Posts by big_D 6775 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2009
Robert Koch Institute, in Germany, has an app to collect health data from smart watches to help with diagnosing Corona. The app stays within GDPR, because it has a privacy statement and is opt-in.
The data is anonymised and is used to help them detect early signs of COVID-19.
GDPR gets blamed for making things impossible, when it only makes people actually have to think about what they are doing and to get the correct permissions and to ensure the data is handled accordingly.
DEC's FORTRAN compiler was much more efficient..
I've told this here before, but we had a data centre full of VAXen and we were looking at possibly replacing some of them with a mainframe from a well known manufacturer. They actually delivered a test machine for us to try out, a whole room-full of big boxes!
The salesman gave us a tape with a FORTRAN program on it, which would "run for about a week" on the mainframe and several weeks on our test VAX. We should "load it, compile it, run it and call me in about a week, when the mainframe finishes its run".
He then left us to it. The ops put the FORTRAN tape through both machines, compiled the program and hit run simultaneously on both machines...
The salesman had a message to call us back, by the time he had returned to his office. The VAX had finished in about a second, his mainframe was still chundering away.
It turned out the FORTRAN compiler on the VAX was actually quite clever. It analysed the code: no input -> create a huge array -> fill array with random numbers -> no output. The compiler decided if there was no input and no output, there was no point running the bit in between, so it made an empty program stub. The mainframe compiler was not so clever...
Yes, but aren't those houses still treated as commercial premises, if a business is being run out of them?
Probably you could refuse access to your private rooms, but the "commercial" rooms would be excluded from this and you'd have to let them in, whether they have the app or not.
I think the not allowing someone into the house unless they have the app is fine as an exception to the discrimination clause.
You can refuse somebody access to the premises for any reason, generally. If you tried to refuse them entry because they didn't have the app, you would be liable for discrimination, yet not letting them in, because you don't like them, don't want to hear about The Tower etc. is fine, so they could then claim discrimination... It is just how the law works.
M.A.L.S. for the win.
Both sides of the grandparents of my step-daughters have no Internet and no mobile phones (in their 70s when I first met them, now in their late 80s). They don't see the need, they don't go out and they have the TV...
One sister-in-law shared a Nokia 3310 with her husband up until last year, now they share a smartphone, because grandchildren.
These are people who never used a computer at work, their children didn't have computers growing up and they never used/needed a computer at home...
Heck, my other half didn't get her first PC until her kids were in the equivalent of high school and she never used it, it was just for them to use for homework. The first time she had to use a computer was when she applied for her Master Craftsman Diploma in her mid 40s. I now turn on her computer once a month to fill in her timesheet for her.
2020-02-01, 2020-03-01, 2020-04-01 and 2020-05-01 have all been released with critical security patches since the January patch level.
My Samsung S20+ got the 2020-05-01 patches on 2020-05-04. Given that the last Samsung I owned, an S3, only received 2 patches in 18 months, I find that it is currently doing a very good job. I just hope they keep it up for the 3 years they provide the guarantee for...
First of all, Libreoffice has the same option to use Microsoft XML or Opendocument XML, so I can't see what the big play is surrounding file formats.
The big play around file format is how well they are supported and how well the application interprets that file format and displays it. OO.o and Libreoffice provide support for Open XML, but it works in a different way to Microsoft Office and it can't display the file "cleanly", there are always minor differences between them on how things are displayed, so the formatting goes to pot.
I've had presentation in PowerPoint that were displayed in OO.o or LO and the lines point to different objects on the page and the objects have moved as well! Word documents, the page formatting goes to pot, the ToC will say a section starts on page 12, which it does in Word, but due to formatting issues in LO, it will be on page 13 or 14 - the higher the page number the bigger the difference to where the ToC says things were and where they actually are.
(The same goes in the other direction, of course.)
If you are sharing documents with people, you really need to be on the same version of the same program - even version differences can cause formatting issues when swapping back and forth. I used Linux for a long time as my main workstation and worked with LO, but for documents that I had to share with clients (where I had to provide the original and not a PDF), I always had a Windows machine in the corner to check the formatting, before it went out. At some point, I was spending so much time correcting the formatting that I gave up and switched back to Windows and MS Office for document generation, because it saved time and I wasn't going to get a large, multi-thousand seat, client to switch from MS Office to LO, just because I wanted to use that.
