Posts by Doctor Syntax 40413 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I've said this already a few times in this thread. You don't have to treat everything as a big project. Deal with things at the right scale with the right tools and the right people.
If HMRC hadn't bolloxed up the freelancing profession the appropriate route here and in very many other cases would have been to engage a freelancer to set something up.
"Someone screwed up with how they merged two datasets, this has absolutely NOTHING to do with the software they were using."
If the spreadsheet had named and/or typed columns it could have warned of a mismatch. Mishandling of data in one way or another is s common post-mortem finding of spreadsheet-based disasters. The situation is common enough by now that spreadsheet wuthors should be aware of it and look at the possibility of adding typing and constraints as an option. That wouldn't, of course, prevent users failing to apply them but users can't be blamed for the option not being there.
"If I just pound hard enough, I can get this square peg to fit, damnit!"
Many years ago a friend had worked at Shorts in Belfast (the aircraft manufacturers). Someone asked him to create a square hole throgh a piece of wood - I suppose it was far too long for chisels or morticing machines. After whoever it was had gone he drilled a round pilot hole, then took a square section bar and hammered it through. The square section bar and hammer were the right tools for the job.
Analyst/programmer was also a job title. I think it's what's needed now. But the CIO wants to be seen in charge of big projects - those are what justify the big salary and having a few A/Ps who can work individually with user departments doesn't fit into that world view. But the A/P can do a lot to solve the coal-face problems that can contribute a lot to the business, perhaps as much as or even more than the big shiny project. In fact you can see they CIOs aren't going to let that happen.
"How about at adding some kind of iterative process allowing them to specify the schema by answering business questions? This allows them to bring their knowledge of the situation to the table rather than hoping ML will spot random anomalies. AI could certainly help suggest questions and drive a graph that would lead to the right kind of schema."
An approach might be to have a user enter some specimen data into a tabular interface. The system would then attempt to interpret the data and ask questions for clarification (is this a date? No What is it then?Name of a gene Should it be treated as text?Yes). Also check whether the data is entered column-wise or row-wise.
However a good start might simply be to require that every column (or row if appropriate) has a title and that on attempting to merge enforce a check that the titles match.
"It sounds more like they gave up on SAP very much too early, to save money one could guess."
That was my point. They may well have been constrained to give up SAP - budget, end of contract or whatever. If, at that stage they were still unable to reconcile the results of running Oracle in parallel they were well stuffed.
The time overrun might be the problem here. There'd be a cost to just keeping the SAP system going. Worse still, if the new system was going to have to handle some new requirements those might have had to have been added to the SAP if it were to be kept going for an extended parallel run. It's not difficult to see how, once they'd run over time, they could get to the position where they might not be able to keep SAP running.
This may come as a surprise to some people, but IT needs to get closer to users. There are situations where big complex systems need complex analysis and testing (Horizon!) but there are others where, with an appropriate set of RAD tools or the like, something can be put together professionally but without the high ceremony methodology. Maybe we lack CIOs who rate serving the business some above running big-budget projects.
Irrespective of the party governments, when they get scared by inflation, try to suppress wage increases. The only wages they can directly affect are those in the public sector so the public sector, all of it, gets hammered whoever is in power.
"so in the real world what is the right solution if it isn't Excel?"
It would appear that there's a gap in the market for a tool which manages data rather better than Excel but which can be configured by non-specialists even if it's not in the Office suite. Of course as it's not in the Office suite the need for it is not even visible to many business users.
with whole company structures being beholden to beancounters
The problem with having things run by beancounters is that there's never budget to do it right in the first place but there's always budget to recover the disaster.
Excel is cheap, fast and "mostly-good-enough *right now*"
I think it's a often a case of looking mostly-good-enough rather than being that.
Rotweillers notwithstanding, going straight to A&E is the appropriate measure. The ECG & biochemistry diagnostics are not likely to be within your GP's capabilities. SWMBO was in a similar situation last year. I took here straight to A&E who transferred her the same night to the cardiac ward at the other hospital in the trust. They got her in for a heart valve replacement ASAP.
