Adding up your timesheet
0730, ... until ... 1630 ..., 8 hours later.
Hmmm.
1537 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
First of all, "Tell us Once" is 'a service that lets you report a death to most government organisations in one go'. It doesn't belong to the Department for Work and Pensions.
Secondly, it is in fact an attempt by The Bureaucracy to alleviate the pain of the bereaved having to call many elements of the government to report their loss, and in general it is a Good Thing. I say this as a relatively recent user.
> Stored program operation means greater flexibility as all programs may be internally self-modifying.
Self-modifying code *can* be very space-efficient, with small op-code sets like this, I suppose, but all I can say is that I tried it once (6502 assembler) and it almost scrambled my brain.
Alright, which one of you at the back said "Almost?!?"
> No-one said anything about restore.
Similarly, I was firmly told that I needed to ask for permission to undertake some course of action I wanted to take (can't remember the details). When challenged later, I said "Well, I did ask for permission. No-one said anything about waiting for it to be granted."
> Before the PC
I had a spreadsheet on my Commodore 64, but I can't for the life of me remember what it called itself. I remember loading it from cassette tape every month to check my payslip, which was calculated with bizarre additions and deductions. I've probably still got the tape somewhere...
"Computer" is indeed an important word, it's right there in the title of the Act, and *nowhere* does it give an indication of what Parliament thought a computer actually is. It gives the impression that they might have been thinking of digital electronic computers, which would have been a good start, but as it stands it probably takes in everything from nomograms and slide rules to AWS/Azure data centres.
OK, you have a risk profile for your IT that means it should be air-gapped from the Internet. Great. That stops you being affected by some widespread zero-day. But you have to build and maintain the operating systems on the "safe" side of the air gap, and get operational data in, and products out. That means that the air gap isn't just some fresh air - it's a carefully managed interface to The Great Outside. The operational data coming in must be sanitized, on trusted media, and the products out must not give away attack vectors to bad actors who might get hold of it.
If part of your careful management is to carry data over the gap with USB devices, then gluing up the ports isn't useful. Perhaps a USB driver stack that works only with specific whitelisted device IDs, and special control measures on how the whitelist is managed? Big Red Klaxon for when a black-listed device is plugged in? ==>
Whooosh. Dr Fowler was quoting something written in or before 1926; even if he had made up the illustrative sentence, it would only be relevant for its grammatical structure, not for 21st century geopolitics.
For all the people wanting to catch up somewhat painlessly, even entertainingly, with English grammar, I recommend buying a copy of 'A Dictionary of Modern English Usage' by H.W. Fowler. First published in 1926, though mine is a 2nd edition, published 1968. So, correctly named for certain values of 'modern', then, but it has been issued in several new editions since.
Having the book, you can always look up a particular topic, or you can open it at random, and enjoy whatever your eye lights upon.
Here is the 5th entry under passive disturbances, reproduced for your pleasure:
5. The impersonal passive --- it is felt, it is thought, it is believed, etc. --- is a construction dear to those who write official and business letters. It is reasonable enough in statements made at large --- It is believed that a large green car was in the vicinity at the time of the accident. / It is understood that the wanted man is wearing a raincoat and a cloth cap. But when one person is addressing another it often amounts to a pusillanimous shrinking from responsibility. (It is felt that your complaint arises from a misunderstanding. / It is thought that ample provision has been made against this contingency).The person addressed has a right to know who it is that entertains a feeling he may not share or a thought he may consider mistaken, and is justly resentful of the suggestion that it exists in the void. On the other hand, the impersonal passive should have been used in For these reasons the effects of the American recession upon Britain will be both smaller and shorter than were originally feared. Were should be was (i.e. than it was originally feared they would be).
Well, I upvoted that post before I saw the joke icon. You keep the upbovote, but IMHO it's not a joke, at all. A server connected solely to clients on an internal network, as here, is pretty damn secure. If you don't need any new functionality introduced by updates, then updates are nugatory. Finite state machine just goes on changing between one of its finite states and the next one ...
Here in the south-west of England we have a lot of single track roads. Not wide enough for two cars to pass, and there are few passing places, and stone-built overgrown hedges 6-8 feet high on each side. The frequent bends are such that you have no clue there is an oncoming vehicle until it appears 20 metres in front of you. Reversing is frequent; one journey I undertook recently, admittedly on back lanes and to avoid flooding elsewhere, involved a total of at least half a mile of reversing.
On the other hand, it won't be a problem for Cybertruck. It wouldn't fit between the hedges.
Somebody let Beilstein into the training data!
Die Beilstein-Datenbank ist eine Datenbank für organische Chemie, eine der größten Faktendatenbanken der Welt und ein Standardwerk der chemischen Literatur. [emphasis added]
When I used Beilstein it came in dead tree form, and was measured in metres of bookshelf required. It once took me literally half a day to re-order the volumes on the shelves when the collection had been untended for a while.
I've just checked, and it hasn't been published in book form since 1998, when it had reached 503 volumes with 440,814 pages.
Source: https://www.beilstein-institut.de/en/about-us/history/
Sorry for the delay. I think the downvotes (none from me) might have been to do with the perception that your comment advocated less dependence on the renewable power generation that entails the vulnerable transmission infrastructure.
There's a threat from hostile disruption of the infrastructure, and then there's the global threat from fossil fuel generation. The balance of responses to those threats is difficult to strike.
He was charged with aggravated identity theft. Perhaps, in addition to impersonating the medical staff, he also attempted to acquire another identity? I haven't read the DOJ article linked to in TFA, just guessing. It's equally likely that he just didn't think it through. => icon
From the PDF:
> As we enter this code, the address of the 20-input pointer array is held in register rax, and register r11 indicates that the input to be retrieved is at index 0x14, i.e., the 21st element.
Surprise! The 21st element does not point to valid memory, and global misery ensues.
However, that does not seem to be me to be adequate for a document calling itself Root Cause Analysis. How did r11 come to hold an out of bounds index? That would seem to be a rootier cause than jumping through the pointer that doesn't exist.
Disclaimer: the last time I tried to work out what the hell was going on by means of referring to assembler listing, it was MCS 6502 code. I'll get me coat, if I can remember where I left it.
> a way to make it run as slowly as it did on my Z80 based CP/M machine?
Yes, there is. Well, maybe not quite as slow as CP/M on a Z80. I've just compiled and installed dosbox-x in order to have a play with the WordStar archive, and there is a CPU>Emulate CPU speed menu setting, the lowest of which is an 8088 XT 4.77MHz.
We may have slashdotted Sawyer's site at sfwriter.com, though. Currently downloading the WS7 archive at less than 200 KiB/s - unless that's all part of the retro vibe, of course!
Alt-SysRq-B will instantly reboot many Linux boxes (depending on the kernel configuration). You can achieve a more or less controlled reboot by remembering the word BUSIER, but using it backwards, i.e. by pressing Alt-SysRq-R, Alt-SyRq-E ... Alt-SysRq-B. Leave a little time between each invocation for the kernel to do its thing if you're not working from a console.
All you need to know: Documentation for sysrq.c