Posts by Doctor Syntax

White House creates 'Team Telecom' to probe whether foreign telcos should be allowed near US networks

Why the joke alert?

First it was toilet paper. Then pasta. Now Broadcom suspects hoarders are behind its surprisingly good-looking Q2 sales

All this prompts a slightly OT thought.

A commonly expressed view is that mobiles have been replacing PCs because "they can do everything people need". Suddenly working at home arrives and when real work is to be done laptops or even desktops are needed for Real Work. Could there be a shift back to PCs?

Minister slams 5G coronavirus conspiracy theories as 'dangerous nonsense' after phone towers torched in UK

Their children's health in the face of a not obviously present problem is one thing. Their own health and possibly life in the face of a very obviously present threat is another.

In 2018 we went back on holiday with our daughter and took the grandkids for the first time. After feeding them with stories about the weather it was glorious for the whole time except a thunderstorm on the last day.

There's a lot to be said for letting them congregate in parks, have barbecue parties (but not on moorlands like the twerps on Winter Hill) or whatever and collect their Darwin awards.

Re: In other disinformation news from Michael Gove

"just feckin incompetent!"

That's what happens when you do things yourself. He should have taken expert advice.

Re: The boss at worked asked me

"an IT guy gone managerial"

Yes, I can see from your story that he had the appropriate talent for a move like that.

Undoubtedly. Because they read it on Facebook. On their mobile phone. It's only ignorance than saves them from needing an irony bypass.

"There have been plenty of anti 3G/4G/5G campaigners for as long as I can remember now.."

And all propagated by means of whatever it was they were campaigning against last.

'Beiderbecke Tapes'

Barbara Flynn!

"Maybe this 5g rubbish has been created to identify gullible idiots"

It only needs an extra twist - that those so identified will be denied treatment if they catch the virus. Get that one circulating and it should end the rumour PDQ.

New IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says hybrid cloud will be bigger than mainframes, services, middleware

Re: What a pile of old bollocks!!!

It's easy to see why he got promoted to CEO. He has the usual total disconnect from that customers want and the coal-face staff who are trying to provide it.

"must have the maniacal focus of the entire company.”

How does that work when everyone in the entire company is focussing on working out when they're going to be chopped.

From Amanda Holden to petrol-filled water guns: It has been a weird week for 5G

The radiation was affecting their children. Not the radiation itself but the garbage it was carrying.

Re: Who'd have thought

They did and didn't agree with the premise.

Re: conspiracy

It's for the sake of efficiency. Don't waste NHS resources on treating them when they go down with COVID-19.

Re: What about

At a guess such actions could already be classified as acts of terrorism. I'm not sure adding capitals makes much difference.

Re: Indictment of education system

You forgot to name check the former Educaton Sec & current minister for the Cabinet Office, right at the centre of government.

Good ploy by HMG

This idea such obvious bollocks that it could only be believed by celebrities and the utterly stupid (I'm not claiming there isn't overlap). It's a conspiracy by HMG to identify the utterly stupid so as not to waste resources on treating them when they go down with the virus.

You heard it here first. Spread the word.

'Anything' related to remote working is a winner for Euro disties, but classic enterprise hardware? That's another story

Re: But if there is ever an end to this...

They may also start wondering if they need the moronic middle managers.

Re: Cloudy destiny

"if you have to dedicate a part of your home as a workspace, you should be paid for it"

Prepare for business rates. And insurance. And tax for benefit in kind.

Remember Tapplock, the 'unbreakable' smart lock that was allergic to screwdrivers? The FTC just slapped it down for 'deceiving' folks

Re: Don't think padlocks are very secure in general

"managed to break the lock gaining entry"

Even if the lock didn't break you'd have eventually broken whatever it was attached to. Building a securely locked vault starts with a securely built vault.

Kaspersky cleans up poisoned watering hole, Google presses pause on cookie crackdown

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is unaffected, for example."

So is Devuan.

Real-time tragedy: Dumb deletion leaves librarian red-faced and fails to nix teenage kicks on the school network

Re: Fat Mac

If you're going to use a shared machine you should be prepared to sit there until the program completes. It would have been a learning opportunity for him.

Re: COMMAND.COM

But only by those who knew enough not to delete it in the first place.

COBOL-coding volunteers sought as slammed mainframes slow New Jersey's coronavirus response

Re: How systems were all too often documented in the 60s and 70s

"Once the project was complete, the development team handed it over to support and support would refuse to accept the project as finished and supportable if the code was properly documented."

This!

