Re: Prison for the execs
For what? I'm pretty sure that buried in the Terms of Use for Twitface and Instachat is the news that credential breach is only a matter of concern and actionable recourse when it is perpetrated by the user.
Posts by Stevie
7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
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Who's using Mueller Report Day to bury bad news? If you guessed Facebook, you're right: Millions more passwords stored in plaintext
Microsoft debuts Bosque – a new programming language with no loops, inspired by TypeScript
Friday 19th April 2019 14:20 GMT
Re: All those 'GO TO' statements
No, they can't. ANSII Cobol '74 and ADMLP cards in play.
You either used AT END GO TO or risked a read beyond end of file error & crash.
You could decline to register the database error contingency with the program and cope with a programmatical error-handling routine in the case of the ADMLP code, and thereby put yourself in the frame for all sorts of pain during your voyage of discovery of just how many different ways your DMS FETCH (FIND+GET if you are using Non Sperry computers) can say "your record ain't here, mate".
Had great fun during the mid 80's twitting DB programmers for the inventive ways they had missed a few possible endings for their Life Story In Code and the lame excuses they tried to make this a DBA problem.
My absolute favorite was "Go fetch my record; on error just keep going on the assumption all is well" which was always paired with "there must be a database problem because when I change this record the previous one gets updated" when the "programmer" had checked his results.
Thursday 18th April 2019 14:43 GMT
Re: What's Wrong With a Loop? 4 Hedley_Grange
Heh.
I once went on a Cobol Advanced Topics course given by Sperry Unisysvac.
One of the very nifty things we were shown was Report Writer, a module that made Cobol into a declarative language by doing all the hard stuff in the data division. The procedure division was then reduced to:
Initialization Paragraph
(about three lines of code)
Report Generation Paragraph
Loop, Generating report, at end go to termination paragraph.
Termination Paragraph
(about another three lines).
Everyone worked the lab that morning, finished in about 3/4 of an hour and went drinking Ruddles County Bitter in the Midland Hotel.
Everyone except the Bass Charrington crew, who were a Structured Programming shop and strictly forbidden to use "go to" under any circumstances.
When we eventually rolled back into theatre, with all the bonhomie that a three hour lunch on XXX Brainsmack can bring on, they were still at it, attempting to make the simple monolithic logic model of a Report Writer procedure division conform to the "Perform Until" demands of their enterprise. They never did finish the simple lab, giving a clear and unambiguous win to the structured programming crowd.
I often smile when I think back on the irony of the Bass Charrington team not getting a drink on the last Friday lunchtime of a course, and I've often wondered how they worked around such beasts as "READ <file> AT END GO TO" and "FETCH <DMS Record> ON ERROR GO TO" in their code. The results must have been a nightmare to debug for a new guy in the shop.
Yes, I may have advised 'some' investors to flog their Autonomy shares, analyst tells High Court
Thursday 18th April 2019 18:26 GMT
Bah!
<mode=Clouseau>So ... what you are saying is ... this Autonomy, they had cookéd their books, and the Hewlet Packard, they did not care enough to find out about it before they puchaséd the company?
Mon Dieu! We must arrest everyone in the name of The Lieu, and question them without mercy until the truth, it is revealéd!</mode>
A quick cup of coffee leaves production manager in fits and a cleaner in tears
Wednesday 17th April 2019 16:49 GMT
Re: Bah!
Yeah, only MSc students and above got to play with the clever spectrometers upstairs. Same deal with the Raman spectrometer, but that was because of the waiting list for the eye exam and laser safety training.
I'm not saying this NMR spectrometer was old, but it had an orange oscilloscope tube for the spectrum preview.
The reason the pen drilled holes in the paper was that it wasn't the original pen, was too heavy for the latch that was supposed to hold it off the paper while fiddling with knobs all over the room took place, and the background noise made the pen assembly (a Rotring-style pen if I remember correctly) chatter enough to drop nib to paper while one was busy adjusting the veeblefetzer over by the window or tweaking the deflector array using three different knobs simultaneously on the oscilloscope console, and by the time one had noticed the pen was at work again the damage was done.
