Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"For a while, it remained possible in the Waterfox Classic fork of pre-Quantum Firefox, but today, sadly, that browser is barely usable anymore."
What about Palemoon and/or Basilisk?
Actually an article on the Mozilla spin-offs would be welcome. I've read the long article on the Palemoon site and left with the impression that it's the XUL Liberation Front vs the Liberation Front for XUL or something along those lines. Throw in Epyrus & the Matt Tobin projects for good measure.
"Just like Jansen, Kirkby inherits a massive cost-cutting programme that will see up to 55,000 BT jobs wiped by out by 2030."
I think the target is to reduce staff to board, C suite, an outsourcing contract manager, their PAs and receptionist, a tea-lady an extensive catering staff and a cleaner.
"Vote With Our Feet"
Yes, indeed. Home page has long been DDG. Because Google, email login suddenly decided my preferred client wasn't good enough for them I switched the use (which was simply to receive the Contact us messages from a web site elsewhere). In fact almost the only email I see from gmail addresses is spam.
"the BBC has only limited resources they can only certify a restricted number of browsers such as Chrome based ones, Safari or Firefox"
In that case they should have stuck with the earlier version that worked on all browsers instead of employing kiddies who want to fix what wasn't broken. Breaking it cost them salaries. Unfortunately BBC management has never been known to be wrong. You can take their word for that.
Alex Russell ... took to Mastodon to urge people to withhold their judgment until WEI is more fully developed.
"Particularly in the early design phase, lots of ideas are bad!" Russell said.
That seems to be just the time to not withhold judgement. If bad ideas aren't stamped on PDQ they tend to stack around.
"the only way to test the output of a change is to actually deploy it in production."
One program in the system I looked after had been written by a programmer who, thankfully, had left long ago. It always annoyed me because of her odd programming style. It largely consisted of much the same code repeated multiple times. It was ripe for refactoring as we say now but maybe not at the time.
Late one afternoon I decided to tackle it.
One block of code was repeated several times. Copy that into a function and replace all the repetitions with a function call. Very straightforward. This must have shrunk the LoC to about half.
The remainder of the repetition consisted of two similar but not quite identical blocks of code each repeated several times. Not quite so straightforward. Copy one version into a new function adding a switch parameter then add the different sections of the version using the switch parameter to decide which t call.
Replace the repetitions with function calls taking care to use the correct value of the switch.
We now have a much simpler program, a fraction of its original size. It ought to be easier to understand what it's supposed to do which was one of the objectives of the change. But the remainder is still a bit of a tangled mess. Sorting through it to work out just what data would be need to test all the alternative paths would still take ages.
Well it was really all very much a mechanical replacement - the same code is being run, just from one of the two new functions instead of inline. Of course it must still work exactly the same as before.
It was now early evening. Why not put it live?
So I put it live.
Of course it worked exactly the same as before - what did you expect?
Web applications are missing a lot of the "systemness" we expect from traditional computing environments
It depends on what you consider a traditional computing environment. In my working world that was a multi-user database system. If there were access levels for different categories of user it may well have been down to the application designer to build in safeguards.
If Buildings Maintenance was to be prevented from seeing tenant financial data that might be an administrative matter to ensure that Buildings Maintenance didn't have access to the screens for financial data. If, on the other hand, Crawly Buildings Maintenance shouldn't see data on Coventry buildings and vice versa but Estates Management could see data for both then it would have to be handled by something a bit more complex in the application itself.
What web applications are missing is a lot of statefulness and shoving responsibility for that onto the client.
"An IT director unfamiliar with basic computer operation? Say it ain't so!"
Why should it be so?
IT directors fall into 3 categories:
- Those who have a purely administrative background - maybe a degree in music or whatever - rather than IT.
- Those who have operational IT experience but with obsolete systems.
- Those with operational experience of current systems.
It's not easy to say which category is the most dangerous.
Add the date and time to your note - both the date and time of the request and of the note.
