Posts by matjaggard 321 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Apr 2015
This is so unfair. They're mostly people who genuinely want to help improve the country. Sadly they're not the best people for the job because we pay so much more for private sector leaders. Maybe some small minority are also in it for the power or revolving door opportunities rather than to genuinely help.
If we give them zero respect, threats of violence and a not-much-above-average wage then who the heck are we expecting to apply??!
I'm no Apple fanboi but I do have to use one for work. I find Apple exactly as intuitive as Windows once you're used to them, both take time to get used to how they do things.
On other things, MacOS has a faster filesystem than NTFS in my experience but a tendancy for things to "just not work" like missing keyboard control or external hardware not made by Apple just stopping working where it would be fine on Windows.
Ooh that's annoyed me, well done.
For what it's worth I'm going to rise to the bait.
Not all these technologies are all hype and no substance. Blockchain always had pretty limited use cases in my opinion. AI on the other hand is going to be pretty transformative to the world - equivalent to the industrial revolution or the internet. People will get crazy rich from it and very many, possibly most current jobs will just stop and we'll almost all have to change how we work to augment the AI rather than instead of it.
I'm not sure you've understood how this works!
From the spec: "Web Monetization doesn’t allow a website to specify a payment amount or currency. It only allows the site to tell the browser it can accept payments.
"With the help of a WM provider , your visitor decides whether to make a payment, how much and how often to pay, and in which currency."
I've had to fight the system occasionally to remove unused code. My worst was with a bank where every code change required a change request from an internal or external customer. Thankfully I found a helpful business analyst to sign off on "as a developer I want less pointless code so I can focus on the important stuff" type stories.
Incorrect. They should only charge a fee if there is an alternative. Specifically they do not offer load balancers as IPv6 only. You can get Dual Stack or IPv4 only but if you want a load balancer you must pay for an address. That's a simple increase in price, not a new charge for an avoidable commodity.
Sadly the umbrella is required in my experience. The crap will fall, no matter what. From shareholders, from customers, from suppliers, from government, from lawyers, from the need to make really significant decisions occasionally, from unions. We need people higher up to deal with all the big crap and pass it down as smaller crap that can eventually be dealt with by people who also need to get some proper work done.
Ideally those layers are not too high and the people are both clever and understanding, as well as trusting their employees, to enable the maximum work to be done but sadly that's rarely the case.
I completely agree that we need to invest in long term things but is space exploration really the right thing? It's sexy and all but even with exploration the sea is likely a better option to learn relevant lessons and I'm not convinced exploration is the best area of science to invest in anyway.
I don't see national pride and patriotism as significantly positive things on their own, they seem to be increasingly linked to xenophobia as far as I can tell.
I don't really agree with this sentiment in this case, but I do think that the EU's cookie policy has meant that even more than before people will click on these things without thinking. And clicking decline without thinking is likely equally bad, we have to stop asking stupid questions all the time.
It's really not true to say that it doesn't matter how pretty software is. Users need to be OK with the basics of what they're looking at before they'll invest time looking for the specific thing they want. That's where Notes fell down. That and the fact that the sync seemed to be broken more of the time that it worked. Countless times I couldn't open a database or application or whatever they called them - I never understood why.
As long as you don't disagree with software patents altogether (which as a UK resident I basically do) the old scheme was pretty good. Come up with an invention which need not be particularly novel and certainly need not have any potential for making money and you'd get some points. If it was novel you'd end up with more as it could be filed rather than published.
Points mean a mind numbingly boring day job with a dinosaur company which in the rare event of it making some profit you're unlikely to share much of it. What do points mean? Prises!
Tax avoidance is legal but not moral. Doing the things that tax rules are there to promote (saving for a pension for example) are avoiding tax but are not "tax avoidance" but "tax planning". Avoidance is using laws in a way that they were not intended to be used, hence is using a loophole.
