Posts by Doctor Syntax

Keeping your head as an entire database goes pear-shaped

Re: Backups

"a hell of a lot of cash"

That would be a regular payment to DEC for DR cover, presumably with provision for occasional tests.

Spam is back with a vengeance. Luckily we can't read any of it

"Span-filtering your abuse role account is simply cretinous."

It saves them from losing valuable customers due to complaints about spam.

"Suggest to phone scammers that they are immoral in trying to defraud vulnrable people"

Just ask them to hang on a moment while you deal with someone at the door. Put the phone to one side & hang it up 10 minutes later. That keeps them out of mischief for a few minutes. It also seems to get you on a phone spammers' black list.

"Well, a lot of automated confirmation emails are sent as "NoReply" (when you complete a transaction or some such)."

A good rule of thumb is that if you are in business and send out an email to a customer expecting the recipient to read it you should be prepared to read any reply. It's no more than courtesy to your customer, even in the situation you describe.

If you spam your customers you should certainly expect complaints and deal with them if only to apologise. Of course the snowflakes in marketing don't want tohave their bubble burst by being reminded of how unpopular their tactics are. Even less do they want the risk of of someone higher up the food chain deciding to review customer feedback and finding just how much they're damaging their employer's reputation.

Re: Spam = all time low

Why did you keep the address alive once the spam started?

Re: Spam = all time low

There's a difference?

Re: Put a cost on outgoing email

Even better - a charge against incoming email payable to the recipient but based on the number of outgoing emails by the sender.

"no one uses a real email address any more"

I do and it's occasionally used to take discussions off-group. It helps, of course, that using my own domain it's a dedicated address I can kill and replace immediately if it's abused. But, as I've said, experience shows it's not a concern although this might be a sort of reverse network effect; as long as most people don't use real ones real ones don't get skimmed.

Workday nearly doubles losses as waves of deals pushed back

They're hoping to add 1,000 new jobs in Dublin over the next two years. What's the employment situation like in Dublin? How likely are they to achieve that with their back to the office policy?

SEC probes Musk for not properly disclosing Twitter stake

Re: Egon Durban...tried to resign

"Or it’s the opposite way round depending on the lawyers."

More likely a golden handshake either way.

"Musk sold a chunk of his shares in Tesla worth $8.4 billion"

Was this another transaction he should have filed with the SEC and if so did he?

Drone ship carrying yet more drones launches in China

Meanwhile https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/27/mayflower_autonomous_ship_latest/

Quantum internet within grasp as scientists show off entanglement demo

Re: Can you split photons into 3?

Especially if you add blockchain, AI and use it for autonomous flying cars.

UK monopoly watchdog investigates Google's online advertising business

Re: "Another probe? Mountain View is starting to look like a pincushion at this rate"

In the accounts department it's written off as "the cost of doing business".

I don't think fines can be written off as a cost of doing business before tax. OTOH these cases seem to be civil cases and settlements are paid. They may be treated differently to fines.

But it's high quality. Mostly.

"because millions of people across the UK use websites that rely on advertising revenue to offer high quality, free content."

More millions also use websites that rely on advertising revenue just for income but without the high quality aspect of the content. The content which they leave to the users to provide.

Experts: AI inventors' designs should be protected in law

Require the AI to sign the patent application i its own hand.

Re: If it floods the patent office

Given the US patent office's mode of operation it will take the fees, issue the patents. In the words of my late aunt, more muck to t'midden.

Re: 'Creative' Artificial Intelligence

Maybe not but always read the small print of the software T&Cs.

Re: 'Creative' Artificial Intelligence

He had the balls to demand it. He'd signed an agreement so the dollar was rightfully his. In the end the official had to give him the dollar at which point all the others who'd assigned patents demanded theirs. As there was no accounting mechanism to actually pay the dollar Fenman thought the official must have been paying out of his own pocket.

IANAL but there's always the possibility that if your dollar hasn't been paid the assignment is invalid. It would be an interesting situation if someone who'd assigned, not been paid and then been fired started suing the supposed licensees.

The mathematical processing that AI caries out may be obscure but it is essentially some sort of mathematical processing. Mathematical facts can't be patented so why do they think the output of some AI can be?

BOFH: Where do you think you are going with that toner cartridge?

Re: HP Laserjet 5

We had an early Laserjet in the lab. I don't even think they'd got round to adding numbers to them. It was still there when I left a few years later, of course and probably survived the IRA's destruction of the lab with their largest ever bomb some years after that.

Re: HP Laserjet 5

They needed to be worked on?

Re: Too Often...

This side of the pond US paper sizes are only known as what misconfigured printers expect. Everything is in ISO sizes. Possibly BoJo will have us switching back to quarto and octavo if he lsts that long although in his case foolscap would be more appropriate.

Re: Stack of money

"so probably the most expensive door stop ever"

Maybe not. Feynman tells of the solid gold doorstop on the room that contained the sub-critical plutonium sphere.

Re: We had a copier engineer once...

something wrong here. I'm not convinced a customer disservice drone would understand any of the terms "PATT tester", 5kv" or "insulation test".

Re: Too Often...

