Re: Stakeout
Ask the Stasi about manpower limits. When half the population is spying on the other half, there are no limits.
Essentially what this permits is the 1984 video screen in the home that watches you all day, looking for thoughtcrime..
76 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jul 2007
"You really have to test, test, test. Even then someone else will find bugs in your code."
That suggests you don't know how to test.
Contrary to what someone who posted earlier said, there is no better tester than an experienced and well trained developer who understands the language, the hardware, the operating system, the compiler, memory management, data storage, timing issues and every other aspect of what actually happens inside the machine.
Once upon a time this sort of thing was taught; now I meet developers who don't know binary or hex and I despair.
Not necessarily. It might be evidence planted there more recently by the Devil to try to mislead us and make us think the Holy Bible isn't an accurate record of actual events. Like when he buried all those dinosaur fossils.
No, hang on, the dinosaurs died in the Flood. So there were dinosaurs.
Now I'm confused again.
I don't know how the scientists manage to keep up with the flexibility of the Holy Word.
Here you go: https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/thors-hammer
And: "Swedish Government wants to ban ancient Viking symbols, claiming they “constitute incitement to hatred” " https://voiceofeurope.com/2019/05/swedish-government-wants-to-ban-ancient-viking-symbols-claiming-they-constitute-incitement-to-hatred/
"Senior management is a fucking rat's nest of scum bags. They aren't there because they're the golden bunch, they're there because they're a liability on the front line."
This.
It took me decades to accept the truth of this reality. I wish there were some way of convincing young people entering the workplace that this is how it is.
She's my science hero. Whenever I see her name I feel obliged to give a minute's silence.
My most recent discovery about her was what she did in the Great War, driving round trying to get the field hospitals to use this fancy gadget she had in a van that showed where the embedded shrapnel was in wounded soldiers. And, while at it, installing a telephone network in one field hospital.
I am too young to understand Imperial measurements.
As a child of the 1970s, I was brought up solely using metric and the SI. I have never used the Imperial system with the exception of milk, ale and, for a while, petrol.
I don't actually know what Fahrenheit temperatures mean. I know 40 is cold and 140 is hot, but that's about it.
The sooner the Imperial system dinosaurs and the 'metric martyr' wankers die off, the sooner it will suit me.
On our college band printer, I thought I'd be clever and edited my source code file to make every zero be a 0, backspace, then / so the numbers came out thus:
ØØØØ1Ø IF MY-VAR > 1ØØØ THEN
The / is the character before the 0. Instead of the paper fair hurtling through this high speed band printer, it suddenly stopped when it got to my job, requiring a full revolution of the band for every '0'. It sounded very impressive.
B-BANG. pause. B-BANG. pause. B-BANG. pause. B-BANG. pause. B-BANG. pause. B-BANG. pause.
It even attracted the attention of the head of department from his office at the end of the corridor.
It was interesting to watch, but made it slower than a dot matrix. And made me very unpopular since we were running off our listings for handing in.
Working in an outsourced MoD secure office, someone tried to follow me in through the card-swipe back door. I refused to let him in, so he went mental. He was bigger than me and I could not physically stop him forcing his way past, so I 'escorted' him to his destination i.e. followed him explaining you cannot come in without ID. When he got to an office he walked past some staff into a second office. I said to the staff present what had happened and asked if he was legit.
They thought it was hilarious. He was the Head of Facilities Management.
Wow, did I get a totally unfair big time bollocking for that - which I refused to accept.
I was dismissed from that contract shortly after. :-/
"However, users be aware, unless we invite you, the IT department is off limits and not to be wandered in to whenever you feel like it to raise an issue"
Oh dear. One of the Ivory Tower brigade. The up-my-own-arse sort who thinks they are more important than the people they serve.
IT is a service. You are there to help. Not make it hard and raise barriers. It is attitudes like yours that have given IT departments a bad reputation.
You know those tossers in Accounts who block things and never explain why and you can never get hold of them? You are like that.
You know those bastards in Finance who cock up your pay and you can never get hold of anyone to fix it or explain what happened? You are like that.
So, open the door of the IT department and welcome people in. If you actually communicate with your users, you'll find they have far fewer problems and thereby stop being a pain in the arse.
What would I know? 35 years experience including setting up friendly, open, service desks and turning around Ivory Tower ones into helpful ones.
Just needed to get that off my chest.
But she's not a tech specialist.
When you set up a small business and you get sold this Shiny New Thing and are assured it is The Only Way To Go, you have to trust what you are being told. If GoogleDocs and DropBox and tethering are what it takes to make your mobile business work, you'll do it.
So she knows she is tied in to a cloud solution, but has not got the time, money, experience, knowledge or staff to fix it. It's just another unmanageable risk, like assuming your Northern Rock Bank won't go bust, your Eagle Star endowment won't go down in value or your pension fund won't get robbed.
