Posts by Doctor Syntax 42407 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Modern USB keyboards on desktops running Unix variants still do that in the terminal program."
It's not restricted to USB keyboards, in fact it's not the keyboard itself. The keyboard driver converts the key presses and releases into emulation of some sort of traditional keyboard input, typically that of the VT100 or one of its descendants.
"someone appears to be testing on the live Register server because I'm getting daft capcha requests on previews now"
Did you try typing in something that might have looked like a critical file name? I've seen that in the past and I just got the same thing by typing in the full pathname of the Unix password file and got the same thing. By calling it "the password file" I got round it. I've noticed it before. It seems to be some input sanitisation. My experience in the past is that the capcha doesn't work, possibly because I have NoScript firmly tied down.
In the real old days there weren't Unix commands for adding users, you just edited the password file.
Up and down arrow keys and the like on terminals issued escape sequence which tended to contain tildes. A bit of a timing error in transmission and the escape sequence would get misinterpreted and if you were unlucky vi applied the tilde to change toe case of the character under the cursor.
That's how I came to have the first name in my password file spelled "Root". I can't remember the reason why I couldn't then su back to root - possibly su didn't like the spelling. But also in those real old days if the first character you gave to a login prompt was upper case the terminal driver assumed you were on a TTY that only had upper case and obligingly changed all your characters to lower case so trying to login as Root failed because you were effectively logging in as root. Needless to say that back in those days sudo wasn't a thing. I had visions of crashing the whole machine with the power switch to gain root access in single user on reboot.
Fortunately I found someone had still got a root session open so we were able to fix it. But for a long time after that I got into the habit of having an alias of root - an entry with a different name but still with a UID of 0 - well down the password file.
"The other fun property of Sages was hard disks very averse to the computer being dropped."
Back in the day I remember a salesman dropping a Fortune (also a 68k box) from waist height - and it survived. I still can't understand how although the fact that it wasn't running probably helped.
OTOH I've dropped a hard drive about 6" whilst installing it and it was completely dead.
"So if these indirect blocks get reused before `rm -rf /` completes (and while you're busy "backing up" the filesystem, other processes are appending to logs and writing data) then you'll only be recovering text files."
But that's still data. According to the article there wasn't any.
"When it comes to things like scripting and testing changes, that's all well and good if you have the time and warm bodies - and test platforms with representative data."
As a DBA you are responsible for the records on which your employer depends to conduct their business. To quote Len Deighton, the price of survival is eternal paranoia, vigilance is not enough.
What you do not have is time or sufficient warm bodies for getting it wrong because when (not if) you have to fix it after an over-hasty operation it will take a lot more of those resources. At the very least put a potentially destructive operation in a transaction and only commit if the number of rows affected looks right. As to test platforms, how often do we hear, right here in el Reg comments, of people thinking they're on test and then finding they've just done something terrible on live.
Scripts don't - shouldn't in this context - mean something with a high ceremony sign off. They simply mean typing something into a file instead of into a command prompt which can give you a chance of rehearsing it non-destructively - give that expression to ls, not to rm -rf, count the rows a WHERE clause returns etc - and and a chance to take a second look before it's too late.
More haste less speed. Or, if you prefer, the carpenters' motto: measure twice, cut once.
"I'm still wondering why rm returns an error when the thing you are trying to delete doesn't exist."
Your intention: to delete a file called 0nefile.
You type in: rm Onefile
On completion of rm, 0nefile still exists because you didn't tell rm to remove it. If rm doesn't return an error you're no wiser to this unless you then run ls. Wouldn't it be handy if rm gave you some feedback to tell you you'd typed in an incorrect filename?
rm -r simply unlinks the data (including, of course, the directories themselves) from the directory tree. The data is still on disk if not organised in a friendly way; simply running od on the device sees it. Even if /dev is gone it should be visible if the drive is hooked up to another machine. If the data recovery company couldn't find any data then either they were not fit for purpose or something considerably stronger than rm hosed the drives.
"Once again, they'd managed to issue an UPDATE statement without any constraints on it. "
1. Always, always, ALWAYS do stuff like this as a script. Get into the habit so that you automatically won't run it straight from the command line.
2. Write the WHERE clause and test it in a SELECT. (If you know what to expect just select a COUNT without getting all the data streamed out to screen).
3. Ask yourself if what the SELECT returns is sensible.
4. When you're convinced it's right add BEGIN WORK at the start of the script and convert the test statement to your risky DELETE or UPDATE. Do NOT add a COMMIT to your script.
