Posts by Doctor Syntax

Chemists bitten by Python scripts: How different OSes produced different results during test number-crunching

Re: Mission creep

A glimpse of reality. This is how stuff happens. The first and maybe only version of the code is written for a single, constrained situation. My first FORTRAN program (the initial attraction was "You mean I don't have to do my own arithmetic any more?!") was to take readings from levelling (did you know there were surveyors staffs calibrated in decimal feet) and metric measurements from the Hiller borer and print out lists of numbers for me to draw stratigraphic sections by hand. Not too many people were going to want that one.

I admit to a certain amount of conflict over this one.

As a sometime scientist the computer was to be used as a tool like any other instrument such as a microscope. However you should know your tools, e.g. if you're a microscopist setting up the Kohler illumination should come naturally to you. If you're going to write programs to do a job you should take care over them.

OTOH a high level programming language should provide a high level abstraction of the platform and it might be reasonable to expect the provision of a view of directory contents consistent from platform to platform to be a part of that abstraction.

Re: Not a single mention of testing . . .

There's not a single word of not testing either. The original authors might have tested the life out of it - on the H/W & S/W they possessed. That doesn't mean they could guarantee to catch all corner cases on all other possible platforms including those yet to be designed.

Re: Language question

" If the data format is some sort of standard one in the scientific field, then chances are that there is already an open source Python library which imports it."

This where we came in. There was open source Python code to do what the chemists wanted, except that s didn't.

Re: There's a problem with my python I need to get sorted

"Similarly, why should a language's file system API presume to know what sort order an application wants (if any)"

Fair enough. But one of the functions of a high level language is to present the programmer with a platform that isn't dependent on low level stuff. That move started when symbolic assemblers replaced writing raw machine code - or possibly when people started writing machine code instead of using plug-boards and switches or whatever. It's not unreasonable to expect a language to offer an API option that at least provides a consistent order independent of platform.

YouTube thinkfluencer Siraj Raval admits he plagiarized boffins' neural qubit papers – as ESA axes his workshop

"He promised students who graduated from his course that they would be referred to recruiters at Nvidia, Intel, Google and Amazon for engineering positions"

So what? All this means is that he'll send in CVs just like any other pimp agent.. Where the recruiters file the CVs is up to them.

Re: When does curating become plagiarism?

A bit further on than that. It's when you get found out. Then you can admit your mistake. The mistake, of course, is being found out.

Telstra chairman: If those darn kids can earn $5m playing Fortnite, why can't execs?

There must be a glut of straw. It's the only explanation for so many straw men. First of all, in the linked Forbes article we have the comparison with hourly rates straw man. Then we have the comparison with the streamed games player. Finally we have the straw man of the family firm where the firm whose members can choose to pay themselves as much as they think they can afford. All this to support what are essentially auction prices for top managers.

We're asked to believe that if company A is prepared to pay more than company B for exec X then X must be worth that. But the comparison with the games player is worth examining more carefully. The earnings there directly reflect the fact that sufficient individual consumers are prepared to pay (I admit to wondering why) an overall sum great enough to pay the gamer. In this case the gamer is demonstrably providing value that justifies the payment. The issue which both this article and the Forbes article avoid is demonstrating that the high paid exec is providing value.

We should not be arguing that the exec doesn't put in several hundred times more hours than the line worker nor that he works hundreds of times harder but that he demonstrably provides hundreds of times more value to the business. The fact that this argument isn't being made suggests that all too often there's no such demonstration possible. The bidding should have been stopped before it got so high.

This becomes a particularly acute issue when - we can all put names to this - the big payments are being made to execs by companies which are visibly circling the drain if not heading directly down it.

It's impossible to avoid the suspicion that the auction is being rigged. The people doing the bidding also have their incomes determined in like manner and have no incentive to question the mechanism.

Conspiracy loons claim victory in Brighton and Hove as council rejects plans to build 5G masts

Re: Still remember the Great Late 90s Mobe Scare

"but that's just my opinion."

No, you're doing it wrong. You're supposed to say it's a fact.

Re: Who Needs 5G In Brighton?

Tetra eyesores? Are those the milk cartons you can't open without spilling some?

Re: Reminds me of a true story

"Their headaches were all psychosomatic."

So that's proven then. Mobile phone masts cause psychosomatic headaches. It's only a short step from psychosomatic to psychopathic.

"Those complaints eventually disappeared, to be replaced by whinging about lack of coverage instead."

Completing another trip round that loop is only a matter of time. The time taken for 5G phones to become the norm.

