Posts by Doctor Syntax

Desperate Nominet chairman claims member vote to fire him would spark British government intervention

Re: I'm pondering how bad "government control" would really be

Now that really would be a threat - if he gets pushed out Harding might be put in to replace him.

Why yes, I'll take that commendation for fixing the thing I broke

Re: Change control is good - when it is properly controlled

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.

Re: The good old days when management believed everything

Hi might not have been S.H.I.T. but did you get S.H.O.T. of him?

Re: Documentation

"a comment in the config file"

In the world of point and click what's a config file?

Re: Experience is the best teacher

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.

Documentation

Was there documentation of the set up? Documentation of why things were done this way? Even more important, why things were not done that way? Or did ne not bother to read it?

OVH says some customer data and configs can’t be recovered after fire, some seems to be OK, plenty is safe

Re: Backups - in the heat of the moment

"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.

Third time's a harm? Microsoft tries to get twice-rejected encoding patent past skeptical examiners

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.

'No' does not mean 'yes'... unless you are a scriptwriter for software user interfaces

Re: Pedantry

It depends on whether you're making your selection on political grounds.

Document can apply to an image. A physical file of documents may well contain maps, photographs etc.

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.

Re: when to use the word "fewer" instead of the word "less"

I suppose the pedant would prefer "bigger" or "larger" as the opposite to "less".

Re: when to use the word "fewer" instead of the word "less"

"half a mile is less than a mile (not fewer)"

It's also 4 furlongs fewer than 8 furlongs.

In fact Fowler says "Less can be idiomatically used with plural nouns in certain circumstances, esp. distances"

Re: Here's the next step - removing outdated names:

I had quite enough problems working out how to parse one name: William Paley Baildon. Was Paley part of the surname or not?

IIRC, not.

"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.

Re: when to use the word "fewer" instead of the word "less"

Is 18 less or fewer than 24? Is a dozen and a half less or fewer then two dozen?

Re: when to use the word "fewer" instead of the word "less"

"Less clarity is clearly caused by having fewer clarits available."

Or by drinking more clarets.

Re: Distinctions

I don't find the grey space in the middle of your shirt offensive but it can be black and white whilst still being cut with pinking* shears.

* That leads to a whole load of debatable terminology.

"Dark mode and Light mode interfaces"

This usually means "completely illegible" mode and "almost illegible" mode as those offering such choices seem to separate background and foreground by about two bits' worth of brightness.

"uncontentious alternatives such as blocklist and allow list."

I'm glad they're allowing lists but what are the blocks they're listing made of?

Gummy bears as a unit of measure? The Reg Standards Soviet will not stand for this sort of silliness

Re: Football Fields

When something I recognise is quoted in football fields my reaction, should I be interested enough to have one, is along the lines of "so that's the size of a football field".

Stability of standards is essential. Thank goodness nobody has tried to eat Wales.

We can't avoid it any longer. Here's a story about the NFT mania... aka someone bought a JPEG for $69m in Ether

Re: Blockchain 0, Mona Lisa 1?

"a thing is worth what somebody is prepared to pay for it."

HP wish to dispute that.

NFTs are a hyped up, cryptographic way of proving you own an official copy of something separating fools from their money.

FTFY

Talk about a Blue Monday: OVH outlines recovery plan as French data centres smoulder

"Clue: it's not the hosting company."

No, just all those who made reassuring noises about "the cloud".

Re: «Noooo!!!! F4ck!!!»

"Time and again I find it clearly written in their SLA"

Why read the SLA when the salesman was so convincing?

Forgotten what?

Re: It's not the incident that's important

"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.

UK.gov about to release £500m funding for Shared Rural Network targeting countryside 4G notspots

Re: £500 million

You need to look very carefully to make sure that (a) it's not the same £500m that was announced at least once before and (b) it actually happens.

Communication Workers Union to hold national ballot for members at BT, Openreach and EE over strike action

"BT reckons it needs to transform because financial results have stagnated in recent years as it focused on the UK, consumers and the network"

I remember it trying to focus on non-regulated sectors back in the '90s. That didn't go well either.

Huge if true: If you show people articles saying that Firefox is faster than Chrome, they'll believe it

"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.

Re: XX is faster than Yy ?

