Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: Charities are a fraud

Sometimes figure need a little interpretation. A while ago it was reported that the Charities Commission was concerned with Samaritans because almost the whole income was eaten up by office expenses. What do Samaritans do? They seat counsellors in offices to answer phones. Offices and phones were classed as office expenses.

Re: Would someone explain

"when turning right."

Remember the US drives on the wrong side so the UK equivalent would be making a left turn at the junction.

One junction in Huddersfield used to have a turn right filter operated by a detection loop in the road. The detection loop was forward from the stop line. Out-of-town drivers would stop at the stop line on red. The main lights changed to green and they'd just stay there waiting for the filter not knowing that they needed to roll forward a car length or so to trigger the filter.

Re: Countdown

Taxi drivers are perpetually annoying.

FTFY

Shocked to discover that budding skiddies don't already know about them. The state of education today...

Re: Gazetta dello sport

The thing to do in such circumstances is to ask oneself what BOFH would do.

In this case, gradually limit the bandwidth available over period of a couple of months. When the complaint eventually arrived the usual BOFH/PFY good cop/bad cop/worse cop routine would explain that it must be because our internet connection is getting very congested these days and we really need a much bigger pipe and suggesting a contract with a new comms supplier they've just heard of.

Re: Hacker House

And while we're on the subject:

"But the whole point of having a government internal audit service looking at this is to make sure that we take it seriously."

Surely she knows that the point is to find a lot of non-evidence.

Re: TV ownership fine

I think you collected downvotes because HMG has too much say in setting licence fees. As for your second point I did just that some years ago. My view of your TV back then was that it was like having multiple channels of UTV and it would be hard for me to get ruder than that.

Re: TV ownership fine

As a non-Brit, it boggles my mind that an entire country feverishly defends its government fining people for owning TVs.

And before you explain to me the difference between a "fee" and a "fine", I would like you to first explain it to yourself.

First you have a false premise.

Your second paragraph seems to indicate that realise that there is a difference so why didn't you use the correct term in the first place?

And I don't need to explain the difference to myself, it's something I've known for as long as I can remember. I think I also have a reasonable handle on what the two words meant in medieval English but that's something I've only understood for the last couple of decades or so.

Re: More clueless rambling from people who don't know what socialism is

As that frenetic little tick, V.I. Lenin, was fond of implementing: "None Shall Eat Who Do Not Work."

Although it's not clear what work he did in return for eating.

Re: TV ownership fine

"A fine is a penalty levied as a punishment for breaking some rule or law to discourage you from doing it again. There is no way you can legitimately consider the licence fee to be a fine."

IYHO

Not a matter of opinion. Go and look the words up in a dictionary. You'll find that in modern English they're two different things. Intriguingly they also meant too different things in medieval English although a fine then was more akin to a fee in modern English.

Re: "I do think it is right that we should understand what pages are most popular"

To know the pages that were accessed they only need the URLs from the server logs, they don't need client IP addresses.

Re: Yes please...

OP will be getting letters addressed to "The Occupier". That requires no PII, just a list of addresses. As no PII is being held Crapita have no information as to whether it's the same occupier as last year.

Re: Yes please...

"Which didn't stop the BBC re-awarding contracts to most of them."

Nothing ever seems to stop any public sector body from awarding contracts to the usual suspects.

Re: Hmm

"My attitude is really that if I have to listen to government propaganda then the government should pay for it."

Governments pay for nothing. It's taxpayers who pay.

Re: Hmm

"Hence we get one spiv after another trying to sell off our national assets, like the BBC."

Although they're now more ambitious and going for as much of government as they can get.

"No Samsung TV web browser still works well enough to use."

So smart TVs improve with age?

Re: Ron Wyden gives me cognitive whiplash.

"It will likely fail a few times, growing stronger until it actually gets the requisite amount of votes to pass."

I suppose the usual tactic is to water it down a little on each iteration until the proponents and opposition meet in the middle. I think I'd be tempted to be a bit contrarian and strengthen it each time until the lobbyists' clients get the message that maybe it's be a good idea to get it passed this year because next year may be even scarier.

Re: Preparing for planned surprise outages

It'll be interesting when there's a really surprise test - well not really a test. As I keep saying, once you've had a real disaster you take things seriously.

Re: That reminds me of another story...

"but that means having spare equipment ready to go"

That would be old equipment replacing old. Doing it properly you get to replace everything with brand new shiny.

Re: Directors and DR

"it transpired that no testing of the backups had been done"

I had a gig replacing a pair of non-identical servers prior toY2K on the basis that the smaller on, the warm standby, wasn't Y2K compatible. They did, in fact, take nightly tape backups and put them in as remote as possible whilst still on-site fire safe but the backup they were most relying on was a nightly network copy of the database from the live server to the standby. This clearly hadn't been tested recently is at all because I discovered that the time slot wasn't long enough and when the server kicked into production mode the copy process got terminated.

