Posts by Doctor Syntax

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

Re: One step too few

Oops. 1904

Re: One step too few

Normal distribution blobs to stick on the C14 age/depth section at the end of hand-drawn pollen diagrams. But with a 1804 & Calcomp plotter.

Re: Stealing more than fuel

Yes, the neighbours had multiple CCTV fitted quite a while ago.

"three kids on dirtbikes"

Does your hunting licence cover these?

Re: Wait. Backups ned to be restorable?

Presumably there was a separate migration to a new system so the backup would be belt-and-braces for an extreme situation. If there were suitable drives almost anywhere on the planet this could be acceptable.

Re: One step too few

If you use the services of a DR company the greatest need is to check restore on their H/W. The experience of your first test - or rehearsal if you prefer - can be quite informative. The first time I tried it we ran out of time just about at the point where we had a file system system we could log onto as /etc had been backed up after a lot of stuff it would have been less urgent to restore. Things were changed round so that next time we were in a position to start restoring the database fairly quickly.

I was told this story yesterday.

Once upon a time we had a county Council*. They used to use snow ploughs to clear rural roads* in winter. Because some of the roads are steep and snow ploughs are less likely to get stuck coming down hill they decided to park one at a convenient spot at the top of a hill. When the sown came some poor council worker fought his way through the drifts to the top of the hill. And found the snow plough''s diesel had been stolen.

* This now seems like a fairy story, hence my use of the traditional opening..

Driver in Uber's self-driving car death goes on trial, says she feels 'betrayed'

"It will be difficult for Italy's data security agency to force the company to pay up, but the decision could deter Italian companies from using Clearview's software."

GDPR has options for holding officers of the company responsible. I think an extradition request for the CEO, CFO and directors for non-payment of the fine would produce quick results.

Re: Who cares....

"Turn it into a T to make their shareholders take down the entire C-level bunch of prats with pitchforks, burning tar, & bags of feathers."

The shareholders are equally reprehensible for investing in this antisocial crap. Don't let them escape the the tar and feathers.

114 billion transistors, one big meh. Apple's M1 Ultra wake-up call

"Above it all, the stratospheric mysteries of supercomputing hung like the PCs the gods themselves ordered from the Mount Olympus edition of Byte."

My recollection is that by 2001 Byte's glory days were well behind it. That in itself was an indication of things to come.

"a new budget iPhone"

This must be some meaning of the word "budget" with which I was previously unfamiliar.

Re: Blame the web for that...

"requires you to be tethered to a remote server that may be at the end of a still slow connection"

Too true. A colleague in our Civic Soc. usually sends our lecture posters as PDFs to somebody's farcebook page. She was recently told to use some web page to convert it to a JPEG. Really? Somebody thinks you need a remote server to convert a PDF page to a JPEG?

Re: Hyperbole...

RaspberryPi marketers have it right... all that we really need is Sufficiency products in stock, unfortunately.

Re: I'm holding off

Don't worry. The next generation os S/W will be along soon to soak up the performance of the next generation of H/W.

Re: Hmmm..

"He didn't once stop to ask what benefit anyone using the tech would receive."

Didn't you ask him?

Re: "they can still watch cat videos. Or prOn. Or both"

It's good that you quoted the URL in full. It ensures I'm adequately informed without needing to follow it. Thanks.

Those who don't ensure there are processors for those who do by buying the same processors to run bloatware.

China's top tech city Shenzhen locks down completely for at least a week

Re: 5 Year Review

A lot of media whose standard product is a load of bollox produced a load of bollox about Y2K and devices which had no relationship to dates. So what?

Re: Oligarchy

Could you clarify why Gates and Bezos are part of NATO, who the others implied by "to" are and how they are also part of NATO. If they were part of the old "industrial-military complex" I'd understand your thinking. However neither Microsoft nor Amazon can be no more thought of as part of that than they are part of any other industrial complex, anywhere on the globe, that uses their ubiquitous products and services.

Re: 5 Year Review

I suppose you also think all the fuss about Y2K was nonsense because in the event nothing went wrong.

Re: eggs->basket!

I wonder what his attitude to backups was.

Prototype app outperforms and outlasts outsourced production version

A former colleague - also Harry as it happens - could never get it through to his users that the prototype/demos he presented them with were just that. They kept complaining that he was giving them software that didn't work because of this, that or the other.

