Posts by Doctor Syntax

Kaspersky cleans up poisoned watering hole, Google presses pause on cookie crackdown

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is unaffected, for example."

So is Devuan.

Real-time tragedy: Dumb deletion leaves librarian red-faced and fails to nix teenage kicks on the school network

Re: Fat Mac

If you're going to use a shared machine you should be prepared to sit there until the program completes. It would have been a learning opportunity for him.

Re: COMMAND.COM

But only by those who knew enough not to delete it in the first place.

COBOL-coding volunteers sought as slammed mainframes slow New Jersey's coronavirus response

Re: How systems were all too often documented in the 60s and 70s

"Once the project was complete, the development team handed it over to support and support would refuse to accept the project as finished and supportable if the code was properly documented."

This!

Development is the process of launching the product into the maintenance cycle. If it's not maintainable that fails. Better still, however, one team owns the product throughout so documentation is self-defence.

Re: comments got out of date, you should just read the code

"Comments don't have to be updated when code is. When things have to be done quickly because money is being lost then updating the comments doesn't help get the fix into production quickly."

You comment the changes as part of check in. You do have a version control system to check it into, don't you?

"In my experience, everybody is a systems analyst nowadays."

In the olden days we used to be "analyst programmers".

Re: No so much COBOL as the tools

In your place I might be tempted to get ahead of them and then ask "Is this what you're looking for?".

Re: We've been saying an upgrade is necessary for literally decades.

"they spend the money on whatever makes them look good now, not for the benfit of the next seat warmer in 5-10 years time."

In that case they should be spending money now, not looking for volunteers.

Re: No so much COBOL as the tools

"RTFM means going looking for a YouTube video."

The more experienced eventually discover Stackoverflow.

Re: How systems were all too often documented in the 60s and 70s

"Always write at least two lines of documentation for every function (Or, even every line of code)."

Specifying quantity without quality doesn't necessarily help.

Hypothetical example:

Function name: AddTwoNumbers

Documentation:

Takes two numbers as argument

Returns sum

Yes, we can work that out from the function name. Now tell us something we can't - why you used this algorithm, why you didn't use something else, what the limitations are.

Re: Volunteers?

Arrogance.

Re: COBOL is still running

"training new programmers"

That's the key phrase. Their issue is not with the difficulty, it's because it involves spending money training people and then paying them. What's worse those are the sort of people who have to know what they're doing whilst they themselves have been getting away without that for years.

Re: No so much COBOL as the tools

Also the tools who've "managed" themselves into this situation.

Minister slams 5G coronavirus conspiracy theories as 'dangerous nonsense' after phone towers torched in UK

Undoubtedly. Because they read it on Facebook. On their mobile phone. It's only ignorance than saves them from needing an irony bypass.

"There have been plenty of anti 3G/4G/5G campaigners for as long as I can remember now.."

And all propagated by means of whatever it was they were campaigning against last.

'Beiderbecke Tapes'

Barbara Flynn!

"Maybe this 5g rubbish has been created to identify gullible idiots"

It only needs an extra twist - that those so identified will be denied treatment if they catch the virus. Get that one circulating and it should end the rumour PDQ.

Absolutely everyone loves video conferencing these days. Some perhaps a bit too much

"Blame that on the "ICT" curriculum"

Not in this case. One of the authors is well into her 80s & the other is in his 70s IAFAIK).

I think it's more likely that if you drag an image into Word or whatever and then crop it there's nothing to tell the user that it's not actually cropping it, just framing it. It's only when you click on Edit with external tool and Gwenview shows you what's actually there that such little UI shortcomings are exposed.

I've been having similar problems cleaning up Word docs originally sent as PDFs to printers so we could put out-of-print books on the website for free download. I find a mixture of huge resolution images and whole page scans cropped down to show just a small part of the document etc.

BOFH: Will the last one out switch off the printer?

Re: the next wrung up.

Or one of the bits nicked from us over 'tops?

Re: "and rather bury"

"virtual autopsies"

??

"my wife refuses to play with me cos she says I cheat, she only says that cos I win all the time"

I've always hated the game as being boring and lasting far too long. Instead my wife has given up playing with our grandson as he always wins.

Cricket's average-busting mathematician Tony Lewis pulls up stumps

Re: Limited over

And it looked a lot more like cricket than the modern short forms. There was advertising back then, not that all those Rabbit banners on the boundaries did any good. And I assume those giant egg-cups were advertising something, whatever it might have been.

As a pundit he could have explained it without having been the author so not necessarily a false memory.

I just checked to see if he was also the Tony Lewis who played for England and later became a cricket journalist. He wasn't. However the Wonkypedia entry for the player shows him as having died on April 1st as well. Outstanding coincidence or wonky editor? I'll settle for the latter whilst wondering of the statistician could have estimated the probability of the former.

Not only is Zoom's strong end-to-end encryption not actually end-to-end, its encryption isn't even that strong

Re: Why do so many businesses seem to need video?

"Communication without visuals is definitely strange though"

We've had the telephone for long enough for most of us to have got used to it.

