Posts by Doctor Syntax

BOFH: I care a lot ... about onion bhajis

The PFY could have complained about having his intelligence insulted by the reflective listening traing. But I suppose that's best saved for one of manglements' alleged motivational courses.

Duelling techies debugged printer by testing the strength of electric shocks

Re: Been There

"the supplier allowed me to speak to them directly "

What was the drill for this?

The Great DB debate: SQL extensions won't solve the graph problem

Re: data access

"you need direct control of the storage device"

My database engine was Informix which, at least on Unix boxes, allowed access to the character devices in /dev which is about the closest you can get without having the database engine include a H/W driver. Linux doesn't offer that although it does provide something close in terms of tweaking the block device (it's so long since I looked at this that I can't remember the details).

Although it's possible to use the OS's file system (reads and writes to files in /srv have the same semantics as devices in /dev) this was usually avoided for production systems except for earlier versions and what they called the Standard Engine.

AFAICS there are three aspects to this: data model, query language and processing engine.

I'm not familiar with graph databases but it did seem to me that edges simply model those relationships in ER representations which would be modelled as link tables in a relational database. Alternatively are there situations where a graph data model does not have an equivalent relational model? If there are none, then it would seem that the data models are equivalent*.

If they are equivalent then could a pre-processor convert a graphical query language statement to SQL and vice versa? If so then does that mean the languages are equivalent?

If so that just leaves one question: Different workloads work best with different processing engines - who knew?

* Link tables are only needed for many-to-many relationships. I can't see that graph databases would be unable to cope with relational models that have simple joins and that there would not be situations where a relational model would not have an equivalent graph model.

Adidas grapples with $1.3B in unsold Yeezy sneakers after breaking up with Kanye West

"The people that are saying send the shoes to Turkey or somewhere where people don't have shoes or there has been a tragedy happening"

There is nothing in there that precludes donating them to a first world charity to raise money. In fact, the Beeb's report says "Adidas said it was considering selling the footwear and donating the profits to charity and had ruled out other options, such as burning them."

Of course they'll all end up in land fill one way or another.

Re: Maybe, just maybe

" Were they really expecting to sell that many???"

PT Barnum wouldn't have shared your doubts.

My guess is that the people who sold them at a profit wouldn't be those in need, nor would they be just selling a pair but a container's worth. I can't blame him for wanting to feed a few black-marketeers.

Re: Maybe, just maybe

The article deals with that. They'd just be sold back into the market and someone would make a big profit. It's doubtful that the someone would be the intended beneficiaries.

Maybe the best solution would be to donate them to a charity or charities who would sell them and use the proceeds.

Inaugural flight of first (mostly) 3D-printed rocket aborted

So it's Bad Luck, No Fun.

UK Prime Minister wants £800M to spend on big British iron

"is "iron" an acronym I missed?"

No, it's just that a "big iron" is "irony" and a £800m "big iron" is "ironical".

It's all relative

You're overlooking the nature of political time and political event horizons (general elections).

It will reduce spending within the event horizon.

£2B in UK taxpayer cash later, and still no Emergency Services Network

Re: IR35 changes

2017? Try 1999.

Youngsters today, mumble, mumble...

A new version of APT is coming to Debian 12

Re: APT

Yes. APT is Advanced Persistent Threat, apt is a Debian command. Command lines are case sensitive.

'Thousands' at Meta face layoffs this week

Re: Obligation to workers....

"Surely the fine professor knows that in the USA, the only obligation is to the wealth of the shareholders."

Probably.

According to the article and also following the link to what he said he also knows that these lay-offs don't contribute to that wealth.

"without a rationale for doing so"

There probably is a rationale: keeping activist investors off their backs if they don't follow the pack.

Ex-Tweep mocked by Musk for asking if he'd actually been fired

Yes:

https://www.gov.uk/wind-up-a-company-that-owes-you-money and

https://www.gov.uk/options-if-youre-owed-money (see under "Make an official demand")

For someone who reckons their grudge is worth risking the fees and outstanding debt...

"Just add it to the pile of unpaid bills Twitter is racking up and we'll see if this one actually gets paid."

I wonder if they have the liquidity to meet all these bills. Maybe someone will go nuclear and apply for the US equivalent of a winding up order, assuming such a thing exists in the US.

WFH? Google Cloud's offices like a 'ghost town' before new policy

Re: You cannot eat your cake and have it.

But I do miss the scavenging opportunities that came with having a desk next to a conference room frequently used for lunch meetings between people who all seemed to have decided lunch was for wimps. The stack of untouched Cointreau crèmes brûlées is a particularly glowing memory.

