Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK privacy watchdog wraps up probe into Cambridge Analytica and... it was all a little bit overblown, no?

According to the article that was a direct quote from the ICO so why do they have had any more legal problem quoting it than you?

It's in their DNA: Nobel Prize in chemistry goes to pioneers of the CRISPR gene-editing tool

This year's Nobel awards seem particularly outstanding. A bright spot in an otherwise dismal year.

After ten years, the Google vs Oracle API copyright mega-battle finally hit the Supreme Court – and we listened in

Re: Good analysis

"In any case, programming will go on."

If Oracle win any vendor that wants to see its libraries used will have to make very specific declarations as to the ability of developers to include the API's declarations in their code. It will be interesting to see how Oracle themselves deal with that. On the whole it'll probably be safer not to develop in Java and probably a good idea to develop outside the jurisdiction of the US.

Re: Nine Laypeople

There seems to be a widespread view, which I find very odd, that judges live in isolation from the rest of the world and know only about the law.

A moment's thought should lead to the realisation that all manner of cases are brought before them. As a defunct Sunday paper used to claim, all human life is there.

Re: Nine Seniles

I take it you've not spent much time in courts listening to legal arguments.

UK, French, Belgian blanket spying systems ruled illegal by Europe’s top court

Re: May as well leave security services to do as they wish collecting data

"Oversight devolves to government ministers, parliament, judiciary, and perhaps a committee of the Privy Council."

You think Parliament gets an effective role?

The problem is the government minister bit. They can sign warrants which ought to be limited to the judiciary. At present the judiciary is independent (if you doubt that just remember the judgements against govt. over the last few years) but Cummings isn't happy wit that and wants to get his hands on appointments.

Re: Half way home

"we'll find out the reality that we don't"

Bu, but, but...we've taken back control.

Re: Not for much longer

Cummings doesn't need to explain anything to BoJo. He just tells him.

Re: Not for much longer

"The UK will be at theoretical liberty to go its own way, but the practical consequence...."

And you think the current HMG gives a damn about consequences?

Like the next US govt, the next UK govt. is going to have a massive foreign relations and trade repair job on its hands.

Re: Nothing rhymed

" the illegality of these mass surveillance systems was known long before"

In legal terms it's not "known" until a court rules on it.

As such, the intelligence services will immediately start work on their own interpretations of what phrases like “strictly necessary” and “persistent threat” mean and see if they can fit them within existing laws. If that effort doesn’t hold water, we can probably expect to see new legislation proposed by the government.

Assuming HMG deigns to take notice of it (and they'll have to if they want* any hope of getting a pass on businesses doing any trade with the EU that involves sharing data) they'll probably just go to the filing cabinet and get out Investigative Powers Act 4.0 or whatever number we're up to now.

I'm sure they've anticipated this and couched the same old slurping in different terms. It's one thing where we're really world beating.

* I have serious doubts they even care.

A decades-old lesson on not inserting Excel where it doesn't belong

Re: Excel as an intermediate step

And if you really know what you're doing you'll use something different.

Re: RDBMS vs Excel

the last one said “This page intentionally left blank.”

Surely that should be the zeroth one.

It's the "and dirty" bit that catches people out.

Re: Is my memory failing..

"CSV is so useful that I'm more than a little surprised that a decently flexible and configurable CSV module has never surfaced in either the C or Java standard libraries."

TStringlist, the Swiss Army Knife text handling class in Object Pascal (Delphi and Lazarus) has options for treating data as CSV.

President Trump to slap fresh restrictions on H-1B work visas, refuses to hear public comment on changes

"with the added benefit that US companies pay them less. Last month ... plug the skills gap ... if that works it will still take years for the results to take effect."

Same problem in US and UK. Over the long term, neither country has wanted to take on the cost of training a sufficiently large skilled labour force. Neither country's employers want to pay the going rate for such a labour force. Both countries have, in consequence, an unemployment problem with people with few or no skills and their only solution is to periodically make noises about training people up to fill the skills gap as if that could be done with some short course. The fact is that the effort needed to repair the damage would take much longer than the life of a government in either country; it isn't going to happen.

Was he sent on a spool's errand or something? Library staffer accused of stealing, reselling $1.3m of printer toner

What were they working on round the clock? Hiding it from the next level up?

Nvidia promises once again to let Arm keep its Switzerland-of-chips biz model – and even license some Nv GPU tech

"We have every intention of protecting it, nurturing it, and growing the business model."

Even if present management has every such intention there's no guarantee that a future management will.

"We value a network of partners that can take difficult designs and turn them into soft IP products. It’s something that I wish [Nvidia] could always do.”

And what was stopping you?

What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases

Re: VBA implicated yet?

But they didn't. They didn't even realise it was broken.

Re: Use Excel or use Oracle?

False dichotomy.

Re: I once had to..

It would help to know the reasons for denying the request. Security - B not entitled to know? Reliability - data not clean and B want to make decisions based on it?

Re: It's not the software

and take duck the blame at the subsequent enquiry

Fixed to bring into accord with political reality.

Re: Excel by print only

"the problem seems to be bespoke software that expected ..xls files"

You may be assuming something here. It's more likely that the writers of the bespoke S/W were told to expect .xls files and don't complicate things with things manglement don't understand.

"they are quite clearly and human stupidity error by the system architects. developers, Project Managers (who at least have teh excuse that they are just IT users and don't know better but really should) and Developer management who really should not this kind of thing happen."

More likely a human stupidity error then ensured professionals never got near it. Remember this is a government that declared its disdain for experts except on the rare occasion when it realised that it was in over its head.

Re: Dido (computing):

A recursive acronym,

Dido In Disaster Out

Re: Old Excel version

I blame the whole lot, from Cummings, via his underling BoJo, downwards.

