Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7402 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
Late 70's, ICL 1900 FORTRAN, I was an undergrad student just learning the language, and had a program that just behaved bizarrely, loops that ran for the wrong number of times and similar weird things.
Turned out that 1900-series systems had no machine-level instructions to add a constant to a location, you had to put the constant into another storage location and then add the two contents together. As an optimisation the compiler stored the numbers 1-10 (or maybe 20, I forget) in a fixed table so that they could be quickly accessed.
I was calling a subroutine with a constant argument, and inside that subroutine I was inadventently changing it. FORTRAN passes all arguments by reference (i.e. pointers) and there was no form of readonly page protection on those systems, so my when I inadvertently added 1 to the passed-in constant 5, all "constant" 5s in the program became 6s...
You're jumbling all sorts of things there.
electoral laws that ensured the majority of Catholics were ineligible to vote
Catholics had the same rights to vote in parliamentary elections as anglicans since the 1830s. There was, however, a "property qualification" for everyone (lifted in 1918 after WWI) so that only property owners could vote. Although there was no legal bar to catholics owning property, they had to find someone willing to sell it to them, which was almost impossible in NI. As a result there was effective disenfranchisement, but it was due to local persecution, not legal rights.
A similar situation applied to local elections until much later, where only ratepayers (owners or tenants) had a vote. Since local authorities controlled council housing allocations it was that latter issue that caused the main civil rights issues in the 50s and 60s.
it wasn't long until the troops were seen as an occupying force by the Catholics and became their target.
Not quite. The troops were sent in very reluctantly (the home secretary at the time made the prophetic comment "It's easy to send them in, it'll be the devil's own job to get them out again") and they were welcomed by the catholic community as neutral peacekeepers, which the RUC & Special reserves were not.
It was rather the IRA that were horrified to see ordinary catholics turning to the hated British army for protection. The IRA attacked the army, and since the resulting clampdown was much more severe in the catholic areas where the IRA hid out, that turned many ordinary people against the troops. That was carefully orchestrated by the IRA.
You can however blame Thatcher for repeatedly blocking any dialogue with Sinn Fein during the 80s
The blame lies much more with SF themselves. Danny Morrison's notorious Ard Fheis speech in 1981 "But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?" was hardly an encouragement to democratic dialogue.
It was only after Adams signed up to the Good Friday agreement, a process kicked off by John Major despite Tony Blair's attempts to take all the credit, that some democratic discussions could really start.
Some of Tony Blair's ministers could even be considered far right-of-centre
Blair and almost all of his ministers were "wherever sort of centre-ish will get me re-lelected". We haven't had politicians with any kind of principled beliefs since the Thatcher/Benn era.
So why did Merkel agree on doing it at the EU level with Macron last year? It's that change I don't understand.
Donald Trump happened, I think. Germany is worried about reprisals against its industries if this becomes an EU/US trade war. That seems to be the French interpretation, anyway. I don't read German so I can't check their press, perhaps someone else will have info.
No, because I value morality above profit.
So you voluntarily hand over more tax than you are legally required to, every year? That's nice of you, but perhaps you'd consider giving to some charities instead, they'll likely use it more wisely.
Avoiding paying tax that you don't legally have to is entirely reasonable. Evading tax that you're legally required to pay is of course both morally reprehensible and criminal. Not the same thing.
Those three countries together are little more than 1/4 of my country population...
Which is why it's curious that the article only refers to Ireland, Sweden and Denmark, while ignoring the 4th country which is opposed to this tax on revenue that was proposed by France - Germany. Hardly a small player.
It was discussed on French radio yesterday. The commentator made the point that while Macron is pushing this as a good initiative for the EU, Germany's reluctance is embarassingly blocking it. He added that Brexit will allow the UK to introduce such a tax alone as Hammond has suggested, which is not good for Macron's image.
Insurance companies apply a "duty of care" rule to people who own insured items, for example if your new Mercedes is stolen they aren't likely to pay the full cost if it turns out you left it in a back street, unlocked with the keys in the ignition.
The same should apply here. His lack of a backup suggests that either the data wasn't valuable, or if it was he wasn't taking sufficient care of it. The judge should probably find in his favour, Adobe have admitted to the bug after all, but perhaps just award him a symbolic $5K or so in damages on the basis that he was 95+% responsible for the loss.
if people in the UK actually went for the best package available to them rather than the cheapest we could be number one.
Isn't that a bit like saying "If everyone bought a Jaguar instead of a Fiesta we'd have the best car fleet in Europe"? People buy what they need, why should they spend more money for something they won't use?
Just using a mean is a bit pointless as a measurement, I'd much prefer to see mean/median quoted, and over different times of day.
This is the problem with "None of the above": what do you do with votes for it? If it isn't the top choice then it is, to a large extent, much the same as just not voting, or a spoiled ballot. If voting is compulsory then it could be considered as an indicator similar to turnout, but would only have an effect if there were some minimal threshold for that vote, i.e. if the vote were invalid without at least 60% turnout.
