Posts by Doctor Syntax

China's top tech city Shenzhen locks down completely for at least a week

Re: 5 Year Review

I suppose you also think all the fuss about Y2K was nonsense because in the event nothing went wrong.

Re: eggs->basket!

I wonder what his attitude to backups was.

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

Re: One step too few

Normal distribution blobs to stick on the C14 age/depth section at the end of hand-drawn pollen diagrams. But with a 1804 & Calcomp plotter.

Re: Stealing more than fuel

Yes, the neighbours had multiple CCTV fitted quite a while ago.

"three kids on dirtbikes"

Does your hunting licence cover these?

Re: Wait. Backups ned to be restorable?

Presumably there was a separate migration to a new system so the backup would be belt-and-braces for an extreme situation. If there were suitable drives almost anywhere on the planet this could be acceptable.

Re: One step too few

If you use the services of a DR company the greatest need is to check restore on their H/W. The experience of your first test - or rehearsal if you prefer - can be quite informative. The first time I tried it we ran out of time just about at the point where we had a file system system we could log onto as /etc had been backed up after a lot of stuff it would have been less urgent to restore. Things were changed round so that next time we were in a position to start restoring the database fairly quickly.

I was told this story yesterday.

Once upon a time we had a county Council*. They used to use snow ploughs to clear rural roads* in winter. Because some of the roads are steep and snow ploughs are less likely to get stuck coming down hill they decided to park one at a convenient spot at the top of a hill. When the sown came some poor council worker fought his way through the drifts to the top of the hill. And found the snow plough''s diesel had been stolen.

* This now seems like a fairy story, hence my use of the traditional opening..

BOFH: Gaming rig for your home office? Yeah right

Re: Every company!

Then you produce the signature acknowledging that either they accept that this is not the standard product bundle that IT currently have the skill-set to support and that either they arrange their own support or they will, out of their own budget, arrange for sufficient IT staff to go on sufficient training courses to be able to provide support. That would be the memo they were obliged to sign before getting their kit. It's now accompanied by the requisition they need to sign for the aforementioned training courses which will take place in reassuringly expensive locations and to be paid for out of the aforementioned budget.

Re: Simon is on form, these days!

"if it were me, I'd suggest a replacement"

Ah, but you're not the BOFH who now has Carl under obligation. Who knows what might come of that.

Re: It's time to kill the dragon!

I had a gig on a secure site that required clearance. They required it a step higher than the regular employees. No problem, that went through; given my previous career it would have been strange if it hadn't. Perhaps it was that process that alerted someone to the fact that the regular employees clearance should also have been a step higher than it was.

Re: Every company!

Should have made clear they were on their own for support.

Cryptocurrency ATMs illegal right now in UK

Re: are unregulated and high-risk

"The value of your investments can go down as well as up."

If you're lucky. Otherwise they just go.

Not exclusively, There are all the exchanges where you can store your currency before they mysteriously close down and their operators disappear. That's an application in its own right.

Afraid of the big bad Linux desktop? Zorin 16.1 is here

Re: Zorin, Ideal for beginners

You can always tell those who've never used Linux but you can't tell 'em much.

Re: Zorin, Ideal for beginners

And Mint.

Re: @RegGuy1

"Agreed, it does have loads of irritations, but there are fixes for many of them."

That's the problem with Gnome. It seems to have to be tweaked to make it useful. These limitations seem to be design choices. I've never seen the point in starting with something that has to be taken so far from its designers' intentions to be useful. Maybe it's intended to be a blank canvas for the likes of the Zorins to customise but even so KDE has always seemed a good deal more functional straight out of the box.

Having said that Zorin has been what I've used for relatives' ex-Windows boxes.

Mary Coombs, first woman commercial programmer, dies at 93

Re: Paper tape at first.

I know about Jacquard looms; I grew up in a textile area and my holiday jobs were when I was young were in milla.

Jacquards are more limited in function than you may think. None that I saw in the mills 60 years or so ago could do no more than control healds so although they were capable of making complex patterns in the warp they were no use if there was more than one weft. In the woollen mills of the West Riding Jacquard mechanisms were limited to what were termed "Woven lists", lettering woven into the edges of the cloth saying things such as "SUPERFINE WORSTED". The main control mechanism on looms such as the Dobcross used a chain rather like a very heavy bicycle chain with disks on the cross-pieces of the links. The disks acted as cams and although they could only control a limited number of sets of healds - AFAICR the biggest gears we had used about 12, they could control the selection of the shuttle boxes, i.e. the weft.

