* Posts by JulieM

950 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2014

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Good news: HMRC offers a Linux version of Basic PAYE Tools. Bad news: It broke

JulieM Silver badge

Re: It's 2024

That's a bad design decision at the language implementation level -- and it's foreshadowed by the inappropriate recycling of + as a concatenation operator.

If you are implementing a dynamically-typed language where numbers and strings can be freely mixed, you cannot just silently state that a number and a string are definitely unequal. That's a throwback to old-fashioned static typing, and at least would have thrown an error in an old-fashioned language. If the given string can be validly parsed as a number, and that is equal to the given number, then the two may be considered numerically equal. If every character of the given string is equal to the corresponding character of the default string representation of the given number, then they may be considered stringwise equal.

Perl gets this right, by using separate operators for numeric and stringwise comparisons.

PHP and JavaScript try to reuse < / = / > for both types of comparisons, and sometimes get it wrong.

JulieM Silver badge

Re: "for businesses with fewer than 10 employees."

The government should publish the reference implementation in Source Code form, and "effect on businesses" be damned.

No-one should ever be required to use a proprietary product (and thereby enrich someone else) simply in order to comply with the law of the land.

JulieM Silver badge

It's 2024

Static typing is a leftover from the days when you had to understand how data of different types would be stored and how much space it was going to take up.

Modern programming languages don't care what type of data you put in a variable. That's your business.

As, of course, is remembering what type of data you put in it.

JulieM Silver badge

Re: "for businesses with fewer than 10 employees."

No doubt that will end up being one of the things that gets fixed ..... Compare what happened when BitKeeper made their servers and a limited version of their proprietary client software available to the best Open Source developers in the world. The ensuing reverse-engineering effort naturally delivered an alternative client that comfortably out-featured the paid version of the proprietary client software; and when BitKeeper tossed their toys from their pram, that in turn led to the creation of git.

Unfortunately, Python isn't one of my weapons of choice; but I do know python3 needs round brackets around the arguments to print, which always struck me as highly un-Pythonic .....

UN: E-waste is growing 5x faster than it can be recycled

JulieM Silver badge

Re: A metric ton is spelled “tonne”

10^3 would be 9. You're thinking of 10**3.

1010

0011 ^

----

1001

JulieM Silver badge

Re: A metric ton is spelled “tonne”

Why is 1000 kg. not called a megagram?

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Perspective

The simplest way to "avoid spilling trade secrets" would just be to ban trade secrets.

What strange beauty is this? Microsoft commits to two more non-subscription Office editions

JulieM Silver badge

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

If I was doing the same fairly heavy maths over and over again, I wouldn't use a spreadsheet for that -- I'd write myself a simple program (possibly even in Fortran -- why, yes, I am that old) just to generate the data points, and spit them out as a CSV.

JulieM Silver badge

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

I've seen far too many CVs in my time that were formatted for 216*279 (US Letter) paper, with spaces used for positioning and ad hoc font changes instead of styles; and claiming "intermediate to advanced MS Office skills".

And maybe it's time Word Processors got smart enough to fix this sort of stuff; using the time between keystrokes to build up a collection of styles and setting tab positions at the first non-space character following a stream of spaces as a document is (badly) created, and turning the mess into something manageable.

JulieM Silver badge

What a faff

My preferred method is to have a script that reads stuff directly from the database; then generates a PostScript document directly, using a custom library I created (and haven't had to add much to in the way of extensions for a long time, now .....) that can then either be sent straight to a laser printer or converted to a PDF and attached to an e-mail.

US Congress goes bang, bang, on TikTok sale-or-ban plan

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Conflict

You know what they say about people who get pedantic about the technical details of rape vs. sexual assault .....

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Conflict

Do you really need to have it explained to you exactly why "monkey" is not, in fact, racist when used against serial sexual abuser Donald Trump?

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Conflict

What the 6 Jan insurrectionists did were not "misdemeanours". That was a full-on attempt to attack a country's democratic process and install a serial rapist instead of the elected President. At least one murder was thwarted on the day.

JulieM Silver badge

Conflict

From the US constitution:

No Bill of attainder or Ex post facto law shall be passed.

If corporations are people, then a ban on TikTok surely amounts to a Bill of Attainder?

(Then again, resurrecting and extending an already-expired copyright amounts to ex post facto enforcement, and they already got away with that .....)

