Posts by Doctor Syntax

Fujitsu does not trust Post Office in use of Horizon data in future third-party prosecutions

Could you please explain this in more detail with reference to comparing textile fibres b*y:

Transmitted light microscopy

Fluorescence microscopy

Polarised light microscopy

TLC dye separation

Visible light spectroscopy

IR spectroscopy

When you've done that you can move on to toxicology which was never my area but they seemed to have a lot of kit back in the day.

And I'd like your take on use of SEM with or without XRF

That should keep you busy for a while. Or perhaps you could admit you've never set foot inside a forensic science laboratory and that your supposed knowledge is gained from watching CSI and the like on the box.

* There may be more because when I left, a long time ago, we'd just been talking to a manufacturer & learning about addition of small quantities of halogenated materials and wondering if we could pick them up by XRF. If that was feasible it might have come to fruition now.

"continuing pursuit of enforcement actions against postmasters"

It's time the men in white coats visited PO HQ to sedate selected management & remove them to the padded cells.

Canada passes new right to repair rules with the same old problem

Re: Questions questions questions

Entitle each customer blocked by an effective lockout to compensation at twice the retail price of the product. Vendors then have the option of making sutable tools available or having every customer claim back twice the retail price whether they actually want to unlock it or not because it's free money.

Watchdog reluctantly blesses Vodafone-Three merger – with strings attached

I'm not sure about what spin they put on it but I suspect BT management didn't really trust anything that didn't use wires. Whatever the explanation it was a result of the levels of foresight, flair, judgement, and general competence that's characterised every generation of top BT manglement. If they'd really wanted it I'm sure they'd have worked around the regulatory issues one way or another. And the purchase of EE was partly by shares so BT ended up with a very substantial chumk of themselves owned by Deutsche Telekom.

I think by that time they'd taken over CellNet entirely - it was originally 20% owned by a security company (Group 4 IIRC). They didn't actually sell it off, they created a new company so that each share of BT as was became a share of BT as is and a share of O2. O2 consisted of the network operation and the retail side which had long been a part of BT.* It was then taken over by Telefonica.

* To the mutual dissatisfaction of both, I think; certainly within BT Mobile "Big BT" was a term of disparagement. I'm sure Big BT returned the - err - ?compliment.

In fact at one time we had 4. The original pair of Cellnet (mostly BT owned) and Vodaphone followed by the second pair, One2one and Orange. Now we have 3.

Re: Monitoring by Ofcom - not a serious remedy

Given that analogue landlines provide far better resilience than digital the real issue there was allowing it in the first place.

Clues to Windows Intelligence found in Windows 11 builds

1. All of it by the time they've finished.

2. Delete Windows. If that's not enough for you, install something better.

Re: Naming opportunities

An Eagle-eyed assistant?

Re: Options

"it could be pronounced why"

And there's no good answer to that.

Re: Angry ladies with sponge cakes and scones.

Yes, but a better headline so upvotes all round.

To kill memory safety bugs in C code, try the TrapC fork

How many memory-safe versions of C are we going to have? All different, all nearly compatible...

The NPU: Neural processing unit or needless pricey upsell?

"Manufacturers promote NPUs as essential for future-proofing laptops in an AI-driven world."

There's a bit of an assumption in there.

Continuity of CHIPS and Science Act questioned in a Trump presidency

Re: Popganda much?

It looks like you've had too much master bait already.

Microsoft 'resolves' and 'mitigates' Windows Server 2025 update whoopsie

Microsoft described the problem as "mitigated" but has yet to provide tools to facilitate a rollback, meaning affected administrators will have to reach for their backups or potentially pay for Windows Server 2025 licensing.

Perhaps "mitigation" would be waiving payment, always assuming that WS 2025 is something the user wants.

SpaceX Dragon gives ISS a helping hand with altitude

Perhaps it would be better to treat the ISS as a heritage object and simply boost it into a graveyard - or perhaps a better term would be preservation - orbit rather than destroy it. It some how seems more respectful.