None of this is relevant to Mary Coombs's story. If you read the PDF linked in the article you'll find that although punched cards were used for storing data - Lyons already used them already with tabulators - the programs were entered on paper tape.

Re: All punch cards at first.

Paper tape at first.

Re: I hope there is more than this somewhere

Read the linked PDF. Fascinating. And, as the article says, things don't change. They were working with the French firm Bull and she was doing some technical translating of manuals in her own time. When she suggested they pay her for that they outsourced ot to a firm of translators instead.

Reg reader rages over Virgin Media's email password policy

Re: Smug mode off

Staying with an ISP that provides sub-standard service.

Re: Another issue with VM's password policies is...

"these characters have to be from the password you set when you first opened an account"

This looks as if it might the source of Nick's problem: his adversary has that password. Did Nick take over an existing installation? It might be that the previous customer is continuing to use the Virgin email address and is using the access the original password gives him to counter Nick's attempts to change the current password.

It would be a reasonable protection against a random stranger closing the account.

The official communication address for a company is the company secretary at the registered address. Send a letter, preferably recorded delivery telling them you no longer wish to use the account from a given date and will no longer be responsible for paying its bills. Whether they then close it is up to them.

Re: Rainbow tables anyone?

The cracker has to get the hash to do this. That might be the case if the site leaks but in that case you'd have to change it anyway. The bigger risk in that case would be if you've used the same password elsewhere so remember - don't do that.

Re: Re-enabling paste

That's odd. They give PayPal as an example and I can't remember ever having a problem pasting there.

I agree but you only have to do it once and the longer you leave it the bigger the job gets.

However, there's no problem in running an ISP and non-ISP address side-by-side so get your independent address first and then take as long as you need to register your change of address with whoever needs you want to know your new address.

For extra advantage register your own domain which allows you to switch the MSP if need be. Since ditching my ISP (Nildram which was fine until a series of take-overs left it in Dido-land) I've switched not only ISP twice more but also switched domain registrar/MSP (ending up with Mythic Beasts and see no reason to swap again).

Re: Smug mode off

What part of an ISP provided email address making it harder to ditch your ISP did you not understand?

Re: Virgin, bringing you the barely-adequate security from 2002

It makes you wonder what their internal security might be like as well.

Simple solution. Don't use an ISP-provided email service. If you do you're not only lumbered with crap like this if the ISP doesn't care, it also makes it harder to ditch your ISP.

One person's war is another hemisphere's developer crunch

Will this attempt to automate S/W development be the Last One?

The Human Genome Project will tell us who to support at Eurovision

Re: American Song Contest aims to tap Eurovision formula

High quality sound in the song contest?

Re: American Song Contest aims to tap Eurovision formula

I think I stopped watching it well before Terry Wogan started presenting it otherwise that would have been the last straw.

Re: Now that is one hell of a tale

Given that a "simple" paternity test costs €74, the fact that a DNA history test costs less is, to me, rather laughable

The paternity testing is basically "Could be and that applies to x% of the populations" or "Couldn't be" so, yes, fairly simple but if need be the lab would have to be prepared to stand over its results in court. It might also have to offer counselling. x should now be a lot smaller than when we used to do this with a selection of immune reactions and blood enzymes.

The ancestry type test is based on whatever percentage of the genome they managed to analyse. This is less than complete which explains why siblings, even identical twins, can end up with different "ancestries". It's then compared with the geographical areas most closely associated with various bits of the subset actually analysed. But a moment's thought will show that if people in N Europe can show up with various percentages of "Mediterranean" or whatever there isn't a clear cut Mediterranean genotype. "Mediterranean", "Baltic", "Celtic" or whatever are ill-defined results of human settlement and migration over thousands of years. There's also the issue of what percentage of the subject's genome is part of the geographical variation - the 98% gorilla isn't going to do so.

I suppose it's a good bit better than Madame Xavier with a crystal ball, a pendulum and a shrewd understanding of facial features and colouring can manage but on the whole I think the paternity test is better value for money, especially if they keep the results more confidential than the "ancestry" labs might be wont to do.

Extradited Canadian accused of unleashing NetWalker ransomware

Re: FBI / US Justice Department

He was a small-time criminal operating a franchise. It may have netted him a large amount of money but there's no evidence he had the underlying expertise to set up this sort of operation. If you were in of the latter category would you put yourself at risk in the front-line or let someone like this take the risks?

