Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"...certainly this is true for me and my family, we all want to know that if we’re using a smartphone for transactions, sending messages, having private conversations, that we don’t have a bunch of people compromising that process"
He doesn't seem to quite grasp that it's true for the rest of us in Europe. Apparently Europe's objections to privacy compromises are based on trying to do down US corporates for commercial reasons.
"continuously improve the site until it does do what is required."
OK, let's do a thought experiment.
As an alternative to consulting your doctor you go to a health advice site looking for advice on some symptoms you have.
You get the first iteration. I tells you you have nothing to worry about.
The next iteration would have asked some more questions and identified a few possible complications.
The final iteration would have asked you even more questions and identified that you have an uncommon but very serious illness and should contact your doctor immediately.
Unfortunately having had the misleading advice that the first version gave you you didn't get in touch with your doctor and didn't live to get the advice you needed.
Was the agile-developed site useful to you?
"The Civil Servants that manage IT projects need to have a proven track record of (5-10+ years) software development (using a key language like C/C++/C#/Java/Python/Ruby etc...) and managing software development teams."
No. They need to be able to analyse requirements properly. No amount of years experience with any number of languages will be of benefit if the requirements keep changing every 3 months.
Historically the survival of any particular document has been a matter of chance. Some Anglo Saxon charters survive as originals. Some older documents have survived in particularly favourable environments. For the most part, however, texts from antiquity have survived as copies several generations removed from the original and the more copies were made the greater the chance that one or more has survived.
I don't see that changing in terms of digital texts. Anything posted to Geocities, for example, is long gone unless someone copied it - archive.org doesn't seem to have got it all. If Google decided that Groups should go the same way as Wave how much of Usenet would survive?
If we are to have digital records available far into the future we need to do three things:
Have multiple archives of what is to be preserved*
Each archive needs to copy its material onto new media as old ones become obsolete
In addition to copying material archives need to translate obsolete file formats into current ones**
* What is chosen for preservation is a thorny problem. Every time an archivist decides to weed the archive their decisions will be incomprehensible to someone. I remember some years ago wandering into a 2nd-hand bookshop in Cromer and bound volumes of Nature that the county library had disposed of crammed into all sorts of corners.
** Ideally one format that can be kept current for a long time - long in an archival sense. PDF/A?
'In the main, the "plebs'" lives aren't very interesting - not even of today's "plebs."...Certainly there are things that need to be preserved - the back ground of historical events and agreements'
Maybe not from your point of view. However as you're not the only person in this planet that's a fairly limited one. Social historians find these lives much more interesting than the doings of the political classes.
To take one tiny area - how did the domestic textile industry of the West Riding evolve? Just how did the clothiers operate? How did this differ from the domestic industries of other areas such as the Cotswolds? How did it differ from the development of the metal-working industry of the Sheffield area? Manorial and parish records are remarkably unforthcoming about this aspect of their inhabitants. These are not trivial historical concerns; these trades launched parts of the industrial revolution and yet our understanding of them is quite limited.
" the retarded ULTRA-LARGE/ULTRA-WIDE picture format newly employed that is currently de rigueur with every web designer priding him/herself on being irredeemably autistic and subscribed to all the premier webby lifestyle magazines"
Does this remind you of anyone?
Let's hope the fad passes soon.
I assume the downvotes came from web designers.
"we just all need to start replying to all Nigerian/Ivory Coast/Congo/etc 'princes' and they'll eventually get overwhelmed"
I'd like the mail services to add an option to forward each mail in the junk folder to the Reply to addresses of all the other mail. That would overwhelm them PDQ.
1. Why should MS (or Google, F/B, Twits or any other business) know what the composition of their workforce is in terms of race, sexuality or anything else? It shouldn't be an attribute on their staff database. Male/female might reasonably be if it's affected by different legislated retirement ages but that's that the only good reason to gather that information.
2. Age still seems to be a PC-allowable basis for discrimination.
3. What proportion of African ancestry is required to be classed as $terminology-of-choice as opposed to white? I ask partly because there are occasional findings of African Y-chromosome haplotypes in English families with no clear explanation.
"These are still very early days for Audio Factory and we have been very focussed on getting the service live. There are still some local stations in mono, and our full range of bit rates and delivery methods have yet to be rolled out. "
And did it not occur to anyone that the time to close down what was already working was after the new version was fully rolled out?
I'd be quite happy to provide them with a local test route.
It would consist of roads which according to the local council are part of the road network and shown as such on the OS 1:25000 map. Several would be roads which have an unsealed but reasonable surface and are closed off with locked gates. Another would be a road which is occupied by a stream and supports dense rushes about 2 feet high. A final one would be a road bypassed by a turnpike in the late C18th and by the mid C19th had been subsumed into the field system following enclosures a few decades earlier.
"an HGV (usually from foreign parts) gets stuck half way down"
We have a local lane which is steep, had two right angle bends and a few lesser bends and gets narrower as you go down. I think the local farmer could do quite well out of a sign with the number of the local recovery firm.
One of the oddities of this is that the victims are obviously being SATNAVed to a particularly congested main road (which the Highways Agency would really like them to avoid) but have either crossed or turned off another main road which is less problematic. All the route planning sites have this strange preference. Do the routing algorithms prefer a road with a slightly lower number?
As a side issue, being near to a national park we often see parties of walkers all togged out with their waterproofs, sticks in each hand and, despite the maps in plastic envelopes round their necks, wearing distinctly lost-looking expressions on their faces. I've seen one group turn back just before they got to the footpath they were probably aiming at and turn up what was clearly marked as a private road leading to a row of cottages. It's not just drivers and SATNAVs who can't navigate.
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