As I read it - and I've just gone back and read it over again - he seems to be doing exactly what you said he should do, not what you are saing he is doing. Much desk space is underused so they're getting rid of it and those who do come into the office on different days are going to have to share desks and they're getting rid of the surplus real estate.

US lobbyists commission report dismissing proposed EU cloud regulations

And with the CLOUD Act they have to make sure it really is independent. Some sort of franchising operation seems to be called for.

So it's OK for the US to restrict access of Chinese firms because the Chinese govt. could lean on them to extract data but it's not OK for the EU to restrict access for US firms because the US govt could lean on them to extract data. Does that sum it up accurately?

'Brittle' Twitter suffers bad case of the Mondays: Links, pics, vids fail

Re: Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint

"It pays for each of these."

Existing creditors might say that's a bold assumption.

China accelerates drive for scientific self-sufficiency

Re: How CCP is El Reg?

It's an Asian news round-up article. Did you seriously expect it to NOT contain anything China related?

Salesforce promises to follow the Oracle playbook

The Barnum effect is quite powerful.

Financial red tape blamed for London losing Arm IPO

Re: Brrrreeeeeexxsshiiittt

If you read TFA Brexit isn't mentioned once.

But as you wish to bring the topic up am I remembering incorrectly when we were told that Brexit would free us from red tape, we'd be rule makers, not takers, and consequently avoid this sort of thing?

You got your Brexit. ARM chose not to list here in spite of this new freedom.

Are you now trying to blame remainers for its failure?

Re: The bind

Brexit was supposed to remove red tape and avoid this sort of thing.

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

It may not function by displacing oxygen but unless the room is sealed introducing a volume of one gas will displace an equivalent volume of whatever other gases were previously there.

Re: Change window - cue the drums

Given sufficient levels of arthritis in the hands the only way to open a child-proof medicine container is to outsource the job to a child.

Re: pizza is the perfect food

Rules and policies should come with a rationale. It works both ways - it can show they should be waived in such circumstances and it can also be pointed out to manglement when it's a legislative or regulatory requirement they're trying ignore.

Re: Why would one ...

"I once put a pan of water on to boil some eggs, forgot about it,"

SOP for one of our former neighbours - with the eggs in the pan. I think her kitchen ceiling had been replaced a couple of times.

Can we interest you in a $10 pocket calculator powered by Android 9?

Re: XX * V = C

"Other peoples at the time had better systems for writing numbers."

But Romans had better armies so their number system got spread around more effectively.

FTC: BetterHelp pushed users to share mental health info then gave it to Facebook

Re: There is only one punishment outside massive fines

"Having to repay a percentage of the fees collected is definitely, provably, not a deterrent."

It depends on the percentage. Let's start at 400% and increase it if it's still not effective.

Re: What about Facebook?

"To sue you must know Facebook has collected personal health/medical data on you."

The solution to that is legislation that ensures pro-active enforcement and fines so large that such data would be regarded as toxic and companies wouldn't want to touch it let alone pay for it.

What do I mean by pro-active enforcement? The equivalent of factory or fire inspectors who would have the right to descend on a company and go through it with a fine-tooth comb to see what they were doing. Impossible to legislate? Well, in the early days of the industrial revolution you'd have said the same thing about regulation of working conditions but as the abuses came to light legislation became inevitable irrespective of the influence factory or mine owners might have wielded.

Re: industry standard

Which is a good reason have set the fine at a level which would have taken down the business and thereby encourage the rest of the industry - whatever that might be - to raise its standards to something acceptable.

At Citrix, 'perpetual licenses' means 'we'd rather move you to a subscription'

Re: "the vendor will stop maintaining products sold [..] under that scheme"

I don't usually disagree with you but on point 1 I do. A perpetual licence is what it says in the licence terms and that's usually a licence to use whatever was on the (possibly virtual) medium in perpetuity as long as you have something to support it. Maintenance or support contracts are a separate thing and usually bought on an annual basis.

Products based on regular connection to the vendor's server (other than those where the service is the product) are a different matter. Can we have a tar and feathers icon?

Arm swans off to Nasdaq despite UK gov pleas to IPO in London

Re: Correction needed in article.

Should read "adds need for UK government to publish any strategy"

Although I do worry about that saying that the most dreaded sentence in the English language is "I'm from the government and I'm here to help.".

Pushers of insecure software in Biden's crosshairs

And this could be bad news for Open Source.

