Proper testing
"to be as dastardly as possible in testing systems!"
That's the way it ought to be done. Test the error cases, not just the one that is supposed to work.
1532 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2010
Ancient languages, e.g. Sumerian, Akkadian, were written with only the consonants. But when you have dialects, the consonants generally sound similar but the vowels can sound very different; for example, in American English, British English, and various others.
The PA document is stiff with management jargon. I do realise it would be a lot longer if written in clear English, but it would be far more useful if it had been.
It is a classic example of a document written for the benefit of the authors rather than for the people who need to read it. For that reason I fear it will not help to improve future systems at Edinburgh University. It is an example of a major problem in this disaster of a project: that nobody was discussing matters frankly and clearly with the working staff who would be directly affected, in terms that those workers would understand.
One small item among its findings was close to my heart: the poor quality of the data in the preceding systems, so it took much longer to achieve a clean set of data in the new system. At various times I have had to clean up membership lists of various organisations, in which names, addresses, and dates were recorded in slightly different ways by my various predecessors. That matters little if all the list is used for is to print address labels; but when you also want to analyse membership by location, and do financial things, consistency of data is essential.
I find spell checkers very useful - not because I cannot spell but because I am a poor typist. But only in a word processor, not in Notepad.
Spell checkers are also useful for OCR text or text that has been dictated or transcribed. Or indeed text from many other people.
I always wanted a facility to reduce text to basic ascii characters only: replace curly quotes with straight ascii quotes; replace en-dash, m-dash, and arithmetic minus with a plain hyphen; replace any other fancy character with a question mark.
I can use a full word processor to restore the fancy characters if I need to.
There are of the order of a million million tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. Sounds a lot, but is trivial by planetary standards. Natural events have in the past meant that sometimes there is a lot more, sometimes a lot less. The first major failing of this article is that it fails to discuss those natural processes.
The second major failing of this article is that it fails to discuss the oceans. There is a thousand times as much CO2 in the oceans, dissolved or as carbonates, than there is in the atmosphere. If we did somehow withdraw 1.0E9 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, .99E9 tons would be released from the oceans to restore equilibrium.
What are those 'natural processes' I mentioned? I suggest emission from the junctions of tectonic plates, as CO2 is expelled from subducted carbonate rocks. Expelled into the ocean, where we do not directly see it, but still dwarfing any man-made emissions.
It is time to stop the hot air about CO2, and to start preparing ourselves for an inevitable further rise in sea level to a geological long term normality.
I had to use Latex at one time in my career. I am so glad to be shot of it.
I hate being expected to remember control keys and keywords for every documentary tweak. An 'intelligent' computer should make that easy for me, and Word does that. Even Word 5 for DOS, which I have looked at out of curiosity.
It is nonsense to suggest that a contractual clause will override a statutory right by government to insist on seeing the decrypt. But the point at issue is how the government can demand the key that was used for a standard encryption algorithm. If the key is provided by the comms company, the government can demand that they provide it, or drive them out of business if they do not. If the key is provided by the customer, it depends. The government cannot compel another state, or the United Nations, to cough up the key.
Excel is a wonderful tool for a knowledgeable user. But it is a disaster when clerical staff are expected to use it directly from their keyboards.
At the very least there should be an Access screen, or equivalent, which will do some checking on what is typed in. Excel sheets should be in the background, after being professionally designed and at least with data-types to distinguish dates, numbers, and text.
If bacteria tootle around the galaxy on interstellar meteorites at approximately 1/10,000 of the speed of light, they could travel the galaxy's diameter of 100,000 light years in about 10**9 years. But bacteria might not survive for more than 10**6 years, so it would take many separate steps for bacteria to span the galaxy.
Other galaxies, even Andromeda, are too far away for their bacteria to have reached us.
We know there are plenty of simple organic molecules kicking around the galaxy, and they would have been there on early Earth. But we do not yet know how they became the intricate and precise molecules of proteins, RNA, DNA, or cellulose.
I am tired of these headlines about 'the key to life' when we are as far from ever from explaining the origins of RNA etc.
"we are already living in a simulation created by a post-human society"
Our invisible galactic overlords will not allow us to become too self-aware. 65 million years ago they bombed the dinosaurs into extinction because some of them were getting smarter than could be allowed. But the bombing was disguised as a meteor impact.
Our overlords may be thinking that another 'zoological weeding' is due.
Designing systems to cope with errors, i.e. raw user input, is difficult. To give constructive error messages you have to parse a range of inputs that include error cases, not just the perfect working case. So system design is a bigger and more expensive task, not always appreciated by techies let alone by beancounters.
Well said, sir. There are problems with criminal behaviour on the internet which are obvious to ordinary people even if the computer nerds deny that. Law enforcement needs powers that ordinary folk don't have.
We do need some checks and balances against the abuses of power that will inevitably happen occasionally, and against the misunderstandings of the PPE graduates in our establishment. These checks and balances need constructive negotiation, as against the dismissive whining of this and many other articles.
tracert www.theregister.com
Tracing route to www.theregister.com [104.18.4.22]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms 192.168.0.1
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 14 ms 16 ms 19 ms glfd-core-2a-xe-801-0.network.virginmedia.net [80.7.14.1]
4 * * * Request timed out.
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 14 ms 14 ms 15 ms tele-ic-7-ae2-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.175.34]
7 15 ms 13 ms 14 ms 2-14-250-212.static.virginm.net [212.250.14.2]
8 14 ms 14 ms 30 ms 172.71.176.4
9 41 ms 16 ms 13 ms 104.18.4.22
Trace complete.
The traditional word processor font was Times Roman: a serif font both elegant and compact. Then people started moaning about "boring Times Roman", so in Office 2007 and 2010 the default became Cambria. The sans options were Arial with Times, and Calibri with Cambria.
Then, to my regret, the default in 2013 became Calibri.
After Germany abolished the old gothic (fraktur) fonts in 1941, Germany preferred the sans serif fonts. But Britain prefers serif fonts.
Oh spit, I guess we shall have to set up our own styles with our own preferences.