment YouTube will block completely private videos of people singing songs that are in the public domain because some big name artist also recorded the same song and the record company makes a blanket claim to copyright.
That sounds credible, but not (AFAIK) proven.
It's basically something Big Pirates (like Disney) have been doing for decades. Which begs the question: is it some story from the past that's become apocryphal in a modern retelling, or are there documented cases you can cite? URLs would be welcome here.
He's not a SPOOK whatever that is
In modern parlance, that's exactly what he is. You may not like it, but language evolves. Would you like to suggest an alternative?
Dammit, I'm usually the one fighting a rearguard action against corruption of the language. In this case I use the word because it seems a decent enough word where no traditional alternative exists (so far as I'm aware). It has the additional virtue that this usage isn't confusing or damaging any previous meaning, as sometimes happens when a word gets re-purposed.
Spook gives speech, telling politicians to get their act together. That's politicians on both sides, which is what it'll take to reach agreement.
Sounds fair enough to me. Unlike commentards descending into tired old arguments about which particular politicians (and views attributed to them) are right or wrong.
Since the UK is revoking existing arrangements, it seems reasonable that the UK should start the ball rolling in proposing a replacement. That means a white paper (or equivalent) from the civil servants, not armwaving from politicians. Except ... the civil servants are supposedly answerable to the politicians, and anything they produce is useless if the politicians can't get their act together and endorse it.
some poor sod has their life destroyed by the penal system
That's traditional. The system ruins lives fairly indiscriminately, for accused people, for victims of crime, and in some cases for witnesses and jurors. A lot of victims of false allegations have been in the news recently (probably a consequence of and backlash against actions taken when the warcry was "more rape convictions"), which is probably what provoked the speech.
If an automated system does no more than a fuzzy[1] grep for the accused's name on all the accuser's accounts and highlights places for a human investigator to look, that could be a huge improvement on the present system.
[1] as in, able to deal with a realistic level of variants and misspellings.
God help us in the UK if Brexit goes badly and we have to start importing more food from the US, as we'd have to weaken our food safety laws to let the stuff in.
We already import lots of food from the US. Florida orange juice and California wine, to name but two I generally avoid in favour of alternatives from elsewhere.
The issue isn't how much we import, but whether we have a general trade agreement. If we do that, we'll have to accept US "red lines", that prevented proposed trade agreements with either the EU or Pacific Rim countries under Obama and Bush - back when the US at least believed in trade. That'll mean not just weakening food standards, but also any labelling (like "red tractor") that could be used as a proxy to discriminate against products like US growth-hormone-filled beef.
BTW, the scale of smuggling likely to follow that is why a trade agreement with the US must imply border controls for Ireland.
So ZTE is accused of violating US law. And that's coming from politicians, whether it's the President or the Congress!
Isn't that kind of political posturing the very reason we have supposedly-independent judiciaries? Does this mean they've abandoned any pretence of Justice?
Wot, you mean to say there might be a bug in my script? Yep, a commandline tool in a traditional unix pipeline doesn't belong in a security-critical situation. In the case of gnupg I can't even rely on $? .
Though I'm not sure XML or JSON would really help much more than plain ol' CSV or ... um ... ASCII. What I could really use is a libgnupg, to include a high-level API matching gpg commandline options.
why in the blue blazes would a supermarket have its own date format?
People have already pointed to the multiplicity of (non-)standards. Things were probably even more chaotic when the system was first designed. And who knows, maybe it had gone through something more esoteric, like the software I once had the misfortune to encounter where all the time&date code (among other things) were completely screwed by porting to a different-endian architecture.
But more importantly why is a format like that not documented and given to all developers?
You must be young! Corporate documentation walks faster than a ripe cheese. Pre-google, it was rare indeed to be able to lay hands on anything that wasn't too patronisingly obvious for anyone to have bothered to nick it. Even if it existed, expect it to describe something that needs you to perform - say - endianness magic (never imagined by the writer) to work.
And to be written to corporate processes. The bit you need was chopped as "too complex" by the tech writer's boss. Any surviving note is buried in a disused septic tank behind something more intimidating than a mere "beware of the leopard" sign (icon for one prospective layer of cover).
Sorry, missed your post when I referenced ADA.
I always thought that pascal-on-steroids was a missed opportunity for nice things like builtin checking of types and dimensions. All that extra complexity, yet it never occurred to anyone that the language might enforce that dividing a distance by a time gives you something that isn't your blood pressure.
I thought the rot in C++ started with navel-gazing over templates, about when it went from C-with-classes to designed-by-committee. But at least STL is kind-of a separate module in the language.
I think my attitude over the years has been shaped by the alternatives. When I first encountered it, the world I worked in was drooling over ADA, and I grasped C++ as a beacon of relative sanity. A decade on, JAVA was the new kid on the block with promises that looked a lot like ADA had done, but C++ had turned committee-ugly and was no longer such an attractive refuge.
