Posts by Loyal Commenter

I have a feeling they were bought out by Yodel some years back... I have memories of them being "less than good" as well...

edit - a quick google reveals they went into administration and were bought out by "DX Deliveries" in 2016...

Re: Beer...

Why did the senior DBA let him do it if he was really looking over his shoulder?

More to the point, why did the senior DBA teach the junior DBA to use TRUNCATE, especially on live data.

If you know you're on a database which is definitely not a production one, preferably on a server that definitely isn't a live one, and you've made sure that you don't have another session open on any live server anywhere that you might accidentally type a command into, then maybe you might use TRUNCATE, but even then, you'd probably DROP or DELETE FROM instead, unless the table in question was huge, or the hardware very slow, because typically, if you're doing something on a test system, you'd want to replicate what you'd do, and the way you'd do it, on a live system.

Typically, if doing anything that involves deleting data from a live database, the very first thing you'd do is make a copy of the data you're about to operate on. The senior DBA should have been teaching teh junior that as a matter of course. If not making a copy of the entire table, then running your DELETE statement as a SELECT first to copy that data somewhere else.

Then, of course, you'd check for any cascading delete constraints...

Re: Artificial Neural Nets aren't all there is to AI.

Indeed, algorithmic AI, is the real "hard" problem of AI, and it has been for half a century or so.

If you can identify the fundamental aspects of consciousness and reproduce those in algorithmic form, then you might have a fighting chance of creating something with the intelligence of something more advanced than an insect. That might even incorporate an ANN for state processing, to replicate the way actual neural networks do it. The technological capability to do so is still science fiction.

Re: "and caned the computer"

A good error message should have four parts:

- A meaningful title, i.e. "Could not make fondue"

- What happened, i.e. "Out of cheese"

- What the user can do about it, e.g. "Please refill the cheese hopper."

- Where applicable, technical information for troubleshooting, e.g. "The cheese processor reported error code #47 - OUT OF CHEESE ERROR"

Where at all possible, the third part should be logged somewhere reachable instead, and the message should contain something like "Please quote log ref #C4EE5E".

Re: Stating the obvious

Yeah, that whole, "I'll comply with the laws of the country I'm in, but only when I've left the coutnry, and at my convenience, at their cost" defence. Why should the Swedish prosecutors have to leave the country and travel to a place of Assange's choosing to do their job?

To use an analogy, imagine buying an item from an online tat bazaar (let's call it iBuy) where the seller states that the item is collection only, and is based in, lets say, Leeds.

After negotiating the sale, you then refuse to pay until the seller comes and personally delivers the item to you, at your new address, in the south of France. You refuse to return to Leeds to collect the item, and complain that the seller is being unreasonable. Now, I don't know what the wholly fictitious iBuy's terms of service would say about this, but I doubt they would smile favourably upon you.

Re: Who judges the Judges

...and in the absence of a convenient D-Jump to go and fetch the Dark Judges, it's the SJS...

Re: But fuck it. It's £499. You could do worse

...cue a rant about how the "new" HTC10 my wife bought wouldn't do the OTA upgrade to Android 9 due to a "corrupt file system" and also wouldn't re-flash the official stock image from HTC, crashing half-way through the update process. Bought from an eBay seller purporting to be in Leicester and then, when trying to return the phone as faulty, turns out to be in Singapore (and also turns out to have several eBay accounts all with very similar names, created on the same date).

Dodgier than a Naruto-running Jerboa driving a Dodge Cherokee to its dodgeball match...

Re: Hope the hack is up to date with his TB jab

Worryingly, most of the strains in circulation aren't included in the BCG jab, which IIRC contains 23 separate needles for the strains it does cover (I stand to be corrected on this, as it's 3 decades since I had one). This indicates something about why TB is such a successful pathogen (and still the world's number 1 killer infectious disease), this and the fact that it is hard to kill because (a) it lives in the lungs, where it is hard for antibiotics to reach, (b) it divides slowly (antibiotics typically kill cells when they divide), (c) it has a thick cell wall, affording the bacterium some degree of protection, and (d) people don't finish their courses of antibiotics and stop when they feel better, leading to low-level disease reservoirs. oh, and (e) a lot of infected people are asymptomatic.

If you develop a cough, I'd suggest a visit to your GP...

Re: Reasonable defaults

The thing is, the human vision system is very good at spotting moving things, especially in peripheral vision, and that's without using doppler radar/lidar, which presumably this could use (if it's sensitive enough). Admittedly, that's only good for things moving towards or away from you; the vision system involved needs to be a lot better at detecting transverse movement.

Indeed, I wasn't going for the "my pipe's fatter than your pipe" (oo-er-missus) type of post, but it may have come off like that (ooh-she-didn't). My point was that supposedly good business connectivity shouldn't be worse than cheap consumer broadband.

Re: *capitalist* nightmare...?

Haha, you crazy Americans with your irrational hatred of socialism. You do know socialism and totalitarianism aren't the same thing, right?

Uncle Joe isn't hiding under the bed waiting to brainwash your children into being nice to each other.

I know, I know, you think corporate free-market capitalism is the solution to all of life's woes. Come back and tell me that again when you don't have the highest per-capita prison population in the developed world (and most of the undeveloped world too), and a massive (rising) gap between the wealth of the richest and poorest.

Edit - I'll just add, from a historical perspective, the thing that most accurately describes what you are thinking of is the polar opposte of the "S" word, that one that starts with "F", and seems to be on the rise again.

Why should the NHS spend a fortune upgrading their systems just because some scrote has a cheap SDR dongle and chooses to broadcast their pager messages?

The same reason that they shouldn't be putting confidential patient files in a dumpster without shredding them. IIRC, trusts can, and have, been fined for doing exactly that.

Re: Bite..

Natural or otherwise, it depends on the half-life of the isotope in question.

More strictly accurately, it depends on the half-life, the decay type and decay energy.

Radiactive decay typically involces one or more of electron emission (beta radiation), alpha particle emission (alpha radiation), high-energy photon emission (gamma radiation), and neutron emission.

Ionised particles (alpha and beta emission) cause damage by basically smashing into other atoms, alpha moreso, because an alpha particle consists of a positively charged combination of two protons and two neutrons (some 8000 times more massive than the electron released in beta decay and with twice the electric charge).

The amount of damage such particles can cause is pretty much directly related to the amount of energy they hold when they are emitted, which is specific to the isotope that is decaying, but for alpha particle is usually around 5 MeV.

Gamma radiation depends very much on the energy of the photon in how harmful it can be. They typically cause damage by ionising the atoms they pass by.

Neutrons can hit other nuclei and make them into unstable isotopes. This requires a direct-hit on the nucleus, and the vast majority of every atom is empty space, so neutron flux has to be quite high for this to be hazardous. A single decay has a very low chance of being harmful, compared to the potential of an alpha particle. Neutrons, however, being uncharged, can travel a lot further, so the safe distance from a neutron source is a lot more than the safe distance from an alpha source - alpha particles typically don't get more than a few cm, but neutrons will travel many metres. Free neutrons also have a half-life of around fifteen minutes before decaying into ionised particles (a proton and electron) and a neutrino. If it does so when it's inside you, that proton and electron are going to cause damage to whatever is around them.

Re: Eh?

It's called "outsourcing".

In this case, the government outsourcing the problems created by magical thinking to someone else...