If you fall into the dissident category or other high risk user, if your machine has been compromised (i.e. outside of your sight for any period of time), you'll either use it for banal things or you'll physically destroy it and get another device.
I was ill whilst on assignment and couldn't travel home for 2 weeks in 2001. I was stuck in my hotel room (too sick to get out of the room, not sick enough for a hospital bed).
I could order food from the hotel, I had wired Internet and I could order food deliveries from the local pizza parlour etc. Not that I was actually capable of eating, I lost nearly 40 lbs in under 2 weeks.
The best thing about being ill with a high fever in a hotel was calling room service at 3 in the morning and getting them to change the bedding. I will be forever grateful for the outstanding service and understanding of the staff at the hotel.
The only thing that doesn't sound "right" is no opening windows and not being allowed out of the room, that would drive me stir crazy, I don't like AC air and I can only sleep with the window open.
I don't see why they can't organize a short walk in the hotel grounds / in the entrance-way in small groups with distancing - I assume that guards are on duty 24/7, so putting up a fence and letting them walk around guarded should make them feel better.
At a previous job, I was forced to take on the role of Social Media Manager. I was supposed to write a German post for Xing, an English post for LinkedIn and one in both languages for Facebook every single day... I tried to point out to the CEO that over posting isn't considered good practice, I also tried to tell him that the different platforms need different approaches, but he wasn't having any of it.
So we started our campaign. The first day or so went smoothly, although I had to submit the posts to approval to the CEO and he was never happy with the wording and re-wrote most of the short, witty posts into long meandering nonsense, it was also hard to find enough topics to write about as well, I tried to say we should put in things about the IT industry in general, but there was an iPhone zero-day, so I wrote a warning that Apple had patched the zero-day and users should update their phones. Vetoed, I can't bad-mouth other companies. Our own stuff? I couldn't mention our staff (GDPR), I couldn't mention our customers (he wouldn't let me get clearance to use their names), most of our products were taboo as well, we wrote software for the slaughter and meat-processing industry and he didn't want a PETA shitstorm attached to our posts...
Anyway, I usually found something to write about. But after a couple of days, the posts weren't appearing! I was called into the CEO's office and he tried to wipe the floor with me, the posts weren't appearing, I wasn't doing my job! I quickly went to his computer and navigated to the relevant Facebook, LinkedIn and Xing pages and there were the posts.
Well, I must be incompetent, because they weren't appearing in his feed! I tried to explain about their ranking systems and how they used his interests and browsing history to work out what was of interest to him, and that although he was CEO of the company, Facebook & Co. didn't know that and, based on him browsing his favourite football and basketball teams all day long, they had decided that his company wasn't of interest to him!
That didn't work, I had to find a way to change the Facebook ranking system, so that the company posts popped to the top of his feed every day! ARRGH! I quit left shortly thereafter and I'm much happier now.
Why do these manufacturers keep going for the shiny toothed "Oral B" look for their ear buds?
The Surface Buds are ugly enough, but at least it doesn't look like you are running round with a pair of toothbrush heads in your ears!
I find the Bose, Jabra, Samsung etc. buds a lot more stylish.
together with the sense that what really counts is not the device you use, but the cloud services you access.
Hmm, I use OneDrive to save my photos to from my smartphone, before downloading them to my local PC and NAS. That's about it for cloud at home.
At work, nearly all employees have a PC, about 5% of them have a company smartphone and they aren't allowed to install any third party apps onto the phone, only those provided by the IT department. The only cloud service we are currently allowed to use - and this rolled out last week - is Microsoft Teams. Everything else has to stay behind the firewall...
Not every cloud has a silver lining. I'd rather not have my data held to ransom.
I did some testing for a retail outfit that was going online at the turn of the Century. It was my first security testing gig and I had to go through the site and see if it was secure.
The first thing I noticed was no SQL Escaping... They didn't seem to think it was important, a quick demonstration of bypassing the customer logon didn't impress them, nor did listing the users table... So for my next trick... DROP DATABASE.
Now, that got their attention!
I used to use Burroughs/Unisys kit and was on a training course in Milton Keynes. In the evening, we got talking and one of the Unisys instructors regaled us with a story about one of their engineers.