Kremlin accuses America of plotting cyberattack on Russian voting systems

JulieM Silver badge

Easy solution

There is a very simple way of preventing anyone from interfering electronically with an election; and that is not to use any electronics.

That is to say, use physical ballot papers, marked with a pencil, folded and inserted via a narrow slit into a tamper-proof sealed box; and counted manually by equal numbers of interested representatives of each candidate. If no-one on the counting team trusts anyone else, the only result on which they can ever agree is the truth. And the number of people who would have to be compromised in order to change even a few hundred votes is significant.

You don't even really need to check ID cards inside polling stations. Because you do not need to know exactly who is voting, as long as they have not already voted today; the low-tech way of ensuring that is to make a mark on their skin with a Sharpie (other indelible markers are available); which is not going to come off, at least not without leaving tell-tale signs, before the polls close.

How do you lot feel about Pay or say OK to ads model, asks ICO

JulieM Silver badge

Re: "It's hard to give consent freely"

That presumes you have any choice in the matter.

JulieM Silver badge

Re: "It's hard to give consent freely"

Some people have no choice; for instance, if applying for a job with a company that requires contact to be made via social media.

JulieM Silver badge

Never

There should be a legal requirement for advertisements to be cleanly separable from editorial content, such that the client end can always remove adverts.

My screen, my rules.

If you show me an advertisement, not only am I never, ever going to buy anything from you; but I will recommend to my friends, family and anyone who will listen not to buy anything from you.

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

JulieM Silver badge

Re: I may have told this one before...

As Mr punch would say, that's the way to do it!

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

JulieM Silver badge

Re: You caught me on the isostatic rebound

This is not altogether unbelievable. Certain genes have actually had to be renamed; fittingly enough, because Microsoft Excel was incorrectly interpreting their names in cells of type "auto" as dates and storing them internally as such, which led to them being mis-displayed on systems configured for other localities.

JulieM Silver badge
Boffin

Re: First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

The first is TheWife's monthly cycle. If you are married to a woman, you'll grok.
I'm genuinely curious here: Do you not have your own monthly cycle?

Oestrogen affects the growth of facial and body hair. If you shave with a blade, you can actually feel the resistance offered by the hairs changing from one day to the next, coming down the handle; and it's easy enough to demonstrate experimentally that this is not just your razor blade getting blunt.

It's my personal contention that this phenomenon is where lycanthropy legends originated; since it's no great leap to imagine a man preferring to believe he is turning into a wolf during a certain phase of the moon (which, conveniently, tends to line up fairly well with the oestrogen cycle; there may well be an evolutionary explanation, as an external clue to your own fertility sounds like the sort of survival advantage that could be significant over thousands of generations, and the period of the cycle sounds like the sort of thing that would be hereditary), rather than accept his body undergoes the same cyclic changes as a woman's body.

Oh, and if the quartz clock in my kitchen is in anything like sync with local solar time, you may infer from that fact that the battery has recently been changed. It's used strictly for measuring time differences (especially since the timer on my microwave broke; so as long as there is any life left in the magnetron, it's wedged on full power and controlled with the switch on the wall socket), and whatever it may lose or gain over the duration of cooking a meal is unlikely to be significant. Even although it drifts a lot over the life of a battery, which may well include daylight saving changes. It's not really worth getting the clock down from the wall to adjust the hours and minutes hands, if I'm only paying mind to the seconds hand!

JulieM Silver badge

Re: First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

Leap days are not going anywhere.

Almost nothing anyone says or does will change the fact that the number of days in a year is not an integer; that is to say, the Earth does not rotate around its own axis a whole number of times in the time it takes to complete a full turn around the Sun.

Water worries flood in as chip industry and AI models grow thirstier

JulieM Silver badge

Re: England as well

For once, it's not the water companies to blame for Britain not having the reservoir capacity.

British people hate any kind of infrastructure. When anyone tries to construct a new reservoir, letters of objection come flooding in from people who prefer an annual hosepipe ban.

I actually think we should just make the ban permanent. If shops stop selling hosepipes, everyone will get used to it.

City council megaproject to spend millions for manual work Oracle system was meant to do

JulieM Silver badge

Needs a firm hand

Excuse my French, but why the fuck has anyone spent a halfpenny on Oracle, in a world in which Postgres and MariaDB exist?

There needs to be a strong presumption against the use of proprietary software by the Public Sector. It is not the people's business further to enrich billionaires.