You see an Agenda when you compare how little Bhopal is remembered - or was discussed at the time - with the comparatively tiny and harmless accident at Chernobyl around the same time.
In fact, two Agendas. Big up the nuclear, even though it's a drop in the ocean compared to the chemical. And big up the Evil Empire cockup, while turning a blind eye to the US corporation.
For what it's worth, I transferred a domain to a US registrar today (my previous provider having discontinued the service)). This was a .org domain, nothing EU-oriented about it.
They offered a privacy option to hide all my details. It was offered as a free extra, which I was encouraged to select. I was slightly in two minds (dammit, I post to El Reg under my real name too), but I ticked the option with thoughts that it would be perverse to risk them getting a visit from GDPR enforcement on my account.
No, quite the opposite. They're looking for a quick and clean defeat. Hence jurisdiction-shopping in no-nonsense Germany, rather than one of the many countries (like Blighty) where the case would be likely to go on and on and consume an order of magnitude more in lawyers fees.
I said so last time this story came up. This just confirms it.
Can happen in any walk of life. One day you're helping bail out of a BSOD, the next it might be fixing a wobbly chair.
English language O-level, we had a "teacher" who was borderline-illiterate. One minor recollection from that was a spelling test she had prepared for us. When it came to marking it, I had to correct her on three (of twenty) words. Each was a long argument before she finally looked it up and confirmed I was right.
There was a special mouse pad with horizontal and vertical lines on it.
Yes - though my experience of them was rather later than that (most of the 1990s).
Cold to the touch, and rather unpleasant even at times when cold should have been good. Also moved according to a rather coarse grid, meaning you couldn't steer the pointer between grid points but only move in multi-pixel jumps. Put me right off optical mice for many years, and may have contributed to my RSI.
Trump's accusations might be more credible if the sanctions operated less of a scattergun approach.
China? Well also the rest of the world. EU, Canada, and Mexico lumped together: do we really all do those Evil Things? Trump must be the only one marching in step.
Mind you, the rest of the world does itself no favours by failing to work together on this. EU/Canada/Mexico lumped together because they thought they could be exempted as Good Guys.
Divided we fall.
Upvotes to both Duffy Moon and Adrian 4 for sensible ... provided the universal income kills off all means-testing. Kill off all those cases where loss-of-benefits due to working exceeds basic-rate tax, let alone where it exceeds 100%.
But Sir Humphrey certainly won't stand for that: just look at the huge chunk of administrative Empire he'd lose. That could be precisely the underlying reason UC implementation has been such a shambles: Sir Humphrey is protecting his own empire and minions.
I was 'between jobs' after my employer (Sun) had got borged and my new owner discontinued my work. Not destitute, but signed on out of bloody-mindedness and to get a little of my tax back.
Beginning of February 2011, I went to FOSDEM, with a view very largely to sniffing around for new work. Jobcentre severely penalised me for that: I had left the country, so wasn't available for work over the weekend. They killed my claim altogether, so I had to sign up again from scratch, meaning two weeks interruption and having to travel to a deeply inconvenient regional jobcentre again.
They really don't (or didn't) like you taking any kind of initiative! I wonder if UC would've been any different?
And I say that as someone who's been working in the UK space industry for the last couple of decades.
That was also my impression, having spent most of the '90s working at ESA. Good UK companies existed, UK government programmes existed, but if there was ever an intersection between the two, it eluded me.
To be fair, Davis is actually the more acceptable face of brexit. He's not Kim JongSon nor rival arch-toffoon Rees Mogg; he's not "no more experts" Gollum, he's not dotard flat-earther Lawson, and above all he's not any of the altogether more shadowy figures behind them. He even has a track record that includes making a stand for liberty.
If there's any potential for good news in the whole mess, it's probably him.
@Disgruntled - the "erosion of democracy" is the most interesting aspect of brexit. 'Cos various proposals to improve EU democratic accountability have been made over the years, but have always been blocked by UK governments of both colours.
The Sir Humphrey master plan was to stay in until it was so poisoned someone else could be relied on to take that role. It remains to be seen what happens without us: will east/west and north/south tensions over issues like immigration scupper any future proposals without the need for a UK veto?
Surely what really matters here is, we have a straw in the wind.
The new Home Secretary, unlike his #hashtag-predecessor, isn't afraid to come out from under the boss's thumb and revise one of her key policies.
So, what's next? Or will he be stamped on so hard from above as to cow him into submission?
When I've been on a peaceful protest, I've fully expected the police to be watching me, and my mugshot to feature somewhere on recorded material. That goes back to sometime last century, before Data Protection.
Not saying this chap doesn't have a case. But I'm not convinced the hyperbolae help anyone.
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