Posts by Doctor Syntax 42029 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I suppose there's a grin of truth in what he says. If the company isn't being run in accordance with company law then the relevant govt. body, Companies House might take an interest. Of course the exact nature of that interest could depend on whose actions are responsible for it not being run in accordance with company law.
It raises the usual questions about top management:
Do they believe what they say?
Do they believe we'll believe what they say?
Do they think we won't care even when we don't believe what they say?
Do they care whether we care when we don't believe what they say?
None of the alternatives show them up in a good light but I've never been able to determine which is the case given that the only external evidence is that they keep spouting bollocks that only an idiot would believe.
What may well give rise to suspicion is running an expensive service and providing modified equipment. But to go further than that needs evidence of conspiracy. Offering over-priced goods and services is not in itself a criminal conspiracy. Were it otherwise I'm sure we could all think of many businesses both inside and outside the IT industry who'd be in line for prosecution.
The question here is whether they have evidence of a conspiracy or does the US system allow indictment on suspicion alone as well as allowing indictment of someone who's not even within their jurisdiction?
"Do you understand the difference between assumption and fact?"
Do you? Let's start with some of the basics. Everyone is assumed to be innocent until proved guilty by due process of law.
Do you think that rule exists to protect the guilty? If so, you're wrong. It exists to protect the innocent. If you set it aside then we're all at risk.
You may argue that it makes it hard work to proceed against criminals. I know, I was one of those working hard at it. Nevertheless, that's the way it should be.
I remember installing DecNet S/W on an HP-UX box to communicate with a VAX. DecNet packet addressing was based on the assumption that all the NICs were Dec and so had the same MSBs. in the MAC. In order to work the S/W changed the HP MAC to look like a Dec with no warning. This rendered all the users' caches invalid and broke their connections. Fortunately this was in the days of character-based applications with client and RDBMS running on the same box so there were no database connections broken and the user PCs caught up with the change of address pretty quickly.
OTOH - trying to get through to management that the system was designed to set up new products through a proper user interface that stitched everything together properly and not via a list of instructions for the DBAs to execute individual SQL statements that required CC clearance.
"No real problem when you're ... simply replicating transactions to a standby system"
The real problem is getting it past the bean-counters. "We're paying how much for this? And you want to pay the same again for another one just in case?"
Remember that this was all too often sold on the basis that it makes problems like this go away. Of course all it does is make them just go out of sight.
A simple solution. Challenge to granted patents is taken out of patent offices' hands but any patent successfully challenged by negligence of a patent office results in the office being responsible for all the challengers' costs and damages resulting from any lost income.
Just watch the number of successful patent applications fall.
It will likely be peppered with "syntactic sugar", such as the "quotative like", "ummms" and "aahs", and all sorts of syntactical errors which you wouldn't see written in an email, for example.
Sugar is too kind a word.
I've certainly seen one example of the intrusive "like" (fortunately on the decline, not so fortunately being replaced with the millennial "so) in a query on a technical forum. The query was about excessive memory use. I was tempted to suggest the memory was filling up with superfluous likes but I doubt he'd have understood.
"File" is one word that is definitely anachronistic now. Back in the days of punched cards it was meaningful to speak of a file of cards, file in the sense of objects lined up in a row (cf rank and file).
In terms of representing physical objects used in offices a file is usually a folder containing a number of documents. "Document" would be a better term than "file" as used in computing today. XML terminology does refer to documents but they're usually implemented as files.
"It's what you do afterwards that really counts."
It's amazing how reactions vary. I had experience of a fire in the '70s. The fire affected one wing of the building. The top level management came to the decision that those of us who occupied that wing had to remain on the site for security reasons, quickly arranged for alternative accommodation for the others and decanted them out, and arranged for a few portacabins. Almost every department set to work sorting themselves out in their new space allocations, cleaning up, replacing equipment etc. and got back to work ASAP. One department whose equipment had survived unscathed just piled it up in their allocated space and sat there for days, apparently waiting to be told what to do.
"But browser?"
You see the space where you type URLs? Type something in there that isn't a URL. What happens? If I do that with Seamonkey I get a complaint about an invalid URL. If I do it with FF or any derivative I get search results. Doesn't it need the browser to send everything to a search engine to do that that?
With Palemoon I can at least choose DuckDuckGo or whatever as the search engine it sends it to. So far I haven't succeeded with FF although I haven't tried hard because I can mostly avoid it.
Information?
Once the offence-taking industry gets hold of it they don't need information. If they say it's bad then it's bad by definition.
I wouldn't normally be in favour of an Academie Français approach to language definition but it really seems that we need one to stop English from being stolen. Although if there was one I can guess the sorts of people who'd consider themselves entitled to run it.
"Reforms intended to protect the innocent from miscarriages of justice became the focus of BBW's campaigning, with the pressure group arguing the pendulum had tilted too far against victims of crime."
This is a fraught area. Those who are subject to a false accusation are also victims of crime.
IME investigators really do want to do the right thing by the victim but working out who the victim is is far from straightforward.
