Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Yup. What was anticipated can have a pre-planned and possibly tested process working. What wasn't anticipated is where you earn your money.
Where what wasn't anticipate was the need to have somebody around to sort it out is where somebody gets to earn even more money.
"What's probably taking the time is restoring the data to a test system"
And if they don't have a DR contract by which they've tested their restore finding that system and doing the restore are going to take quite a lot of time. That's before they manually start picking the records out. And that's before they graft the records back into the live data in a way that retains consistency.
The RDMBS I used to work with included transaction log backups as part of the backup set. On a restore the transactions were restored as after the data. Consequently if the data backup were restored to the point in time of the last data backup, a point before a deletion took place, the subsequent restoration of the transaction log would roll forward the transactions so the deletion would be repeated.
The full backup set may physically include the deleted data but the restored backup doesn't. I regard this as the normal and satisfactory way to handle backups in relation to deletions.
repeatedly called people who had been arrested but not yet tried as "criminals" instead of "suspects"
A crime is committed by one or more culprits and yet reports will almost inevitably say "suspect" instead. I suppose referring to suspects as "criminal" is the logical extension.
If I hear that somebody has been released without charge I assume it was because there was no provable case against them and that they are, therefore innocent. That is a basic principle of the English justice system (no "not proven" stuff here), has been for centuries and hopefully, despite the longings of the HO and intelligence services, will continue to be. It applies to everyone. It applies to Tory MPs and donors. It even applies to YOU. And if you think about it a little you'll realise that the reason that it applies to Tory MPs, donors and everyone else is so that it can apply to you. And if you do a little more hard thinking you might realise that that is the most valuable protection you can have under the law.
Meanwhile, those of us who've actually had the job of investigating allegations of criminal behaviour appreciate just how important it is that the subjects of those investigations do go unnamed.
"why the likes of Priti Patel have been so vague about what the actual cause was"
The last time the HO tried to brief their front person on techy matters all she thought she could remember was something about hashtags. I guess they're avoiding going there again.
There's a long history of there being records they're not allowed to keep indefinitely, that have been kept indefinitely. The excuse being the difficulty of removing them because although they should have a process for removing them, they don't. It's been reported here a number of times. The admission that they have a weeding process blows that one out of the water.
At some point there was talk of scientists having to become members of the relevant charted institute so I joined mine whilst my degree counted for admission in case they made the MIBiol exam route compulsory (I'd long since promised myself no more exams ever). The talk came to nothing but what made the membership worthwhile was a section of the magazine. It turned out most/a lot of the members were teachers and there was always a selection of exam howlers.
"The problem with Aneel's view and similar from other senior execs, is that it overlooks how modern work, well, works"
He probably belongs in the class of people who find it difficult to understand something when their livelihood depends on not understanding it. He's also selling to others of that class.
I do have a 17" laptop on order to make it easier on the eyes and I suppose at a pinch I could have gone upstairs & connected a second monitor but it's pretty chilly up there. However simply flipping between multiple desktops works fine. At one point I did have three on the go but really two was enough.
If the Black Death pandemic is anything to go by it could take a few centuries to sort out although things will probably happen faster this time and, in Western Europe, the plague was followed a generation or so earlier by a famine lasting several years which also caused substantial mortality. The consequence was to hasten - after some delay - restructuring of the economy including the end of feudal servitude and to lead to a long period during which population growth didn't restart as might have been expected.
"become reasonably resistant to Covid despite its mutations"
More likely because of them. Vaccines (and natural immunity) are largely targeted at the surface structures that enable the virus to gain access to cells. This should result in selection for mutations that change those structure. Mutations that substantially change the shape of those proteins are likely to be less efficient, especially if vaccines are re-engineered to track changes that make the virus more virulent.
Unsustainable? The present (apart from the current unpleasantness) model of the huge agglomeration of work places drawing in commuters from a thousand square miles or so is utterly unsustainable. This might be enough to start it toppling.
The ultimate solution could be WAT ("at" and "from" are two quite different propositions). It could be some form of dispersed office system - multiple small offices housing a few employees living locally. It could be rent-a-desk in local shared office spaces. It could, and probably will, be a mixture.
Whatever it is the big city has reached its unsustainable limits. Its end must be in sight.
Hmmm. I've just been working through a history mini-project having stumbled across the fact that the records in a published set of documents aren't entirely in order. The working set of applications: Okular to read the publication where the dates are given with respect to saints' days; browser to check the saints' days in Wikipedia where necessary, LO Calc to record page numbers against the dates looked up from the calendar; terminal open at command line to run cal to get the calendar. Three GUI & one CLI. It's not one or the other, it's just the best tool for the job.
And now I've done that I can get back to the real project, extracting selected items and being able to get them in the correct chronological order for which the tool set is remarkable similar.
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