Posts by Doctor Syntax 42414 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I wonder if the downvote is from one of our local estate agents who things everyone should sell their house and hasn't realised that (a) I don't want to and (b) if I did they've just ensured that they're the last of our many local alternatives that I'd give the job to.
"And how do you keep Sgt Jones from buying his batallion's paperclips and toilet paper from his brother-in-law who marks supplies for the government up 500%?"
All supplies to be purchased at no more than manufacturer's list price.
"a Z80 CPU, a few hundred K of memory"
The Z80 can only address 64K so unless you have some clever bank-switching H/W it would have been limiting.
But the basic issue here is that DoD desk wallahs' desks aren't going to be suddenly deployed to the field. In fact no rank is quoted in the article so it seems likely he was a civilian.
"To be fair, I wouldn't be surprised if half the DoD only needed to reboot their boxes."
According to the article he restarts his PC several times a day although it doesn't actually say whether this is a reboot.
"personal Linux laptop with uptime of more than 86 days"
True, for a server 86 days is nothing. But I don't see the point of not switching off my Linux laptop when it''s not in use.
"I don't think about the children"
I do. I used to think about my children. Now I think about my grandchildren. And I think it's wrong of the government to deny them the legal use of secure forms of communication which criminals will continue to use.
Criminals will continue to use them. One thing my experience has taught me is that if a criminal is setting out to commit some offence, say a robbery, which needs some other law to be broken, say stealing a vehicle to use as a getaway car, in support of the main objective, that secondary offence will not inhibit them in the least.
"Did you enjoy leaving the European Union"
No. I was in the half of those who voted who voted against it. I voted against it for several reasons one of which was that it blatantly ignored the blatant incompatibility between Brexit, NI being in the UK and the Good Friday agreement.
"Mind you, perhaps the page should have checked that the phone number started 07, and rejected or queried the number otherwise"
They're not alone.
Exhibit 1. Local restaurant has (maybe had, for reasons which will become clear, I have no way of finding out) booking software which confirms the booking by text to the phone number. Some children at BT have decided that obviously landlines shouldn't be left out form the SMS fun and implemented S/W to accept an SMS, ring the landline and read out out This is a text message from $GabbledNumber $GabbledMessage
The one thing that stuck from that was "thank you for signing up to our service". It's a scam, right? After finally sorting out what it was all about - nothing more than a booking confirmation - words were said which left the distinct impression that I hadn't signed up for anything and that if they thought I had I'd better be unsigned because SMS spam is even worse when it's read out as gabble. Given that they thought this was customer service I haven't booked there since, not even by mobile.
Exhibit 2. You don't need a computer to make dumb assumptions. Our landline number is on a poster advertising SWMBO's patchwork class. The poster is in the hall where the class is held. Anyone standing there reading it should be well aware that it's a local number. So the phone rang with a text message from $GabbledNumber wanting to know if the caller should bring anything to the class. No chance of ringing back as the only contact was $Gabbled Number which has already receded into the irretrievable past. Whoever rung didn't turn up, presumably thinking that she'd been rudely ignored.
If the children at BT who'd come up with this scheme had properly tested it, including sending SMS messages to test subjects who weren't expecting the call, they might have correctly decided that it wasn't fit for purpose and should be abandoned. If they had gone ahead they should at least have supplied the originating number as CLI for the call so the recipient would have a chance of calling back to ask what the gabble was about.
"As part of its settlement with the FTC, Fashion Nova will cough up millions of dollars, and must allow all customer reviews to be posted online unless they contain obscene or unlawful content"
It seems that the FTC should have insisted in one more thing in the settlement: an admission that they were, in fact, wrong.
It doesn't need a computer for the beancounters to play those tricks. Back in my Civil Service days they always seemed to come up with some new IR* to say my claim was invalid. I considered claiming witness expenses from the court instead. That might have caused a ruckus.
* Waaay before HMRC was invented.
As far as I can remember so long ago the basic design, or at least V7 which was my earliest version, was a bit more nuanced.
Yes you could use root to do things such as administer printers but you could also use a different UID to do that such as lpadmin for the printers. "Do one thing and do it well" in operation.
It meant that in the case of an installation with multiple operators the privileges could be shared out appropriately by giving an operator the specific passwords they needed.
That seemed to be Too Complicated so everyone tended to get the root password whether they needed it or not.
That was Too Insecure so then we got sudo and pkexec.
"But the kids are more tech-savvy than the grown-ups. They can make it look like a voice-only phone when it really isn't after a magic knock or the like."
If you think you can make SWMBO's ancient non-smart Nokia that totally lacks a camera into a camera phone you're welcome to try.
Observing a few cases would soon dispel any notion that any magistrate or judge would be out of touch. As the slogan used to go, "all human life is there".
I did - very briefly - consider it when I retired, largely as a matter of curiosity as to what it looked like from the other side of the witness box. Very briefly because I looked at the bumf about training and decided it seemed to be all in managerial-sounding jargon.
I suppose the thinking is that if it works, then in ten years time they'll have built up their industry to the point where they don't need to offer the incentive. What happens to the freelancers after that isn't their concern. They're not doing it for the freelancers' benefit.
As for nuclear, I don't think that many people are thinking "mushroom cloud imminent"
I'm not sure everyone is capable of making that distinction. If they were we probably wouldn't also have anti-vaxxers, Ng phone mast arsonists etc. Never under-estimate the technical ignorance of a Grauniad reader Sun reader substantial chunk of the UK population.
Our (not Samsung) washer does indeed just ping when it finishes the wash cycle. Responding to the ping leads to disappointment. The door remains locked for a further period to no good purpose that I can see.
After a while it unlocks the door. Silently.
I can never fathom what happens in the heads of UI designers.
