* Posts by Bernard Peek

9 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Feb 2019

CompSci teacher sets lab task: Accidentally breaking the university

Bernard Peek

Oooops!

A friend started learning computing at Hatfield Polytechnic as it was then. He wrote his first BASIC program and submitted it to their PDP10. He was learning about loops. They hadn't yet come to the part of the syllabus about terminating infinite loops.

We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners

Bernard Peek

It's different in the UK

The Computer Misuse Act seems to apply here so customers shouldn't need to sue.

That feint hum is coming from the graves of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.

Digital democracy or IT anarchy? Gartner flags the low-code revolution

Bernard Peek

Welcome to the 21st century

Schools are teaching kids to code. It's up to IT departments to make use of those skills. Low-code and no-code solutions exist and are going to be used. It's up to the IT department to ensure that it's done safely. That involves setting guidelines and procedures for handling corporate data. It's a pity that it's too late to apply those controls to spreadsheets. It's up to corporate management to give IT departments the resources to do that. Billing a department for the cost of hiring a contractor to fix 'Shadow IT' will concentrate the mind wonderfully. Make sure that corporate management knows in advance that's going to happen if end-users don't follow your rules.

Big IQ play from IT outsourcer: Can't create batch files if you can't save files. Of any kind

Bernard Peek
Facepalm

Batch files botched

A company I worked for banned the use of a query tool in interactive mode. So our IT Manager ran a batch file that changed what he thought was unimportant data in the production database. He got a bollocking for that. Later, after I took over his job, I found out that the changes blocked the purge of old data and cluttered even our enormous 20Mb disk.

This'll make you feel old: Uni compsci favourite Pascal hits the big five-oh this year

Bernard Peek

Re: pascal was simply useless.

Given a free choice of development systems for a new project my team of very experienced developers chose Delphi. Their reasons were better IDE, easier to code, more reliable and faster execution than MS C++.

Excuse me, I'm just off to write a ROT13 filter in TP 3.02, My first programming language.

Gmail and Outlook sitting in a tree, not t-a-l-k-i-n-g to me or thee

Bernard Peek

There's an addon for Thunderbird to synchronise its calendars with Google. It's borked and asks for authentication every ten minutes.

At the Supreme Court, Morrisons pops data breach liability win into its trolley – but it's not a get-out-of-compo free card for businesses

Bernard Peek

Negligence

Enabling an employee to copy unencrypted sensitive data to a USB stick. Sounds like negligence to me.

World Wide Web's Sir Tim swells his let's-remake-the-internet startup with Bruce Schneier, fellow tech experts

Bernard Peek

There are two ways it could work

All of the directors have been around the block a few times. They know that the Internet is largely funded by advertisers.

The threat of users moving en masse to Inrupt might be enough to bring the ad industry to heel. They might "voluntarily" agree to restrictions on how they collect and use data. Advertisers will have to be satisfied with extracting less value from data they collect. Advertisers will complain but live with it as long as nobody else can can do better.

Alternatively Inrupt could set up a micropayment system that replaces web-sites' income streams. That could make Inrupt the world's biggest bank. Advertisers will find other ways to reach your eyeballs.

Techies tinker with toilet-topper to turn it into ticker-tracker

Bernard Peek

Smart Home

In a fully automated smart-home if your bog catches you straining Cortana will add All-Bran to your online shopping order.