Development is the process of launching the product into the maintenance cycle. If it's not maintainable that fails. Better still, however, one team owns the product throughout so documentation is self-defence.

Re: comments got out of date, you should just read the code

"Comments don't have to be updated when code is. When things have to be done quickly because money is being lost then updating the comments doesn't help get the fix into production quickly."

You comment the changes as part of check in. You do have a version control system to check it into, don't you?

"In my experience, everybody is a systems analyst nowadays."

In the olden days we used to be "analyst programmers".

Re: No so much COBOL as the tools

In your place I might be tempted to get ahead of them and then ask "Is this what you're looking for?".

Re: We've been saying an upgrade is necessary for literally decades.

"they spend the money on whatever makes them look good now, not for the benfit of the next seat warmer in 5-10 years time."

In that case they should be spending money now, not looking for volunteers.

Re: No so much COBOL as the tools

"RTFM means going looking for a YouTube video."

The more experienced eventually discover Stackoverflow.

Re: How systems were all too often documented in the 60s and 70s

"Always write at least two lines of documentation for every function (Or, even every line of code)."

Specifying quantity without quality doesn't necessarily help.

Hypothetical example:

Function name: AddTwoNumbers

Documentation:

Takes two numbers as argument

Returns sum

Yes, we can work that out from the function name. Now tell us something we can't - why you used this algorithm, why you didn't use something else, what the limitations are.

Re: Volunteers?

Arrogance.

Re: COBOL is still running

"training new programmers"

That's the key phrase. Their issue is not with the difficulty, it's because it involves spending money training people and then paying them. What's worse those are the sort of people who have to know what they're doing whilst they themselves have been getting away without that for years.

Re: No so much COBOL as the tools

Also the tools who've "managed" themselves into this situation.

Absolutely everyone loves video conferencing these days. Some perhaps a bit too much

"Blame that on the "ICT" curriculum"

Not in this case. One of the authors is well into her 80s & the other is in his 70s IAFAIK).

I think it's more likely that if you drag an image into Word or whatever and then crop it there's nothing to tell the user that it's not actually cropping it, just framing it. It's only when you click on Edit with external tool and Gwenview shows you what's actually there that such little UI shortcomings are exposed.

I've been having similar problems cleaning up Word docs originally sent as PDFs to printers so we could put out-of-print books on the website for free download. I find a mixture of huge resolution images and whole page scans cropped down to show just a small part of the document etc.

BOFH: Will the last one out switch off the printer?

Re: the next wrung up.

Or one of the bits nicked from us over 'tops?

Re: "and rather bury"

"virtual autopsies"

??

"my wife refuses to play with me cos she says I cheat, she only says that cos I win all the time"

I've always hated the game as being boring and lasting far too long. Instead my wife has given up playing with our grandson as he always wins.

Cricket's average-busting mathematician Tony Lewis pulls up stumps

Re: Limited over

And it looked a lot more like cricket than the modern short forms. There was advertising back then, not that all those Rabbit banners on the boundaries did any good. And I assume those giant egg-cups were advertising something, whatever it might have been.

As a pundit he could have explained it without having been the author so not necessarily a false memory.

Not only is Zoom's strong end-to-end encryption not actually end-to-end, its encryption isn't even that strong

Re: Why do so many businesses seem to need video?

"Communication without visuals is definitely strange though"

We've had the telephone for long enough for most of us to have got used to it.

Re: Why do so many businesses seem to need video?

The usual answer to questions of this type is "Because they can."

"Why do you believe that paying for a product makes it secure?"

What the OP said was If you are not paying for a guaranteed, security based, purpose built piece of software

It's the bit's which you missed out that should give some degree of confidence about security. It may still fail, of course, but being paid for with a guarantee gives the purchaser some degree of come-back that might persuade the vendor to do their est to make it so.

Why is ransomware still a thing? One-in-three polled netizens say they would cave to extortion demands

"when it comes down to getting critical business data back, sometimes there is a case for paying up."

Of course there is, and not just sometimes. So pay up in advance by investing in a proper backup system.

Australian digital-radio-for-railways Huawei project derailed by US trade sanctions against Chinese tech giant

Re: Trade war

Not scrap it, just leave the US out.

Re: "This decision will also ensure the state complies with US trade restrictions.”

But why not simply ship them straight to Oz?

Zoom vows to spend next 90 days thinking hard about its security and privacy after rough week, meeting ID war-dialing tool emerges

Helped along by the fat finger.

"So much so, Zoom published advice on how to keep uninvited morons out of private conferences."

That's half the problem solved then.