Posts by Doctor Syntax

Post Office Horizon Inquiry calls for compensation to be brought forward

Re: They want to delay as long as possible ...

The essence of limited companies and especially of those listed on major stock exchanges is that the share ownership of widely distributed between those who play no part in the management of the company and share ownership is not limited to "powerful and rich people". In fact most of the ownership of PLCs is likely to distributed between pension funds and other investments. If you have any sort of pension fund including corporate pension funds and workplace pension schemes you will have a smidgeon of ownership of a lot of companies, possible even PO and Fujitsu. Does this make you a "rich and powerful person" and more to the point, if your pension scheme owns shares in these companies should you, personally, be prosecuted for their wrongdoings? A company might well be successfully sued for compensation or prosecuted for corporate wrongdoings but that, rightly, does not extend to those who, quite possibly unknowingly, hold shares in it.

Having said that there is no protection for individuals within a company if they knowingly and deliberately break the law in determining and following some course of action for their company. That would include any perjury in providing evidence,* any deliberate perversion of the course of justice or any conspiracy to do those things.

* I spent about 14 years in a job where providing evidence was the sole purpose. I was never in any doubt that the responsibility for the truth of that evidence was solely mine and not that of my employer.

It's not just one scandal, it's a whole stack.

First there's the scandal of the original prosecutions including inducing the innocent to plead guilty.

Secondly the fact that as soon as it was discovered urgent action wasn't taken to proactively and promptly quash every single verdict as unsafe. There may well have been some real fraud cases in there but given the circumstances it would likely have been impossible to work out which they were.

Thirdly the fact that immediate urgent action wasn't taken to proactively and promptly compensate those convicted or forced to make up "deficits".

Fourthly that criminal cases weren't investigated and, where appropriate, prosecuted by the barrier presented by the ongoing enquiry and finally that the PO has been allowed to drag out the enquiry for so long with delaying tactics.

It's not just an IT scandal either, it bears on the entire British justice system. There's an old saying "justice delayed is justice denied.". An awful lot of people are being denied justice.

Twitter ad revenue has halved since Elon Musk took over

"While Zuckerberg's Threads reels in users at record rates"

You mean people are cottoning on?

Re: As someone who does not and will not ever have either a twatter or a zuck imitation account

He seems to favour option 2.

"bit more promising."

Translation: I think there'll still be a few ads

First of Tesla's 'bulletproof' Cybertrucks clunks off production line

a weighty metal ball thrown by chief designer Franz von Holzhausen was able to shatter the "armor glass" on the prototype

Credit for doing their testing in public.

Boris Johnson pleads ignorance, which just might work

Re: Please. No Bozo pictures

A turnip would be too plebeian, I suppose, even if well merited.

Re: surely the phone can be cloned

It's just that it's taken so long for th spooks to get their hands on it.

Re: Boris pleads ignorance

i ii iii iv

It's very hard to remember 1234 when your education is classical rather than mathematical.

UK government faces calls to end IR35 double tax anomaly

Re: The Starmer Party won't do a thing

I reckoned at the time we should have had a whip-round for Labour funds. I'm sure we could have managed half a Bernie,especially as it would be refundable when the press found out. As we'd have had to include some freelance journalists on the basis that they might be affected it would have been hard to prevent them finding out.

Mine's got a brown envelope in the pocket.

Network died, hard, during company Christmas party, leaving lone techie to fix it

Re: "was disposed off shortly after"

There was one stairwell nobody wanted to use after the cleaners gave notice.

Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

Re: I need my Trash

Sometimes it's reasonable to rm stuff with extreme prejudice but a balanced approach is better especially when the only copy of the file you searched for turns up in .local/share/Trash/files

"Where do those people put their actual trash?"

In the trash/recyle bin,of course. Where else would they put anything?

Re: It could be worse

OP was describing chucking out hard copy. The correct system for that is the one pile system: "I know where it it. It's in there."

Re: "you have to wonder how they get home each night

How do we know she can tell one boffin from another?

Re: The old story, Employee is always smarter than the Founder

This particular story is a recurrent one. It will turn up every so often in every Who Me, On Call or any other IT forum and, if you've read the comments, you'll see that the articles that prompt it are only the tip of the iceberg as commentards will add there own experiences.

