Posts by Doctor Syntax 40413 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"You'll find it on page 19."
Only 2 away? Downloads of C19th books from archive.org or Google books can be way, way more out than that. With the occasional plate that didn't have a page number. And that's only vol 1 when the page numbering continues into multiple volumes. With luck the OCR isn't too bad and you can search for the actual page number.
"The number of press releases I see as .doc(x) - because obviously I'm going to have the same fonts installed on my Ubuntu/Mac/Win10 machine as you will on your Win7/Mac box."
You could, of course, make some - interesting - amendments to those before passing them on.
"IBM also told TSB to prioritise telephony and branch channels"
These are only useful if there are sufficiently trained and helpful (a contradiction in terms?) are available and in particular the second is only useful if the customer's local branch hasn't been closed to save on staffing costs. These considerations are not unique to TSB.
It said that a “limited number of services” - including mortgage origination and ATM and head office functions - had been launched on the new platform and a broader set of services to about 2,000 TSB partners.
The wording on the slide is a bit obscure. Given the preceding "IBM would expect world class design rigour, test discipline, comprehensive operational proving, cut-over trial runs and operational
support set-up:" I read this as saying it's what they would have expected to happen, not what did happen.
"Last time i went to Currys the smug twat there blatantly refused to sell me the laptop i wanted"
The latest thing in retail seems to be that bricks & mortar should deliver "experiences". They really need to ensure that they can deliver better experiences than that. The fact that the e-word is usually a warning about user interfaces doesn't bode well.
"One of Kenneth Williams's most quoted lines is in his role as Julius Caesar"
My favourite line from that, aboard ship, was "Sic transit Gloria". Did they call the character Gloria just so they could use that line?
But when it comes to innuendo the whole of the Carry On series pales in comparison to Round the Horne.
"Does anyone else notice how, throughout this technical and complicated international discussion about the future of border security, intelligence sharing and anti-terrorist initiatives that there is zero mention of things such as public safety, effective policing or common defence?"
That's because we've spent several decades with the EU as the vehicle for handling these at the European level and by leaving we exclude ourselves from that. It's up to the Brexiteers to explain how they propose to deal with the consequences - it was they who persuaded a small majority of those who voted to bring those consequences down on us. Or didn't they think it was important?
What is the American government security sharing agreement with the EU like considering they don't have any say in what the Americans do?
A fig leaf.
It was simply a fudge to allow TPTB on both sides to pretend everything was OK despite a clear difference in attitude between the two continents. It was never going to be able to withstand a serious challenge.
By adopting the provisions of GRPR the UK should have been much better placed but HMG has insisted on providing itself with some exemptions and various iterations of introducing Investigative Powers Acts found to contravene the HCRE. The EU is going to be much less likely to admit such a fudge.
"Since Liam Allan every single one of them has to be reviewed and analysed for relevance. That can take a detective days."
Unless that can receive some automated assistance on the lines the speech suggested it's a requirement that clearly needs to be reviewed. It's not always appreciated that the vast majority of lab time spent in criminal investigations is occupied by irrelevant material. A directive that casually adds to that without understanding the consequences is asking for trouble. As per sillyfudder's comment below it would be far more sensible to let the investigation be guided by the statements in the case unless there's good reason to think that material more distant from the time of the offence would be relevant.
They kept asking for the same evidence for (I recall) 2 years. only for it to be "discovered" the day before the trial, which was then cancelled.
Parts of the explanation might lie in Adam52's post, a requirement to go through everything and then the subsequent backlog. Unfortunately everyone only sees their own case and doesn't realise what else investigators are dealing with. That doesn't just apply to complainants and accused; I remember having a couple or so murders in my caseload and being chased by a uniform constable for a result on a taking and driving away as he wanted to get it finished before he went on leave!
I wonder what proportion of complaints actually get to court these days. Back in my day one would come in to work on a Monday morning, look though the weekend's new cases and realise that most if not all were never going to proceed beyond a report on the medical samples. Are the police and/or CPS being set targets as to the number of cases to go to court regardless of merit?
I wonder how many commentards have bothered to read the speech. It turns out that he has several time been involved in attempts to get disclosure put on a proper footing. The AI bit comes in the penultimate paragraph where he deals with the massive amounts of data generated by social media users with verbal diarrhoea (my description not his) and he seems to be looking for technological solutions "including AI" to help, not to dictate.