Even if we have to create a new national body to be responsible for creating replacements for proprietary software, it will all be worth the effort; as this money need only ever be spent once and everyone will be able to benefit from it, forever.

Underwater cables in Red Sea damaged months after Houthis 'threatened' to do just that

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Why do they need a submarine?

When the only tool you have is a fantastically expensive Magic Hammer™ costing thousands of pounds that uses a built-in camera to identify the recess in any screw head, automatically selects the matching bit from its repertoire, inserts it into a mechanism which will converts the impact into rotary motion and dynamically maintains the tip in alignment with the screw as the tool is swung, it's very easy to forget just how cheaply traditional screwdrivers can be purchased .....

Musk 'texts' Nadella about Windows 11's demands for a Microsoft account

JulieM Silver badge

Re: there are plenty of alternatives to Windows 11 out there

You can't bring your existing precompiled binaries from any other OS to Linux; but you can rebuild them from the original Source Code (the human-readable* form of a program, that programmers actually work on), and they will Just Work™ with your existing saved project files. Recompiling the source will take some time (up to a matter of hours, but can be left unattended to happen), but only needs to be done once per app.

* For some value of readable. And some value of human.

Singapore's monetary authority advises banks to get busy protecting against quantum decryption

JulieM Silver badge

Easy solution

If the plaintext is no longer than the key, then every possible plaintext is equally probable; thus, there is no way to tell whether a given ciphertext might resolve to "DEFEND THE FORT AT SUNSET", "ATTACK THE BRIDGE AT NOON" or "MY DAUGHTER HAS THE PILES".

Even quantum decryption cannot get around this.

The only thing that makes it not quite that easy is the need for each end to have copies of the same keys -- bearing in mind that this essentially requires a secure communication channel already to exist in the first place. Though, many messages' worth of key information could conceivably be exchanged during a single face-to-face meeting in private.

Dave's not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like, arrived

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Jazz Cabbage

Maybe the seeds are sown by one class of people and the plants are eaten by a totally different class, and the two never mix?

That was why some living animals have different names in English from the meat that comes from them.

JulieM Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: So, he was just fired ?

I think you mean "The tax man could care more ....."

The ability to care less implies caring a lot.

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Game Theoretic Analysis

No, my analysis really doesn't depend on leaders.

It depends on the ordinary people upon whom leaders ultimately rely to make everything work.

Not the President with the button on his desk; but the electrician who wired up that button, has a family, might well have seen Threads or When the Wind Blows, definitely prefers being alive to being dead and knows it's the one tiny -- yet potentially, oh, so far-reaching -- act of spiteful disobedience within their power that is certain to go undetected, let alone punished.

If you got one chance to stand up to a genocidal maniac and refuse to allow them to destroy the world, why the hell wouldn't you take it?

JulieM Silver badge
Mushroom

Game Theoretic Analysis

Let's try applying a spot of Game Theory to the scenario.

When the game is Global Thermonuclear War, the electrician charged with the job of wiring up the big red button on the President's desk has a set of choices that go something like this:

* If the other side has already fired, and their launch was successful, you're toast anyway. It does not matter whether or not your launch is successful.

* If the other side has already fired, and their launch was unsuccessful, history is unlikely to look kindly upon you if you launch a counterstrike.

* If the other side has not already fired, and your first-strike launch is successful, you are going down in history as the baddie.

* If the other side has not already fired, and your first-strike launch is unsuccessful, the world is saved from nuclear annihilation.

One of those outcomes is so much less undesirable than the other three, it overrides any pride in a job well done. The thought of potentially never having to cook again, and for the right reason (every restaurant in town is desperate to have the hero who saved the world from nuclear annihilation as a customer) as opposed to the wrong one (being dead) even overrides the fear of a bollocking. Not that the job you did can even be tested in any meaningful way. Verifying the integrity of the cables from the power supply through the switch to the ignition system necessitates disconnecting the actual ignition system, and enough sundry poking about with stuff that nobody is likely to notice you slipping a wire back into the hole you were supposed to have put it in the first time, just for long enough for someone to hear a multimeter go beep.

And now remember that in real life, there isn't just one person responsible for the job that is orders of magnitude more complex than the heavily-simplified version I just described, but hundreds, if not thousands; every single one of whom has a stronger incentive to sabotage it than to do a good job.

Icon -- "Look at what you could have won!"

