Posts by Doctor Syntax

'They took away our Cup-a-Soup!' Share your tales of bleak breakout areas with us

Re: First they came for the coffee

It's likely to come to the same thing in the end, at least as far as employees are concerned.

Re: unintended consequence

"Can I hazard a guess that this was in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave?"

Probably. It's the sort of thing the Truck Acts made illegal on this side a long time ago.

Re: join us by the watercooler:

I did hear of one request for a fridge for a lab staffroom that got turned down. A request for an environmental chamber got passed. It looked just like a fridge.

Re: From my cold, dead hands!

"Or the carpet tiles."

Rebuild of lab after a serious fire.

Issue 0. Only staff above a certain grade allowed to have offices. As the staff are apt to have rather confidential discussions from time-to-time and spend a good bit of time at desks writing reports rather than at lab benches that won't fly. So the "writing room" came to be invented. Looks like an office, feels like an office but it's not an office, it's a writing room so non-office level staff can use a writing room.

That was the preliminary. Then comes the significant issue here. Office or writing room, entitlement to "carpet" or whatever name was given to the non-woven fabric concerned was above the grades of any of those going into the new facilites, even the most senior who were entitled to a non-shared office. As it happened it was one of the latter's office that was fitted out first with the lino or vinyl or whatever the membrane was made of. At this point someone checked the prices and discovered that the "carpet" was actually cheaper than whatever it was that had been laid. So in the end only the senior scientist whose office was fitted out first got the plebian "lino" and everyone else, down to the humble writing room dwellers, got the posh "carpet".

Need I say this was a Civil Service job?

Not exactly a breakout area

My team's pig-pen was located next to a meeting room. A meeting room greatly favoured by those with over-generous budgets for lunchtime meetings. We'd eye up the lunches being delivered and decide whether to go to the canteen that day or just wait for the meeting to end.

Mmm Cointreau crèmes brûlées.

Sadly, when relocation was on the cards all those folk managed to find themselves transfers to divisions that weren't being relocated out of central London and the meetings became a thing of the past, well before I took the relocation.

Re: First they came for the coffee

"It's my experience that when a company starts getting petty about small things, they quickly build up to larger ones."

HP. Doughnuts. QED.

Re: From my cold, dead hands!

"I'm sure those three brands alone will spark lively debate on the merits, or otherwise, of these brews"

Of course. Yorkshire tea. Accept no substitutes.

I did try some "fair trade" stuff once. I quickly came to the conclusion that in tea growing country they quickly worked out that after they'd flogged off the good stuff to the premium grade buyers they could get equally good money by shifting the naff stuff to the fair trade buyers. It's put me off buying anything with a "fair trade" label on it ever since.

"downgraded the staffers' coffee machine to a cheaper, crapper one"

I really hope you meant "crappier" and not "crapper". Not that it makes much difference to my view of coffee.

Customer: We fancy changing a 25-year-old installation. C'mon, it's just one extra valve... Only wafer thin...

Re: Line editor without echo...

However, a so-called "poweruser" that doesn't check the .rc for local variations of a very customizable editor isn't going to get admin privs on any system that I maintain.

Conversely something describing itself as "improved" isn't going to get installed on a system I maintain, not if there's an alternative. In a third of a century of use I've never felt vi to be lacking in those "improvements" so I regard them as featuritis. Obviously we choose to differ on this.

To be fair to vim this is the only instance that I came across so egregiously set up out of the box. But it's like a restaurant; if you had a dose of food poisoning the first time you ate there even if it had a constellation of Michelin stars you'd be likely to feel a bit queasy going in there again.

Re: Valves!?

"And parkways tend to run through...well, parks."

The latest thing to run through parks in the UK seems to be park running. Daughter and grand-daughter are keen on it. The young are beyond comprehension.

Re: my line of defense against this:

"Other than pulling their data off first,"

Just shrink the Windows partition to fit Linux and stick it somewhere such as /mnt/cdrive. LibreOffice will read all their Office files.

Re: my line of defense against this:

"if you get asked to do something you don't want to do, do it badly so you don't get asked again"

No. It's do it so well you don't need to get asked again.