Welcome to the World Of Tomorrow, where fridges suffer certificate errors. Just like everything else

Re: But...!!

This is how we finally discover the truth.

The truth in in there.

OK, OK.

So it's either a webcam in the extractor or just a matter of time until the smart hob burns the house down.

"E.g. a good TV and then something like a FireTV or a Raspi for media playback."

A good TV would be one that doesn't want to connect itself to the internet. Where do you get one of those these days? You might just about get away with not letting your TV connect but how soon is it going to be that you can't do that otherwise the damn thing will just have a temper tantrum and refuse to work at all?

From Libra to leave-ya: eBay, Visa, Stripe, PayPal, others flee Facebook's crypto-coin

Re: The cost in kW

TfL is Transport for London. It used to be London Transport. As name inflation goes it's not too bad.

Re: WTF?

"The stuff can even be converted to gold cyanide or chloride, shipped as an innocuous looking white powder, and electrolysed back again."

The density might give the game away.

Re: VISA

"I wonder how they figure any of that is necessary or even true?"

It's just a polite way of saying they're getting out.

Re: Good reasons for virtual currencies.

"Online ads are extremely cheap."

They're an extremely cheap way of pissing off existing and potential customers. Don't believe me? Ask yourself why so many people run ad-blockers. Perhaps you run an ad-blocker; if so ask yourself why.

"It also allows advertisers to run many different campaigns at once targeted all over the place."

Are those the campaigns that try to sell you what you just bought?

Repeat after me: the only thing the advertising industry sells is advertising to advertisers.

Re: But today I'm a reformed character

"However this is less than 10% of "money" the rest is virtual and is worth more or less what people want to believe its worth.... And are alluded to as financial instruments..."

No, it's worth what people as a whole have decided it's worth. If I decide my investments are worth ten times what they are actually worth, I won't get any more money. People disagree on the actual worth of the things, but that's why we sell things we think are worth less than other people think they're worth.

I took "people" to mean "people as a whole". I think you and the OP are saying the same thing here. And governments also have their own ideas as to what they want people to believe (or decide) it's worth. To go back to your earlier point: That would only be the case if the treasury simply ordered notes printed up and started spending them. But they don't do that. No, they don't quite do that because of the inflationary effect so we get tricks such as "quantitative easing" played instead.

"Each downvote is a bullseye scored."

This exaclty!

Re: Re : Downvotes

There, have one to help you along.

Openreach's cunning plan to 'turbocharge' the post-Brexit economy: Getting everyone on full-fibre broadband by 2025

HOW MUCH???

Probably somebody added up the cost of everything he'd been promising and showed it to him over the weekend.

Re: FTTP Obstacle removed

Money works for Salesforce? I suppose it does.

I think this is already in hand. Personally I wonder what the effects of this will be on ground water movements. Even just building houses seems to have effects on that here with some springs drying up and others appearing where they're not wanted (including through a retaining wall which was also the back wall of an outhouse). Drilling a deep hole for each house is going to have undesirable side effects somewhere.

Lies, damn lies, and KPIs: Let's not fix the formula until we have someone else to blame

Re: Melons everywhere

Or because the boss didn't want to hear bad news. This is how the reality distortion field works.

Re: Reminds me of two things..

It's what I call the seductive power of numbers. If you produce a number it must be right and it must be meaningful. That doesn't encourage taking care in measuring things. Measuring properly can be hard, at best it needs thinking about and at worst involves expensive equipment (CERN!) and processes; if you've already got a number why put in the extra work to get a "bettter" number?

Back in the early days of the OU I had a couple of students who were science teachers. Why faff about with the single balance and its weights when they had digital scales at school that read out numbers? So where do your numbers come from? How do you know they're right as opposed to just believing what the display says? The first time we got a digital balance in my lab I paid a visit to the local Weights and Measures department - handily our neighbours - to borrow a couple of their standard weights so I could check.

Knows where the bodies are buried and where to buy the quicklime.

Re: hmmm

Since when have managements numbers ever been related to reality????

FTFY

Re: Reminds me of two things..

Carefully balance the handset so it falls off after the first ring. Who said anything about talking to the customer?

"And the alternative could have been Alban getting fired."

Not really. He now knew and could presumably prove they'd been submitting false returns all this time. Not a good idea to fire someone who has your balls in a vice.

"it took a lot of explaining."

The explanation should have been simple, although probably beyond manglement's understanding: you get what you pay for.

How do we stop filling the oceans with Lego? By being a BaaS-tard, toy maker suggests

Ours has gone back into storage waiting for a 3rd generation. Be nice to see it in use again....