Gang of monkeys escape South Carolina biomedical research facility

Re: Sounds like a "farm" run with minimal funding

They've probably learned from the local kids - keeper opens cage, one of them distracts him and the rest slip out.

When Windows Server 2025 is delivered like it's 1999, nobody gets to party

Your understanding is correct although a lot of time Linux usage adds belt and braces in that libfoo.so.1 is linked to libfoo.so, then libfoo.so.2 is added and libfoo.so is linked to that instead. That means that libfoo.so.1 remains listed until it's rm'ed at some convenient point. We used to do a similar thing manually:

mv application-foo application-foo.old; mv application-foo.new application-foo

"There's no fundamental reason for update, patching, and upgrade mechanisms to be OS-specific at all."

Is this really the case? With Linux the underlying mechanism allows you to slip in a new executable, program or library on the fly and provided it's has the same interfaces the next time it's invoked the new version will be loaded into memory. If it's a regular program that gets invoked as needed then there's nothing further to do. If its a service then it can often be restarted without ill-effects. There are few things* that need a reboot to reload.

While Windows isn't monolithic I get the impression it's a bit like the trilithons and you just can't quietly replace a small library as an o the fly update in the same way.

* At one time I'd have said just kernel and init but then I came across a dbus-related service.

"From reports I have read, Win25 is being a bit of a bitch when it comes to installing and running smoothly, with many saying it is nowhere near production ready."

Will anybody notice?

Microsoft rolls out AI-enabled Notepad to Windows Insiders

Re: Nano or Pico

I see you've replaced all Microsoft IP addresses with 129.0.0.0 I can fix that.

or removing the formatting from text before putting it back into LibreOffice Writer

FTFY

Re: What's going on with it needing to load more quickly?

"A text editor 20 years ago took about a second."

As long as that?

Re: Hi! It looks like you're trying to write a suicide note!

It was British Oxygen that supplied the liquid nitrogen for our lab.

Intel: Our finances are in the toilet, we're laying off 15K, but the free coffee is back!

Re: Panic

It was stopping the doughnuts that signalled the end of HP as we knew it.

Re: Service enshittification

"The ladies were replaced by up-market "beverage machines". ... After a year the machines were deemed to complex and expensive"

That sounds like a hint to polish up the CV.

Re: Is it decent?

"motorised standing desks and $10K espresso machines"

I'd have been out of there like a shot.

NHS to launch 'real-time surveillance system' to prevent future pandemics

Re: Give the negativity a rest, guys, this is pretty amazing stuff

The solution is to have properly thought out arrangements in place rather than what appears to be a combination of ad-hocery and various 3rd party companies selling services, all of which involve them in having access to patient personal data and everyone pointing the finger at everyone else when something goes wrong (e.g. an account elsewhere on elReg of someone who couldn't get a record erased).

Re: Give the negativity a rest, guys, this is pretty amazing stuff

The idea is fine. It's just that (a) we get it presented with nonsense hype and (b) the NHS and, indeed, the related industries have a trust problem.

I doubt anything will quiet the anti-pharma voices until Darwin reaps them. OTOH the NHS trust problem is one which needs to be recognised and it is entirely of its own making. Taking my own local hospital Trust for instance:

1. They take next of kin contact numbers and then use them as contact for the patient instead. That one has now been resolved.

2. Instead of sending appointment letters or emailing them (I presume email was considered too insecure) they signed up with some 3rd party to hold the appointment details and them send out phishing style emails to get patients to register with the 3rd party to log on to read their communications:

2.1 They now have given PPI information to a 3rd party without even seeking the data subject's consent

2.2 If email was too insecure to communicate the appointment why was it used to communicate the instructions to set up the account?

2,3 They are training patients to be phished with the added implication that whoever is responsible is already trained. The response was that because there are posters up about this in the hospital patients would know what it was about; the fact that until the patient has received the appointment invitation and visited the hospital they wouldn't know was overlooked.

