Posts by Doctor Syntax 40560 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"The goal of the EDPB Recommendations is to guide exporters in lawfully transferring personal data to third countries while guaranteeing that the data transferred is afforded a level of protection essentially equivalent to that guaranteed within the European Economic Area,"
It should also be important guidance for would-be importers - IDS please note.
"/var/tmp is for stuff that should survive a reboot."
Do not rely in this
I'd never done an install without reformatting the partition holding /var until the other day when I decided to test this notion. It failed due to a permission error citing a non-existent user name. In Debian-based systems at least, /var includes a lot of stuff relating to the installation. Admittedly the error came with an explanation that it may be a packaging error but the fact remains that the installation process is likely to have been designed assuming an empty directory.
If, by intent or bad luck, your reboot involves a reinstall your vital stuff in /var/tmp or anything else in /var cannot rely on its survival. Given that Apache and MySQL default to placing user data there it's safest to make their directories symlinks to real directories elsewhere such as /srv. Assume /var is for system stuff only.
"the database in question had nearly 100 tables, none of which were linked"
I've dealt with a product of that scale although it had a decent schema and worked well. The only issue was that, running on Informix, it had been written in the pre-cost-based optimiser days and the vendor wished to stay there so they forbade customers from running UPDATE STATISTICS. The SQL was written to hint the query path to the engine. I recognised the technique because I also go back to the pre-cost-based optimiser days. Step outside the limits of what could be done with that approach and the performance was a disaster.
When I arrived there were a few home-written reports that they couldn't run - if allowed to complete they'd have taken well over 24 hours. In my second - or maybe even late in my first week - I took a look at them and found the query plan generated took absolutely the worst route it could, index searching almost the entirety of small tables and joining large tables to them with a sequential search. Temp tables to the rescue.
Eventually the vendor decided that as the cost-based optimiser had been around for over a decade and probably worked they'd allow it.
The best solution would be to fork it from the previous free version, perhaps with an announcement that the ISO version is deprecated. Ultimately the standard that matters is the one everyone follows. If the free version is regarded as definitive then ISO can charge whatever they want for their text and it won't matter.
An alternative aspect Jelliffe could consider is to whether ISO has the right to refer to the standard as implementing Schematron. The licence is MIT which does allow ISO to change, re-licence and charge for it but does the licence cover the name?
Very likely. The mere mention of it raised memories.
One of the problems with over-escalating them was the realisation that if you picked up on the hunt-group ring (all the phones ringing simultaneously* is the big clue) it might well have been escalated from some group for which you couldn't possibly substitute. That made it a good personal policy not to answer any hunt group calls.
* That might not necessarily be the case. The unanswered phone on the builders' merchants counter yesterday started passing the call round several extensions in succession so that it could be serially ignored.
ceoemail.com is a useful resource. Usually the issue gets referred to an escalation team. Sometimes the escalation teams work and sometimes they're utterly useless. An example of the latter is one of the major courier companies that insists on their drivers using GPS coordinates instead of addresses and after extensive correspondence have still failed to correct those for our house.
I discovered the power of chairman/CEO complaints the wrong way. We used to send out work orders by fax modem (IIRC we shared the queue berween 3 of them). The fax numbers were in the database so there was no chance of fat fingering the number. Or so we thought. One of the recipients had two faxes and for some reason set up call forwarding at night. Manually. So one night the fax we were sending to was forwarded to not quite the same number which was a private line. The next morning I was trying to work out why the fax queue had failed when the rocket from HQ arrived.
This looks pretty reasonable: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-57496005
It's a pity it's going to be built in one of the least accessible town centres in the country. I lived about 20 miles away for a few years and never ventured into it more than twice.
I don't quite recognise the KDE you describe. I don't know what you're doing to get keyring prompts. The only pop-ups I see frequently are from Cookie Exterminator telling me it's exterminated cookies but that's neither KDE not the underlying OS but a browser add-on.
Update notifications - maybe that depends on the distro - Mint seems to put them out with great frequency, less bleeding edge distros such as Debian & Devuan less so. But at least they're notifications to install at leisure and seldom require a reboot.
"And who gives a flying monkey of the window corners are square or rounded?"
If I used it I probably would because I expect it takes a little more screen estate - in order to stop the corners encroaching on the menu contents the window will be bigger than it has to be. Alternatively they could really mess up by letting the corners encroach on the menu content.
Encrochat and ANOM's predecessor, Phantom Secure, started off as, shall we say, independent efforts. Their getting compromised could have been put down to bad luck and hoped for better next time. Now that criminals have been told explicitly that such off the shelf systems can't be trusted individual gangs might start commissioning their own. That introduces its own trust problems of course but assuming many of them aren't a multiplicity of small networks are going to yield much less reward for the effort needed to break into them.
The alternative is that they simply move to using mainstream end-to-end systems giving even more weight to calls for these to be backdoored. The ongoing existence of separate criminal systems should really be an argument against the Patels of this world demanding that the rest of us shouldn't have secure communications for out legitimate day-to-day lives.
How cynical is it to wonder if these public pronouncements are an attempt to bring that situation about?
"Dell also pointed out several subsequent decisions by customers to not purchase further or not purchase as much as previously."
Previous reports suggest working at home has prompted increased sales of PCs. Perhaps Dell's customers aren't purchasing as much because they can't find a salesman to sell them stuff.
"neither seemed to notice or be troubled by the fact they both wore partially metal-framed glasses during their testimony."
They probably can't take them off because they're magnetically attached.
Seriously - they easiest way to test for something being magnetised is a simple compass. I don't suppose they considered demonstrating their magnetism with that. What a pity nobody asked for that to be demonstrated when she asked "Any questions?"
Povlsen has invested a substantial sum in another space port in Shetland.
In that case that objection should be easily dealt with "if you don't object to mine I won't object to yours".
It reminds me of the time when a pub kept objecting to someone converting a house a couple of hundred yards or so away as a restaurant. The objections were based on the house not having any parking. Neither did the pub which was less than a hundred yards away from a cross roads with traffic lights and whose parking lines extended most of the way to the house. Surprisingly the would-be restaurateur gave up instead of making the obvious objection next time the pub's license renewal was due.
About 1990 the drives for HP disk cabinets (about a small USB stickfull in modern terms were huge and hugely heavy. There was a crane to ift them in and out which consisted of a steel bar that fitted over the cabinets and a sling with a pulley system to lift the drives. Same job but portable enough for the field engineers to bring with them instead of having to have one permanently on site but they did look a bit dodgy in use.
"find out who's siphoning diesel out of the storage tank."
I'd never thought of this aspect before but is generator diesel marked in the same way as agricultural "red diesel"? If so a quiet call to HMRC and a spot check on the offender's tank's content might save the need for involving the CEO.
"unless it is an extreme case involving them making you brave blizzards and dodgy moorland roads."
My last gigs before hanging up the invoice book for good did indeed commuting over a dodgy moorland road with occasional blizzards. Not that visibility of about three metres would stop some idiot Merc driver overtaking.
Questioning the betters is fine. It requires recognising the betters, recognising why they are the betters and why the answers they give are more likely to be right than the opinions of some eejit they found on the net who can't tell the difference between biology and telecommunications technologies.
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