Meta says risk of account theft after phone number recycling isn't its problem to solve

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Well if Meta are going to get roasted for this one

I would, because I know how TOTP works, and I know the things an authentication app does *not* need to do. If there was anything in the Source Code that I did not think belonged, I would try removing it and seeing if it still built without it. And then I'd make my fork available.

In any case, once I had gone to the effort of building the source, even if the resulting binary matched the one they were supplying, I might as well install my version.

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Well if Meta are going to get roasted for this one

I looked around, but I could not find the Source Code for download. That is a complete dealbreaker, as far as any kind of security software is concerned. How can anyone be sure it isn't doing something naughty behind the scenes, without being able to inspect it properly?

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Well if Meta are going to get roasted for this one

TOTP authentication is an example of something to which no value can possibly be added -- but from which a lot of value can be subtracted, by a particularly bad product. The state of the market, and the prevalence of dodgy apps, proves it.

Nobody would stand for cars being sold without seat belts fitted at the factory, empowering drivers to choose from a range of competing suppliers' products -- most of which included something unwanted, and some of which happened to be designed in such a way as to extort money, fail to provide protection in the event of an accident or even cause your car to crash -- under a legal régime that required customers to accept the manufacturer's word at face value, and criminalised any attempt by owners to inspect them, or by independent parties to publish their own assessments.

JulieM Silver badge
Alert

Re: Well if Meta are going to get roasted for this one

Have you taken a look in the Google Play Store or Apple App Store for an authenticator app lately?

I had occasion, recently, to search for a reputable authenticator app by name. What I found was a plethora of dodgy apps, all including at least advertisements (probably supplied from some dodgy third-party advertising networks, so already at risk of malware even if no-one thinks it is worth the effort specifically to attack an app which might well hold a list of TOTP keys). Some even claimed to include in-app purchases, which sounds like the perfect mechanism for holding users to ransom by insisting on a payment before they can view their 2FA codes. (Though probably not before said users have already given the app a good review.) I did not dare try to install any of them, so I don't know what extraneous permissions they might be asking for.

And while I like to think I'm not daft enough personally to fall for it, I can't imagine a thoroughly nasty "2FA" app, if its installation process had already filtered out the half-savvy users, would necessarily set off too many alarm bells if it were just to ask users casually for their passwords along with any QR codes they scun, and send them -- along with the usernames, site addresses and TOTP keys extracted from said QR codes; the keys to the kingdom, in other words -- to criminal gangs.

I actually felt quite ill seeing this mess. As much as I would be in favour, ordinarily, of healthy competition in a marketplace, it is clear that not a single one of these parasitic apps adds anything worthwhile, and the potential exists for them to be downright harmful. I consider Google and Apple complicit in any damage, for not including a 2FA app in the default distributions of their operating systems.

I would honestly recommend anyone who knows how to, to get the SDK for their phone, and either write their own 2FA app from scratch, or download an Open Source one from Github. Failing that, as much as it sticks in my craw, use Google Authenticator or Microsoft Authenticator. Or use SMS precisely because it means you don't have to risk installing a malicious app.

JulieM Silver badge

I can't understand why WhatsApp is tolerated

I really cannot understand why mobile companies put up with WhatsApp.

What Meta are doing is the equivalent of setting up a stall outside a telegraph office; encouraging would-be customers to take a telegraph form and fill it in using a pencil from the office; and then sending a youngster on a bicycle to pedal along under the telegraph lines and deliver it to the intended recipient, who for want of knowing any better will imagine it to be a telegram.

Meta don't have to build any telegraph offices of their own, lay any wires of their own, or even supply any stationery of their own. They just take what the telegraph companies make available for free anyway to the bona fide customers they are poaching, get to read the contents of the messages (and sell to the highest bidder any nuggets of valuable information they might contain), and slip in advertisements -- for which they are paid rather more than just the few shiny coppers their "couriers" get.

How is this anything but straight-up parasitism?

EU repair rights bill tells manufacturers to fix up or ship out

JulieM Silver badge

Re: I haven't read

Today if you include schematics with the product, you may expect 20 clones show up on Amazing in few week's time at fraction of the price, because they didn't have to spend much time and money on R&D, testing, certification and whatnot.
And what exactly would be the problem with that? All the benefits of all human endeavour rightfully belong to all of humanity.

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Shirley?

I can second that recommendation. Though I might suggest for anyone who has never seen "Airplane" before to watch "Top Secret" first.

