Posts by Doctor Syntax

Google lashes out at DoJ, Oracle as it asks US Supremes to sniff Java suit one last time

Re: Java was supposed to be a platform agnostic programming language.....

I wonder if you'll say the same thing if/when IBM's lawyers arrive to cut Oracle's balls off with a copyright claim about SQL.

"there is only one indefinite copyright that I'm aware of, and that's Peter Pan"

Don't worry, Disney have their lobbyists working on that problem.

Re: The problem is...

The real problem is that the rest of us are lumbered with a decision that turns on its head everything we've thought for all these years about coding against an API. That's the reason for all those amicus briefs. Maybe Google should have called James Gosling as a witness to tell which previous APIs he took various bits from.

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

Re: That reminds me of another story...

"but that means having spare equipment ready to go"

That would be old equipment replacing old. Doing it properly you get to replace everything with brand new shiny.

Re: Directors and DR

"it transpired that no testing of the backups had been done"

I had a gig replacing a pair of non-identical servers prior toY2K on the basis that the smaller on, the warm standby, wasn't Y2K compatible. They did, in fact, take nightly tape backups and put them in as remote as possible whilst still on-site fire safe but the backup they were most relying on was a nightly network copy of the database from the live server to the standby. This clearly hadn't been tested recently is at all because I discovered that the time slot wasn't long enough and when the server kicked into production mode the copy process got terminated.

Re: There's a solid point there too

"Except when it's a genuine false alarm"

I worked in a completely glass-clad building where one of the other tenants got occasional bomb threats causing the entire building to be evacuated. Manglement's idea was that we would evacuate through the nearest door and if that was the back door we would walk round the end of the completely glass-clad building and congregate in the front of it.

I made the point that I'd worked in Belfast and in building that had had a genuine car bomb delivered to it and although I wasn't there at the time I'd heard first hand reports. There was no way that I was going to walk alongside the end of their completely glass-clad building with a suspected bomb in it. If I left their completely glass-clad building I would continue in as close as possible to a straight line perpendicular to the frontage as far as possible away from it because a bomb in a completely glass-clad building is going to project potentially lethal shards of glass for considerable distances.

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.

What's the scoop with Mars InSight's mired mole? It's digging again, thanks to trowel trickery

Sometimes you just have to use the joke alert icon.

Yahoo! Groups' closure and a tale of Oftel: Die-hard users 'informally' included telcos

On a quick look at the groups.io page there are options for importing from Google and Yahoo groups but no mention of being able to upload from an archive of mail messages.

Thanks for that. I'm also a member of a local history group and although we have a web-site for public facing stuff discussion outside face-to-face is by email (and, yes, there is a use case for cc: rather than bcc:) but this bears looking into. The other possibility I was looking at was a hosted Nextcloud.

Pack your pyjamas, Zuck: US bill threatens execs with prison for data failures

Re: Ron Wyden gives me cognitive whiplash.

"It will likely fail a few times, growing stronger until it actually gets the requisite amount of votes to pass."

I suppose the usual tactic is to water it down a little on each iteration until the proponents and opposition meet in the middle. I think I'd be tempted to be a bit contrarian and strengthen it each time until the lobbyists' clients get the message that maybe it's be a good idea to get it passed this year because next year may be even scarier.

From the one and a bit page summary: "(6) Require companies to assess the algorithms that process consumer data to examine

their impact on accuracy, fairness, bias, discrimination, privacy, and security."

I'd go a bit further. For businesses that exceed some function of number of data subjects and sensitivity of data the FTC should be required to make that assessment on a regular basis and maybe have the ability to make pre-emptive strikes just to ensure that businesses that look borderline aren't being tempted to under declare. It'd need more than 175 extra bodies to do that.

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.