Once everything was reset the spectrum was begun and about halfway through the sample would stop spinning because the little turbine thingy (which resembled one of the keys for dismantling early versions of the Rotring-style pen nibs when they inevitably clogged) wasn't the right one for the glass sample tube* and so had five steady state "bands": Stopped, stopped, spinning at the right speed, spinning too fast and spinning too fast. Band three was very narrow with respect to the little tap on he air hose nozzle inside the magnet, and a slight glitch in the airflow would cause a drift into states four or two before one had noticed that too.
As I say, it was all very trying. If science needs that much twiddling and fiddling it should go bang occasionally to alleviate the boredom.
* I'm guessing that the original little turbine thingies suffered the same fate as the spare baddie supplied with the James Bond Aston Martin DB5 or the teenytiny rockets that came with the Batmobile. The Important Little Pieces Gnomes took them.
Tuesday 16th April 2019 15:50 GMT
Bah!
The NMR spectrometer I worked on in '77 at the University of Climategate required the jamming of a stool in the nearby elevator doors to prevent the elevator moving during the 20 minutes or so it took for a scan and perturbing the magnetic field and ruining the Spectrum.
Much of that time was used in the arcane Zarkoffian leaping from place to place in the room to tweak the phase or the gain or adjust the airflow of the little spinning wotsit, while the pen drilled a hole in the graph plotter paper. It was all very trying despite the total Frankensteinian Steampunkery of the affair.
The lab technicians took great delight in waiting for Minute 18 to casually walk into the room and place a drawer full of retort stand clamps on the magnet.
They didn't stick hard or do any of the stuff non-spectroscopists might imagine, but what they did to the almost-finished spectrum was a thing of whatever-the-opposite-of-beauty-is.
And yes, one didn't wear one's Timex (or a belt) either on account of the metal causing disturbances in the (magnetic) force during the leaping-and-twiddling phase and buggering up the results.
Interesting note: The machine I was working on was built the same year I was born, and was one of two. The other was a stain on the floor as the week before I got that lab, the sister machine was sent to the Science Museum as an exhibit.
Interesting note 2: Someone turned off the magnet a few weeks after my "go", and it took two weeks for the magnetic field to settle down when it was switched on again. Hysteresis on steroids.
iOS 13 leaks suggest Apple is finally about to unleash the iPad as a computer for grownups
I've had it with these mother-fscking slaps on this mother-fscking plane: Flight fight sparks legal brouhaha over mid-air co-ords
Brit Watchkeeper drone fell in the sea because blocked sensor made algorithms flip out
Kent bloke incurs the anchor of local council after fly-tipping boat
User secures floppies to a filing cabinet with a magnet, but at least they backed up daily... right?
Friday 12th April 2019 14:29 GMT
Bah!
Urban Myths don't happen?
Someone should have told a colleague of mine back in the cutting edge days of the 286 c/w hard drive (!) when he wanted to format a floppy for his home machine but was at work, and so asked to use the secretary's workstation (of the same type because the colleague worked for the vendor who had sold the enterprise its new all DOS all the time "micro computers").
She was reluctant because the machine had a hard drive and she'd heard tales of accidental hard drive erasure.
Colleague was dismissive of the danger, hand waving and snorting with laughter. He was a professional and had years of experience with proper computers.
One Urban Legend Event later, the secretary was demonstrating that her own legendary good mood wasn't, in fact, indestructible - as believed by all and sundry up until then - and Mr Computer Scientist spent a day and a half with the state of the art low-level editors manually trying to undelete the hard drive's filesystems.
And so, the next time you clever young things are thinking about having a jolly good sneer, remember two salient points:
a) Urban Legends often have their birth in actual events, albeit events with less shiny stuff bolted on
2) There's a reason Microsoft-sourced software says "are you sure?" when you are about to do something destructive, born out of the experience of those who cut their teeth on more politically acceptable operating systems that don't
Uncle Sam charges Julian Assange with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion
Get the smell out of here! Gaming tournament bans players who raise a literal stink
Tuesday 9th April 2019 19:59 GMT
Bah!
Some years ago I walked into the Javits Lecture Theater complex in Stonybrook's SUNY campus late one spring night in order to get on line for a Harlan Ellison signing, and although the whole place had been closed down, completely refurbished and re-opened only a few weeks before, I was smacked in the face by the stench of feet.
