Posts by Doctor Syntax

Excel Hell II: If the sickness can't be fixed, it must be contained

Re: Application abuse

CSV has the advantage of being plain text, human readable if need be. It doesn't have to be fed into a spreadsheet - it can be manipulated with any text processing S/W.

Re: Is it 'Excel is dead' time again?

Far from it. It's Excel is unfortunately still alive time again.

Re: I don't why she swallowed a fly

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.

Re: I don't why she swallowed a fly

"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.

Tesla goons will buy anything – including these $150 beers

Don't even go near the Tesla brain-computer interface.

Birmingham set to miss deadline to make Oracle disaster 'safe and compliant'

Re: I'm confused by this

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.

If he's the auditor his core concern is to find the costs, not deal with the overrun. That' should be somebody else's job.

Re: Tunnel, lights visible at end, may not be oncoming train

"Would be interesting to calculate a liability per job figure"

They'll probably use a spreadsheet and we can see where that will get them.

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

Re: IBM, too, maybe...

I remember once seeing a picture of a skip lorry where the skip had decided it was tired and didn't want to get up.

If you're brave enough to move fully-laden datacenter racks, here's the robot for you

"Waiting for a puny human to do the job isn't feasible, Jtec suggests."

So wait for a non-puny human instead.

As it prepares to abandon its on-prem server products, Atlassian is content. Users? Not so much

I'm not entirely sure you're right. It's more a case of knowing a lot about IT and using it to screw customers.

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

Re: These things happen everywhere

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.

Re: This is why I have a job

It wasn't enterprise management scale.

Re: "The NHS suffers from a chronic shortage of anesthetists"

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.

Re: Excel Errors

"Then they feed it into the real financial systems."

Either that or it is their real financial system.

"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.

Re: "The NHS suffers from a chronic shortage of anesthetists"

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.

Re: This is not an IT failing

Management at a higher level still should have determined that spreadsheets were not an appropriate tool for the job and formidden their use.

Re: Excel for dodgy databases

Once you start involving professional design, data types, etc Is the spreadhseet even needed. Just design and build a real application to do the job.

"a complex and confused approach to using spreadsheets led to the disaster"

When managers try to manage by spreadsheets is there any other approach and any other outcome?

530K people's info feared stolen from cloud PC gaming biz Shadow

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.

Can open source be saved from the EU's Cyber Resilience Act?

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?

Re: Seems like a simple fix

The paragraph spanning pp 9 & 10 excludes motor vehicles and trailers subject to type approval under existing regulation. Pity, but there it is.

"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?

Re: Unpopular opinion: The act isn't that bad.

"Or maybe he's one of the crazy people that likes using gas chromatograph to see if the food he's eating includes arsenic or heavy metals."

Well played, sir.

Re: EC <> European Council in this context

OTOH I've not heard of Finland joining the US.

EPA flushes water supply cybersecurity rule after losing legal fight with industry, states

Re: Ah, the land of the best Justice money can buy

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.

Re: Ah, the land of the best Justice money can buy

It has to be asked whether the US constitution - of which they are ridiculously proud - is fit for purpose in the C21st.

Re: This will end well

So any hackers taking over a US water installation will be elected and accountable, right? Or have I misunderstood you?

NASA reschedules Boeing's first crewed Starliner flight for mid-April 2024

Was the crewselection by drawing straws?

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Let me guess. There was an old printer just sitting there waiting to be scrapped.

Microsoft gives unexpected tutorial on how to install Linux

Re: WSL 3

"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.

"Perhaps recommending Chrome OS Flex as a replacement for macOS is a step too far even for Microsoft just yet."

It's possible they're trying to edge their business to a Microsoft equivalent of this - it's just that they expect you to run their web services rather than Google's and don't really mind if you do that from Linux.

My SiL has a W7 machine and uses nothing beyond the web browser (including email) and Excel. A few months ago she had a look at W10 & decided it would be too different for her to upgrade.

I don't have a W7 instance I could try this on but the download link in the Which article appears to work in that it downloads an exe file.

Bennu unboxing shows ancient asteroid holds carbon and water

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.

The panspermia hypothesis is just throwing the problem over the wall. As regards organic compounds its proponents need to read up about Miller and Urey and then visit Occam the barber for a closer shave.

AI safety guardrails easily thwarted, security study finds

Re: " AI safety guardrails easily thwarted"

"Until the machine actually understands what it's spewing forth and exercises moral responsibility for it"

If the two were linked that would exceed a good many instances of human intelligence.

Re: Bollocks

Which? Benevolent Rust or Corrosive Contradiction?

Everest cybercriminals offer corporate insiders cold, hard cash for remote access

A high risk strategy. I'm sure law enforcement could use such an approach to gain access to the gang.

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

Re: How many simulate consciousnesses ...

I'm disappointed. I'd hoped someone would come along to say they had but the margins weren't wide enough to fit it in.

Re: How many simulate consciousnesses ...

"Philosophers gotta eat, too."

Do you have a proof of that statement?

Generative AI slashes cloud migration hassles, says McKinsey partner

Re: Why would anyone trust someone from McKinsey?

Are you calling your partner a crook?

It sounds like a house of cards.

Software patch fixes Euclid space telescope navigation bug

Re: Windowlicker

As things stand it seems to point to a gap in existing physical theory. Experience shows that when you fill in gaps the new knowledge means something potentially useful right here on Earth.

Go ahead, let the unknowable security risks of Windows Copilot onto your PC fleet

Re: User free

You won't operate Windows, Windows will operate you.

What to expect when the UK-US Data Bridge comes into force this week

Re: It's always from The World to The USA

I think there's one simple principle that would sort this out for good. If I hand over personal information to a second party for some reason that party becomes directly responsible to me, and answerable in a court in the jurisdiction where I live, for safeguarding that information. If they hand it over to a 3rd party they're still responsible, even if that 3rd party hands it over to a 4th party etc. up to infinity, it doesn't matter whichever party is responsible for any abuse, it's the second party on the hook.

The sole exception would be access required by law of the jurisdiction where I live. CLOUD Act? If I don't live in the US the 2nd party is on the hook.

International agreements? The 2nd party is on the hook.

If the 2nd party wants to use a 3rd party they need to come to a judgement about that party's reliability and exposure because they're going to be liable for the 3rd party's failures.

Microsoft says VBScript will be ripped from Windows in future release

Thin end of wedge.

Microsoft's view will be that given that it's not in the browser it can't be tolerated elsewhere because from Microsoft's PoV everything has to be run in the browser using Microsoft's cloud. Of course that applies to any other programming language too. The logical consequence is that all the other programming languages available to Windows will have to follow it. Elementary when you think about it.