Re: The dirtiest four-letter word...

"It's being enforced at all management levels from directorate level."

That is seriously impressive.

"Unless you have a complete, working, development suite, which can run on modern hardware (even in a virtualised environment), ... then it's just not going to be worth playing with it."

Unfortunately, even if you don't have that when there's a few million quids-worth of industrial plant paying lots of wages involved somebody has to play with it. It's what's called legacy. It might be ancient, creaky and undocumented but it's what brings in the money to pay for all the new shiny. Despise it at your peril.

Re: Line editor without echo...

"VIM is actually the chosen one"

Vim? Beware of cheap imitations. My first contact with it was enough to teach me never to trust it.

I fired it up to tidy up a file that came from an MS box including removing the ^Ms off of the line endings. I discovered it had been set up to "helpfully" hide them. If vim is prepared to hide those what else might the lying little bastard choose to hide? Any time I set up a Linux box one of the first steps it to replace vim with nvi.

Re: Line editor without echo...

vi is only a line editor in ex mode.

In normal mode if the terminal uses escape sequences delays like those described bugger up the timing so badly the escapes get misinterpreted. In particular you get the situation where an escape sequence with a tilde in it is strung out so the tilde is seen as a character in its own right and flips the case of whatever character the cursor's on. So, no, he wouldn't have been using vi. Maybe its alter ego ex or ed. ANd that assumes the server was running HP-UX; I've not idea what editor's on the non-Unix HP jobs.

Re: Valves!?

But tubes just run straight through. Valves control things.

Re: Valves!?

And me. And seriously disappointed to discover it wasn't.

Re: my line of defense against this:

It's a well established fact in my family that I fix Windows by installing Linux and not as a trendy sub-system either.

It's not your imagination: Ticket scalper bots are flooding the internet according this 'ere study

"Create an actual strategy focused entirely on fighting back against bots"

When about 80% of tickets have been sold have an administrative error such that the first X% of tickets have been accidentally invalidated and are being refunded.

Today's good news is that whoever has to clean up Solar System will have an easy job: Lack of small debris in Kuiper belt

Messrs Bodgitt and Runn will be bidding for the contract to clean up all that rubbish round the Earth and then fly-tip it out there.

Why are there never free power sockets when my Y-fronts need charging?

Re: Don't blame ISO

@Voyna

Apologies. That really shouldn't have garnered 20 up-votes when yours only got 6.

"Much easier to put a sticker on the desk saying don't connect both ends of the cable."

Your idiot-proofing sticker will conjure from thin air a better class of idiot who will think "Why? Let's find out...".

Re: International plugs

"Suddenly everyone else was doing it too."

This has an additional benefit. When the extra long lead still isn't long enough a bit of cooperation allows you to daisy chain them together and defeat the architects' best efforts.

Re: Don't blame ISO

What are you doing, coming here with facts?

Re: International plugs

"with the side effect that they cover up the precious sockets on either side of the one they are plugged in to "

Can we also have a special mention for those wall warts that have the lead emerge from the wrong end so that it blocks the opposite socket of those compact back-to-back multi-blocks? Even if the adapter itself doesn't extend enough to block it the cable emergence is armoured with an inflexible grommet.

"The currencies are backed by the existence of the country and their government, and that's about it."

Which even in these benighted times is more substantial than Bitcoin.

"it is a strict ISO requirement that power cables for electronic devices are manufactured in one of two lengths:

25.4mm shorter than required

2 metres longer than necessary

"

Those of us who put together systems from boxes and components know that this extends to internal cables as well. It's just that the actual measurements are smaller and what's more there are far more options than power cables to be the wrong length. And that's before you get into the types of cable and connector.

Build something into a min-ITX box and you quickly discover that a box big enough to hold all the components is too small. It might hold the components but the only available cables are for tower cases and there isn't enough space to fold them all up into and have air circulation. Of course SATA has made things easier hasn't it?

