* Posts by Doctor Syntax

40413 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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How do you save an ailing sales pitch? Just burn down the client's office with their own whiteboard

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And in an electric kettle its function is to detect the fact that it's boiling due to the temperature of steam in the space above the water. Other uses are as thermostats to switch your fridge or freezer compressor on or off, or to control your boiler. One technology, many functions.

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Re: 60HZ+-+- " 220V on which South Korea operates"

A) How much should g be off?

B) One of the important things about making measurements is to understand what your reference sources are and how good (or not) they might be.

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Re: Opps

I heard of a Telex machine seized in a police raid. Somebody testing it decided that the telephone leads were the obvious connection for the mains power.

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Re: When <i>something</i> goes bang

It's not just your white cables that can go short like that. At the beginning of December (just post-lockdown start) the cable 100metres or so down the roa did that. Standing on the road surface you could feel the pulsing under your feet. It also damaged the adjacent gas pipe, fortunately not as bad as it might have done.

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I haven't used a kettle lead in years. We've had the upright, jug-like things with the lead hard-wired to the base and the kettle plugs into a coaxial connector on the base. First an old, well-respected brand and then, after its cheap and nasty clip closing the lid failed so the steam detector couln't work (if you've had the same brand you'll recognise the problem) and than an Amazon Basics, cheaper than the well-known brand, not quite so well balanced to handle but just works.

European Commission redacts AstraZeneca vaccine contract – but forgets to wipe the bookmarks tab

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Re: Can't wait to hear how BoJo is also responsible......

"Boris is responsible"

Also irresponsible.

One of the quirks of the English language.

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Re: the South African, the Spanish, the Denmark, the Brazilian, the Nigerian, etc. strains

Bats.

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Re: And the EU still can't understand why the UK left.

The word you are looking for is "surplus".

Also the collective noun for accountants. An accountant once told me "This business has a surplus of accountants".

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Re: Null and void

"As an EU citizen, data security is not about keeping the government's data secret from the voters."

As an EU citizen maybe you're not aware of the reasoning of Sir Humphrey. Keeping stuff secret from the voters is the sole reason for an government security.

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Re: confidentiality clause

At least they won't have to worry about vaccine safety.

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Re: someone hasn't read the contract

Thanks. Now it makes sense. It would have made even more sense if, instead of the garbage about for these purposes UK is part of the EU they'd just have talked about manufacture in the EU and UK. I suppose, however, if AZ had ramped up production outside both and they were still having problems in the EU plants the reservations would have dried up PDQ.

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Re: Yeah well

"But anti-vaxxers are numerous enough to undermine the attempt to reach herd immunity."

It's still not established whether the vaccine stops transmission. If the virus is able to survive in the upper respiratory tract out of reach of the immune system then someone can have a symptomless infection and spread virus although they're protected against any major symptoms. That means that the anti-vaxers would-be parasites can still be infected by those who've been vaccinated.

It also means that we still can't get rid of the virus. Let's hope that situation doesn't happen.

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Re: Clearly states the first batch is manufactured in EU, not UK

It looks like enough contradiction between 5.1 & 5.4 to keep several lawyers' children fed.

I can't quite see the point of closing the Irish border for exports from the Republic to NI given that the latter is likely to have the better supply and it sets a precedent for the UK to reciprocate in banning exports. The smart thing for BoJo to do would be to allow some exports as a matter of goodwill - and respond to the border ban by dismantling as much of the Irish sea border as possible as that is really the biggest danger to the UK as a whole in the entire Brexit shambles.

On the whole it seems like classic managerial approach. Let's play the blame game instead of "What can we do to help get production going?". Ans no country or bloc has a monopoly on experts at that.

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Re: And the EU still can't understand why the UK left.

And not PII.

Countless emails wrongly blocked as spam after Cisco's SpamCop failed to renew domain name at the weekend

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Nobody took the opportunity to grab the spamcop domain?