He worked in some remote place and, over a couple of years, every time he visited a customer to repair something, he order 2 of the thing being replace, instead of 1. They said that nobody had noticed and he would have gotten away with it, but he tried to order a new case - no engineer hat ever ordered a new case, so they made an investigation...
Testing to destruction as well. That's what many engineers do, when they don't like something. Turn the voltage up to 11 and see what happens.
Sticking with rail, but skipping across the water, one company I worked at helped with the Australian VFT (Very Fast Train - very pragmatic naming in Australia, I always joked it would be replaced by the FFT, I'll leave you to work that out!). A colleague was at the launch press conference and allegedly, someone from the press asked what they would do if their was a kangaroo on the track (we are talking about a train doing in excess of 120mph).
The managers and consultants all looked at each other, shrugs were given, then some bright spark said "turn on the wipers?" I guess they hadn't thought about every scenario for the press conference, although I'm sure the engineers had tested up to camel/buffalo...
It was drummed into me, when I started analysis and programming, that 60% - 70% of a projects time is testing.
You received the spec and wrote your test plan, only then did you start on the code and the test harness. You coded to the spec and test plan, you didn't write the test plan to fit the code.
Then the code went to system testing, who only ever saw the spec, never the code, so their test plans were spec based.
When that was complete, the test was signed off and the code put into pre-production, where the customer had their acceptance testers. Once they had signed off the code as correct, it could be moved to production...
Nowadays, it often seems to be people throwing links between frameworks together, then throwing the whole lot "out there" and waiting for the screams.
Having had to bail out some projects that were written by people who could string together SQL statements, but not actually understand how a relational database works (and thus the servers ground to a halt once real workloads were put through them), I whole heartedly agree with your second paragraph.
Only by journos who don't know the difference:
Market position has nothing to do with capabilities. It is solely popularity and MySQL had the marketing in the early days to get itself seen as the alternative to Oracle and SQL Server.
I like PostgreSQL, but even a lot of open source projects use MySQL/MariaDB as the default and PostgreSQL is often mentioned as an "option", but can be a pain to actually get working. I tried setting up a Debian (BusteR) system to run Icinga with PostgreSQL instead of MariaDB a couple of years ago. The installation failed, because the installation of PostgreSQL from within Icinga was borked; it would automatically install and configure MariaDB, but it would crash out if you chose PostgreSQL without first having installed PostgreSQL.
Having already installed Icinga on a test machine with MariaDB, we wanted to run a second test with PostgreSQL on another VM, we went through the exact same process, only we selected PostgreSQL from the install menu... BAM! Failure. It took several retries and a lot of searching for information, before I nuked the VM, reinstalled Debian from scratch, installed PostgreSQL and then Icinga, and the install worked perfectly!
It is instances like this, where PostgreSQL is a poorly documented and half-heartedly tested second class citizen in other projects that damages its reputation. I would chose PostrgreSQL over MySQL most of the time, but some projects just run more reliably, or actually install, if you use the MySQL/MariaDB option. It is a real shame.
This wasn't me, I remember reading it when I was a young whipper-snapper. I think it was in either Practical Computing or PCW in the UK.
The journo had a friend (apocryphal?) who had worked on a large system in the 70s. It was fairly advanced and used an early teletype terminal. He would have to wait for the users to finish for the day, then he could start the reconciliation jobs. He would have to let them run, before powering down the computer and going home...
Only the jobs took hours to complete, which meant missing Corrie or valuable drinking time.
Being a primitive teletype with a roller and moving carriage, the BOFH candidate became creative. A line feed would execute a command, while CR/LF would execute the command and return the carriage to the start of the line... Being sneaky, he batched up all of the commands in the input buffer, then attached one end of a piece of string to the carriage and the other to the power switch of the computer (a throw switch, not a push button).
Thus the jobs would all run sequentially, the carriage would gradually move to its full extent and once the final job had run, it did a shutdown and when that sent the session termination string, the teletype would throw a carriage return, yanking the power switch of the computer to the off position in the process. Obviously, there were a few flaws with this, a spelling mistake in the type-ahead buffer would leave jobs un-run and failed jobs would be ignored...
But, hey, extra beer time whilst being paid overtime for running the jobs - the log showed when "he " shut down the machine, so they "knew" when he had left the building...
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