Posts by SloppyJesse

Re: Since we are being profane, Fsck linux Desktops.

> very few people will notice the performance hit from the virtualization overhead

More likely, very few people will realise that the sluggish performance they experience is due to the way the app developers have shipped the product - they'll just blame the application itself. And then probably get told to go buy a bigger machine.

Re: All True, But

> Just lower the pantograph before you switch the lane or enter a junction.

Trains cannot raise and lower the pantograph at will - they have to do it at a specific section of reinforced cable (source: Pops is a train nut and often rants about the terrible implementation of railway electrification in the UK)

.

So you'd need significantly stronger cables than used on railways.

Better to build a system of guided routes with more control over the vehicles and designated on/off points.

Anyone up for a BYOD railway?

> why are we touching screens when we have voice control?

Did you forget the joke icon?

Re: Digital Cash..

> Shops like Tesco with an EPOS/ERP system can't even take cash payments without the internet because they can't log the transaction in their stock-keeping database.

Is this an assumption or do you know it to be true?

Certainly when I worked on supermarket EPOS the store -> HQ was a batch link. It could go down for several days without severe implications. Obviously no new offers, central pricing changes, but things could be managed locally and the tills would keep taking cash. Local failover was tested weekly and comms failure was tested monthly.

I can believe that at least some of that resilience is no longer there as we've moved to a more connected system. Loss of connection to the payment system would be the biggest pain - I wonder if they still have the card imprint machines? Probably not since card providers are now issuing cards that are not embossed (Which is for improved security and nothing to do with the embossing costing money)

Re: Two things always come to me when I hear bing

I always thought the indicator that something has happened was a 'ping'.

As in "This is the machine that goes 'PING!', and this is the most expensive machine in the hospital. Aren't you lucky?"

Maybe things go "Bing" in left pondian.

Personally my brain responds "Chandler?" Which seems appropriate as whenever I accidentally use it I look at the results and think "Could it BE anymore annoying?"

Re: no payment information was among the mix

> Seems ever time these these companies report their servers got hacked the hackers never get away with payment information.

Because PCI DSS - https://listings.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/PCI_DSS-QRG-v3_2_1.pdf

Unlike retailers when storing personal details, the credit card networks (Mastercard, Visa, etc) do take security seriously. They're still not perfect, but security requirements around the actually payment information is significantly more than 'just' personal data.

Re: Colour me surprised (in upper case)

Still gets my goat how many web forms claim an email address with a plus sign in it is not valid.

Re: Speed of a battery in a vacuum...

> Why not just remove all of the oxygen from the hold... not much chance of a fire then.

Did you forget the joke icon or are you unaware lithium batteries don't need atmospheric oxygen to burn?..

Re: Hmm, 'Incident'?

> Fujitsu are just as culpable, if not more but appear to have escaped without much impact.

So, exactly like those responsible at the Post Office then...

You do understand that when you charge a battery you convert the electrical energy into chemical energy, right?

The energy conversions in both cases is

electrical->chemical->electrical->kinetic

Re: Admission

@myithingwontcharge said

> The fact we already have an effective broadband monopoly in many parts of the country is why fibre prices are

> high and availability poor. We need more competition, not none. As an example, Openreach often seem to add

> fibre to an area only when prompted by the plans of a competitor."

So in an area where there is competition the price would be cheaper, right? I can get BT FTTC, Virgin or CityFibre FTTP. The prices are the same despite the local competition.

Your example of Openretch magically being able to install fibre when a competitor comes along indicates a failure of regulation.

Seems the issue is poor regulation of what should increasingly be regarded as a critical infrastructure. Competition is either being stifled or is an ineffective driver to delivering a good service to more people.

Re: Confused..

> We can't expect reasonably medical staff to be informed buyers with regards specifications for complex IT programmes.

Well, if you set the expectation that low you're not going to get much useful input from the highly qualified professionals you're expecting to use the system. These are the same medical professionals that specify highly complex medical equipment balancing functionality, interoperability, servicing, upfront versus ongoing costs, etc.