Back in the 1980s our Senior Lecturer said there are decade-long cycles in the Data Processing industry to keep the computer company sales force in work. A key one is the centralisation / decentralisation flip-flop. He predicted that would continue throughout our careers.
You are proving him right, by decentralising from the cloud.
He was a very clever man, that Mr Milner.
That's not how blame works in the public sector.
"It's not my fault that personal private data is now public / lost. I outsourced all the NHS data / HMRC data / Social Services data to UKCloud in according with the government Cloud First policy."
is just as effective as:
"It's not my fault the service is shite. I outsourced it to Crapita."
The problem is we are using an artificial time constant, the second, to measure a variable time activity, the Earth year.
Just go back to the old system of defining a second based on a fraction of a year. Then all that needs to be done is agree annually the length of the second that will be used next year to keep us on track.
It's that old computing problem of using a data index pointer as a real world definer.
One of the call loggers on the Helpdesk said "The call reference number has got a dash in front of it". Another pointed out "And it is going down".
"What are we up to?" I asked. One said "It is -32766 now".
I called over the annoying boy who had written the bespoke Helpdesk system. (He had recently completed his IT degree and wrote the system during his work placement year.) "Change the call reference number to unsigned, and, when you get the chance, make it a longint in the database and the code". He looked at me with his mouth open.
They all thought I'd done magic + was psychic + must have seen the code.
I had never seen the code and did not know what language it was written in. But I knew the call reference numbers were in the range 32000s and wondered if something interesting might happen.
That annoying child with his IT degree wrote horrifically slow and inefficient code. But hey, that doesn't matter these days, does it? Just keep putting in faster processors, more RAM and bigger disks...
... to do what we did in 32K at under 2MHz.
A similar thing happened at a local authority I worked at some years ago. The councillors voted that they should get access to council systems from home courtesy of the council. So they got PCs and access to the council systems via the council networks. When they did web surfing on these council-provided desktops, it went through the council web cache so it was all logged just like the staff internet access.
When it was pointed out by someone in IT they were spending huge amounts of time surfing for porn, the councillors decided their internet access should be private and not monitored by the staff. So they had their free internet access changed to stand-alone laptops and free broadband at home. Meaning their porn browsing was still paid for by the council but now unmonitored.
Democracy, eh?
The version I heard, and have often repeated, goes:
"It was a wild and stormy night, and the Captain said to the First Mate,"Jack, tell us a story". And the First Mate began.
"It was a wild and stormy night, and the Captain said to the First Mate,"Jack, tell us a story". And the First Mate began.
"It was a wild and stormy night
And so on ad duffyouupeum.
The "Classic Theme Restorer" did a reasonable job, but here in LinuxLand, this did even better:
Synaptic Package Manager.
Select "Installed".
Search for Firefox.
For each item that says Installed Version is 29.xxxxx, click on it and choose Package (that's in the menu bar, remember menu bars? They're the things FF29 doesn't have) and Force Version. Choose an older one (FF24 in my case). Repeat for each item at 29.xxxxx
Then click on Apply. Wait for the downgrade (snigger) to finish.
Then for each of the changed packages, click on it, then Package, Lock Version.
Voilà! FireFox looking like FireFox and updates won't update it.
And on the missus's PC, I managed to lock it at FF28.
I'm sure that's only a temporary fix (the next major Linux version upgrade might be a problem). But maybe by then, there'll be a fork of FireFox that isn't FireFuxedUp.
Paris, because I want a browser that hasn't been shagged beyond all recognition, and where the appearance has had a lot of time spent on it, but it still ain't pretty.
The Merkins have outsourced astronautics to China, just like everything else.
The purpose of this mission is to do the surveying to work out ...
... where best to place a USA flag and Lunar Lander remnant to match where the moon landings were alleged to happen.
They're intending to write past history by placing the evidence to prove it happened, that's what.
There it is AGAIN: "... making off with their pensions and spunking the lot on alcopops and gangsta ringtones."
What is this 'spunking' verb El Reg keeps using? Who on Earth tosses themselves off with a table fork? Is the implication here that adolescents can't be trusted with a steak knife for fear of self-abuse of the joy-gloy-making variety?
I'd just managed to forget yesterday's spunk reference with regard to burgers and was thinking I was safe with cutlery but no - it gets everywhere.
WHAT'S GOING ON AT VULTURE CENTRAL WITH THE "SPUNKING" FETISH??
@Peter Hewitt, thank you for the dasani reference. So off I go to Google to look that up.
Now I have tea over my keyboard too.
Still, it's nice to have Coca Cola confirm there really is baby-maker gravy in all their products, not just the burgers.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/03/11/introducing_dasani_the_water/
So, that's the Paris Hilton angle sorted.