CEO Eric Sele declined to say how many people's personal information was accessed in the leak
declined to answer specific questions about the security breach, including if customers' remote Windows instances and storage were compromised.
"we will not comment further."
"Transparency with our community is a key principle at Shadow"
I suppose charity demands that I assume something went wrong in translation from the French, otherwise it would appear that this is an even greater than normal load of bollocks parroted in the wake of a breach.
The Act defines the following:
‘economic operator’ means the manufacturer, the authorised representative, the importer, the distributor, or any other natural or legal person who is subject to obligations laid down by this Regulation;
‘product with digital elements’ means any software or hardware product and its remote data processing solutions, including software or hardware components to be placed on the market separately;
‘manufacturer’ means any natural or legal person who develops or manufactures products with digital elements or has products with digital elements designed, developed or manufactured, and markets them under his or her name or trademark, whether for payment or free of charge;
Is the lone developer in Nebraska's (a term likely to become as much part of legal debate as the man on the Clapham omnibus) library a product or just a digital element used in others' products and/or marketing them under his or her name or trademark?
Is source code as opposed to a compiled binary a product? The binary is subject to any errors that the compiler produces and, in the case of the final running code, the linker.
‘authorised representative’ means any natural or legal person established within the Union who has received a written mandate from a manufacturer to act on his or her behalf in relation to specified tasks;
Does a general licence constitute a written mandate?
‘importer’ means any natural or legal person established in the Union who places on the market a product with digital elements that bears the name or trademark of a natural or legal person established outside the Union;
‘distributor’ means any natural or legal person in the supply chain, other than the manufacturer or the importer, that makes a product with digital elements available on the Union market without affecting its properties;
‘placing on the market’ means the first making available of a product with digital elements on the Union market;
‘making available on the market’ means any supply of a product with digital elements for distribution or use on the Union market in the course of a commercial activity, whether in return for payment or free of charge;
If a product is made available other than with a contract for supply is it commercial activity? If not then can this regulation apply?
"maybe there is an opening for one of those UK type QUANGO's out there, one that has powers to set up the framework, and accept input, like, ooh, I don't know, an IRC :o)"
You really think the current UK govt. - the one that perpetrated the Online Safety Act - would do a thing like that? Or HM's loyal opposition?
It seems to have been a good fit for a geographically dispersed community with the slow communications of the C81th. Communications have improved a tad since then so the requirement to deal with them has gone but the basic design has left what seems to be an excessive number of moving parts into which sand can be thrown and an excessive number of throwers of sand. The big disadvantage of a written constitution is that it is very difficult to change to adapt to changing circumstances.
"I have spent some time trying to get OneNote to run under WINE."
The W10 installation on one of my laptops couldn't run it either. When it booted up it complained about a wrong dll or the like. After a lot of patch Tuesday cycles I noticed it stopped complaining. Whether it works I know not. I'm tempted to look at the possibility of creating a Tb's worth of random words - or select a few random words, arrange them in loose associations and embed copies of them in more random words. Just to add a little data to MS's data mining.
That reminds me, I must check to see if it's monthly patching run has finished yet. It's been going several hours. The Devuan run took about quarter of an hour.
"Why not install Open Shell for her? It makes nearly all of the pain of W10 go away."
I think you underestimate the situation.
Her desktop is littered with icons for all sorts of things including email, most of which seem to be invocations of ie to open specific sites. There's no way I'd start to replicate all that and I suspect there's no way she'd want to do so either. It still would look different even if that were done*. From my point of view it's a matter of quietly tip-toeing backwards out of the room.
BTW she has a degree in physics - from the early 1970s as far as I can recall.
* I could, of course, fake up a Linux desktop to present a reasonable facsimile of either 7 or 10.
There is still only one planet demonstrated to have life on it. The fact that this is extended to anything between "must be others" and "must be ubiquitous where ever conditions are right" is extreme observe bias.
Looked at objectively the number of systems which have to come into existence, come together and become integrated into a working whole makes the existence of life extremely unlikely. Once it exists it's extremely good at propagating the unlikely which is maybe why it seems inevitable.
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