If NOTA were the "winning vote" then things get more complex. If you ask someone to choose between options and they reply "I don't want any of them", the obvious next question is "well, who do you want, then?". If they can't answer that question, is their opinion actually worth much?
What about elections which allow a write-in?
I wouldn't agree with using a NOTA result to disqualify the others, it would again achieve little since they clearly were unwanted that time and presumably would lose if they stood again. As for excluding parties, it's important to remember that in a respresentative democracy like the UK you vote for a person to represent you, not for a party. The party name wasn't even on the ballot until the Wilson government of the 70s. Blocking a party in one constituency because of one undesirable candiate (often chosen by a local group) also seems extreme.
The reality of giving everyone a vote is that people will chose to vote, or not, for their own personal reasons, and we have to respect that. Forcing them to vote, or forcing change based on non-votes, is hardly democratic.
I's say that harassment (as distinct from, say, actual assault) is continuing to do something which offends someone after they've asked you to stop. Just flashing a lighter like that is juvenile, and the person's manager should probably have asked them to wise up & leave it at home. If a female staffer has complained, and they continue to display it, I'd certainly define that as harassment, although admittedly of a fairly low severity.
As a guess, False is defined as zero and True as anything non-zero. The boolean constant value "True" is probably defined as 1, so if a routine returns, say, 2 then "Blah != False" will be true (if you see what I mean), but "Blah = True" will still not be true.
Maybe the test should just have been "if (Blah) then"?
And what if the questions are being asked in a language in which the perfectly legitimate traveller is not fluent, and is struggling to understand the question & formulate an acceptable answer from their limited vocabulary? Current speech recognition "AIs" have enough trouble with regional accents as it is.
Yes, VMS cluster, Solaris cluster, Veritas cluster, they all do that for local HA, and it works. Disk vendors like EMC and HDS can also do it for their distributed storage.
It gets much harder once you bring geographical distances into the picture. Fully synchronized updates so that both sites always have identical copies of data gets too slow once you go much past a few mS latency, so you have to live with the fact that each site has a different view.
There are solutions, usually requiring more than three sites with a mix of local/remote and sync/async replication. That gets expensive.
Oracle DataGuard (yeah, I know it's the evil empire, but the DB is still good) has a useful feature called "far sync" where the data exists only at the two main sites, but there are additional copies of the redo logs maintained synchronously at nearby sites. If a main site is lost, the survivor will automatically fetch & replay the logs to make sure it has caught up before becoming active. Still needs multiple sites, but the intermediate ones only need small systems & storage for logs, not the big servers & TB disks it would require to keep another copy of the whole DB.
And this is why you shouldn't have automatic failover in disaster recovery situations. For local HA, with redundant equipment, when a disk, switch or server goes down automatic is fine. For long-distance DR it's well-nigh impossible for an automated system to have a full view of what happened (recoverable network outage versus primary site disappearing in a ball of nuclear fire, for example). With a person in the loop they could have looked at the situation, perhaps called an admin on the other coast, and said "oh, it's just a transient network outage, best solution is wait until it comes back.". Automate the changeover by all means, once the decision is taken, but don't make it automatic.
..to tell us these whiners don't know what they're talking about, they're about to never have had it so good and they should just 'get on with it'.
I can't speak for codejunky, but the only people who seem to have heard those sort of promises are the remainers, who do seem to have a very overactive imagination when it comes to a past they don't like
S/he will also point out that we can't thwart the 'will of the people' (at a specific moment in time when they had been comprehensively lied to about how great the deal was they were going to get)
Funny, I don't remember any promises about a deal, it was a simple "Do you want to stay, or leave?" question. I certainly don't feel I was lied to. No-one ever said Brexit would be easy, it clearly won't be. It will take years of hard work to make it effective, but I strongly believe it will be worthwhile in the long run.
and how it would be anti-democratic to go back and ask them if they've changed their minds now the reality is becoming clear.
Reality has always been clear for those of us who paid attention, and democracy doesn't consist of asking the same question every year until you get an answer you want, and then stopping. Or were you planning a third referendum next year, and a fourth one in 2020, etc. just in case people changed their minds again?
I guess it depends on how you understand the terminology. To me what you're describing is an incremental backup.
In a way it's the opposite. An incremental backup is a set of all the data which has changed since a particular moment, which can be added to a full backup to get the latest state. A snapshot is the opposite, it's a list of the data which has changed, but it contains the unchanged data, not the changes. The idea with the snapshot is that you can go back to that point in time, even if things have changed in the meantime. In both cases, though, you need the full dataset as well, neither snapshot or incremental backup are of any use without a full copy of the data, since they only reflect changes..
A snapshot to me is a backup of a moment in time but that backup contains everything needed to rebuild the system. E.g. dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc is a snapshot/backup, call it what you will, of sda that contains everything you need to rebuild that disc.
