Posts by Doctor Syntax

Q: If Pesky Pepper had a peek at patient papers, at how many patient papers did Pesky Pepper peek? A: 231

Re: Norfolk

"all the DNA is the same"

Having heard all these stories about Norfolk, when the "Fine Structure" paper ( https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14230 ) was published I expected Norfolk to have its own cluster. It didn't.

"I wonder how many of us here would not have done the same thing in that situation?"

I hope all of us would not have done the same.

Support whizz 'fixes' screeching laptop with a single click... by closing 'malware-y' browser tab

Re: I was that luser

"I wanted to watch training videos."

As opposed to having been told to watch them?

"Unfortunately salesweasels are a nice, plump target for ne'er-do-wells as salesweasels will open any email from any sender, even if it looks highly dodgy"

Because they lack any ability to recognise dodgy emails they can't recognise that the emails they send also look dodgy. The same seems to apply to the fund-raisers currently employed by archive.org.

Re: Hell is other people

"I could write a book about IT problems with governments and where nothing beats HM Government junior ministers for sheer, stubborn human stupidity"

Yes Minister: The IT Story.

It should be a good read.

"A webpage with a sound on it is not normally something I would consider a virus or Malware"

You've just failed your BOFH examination for missing an obvious opportunity to wipe all the luser's data.

Take my advice and stop using Rubik's Cubes to prove your intelligence

Re: You have clearly only met consultant version 1

"I was lucky enough to meet a version 2 consultant early on and so discovered the technique required to get PHBs to listen: increase your hourly rate."

This is the critical factor. PHBs confuse price with value. The same information could be obtained much more cheaply by asking the employees at the sharp end who are almost sure to know the answer but obviously someone on a pay grade so far below the PHB can't have an opinion of any value. By making the opinion reassuringly expensive it becomes obviously valuable.

Re: 1970's black-and-white

"Well, they are if you got all your photos developed at the Belfast Belmont labs in the 70's"

You found that as well? We've got graduation photos to prove it.

Re: 1970s?

"If there was no year zero, then the year 1980 was actually part of the 1970s"

Nearly. It was the last year of the eighth decade of the twentieth century.

Sacked NCC Group grad trainee emailed 300 coworkers about Kali Linux VM 'playing up'

Re: Article unclear!

If you go pack to the article, just after the mention of "protected disclosures' and 'suffered detriments" there are a couple of links labelled "here" and "here". Follow those and it will be explained.

Domain name 'admin' role eyed up as latest victim of Whois system's GDPRmeggdon

"since you have a contract with them"

If she didn't renew she might not even have a contract.

"The DPA is the UK implementation of GDPR."

The current DPA implements GDPR. There have been previous DPAs.

Facebook spooked after MPs seize documents for privacy breach probe

Re: Contempt?

"would the UK authorities apply the law that mandates disclosure of (VPN) credentials to him?"

No, they just tell him to produce the documents. How he does that is his problem.

Re: An early Christmas?

The documentation is what matters - and the UK doesn't have "fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine.

Not that that would make any difference. That doctrine only comes into play for a court verdict. What a Parliamentary Committee does is publish reports and it's quite clear that FB really really don't want this published. Perhaps it's starting to dawn on Zuckerberg that refusing to appear before the Committee might not have been the brightest idea. No matter how many LibDem peers he appoints it's not going to make up for having been uncooperative - to put it at its mildest.

I wonder how long they'll string this out, just for badness. Drop a hint that it's not too late for him to drop by and then postpone at the last minute because they have to attend the Brexit debate. A bit of cat and mouse would be well deserved.

Re: It's got me wondering...

"Either way, I am no longer certain that noise is the best poison for this plague of vermin."

It would take a massive effort to have any effect. A few noisy accounts here and there won't be significant. Just avoid them.

Re: It's got me wondering...

"I recently got a Facebook page."

Why? Research purposes only?

Re: Why?

"You disable all javascripts so they can't spy on you from their Facebook Like buttons plastered on other sites?"

That's what NoScript's for.

Re: An early Christmas?

"It seems odd to me that this app developer with a grudge would be in London carrying around said documents"

Not to mention that the Committee got to know about it. Or maybe they just heard he was in town, decided to call him as a witness and got lucky. Or maybe he didn't have the documents on him but was made an offer he couldn't refuse to produce them even if he had to download them to do so.

As Aladdin Sane said - popcorn.

Re: Its about time

"There is a good reason that its key EU offices are in two of the biggest native English speaking countries."