You'll also find a few of us complaining that email clients are to blame for poor design; personally I'd like to think that some day someone working on Thunderbird, Outlook or whatever would read such a thread and undertake a bit of introspection.

However it does provide a bit of light relief to read of someone who's bullied their way to the top get a bit of comeuppance for failing to have picked up a few working skills along the way.

Re: This is more common than you think

Presumably these Linux boxes were servers, not PCs that get shut down every night - or even more regularly than that. The contents of /tmp are not unimportant but the application would be expected to manage its temporary files. Also, a proper shutdown procedure would signal the application to shutdown and give it time to do so. However in the event of an unplanned shutdown it would be important not to clear /tmp because the files in there might need to be recovered.

Paranoia is a requirement for a DBA or any server admin. Managing a server is not the same as managing a PC.

"I've no idea why any remotely sensible person would do this"

The only options the email client provides are usually the Inbox, the Sent folder and Deleted, none of which are appropriate. The more appropriate question is what remotely sensible developer would produce an application like that.

Re: This is I.T's fault , not the Execs

"senior manglement like politicians have the skill set to achive the position they now occupy"

It's devoted to climbing hierarchies and use of elbows. Anything else is an unlikely bonus.

Re: UX Design is Destiny

"on this mail client at least"

Sounds useful. Which one is that.

Re: It could be worse

His logic was that if someone was not screaming for something in the last pile by the time it got there, then it was irrelevant and no longer needed.

"That contract from eight years ago that we're going to sue about. Everybody says you had it last..."

Sometimes stuff is never too old to be irrelevant.

Re: Training?

"Strange, IIRC there was much derision around these parts when the idea for the ECDL was announced, yet here we are today..."

Wasn't ECDL prior to The Ribbon? And indeed, here we are today...

Re: It could be worse

"have people just generally lost that mentality of keeping the inbox tidy?"

Yes. The absence of that pending tray is part of the problem.

Email clients are apparently built by people who have never worked with physical mail. In the past a busy exec would probably have had a PA or secretary who would systematically file mail that needed to be kept. A large bureaucracy might have a registry dedicated to the task. Now we have email clients designed by supposedly clever people which ought to be able to automate all that but which can't even manage the basics.

Re: It could be worse

My computer and physical desktops match each other.

An empty desktop is the sign of an empty head.

Re: Recycle Bin is not permanent storage

It recycles the disk space that the old file/email occupied for reuse.

Re: You wouldn't file your important papers in the wheelie bin

"OTOH we are quite happy for parcels to go into the green wheelie bin"

Quite a lot of our mail could usefully go straight there - it would save me the effort.

Re: "you have to wonder how they get home each night

"The weirdest thing I had to contend with the tube a few years back ... was that apparently the Circle Line no longer operates as a continual loop"

Not having visited London for years I couldn't believe it when I saw it. My regular commute when I worked there was from Marylebone or Paddington to Euston so it would have been a big inconvenience. The name's a big clue as to how it should work. I wonder if it was a Boris idea.

Re: "you have to wonder how they get home each night

"Now, we live near a reasonably large city elsewhere in the UK and have busses and trains that are reasonably regular, but you do learn the timetable."

We have one bus an hour to town which takes 40 minutes but if I drive over to another village there are 4 scheduled and it takes 15 minutes so that's what I do." In fact there were 2 companies on the route vying with each other, each apparently with 4 buses an hour. Since COVID although there are still timetables and the displays in the bus shelters tell when the next bus is due the relationship between the display and arrival of buses is random. In fact although the shelter is only a few minutes from the start of the route I've seen the "due in x minutes" message increase the value of x.

Learning the time-table is of no use whatsoever.

* No I'm not going to drive to town and faff around with trying to guess how long a pay and display ticket to buy.

Re: "you have to wonder how they get home each night

"She asked around for tube schedules"

OTOH if you were to find yourself in my locality (and we have plenty of tourists, including walkers) you might have an unpleasantly long wait at the bus-stop being unaware that there's only one an hour.

Re: "you have to wonder how they get home each night

She was, however, amazed at some of the allegedly clever scientists whose reaction was "but how an I going to get home?"