In fact, he makes some excellent points about the prosecution adopting a proper investigative mindset - by which he means considering multiple possibilities rather than just assuming a given person is guilty and concentrating on that. He also makes a good point about differentiating between a complainant and a victim - the difference being whether there has actually been a crime, a factor that an investigator needs to consider. It's just a pity he doesn't extend that terminological debate to differentiate between a culprit and a suspect.
TL;DR It's actually good stuff. Read it for yourselves.
"Why not just give the evidence to the defence in the first place?"
I think this is what he refers to as the keys to the warehouse solution in para 17 (judges making speeches apparently can't get out of the habit of numbering their paragraphs). He points out that it simply transfers the problem and doesn't solve it.
"But thats the problem, in house IT doesn't work, in house IT is lazy and takes advantage of working for public services."
More likely the in house IT in public services are running around like blue-arsed flies because their numbers have been cut and cut and cut again and there aren't enough left to do the job. There's probably not many between the techies who know what they're doing and what needs to be done and the PHBs who have no idea about either. So the solution is to outsource it, a process managled by the said PHBs with entirely predictable results. Usually it goes to an underbidder who then load on extras when they discover what needs to be done. In this case it looks as if Capita failed to discover what needs to be done before attempting to do it with even more predictable results.
"All control of the medical device is on one computer that runs the approved (and often years out of date) software for the device."
There's an additional problem if that computer fails and the approved S/W is unable to run on current H/W. There's a periodic need to update the S/W to keep up with what's available in the market place.
"they...don't want / can't tolerate the disruption of a massive overhaul."
It needs to be presented to them in the form of "You can have the planned disruption of the overhaul now or you can have the more serious, unplanned disruption of something like Wannacry later with the media and public pointing at you and blaming you. Which is it to be?".
"So the only way the government doesn't have information on you is if you're not from the UK, entered illegally and live illegally while not working, driving or renting. Which seems pretty much an edge case."
So if they've got all that information why would they need to issue me with an ID card - they know who I am?
"They may very well include DRM. Again, is this necessarily bad?"
If it comes up with false positives, yes. How do you know the version running the display panels was hooky? Could it simply be that they were isolated from the internet & couldn't phone home to be verified? You do not want your radiotherapy machine to lock up in the middle of your treatment because it suddenly decided it wasn't running legit Windows.
FTFYA
They're not even profitable these days.
You can see why if you look at the case of them not forwarding NHS mail and storing a backlog. Back in the old days they'd have got either the forwarding or the storage added to the contract as an expensive extra, probably both.
"sure, pedants will find exceptions"
I don't think I've seen one that adopted that. Things were generally spelled out, often using regnal years - in fact the realms covered by the regnal years still included France well into the C17th.
Here's a Derbyshire lease: "the twelfth day of September in the fourth year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord James ye second by the grace of God England Scotland France & Ireland King defender of the faith &c Annoq Dom one thousand six hundred eighty eight "
That one was on the cusp of replacing regnal years by AD years. A few decades later and into the C18th this is the somewhat terse date of my 6x great grandfather's Will: "the twenty first day of October Anno Dmi 1720".
By the time of my 5x great grandfather's Will this had got abit more wordy: "dated this twentythird Day of November in the Year of our Lord one Thousand seven Hundred forty and nine".
That continued into the C19th with my 3x ggfather: "the twenty seventh day of July in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fourteen".
"The quarter around September 1752 ... was bad news for renters."
Thanks for that. I'd not thought about quarters. Yearly contracts were adjusted by moving the financial year end back by 11 days to April 5th.
"You're confusing the Julian calendar with the Julian Day."
Oh no I'm not.
"The calendar is extinct"
Not if you're dealing with historical material. Just because you don't it doesn't mean that nobody else does. It's building in assumptions like that that lead to failures.
If you have a Unix-like system with TZ set to one of those for "England and its colonies" (to quote the original man entry) run
cal 1752
"The Home Office has been contacted for comment."
I'd like to see their comments as to whether this spreadsheet was the actual tool used for day-to-day management of their operations, why nobody checked to see if it was the appropriate form of this data for release and what in-house IT expertise they have for supporting staff.
It looks suspiciously like the consequence of the "if the only thing you have is a hammer..." approach to using spreadsheets for everything.
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