Re: Why do so many businesses seem to need video?

The usual answer to questions of this type is "Because they can."

"Why do you believe that paying for a product makes it secure?"

What the OP said was If you are not paying for a guaranteed, security based, purpose built piece of software

It's the bit's which you missed out that should give some degree of confidence about security. It may still fail, of course, but being paid for with a guarantee gives the purchaser some degree of come-back that might persuade the vendor to do their est to make it so.

Why is ransomware still a thing? One-in-three polled netizens say they would cave to extortion demands

"when it comes down to getting critical business data back, sometimes there is a case for paying up."

Of course there is, and not just sometimes. So pay up in advance by investing in a proper backup system.

Australian digital-radio-for-railways Huawei project derailed by US trade sanctions against Chinese tech giant

Re: Trade war

Not scrap it, just leave the US out.

Re: "This decision will also ensure the state complies with US trade restrictions.”

But why not simply ship them straight to Oz?

Zoom vows to spend next 90 days thinking hard about its security and privacy after rough week, meeting ID war-dialing tool emerges

Helped along by the fat finger.

"So much so, Zoom published advice on how to keep uninvited morons out of private conferences."

That's half the problem solved then.

US prez Trump's administration reportedly nears new rules banning 'dual-use' tech sales to China

What happens if those dual use products also have a use in medical equipment, say ventilators, which get exported to the US? One of the effects of globalisation is that it's not a big world any more. Or, to put it another way, it's difficult to shoot somebody else without your own foot getting in the way.

Here's what Europeans are buying amid the COVID-19 lockdown – aside from heaps of pasta and toilet paper

Re: Lost post

On neither ground is it an appropriate address field in the UK.

Re: Lost post

We're not quite the same - House name, Road name, Post town about 2 miles away. At least post code works for us. The other day I tried ordering something over the phone from the local pharmacist - their merchant S/W required a house number to verify a card payment over the phone.

And what's this "City" field so many forms have? I haven't lived anywhere that ranked as a city for the last third of a century.

Re: Lost post

OTOH they're the most reliable here. I've had all manner of problems with other carriers who seem to either lose stuff in their systems, deliver to the wrong house or simply not see a house name carved in 6" high letters on a block of stone. Under normal circumstances I prefer to get Amazon stuff delivered to a locker. Vendors' systems that can't cope with a house not having a number are another problem.

The posties, however, know us, would be able to deal with a misaddressed parcel and also know enough to link us and our daughter who lives a mile away and have been known to leave her parcels with us when they didn't have anywhere handy to leave it there. It's the sort of thing that happens out in the country!

Huawei P40 pricing is in step with previous P-series efforts – but flagship lacks the apps punters have come to expect

No social media? I call that value for money.

Marriott Hotels hacked AGAIN: Two compromised employee logins abused to siphon off 5.2m guests' personal info

Re: Expectation

True, but if they had a reasonable expected amount shouldn't an alarm have been triggered at much, much less than 5.2 million records?

Zoom's end-to-end encryption isn't actually end-to-end at all. Good thing the PM isn't using it for Cabinet calls. Oh, for f...

"Setup and use is idiot-proof."

Idiot proof or idiot friendly?

Because the government overruled them? It's not unknown for top management anywhere to decide that rules only apply to little people and do their own insecure thing.

Re: What else is there?

Take a look at what can be built on NextCloud, assuming you have the capacity to host it yourself.

Re: Boris: You sacked Bob Quick for less!

There was quite a back story to that as the Grauniad article explains. It struck me at the time that if he hadn't upset the then opposition he might have survived. If you put yourself out on a limb expect it to be cut off.

Re: To be clear ...

It should be part of the S/W. If they advertise end-to-end encryption and mean it the way the rest of us expect it to be meant then they'd need to do that. The user need never be aware of it.

Re: Surprising. Or not.

I'm not sure the cabinet counts as one of the most advanced nations on the planet.

How many days of carefree wiping do you have left before life starts to look genuinely apocalyptic? Let's find out

"only have four of any one alcohol product"

That explains it. Daughter is doing the shopping for us and some of her neighbours. She left the entire till-roll with our shopping this morning & it started off with 4 bottles of Chardonay.

"as the weather warms"

Not much sign of that here.

Welcome to the telco, we've got fun and games: BT inks 5-year deal to outsource mainframe management to IBM

"The five-year contract with IBM nestles well with BT's intention to close the public switched telephone network by 2025."

I wonder. Applying the basic law of project timelines "close the PSTN by 2025" translates to "close the PSTN starting in 2025 at the earliest". When that happens we can reasonably expect customer support calls to go up just as the contract for supporting this system supporting customer service ends. From IBM's PoV the renewal nestles well with that, maybe from the BT side not so much.

Talk about ill-gotten gains: Coronavirus KOs Xerox's $30bn months-long hostile takeover bid of HP Inc

Re: aren't they doomed anyway ?

"This was all Carl Icahn's baby from the get-go"

Is it too much to hope that he'll lose money from it?

Re: aren't they doomed anyway ?

It sounds just like the sort of thing for SoftBank to sink its money into.