She, of course, had nothing to do all day except wander round the place. The staff who did the actual work had plenty of other things to occupy their minds. Not having wandered around the place all day and had the opportunity to see which gates were locked and which weren't, they might be concerned that if one gate was locked the rest might also be. If she were that bright she might have realised that.

Re: Oh dear

"His main qualification for the role was that he went to college with the CEO."

But not related? No nepotism there.

Re: Oh dear

You could send repeat offenders bottles of bleach without the "do not drink" instruction.

Re: I need my Trash

As HP-UX was basically a server OS long up-times would be expected so applications ought to make their own arrangements for clearing their /tmp files while an unexpected shutdown might leave important stuff there to be recovered on the next boot.

Re: I need my Trash

If an exec is capable of "saving" messages in Deleted they're not going to be capable of creating new folders; it's an either/or situation due to a limited supply of brain cells. And even when the new folder is created it doesn't have a handy key such as Del to put it there. You then have to provide a filter to move a message from Inbox to Old messages once it's been read. This is really behaviour that should be part of the client if we're going to break users out of this behaviour.

Re: I need my Trash

"Personally, I'd like to see a time limit on trash being implemented at an OS level."

In Linux the trash-empty command is available. It's found in /usr/bin of course.

Without arguments it empties the desktop's trash, with a numeric argument it empties trash older than that number of days. I have it in my KDE startup list to run with a 180 day parameter. It's strictly for trash bins specified by freedesktop.org so it doesn't help with email clients which have their own trash handling.

Re: American English at work?

My client (Seamonkey) labels it "Deleted" but that's equally strange. If it's deleted why is it still there?

Re: Well I'm not alone...

They had apparently been "told" to do it, but when pressed they couldn't say by whom or why.

They probably train each other to do that. The email client doesn't provide any options other than Inbox and Trash or, as someone said above, Drafts. Maybe some use Sent - that probably would get restored in migrations so doesn't become part of support stories.

Re: Oh dear

Remind them that their physical bin gets emptied regularly and they only file stuff there when they want to see the back of it.

Re: I need my Trash

Using trash as storage, temporary or otherwise gets mentioned here from time to time. It seems a big gap in email clients that there doesn't seem to be anything between Inbox - which in any sensible usage ought to be for incoming mail yet to be read and Trash which anyone ought to realise is for stuff held temporarily before deletion. Deletion from Trash ought to be automatic after a configurable interval to discourage use as storage.

Microsoft kicks Calibri to the curb for Aptos as default font

Re: This is most likely a new incompatibility ploy.

"so it's not publicly available other than via a bit of creativity"

It was already available under the previous moniker along with the other candidates. I downloaded it. It's just another meh sans serif.

Your cursive writing probably joins l (or is that I) on to other letters. But do you, like myself, put cross bars at the top and bottom on I (or is that l)? I doubt you use cursive writing for numbers.

Re: set our own preferences

Yea for modernity and symmetry. Who needs legibility and unambiguity?

Re: I like serifs

Are you sure you got the name right? Every reference I can fint to Constantia says it's a serif font.

Sans serif fonts are the triumph of form (for some values of form) over function. The requirement of a font must be to unambiguously indicate the character to the reader. Any font which includes a single vertical stroke as one of its glyphs is apt to be ambiguous between lower case L, upper case i and possibly number one*. A font which has this for two characters is really problematical even if they're differentiated by slightly different lengths and if there are two equal in length you end up with with the worst case which is Arial.

* The way I, and the article, had to convey this surely stands as condemnation.

Search and ye shall find. There seem to be several sites offering downloads. Alternatively Carlito is pretty close.

Lucky backup might save 100 days of data for InfluxData's GCP Belgium users

Re: Am I that old school

True. But if the cloud provider is acting as your DBA they should also have backups, especially when they know they're about to turn off the service. Your backup is against the cloud provider having a bad accident and their routine backups be the same. But natural caution should indicate that a final archive should be taken just in case. But if they don't grok "just in case" and a backup should be available only by accident is beyond belief makes you wonder just what sort of background they have in managing data.

Senator trying to force Uncle Sam to share everything it knows about UFOs

US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has been pulling some strings to force the government to spill what it knows about UFOs - and he won't accept "there aren't any" as an answer.

'There has never been a realistic plan' for UK's £11B Emergency Services Network

"We budgeted £11B. How dare you say that's not a realistic plan?"