Posts by Doctor Syntax

BOFH: The company survived the disaster recovery test. Just. The Director's car, however...

Re: "The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault."

"Having full backups in a separate firesafe building saved us."

I believe the relevant safe manufacturer liked to tell the tale of the Co-op building fire in Belfast. The fire safe fell through several floors and landed not really damaged but jammed. A PHB decided he couldn't wait for the manufacturer's locksmith to come and open it and got someone to cut it open with a torch. The contents were unscathed except for those damaged by the torch.

Re: That reminds me of another story...

For a really comprehensive business continuity event you can't beat thoroughly comprehensive fire.

I discovered the world's last video rental kiosk and it would make a great spaceship

Re: Recycling

Sacks of grain. The SoP for corn milling is to heave the grain up to the top of the building by a chain hoist powered by the water wheel or sails and let gravity take over from there.

Re: Recycling

"also where are we going to work when all buldings are houses?"

This is a big problem. I think planning policy for the entire post-war period has been to separate housing an work places and the use of so called brown-field sites has aided* this.

When I wor nobbut a lad there were about 3 mills to the mile in a typical Pennine valley. Anyone who chose to work int e nearest didn't have far to walk and there were enough buses to make commuting by bus feasible to a mill further up or down the valley. Note the inclusion of "up" because it made the bus service more efficient than having full buses in one direction and empty buses in t'other. For some, of course, their bus stop might be further away than their nearest mill.

Once the mills started to close instead of getting new businesses to take them over developers bought them up, knocked them down, built houses and then started kicking themselves when the next wave of developers discovered they could make bigger profits by leaving the buildings up and converting them to flats. The buses are also long gone; a straight run up and down the valley doesn't cut it when residents are going to jobs spread over umpteen towns and cities in four different counties.

Now we have the double whammy of more people and far less jobs. We also have planners ranting about traffic**, completely blind to the fact that it's the consequence of their own policies over the years. You also have teenagers like by granddaughter being terribly environmentally concious by joining this strike and being taken to a demo 25 miles away by electric car and ignoring the fact that their parents commute large distances each day because their homes are so far away from their jobs.

Here endeth my standard rant on the subject.

* If that's the right word, which it obviously is in the planners' minds.

** My eyes were really opened to this years ago by someone from Sheffield City Council appearing on the news one night bragging about getting some project to locate in the city and all the jobs it would bring followed a couple of weeks later by a colleague bemoaning the city's traffic problems.

Re: ArtJl - old fires

"electrical heating to augment our heat pumps and geothermal"

No way. We'll get issued with hair shirts to keep ourselves warm.

Re: ArtJl - old fires

They must do things differently in France. The typical ones here are dim enough to send you blind if you tried to read by them. Think of the brightness and colour temperature of a 240V bulb run on 110V mains.

"I don't think I've ever seen anything like that in Britain."

Really? It's called up-cycling and all the rage. Stick a bulb-holder on any self-respecting by-gone and turn it into a lamp. IIRC The first place I saw doing that had what was claimed to be a circuit board from a Harrier as the donor. They moved on from chianti and Bulmer's bottles a long time ago. Give them half a chance and they'll turn lamps into lamps.

In much the same vein you cam make candelabra out of copper pipe and Imps fittings.

Fancy yourself as a bit of a Ramblin' Man or Woman? Maybe brush up on your cartography

Not that it helps if you can't read the map. I saw a group with their map holders dangling round their necks wandering down the road towards the sign-posted start of a foot path just further along the bend. They gave up looking bfefore they cam in sight and turned back to head up the clearly marked Private Road to some cottages.

Re: Any Idiot...

"Civilisation and a warm fire in a pub are rarely too far away"

It's the rare occasions you have to worry about. Actually publs, like high street bank branches, are getting rarer these days.

"we recently made necessary changes to the app"

If breaking the app is called a necessary change I wonder what an unnecessary change would be like.

A cautionary, Thames Watery tale on how not to look phishy: 'Click here to re-register!'

Wouldn't it be a great id for Thames Water to reassure their customers that this is genuine. If only they had a website where they could inform the public of what's going on.

There is a website at thameswater.co.uk but it can't be genuine. All it does is issue self-congratulatory pats on the back to Thames Water instead of admitting that they've made a balls-up.

Help! I bought a domain and ended up with a stranger's PayPal! And I can't give it back

Re: Whe someone uses my email address...

This seems the approach most likely to succeed. The ICO or other appropriate regulator would go in at a rather higher level than customer disservice.

Scariest thing about Halloween? HMRC and Defra systems still a risk to post-Brexit borders

Not at all. They've told us something's going to happen and it's up to us to plan for all eventualities. What more could they have done? And when it all falls apart they can tell us that it was all our fault for not planning for whatever eventuality it was and that we all* voted for it anyway.

* Ignoring, just as they have done for many months now, the fact that it was a bare majority of those who voted and nothing like all.

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

Re: Computer scientists not immune...

Nice to know somebody noticed.

Re: Computer scientists not immune...

"- just because untrained devs can use Python, doesn't mean you must be an untrained dev to use Python. If it's the right tool for the job, use it, and if it's not then use something else."

If untrained devs are expected to use Python then maybe Python shouldn't bite. And don't expect them to know if it's the right tool for the job or what the right tool might be.

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.

Well, well, well. Fancy that. UK.gov shelves planned pr0n block

The fibre to the home bit was quietly watered down by Monday. I think that over the weekend somebody showed him what all his promises would cost when it was all added up.

Who else here thought that?

Let me rephrase it - did anybody here not instantly think that?

A spot of after-hours business email does you good, apparently

"employees who prioritise work performance goals and who would prefer to attend to work outside of hours if it helps them get their tasks completed."

IOW employees whose mental health has already been damaged.

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

"35-year-old CEO who took over from dad blasts millennials for being entitled"

It ill becomes anyone who takes over from dad to let the word "entitled" into their vocabulary.

Perhaps those drawing large salaries for running the shareholders' business down the drain should be charged with fraud. That might concentrate a few minds about offering value for money.

Re: A few problems.

"great execs and managers are more economically valuable than even great line employees."

They would say that, wouldn't they but where's the evidence?

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.

WeWork's Meetup slaps RSVP fees on events ‒ then tells everyone not to panic amid backlash

What's wrong with organising a meeting by email or WoM? Been done before, can be done again.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?