5. Run the script.
6. Check how many rows were affected. If and only if the result looks right type in your COMMIT, otherwise ROLLBACK.
Scripts are your friend.
"The lift fans are unsafe: no ducts" etc.
There are these things called helicopters...
I remember going along to give evidence at a coroner's inquest. One of the cases before mine was about a squaddie who'd gone round the back of the helicopter he'd just left and into the tail rotor. In fact, it's that case I remember and not my own. I thought of it when I actually got a lift to a scene in one. The landing was on slightly sloping ground & I just remembered that case in time and decided that leaving down-slope was better than leaving up-slope.
"Who wants the job of doing nothing for extended periods, then suddenly being thrown into an emergency situation you have no prior knowledge of, and where the live of several people depend on your decisions."
Fire brigades, emergency ambulances, lifeboats... It wouldn't be a unique situation.
"Also, also, if this is supposed to be a city-based air taxi why was the video flying over mountains and valleys"
Because the development flying has been done in the S Island of New Zealand where they have lots of mountains and valleys but relatively few cities.
"YOU do not really need to know anything about a person's history if you are not employing them."
You may need to if you're buying some product or service related to past offences from them. You may not wish to hand over sums of money for safekeeping to someone who has a history of embezzlement.
"The people who build them and ship them have physical access so that's one hell of a big handful."
So what do you do, compromise all of them in hope that you'll eventually find one online that shares a room with an air-gapped one you're interested in? However, just to be on the safe side, if you're installing an air-gapped machine make sure it's a different make to any others in the room.
"Corbyn has realised re-nationalisation (slowly) is a vote winner, so is punting it for the trains and other areas."
In that case I'm glad I no longer travel by train. I remember what it was like before it was nationalised. as per a comment above, they had to address announcements to "customers". They couldn't call us "travellers" when they were telling us why we weren't travelling or "passengers" when we were simply standing about on the platform.
"We sincerely apologise for any concern and inconvenience this has caused."
More like typical PR. It's another situation where the likes of el Reg should make life more difficult:
"Don't you mean 'the concern' rather than 'any concern'?"
"Then why didn't you say so?"
Weasel words contaminate the language. Journalists shouldn't let them get away with it. Even if they don't get chance to question the wording as I just suggested they should at least comment on it when quoting it.
"They paid themselves to do it so apart from what it cost to do it cost no more."
Actually it does. The Ponzi nature of Civil Service pensions is a cost for the future. The notional deduction from pay (the pay rates are supposed to take into account what would be the cost of pension contributions) doesn't go into a fund. If it did HMRC would probably take a rather less aggressive approach to what they see as overfunding. Instead pensions are paid out of current taxation. In consequence every member of the civil service doing something now represents a future pension cost. This is one of the things that govt. can dump on someone else by outsourcing. Of course when the outsourcer's pension scheme goes TITSUP* it might well be HMG picking up the bill in the long run.
*Typical Industry Titan's Shockingly Underfunded Pension.
how about using DuckDuckGo, Wolfram Alpha, IxQuick, Yandex or Gibiru
Of that lot:
"Wolfram|Alpha needs JavaScript in order to work"
"Start Page by ixquick....enhanced by Google"
Yendex "It is the largest technology company in Russia" (Wikipedia)
"Gibiru is the preferred Search Engine for Patriots." and does absolutely nothing on my browser except a lot of self-praise.
"She once had to assist a company that at first glance had done all the right things"
It must have been a very cursory glance. If first glance at your tape store doesn't reveal a tape labelled "Full backup $DATE" or "Level 0" or such you should know it's time to do something about it. In fact, if they were running tapes on a 3 month basis then it should have been obvious that at the end of the 3 month cycle it was time for a new full backup.
"I also assumed this just do to simple self-interest, that people will stop paying if they getg the word that they won't get the key anyway."
The initial wave of ransom-ware operators did indeed seem to operate in this way. They clearly looked on it as a business and had to be handled in a business-like fashion in order to keep the money flowing. If they didn't put the work in the ransoms wouldn't be paid and the income would disappear.
However, like all areas of business new operators came in looking for the quick buck and so we have a race to the bottom. Add to that a few nation-state operations where the sole intent seems to have been to cause harm.
The guys who started this must be fuming.
"I believe that if he had not been such a controversial person, publicly making unpopular business decisions, he might have been treated differently by the legal system, and spent less time in prison."
Yup. If he hadn't done bad stuff he wouldn't have broken the law and been charged.