The thing about a snapshot is that it is instantaneous. A dd of a disk will take a finite and possibly long time to complete, during which you need to block all activity to keep it self-consistent. A snapshot freezes an instant of a running system without any visible impact. You can then, of course, make an offline copy of that snapshot, with dd or anything else and you'll get a complete and consistent copy of the filesystem at that frozen moment. It won't matter if the filesystem is changing while you're doing that, the snapshot will protect you from the changes. That offline copy is certainly an independent backup, but the snapshot alone isn't.
Snapshots certainly are backups
Not really. They are a frozen point-in-time image, but they work by storing original copies of blocks that get changed after the snapshot time. For any unchanged block in the snapshot, the original filesystem is still the underlying source of the data. Take a snapshot of a filesystem, then remove or corrupt the original filesystem, and your snapshot is worthless.
Please tell me there was some form of SLA or KPI measurement in the contract...
One would have hoped so, but for a contract negoitiated by civil service oompa-loompas against Crapita lawyers I would be surprised if there was such an SLA.
Still, £50m to get rid of Crapita seems like a bargain to me.
I'm not sure that negative tariffs on imports are strictly speaking "tariffs".
Who mentioned negative? I just said "reduced". WTO policy is for all tariffs to trend to zero in the long term.
If splitting off all your export markets
All? Since when did 27 out of 180+ countries count as "all"? Never mind that no-one has mentioned cutting off exports to the EU, the UK wouldn't want that. The EU might, I suppose.
Anyway, my point wasn't to have another pro/anti Brexit argument, merely to point out that it makes a great reason to increase prices, but companies always find an excuse not to reduce them.
So is climbing the Everest. Or going to the Moon.
It's not really the same. I'm the first to suport NASA/ESA and their exploratory missions, and if this had some novel engine technology, or if it were likely to lead to some new advances in science, it might be worthwhile. As it is, it's really just a jet aircraft without wings, that 'flies' at 0 ft. All that a success will demonstrate is that they found a pilot with more nerve than brains and fun game for rich people with money to spend on toys.
Incidentally, they are even better with bacon
I came here to say the same thing. Cooked "al dente", tossed in butter with some bacon lardons and just a hint of nutmeg.
Please don't confuse them with the stale, boiled-to-mush, sprout stew beloved of industrial cafeteria. Properly-done sprouts are excellent.
they always go down when its the weekend and you have to restart them on your own time.
And that is why the problem exists.
If you tell your bosses that you don't have enough resources, and yet still manage to keep things running because you beg/steal/borrow resources and time from somewhere else, your bosses will never believe you.
Of couse while "going that extra mile" to recover from some occasional disaster is part of the job, there's nothing heroic about doing it regularly. That just sets you up to fail.
If you don't have resources to run some new service, and the boss insists on it anyway, then get your objections down in writing and let, say, the monthly billing cycle fail due to overload. Anything else is simply demonstrating that you do actually have the resources, even if they are overworked and unpaid ones.
I'm actually getting quite tired of explaining to "Hard Brexiters" that the referendum was not a vote on "Stay in the EU or Crash Out".
I can see why that would be hard, given that the text of the question was just that:
"Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?"
Nowhere on the ballot paper did it say "I vote for No Deal", and this is exactly what a second referendum should be about.
And what if that second referendum decides to reject "No Deal" by 51%? What then, a third referendum on "Canada or Norway"? Or on "Change our mind again or not?" And what if the vote were 51% to "not leave after all", do you think everyone would say "Oh goody, that's the right result, we can all stop worrying"? Of course not, there would just be calls for another referendum next year in case we changed our minds again.
We've had the referendum, we've had an election, both indicated a desire to leave, so we leave. It's the only democratic choice. Maybe in 20 years time the next generation might decide to rejoin, presuming there's an EU to join, which I personally doubt given the way Italy & other countries are going.
I grew up in the 70's, I remember rolling blackouts, winter of discontent, cap in hand to the IMF, inflation, high interest rates. That's the whole reason we joined the EU in the first place.
FFS NO, that's the reason we joined the Common Market, which was an economic partnership that mostly worked, and where things should have stayed. Turning it into the political entity of the EU happened with the Maastricht treaty, which John Major signed us up to without a referendum, because he know from the opinion polls would have been rejected by around 60% of people in the UK. The Danes rejected it, even the europhile French barely accepted it (51%, a smaller majority than voted Leave in Brexit, yet remainers don't deny the validity of that result).
The centralized political and monetary control of the EU is unnecessary, unwanted, and making Europe dangerously unstable by driving people into the arms of the extremists, but as usual short-sighted politicians are too busy empire-building to see the grassroots danger.
The Referendum was never billed as an Ultimate decision, merely an advisory.
What is the point in having a referendum if you're then going to ignore the result? That would be both undemocratic and a waste of taxpayers' money If all you want is advice, you run an opinion poll, not a referendum.
What a waste of effort for something that applies to bugger-all.
Are you sure? Read the text of the bill:
(c) “Manufacturer” means the person who manufactures, or contracts with another person to manufacture on the person’s behalf, connected devices that are sold or offered for sale in California.
