Posts by Doctor Syntax 42272 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Transcribing Meetings? Who on Earth does this?"
Whoever it is they have an amazing amount of control. It's so important a job that, as Sir Humphrey would tell you, sometimes the minutes are written up before hand, just to ensure that they show the correct decisions being taken.
Seriously: I'm on the committee of a charity. A few weeks ago the sec sent round minutes of the last meeting and I had to point out that there was an omission. I needed them to include a point which we had agreed but the minutes missed. It was one that enabled me to give the agreed reply to an enquiry via the web site. Hasty apology and circulation of the revised minutes. The written record matters.
Once upon a time I dodged an employment contract bullet. I was near the end of a research assistantship and the job advertised was a college lecturer teaching MIBiol* which is supposed to be a degree equivalent. I envisaged an arrangement which would be partly teaching, partly opportunity for research. I was offered the job on the spot after the interview and taken aback. This is normally unheard of but said I'd like to think about it. The biggest impediment in my mind was that research assistantships don't pay much, neither did my wife's research student grant - we were flat broke and suddenly realised that we really couldn't afford to move for the job. They were equally taken aback that I hadn't instantly accepted but gave me a copy of the contract to sign when I was ready.
Big mistake on their part. On reading the contract the MIBiol was a sweetener taking up about a third of the time. The rest of the time, in other words, the real job, was just straight A-Level biology teaching.
* Membership of the Institute of Biology.
It seems to have been derived from another project checkrestartneeded. Both are in the repositories for Devuan and Debian but neither is installed on my desklaptop either. It's easy to see why. They're to make sure any updated libraries are broad into action by ensuring everything that runs them gets restarted. Desktop and laptops get rebooted fairly often (unless they're left running for the janitor to come round at night and fix everyone's problems for them) so it's really a server need where there are long-ruiing daemons. But Debian is pretty good at restarting daemons anyway. I wonder if its something that's used for setting up the .deb files before distribution.
"their lawyers can interpret the law"
Their lawyers can argue how they want the law interpreted. It will be the courts and no-one else who actually decide how it should be interpreted and they'll listen to arguments and expert witness from both sides, maybe also from amicus curiae briefs.
It's high time the RFCs for email were updated to make end-to-end encryption the default rather than an add-on, together with adding the required public key infrastructure into the mechanism (add the information as to location of the key store to the domain data and extend the mail sending protocol to request the key). Key store* would mostly become a part of the MSPs' offering.
PGP (I'm assuming this would be the mechanism) would become part of the mail client. Plebmail would scarcely see any difference as Microsoft and Google would provide all that anyway and the user will continue see plain text via MAPI but everyone else will get secure mail. It would get over the problem that virtually nobody uses encrypted email because they don't know anyone who uses it because virtually nobody uses it..
Correction - it's not high time for that now. It was high time for it years ago. It should have been the norm for years so the governments trying to pull this now would have to explain to the world why they're trying to unilaterally wanting to reduce confidential business communication to the equivalent of being written on the back of a post-card.
*Yes, I know. There's also have to be a mechanism for getting the key into the store.
"Clearly, none of them were listening."
I'm sure some of them were. Unfortunately the various agencies who just want their jobs made easier - and preferably done for them by somebody else - have a lot more influence on the relative ministers than backbench MPs. Home Secs are notoriously well house trained very quickly, apart from the few who start that way.
New - and old - laws have to deal with situations, including technologies, that have not even been thought of when they're drawn up. Fitting them to current reality is the job of the courts. Normally this works and has done from the time of Henry II or earlier. The trick is to draw them up without inherent nonsense. In this particular instance the courts are going to have a bit of a problem.
An inbox is not the place to store read mail. A well-run paper-based system will have a filing system to handle old documents. What doesn't fit the filing criteria won't get filed. Problem solved.
Having said that and worked in an organisation with a filing system like that it was important to keep lab notes, instrument charts and any case document received from outside because it might become important a few years down the line. That would have applied even if the information was incorrect; in fact it might have been even more important to have preserved a copy if it was incorrect. Cases can have a long life so the case files have to as well. The best way of dealing with that sort of storage problem back in those days was microfilm.
Nevertheless there seems to be a difference in the way any good programmer asks themselves that question and the way Microsoft do.
Good programmers ask it to probe for likely problems and deal with them in advance. For Microsoft it seems to be a form of self-assurance inviting the answer "Nothing". Of course for the rest of us nowadays, when asked in the context of a Microsoft product, it's asked ironically.
I never found FORTRAN a difficult language to learn, nor did the instructors in QUB. It had been decided that all the lab staff (included me as research assistant but not SWMBO as a research student) would go on a 1 week (i.e. 5 days) course in this mysterious computing stuff.
Compulsory courses did not go down well with me and that may have been how the timing of the previous week's field trip to Scotland for SWMBO somehow ended up with missing the Monday of the course. I never found out what they did on that day because all the programming was fitted in on the Tuesday to Friday and I had no sense of having missed anything. And it was easy.
Having said it was easy we were using coding sheets and punched cards with professional keypunch operators to join the two together. It wasn't something that would have been quite so easy dealing with the rigid line formatting at a terminal although I did, much later, use Microsoft's CP/M version. It also helped that FORTRAN was at its best with what I wanted to do with it - doing some calculations and producing nicely laid out tables of results to plot by hand. Nevertheless, a four day course surely makes it an easy language to learn.