From TFA:

(If you're wondering where open source code fits into this planned approach to liability, the strategy has this to say: "Responsibility must be placed on the stakeholders most capable of taking action to prevent bad outcomes, not on the end-users that often bear the consequences of insecure software nor on the open-source developer of a component that is integrated into a commercial product.")

That answers your question "You pick up some package for nowt off NPM, who is the responsible person?". You are, at least in the first instance. If the package is deliberate malware then the author, and any third party who planted it in the repository, would also be responsible. If a particular repository were to become conspicuous for hosting malware then its operators might also become responsible; it would certainly encourage them to be able to demonstrate that they were making serious efforts to curate the contents.

My take on this is that it gives those who use FOSS in commercial products an incentive to take a more active interest in what it is they're using, review it, fix problems and send the fixes upstream.

BT opens 'voluntary job leavers' scheme for merging Enterprise and Global units

In BT voluntary redundancy and early retirement schemes are business as usual.

It's worth noting the union's contribution. The unit is top heavy but it will be middle management being let go.

Thought you'd opted out of online tracking? Think again

Legislation without sufficient enforcement is useless. Back in the C19th when the Factory Acts and the like were introduced an inspectorate was set up to ensure it was obeyed.

The same thing is needed now along with a provision that was in DPA 1.0: the power to forbid further data processing until the situation is remedied. Party inspected tries to hide from the inspector via an NDA? Told to take down the site Right Now.

Amid the gloom of widespread layoffs, Fujitsu is hiring and acquiring

"it is getting harder for young people to get a foot in the door ... things are going to get pretty difficult when people start retiring en masse in a few years"

The two problems should solve each other.

NASA finds crashing spacecraft into asteroids is a viable defence strategy

Re: Worrying.

For a pile of dust & gravel just rely in the ejection impulse. Send up a solar-powered gizmo that parks itself on the asteroid scooping up handfuls & ejecting it. No need to achieve high velocities and wiith enough warning the entire asteroid could be thrown away. My H Robinson could design something suitable in a trice.

Apple's outsourced Lightning cable plant in India goes up in flames

Re: Link?

Or the Up Yours Jack.

Re: Link?

"The world does not end at the borders of the EU"

The ERG is probably thinking of demanding the UK mandate the ¼" jack.

Find pushes back birth of Europe's steel hardware to about 3,000 years ago

If it's known how to produce iron in any form from ore then it's likely that iron-working sites would of the period would have been discovered and the Early Iron Age would have been pushed back to that period. I take it that no such sites were known. That raises the possibility that this was derived from meteoric iron. How close is the carbon content of meteoric iron to that of steel?

Windows 11 update breaks PCs that dare sport a custom UI

It's simply a matter of whose expectations it won't meet.

US cybersecurity chief: Software makers shouldn't lawyer their way out of security responsibilities

Re: As bad as having a monthly fix for security and other issues is...

In the situation I was remembering we'd had the accountants do all the UAT on the new hardware (old H/W wouldn't support the Y2Ked version) so the obvious time to switch over was when the office was shut down over the long break. So rather than go with the signed off, known Y2K compatible version, they insisted on running the first 2 months of 2000 with a known incompatible version. It didn't go entirely as badly as feared (thanks to the vendors going above and beyond by dialling in several times to fix database errors*) but it didn't go well.

*Small S/W houses have a different attitude to customer service.

UK courts' £1.3B case management platform hit with failures

Also independent of the courts. Taken together those are quite significant factors.

In my case it was covered by salary and, like the police witnesses, I doubt the cost was charged to the prosecution, courts or anyone else. If that had happened it might have encouraged more effective use of time but I doubt it.

As to taking written statements a colleague who had come from working in a different lab said that in her area that happened much more frequently than ours - and it was quite rare to encounter a defence expert in ours.

But one of my statements concerned a partial identification of one of three women's' bodies from La Mon House burned beyond recognition. Circumstance had preserve a small amount of head hair and my statement was confined to saying that, on the basis of comparison with samples from the hair brushes of the three women known to have died, that it could have been that one and couldn't have been either of the other two. The main consequence was that one of the families had the assurance that they had the right mother's body to bury and yet I spent ages hanging about to make that brief statement in person in the several separate trials that took place. That was an extreme example which sticks in my mind after all these years but there were many others which were less so.

Shareholders accuse Tesla of overegging Autopilot, Full Self-Driving capabilities

I can see the logic in suing executives and/or board members. but why sue the company themselves? The only payment the company can make is from shareholders' funds so all they do is get their own money back, less a deduction for lawyers' fees.