Nominet faces showdown with British internet industry: Extraordinary vote called to oust CEO, board members

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Kills? I suppose "skills" was intended but nice Freudian slip.

Skål! Ericsson toasts healthy set of Q4 2020 results thanks to global 5G rollout and a kneecapped competitor

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Not a US company. Just as well Trump isn't still in power, otherwise they'd be next in the firing line.

Microsoft's Gooseberry is a dish best served really, really cold: Progress made on silicon quantum computing

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Re: Australia has invested heavily in quantum computing

"the transistor. First created in the lab in 1947, it did not become important until the integrated circuits of the late 1960s"

Cough - transistor radios - cough - 1950s - cough.

Transcribe-my-thoughts app would prevent everyone knowing what I actually said during meetings

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Re: Keep it brief and pertinent.

Soon dealt with. Tear document up and declare meeting ended.

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Re: Engineer on HR violence

He was probably in a mental state where he didn't care and might quite possibly have gone on to shoot himself if he hadn't been stopped first. It's a frequent enough pattern in these sorts of incident.

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Other direction.

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Last straw

Greek meetings. Well, a Greek PM. He spent the afternoon before going on holiday dithering about how work was to be allocated in his absence. When a decision had been made I went home. By the time I got there he'd changed his mind again. I decided it was finally time to announce my retirement at end of current project.

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Simple process.

1. Write extremely slowly, asking for pauses while you get it down and frequent repetitions.

2. Next meeting issue photocopies of your illegible handwriting.

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With Penistone just down the road (A629) via Cumberworth and Scout Dyke.

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Re: "Smart" paper system

If I can't read my own writing how can they be expected to?

Hey, AT&T, you ripped off our smartwatch-phone group call tech – and we want our $1bn, say entrepreneur pair

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If they'd had any sense ATT would have made an offer to buy out the original contract once they realised their mistake. It would have cost them somewhat but saved in the long run. This time round they'll have to do it. Very likely it will cost them more.

What happens when the internet realizes the stock market is basically a casino? They go shopping at the Mall

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Re: The money has to come from somewhere

But the money the hedge fund loses will end up in some pockets -- so on average the people who jumped on the bandwagon and got out in time will make a killing.

FTFY

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Re: Sounds

I was thinking it makes a nice change from Bitcoin.

We've got some really bad news about Apple's privacy measures, Google tells iOS app devs: It'll hurt your Google ad revenue

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As per my comment on the FaceBook thread, it's incredibly generous of them both to give Apple so much free advertising. Personally I'm not in the market for a phone or tablet at all, let alone at Apple prices but if I were this would certainly be a decisive factor.

Facebook finally finds something it thinks is truly objectionable and needs to be taken offline: Apple

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It's very generous of FB and, in another thread, Google to give Apple so much free advertising. Ironic, really. I I were in the market for a phone and willing to pay anywhere near Apple's prices this could tip the decision in their favour. And it's not even targeted advertising.

The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

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Re: Basically RH steals contributor's work from now on

We see a regular pattern on this site. Some big corp makes a misstep that pisses off its users. Its very experienced users. Its very experienced users who really know what they're talking about.

Then suddenly somebody appears without any previous posting history and starts trying to tell these users that they've got it all wrong. They're utterly unconvincing.

Does this fit anybody here?

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Re: I don't get it....

Dammit, I'm getting old and slow. I should have checked. This was mlupo's first post.

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Re: I don't get it....

If it's RHEL next minor version how is it RHEL current?

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Re: @mattdm - I don't get it....

LTS is bug-fixes only, not randomly dropped new features.

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Re: I don't get it....

"I think you have a basic misunderstanding here. CentOS Stream 8 will never be significantly different from RHEL 8; CentOS Stream 9 will never be significantly different from RHEL 9. All updates headed for CentOS Stream are already approved to land in that major release of RHEL, with the same general rules about stability that RHEL holds to."