It's not going to have any EU offices in the UK for much longer. It's a big incentive to the UK Parliament to take their own line on this one and not depend on an EU investigation. There's a certain irony in the extent to which FB might have brought this on themselves.

Consultant misreads advice, ends up on a 200km journey to the Exchange expert

Re: Onomatopoeic dinner parties...

@TRT

You should be ashamed of a pun like that. Have an upvote.

Re: Spoilers in Tech Docs!

"I usually ring it"

You may ring the bell but you probably just press the button at the door.

Re: "click" with the sound the mouse makes...

"I just noticed as I was curious."

There's a limit to my curiosity and trying WIndows 10 to find out is beyond it.

Re: Spoilers in Tech Docs!

"You select YES, you don't click on YES."

Drop-down list, Run the pointer down the list. As it traverses the list it selects each item in turn. Leave it on the item you want. Many (?most) people would reckon you'd selected the item but nothing will actually happen until you take a further action which, at least on this laptop makes a loud, and AFAICS, purely mechanical clicking noise. But don't call it a mouse pointer 'cause it's a trackpad.

That sphincter-flexing moment for devs when it's time to go live

Re: Experience is a harsh teacher

"'quiet period', Christmas, end of life date on previous product"

Situation: current H/W due to be EoL (at least for support purposes) at end of 31 Dec.

The quiet period between Christmas & New Year would have been the ideal time to migrate over to new H/W. Minimal risk, just unload the data and reload it onto a version of the same engine on current H/W*. Client's manglement absolutely forbade it even when warned that any H/W failure would cost an arm and a leg and possibly CEO's first-born.. It turned out that they'd arranged for bean-counters to come in to value the company for a sale.

* When it eventually was moved it went just as smoothly as anticipated.

"include go/no-go meetings"

I've seen one circumstance where it should have been no-go right from inception. However the project owner was the senior IT manager so it was go all the way in moving an application to a completely new OS as far as the RDBMS & tools vendor was concerned (I was later told their porting procedure was something along the lines of "we made the changes necessary to get it to compile"; I suspect we were the only site that went live).

In practice as soon as we got to go-live we started to get database index corruption; I suspect there was a race condition that only manifested itself under real load. Oddly enough, migration back to the sort of OS it should have been on had weeks of testing mandated with no issues found then or on go-lie. I could have done without those weeks of testing as they were weeks of fire-fighting on the live system as far as I was concerned.

Office 365 Exchange enjoys a less than manic Monday. Users? Not so much

"what SWMBO has purchased on my behalf, or at more accurately on my income"

When you ask her you'll discover it's the same thing.

Shocker: UK smart meter rollout is crap, late and £500m over budget

Re: Home security problem

"I guess you don't get parcels delivered by Amazon then, or any other courier."

It'd take a hell of a lot of lot of such deliveries by relatively few couriers to work that out.

Blighty: We spent £1bn on Galileo and all we got was this lousy T-shirt

Re: FFS

"you voted for this (or didn't vote at all) and now it's time to pay the piper."

Who's this "you" you had in mind? Wasn't me and I rather think it wasn't most UK voters on here.

'Cuddly' German chat app slacking on hashing given a good whacking under GDPR: €20k fine

Sure, but what if the site owners are non-techies who hired "specialists" to do the work?

They can sue the specialists for €20k. After all, in such circumstances the specialists would have deserved to be fined.

"I think the fine is reasonable as Knuddels apparently copped a mea culpa and fixed the problem"

Those are factors to take into account. But at some point the message needs to get across that you can't just wander into setting up a site with no knowledge that you need to secure it, or maybe no knowledge of whether the people you entrusted to do that actually did so. If people can get away with saying sorry and fixing it after the event they will, and that doesn't undo the damage that might have been caused. From this event it's probably 800k people who need to change their email addresses with all the inconvenience that causes to get off spam lists and maybe a few of those will lose money getting scammed along the way. Repeat for every business that hasn't got the message yet.

having a "vision" is only part of C-level duties

But who's going to explain that to them?

Oh, I wish it could be Black Friday every day-aayyy, when the wallets start jingling but it's still a week till we're paiii-iid

Re: Today IS payday...

"I ended up making sure all the bills were timed for the first fortnight of the month for that very reason."

As a variation I used to get bank statements in the middle of the month so I could work out how bad the remainder was going to be and prioritise things accordingly.

(Current bank adopted the practice of sending statements whenever there was a full page to print. It's now abandoned that practice and apparently sends out a statement after some random fraction of a full page has been generated. What they never seem to have worked out is what every other bank I've used over several decades has accomplished: print monthly and shove as many pages as that requires into a single envelope. The wonders of modern banking IT.)

