Re: Consistency Is The Hobgoblin Of Small Minds
So, trussed and exported in January? Perhaps they can put Julian Assange on the same cargo flight and save on the gas?
3426 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Oct 2014
Great story.
In the mid-eighties at a "secret government installation", or "Whitehall" as the rest of us called it, I was once asked to audit some of our security protocols for emergency shutdowns. The server room shutdown control was a suitably impressive big red button, on a bright yellow base with a sign saying "Do Not Touch Except in Emergency" plus various threats as to what would happen if you did. Back then there was a tendency to colour halon controls in green, so one might expect a separate green button on a yellow base with a similar sign above it.
But no, this is government contractors at the lowest price we are talking about. Thankfully nobody had ever had to hit the red server room power button, as the halon door lock and gas release had also been wired into it. Checking the evacuation protocol for around 5 admins it would appear appear that the Halon lockdown would have killed all of them since it gave less than 3 seconds to evacuate the room before engaging the door lock and releasing the flame suppressant.
What most distressed the department was not the fact that it could have killed 5 admins, but that it was in clear breach of HSE guidelines, and most of all in breach of a new piece of legislation, Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1985, or RIDDOR. Typical civil service.
Funny that you mention Dyson as, in a similar vein, Dyson has an R&D centre in Hullavington for battery technology. Mind you, I would probably trust a Dyson EV less than I might trust an Über killing machine autonomous vehicle - the only product that James Dyson makes that doesn't suck is his vacuum cleaner.
I stopped complaining to BT about their speeds a year ago. I simply switched to Virgin which has not got very good customer services but does provide a 350Mbps line in an area of London where BT could/would only provide a maximum 3Mbps. They continue to maintain that it is not worth it to them to fibre-enable that particular exchange (W14 Blythe) as the 4 adjoining/overlapping enabled exchanges cover most of the area ... except, Kensington Olympia and much of its surrounding area, including several large hotels.
I really doubt they would even notice that they had been re-nationalised back into the "GPO", or whatever Labour want to call it. I would suggest that Labour also nationalises Vodafone, so that the GPO can learn how to build a particularly unpleasant customer "support" team.
In the absence of guidelines from HMRC then the ‘presumption’ is that you should immediately go onto PAYE and how dare you not do that.
Personally speaking as a contractor, I know that you are only employed on a permanent basis in IT until they can get someone cheaper to do your job or you can automate yourself into redundancy, so not a chance.
He then argued that everyone should be forgiven, and defended the Saudi government’s investment in Uber.
Luckily in Tempe, AZ the Über self-driving cars do not appear to have instant body-disposal devices as Saudi Arabian embassies seem to possess. I am sure that this must be an oversight to be shortly corrected.
No, because you are using the words "Costa" and "Coffee" in the same sentence. If you compare a cup of the watery substance that Costa produces with something from just about any other coffee outlet you find that the Costa output actually has no real discernible taste. The presumption is that since it has come through a coffee machine, has made lots of noises associated with the coffee process, you have been served by a (usually) surly individual of unknown origin and you have been chronically overcharged then it must coffee.
TBH I can not see any self-respecting criminal using GitLab for anything. Given their disastrous handling of customer data back in 2017 ("What exactly is a backup?") plus the famous "team-member-1" incident ("sorry I deleted the db1.cluster.gitlab.com directory, not db2.cluster.gitlab.com").
I wouldn't go near GitLab, except possibly a self-hosted instance sitting behind a very well protected firewall.
It costs 5 years returns and something akin to a $2,500 fee for the IRS. A friend of mine tried to renounce his "American"* nationality, gave up and simply sent a letter to the US embassy in London with a rather nice flag attached to it.
* He had never actually had a US passport but was required to pay their disgusting taxes by dint of having been born there, like Boris.
Deloitte was Autonomy's auditor; Ernst & Young is HP's (not HPE). KPMG provided approval advice on the deal to HPE. PwC has been hired by HPE to sort through the mess. If HPE's claims are true, Deloitte, Autonomy's auditor, should be the one in the firing line.
PWC are Xerox's auditor. Xerox, not surprisingly, would not appreciate KPMG being involved at any level.
4. We actually do not have a clue about internet security. Sorry about that.
5. We are appointing a Digital Security Czar to oversee our lack of security and to advise us on why. This may be a high court judge appointment of someone in their late 70's with no experience of the "Internet".
6. Apropos 5 above, we are intending to set up an MoD Cyber Security division. The cost to the taxpayer will be minimal, or so Capita assure us.
(speaking as one with 25 years experience of UK government IT)
Because the love of my life is Type 1 I tend to get spammed by all of the shysters on Instagram, Twiiter etc. peddling their disgusting snakeoil cures for diabetes. Nowadays they seem to know when we have to do glucose checks and tend to hit my email right on cue.
News International (Times/Sun/Sky/Fox etc) still issue their staff with a white iPhone 5c. WPP (most of the planet’s ad agencies) issue their staff with the iPhone SE. Yet to come across a fanboi working at either who starts screaming how he cannot use such dated technology.
Very wary of new Apple kit post-Catalinastrophe but a fellow freelancer just bought a set of the AirPods and claims that they are the first decent set of earphone he has ever found, and they fit perfectly.
Beer for the brilliant "Huntingdon Life Sciences of the tech world"
significantly accelerating its pace of FTTP build and is now passing a home or business every 26 seconds.
Ok , so an OpenRetch van passes a customers house every 28 seconds and fails to stop. This is promptly followed up by someone in India who telephones your home number for a second and thus fails to get in contact with you. They then promptly "reschedule" your OpenRetch connection visit to another 3 months in the future.
I am sorry about the 100,000 staff, but BT deserves to die the death.