"Could you make a simple job any more difficult?"
Remember that well known training programme on all things relating to HMG administration, Yes Minister. Being sent to the DVLA was one of the ultimate threats for a Civil Servant (the other was RAF Lossimouth). They're all trying to exhibit their red tape credentials in hope of being posted back to London.
Thus if you run a web app, best to check it in all the major browsers.
Once upon a time there was just HTML. The marketing wonks wanted control over layout and it all went downhill from there. Just make your site work without stupidities such as loading stacks of executable stuff from sites over which you've no control and guessing at what browsers the punter might actually have available. KISS
"The security certificates of all of our websites meet industry standards and we use recognised industry best practice methods to ensure that all our URLs are secure. The security of our customers' data is always paramount and we constantly review our websites to ensure they are fit for purpose."
Translation: "I work in PR. Understanding what you said isn't in my job description. Here's some boiler-plate."
"t has always been the case in the past that you get much better long-term stability from mains-frequency-linked clocks than from a quartz oscillator."
Only if you don't have countries playing silly buggers with the grid.
"Perhaps radio would be better still, but you're adding cost at that point."
Just check your clocks & watches against the computer these days. That gets synced to some nice atomic clocks somewhere.
"When Gordon Brown got in they found a sympathetic ear"
I always assumed the word for what they found was "mug" but you may well be right. His predecessors seem to have seen through the arguments, however.
I'm not sure whether it's a socialist agenda. I think it's simply that PAYE was designed by people in permanent jobs for people in permanent jobs and adding another way of doing things involves hard stuff like thinking.
"Government could just go back to employing professional staff as employees on good wages and stop paying contractors to do the work."
You must be joking. Government has been trying to cut head-count for years. For a start direct employees have pension entitlements and as the Ponzi-like nature of state pensions and Civil Service pensions are threatening implosion they want as little as possible to do with it. Why shouldn't they throw those and all the other benefit costs on the worker and them rip the workers off by pretending they're ordinary employees for tax purposes.
"We should NOT be limited companies, but have some other classification which has 5% of the required paperwork."
My understanding is that the whole Ltd Co thing is a response to earlier IR decisions. Previously (before my time so this is hearsay) contracting was as sole trader. If the sole trader defaulted on tax the next Ltd Co up the chain was responsible. Clients didn't want this so insisted on the Ltd Co setup. I've heard people who were contracting in the sole trader days being regretful about its passing.
Oddly enough this client attitude isn't universal, it seems to apply more to IT. I went direct to a client. As there was no agency contract we had to draw one up between us at which point I discovered that they had a standard contract for sole trader freelancers because they still existed in that industry; it was a long time ago now so might not still apply.
"You can be pedantic and split hairs"
I think it's necessary to do that. Firstly, although most contractors really do get the reality but it's the FUD version that affects permie and HMG's thinking. Secondly those contractors that don't get it and really do treat company income as personal income are the ones who are held up as proof that all contractors are evil. I strongly suspect that as soon as times get tough they drop out of the industry because they've spent the cash and don't have anything to fall back on but those who are in it for the long haul get tarred with the same brush.
"Contractors commenting on here seem to think of what they charge their customer as their earnings, rather than their businesses revenue from customers."
A few do. They've been a problem for the rest of the contracting industry's reputation for years. Their approach is what brought about IR35. I wonder how they cope when times get tough and cash flow management becomes critical. Somehow I doubt they're the ones who get through the lean times.
"And that is the decision of the contractor since they are director of the company paying their salary."
Of course it is. But it's one way in which contracting is different to permie work and those ways add up to a significant difference which permies and HMG try their best to ignore.
" If a contractor has a day off sick, it will decrease. As a permanent employee, it will not."
No. If a contractor has a sick day off it's the contracting company's income that will decrease. The contractor can be paid the same salary but there may be less money to pay dividends.
Monthly take home pay is a red herring. There will be months when the contractor is on the bench and there's no income to the company which should have built up reserves to be able to continue paying the contractor's salary.
"I've still not a heard a reason why contractors working for a a one man band limited company can't / don't pay themselves sick pay."
There's a reason why you haven't heard of a reason why they don't. It's because they do.
As an employee of your own company you're paid an annual salary. If you're sick (and I have on occasion been taken from site to hospital) then you continue to be paid that annual salary. The big difference is that the company isn't being paid by the client unless the freelancer has fielded a substitute. The company should build up a buffer so that it can cope with that. It's making the provision for that that falls on the contractor but not on the employee that you hear about in the comparison.
