Posts by Doctor Syntax

As Zoom bans spread over privacy concerns, vid-conf biz taps up Stamos as firefighter in totally-not-a-PR-stunt move

Security is notoriously difficult to retro-fit.

Watch out, everyone, here come the Coronavirus Cops, enjoying their little slice of power way too much

Re: If you're not part of the solution, you are an idiot.

After writing the above it occurred to me that had you been our daughter's neighbour* you might have made a similar comment about her going in her car this morning. In fact she was going to collect her mother's prescription. We're of the generation that was told to stay at home and have stuff delivered a week earlier than everyone else and, despite the airy comment about deliveries the pharmacy delivery service is hard pressed.

It may well be that your neighbour is actually providing some voluntary service of that sort. Even if he isn't, you could, so why aren't you?

* In fact, they know better because she shops for them as well as us.

Re: If you're not part of the solution, you are an idiot.

"currently repaving and refencing his front garden"

So this, at least, is being done at home and at least some of the materials, wooden panels, are those on which viruses don't survive well.

"going out several times a day"

Not, as said elsewhere, against the current SI although maybe contrary to advice.

It sounds as if he has a coping strategy. It sounds as if you don't.

Re: "We don't want to do as we're told!"

Some time ago I read a comment from someone who said if he and his young son were to cycle from home it would have to be on a busy road. By putting the bikes in a car and driving half a mile they could cycle in safety. That seems sensible risk analysis to me. The problem with hard and fast rules is that they don't necessarily fit well with reality and reality is where our problems lie.

There was news footage of police - maybe BTP - at station entrances, interviewing passengers at close quarters, about 0.3 to 0.5 Osman, and checking identities to make sure they were key workers.

Re: Hack is the right word

"go out with the police and watch what they put up with instead of sniping from behind a keyboard"

Let me deal with that one first: I have done that very thing in that back in the 70s & 80s I sometimes needed a police or even army escort in NI.

Now to get onto present times:

I'm in the over 70s so anything that presents an actual risk of catching the virus concerns me. We over-70s have actually been under lockdown for a week longer than the general population. Mostly it's been our daughter doing shopping for us. I've driven short distances to my sister-in-law to pick-up, from her doorstep without meeting her or er husband, our share of her Tesco delivery. So, yes take this seriously.

I also live within walking distance of a National Park. Given the amount of space there, a huge number of people could easily disperse into it and maintain separation. There are a couple of local car parks with quite limited amounts of space in them. Even if they were filled with cars the density of walkers they could bring would be negligible. Looking at it from my strictly selfish but naturally sensitive point of view, if the 2metre separation is safe I would be ultra-safe in those circumstances. Nevertheless from quite early on TPTB blocked the car parks off to prevent visitors; this only makes sense from two considerations. One is if it were the journey to get to the car park that represented a threat of contamination and I've not seen even the faintest attempt to show that.

The other is that groups of visitors would disregard the recommended spacing. Unfortunately people do not have to come out into the countryside to do that. The Beeb news site this morning has a report that the Greater Manchester Police have broken up 660 parties recently. Greater Manchester does include a lot of rural areas but there was no indication that the parties were rural, especially as s great number were described as house or street parties or gatherings to play sport. If people are going to be idiots they're at least as likely to do that at home as visit a National Park. From a country dweller's PoV my main concern is that they don't come here and let dogs loose, start fires or the other usual behaviours.

Similar arguments apply to urban parks. If people are allowed to visit the parks they can spread out to a much greater extent than if they're not.

It seems to me that one factor which has been forgotten by the present government is public morale. If the population is going to be locked down then every measure needs to be taken to maintain morale. This is not something that was lost on wartime governments but I think it is partly lost on this one.

Re: When people talk about the abuse of petty authority I ask

Or even general abuse.

Re: Wear face protection?

That's why we have units like the Osman. An Osman is one Osman is one Osman, even if you convert it into imperial or metric units.

Cloudflare dumps Google's reCAPTCHA, moves to hCaptcha as free ride ends (and something about privacy)

"The biz held a bake-off to pick a new provider"

Without show-stoppers, I hope.

French pensioner ejected from fighter jet after accidentally grabbing bang seat* handle

"hoping to give their workmate a send-off to remember"

Some people are just impossible to get rid of.

Stop us if you've heard this before: Boeing's working on 737 Max software fixes for autopilot, stabilization bugs

Re: It can't

"Financially speaking, it has no choice. The Max must fly again."

True, it has no choice. The choice lies with the customers. If they so decide it won't fly again.

Re: Independent bug-gery

In what way are they new? Are they newly discovered or newly introduced with the previous updates? Neither is encouraging. The one good aspect of this is that while the planes are grounded they're not doing any harm. What with being grounded until recertified and the economic effects of the pandemic, will they ever fly again?

Upstart Americans brandish alligators at the almighty Reg Standards Soviet

Re: Well, I tried ...

Schroedinger's hounds.

Tribunal halts all Information Commissioner's Office cases because UK data watchdog can't print or organise PDFs

Re: Same in the county courts

"lets you ingest documents and then automatically indexes them, adds the appropriate cross-references between documents, etc."

At a guess it's this rather than simply preparing the PDFs that's the sticking point.

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

The real killer argument in these cases is to point out that using a mobile phone involves putting a radio transmitter right next to your head to transmit to the mast and that the further you are away from the mast the more that transmitter cranks up its power.

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.

China and Taiwan aren't great friends. Zoom sends chats through China. So Taiwan has banned Zoom

Re: People don't learn...

The lesson to learn is not about any one state; the US is as dangerous a loose cannon as any at the moment as Germany discovered trying to buy face masks.

The lesson should be about proper risk analysis and taking any new supplier at face value.

Atlassian issues advice on how to keep your IT service desk secure... after hundreds of portals found facing the internet amid virus lockdown

Re: Not just coronavirus

"Security software costs money and authorization takes people (who also cost money) and time."

Don't worry, money and time will be found for cleaning up and paying the fines after the incident. It's just that money now has greater value then money in the future for the beancounters.

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

Re: Typical.....

Perhaps the rest of the world will start to consider taking similar action in terms of critical infrastructure such as hotels and gold courses.

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?

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.

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.