Palemoon if you just want a browser, Seamonkey if you want a browser and email/RSS/usenet client.

The only hamburger menu in sight here is on a red banner with a vulture at the other end.

Don't be a fool, cover your tool: How IBM's mighty XT keyboard was felled by toxic atmosphere of the '80s

With working at home freeing smokers from workplace restrictions is this becoming an issue again?

Australia picks third fight with Big Tech, this time over browser and search on mobile devices

What a pity they didn't extend the effect of Salesforce on Salesforce's customers to the effect on the customers' customers, the general public who have little say on having their details hoovered up so they can be managed (don't forget what C & M stand for in CRM).

The first rule of ERP? Don't talk about ERP: App-maker IFS reckons market has moved on

I thought the entire point of ERP was end-to-end business process.

GitLab latest to ditch 'master' as default initial branch name: It's now simply called 'main'

Re: "Git"?

Nd some of us are old gits. But that's also fine as it's compulsory in the woke world to insult the old.

Re: Information?

Yes, I read your page. It indeed says that the slave-related meaning is false. But that won't make any impression on those who are stealing our language.

So how do we differentiate the code module that contains the main() function?

But no matter, lets just have another ambiguous term.

Re: nitty gritty

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.

You wouldn’t know my new database, she goes to another school: Oracle boasts of earthshattering tech the outside world cannot see

Re: Autonomous tech isn't going to help

Once upon a time TPTB decided I'd take over a system that ran on Oracle. I even got sent on a couple of courses at Bracknell. It didn't happen. I count it as a lucky escape.

UK to introduce new laws and a code of practice for police wanting to rifle through mobile phone messages

"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.

Atos handed £1.5bn to run IT for UK government-founded pension trust Nest

Re: stupid question

"Sorry, I said it was a stupid question."

Given in-house means DWP, yes it was a stupid question.

UK Space Agency will pay a new CEO £125,000 to run non-existent space programme

Re: C'mon, people! This isn't rocket science.

Perhaps this is the ideal post for her. Then somebody capable can be put into T&T.

First Australia, maybe Europe, now America mulls effort to potentially make Google, Facebook pay for news

Whilst I have no enthusiasm for FB and the like the potential for collateral damage is huge. The basic principle of the WWW is that if you post something there it can be linked to. If you don't want that to happen don't put it there. If you don't want it indexed protect it with robots.txt. If you don't like that go off, sponsor some hard engineering effort and invent something that works the way you want but don't forget to make it attractive enough to the public that they'll want to use it.

I can't help feeling that the traditional media giants have come along, decided this was something they could exploit and, discovering that it doesn't work exactly how they want, are now trying to change the way it works.

This developer created the fake programming language MOVA to catch out naughty recruiters, résumé padders

Re: I can't believe it's not real!

Binary Integrated Network Generated Objects

Memo to scientists. Looking for intelligent life? Have you tried checking for worlds with a lot of industrial pollution?

Re: "`Oumuamua, the first-known foreign interstellar object to visit the Solar System"

Seeing as we weren't able to investigate it closely we don't know either way but to state baldly that it is artificial seems to neglect Occam and doesn't encourage taking his project seriously.

A sufficiently advanced civilisation will work it out for itself.

Remember that day in 2020 when you were asked to get the business working from home – by tomorrow?

Re: It Was A Breeze

If you had any shares I assume you sold them quite early on.

Re: Hats off

But SCO - the old SCO, not the litigation machine - had a free or cheap development licence that was only supposed to be used for 6 months but never timed out. You needed a floppy, and CD drive to install it. If they'd just sold the ordinary licences at an affordable price Linux would have been one of those archaic 90's curiosities that you vaguely remember and kids disbelieve. And SCO would have dominated the office server market ever since.

Re: Hats off

"I kind of miss how insecure we used to be able to be"

Support modem plugged into the back of the Unix box. Dial in from a Nokia brick Communicator. Pick up email (this is one that will get the kids - Unix boxes have the facility for internal email so the overnight jobs email their output to a user who can then read it on a character terminal with elm or pine etc). rsh from one box to another - none of your telnet here!

A client with problems would ring me at my main client's office, then unplug his fax and plug a modem into the fax line and, again, dial in from the Communicator.