"What was wrong with just storing it ?!

Or selling it. That takes care of the potential return shipping cost. The purchase cost would have to have been written off anyway so it can be offered cheaply as it's then all profit. The original vendor, faced with the cut-price competition, will be less inclined to accept orders for unlikely looking quantities without checking.

Re: Too Often...

There are some things you can't get too big a stock of.

Re: Too Often...

Don't throw it away. Just make the department who ordered it responsible for storing it. It can become a landmark: "Down there on the right. You can't miss them, they have a five foot stack of US Letter paper.".

Broadcom to 'focus on rapid transition to subscriptions' for VMware

Re: Everybody want to be part of the rentier class...

"Customers have options."

"Not if we have anything to do with ti." - the tech industry.

As regards the LibreOffice database I agree with you.

However I get the impression that desktop database products as a whole are aimed at those who have finally realised the shortcomings of spreadsheets as databases and contrive to reassure by looking as much like spreadsheets as possible. Kex looks more like Access than does LO Base but from an old Informix hand this is damning with faint praise. In particular I'd prefer the approach of "dump controls for the columns of a single from the table(s) I've selected on a new form, provide a menu control for CRUD*, forward & backward and let me take things from there". And I wish they wouldn't devise their own database engines; just use Sqlite for a strictly one user, local data source or ODBC to link to any well-known engine.

* Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete.

Cloud security unicorn cuts 20% of staff after raising $1.3b

With 2 CEOs to feed it might not last that long.

Re: If cloud security was any good

"I'm being flippant."

Are you sure about that?

Lacework? Never heard of them but looking forward to their future appearances here which can't be very far away once they start shedding those who do the real work.

And which of their CEOs is the redundant one?

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Re: Leave it to the professionals

"Later I left the company because I didn’t get along with the manager. He was fired from the company 2 days after I left."

You must have been covering his mistakes very effectively until then.

Re: Fixing the wrong problem

Always the best indication that there's something to learn there.

But you got paid for the second.

Re: nice story

But they're out of sight and out of earshot so less likely to grab attention. It amounts to the same thing where policy is concerned.

Re: nice story

Even without considering global warning there was every reason not to burn coal or other fossil hydrocarbons unnecessarily. They hae uses other than fuelling static energy plants which are not so easily substituted so conservation of finite supplies was always good sense.

Re: nice story

"As for radioactivity - well Carbon has several common isotopes anc the process of burning will often result in some localised concentrates forming.!

Carbon has one common isotope, 12, one fairly uncommon isotope, 13, and one more uncommon isotope, 14. It's only the last which is radioactive (weak beta) with a half-life of 5,000 plus years. C14 is produced at a fairly, but not entirely constant, rate in the upper atmosphere by the action of cosmic rays on nitrogen so its level in the atmosphere and hence in living things is fairly constant. Coal has not been a living thing for millions of years old and any remaining C14 would be well below the limits of practical detection.

Re: nice story

"Some places in the world have a background even more intense than that of Pripyat if you aren't digging trenches."

I was surprised to find that when my daughter was buying a house here in the Pennines that the building society required a radon check. I was even more surprised to find that we're entirely radon free here - it's not as if we're sitting on top of granite. And on the subject of granite, the carbon dating lab in Belfast used distilled rather than deionised water to get rid of the radon in the public water supply from the Mournes.

Re: nice story

Accuracy.

Re: nice story

"Now, I feel nuclear power is really unsafe"

Maybe you felt that at the start and it's why you couldn't fathom the answer. (The rest of us couldn't fathom it because it turned on management doing something right.)

Re: Don’t know about you

"And occasionally, they'd get confused and all end up in a pile against the wall"

There's a story that one of the automated transit carriages at some airport (?Gatwick) went missing with a load of passengers and was discovered repeatedly going through it's automated carriage wash.

Re: Einstein was right.

Or navies have more admirals than ships?

Re: Dogs

See today's Dilbert. Especially the punch-line.

Re: "but I would not report the damage back to my head office"h

"He’d used it at his previous place and was a huge fan. "

I've come across that one before. At one point I and a BA put forward a case for adding warehouse management to our existing order-processing/stock management system. It wouldn't have been a big addition given what was already there. It was turned down. Presumably TPTB decided warehouse management wasn't needed. They also decided the business analyst wasn't needed.

A few years passed and a new warehouse manager was appointed. He must have his favourite warehouse management system bought for him to run on the VMS box (something they hadn't foreseen was coming down the tracks). There was all sorts of sales weaselling going on about how it would be compatible with our Informix on Unix system . It had all the promise of conflicting versions of stock levels on the two systems.

At that point manglement decided they didn't need me either so I didn't have to cope with the mess. It was some time into my post-retirement freelancing career that I cam across a similar - and possibly the same package on SCO and discovered what the weasels had latched onto to twist into their not entirely outright lie.

Re: "but I would not report the damage back to my head office"h

"There was a character in one of our live datasets that their system didn’t like."

Let me guess: £

Re: Next time

Leave out "Simulation".

Re: Next time

"I've baked things that never quite caught fire but were reduced to a black lump and an offensive smell."

But enough of your kitchen disasters.