No. All SATA connectors might be alike on everything from laptop hard drives up to whatever the biggest server drive is these days but SATAs on slimline optical drives are different - they have fewer power pins, are smaller and only come as single connectors with both power and signal leads. The power lead (only available in regulation tower case length despite being made to plug into a laptop-style drive) has a connector to go into one of those connectors on the SATA power harness doesn't it?

No, they're only obtainable with old-style Molex connectors or a connector which only fits the one and only SATA power connector on the motherboard which the power harness should be fitting. So the clutter is increased by a reverse SATA/Molex lead only sold on eBay and only advertised there when there's a J in the month.

And then there's the whole business of USB-3 internal cables. They plug into the motherboard by a connector that sprouts a couple of cables, each as about as flexible as the original Ethernet coax but has to be bent into place with a clearance of about 30mm under the top cover...

UK's beloved RNGesus machine ERNIE goes quantum in 5th iteration

"The prize money comes from the interest the government earns on the Bonds"

Shouldn't that be "pays". The bonds are loans to HMG. The recipient of a loan usually pays interest on it and the lender earns that interest.

IBM hunkers down for no-deal Brexit, warns of disruption to supply chain, data transfers

Re: "Omnishambles"

Jim Hacker Sir Humphrey in charge.

Let's keep a sense of reality.

'in discussions with suppliers to ensure that any vulnerabilities are managed'

I take it this will be industry standard procedure. There'll be a phone number to call, answered by someone who can't actually help because it's not in their script.

Brave claims its mobe browser batt use bests whatever you're using. Why? Hint: It begins with A then D then V...

Re: The WWW is the wrong place for you if you make your money from ads

"What you really want is a magazine, or a TV network, or some other technology where the suckers consuming what you're producing have no choice in the matter."

Actually, with print the punter can ignore the ads. That means that they're read by people who are looking for something to buy and, crucially, they're not pissing of potential customers who will simply skip them. All gain and no downside. Yes the advertiser is paying for a lot of ads that are ignored. They've done that for a few hundred years and it seems to have proved satisfactory.

With TV we seldom consume anything live hereabouts so it's just a matter of FF through the ads.

In both cases we do have a choice and exercise it.

Re: sites wouldn't exist were it not for the revenue from adverts.

"Such as Facebook."

Before Facebook there was Usenet. There still is Usenet. Some of the users had institutional accounts but for the rest of us we could, and did, pay for a service. In fact some ISPs bundle a Usenet service along with everything else the subscription pays for.

There was and still is email. Same thing; you can and some of us do pay for our own domain and a service from an independent provider. Some use the ISP service they pay for.

So communication services have history as a paid for services way before Facebook came along. Many Facebook users are already paying their ISPs for such a service even if they don't use it.

"Google might not exist."

A search service is so useful that even if Google didn't exist paid-for services would have a market. If push came to shove Google could be that service with a subscription business model.

Following the hint by using letters...

Let's just work though this scenario:

Advertiser A* pays advertising middleman W** to place adverts. W pays site owner S to let their add be shown on a page I view. I see the advert and am annoyed. being annoyed I am less likely to buy whatever it is that A wants me to buy. A has paid good money to make it less likely to achieve their goal. A, if only they knew would be unhappy. I'm unhappy. W and S are happy because they get paid.

Now let's modify it:

A pays W, W pays S, S tries to send the ad but I block it. I don't see the add and thus bear A no grudge. W is happy, S is happy, I'm happy. What about A. A, if rational, is also happy. They'd have paid W and S the same amount if I had seen the add but now the outcome for them is neutral, not negative. In a rational world (not an easy concept where advertising is concerned), A, W and S should all be content to accept my ad blocker because they all gain from it.

* Note that the advertiser is someone with goods or services to sell, not the advertising network. The money that fuels this entire scenario is the money that A hopes I will pay to purchase such goods or services.

** W. You should be able to decode this one.

Re: sigh

"the electricity cost is absolutely negligible compared to the annoyance of seeing the ads."

And here's the crux of the matter. The advertisers are being royally ripped off. They're paying to piss off potential customers.

I have to repeat this: the only thing the advertising industry sells is advertising. If you're in a business and somebody in the advertising industry is trying to sell you advertising all he's interested in is taking your money. It makes no difference to him whether you make net gains or losses of customers, just as long as you pay.