Re: When the only tool at your disposal is Microsoft Excel

And you end up nailed to the wall.

Re: If the last record is OK, proceed.

More haste, less speed.

The time taken to do the job right is usually the shortest in the end.

Re: Familiar kind of scenario.

Time taken to sort out the consequences - too long if you happen to have been one of the vulnerable contacts of the unknowing contacts.

Re: VBA implicated yet?

The problem is trying to do things without getting techies involved. I doubt there's anyone in the techie side of IT - and even a good proportion of management who wouldn't look at what they were using and say "disaster in the making". In this case, of course, the management concerned did not come from that good proportion.

Re: CSV?

"The problem with CSV is that when you open it in Excel"

You don't bother opening it with Excel. You open it with an application which has been designed to check for integrity with such things as a declared number of data rows and a proper end of file marker. It fails? Then none of it gets imported and the sender is to to do it again, this time properly, and whatever management processes in place round it are left showing that data from that source is still pending.

It needs a proper process in place of which the file format are parts S/W and only parts. That needs proper management overseen by someone more capable than a two-time loser of PII.

Re: 'spreadsheet software as "human middleware" in the sector'

Is it too much to hope that fiascos like this lead to the recognition that it has its limits?

Yes, it almost certainly is.

If this biologist was in a testing lab with that job the first thing he would do to record results would be to fire up an RDBMS as he has been doing since about 1984.

However the problem here is to bring batches of results into a single system. In that case the first thing he would do would be to devise a file format with sufficient metadata (i.e. a row count) to check that the received file contained the intended complement of rows so that incomplete files could be instantly noticed. Very likely the format would be CSV. Only after doing that would the S/W be considered.

Taking time to do a little planning and design up-front pays dividends later.

Re: 'spreadsheet software as "human middleware" in the sector'

Good enough for politicians but real work needs something better.

The entire team responsible should be sent home to write out "Excel is not a database" by hand, 16,000 times. Each.

At the very least include a count of results uploaded at the top and check that that number is actually received. For preference also add a specific end of file marker. Ring alarms if one of these tests fails.

Is it really that hard?

Wind and quite a bit of fog shroud Boris Johnson's energy vision for the UK

I think we just have to file it alongside all the plans for the EU granting his every little wish for a post-Brexit trade deal.

Re: Or

"The real way to decarbonise the transport sector" is to need less of it. Until recent events we've seen London workers commuting in from sillier and sillier distances. Now London's complaining about all the money lost from lack of footfall but they've been part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Re: The big problem however...

"his leadership"

For want of a better word.

Excel Hell: It's not just blame for pandemic pandemonium being spread between the sheets

Re: VBA Security Security Security Security... I can't hear you!!!

"And yes, an excel spreadsheet is likely more secure than a database set up by someone who has no idea what they are doing."

And when the spreadsheet is set up by someone with no idea what they're doing you get the mess we're encountering now.

"for some reason that is where things stopped."

The reason is that manglement is incapable of understanding that a PoC isn't production-ready. Or even beta. See also that in HMG beta is believed to be production-ready.

Re: Ye Olde English Proverb

The bad workman might have chosen the tools.

Step back here and ask a few simple questions (the answers might not be simple).

1. What data and in what format is received from the testing centre to accompany the samples?

2. What format do the lab instruments export?

3. What needs to be done to interpret the results from 2 and marry it up with 1.

4. How many systems need to be fed from this?

5. What format(s) are needed from that?

6. What needs to be done to prepare the output from 3 into 5.

7. What sort of scale is needed?

8. What's needed to accomplish 6 at 7 reliably and at appropriate speed?

9. What's needed to oversee the process and ensure its all running properly?

At that point you have a set of requirements for the processing needed. "A spreadsheet jockey" isn't likely to be the answer to 8 although it might e the answer to 9.

Re: What should I use instead

"Ok we should not use Excel. What should a non programmer use instead?"

Email or the telephone. To ask a programmer to put together a real application.

For a lot of purposes the spreadsheet is good enough but at the very least you need a sanity check on the results and sometimes "good enough" isn't really good enough and you have to require better. Dealing with people's health and lives is one of those times.

Re: Relax...

In real life this will have gone through all sorts of very important people an NHSX who then said "use Excel because that's what we know.".

Cisco ordered to cough up $2bn – yes, two billion dollars – plus royalties after ripping off biz's cybersecurity patents

"The judge also expressed his irritation again with Cisco over its efforts to force the court to use its own Webex video conferencing system rather than the Zoom software the court had trained its staff on"

Pro tip: don't try to tell the judge how to run his court. It won't end well.

Apple seeks damages from recycling firm that didn't damage its devices: 100,000 iThings 'resold' rather than broken up as expected

Re: Really?

"We already see this in the use of glue instead of screws "

If you're disposing at end of life a hammer is an efficient screwdriver and likely to use less energy than a heat gun.

Re: The Waste Makers

"So having phones responsibly recycled by a Canadian company would, on paper, appear to be the much better approach."

Unless there are environmental reasons for taking the product out of use re-use is the most environmentally friendly form of recycling.

On that basis this unauthorised repair business must be losing money so how can it survive? Either that or Apple should employ them to turn round its own repair business. Or does the chance of a tax loss trump everything?

Nominet refuses to consider complaint about its own behaviour, claims CEO didn’t mean what he said on camera

Re: Failure to fail

"We are well and truly Borised."

That's what Cummings wants you to think.

China takes TikTok-WeChat ding-dong to World Trade Organization, accuses US, India of breaking global rules

"Hint: He’s in hospital"

I see he's now claiming he's really been to school to learn about Covid. I keep quoting "experience is a dear teacher but there are those who will learn by no other". Who's paying the bill this education?