Posts by Doctor Syntax 42414 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Isn't he a US citizen now. However large open source projects aren't the product of single countries. Developers are world-wide.
Amongst Linux distros there's SuSE which seems to have done the rounds: originally German, bought by Novell (US) then AttachMate (US), then MicroFocus (UK) then Blitz GmbH (German again) a subsidiary of EQT partners (head office Sweden).
Document Foundation (LibreOffice) and NextCloud are also based in Germany.
Let's try somewhere in the middle. Don't just tell the traced contacts to lock themselves away. Assume that some, possibly many, will be false positives.
Treat the tracing as simply a presumptive test, i.e., one that has to be backed up with a better test. Only require the contacts to self-isolate in the first instance until a test result is available and then continue or not based on that.
Look to get quick turn-round. Instead of the mega-hubs where the test processing starts next morning distribute the processing so that it can be carried out closer to the subjects.
Look into tests that are supposed to give quick results on inexpensive equipment. Even if they also give false positives (but not false negatives) they can act as a second level test before sending samples for a more definitive test. But testing contacts is key, otherwise when the complaints start coming in in a few weeks time the whole thing will blow up in HMG's face.
If that leaves any spare capacity start looking at random testing. If there are asymptomatic cases giving rise to contacts relying on symptomatic cases only will take forever.
Not only committed but actually written it - more or less - into the current DPA. It's the less that's the concern here. Govts tend to lend themselves wriggle room in legislation. At a guess they'll either defend themselves on those grounds or insist it's not covered because they're doing things manually. Even if they are that latter won't wash; manual data processing is data processing.
"Yes, but how many hours of programmer time did it take to do the optimization, and how much money does a few hours of a programmer's time cost versus a few hours of a single CPU core?"
And how much is the user's time worth whilst they wait for a task to complete?
The programmer only has to optimise it once. Many users may use the program many times.
"Would you be happy if you'd been falsely imprisoned?"
As a regular expert witness over many years a constant worry was that I might despite best efforts get caught up in a miscarriage of justice. It's a concern every expert witness should have, at least one appearing for the prosecution. I can't help wondering if the witnesses who appeared in these cases had that concern.
"While Fujitsu was not a party to the litigation..."
Whilst that's true they provided participants in the form of witnesses. One aspect to look at here is how well informed those witnesses were.
Were the problems known the the witnesses? If they weren't but were known in Fujitsu who was responsible for sending ill-informed witnesses?
I stuck with Trinity for a while but started to run into issues with building applications in later releases of Lazarus and wondered if the two weren't getting on. I might give it another try. KDE has followed the usual UI progression from KDE3 > KDE4 > KDE5 of putting shiny before function. UI designers are like an infestation of mice: they get into everything and once they're there they're almost impossible to get rfd of.
"Sysvinit executes scripts in lexigraphical order. This was dumb at the time, but really, really hard to change."
I wouldn't call it dumb at all. Things to be processed in a specific order on the one hand and a system which automatically addresses things in lexical order on the other are fairly obvious case of problem and solution. It doesn't matter whether they're scripts or anything else - PDF files to be assembled into a new file by pdfunite is something I've found myself using fairly often recently and used just that approach.
Dddly enough I'd just started burning an MX disk, had a look here and found this. You wait ages for a systemd-free Debian 10 and.... Unfortunately Debian, and hence Devuan, never seem to settle on an LTS version of KDE.
Actually I've been using the testing Beowulf on a Pi for my Nextcloud server for months so that's updated.
"On HP-UX this got even worse with their practice of combining all of the above into a single script which then had to work out where in the statup/shutdown cycle it was."
That was particularly useful. The script could be edited so that we could inhibit the system from starting new applications, tell the users to log out with time to finish their current tasks and then let the grace period pass before actually forcing them out.
"Driving 260 miles to Durham while your wife has the virus is not safe"
Driving 260 miles when you yourself might be infected is even less safe. There have been reported cases where individuals started out feeling fine on shorter drives than that and were in a state of collapse by the end of it.
"1 - he didn't write it"
He did sit in on several meetings of SAGE who originated - despite being unqualified.
"3 - the deputy CMO explicitly stated that childcare was an exceptional situation"
Yes. And suggested that if there were no suitable alternatives, contact local social services. Of course social services are only for the little people.
"If you were 10 years older you'd probably have heard from them."
I'm 10 years older than you probably think Will is (well over 60 is stall a valid statement, of course). So is SWMBO with additional criteria and neither of us have been contacted. I suppose it's possible someone might have attempted to send her an SMS but it's not an effective way of contacting her - she hardly ever has her mobile on unless she wants to make a call. Plain old letter would be more effective.
As a techie i find it staggering the the govt appears have just given up on a tracing "app"
I don't think they have. They just realise it won't be sufficient (assuming it works) because ..... not everyone has a smartphone to run it on. And not everyone who has a smartphone can be arsed to carry it everywhere or even keep it charged up; I certainly can't.
I always refused point blank to believe that they were my bank on the basis that I'd already made clear to my bank that I couldn't accept such calls without caller verification and I wasn't even prepared to indicate whether or not they'd guessed right. It was followed up by a miffed letter from the bank saying they couldn't get in touch to sell me something I wasn't looking for (I paraphrase).
It only happened with my business account. I suppose I could have simply said discussing financial matters with unsolicited callers was contrary to company policy.