The paving slab laptop doesn't sound too bad. Build quality and serviceablity we'll never see again in the name of shaving a few more microns off the thickness.

On other fronts - I was looking for a box to build a new MythTV system. Oh, look here's one in $PopularVendor's list on Black Friday offer. It's the one that takes a full height* optical drive. The options for slim-line and slot-loading are full price. Are they trying to shift old stock.

*For pedants - yes I too remember when that size was called half height. If I put my mind to it I can probably find an original full height, i.e. the same as and 8" drive, 5 3/4" floppy drive in the garage.

Re: With perfect timing

"It's like Booking.com and its belief that because I once stayed in Harrogate I want to stay there every time an hotel there has a vacancy."

The only sensible way to deal with booking.com is to have the email server control open on another tab ready to click to set the email address you gave then to bounce the moment the confirmation email hits your inbox.

Re: Today IS payday...

"4 weekly = 28th."

There are only 3 occasions every 4 years when the 28th of one month is followed 4 weeks later by the 28th of the next.

Re: Today IS payday...

I generally dealt with the variability using two techniques that I called "budgeting" and "saving" that meant that I didn't run out of money at the end of the month.

That has a pre-requisite. Being adequately paid.

Re: @ Dabbsy

"I don't actually see what the UK has gotten out of this"

It's Taken Back Control.

Yes, I know it's meaningless. It always was. But it was what a fraction of the nation voted for.

Now some of them have realised they won't actually done that come Brexit day.

What they haven't realised yet is that if they get a hard Brexit they still won't have taken back control. Half the world's map isn't coloured pink any more. The sun set on the empire long ago. There is no control to take back.

Groundhog Day comes early as Intel Display Drivers give Windows 10 the silent treatment

Not with *THIS* group of "developers"

It depends on what you mean by "start from scratch". Scratch might be a new team of developers.

"Is it still the case that consumer versions of W10 still can't turn windows updates off?"

Why would they let their beta testers not test?

Analogue radio is the tech that just won't die

Re: "Broadcasting" in general is becoming obsolete.

The problem though is marketing and finance wonks making decisions about content and infrastructure

FTFY

"It may be that if cash is tight people find it easier to budget for a constant monthly payment"

In one sense you're right. But it's constantly paying out rent that prevents you getting the required lump sum together.

Talk in Trump's tweets tells whether tale is true: Code can mostly spot Prez lies from wording

Re: Why no comparison?

"Why not?"

Did Trumps predecessor spew tweets at the same rate or try to use them as a mechanism of government? Not doing so makes a comparison impossible.

Re: I'm interested in the 'success' rate.

"Trump's tweets can be inaccurate but he may believe it to be true."

Isn't this even more worrying than outright lies?

Re: exporting gas

If there was no alternative to fossil fuels carbon for the chemical industry and metal smelting<

Well, is there? That's why continuing to use it and export it as a fuel is short-sighted.

Re: Nice word

Downvoted for the "occasionally he does get something right", remark

It simply reflects that the 100 monkeys algorithm has an easier time composing tweets. They're shorter than the complete works of Shakespeare.

Re: Basically Depends Who Wrote It

"a marginally cogent and stable PR drone"

These are too easy to identify. They have standard texts such as "only a few users" deployed irrespective of whatever it is they're trying to minimise.

Microsoft sysadmin hired for fake NetWare skills keeps job despite twitchy trigger finger

I used to live not far from Marlow and left my company car in to be serviced in a garage there. There was an agency in the High St that specialised in the sort of systems I looked after and as we were looking for a contractor I simply walked in off the street to talk to them about it. They were tickled pink - they'd never had a client walk in like that before. And yes, they were some of the good guys. They did very well for us.

A few years later I was relocated about 200 miles north. About 2 weeks after settling in at my new desk I got a call from an agent offering me a good job in Marlow. Realistically, I suppose it wasn't two weeks too late; it would have had to have been several months earlier to dodge the relocation.

Later in my new job we were again looking for a contractor. A selection of CVs dropped out of an envelope including one for a guy who'd worked form me a few years ago in London. I think he actually started in the business as a YTS but I knew he'd do. Sometimes the agencies do get thinks right. Sometimes.

"Bloody amateurs"

In terms of recruiters they sound like typical professionals.

Re: Apologies to those who've heard this one before

http://bofh.bjash.com/newbofh/bofh12jun.html

Very suspicious. He walks out without finishing his drink.

When selling security awareness training by email, probably a good shout not to hit 'reply all'

Re: Cold calls from security companies are always the best.

But if you fall for it it gives them something to follow up on.