So many young women. So many young men who will never get to meet them up close for want of ten minutes grooming.
Gah!
Burl Ives has a great line in The Big Country: "So, the schoolteacher's sweet on ya, hey? Treat her right. Take a bath sometime." Words to live by.
Town admits 'a poor decision was made' after baseball field set on fire to 'dry' it more quickly
Tuesday 9th April 2019 18:42 GMT
Re: Bah!
So go live in South Carolina or Georgia.
Gas is about a dollar a gallon there most days, *and* they let you use that little ratchet and peg in the gas pistol handle so you can wander around while the car if filling.
Also: no earthquakes, though you do get hurricanes of late, and snow for the last two years.
1998 called. They want their "pun" back.
Tuesday 9th April 2019 18:34 GMT
Re: Grass?
More akin to the stuff on an "all-weather" soccer pitch (do they still have such horrors?) - actually, just dirt really.
All-weather soccer pitches. Ha! The one at St John Backsides Comprehensive washed out in the first year it was put in so that from then on right behind one corner there was an ankle-breaker & concussion pit. Made for short corner kicks. Star school player places ball on corner, signals in a businesslike manner where he wants all the other players to be, snarls at the weedier ones, takes three paces back, plunges out of sight with a gratifying scream of pain.
Tuesday 9th April 2019 16:05 GMT
Bah!
Strikes me that the easiest way to dry ground out once it is wet (professional fields attempt to avoid this by covering the fields when it rains) would be to erect a large, transparent, air-supported marquee over it, of the sort used to shelter rooftop tennis courts and suchlike. Kind of like a huge hovercraft skirt. The incident sunlight would get evaporation going and the airflow would keep it going until the ground parched and the grass died of thirst.
Tuesday 9th April 2019 15:52 GMT
Re: Grass?
a) Kiddie field.
2) Astroturf hurts like hell when you hit it c/f real grass according to most athletes.
*) I thought we were all supposed to be thinking green and doing our bit for carbon sequestration? Astroturf sucks up no OCO whatsoever. Grass is the very epitome of photosynthetic political correctness.
Until you fire up the ride-on mowers of course, but then you can't make an omelet without firing up the ride-on mowers.
All's fair in love and war when tech treats you like an infant
Friday 5th April 2019 19:03 GMT
Bah!
My fave story about automated checkouts came from NPR and concerned a man who was trying to buy a crowbar in Home Despot. He began trying to use the automated checkout, which persisted in addressing him in Spanish, a language he did not speak. Frustration built as he attempted fruitlessly to make the machine either speak English or sell him the crowbar, and he was speedily driven into a rage as so many of us have found ourselves being driven by willfully thick machines stuck in Unhelpful Mode.
He reached the point of abandoning reason and wishing to teach the machine a jolly good lesson, then realized "Hey, I have a crowbar!", and began smashing seven piles of shirt out of the persistently annoying machine.
He was arrested, of course, but I imagine it was totally worth it. I can vividly remember the wonderful sense of catharsis when, after tripping over a floor fan for the eleventy billionth time as I tried to get my Saturday chores done before Sunday dawned , I let my rage become my master and stomped the otherwise perfectly working fan into a pile of plastic shards and an electric motor. If I'd had a crowbar I would have used that too.
Boffins baffled by planet nugget whizzing round white dwarf that should have killed it
Two Arkansas dipsticks nicked after allegedly taking turns to shoot each other while wearing bulletproof vests
Trend Micro antivirus fails to stop measles carrier rubbing against firm's Ottawa offices
Friday 5th April 2019 18:43 GMT
Re: MMR OK
Are you seriously trying to conflate an organic mercury contamination issue with MMR? Seriously? If so, you had better do it with someone who doesn't remember the Minimata Bay episode playing out in real time. I know the difference between a population exposed continuously to massive doses of methyl mercury in their sole food supply and those exposed a few times over a lifetime to a microscopic amount of a completely different compound in a vaccine - or not if you live in the Western World where it hasn't been used in decades.