Tearoff of Nottingham: University to lose chunk of IT dept to outsourcing

Re: And this means

When the only upwards path is into management you end up with management by people who weren't recruited for managerial talent but could do the technical job and the technical job being done by people who weren't good enough to be promoted or too inexperienced to show whether they're good enough or not.

Re: On the upside...

Imagine having so poor an understanding of outsourcing that you think they won't do it manually if it works out cheaper.

Re: Been through this myself.

"The CEO actually had to resign"

So some good came out of it.

'Technical error' threatens Vodafone customers with four-figure roaming fees

Re: Sorry, we got caught

Have you considered Hanlon's Razor?

Father of Unix Ken Thompson checkmated: Old eight-char password is finally cracked

Re: few days?

Hey, you must have been reading my post where I explained just why we do that.

Re: DES

I agree you shouldn't show them on the login page. But show them on the password setting page.

Re: DES

"attacks which iterate over IDs using the same password"

There's another place where chances are being lost - using the same ID on multiple sites. It doesn't help that so many sites insist on using the customer's email address as an ID and most people only have one. Dishonourable exceptions in my case are bank and GP both of whom allocate reasonably predictable IDs.

Re: DES

"you need that safe to be in the cloud and sync'd."

What if that option were not available to you? How would you handle it? You'd just sync one device to another directly. Or do you genuinely have a situation where you never have two devices in the same place at the same time?

Experts warn UK court digitisation is moving too fast and breaking too many things

"three times more time allocated to it for hearing on that day than could possibly be heard."

I can't remember when that didn't apply to courts. That and, with long running cases, expecting witnesses to turn up whether there was any chance of them being taken that day or not.

I can't believe you've done this: Cisco.com asks visitors to explain to IT why they have broken the website

Re: Sadly, this wording is still common

"First, contacting the webmaster to inform them that the error happened and what time is pointless -- that information is already in the webserver logs."

Having the information in the logs doesn't mean it doesn't need to be pointed out to the webmaster.

Not a death spiral, I'm trapped in a closed loop of customer experience

Re: Citogenesis

Wikipedia is not needed for this. Archaeological dating worked like this prior to carbon dating being introduced. You could even have rival long and short chronologies both supported by such circularity.

Re: Old Spanish Customs

"Why can’t they sleep late when it’s the weekend"

Don't worry, they'll be teenagers soon enough.

Re: This requirement for paper bills/statements...

Until you get to 70.

Re: This requirement for paper bills/statements...

"Keep on living as if the Domesday book was published yesterday, Britons."

You appear to have attempted to make some point about this twice, The only point you've made is that you're familiar with the date and correct spelling of the popular name but have no knowledge of the contents. BTW it was compiled in 1086 but published much later; there's an English translation with a dodgy index published in paperback by Penguin.

What's quite clear was that in 1086 the great majority of the English (not British) population was not free. Here in the Danelaw things were a little better but not much. One consequence was that most people were not free to move from one manor to another except when, as seems to have happened in some cases, their lord actually moved them between is manors.

It strikes me that that situation is very much akin to the notion of having to register your presence when you move to a new town. We got rid of that here. We relish that freedom. It's not we who are stuck with medieval practices but it seems that you're so habituated to them that you don't notice you're still subject to them. Just one of life's little ironies.

There seems to be one common thing in all this: systems designed by organisations where either:

a) Questions such as "what happens when...?" or "What if...?" never get asked

b) They are asked but stamped on by manglement as "being negative" or the like

c) They are asked and get through but due to being Agile get postponed to a later iteration that hasn't happened yet and probably never will

d) Have no means or incentive for people at the sharp end to pass "This isn't working" messages back up the line.

Organisations all that have been racing to the bottom and got there.

Re: If you have a new house

"you still have title documents to show you are the owner"

They're kept safe elsewhere and aren't going to be dragged out to show every jobsworth. And those "sharers" include other family members.

The safest place to save your files is somewhere nobody will ever look

Re: Endless recycling

I'm not sure there was ever an official explanation. There had been a lot of fake incendiary devices seized in the previous week and brought in for examination. My suspicion is that one of them wasn't fake and not recognised as such.

I was taking an OU field trip that day and hadn't listened to any news. The first I heard of it was when one of the students mentioned it.

How bad is Catalina? It's almost Apple Maps bad: MacOS 10.15 pushes Cupertino's low bar for code quality lower still

"I don't think it was premature, I think it's been in roughly the same state for a while,"

A bit of a non sequitur here. The fact that it's remained in a given state for a while doesn't mean that that state isn't premature.