Posts by Doctor Syntax 42398 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"I suspect that the real problem is no one in the organisation wants to manage the organisation's data"
That sounds more like the real problem being that the manglement doesn't realise that its data is a company asset and should be as carefully safeguarded as any other. It's not a matter of wanting to manage - it should be somebody's job.
"The FTTC we do get, is a pathetic 37Mb"
I have a friend who would be quite pleased with that or, indeed, anything reliable. Her house is across the valley from me, a mile or so closer to the exchange and yet on a long line to the same cabinet is my connection a couple of hundred metres or so from me. I doubt that scattering of houses will be on the list for this project even if "North East" were to stretch so far. As ever we're seeing a lucky* few get fibre while those who would be happy with a decent FTTC service get nowt.
* Personally I don't consider myself particularly lucky in having the option of FTTP. I have a satisfactory connection on FTTC.
"People said the same about WINE 25 years ago. If Linux could run Windows apps there'd be no market for native ones."
It was a lottery that an application would run on one version of WINE but not on the next or one version of an application would run and another wouldn't. Then they decided they really didn't like 24-bit graphics H/W so there that when the system reported that it substituted 32 because it would align with a 32 bit word & run games faster or the like - the fact it wouldn't run an application at all was not seen as a problem. Enterprise Architect crashed on its splash screen. Stylus Studio would, I think, have run but there were other issues - IIRC the licencing didn't work.
I did a bit of bisection on the code changes until I found that out, removed the nonsense, recompiled and it worked fine but I had to keep doing that for every new release until they finally mad a big change & I never located where they were doing it or even if there was a provision for 24-bit any more. It was easier to run anything that mattered on a W2K VM. Being long retired there's nothing from that era that I really need to run any more.
For products which need to interface with others the best approach is a double one. For providing a service follow the official specification. For receiving a service allow for the possibility that other providers might not be so good and be generous in accepting departures. The second, however, has the risk of something deliberately nasty being sent down the line which means that being generous comes with the cost of carefully vetting the data.
"OS/2 was a better OS than both Win 95 and Win NT 3.1/3.51 for a time - it ran faster and smoother than both if you knew which hardware it liked"
OSs were originally developed by H/W manufacturers for their own H/W. OS/2 belonged to that world view. Unix had already changed things. An OS was now the becoming a platform to offer a common S/W platform over a widening variety of H/W. In that world view not needing to know what H/W it liked was a merit. That made OS/2 a better OS only for a world that was already passing into history.
Because the PC was essentially a skunkworks-type project done by people from the wider industry. PS/2 was corporate IBM. Corporate was, I think, already moving in on the AT. Ever looked at the cable you needed to make up to connect a 9-pin D to the headers on the board? Whoever specified that didn't know that in the outside world the pin numbering on a board header isn't the same as on a D connector.
It would depend on what they perceived as "best". Taking your printer example, is it best to make assumptions about hardware signalling or to work with as many printers (and cables) as possible?
I take it as an axiom that any assumption you make when developing S/W becomes a limitation of the product.
DECNet assumed that all NICs were DEC and hence had the upper however many bits of the MAC all the same. The lower bits were the DECNet IDs
We needed to have HP-UX talk to a VAX so bought a DECNet implementation for the HP (I dread to think of the hoo-hah we might have had with the VAX team to do it the other way around). What we'd forgotten to allow for was that when we ran it it modified the HP's MAC to fit in. All the PCs lost their network connections for a minute or so until they rediscovered the server and updated their ARP tables.
Back in the day I had a dedicated xterm and wanted to build another using a PC. I managed to do an end run round whatever obstacles BT procurement might have put in the way by buying an xterm kit which comprised a network card, the xterm S/W and something called Windows 386 which was presumably Windows 3 before it got called that.
Someone else in BT ring me up for sourcing details, basically because he wanted the what was basically the same network card; the same card was available via BT procurement but in typical BT fashion they'd broken its leg by specifying some modification for some particular purpose which made it unsuitable for anything else.
You need to include the small business/everything else* market which certainly wouldn't have come over IBM's horizon as corporate but which I would have thought would have been bigger than the home PC market but, like the home market, wouldn't have been signing up for OS/2.
* e.g. laboratory instrumentation
That's why I said the original, i.e. Julian calendar. We're still living with the results of not switching with the rest in that the financial year runs from April 6th - instead of Lady Day.
I suppose suspending leap seconds will stoke up a similar problem on a smaller scale.
There are two types of marketing department. One works to find out what potential customers want and then goes to the designers to commission it. The other sits around in isolation, decides what it wants to sell, commissions it and then tells potential customers what they want. We're looking at the latter, resorting increasingly to FUD.
I think everything about Amazon has been built with the principle that things will go according to assumptions and make no provision for alternatives. It's more likely that there was a built-in assumption that a phone number would be provided, just as there was an assumption that nobody would be struck by a vehicle and shot.
"when the UK's British Telecom's Prestel text message service was attacked."
Doing something about it took about another decade with Project Argent, if memory serves. It was a box ticking exercise.
I got involved and the reviewer of my report turned out to have a background in security. Physical security. It was a farce. One of the questions, presumably a bit of arse covering from higher up asked the reporter to confirm that the applications had no undocumented functionality or words along those lines. I think it was probably intended to deal with the situation where some departed dev. left a little time-bomb to require payment to keep it going*. I refused to tick that box. When this was challenged I suggested they ask BT procurement to say whether they thought Microsoft would provide that assurance. The requirement was dropped when procurement replied.
Systems in use got a desultory review as a consequence. Departments had to appoint a security officer. It was about the time I left - the whole project was the sort of thing that got dumped on someone who was leaving - but came back on contract to cover, as someone with no particular security background, for the appointee, also with no particular security background, to return from sick leave to take up the post.
