Posts by Doctor Syntax 42414 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"HR also regularly sends out announcements by sharing a link to Google Docs."
HR and marketing - the weakest points in any organisation*. They'll only send out this crap indistinguishable from phishing if they don't know what's wrong with them and if they don't know what's wrong with them they'll have know inhibitions in falling for incoming.
* Apart from senior management, of course.
"XTAL's attempt to file for bankruptcy before the trial court could end. If the company succeeded, it could sell off its intellectual property – even if it featured chunks of ASML's code."
I can't imagine much success if the property was largely at risk of being invalidated by the ongoing court case.
"Write your destructive code so that it includes testing the condition that it is running where you intended it to run, before performing the destruction"
Which is another reason for doing it in a script. First write a SELECT* using the WHERE and HAVING clauses and run that. Only once your sure it returned what you expected do you edit that to the UPDATE or DELETE you intended. With a BEGIN at the front, of course.
*Just getting a count might be sufficient.
"Of course a script would be a more permanent solution, but sometimes you just have to run SQL on the production server."
In which case you do it in a script. It doesn't have to be a permanently saved. Your script starts with BEGIN TRANSACTION. You run the script then - and only then - your type your COMMIT.
It's a production database, belt and braces are not amiss.
*It never fails to boggle my mind the number of posts online about "I've found a cheaper O2 sensor that seems to work" or "I use a different kind of CO2 scrubber that isn't actually rated to go in rebreathers and none of the major manufacturers have ever tested on but it's cheaper so I'll use it".
Nobody ever posts "I tried it and it didn't work"? They must all work.
In the meantime, remember the saying "either go to sea with one compass or three."
"Senior company leadership was not involved in the review and first became aware of this issue in the aftermath of the Lion Air accident,"
For some minute value of 'leadership'.
This seems to be a management insistent on getting what it likes to hear instead of what it needs to hear. One thing it needs to hear is "when you're in a hole, stop digging.".
"In Rightpondia, manufacturers they can write whatever they want in the T&Cs but within the bounds of legality,"
The legality can depend on whether the transaction falls within consumer protection. I'd imagine a sale of a tractor to a farmer wouldn't. However in Rightpondia the tractor market is competitive so such shenanigans might amount to shutting up shop. If it wasn't they'd result in an anti-trust investigation.
There's an alternative line of attack. If the manufacturer doesn't want buyers to repair kit they bought, they, the manufacturers, repair it themselves (through agents if they prefer) at their own cost for the life of the item, life being as long as the kit physically exists. IOW a permanent warranty. Suddenly allowing right to repair might sound like a good idea.
"Given how alike family members can sound and given the quality of the average phone line"
I've recently had a few phone conversations with a cousin for the first time in years and it's amazing how like her mother she sounds. I'd be surprised if the system could tell them apart.
In passing I discovered that mailname@hotmail.com doesn't go to the same mailbox as mailname@hotmail.co.uk. I'd assumed they would and the fact that it isn't seems to open the door to impersonation without faffing with UTF look-alike characters.
"The charges were always dubious, which is why they never interviewed Assange in London..... And they never actually charged Assange with anything."
And there was me supposing that it was because Assange was in the Ecuadoran embassy. Are you telling me he wasn't fleeing anything but had gone to see about a tourist visa, got lost and couldn't find his way out for 9 years?
Remember there was no extradition warrant out from the US, just Sweden.
"I understand that it is distressing for genuine victims but allowing people to make false allegations just creates a new set of victims."
False allegations also make it more difficult for real victims. That was the case 40 years and more ago and no doubt still is. It looks as if we've been through a period where allegations were looked at less sceptically than previously and that resulted in a number of cases collapsing so we're now seeing a reaction to that.
Where a couple of spammers include real email addresses themselves you can always try sending one of them an email referring them to your colleague with the other address. After all, it'd be rude not to introduce them to each other after they've introduced themselves to you.
The other option is to have an email address just for such logins which is set to bounce. It's a variation of having a specific email address for specific companies - booking.com springs to mind for no particular reason - which is set to bounce as soon as a transaction has been acknowledged.
BTW is SEO spam still a thing? It seems to have tapered off since I started replying with my SEO self-assessment list.
Which is, of course, the last thing part of the email that you'll read because it's at the end.
It's just occurred to me that there might be a link to top-posting here. Do top-posters expect their emails to be read from the bottom upwards so that the reader will have got the context before reaching their pearls of wisdom?
I started in FORTRAN with coding sheets. When it came to making changes the most convenient way was to come in in the evenings when the data-prep teams had gone home and users could use the card punches. Eventually some card punches were made available for users during the day.
He pointed out that typing and them printing them in anticipation of sending them at a later date would create "all kinds of problems" – not least that none of them would have a sent date.
I'd have thought that not having a sent date on unsent emails really would have been the least of the problems.
Any new technology will eventually mature and when that happens the market will slow down to replacement plus younglings who've got their first pay-packet.
The one thing of which there's an inexhaustible supply is MBA/marketroid types who fail to appreciate this basic fact of life.
"Unless it is written into the contract, treat the case as if no backups exists"
If you make your own backups you should at least occasionally check that these are what you need to restore (it might be on the backup medium but it doesn't help if your restore process has problems). If you haven't successfully tested them don't assume you have backups.
How do you get to test your supplier's backups?
"if Sweden wants him, they take him. At the end... they return him back to the UK"
I'm not sure about the last bit. The extradition proceedings from which he was originally bailed were to return him to Sweden to face charges. After that process ended, including any sentence which might have been imposed either Sweden would have let him go free, dealt with any extradition proceedings which might have started in the interim or deported him as appropriate. I don't see why this would have changed; the bail charges here have been dealt with so, on completion of his sentence here, then there's no reason to demand his return.
"That said... how he behaves in prison is going to determine how well he survives."
Presumably you meant in a US prison. He could, of course, misbehave in a UK prison to extend his stay as a guest of HM hoping that a subsequent US government will simply ignore him.