Re: "It is a warm feeling when your prototype lash-up outlasts the production tool"

There's no indication in TFA of how complex the job was. I'm with you on the subject of properly designed systems being easier to maintain. From the account given this was easy to maintain.

Not just hikes. Income tax was a temporary measure when first introduced.

Like several other people I once developed a code generator for Informix 4GL which would delve into the system catalogs and put together some generic but table-specific code for basic retrieval, update and deletions which could then be augmented with application-specific code. At that time Informix SQL didn't have a scroll cursor so it was largely prompted by the need to provide an emulation of this to enable the user to scroll backwards as well as forwards through the retrieved rows. It had some placeholder prompts in it which would be replaced by something more application-specific when the program was worked up.

I took this with me on several jobs. One which I've mentioned before, in a software house, needed a lot of work to disentangle an application which was one mess of Informix Perform screens into a set of discrete 4GL modules using the core generator to start things off. As I've also mentioned I parachuted myself out of that job leaving some of the modules as work in progress with default prompts in there. Roll forward to early retirement out of that subsequent job and into freelance.

One of the freelance gigs was to oversee UAT for a migration to a new server for an organisation in the field that that system was aimed at although I didn't recognise the application name. This was about 10 or 11 years since I was working in that area. Standing in reception when I first arrived I could see some of the screens in the distance & thought they looked very like how I liked to lay out a 4GL screen. Sure enough, when I got there it was my old application having been through various name changes. The default prompts were still there in the stuff I'd left as WIP and so, I think, was the scroll cursor emulation although the Informix engine had had that for years now. A couple of years later I got called back to repeat the gig for another server upgrade. Still all the old stuff left in.

BOFH: Gaming rig for your home office? Yeah right

Re: Every company!

Then you produce the signature acknowledging that either they accept that this is not the standard product bundle that IT currently have the skill-set to support and that either they arrange their own support or they will, out of their own budget, arrange for sufficient IT staff to go on sufficient training courses to be able to provide support. That would be the memo they were obliged to sign before getting their kit. It's now accompanied by the requisition they need to sign for the aforementioned training courses which will take place in reassuringly expensive locations and to be paid for out of the aforementioned budget.

Re: Simon is on form, these days!

"if it were me, I'd suggest a replacement"

Ah, but you're not the BOFH who now has Carl under obligation. Who knows what might come of that.

Re: It's time to kill the dragon!

I had a gig on a secure site that required clearance. They required it a step higher than the regular employees. No problem, that went through; given my previous career it would have been strange if it hadn't. Perhaps it was that process that alerted someone to the fact that the regular employees clearance should also have been a step higher than it was.

Re: Every company!

Should have made clear they were on their own for support.

Cryptocurrency ATMs illegal right now in UK

Re: are unregulated and high-risk

"The value of your investments can go down as well as up."

If you're lucky. Otherwise they just go.

Not exclusively, There are all the exchanges where you can store your currency before they mysteriously close down and their operators disappear. That's an application in its own right.

Afraid of the big bad Linux desktop? Zorin 16.1 is here

Re: Zorin, Ideal for beginners

You can always tell those who've never used Linux but you can't tell 'em much.

Re: Zorin, Ideal for beginners

And Mint.

Re: @RegGuy1

"Agreed, it does have loads of irritations, but there are fixes for many of them."

That's the problem with Gnome. It seems to have to be tweaked to make it useful. These limitations seem to be design choices. I've never seen the point in starting with something that has to be taken so far from its designers' intentions to be useful. Maybe it's intended to be a blank canvas for the likes of the Zorins to customise but even so KDE has always seemed a good deal more functional straight out of the box.

Having said that Zorin has been what I've used for relatives' ex-Windows boxes.

Mary Coombs, first woman commercial programmer, dies at 93

Re: Paper tape at first.

I know about Jacquard looms; I grew up in a textile area and my holiday jobs were when I was young were in milla.

Jacquards are more limited in function than you may think. None that I saw in the mills 60 years or so ago could do no more than control healds so although they were capable of making complex patterns in the warp they were no use if there was more than one weft. In the woollen mills of the West Riding Jacquard mechanisms were limited to what were termed "Woven lists", lettering woven into the edges of the cloth saying things such as "SUPERFINE WORSTED". The main control mechanism on looms such as the Dobcross used a chain rather like a very heavy bicycle chain with disks on the cross-pieces of the links. The disks acted as cams and although they could only control a limited number of sets of healds - AFAICR the biggest gears we had used about 12, they could control the selection of the shuttle boxes, i.e. the weft.