You seem to be misunderstanding what you wrote. If you get updates to 8 which are already approved for 9 then you're half-way between the two but are actually neither. Updates only in 9 are not 8. Stuff not yet updated to 9 is not 9.

It's not all bad. Your headline is correct.

We regret to inform you the professor teaching your online course is already dead

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Re: And get a better education...

We had a new head of Dept (not appointed to a Chair, he eventually went to Sussex for that) who had the bright idea of reorganising the entire Botany course. Our first year was nothing but systematic botany and plant anatomy - something like it might have been 20 or 30 years earlier. He did admit later that he regarded us as the class that lost our first year.

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Producing a distance learning package, e.g. the OU courses, there'll be a lead time to get the course material together. It'll then be expected to run for several years before being scheduled for replacement. There'll be some amount of probability that one of the authors will die or at least retire before the course EOL arrives. A traditional University course is a live event. A distance learning course is a product; it may have to outlive one of its originators.

Command 'n' control botnet of notorious Emotet Windows ransomware shut down in multinational police raid

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"Criminal charges and prosecutions will doubtless follow from the raids."

I certainly hope so, and long sentences following those.

A Twitter world-improvement plan that doesn't involve deleting Twitter? Unleash the boffins, says microblogging biz

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There must be material for a ton of psychology PhD projects in there on mustual self-delusion.

Today's 'sophisticated cyber attack' victim is the Woodland Trust: Pre-Xmas breach under investigation

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"If it is ransomware, the attack goes to show that no organisation, no matter how innocuous, is off-limits"

Early victims weren't even organisations. They were individuals such as me cousin-in-law who got hit with an email apparently from a friend. Fortunately that wasn't a sophisticate one - it simply deleted the original files instead of overwriting them.

But it just illustrates that any organisation, however unlikely a target it might think itself, needs a defence in depth.

UK Cabinet Office spokesman tells House of Lords: We're not being complacent about impact of SolarWinds hack

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"According to many of the interviews of immunologists I've heard on the BBC, there is evidence that in general a longer gap between the first and second inoculations of vaccines produces a stronger immune response in the end."

I believe the BMA have been arguing the opposite.

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"While this is possible, the question is how do you deal with a limited supply of vaccine?"

What's being planned for is a steady ramping up of supply and delivery capabilities. One consequence of this is that at any particular time the number of people vaccinated four weeks ago is a small proportion of the current capability.

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"It's the politicians' jobs to look at these outcomes and decide which ones they would prefer to head for."

Their preference is all too often the one that wishful thinking points them towards.

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"Historically this would have taken weeks or months but is being done in days or sometimes even hours."

The one thing that's certain about epidemics is that time always counts against you. If the doubling time is 3 to four days and you take a week to decide your problem is already four times as big and it will stay that way until you finally get on top of it - which is, of course, already four times harder to do.

Europe considers making it law that your boss can’t bug you outside of office hours

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Back in forensic science days there was an occasional need for out of hours response to some major crime. My approach was that I'd not guarantee being on the end of a phone at any time (way before mobiles and we didn't have pagers either) but if I was then I'd come in unless it was impossible. It worked well enough.

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Re: Soberish

You stop off at the pub on the way?

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Re: WTD

Just make sure the time spent accounting for every 15 minutes is accounted for. While you're doing that make sure it includes time spent getting back into the zone after every interruption.

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Re: WTD

Not suggesting it keeps within the law. Not suggesting doesn't stop it being career limiting.

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Re: Standard interview questions...

"But it wasn't my problem."

It could have been the basis for negotiation.

Europe promises all-out assault on batteries to counter China’s lithium-ion domination

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Re: Hmmmm

Cornwall. In Europe, just not in the EU.

Meanwhile, we're going to have to duplicate all this in the UK if we want to export UK-built EVs to the EU. IiRC HMG has already promised we'd be the leading place in the world for this which means that we don't stand a chance.

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