Re: There's a solid point there too

"Except when it's a genuine false alarm"

I worked in a completely glass-clad building where one of the other tenants got occasional bomb threats causing the entire building to be evacuated. Manglement's idea was that we would evacuate through the nearest door and if that was the back door we would walk round the end of the completely glass-clad building and congregate in the front of it.

I made the point that I'd worked in Belfast and in building that had had a genuine car bomb delivered to it and although I wasn't there at the time I'd heard first hand reports. There was no way that I was going to walk alongside the end of their completely glass-clad building with a suspected bomb in it. If I left their completely glass-clad building I would continue in as close as possible to a straight line perpendicular to the frontage as far as possible away from it because a bomb in a completely glass-clad building is going to project potentially lethal shards of glass for considerable distances.

Re: "The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault."

"Having full backups in a separate firesafe building saved us."

I believe the relevant safe manufacturer liked to tell the tale of the Co-op building fire in Belfast. The fire safe fell through several floors and landed not really damaged but jammed. A PHB decided he couldn't wait for the manufacturer's locksmith to come and open it and got someone to cut it open with a torch. The contents were unscathed except for those damaged by the torch.

Re: That reminds me of another story...

For a really comprehensive business continuity event you can't beat thoroughly comprehensive fire.

Re: Set a date, and stick to it.

A lot of them will start taking a serious look at possible alternatives

AKA "never give a customer reason to review the market".

Re: Here's an idea

About year 2000 BT manglement decided that as that new-fangled mobile stuff didn't use wires it wasn't really anything to do with them so they merged Cellnet and BT Mobile, the customer facing business as O2 floated it as a separate company. Then Telefonica, who did grap the fact that mobiles were phones, bid for it and bought it.

Eventually a later BT management that realised mobile was an important aspect of telecoms discovered that they didn't have and player in the market. For a while they set up another business, also called BT Mobile, presumably to the amusement of any old BT Mobile hands still left in O2, to flog other people's services. The only way to fix this humiliating consequence of the depredations of their idiot predecessors was to buy EE which had been cobbled together out of bits of some of their previous competitors. To do this they had to use a substantial chunk of ptheir shares as payment to Deutsche Telekom.

I reckon that even by BT's appalling standards the original decision to get out of the mobile business was particularly egregious although it did justify the low opinion that those working in the original BT Mobile held of Big BT as it was known there.

On a quick look at the groups.io page there are options for importing from Google and Yahoo groups but no mention of being able to upload from an archive of mail messages.

Thanks for that. I'm also a member of a local history group and although we have a web-site for public facing stuff discussion outside face-to-face is by email (and, yes, there is a use case for cc: rather than bcc:) but this bears looking into. The other possibility I was looking at was a hosted Nextcloud.

"there is only one indefinite copyright that I'm aware of, and that's Peter Pan"

Don't worry, Disney have their lobbyists working on that problem.

Re: The problem is...

The real problem is that the rest of us are lumbered with a decision that turns on its head everything we've thought for all these years about coding against an API. That's the reason for all those amicus briefs. Maybe Google should have called James Gosling as a witness to tell which previous APIs he took various bits from.

Re: Recycling

"also where are we going to work when all buldings are houses?"

This is a big problem. I think planning policy for the entire post-war period has been to separate housing an work places and the use of so called brown-field sites has aided* this.

When I wor nobbut a lad there were about 3 mills to the mile in a typical Pennine valley. Anyone who chose to work int e nearest didn't have far to walk and there were enough buses to make commuting by bus feasible to a mill further up or down the valley. Note the inclusion of "up" because it made the bus service more efficient than having full buses in one direction and empty buses in t'other. For some, of course, their bus stop might be further away than their nearest mill.

Once the mills started to close instead of getting new businesses to take them over developers bought them up, knocked them down, built houses and then started kicking themselves when the next wave of developers discovered they could make bigger profits by leaving the buildings up and converting them to flats. The buses are also long gone; a straight run up and down the valley doesn't cut it when residents are going to jobs spread over umpteen towns and cities in four different counties.

Now we have the double whammy of more people and far less jobs. We also have planners ranting about traffic**, completely blind to the fact that it's the consequence of their own policies over the years. You also have teenagers like by granddaughter being terribly environmentally concious by joining this strike and being taken to a demo 25 miles away by electric car and ignoring the fact that their parents commute large distances each day because their homes are so far away from their jobs.

Here endeth my standard rant on the subject.

* If that's the right word, which it obviously is in the planners' minds.

** My eyes were really opened to this years ago by someone from Sheffield City Council appearing on the news one night bragging about getting some project to locate in the city and all the jobs it would bring followed a couple of weeks later by a colleague bemoaning the city's traffic problems.