Why would you think they cannot provide insight into an IT purchasing decision?

Re: Dont get your hopes up

> The PO told defence lawyers for the postmasters courts that the horizons data was correct

FTFY

And they repeatedly refused to provide detail level data to justify their position.

During the BBC radio serialisation one of the postmasters was reduced to trying to add up till rolls to understand where the issue was and even when he pointed directly to transactions that appeared twice they denied there was an issue.

Given many of the Postmasters were jailed for false accounting, maybe the P.O. board should face the same charge? They knew that their accounting system was incorrect, afterall.

Re: This regulator's no good, I'll get myself another

MS: "[we] have already implemented many suggested changes to our data protection terms."

That may well be the case, but you've not actually changed what you are doing with the data.

Re: PAYE

I had 4 different employers last tax year and 2 of them had not ended the employment so the HMRC portal showed I had 3 active employments. I found the option to update the employment and say which ones had ended. It's not fully online, but a week later it had updated and then my actual current employer was allocated a proper tax code. All sorted by the next months payslip.

The navigation is still as confusing as ever, but the functionality is improving.

Save up on economy 7, cheaper electricity....

> the old 'Economy 7' tariff

It still exists. Cheaper electricity between the hours of 23:00 and 06:00 IIRC[1]. But more expensive than the flat rate tariff at other times. Very much depends on you having a reasonable consumption in the cheaper hours to make it worth it - 70/30 used to be about break even but I haven't checked in several years.

[1] I think the exact time depends on region.

> I think you'll find that is due to a worldwide pandemic. Other European countries are experiencing the same issues,

> France is at more risk of power cuts for example.

Not sure you can blame low river levels on the pandemic.

Re: Hey, Github!

Github, eh?

Re: Travails through telemetry

> I'd much rather they fixed that the Linux versions are variably unreliable,

It sounds like they're sorting that by getting rid of it.

I expect in a board meeting somewhere they will be trumpeting "100% reduction in issues with the Linux client"

We used Plan 9 when I was a student at University of York. They always claimed it was named after the film.

In the days of text terminals, or if you were lucky a graphical workstation and Orbit, it seemed pretty much like any other Unix.

Re: Goodbyeeeeee

their maximum concerns are always the health of the patients profits

FTFY

The information passed to these trackers is on the consumers side private/personal and on the website owners commercially valuable/sensitive. There is zero reason to pass this to a 3rd party 'to see how people use our services'. Any website owner can get a huge chunk of this information passively from server logs with no additional capturing required. If more detail is needed / application is designed in a way that server logs are not useful there are multiple strategies available up to embedding tracking scripts that send data back to YOUR OWN server for further analysis.

But doing that would require time/money, so let's embedded a google tag - Google can do what they like with our visitors data as long as they give us back some pretty graphs.

> a few thousand 'years'

Might need a little longer than that.

Re: 17 yrs FFS

17 years will probably still be before the new Hinkley Point reactor comes online.

Maybe we'll have some fusion before we get more fission? Although just JRM saying something doesn't make it happen.

Re: Very Interesting

You just described Teradata's architecture.

Re: STASI in Redmond, WA....why am I not surprised???

IT security will block key parts of the communication so it won't work even if you have all the prerequisites.

Re: More lawyers

> Why would building more reactors be simpler or cheaper?

Think building a whole estate of identical houses versus building a millionaires mansion.

That would require a separate encryption key for each natural person. An interesting option to implement on a database system backup.

As others have suggested, if a system contains personal data that can be removed as part of a GDPR right to deletion request then the restoration processes need to take that into account so the data is not subsequently restored and used.

And to answer the argument "but if you delete all personal data you have to delete the deletion request", GDPR allows retention of personal data that you have a legitimate use for. An audit trail of requests processed is a reasonable reason to hold identifiers to ensure restoration processes are compliant.