Big businesses can normally get away with calling their brand whatever value they fancy to avoid paying tax - register your brand name in the lowest tax location and then claim that your UK sales are due to the use of this expensive brand name.
The best way to solve this is to drag tax avoiding brands through the mud, thus decreasing the amount they can claim their brand is worth.
I've not seen much technical detail into what went wrong with the Horizon system. Specifically how can a double entry accounting system (which I read somewhere that it is) be so far out, if it's reporting systems that were wrong then surely they'd have found that while investigating, and how can you get it wrong always in the same direction with the subpostmaster out of pocket? All of that smells like a really bad or possibly even malicious system.
Agreed but sadly that can't happen because 1. Anything you try to make Fujitsu pay would have to have been in a contract with them or they'll just wriggle out of it and 2. The post office will just go bankrupt if we make them pay and then we'll have no universal postal system - fine if you're in London less so in Scourie.
@aerogems I downvoted your well thought through post on tax because whilst it seems simple to tax things where the work was done or where the product was sold it's not.
Firstly because what is the "work" and "product" for Google as an example. Hard to define because it could be where you sell the advertising or where the end users are or where the search code was written or quite a few other options.
Secondly the US would never agree to this because they'd lose quite a lot of tax revenue for massive companies like Apple who currently pay US tax for (some) EU software on Chinese hardware sold to EU citizens.
I don't think anyone is suggesting replacing all virtual machines with this.
This will be ideal for running certain things: docker on Mac where the performance is currently awful, lots of different flavours of function as a service, containers might soon be a thing of the past since this could remove 95% of their benefit over VMs.
I'm not sure why you got downvoted for saying an air gapped system is not fully secure. It seems pretty obvious to me. To be air gapped means it's likely to be patched less often because it's a PITA to do so, so security vulnerabilities will be there for longer. Also you have to allow storage to be plugged into it somehow to allow updates to the main software as well as patches.
I worked at a place that used CDs for this but it was a real waste of plastic so they started to allow USBs. We had specific machines only running virus checks on those CDs and USBs with virus definitions updated daily. Still we got a virus on the secure system somehow*
*it was definitely not a senior manager plugging his phone into a USB to charge it. <\sarcasm>
I'm not usually one to pile hate on lawyers but this case is crazy. Not only did they work hard to ensure that justice was not done in this case, others have hardly worked to put it right and then for the compensation, they "received £43 million ($52 million) plus legal costs in a settlement. The bulk of the money, however, was consumed by the costs of funding the case." - the bulk of £43 million PLUS legal costs (which should be enough to cover the costs of funding the case surely‽) is a crazy amount of money just to gain the beginnings of some justice.
It certainly has inexplicable defaults - you can't tab between inputs without enabling "accessibility". I guess the semi-regular corruption of the NVRAM such that my not-sanctioned-by-apple USB-C docking station stops sending anything to the monitor could be closed as inexplicably but I think it's easily explained by corporate greed.
It's not as simple as that. Firstly you can make a job description biased very easily and accidentally. Secondly these people did not apply at all, if you read the article you'll see that companies are asked to contact candidates on this site. How many women are signed up and how many are shown in search results is more relevant but if they company is producing reports like this, they should have their own biased algorithm sorted already.
The cloud providers help to make it difficult or expensive to use more than one cloud by charging for data transfer and making APIs different. Still, we're using AWS for most stuff but Big Query as a data warehouse because all the equivalents on AWS are crazy expensive for the same or less functionality even taking data transfer into account.
I manage the IT for a small group and we do have RDP straight on the internet. I do what I can in enforcing complex passwords and keeping the system patched but what else can I do? We have no money and limited time to implement whatever it is, the people using it are completely non-technical and the system is on an only-just-better-than-home network.
This is nonsense. Most code is original, even the move-data type projects have quite a bit of original data mapping and the like. The most commonly used data structures are provided by the languages we use. If you're finding yourself rewriting code that already exists then maybe you should be using a library.
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