None of this is relevant to Mary Coombs's story. If you read the PDF linked in the article you'll find that although punched cards were used for storing data - Lyons already used them already with tabulators - the programs were entered on paper tape.

Re: All punch cards at first.

Paper tape at first.

Re: I hope there is more than this somewhere

Read the linked PDF. Fascinating. And, as the article says, things don't change. They were working with the French firm Bull and she was doing some technical translating of manuals in her own time. When she suggested they pay her for that they outsourced ot to a firm of translators instead.

Reg reader rages over Virgin Media's email password policy

Re: Smug mode off

Staying with an ISP that provides sub-standard service.

Re: Another issue with VM's password policies is...

"these characters have to be from the password you set when you first opened an account"

This looks as if it might the source of Nick's problem: his adversary has that password. Did Nick take over an existing installation? It might be that the previous customer is continuing to use the Virgin email address and is using the access the original password gives him to counter Nick's attempts to change the current password.

It would be a reasonable protection against a random stranger closing the account.

The official communication address for a company is the company secretary at the registered address. Send a letter, preferably recorded delivery telling them you no longer wish to use the account from a given date and will no longer be responsible for paying its bills. Whether they then close it is up to them.

Re: Rainbow tables anyone?

The cracker has to get the hash to do this. That might be the case if the site leaks but in that case you'd have to change it anyway. The bigger risk in that case would be if you've used the same password elsewhere so remember - don't do that.

Re: Re-enabling paste

That's odd. They give PayPal as an example and I can't remember ever having a problem pasting there.

I agree but you only have to do it once and the longer you leave it the bigger the job gets.

However, there's no problem in running an ISP and non-ISP address side-by-side so get your independent address first and then take as long as you need to register your change of address with whoever needs you want to know your new address.

For extra advantage register your own domain which allows you to switch the MSP if need be. Since ditching my ISP (Nildram which was fine until a series of take-overs left it in Dido-land) I've switched not only ISP twice more but also switched domain registrar/MSP (ending up with Mythic Beasts and see no reason to swap again).

Re: Smug mode off

What part of an ISP provided email address making it harder to ditch your ISP did you not understand?

One person's war is another hemisphere's developer crunch

Will this attempt to automate S/W development be the Last One?

The Human Genome Project will tell us who to support at Eurovision

Re: American Song Contest aims to tap Eurovision formula

High quality sound in the song contest?

Re: American Song Contest aims to tap Eurovision formula

I think I stopped watching it well before Terry Wogan started presenting it otherwise that would have been the last straw.

Re: Now that is one hell of a tale

Given that a "simple" paternity test costs €74, the fact that a DNA history test costs less is, to me, rather laughable

The paternity testing is basically "Could be and that applies to x% of the populations" or "Couldn't be" so, yes, fairly simple but if need be the lab would have to be prepared to stand over its results in court. It might also have to offer counselling. x should now be a lot smaller than when we used to do this with a selection of immune reactions and blood enzymes.

The ancestry type test is based on whatever percentage of the genome they managed to analyse. This is less than complete which explains why siblings, even identical twins, can end up with different "ancestries". It's then compared with the geographical areas most closely associated with various bits of the subset actually analysed. But a moment's thought will show that if people in N Europe can show up with various percentages of "Mediterranean" or whatever there isn't a clear cut Mediterranean genotype. "Mediterranean", "Baltic", "Celtic" or whatever are ill-defined results of human settlement and migration over thousands of years. There's also the issue of what percentage of the subject's genome is part of the geographical variation - the 98% gorilla isn't going to do so.

I suppose it's a good bit better than Madame Xavier with a crystal ball, a pendulum and a shrewd understanding of facial features and colouring can manage but on the whole I think the paternity test is better value for money, especially if they keep the results more confidential than the "ancestry" labs might be wont to do.

Extradited Canadian accused of unleashing NetWalker ransomware

Re: FBI / US Justice Department

He was a small-time criminal operating a franchise. It may have netted him a large amount of money but there's no evidence he had the underlying expertise to set up this sort of operation. If you were in of the latter category would you put yourself at risk in the front-line or let someone like this take the risks?

Infosys, Wipro silent on their Russian operations

Re: If we need someone to finally cripple Russian IT and probably military efforts too...

But are they providing services there or are they outsourcing work from other countries to those offices? If the latter their customers should be worried.