Infosys, Wipro silent on their Russian operations

Re: If we need someone to finally cripple Russian IT and probably military efforts too...

But are they providing services there or are they outsourcing work from other countries to those offices? If the latter their customers should be worried.

Only 29% of techies truly want to stay in current job

Re: You want our labour?

" hell, shovelling shit on a farm gets better hours and wages"

And a front loader to drive.

Re: "Tough" conversations.

"Or that having your current engineering staff decimated is not an opportunity for HR bods to earn bonuses"

But think of the bonuses to be earned by recruiting the replacements. It really might be an opportunity, not a problem.

"Apparently people just don't want to work anymore."

Given the set-up you described it sound more likely to be the other way around. They do want to work but have cottoned on to the fact that that might not be possible in your mega-corp and making the move on their own terms.

Re: I'm thinking about a lot more than this

"(unless there were doughnuts)"

What - aren't decent biccies good enough?

But, yes, this is it exactly. And what's more the good customers IME are the ones who learn about you by word of mouth. Get a good reputation & you don't have any of the circus which seems to be a feature of recruitment these days.

Re: I'm thinking about a lot more than this

"If you want to change career, you need your own money to study and hope there is a job opening."

IT isn't an end in itself. Unless you've worked for a vendor you'll almost certainly have been working in IT supporting business in some other industry or industries. Take a step back. What knowledge have you picked up about those? Could you use that to get a non-IT, or some form of half IT and half non-IT role in one of those industries?

FWIW this is pretty much the inverse of the way I changed job mid-career. I started off in science with some IT training during post-grad and then, as IT crept into my Civil Service lab, became the IT go-to guy there which then enabled me to step into IT for the second half of my career. I see no reason why it couldn't work the other way around.

The time to worry is when you find 1 & 2 are both true. It suggests management is recruiting people in its own image so what does that make you?

New Windows 11 build boasts inbox updates and UI tweaks

Re: "The idea, it seems, has never really gone away"

You're not really familiar with Linux are you?

Reading TFA - tabs in the file manager, a tabbed terminal emulator - Windows sounds to be getting more like KDE everyday. After all, it caught up with multiple workspaces some time ago. It does need a much better start menu, however.

OTOH, because Linux has such a diversity of user types it has DEs offering a very different user experience - Gnome for one and I believe even Unity (the Ubuntu app-oriented DE) is being kept alive as a community project. There are a few DEs even more minimalist than Gnome and, of course, there's always the option of a straight terminal based set-up.

Now explain to me how the one and only, what Redmond decrees, one size fits all approach of Windows caters to this diversity of Windows users you told us about.

Ukraine invasion: We should consider internet sanctions, says ICANN ex-CEO

Re: Hurts everyone equally - good and bad

"This is not far from just shutting off the electricity. It hurts Russian military forces, but it also hurts Ukrainian civilians who need all the help they can get"

Were we reading the same article? Or even the same sub-title? I actually went back to check what I'd read before. ASFAICS it says exactly the opposite.

Re: Now that I can get behind

Nobody elected SWIFT to be a world ruler either. It isn't. (OK, there's an argument the banks are.) But they're following the actual elected leaders of many world governments.

There's no reason why internet governance bodies shouldn't do the same without being accused of usurping power. In fact, it could be argued that declining to follow suit is such a usurpation.

Standardizing limits to license hikes for minor software tweaks

How many thousands of percents will the limit have to be before Orrible signs up to it?

Fujitsu: Dumping older workers will wipe out quarter of forecast profit

Re: Skills and experience

H/W's not my bag but I had a whipper-snapper look at the not very complex database schema I'd produced and complain it had too many tables. I'd just come off a contract on an ERP system which had, IIRC, several hundred.

The galling thing is that in a way he was right. The next iteration was much simpler after I'd manage to dump some of the IT director's ideas.

Re: I once took the golden parachute in my early 50s

Karma.

Re: I once took the golden parachute in my early 50s

I once worked with someone who claimed to have been made redundant or retired from 3 different companies - by the same CEO. The claim was shortly after the retirement when he was back at his desk freelance.

"What does that mean in English?"

I don't see that as needing to be translatable into English. I see it as sales people getting a dose of what they've been dishing out all these years.

Re: Disgusting..

The age distribution that matters for interface design is that of the users. That depends on what the interface accesses and the audience for it might not match the country's demographics. If you're producing an application for pensioners to manage their pension payments it wouldn't matter whether the country's demographic peaked at 20 or 70.