Show me ONE study that MMR is an actual, real, not made-up-to-sell-pamphlets-over-the-interwebs-and-make-for-a-good-living-from-speaking-engagements and I will listen.
The case FOR the MMR/Autism link was fabricated by venal people for their own reasons, and continues to be promoted by venal people who've made quite a good living from doing so.
The case AGAINST has been made by, well, everyone else in the medical field. Even the journal that published the "study" that started this nauseating ball rolling has repudiated it, as has the author who wrote the bloody thing.
Friday 5th April 2019 15:19 GMT
Re: What a pile of poo
As for the vaccine not "working", understanding of why a few anti-vaxers can fuck everyone over can be had by researching how vaccines provide protection to populations rather than individuals.
It's not political bollocks. It's science and it works if the ratio of idiots to common sensers is low. Once the "I've never seen measles so it can't be a threat" crowd are a significant fraction of your local population, everyone is at risk.
Friday 5th April 2019 15:17 GMT
Re: MMR OK
No, it wasn't that the people were getting a paucity of information, the problem was the places people chose to trust where information that was available. The thinking went:
"Big Pharma BAD. Small Doctor and Nurse GOOD."
Of course, neither of those axioms were true.
Ratbags.com was, at the time this was playing out, a mine of interesting and depressing information on the blithering being done on thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative that had long-ago been removed from MMR vaccine doses.
The best hope for humanity right now would seem to be to hope that the populations of anti-vaxers and consumers of Raw Water have a high degree of overlap.
FYI: You could make Tesla's Autopilot swerve into traffic with a few stickers on the road
Bit nippy, is it? Hive smart home users find themselves tweaking thermostat BY HAND
Wednesday 3rd April 2019 14:31 GMT
Re: you've never heard of a factor of safety
Yes I have, but since the insulation on the wire you'll likely be using when you run your fiendish smart-meter bypass probably has a 600 volt rating I thought someone should take the piss.
Also, good luck fiddling with the wires while wearing said gloves.
"Engineers". Pfft.
Just the small matter of the bill for scrapping Blighty's old nuclear submarines: It's £7.5bn
Wednesday 3rd April 2019 14:26 GMT
Bah!
A lick o' paint, some lead foil and a quick refueling and these magnificent boats could be once again patrolling the seas on behalf of Britannia, ready to deal harshly with any post-Brexit naval shenanigans on the part of the treacherous foreigners.
Or we could do what everyone knows is the best way to rid oneself of toxic and/or radioactive waste by dropping the boats into a volcano, but if we are gong to do that we'd best get a move on before post-Brexit fiddling paperwork denies us access to the nearest and most active volcanoes.
Ex-Mozilla CTO: US border cops demanded I unlock my phone, laptop at SF airport – and I'm an American citizen
Amazon consumer biz celebrates ridding itself of last Oracle database with tame staff party... and a Big Red piñata
DXC Security exec: Yes, I'd have thought we'd spend more on certs and laptop kit for staff, too
Monday 1st April 2019 19:13 GMT
Re: Bah!
Since ServiceNow is, from what I hear, "infinitely" configurable to the user needs, ones mileage my assuredly vary.
Mine is about 4 miles to the gallon with lots of blue-black smoke belching from the exhaust as we go.
ServiceNow isn't about process in our shop. I thought it was. Supported the team that implemented it to the hilt when it was mooted.
In our shop it's about closing incident tickets quickly without reference to the actual cause of the incident (so a ten second fix permissions issue get the same SNOW police schedule panic as an hours-long voyage of discovery lurking under "the system is slow") while at the same time slowing well-implemented and highly automated processes down to a crawl. Example - it takes two weeks to add a new user sign on now even though the actual process takes ten seconds, has been in place as an automated process for over five years and is bullet proof.
I tried to get this turned into a standard "do it now" change but the team insisted that five normal tickets c/w CAB be submitted before the proposal was considered. Then I found out the proposal consideration soviet meets once a month after they found fault with my submission ...
Only one Huawei? We pitted the P30 Pro against Samsung and Apple's best – and this is what we found
Are you sure you've got a floppy disk stuck in the drive? Or is it 100 lodged in the chassis?
Kepler may be dead but its data keeps on giving, thanks to AI: Two alien worlds found in archives
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