If you want something homegrown with a barrage of gags coming thick and fast, see if you can find "A Touch of Cloth" (starring John Hannah and Suranne Jones) on DVD or streaming.

Lurie Children's Hospital back to pen and paper after cyberattack

JulieM Silver badge
Boffin

Interesting Opportunity

There is actually an interesting opportunity here, to measure just how much more slowly a hospital runs when its computer systems are down.

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

JulieM Silver badge

Office Move

Many years ago now, we moved offices. The least breakable stuff had been entrusted to a removal firm, but we had to keep a small cabinet for last, as the machines in it needed to face both ways.

I was carrying a 1500VA UPS (just a little 2U one) under each arm. One of the lads (who had sometimes given me a lift home on his way to the gym .....) offered to help me. I put one down and passed the other to him, and he sagged visibly under the weight of it. "What have you got in that thing, Jules?", he groaned, "Lead weights?"

I just smiled and said, "Close enough". I wasn't about to dock him any points for missing the big chunk of copper and steel at the opposite corner from the lead.

Universal Music accuses TikTok of 'intimidation' and threats to replace humans with AI

JulieM Silver badge

There is historical precedent

Way back in the mists of time, supermarkets actually flirted with "own brand" gramophone records; paying for the licence (which cost a fixed amount, payable to the composers -- possibly without even going via the usual collection agency) to record cover versions of hit songs, then block-booking recording studios and using non-union artists in back-to-back sessions to produce their own recordings as cheaply as possible.

I'm sure TikTok could do something similar, if Universal won't licence their own recordings.

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Regicide?

That sounds like the plot of a bad film -- secrets are being passed to enemy agents by means of hard-to-trigger error messages deliberately implanted in computer software, an innocent user lands upon one of them by accident and finds themself unwittingly involved in the scheme .....

JulieM Silver badge

It's becoming increasingly rare for devs to include proper error handling in solutions these days
That works both ways! If users would rather contact helplines with inane questions than read documentation, why should developers bother writing it?

JulieM Silver badge

See also ARM

The "test suite" (such as it was; it was cobbled together more for show than anything else, because Sophie Wilson was legendary for getting it right the first time) for the ARM architecture contained some error messages that had never, ever been seen -- until someone other than Sophie tried to implement the instruction set in silicon. And the humour in those aforementioned error messages only got drier, darker and filthier as the edge cases became more obscure. All fair game in a UK R&D lab, where catching a colleague out with a light-hearted prank is a major motivating factor -- because the wages certainly aren't.

However, this test suite (which required getting together enough bits to put together a working Acorn Atom to run some parts of it) was sent out unmodified to the early ARM licensees -- exposing the stark cultural difference between British electronic engineers (who have seen -- and probably contributed to -- university rag mags), and American management types (who have invariably had a sense of humour bypass total enough to accuse Germans of levity and frivolousness).

They should have counted themselves lucky they weren't dealing with British mechanical engineers .....

JulieM Silver badge

Dictionaries

The Oxford English Dictionary says both -ise and -ize are acceptable in British English (and words spelt with -ize are accepted on Countdown), but -yze is strictly an Americanism.

China’s gambling crackdown spawned wave of illegal online casinos and crypto-crime in Asia

JulieM Silver badge

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it

Every so often, somebody in a position of power gets the idea to repeat something that other people have attempted previously, under some sort of misapprehension that this time, they will be successful .....

Biggest Linux kernel release ever welcomes bcachefs file system, jettisons Itanium

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Depends how you look at it

You do you; but for my part, I think a restriction that prevents anybody from taking the hard work done by members of the Free Software community with the intention for it to be available for everyone to enjoy, study, share and adapt, then adding some deliberate incompatibilities and turning it into a proprietary product that users are locked out of is actually a good thing.

It's not all watching transparent TV from a voice-commanded bidet. CES has work stuff too

JulieM Silver badge

Re: Fidget Spinner charged keyboard?!?

Why would a keyboard even need a power source of its own, when there is already a perfectly good one in the device it is controlling?

JulieM Silver badge

Toilet Seats

Actually, a power-operated toilet seat that can be raised or lowered without touching it does not sound like a bad idea at all. It could even save a few relationships .....

It doesn't need to connect to the Internet, though! A simple IR -- or even hard-wired -- control unit would be fine.

Avoiding AI-capable PCs will be impossible by 2027

JulieM Silver badge
Joke

Easy solution

Can't we just use CONFIG_AI=n ?

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