The major weakness was obvious. We could review out own code. We could have consultants come and review out own code if manglement felt we weren't up to it. Our own code could be reviewed to the Nth degree. Everything else - OSes, RDBMSes, whatever had to be taken on trust.
AFAICS the only difference between then and now is that the situation is far worse in terms of supply chain vulnerability. Outsourcing has made it worse. Growth in system complexity has made it worse. Network connectivity has made it worse. Why, for example, do organisations have to buy in a file transfer package which, from reports, simply seems to just wrap up FTP, something any admin ought to be able to do, and at the same time provide its own extended attack surface?
* There was something close in an accounts package that would make payment demands to any user as licence renewal came up.
"how to work out which error message was actually the meaningful one"
That was easy with the ICL FORTRAN compiler. It was the first. All the rest were presumably because it couldn't get its parser back on the rails again so everything after the first error looked wrong.
Given the performance of my less than a year old car's ability to work out the current speed limit this is worthless.
First of all, it doesn't retain the last known speed limit so when it's started it doesn't know the current speed limit and won't find out unless and until it passes a speed limit sign. Secondly, when presented with a cross roads where a national speed limit crosses a lower limited road and turning from one to the other it does not consistently choose the correct limit. Thirdly it will miss badly placed signs altogether, Fourthly I've seen it pick up the correct limit and seconds later be confused by something - possibly some other street sign - and drop into its don't-know mode.
I've seen it display 30 where the correct value would be 70 and 60 where the correct value would be 30. And to cap it all where I live a network of lanes connect a road at national speed limit and a road at 30 with no signs in between. It's clearly a case of the legislators believing everything the salesmen told them.
"Customers do not need to take any action, and it's not clear whether any of the data was exposed other than by the researchers."
If it's not clear whether data was accessed by others it's not so much a matter of customers not needing to take action as not knowing it there might be any action they could take whether they needed to or not.
That's in relation to this specific leak. ISTM that if it can be linked to individuals then the collection of the data in the first place is a GDPR violation. Remediation of that is an action customers might well need to consider.
Vikings did, in fact introduce a good few words into English as a whole and rather more in the old Danelaw. That's because they settled as ordinary members of the population. Romans & Normans were an elite, minimally connected to the population. The Normans contributed a few words on account of their social situation, sheep vs mutton being the best known example. I suppose Latin might have loaned words into Welsh - perhaps any Welsh speaking commentard could give examples.
It used to be said that particle physics was like hitting a watch with a hammer and working out how the watch worked by examining the bits. Population genomics seems to me more like collecting a lot of watch bits and working out which of numerous watches each bit came from. As far as I can understand the methods here (which isn't very far as yet) the objective seems to be to reduce the choice of watches.
I'm looking forward to seeing more detailed results. The immediate post-war generation of archaeologists, perhaps understandably, disliked the idea of invasions & insisted that nothing could be called an invasion without written evidence which rather restricted invasions to areas and times with a written history. Roman, Viking & Norman invasions of Britain couldn't be gainsaid but they were against the idea of Anglo-Saxon invasions or folk-movements even though the scanty continental sources, later English and Welsh tradition and the only contemporary insular source, Gildas, all point to such a thing together with the fact that there was a lasting change of language which neither Roman nor Norman invasion managed. Current DNA and chemical analyses are starting to point to genuine folk movements so hopefully this will clear things up.
"XX Megawatts of compute". That's a meaningless phrase or a something that can mean many different things.
It's just following an old political tradition - measure the inputs rather than the putputs.
"We spend x% more per year on Y than Z did when they were in power." It should be an unequivocal statement and the only response for Z is to promise to spend even more. But it's a measure of input. Producing measures of outputs to prove value for money is harder so doesn't get talked about because Z would challenge it immediately.
Dealing in terms of inputs is even more important if you're in the habit of taking money form investors and haven't really anything at all to show for it.
They shouldn't. The clue should be in the name. Take the 20th century. Does the 2000 start with 20 (and continue with 00 for 100 which is what century means)? Then it should be in, and the last year of, the 20th century.
Somebody who should have known better, the editor of the 3rd volume of the Wakefield manorial rolls, made the same error in relation to regnal years (the rolls are dated in the form the umpteenth year of Thingummy) so consequently all the dates given have an off-by-one error in the years.
"French is a significantly more minimalist language, with both simpler grammar and smaller vocabulary"
OTOH it suffers from serious inflectitis* and has to borrow vocabulary from other languages for new concepts until the Academie Francaise gets round to dealing with the matter.
* But at least it handles 2nd person better. English has removed the intimate tu/thee.
"I think English was used in BASIC because it was written by people in the US and UK to be sold to people in the US and UK."
A little more indirection might be necessary. It was more likely to have been because English was used in FORTRAN & COBOL but used there for the reasons you give.
It becomes a self-sustaining processes. People whose native language is not English are likely to create programming language that use English words simply because the programming languages they land their potential users earned, possibly even BASIC, also use English words.
Imagine a world without pocket calculators where you've never interacted with a minicomputer, you've never sat at a teletype which is waiting for a BASIC command and you're sitting at a desk with a pencil and got a stack of coding sheets in front of yu.
That's where some of us started. What was worse, once the compiler (for that's what it was) had encountered PRONT it would issue an error but then continue and as, after PRONT, it had no continuing context which made sense so it would issue an error on the next line and each succeeding line until it was knocked on the head by a counter which ony allowed it to issue 100 errors or the like. Then you had a little while to correct it - if you were very lucky you'd be allowed to punch the card yourself - before the next deadline to put the job through again followed by another 2 hour wait.
You either made very slow progress or you got fairly good very quickly. You also really appreciated every step towards a personal computer far more than anyone who started out later than that.
