Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: clients

The truth of that is that you never get rid of the geld. It was Richi Sunak's lot that were collecting it recently - who'll be in charge when you read this is anyone's guess.

Re: Motivation

Due dilligence needs to be a lot more dilligent.

Re: "A deliberate and considered lack of competant action": fire and forget

He sounds like an excellent fit with the rest of BT muppets top management.

Re: Three strikes

New directors? No;make three strikes mean out. There needs to be a mechanism to compulorily wind up companies who fail so repeatedly.

Re: Ask for explanations is the best you can do ?

It might fall on deaf ears because they know what they're going to charge you per bit to migrate your data out.

Re: Cunning ?

Your average HR bod is about the same risk to their employer as your average sales and marketing bof.

"Hacker was a very average minister" - Yes Minister Diaries.

Re: "where it hopes to save an estimated $400 million annually"

Success at delivering parcels depends entirely on having the right systems to control it. Whether they reslise it or not or whether they like it or not they are an IT business.

Amazon are also in the parcel delivery business wnd realised they were an IT business. That's something FedEx seem not to have noticed.

Re: Wayland is missing one critical feature needed by content creators

"it appears to cut across many of Waylands founding assumptions about information hiding and security"

Assumptions; never a good thing. Make an early design decision to do something specific and you find you've exluded the possibility of doing several other things.

Re: that jerk with the annoying voice and that other bastard who sniffs all day.

"No matter what. After all, the Tories are still blaming Labour for the ills of the world 12 years after Labour were last in power."

To be fair the aftereffects of Brownomics were pretty severe. BoJo has had the gift of a pandemic and now a war to make it hard to allocate due blame for his own policies.

Re: that jerk with the annoying voice and that other bastard who sniffs all day.

To be fair, most "boomers" are now in their 70s.

How long are such "generations" supposed to last? AIUI these are the cohort born 1946 or later so they're mid-70s or younger. That puts the majority in their 60s.

Being slightly older my own definition is one whose musical tastes were defined by the Beatles, their contemporaries and successors. In restrospect I think I've always had more in common with those 10 or more years older than those just a few years younger as exemplified by the cousins on one side of the family vs the other.

They'll do that until they run out of budget. Limit the budget*. when they relise they're wasting it they'll start flogging off some of their slots. Money - real or virtual - puts a value on a resource. If the resource has no price you end up with the tragedy of the commons.

* This doesn't have to be a financial budget - you can have a virtual currence allocated to projects and departments.

Re: Scheme

"Zoom calls for stuff that could have been sorted in an eight minute face-to-face chat."

Could also be done with an exchangeof emails - and have them to hand to refer back to instead of wondering if you rememered the face-to-face chat or the Zoom call correctly.

Re: That syncing feeling ...

Always back up the original before syncing.

Re: re: "Schrodingers backup..."

Signetics - now I remember them.

Re: “Write only memory”

"You also had a single pixel monitor and it didn’t matter if it was lit or not."

Or even plugged in and switched on.

Long time retired so all I have to worry about are my own files. And, yes, in the last few weeks I have had to reclaim some from the Nextcloud server which is, effectively, the backup for my laptop. And this very day I was checking & decided it needs more disk but that can wait for a couple of weeks.

In the past distant past we had DR contracts with provision for rehearsals which included full backup restores.

It doesn't happen often, but when it does...

I think Q4 of the OP's list is better. "Have you tried?" can be answered by "Yes" even if it failed. It can be answered by "Yes" untruthfully even if no attempt was made. Asking for evidence it succeeded can only be ansered satisfactorily if the backup can be restored.

Re: We need a Library of Congress – but for the digital world

To be fair, the publishers of Oracle database have objections to everything except money.

For economically significant commercial software a compulsory escrow system would be a good idea, however.

Re: The Library of Congress already has this in hand

"With modern printing facilities, it is easy to order a few extra copies at a sensible price: there is no need to carry a huge stock or to have a huge initial print run."

Maybe you haven't been involved in small scale publishing.

We typically have a print run of 100* which means that the deposit libraries would take up 6% of it. I looked into using print-on-demand services to put our back catalogue back into print. The price we'd have had to sell at would have been at least half as much again as the original prices which had produced a small surplus. We now have several of them downloadable as PDF instead.

I wonder why UK copyright still specifies TCD. I'd have expected it to have been changed to QUB a century ago although the old library would have run out of storage space long before the 1960s.

* The exception was one which had a much larger than normal print run and sold badly. I think it might have been the reason the treasurer subsequently limited to 100. Depositing half a dozen copies would be no problem but it might alert TPTB to our existence.

Re: The Library of Congress already has this in hand

In the UK the libraries of deposit are the British Library & the Bodleian in Oxford (not sure if Cambridge also gets a copy). I believe TCD library serves that purpose in Ireland.

The libraries might serve a useful purpose for proving publication but it seems unlikely that ant oher proof would be ignored in court. My local history group has published a number of books with a small print run and we certainly couldn't afford to spare a couple of copies; we're out of print too quickly without that.

Re: Stating the obvious

"Why do you accept a guy like that embarrassing the whole country."

Who do you have embarassing a proportion of your country and why are they accepted?

The unfortunate fact is that BoJo doesn't embarass the whole country. and the part that he ambarasses doesn't accept him. It's called democracy. Personally I'd go for a qualified democracy - anyone standing for office should be qualified to do more than run a whelk stall.

Who do you have embarassing a proportion of your country?

Re: Building nuclear power stations in potential war zones

Identify your potential war zones. Or, more to thepoint, identify your places which cannot under any circumstances become war zones.

Re: First get your permission to build nuclear power stations

"From" or "In"?

"literally ONLY MONTHS AWAY"

That use of "literally" should be a warning. Please come back in however many months away it is to tell us when it's in production. How many months is it, BTW?

Oh, the irony!

Re: The Holy Grail...

" fission reactors, unpopular as they are, are available now"

For some value of "now". Unfortunately the unpopularity ensures that the "now" is still some way into the future. Even when unpopularity finally has to confront reality lead times will ensure that "now" will still be some way away. Even then it's unlikely that the "greens" who opposed it will accept their substantial share of blame for the unneccessary CO2 burden.

Hydrogen is also inflammable, potentially explosively so, and what's more, it doesn't stay put. A hydrogen leak in an underground car park doesn't bear thinking about.

"easily implemented energy storage technologies such as moving masses up and down the gravity well."

There's probably a limited supply of gravity wells. Pumped storage, for instance, requires two suitable spaces for water where water is in sufficient supply. Mine shafts are ralatively small even if they are more numerous, provided they haven't been filled in.

"These are proven and reliable, and more so than atomic reactors."

More so? I doubt it.