Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: You've got to love a place...

Sole purpose of "On call" and "Who me". It's after 3 now & I still haven't got round to Dabbsy.

"In order to avoid losing an entire shift worth of work, the IT guy had to drive 300 km to the plant"

How much of the shift was left?

Re: Twisty turny narrow roads

Not much different to where I live. At least routing S/W mostly doesn't direct HGVs that way any more. Descending from the cross roads there's one relatively(!) wide stretch with a right-angle bend with a high wall on the right. A hundred yards or so below there's a right-right angle bend to the left and the road narrows. It was just round there that they mostly got wedged against the left hand retaining wall, probably on account of the fact that from an HVG cab they can see the 20 foot drop on the other side of the right hand wall. We used to get a few diversions whilst the local tow truck came to pull them out.

A couple of years ago I saw a tanker parked just past the first corner and still there when I came back an hour or so later. I realised he'd discovered his problem sooner than most but still couldn't back up unaided. A few hours later he'd gone and there were wheel-spin marks on the road.

Re: Yes, double isolate and still check

You're lucky

First failure - Christmas morning, no less. SWMBO had just put dinner in the oven. We always have as guests her sister & husband who live a few hundred yards away so the whole lot was quickly whisked away to their oven while I went online to order two replacements.

A few years later the next element went in a shower of sparks in the run up to Christmas. Just as well I had the spare; fit it and order another.

Another year the fan seized up just before Christmas.

Sigh. This year is going to be quiet....

Re: My favourite

K40 in the glass not enough?

"many devices available from the 60s onward didn't have a switch on the mains side of the supply"

And still don't If anything things have got worse. All those little wall-warts with their penny-pinched components sitting inside...

"If the appliance itself doesn't have a switch, just unplug it..."

I've always assumed that the function of the plug/socket interface was simply to provide a connection with suitable capability to withstand external forces and that the switch was designed to cope with issues such as arcing on breaking the circuit. Two different designs of connector to deal with two different aspects of connecting an appliance to the supply.

Re: GDPR?

In theory it's going to be essential to gain equivalence for EU trade. In practice, by the time the entire UK economy has been sold out in order to gain protection for fishing in UK waters (and at the expense of the fishing industry's EU markets) it won't make much difference,

It could be an act of conscience like Ed Snowden. Unlike Snowden she might make a profit from it but then she's a lawyer.

Re: "... more in the way of solutions ..."

Essentially GDPR is designed to do that. Part of the trouble is that they can only be caught in breach when someone goes after them. I suggested in the Eperian thread that we need to start at the other end: large scale* data brokers and aggregators should require a licence to operate. Conditions of the licence including a requirement to provide regular statements of data held to each data subject and regular audits. The statement would have to include by what right each item was held and there would be an obligation to correct errors and delete - and not re-collect - items for which there was no consent or for which the subject wished to withdraw consent. The statement should also include a statement of categories of data added and deleted since the last statement, and perhaps an ability to demand an interim statement of the exact holdings at some point in time of the subject's choosing**. Failure of an audit, including demonstrable failure to abide by statement rules could result in immediate suspension of the licence with it being a criminal offence to oversee continued processing after a suspension. Suspension remains in effect during any appeal.

If this makes the business model unprofitable, tough. You have a right to run a business but to to mess with others' individual rights. The ICO pointed this out quite clearly in the Experian case.

* Best defined as a function of number of data subjects, volume of data and sensitivity of data.

** If they want to permanently delete data before the first statement, fine, but unchecked they'd simply delete data before a statement and re-collect it afterwards.

A bit like "hashtags"?

Re: A sign of the times

"Britain for Britons!"

You mean the Welsh, Cornish & Picts?

Perhaps the solution is to construct entirely fake data. Any resulting mail shots are handled by the seller of the data. In practice, of course, no mail shots can be sent as the addresses are fake but the profits should be shared with the mail handlers so they don't miss out.

The gullible buy it and are satisfied because they're none the wiser. The public don't get their privacy violated and don't get pissed off with importunate marketers so don't take it out on them by buying elsewhere. Everybody's a winner.

Re: Team America: World Police

Which person? Alleged culprit or victim?

Re: Linux and more

Agreed that things such as naming conventions etc should make code as self-documenting as possible. The comment should not need to tell you that this is a check on customer balance but it might need to tell you that this is the company standard code to be used everywhere such a check is needed; online ordering, telephone ordering or whatever.

Other things: copyright terms for open source code, why we initialise to 1 or 0 or index from -2*, why we took this approach rather than some other or the fact that this code deals with stuff covered by regulatory requirements and changes should be discussed with and signed off by the appropriate officer of the company.

* I've used indexing from 400 to 700. They were wavelengths in nm for various data points and Pascal allowed such arbitrary indexes.

Re: Unfortunately "Torvalds as ringmaster" trope not dead yet.

It just goes to show how indomitable the human will is in the face of facts.

"The DevOps technologies -- at their heart: easy safe continuous deployment"

What that seems to facilitate is "Oh, there's a problem. We'll fix it in the net a later release."

Personally I preferred getting it right, then releasing it.

Re: Let me get this straight

"It's like the problem is your bigotry rather than anything MS have done."

No, the problem is that if you install anything from MS on your computer they think they own it. And quite likely you as well.

Re: meh

The traditional phrase is "terminological inexactitude".

Nowadays "world beating" amounts to much the same thing.

IBM has yet to solve the conundrum of IBM.

Re: All Important?

"The busines reason for using Andriod and Google's services is the business reason for shipping PC's with Microsoft Windows."

True, but the reason is that this is what customers have been trained to expect by the efforts of large, dominant corporations imposing their will on the H/W suppliers. The customers are so well trained thet you hear squeals of horror from some of them any time you suggest the alternatives.

In this case it's HP at fault.

Re: Fail!

They were good on specifying physical recording characteristics, pre-emphasis/de-emphasis and the like. It seems to have been all downhill since then.

Re: Irrational fear of upgrades?

It's not the effort or even lack thereof. It's the niggling worry of what will be broken when it comes up again.

In my case it was the upgraded release refusing to recognise the camera when I plugged it in. It might have been fine with a thousand other camera models but I only had one and it didn't work. Subsequently I read something that suggested it was just a type in a config file. By that time I was long gone, put off, ultimately, not just by the minor typo that should never have been there (the file was working, don't fix it) but also by the process that allowed it to happen undetected.

For all I know Fedora may be have a far more rigorous release process now but I've no great reason to go there (do they even have a systemd-free version?) so I'm never going to find out.