Posts by Ferry Michael

Re: No, of course I've no idea if this remotely resembles the actual syntax used...

I worked in PO-Coral which became BT-Coral.

My first big programming task was to replace some badly performing Coral with assembly code in POPUS2 Assembler, except for a for weird instructions that were so rare that the CPU designers did not even have a assembly OPCODE for them. The code was just SPECL(<hex code>), where SPECL was a "special" opcode with the parameter being the HEX for the instruction.

The language did not last long enough for there to be an OPENREACH-Coral

I was on John Lewis, run by Plusnet, part of BT. I asked to keep my landline number. They did not know how to do it as I don't think any other customers had asked for it.

Switching my landline to a VoIP provider was tricky as it had to be done at the same time as the switch to fibre but organsised separately. You cannot move the number while the copper landline is active. Once the the copper has been deactivated the number cannot be reinstated.

The fibre install failed due to a problem with the duct. The telephone number transferred as scheduled and the copper landline could not be reactivated leaving me without broadband or landline phone for w a week. Fibre install completed a week later after I did ny own rodding to find the blockage.

Keeping a landline number is hard even when you think you know what are you doing.

Re: I'll raise a glass to the Z80

My first programming was on a Nascom1 my brother had borrowed. Writing assembly on paper and tehn assembling by hand I learnt the instruction set well. "Progressing" to just typing in hex without any source code. I came unstuck when refactoring my code.

Re: A new game

Wrong accent - I assume you meant https://what3words.com/shot.tree.words or https://what3words.com/waft.tree.words

Re: Was that sheep (singular) or sheep (plural)?

I thought it was in Warrington when you said that. It must be your accent. https://what3words.com/ship.ship.ship

Or did you mean Singapore: https://what3words.com/ship.sheep.ship

Oh sheet sheet sheet https://what3words.com/sheet.sheet.sheet

You could be absolutely anywhere

I hope you are not stuck somewhere that is steep steep steep https://what3words.com/steep.steep.steep

You could get quite mixed up with those similar sounding words

Re: Mountain rescue

With a single digit error in a lat/long together with a rough description of the location, e.g. Cumbria an error in a high order digit can be corrected, and error in a low order digit still gives a rough idea. With W3W the smallest error results in total loss of information.

But most importantly lat/long are used automatically all the time without problems. e.g. pin on a google map. AML in any emergency phone call, the mountain rescue system where you click on a link in a text to pass your location to a mountain rescue website.

W3W has been shown to have lots of similar sounding words in close proximity due to their algorithm using a much smaller dictionary in some areas.

Oh, and have you seen their accounts?

Re: Existing to make money

If you look at W3W Company Accounts you will find that the company does not make money and never will. It will make money for a few company directors at the expense of of "investors" and crowd funders.

I expect they will finally go out of business some time next year.

If you call 999 directly the AML feature in your phone will transfer lat/long directly to emergency services. If you are in contact Mountain Rescue they will send you a text that sends you to a web page that will automatically receive your lat/long.

W3W uses word combinations that will not be intelligible if spoken under stress or with any kind of accent.

When W3W tried to promote themselves by giving the location of the end of the queue to process to the queen lying in state 3 out of the first 10 locations were incorrect because the locations were passed on incorrectly. When that was ridiculed they had to take extra steps to get the W3W location encodings passed correctlly.

Re: Multiple redundancy

The reserved capacity for emergency calls was true for landlines too.

I remember the bug report for telephone voting on "New Faces" TV programme when that turned out not to be the case due to a configuration error on an exchange where the overload threshold was not detected.

Re: How about 112 and Advanced Mobile Location?

What3Words aka LotsOfLetters - encoding of lat/long into W3W doesn't solve anything. The actual lat/long will be sent as part of the AML emergency call. The W3W is almost unintelligible judging by 30% error rate on giving the end of the queue for the late queen, and all the problems with similar sounding words, accents, plurals etc. The workaround of spelling out with phonetics just makes it a "lot of random letters" instead of 3 words

Re: Ensure uninterrupted access?

There were a handful of major outages in the 18 months I worked on System X in the 1980s that resulted in loss off 999 calls. Some were hardware failures.

One was a configuration error related to overload management, where 999 calls were impacted by a general overload. A bug report was raised related to the "New Faces" television programme. The overload caused by telephone voting for the programme knocked out 999 calls.

Re: Government creates red tape to fix IR35 mess of its own creation.

This government introduced the change in liability for incorrect decisions from the worker to the client. As part of that they introduced the double taxation mechanism where taxes are applied twice in this situation.

It is that action from this government that that has pressurised end clients into Inside IR35 blacket assessments. That has driven the rise in Fake Employers(Umbrellas).

In my case an end client asserted 6 hour each way travel to client site using 5 modes of transport was a commute, even though it clearly did not meet any legal understanding of "commute".

In my view many or even most inside IR35 assessments should just be considered an evasion of employment law. Tax and employment regulation need to be aligned. This government has repeatedly delayed addressing this, despite many promises to do so.

End clients should not be able to say:

* our IR35 assessment says you are an employee, not an independent business

* you are not our employee and we have no wish for you to be an employee

* lets agree a business to business contract between ourselves

* can you find a FAKE EMPLOYER (umbrella) who has no involvement in our relationship and will give you none of the benefits of employment to satisfy tax law, so we can protect ourselves

Re: master and slave or controlled/controlling

I once had to work on some software where master/slave was used in a different context to the software I was working on so the original developer decided to use different terminology to avoid confusion. He chose "controlled" and "controlling" instead. The code was full of:

if instance == CONTROLLING

then

do controlling things

else

do other things

When debugging it was no surprise when half of these conditionals were inverted.

To make matters worse, the information was held in two different variables.