Best to have a procedure in place that instructions have to be written "for the log" so that asking for written instructions for something dodgy can't become confrontational quite so easily.
"I guess Trump has a gift for recognizing corruptibility"
His minions are probably a self-selecting crowd, slow to disabuse themselves of the reality of what's in front of them. They were probably last of their age group to realise there was no Santa Clause.
It seems an effective way of getting a reputation which will lose business in the long run.
With rented houses comes the little matter of leaving the garden in good order. A group of us had rented a house which was actually the property of the parents of another student* who had gone abroad for a year. One of the students was a farmer's son so at the rental he just got one of his father's farm workers sent along to sort it out.
* The student was sent down having been discovered depositing the Greek professor's bike in a lecture room. The bike was in two pieces which he'd just separated with a hacksaw. To be fair the Greek department's bikes were an ongoing problem - I don't think the staff had grasped the fact that they were no longer in Oxford.
"I have little time for landlords not being quick to remedy faults."
It's not necessarily landlords. When we were first married we rented a top-floor flat & had problems getting the leaking dormer fixed because we were dealing with agents. They never did fix the major crack where the staircase block was coming away from the house. It wouldn't have been in the owners' interests to let the property deteriorate to that extent but it would put the agents to a certain amount of effort beyond the collection of rent and deducting their fee.
OTOH The US is having development of a plant put on hold due to shortage of skilled labour. Not my area but I'd guess the skill shortages include preparation of masks, adjustment of the machines and handling of various nasty chemicals involved. I'm sure others here could add to and correct that list.
One thing you omitted to mention is wafer manufacture. There will be a whole lot of specialist skills involved in that.
These are skills of which there are probably not many holders at any age level. I doubt anyone holding them will be unable to get a job at any age but it's not surprising that that they want to concentrate training on those who are likely to use them for longest.
The politicians only want back doors because they've been told by the security services that having a back door in communications is a Good Thing. It comes back to the security services wanting it at the expense of operational security of everyone else.
I suspect politicians don't think any communication is secure because however technically secure their communication channels might be at least one of them will blab anyway.
"I do understand why this is the case, but it is a sad reflection on a companies progress from innovative development to boring reseller (or ad broker)."
However somewhere there will still bea competitor who knows how to be innovative and will eventually eat their lunch.
In anybody's world a socket with something lugged into it is just that - a socket in use. When you're on somebody else's premises unless you know that it's OK to unplug it you should assume it isn't. He had a flat battery in his screwdriver - his fault, of course - so why not use an ordinary one? Unless that was his only screwdriver he didn't have to plug it in. He certainly didn't have to plug it in without asking.
"Some sympathy for the workman here. He has to do his job. That's his imperative."
No. He's on customer's premises. Their imperative comes first. If he has been so careless as to roll up without a fully charged screwdriver and the only socket available says "Do not switch off" then he should ask where he can plug in. He had no idea what damage he might cause by unplugging it.
"A spoof of say the Lord of the Rings is fine if it changes names to sillier ones and rewrites the text sufficiently to avoid direct plagiarism of stretches of writing."
You might find the guardians of Tolkien's estate taking issue with you. They (or possibly it was the film company, I can't remember which) have been know to come down on what they considered misuse.
If it's not right for law enforcement to get the data without a warrant by buying it the obvious question is how can it be right for other parties to get hold of it by buying it, T&Cs notwithstanding? The only logical conclusion is that privacy of such information is a right that should not be capable of being waived in T&Cs. Does the US have an equivalent to Marcus Schrems to tkae this to court?
On the basis that it was supposed to be possible to prod it into regurgitating training code I decided to see if it could be prompted into repeating a minor discrepancy from the RFC I'd noticed in a FOSS library*. It took some prompting to get it to produce something in the specified language. It didn't reproduce a minor discrepancy from the RFC - it produced something that didn't go anywhere near it.
* Note to self: get on with reporting the bug.
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