Re: sigh

"You aren't paying for ... the internet connection used to deliver it to you."

Yes I am. And given the amount of advertising shoved down the internet that connection ought to be cheaper without the bandwidth it consumes.

Surprise, surprise, yet another cryptocurrency creator collared, hit with $6 million fraud rap

Re: Greedy or Stupid !!!

"all ponzi schemes die"

Shhh. All UK state pensions and at least some public centre pension schemes are Ponzi schemes. So, to some extent are large schemes which do have investments, ever since IR/HMRC took a short term view of overfunding and the Brown clown's attempts at managing the economy.

Caveat emptor

You have to wonder about the motivation of those who buy into something like this. Greed, presumably.

And can we be sure Randall Crater isn't simply a lunar feature?

Danger mouse! Potent rodents 'see' infrared after eyeballs injected with nanoparticles

What's the physics behind this? The normal way of things is that a photon hits a molecule, raises it to a higher energy level and then the molecule emits another photon but as a little energy is lost (in optical terms) as heat the emitted photon has less energy and hence is of a longer wavelength. Does this depend on two IR photons in, one photon out? Otherwise there has to be some additional energy input.

Re: "With few harmful effects"

"It's a relatively common medical procedure when treating wet glaucoma."

And other eye conditions. SWMBO had that treatment for a macula condition.

Three-quarters of crucial border IT systems at risk of failure? Bah, it's not like Brexit is *looks at watch* err... next month

Re: Ha

"you appear remarkably willing to ignore what business is actually telling the government about Brexit."

It's just project fear, as is everything else he doesn't want to believe.

"The two groups have been tracking the government's prep for border control in the event of no deal"

It doesn't sound as if they need to put much effort into it. Ring round the suspects once a day - or even once a week: "What have you done?" "Not a lot.".

Oh no, look out, Google, Facebook, and pals. You're doomed. Here comes another watchdog to, er, nip at your ankles

"And Facebook would today be a lot more irrelevant had it not purchased Instagram which is used by a lot of young people who prefer it over Facebook."

This is the point where you really have a monopoly: the incumbent can simply buy up the competition and close it or run it, whichever makes most money.

Nuisance call boss gets 8-year ban after trying to dodge firms' £700k fines

Re: Yep.

"It'll be his son, or his daughter, or the Mrs., or son-in-law, or Frat brother, or ... all the crooks do it, BECAUSE THEY CAN."

At which point the penalties become personal. Personal fines or time inside.

Re: Director? Who me?

"Or Mrs Jones"

Then he and whoever fronts for him could both land inside. That's assuming he tells whoever it is that they're fronting for him. If he doesn't then he can end up inside for a bit longer.

Vodafone exec dons tartan tam-o'-shanter, clutches bottle of Irn-Bru, in snap shared with firm... just before Glasgow staff told of redundo dates

Re: Not the only telco..

"I like it and will use it often thank you."

Y're welcome. The Brexit preparedness thread is over there --->

Re: Not the only telco..

"Obviously hasn't worked at BT/Openreach then?"

Yup. I always object to outsiders criticising BT management. You have to have worked there to be properly vituperative about them.

The biggest uptick in demand for software devs by bosses is for... *rubs eyes* blockchain engineers?!?

Re: WTF is a...

"Search Engineer? Is it someone spending their working day looking up stuff on Google?"

Maybe it someone who writes stuff that searches Google and then filters out all the false positives.

Re: "A 2017 Stack Overflow survey singled out Perl as the most hated coding language"

"Sadly, for some programmers I've encountered, the opportunity to sadistically use such features and demonstrate that they are in some way superior seems to be a matter of misguided personal pride."

Until they make the mistake of staying in one job long enough to find themselves maintaining their own code.

Companies, he said, appear to be keen to build blockchains but there isn't enough blockchain talent to meet demand.

Mystery solved. Manglement will never get disillusioned about anything until they've tried and failed* and they cen't even recruit the staff to try.

* To be followed by wise-sounding comments about how it's better to have tried and failed than never wasted the company's money tried.