Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Well, friend, not family.
"I've finished writing up .... for the web site but it's too big to email. I'll have to see you and bring it on a memory stick."
"How big?"
"15 pages. Nearly 28 Mb"
OK, I know what's happened. She's pasted in the pictures at their original resolution. I've previously had great fun dealing with the PDF of a book she'd published and later released on the webs site. Our freebie web host has a maximum size of 10M for uploaded files.
"It's too big to host but if you can get it to me I'll sort it."
"Can you accept [some cloud service I'd never heard of]"
Look up unheard of cloud service. They have a CLI client. Download it.
"What's the URL you were given"
Discussion on what this means.
Discover that the CLI only works with a premium account.
Go back to cloud service web site. Put in the URL. Cloud service can't find it (at a guess the free account has already expired it) but here are some pretty pictures. Strongly reminded of https://dilbert.com/strip/1999-02-17
Resort to something not so obviously aimed at "creatives". Look up NextCloud service providers for free account. Set up free account 1Gb. Yes, somebody else's computer but at least (a) they have reassuring complex password requirements, (b) they're Swiss and not a huge US corporate and (c) it's an article that's going to get published anyway on a community website.
Get the monster .doc. As expected, shrink the oversize JPEGs and the file ends up as a 2.6Mb .odt and the PDF is nearer half a meg as expected.
Now all I have to do is make it look reasonable. Still working on it, main reason I'm here now is I'm putting off more work on it. Maybe I should try to instruct the group in use of styles and how to use tables or tabs instead of rows of spaces for formatting.
The converse of that, back in the days of CP/M etc. Called in at a computer dealer and found them in some consternation. Printer spewing out realms of an unwanted document despite them having switched off the computer to try to stop it. They hadn't grasped the idea of a buffer in the printer.
"I'm convinced that the idea of connecting cables was an invention of Satan himself for unending torture of humanity."
It's a quantum thing. Cables generate spontaneously and are always entangled. They are in a state of superposition in that they could be anything until you open the box and find that whatever's inside has at least one wrong termination.
"You have to keep multiple career histories and CVs updated – something that LinkedIn ... cannot handle at all."
To be fair to LinkedIn (it's the last Friday in the month so I'll allow myself a treat) they're not alone in that. Agents could never handle it either. Carefully tailor the CV company brochure to a particular gig and the pimp would submit it for a different one without checking and, I suspect, without submitting it for the intended one either.
"it fails to take into consideration that as people get older their voting patterns tend to move towards long-term ones."
I wonder if this is so. As one of the older ones here my concerns are long term: I have children and grandchildren to think about. And to be brutally honest, I also have my pension to think of, which in both numerical and value terms, depends on the state of the UK economy. Those are personal concerns; in addition, to be altruistic, although it's a long time since I lived there, I do have concerns about peace in N Ireland. Those are reasons why I voted Remain.
I can't see why anyone with long term views would put their descendants' future at risk.
"One of the most noticeable features of the debate (insofar as it is a debate) post referendum is that the arguments in favour of remain seem to consist mainly of ad hominem criticism of those who voted to leave rather than clear arguments in favour of staying in."
I think the term "Project Fear" and disparaging of experts could be reasonably classed as ad hominem. The arguments thus attacked can't.
"but this time it was necessary since there are about 4-5 versions of leaving."
The 4 or 5 versions mean that it's not possible for any of them to get a majority.
Don't forget that when the fragmented leave is taken into consideration the largest group is remain.
"but since parliament is determined to hamstring the negotiations by creating a situation where the EU, alone, gets to decide what the deal is"
There's this odd thing about negotiations. Both sides need to agree on an outcome. It's not the EU alone who decide. We both have to. And so far there's nothing both sides can agree on. Then, of course, there's the matter of in international agreement which the UK entered into a couple of decades ago that, in practical terms, assumes we're part of the EU and the only suggestions for continuing to honour it and not be in the EU seem to consist entirely of hand-waving.
"They're making promises now? I thought they'd given up on that sort of thing."
Not making them. Just keeping them. The trouble with any politician is that they really believe they can do anything so they make promises that any rational analysis will show they can't possibly keep. And they're the last to realise they can't.
"They didn't spend any money for 11 months out of the year, and then spent the lot in March"
It's a general thing in public sector. They have a fixed budget, don't know how much they might have to spend on emergency stuff during the year and won't be able to roll unspent cash over to next year. A local council will be particularly vulnerable to that because one of their big but unknowable expenditures will be winter road clearance.
It was the same in NIO because there was an overall budget so the DoE winter reserve could be spread ou across other deptst. March was known as the spring sales. I used to buy stuff like microscope slides or any other consumables that weren't too bulky and had a long shelf life out of the windfall.
OTOH as a Civil Servant in the 70s & 80s we humble lab rats had charge of the day-to-day ordering of supplies. Just write out the order in NCR book and get the office to send it out. Amongst other thing I found a cut-price supplier for methylumbelliferyl phosphate, one of our common reagents, and discovered that discounted blood-in-urine test sticks were a good and more convenient scene test for blood than the three reagent test we handed out to SOCOs in place of the previous test involving a carcinogenic dye*. If you give the people at the coal face the chance to make purchasing decisions within a reasonable budget you'll find they can save money.
* I wasn't pleased to discover years later that lab where my daughter was doing her PhD were using the same reagent as a labelling agent for an immunological marker.
I have no problem believing in UFOs. If it's an object and it's flying and I can't identify it it's a UFO as fas as I'm concerned. Somebody else (ornithologist, entomologist, plane spotter or whoever) might well be able to identify it, of course. The only problem is with those who make identification by imagination rather than knowledge.
Well, they were putting their trust and, presumably without informed consent, their customers' trust in a third party. That immediately increases the attack surface.
Is this going to turn out to have been another of those cases where a backup was sitting, world readable, on a cloud provider's disks? From the account given it's data up to April 5 last year accessed on May 4 this year. That sounds awfully like a stale backup.
"the first deployment is being used to provide high speed fixed internet access for businesses in an area where there isn't fibre"
The constraining factors for that are going to be getting a signal, spectrum saturation and the extension of fibre coverage. Presumably 5G itself will slow down fibre deployment and everyone gets caught out when the saturation hits the the fibre's needed Right Now.
"Infinite growth is an unsustainable business model."
Sales tend to follow a sigmoidal graph. And that's a graph of total sales. Eventually everyone who wants a gizmo has one. Sales per quarter or whatever are the first differential of that curve with a bit added on for replacements. But every time marketing people think they're looking at an exponential curve. Every time.
"she is very impressive in person but her tenure has been massively disappointing"
The main requirement for climbing to the top of the tree in management or politics is to be personally impressive and wield your elbows well. Being able to do the job would be a nice to have from the point of view of the organisation but a very minor consideration at most for the climber.
Cynical? Moi?
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