3. They have engaged another 3rd party to enable patients (even ex-patients of a few years ex-dom) to see their records online and sent out phishing style emails to invite (ex-)patients to ...OK, you know the rest.

Having received complaints about the two phishing style emails they then sent out an email relating to the patient-records thing saying more or less what they should have said in the first place so maybe the phishing style emails issue has been resolved. What's not clear about that arrangement is whether they'd already transferred the patient records to that 3rd party or would only do so after the patient set up the account. My guess is that they'd already sent them.

I have no doubt that all this was well intended. It's just lack of understanding of the need for or knowledge of how to do these things properly that erodes trust.

Re: Give the negativity a rest, guys, this is pretty amazing stuff

And that isn't the sense in which it was being used in a press-release.

Re: "prevent future pandemics"

Respectively:

"caught" and "prevent transmission"

Re: "prevent future pandemics"

"Compared with wearing no mask in the community studies only, wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness/COVID-like illness"

What's the critical word in there? And what are masks intended to prevent?

Re: Give the negativity a rest, guys, this is pretty amazing stuff

It's not so much disbelief in the technology, it's the hyping to impossibility that's the issue.

"Real-time" for instance. Nothing will be done until a patient presents, which means either they have to collapse and get taken to A&E or they have to get a GP appointment. Neither is real-time, Then, unless the test, is run on the spot the sample has to go to the lab. In the hospital it can go fairly quickly but the GP probably has a once-a-day collection.

Then "surveillance". That means very widespread usage. Is there going to be a Nanopore system at every hospital and GP I don't think that's going to happen. Actually, when "surveillance" was mentioned I thought it might be a monitoring of viral DNA in sewage which is surveillance but you then have the problem of identifying the DNA as pathogenic.

Then there's the belief that, having detected a potential pandemic causing virus (an that's a long step from finding new virus strains) that a suitable treatment or vaccine can be whistled up in short order. Remember that, even with the urgency of the pandemic allowing for protocols to be telescoped, the clinical trials for the A-Z vaccine took some months.

There's also the problem that NHS has shown a somewhat cavalier approach to data handling and in particular will remain tainted with the Register readership as long as it has dealing with Palantir because of the latter's reputation. Trust is the issue here and once lost it's not easy to rebuild so anything which involves handling of data on a large scale is going to be regarded with utmost suspicion. That's deeply unfortunate but we are where we are and that's where successive government initiatives have put us.

BOFH: Don't threaten us with a good time – ensure it

I'm sure there's lots of harmless fun to be had going round the office after hours swapping post-its between keyboards.

"the BOFH must have been in a kindly mood"

Not at all. Brian had a function to perform.

With sudo every ID on the sudoers list is a privileged user ID but I suspect most are used for everyday work.

Re: Brill!ant

I once used the species of tree outside the window. But then the tree got too big & I had to cut it down...

Re: The Generation Game

A "next generation" firewall can only exist in the R&D sales and marketing departments of firewall makers.

FTFY

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Re: I have a whole sack full of 'em.

A relative worked at Holme Moss in the days when they transmitted TV as well as VHF sound. There was a standing instruction that wire wool should be kept in tin boxes.

Re: Many solutions are "Common Sense"

The suits don't like to be though of as common so they don't have any.

If it was in an actual server room anyone who didn't know what it meant shouldn't have been in there.

On the plus side this allowed you to incorporate back spaces into your passwords.

Re: Doh..

I've often thought that car designers should be obliged to drive and service their own product for at least two years.

Re: Byte swapping fix

TACS mobile (ask someone old enough to remember) ESNs were in the form nn/nn/nn/nnnnn and the network required hex for activation with some peculiar rules about how the leading digits were packed up (IIRC the middle nn got split up and possibly transposed with the adjacent nns. We were using C, the other team used COBOL. They couldn't find our function for doing the conversion as it was just one line.

Of course having got it into one line the line had to be shortened and made quite incomprehensible.

Re: Doh..

I've been there myself with my document camera.

Double spaces between words?

NASA fires up super-quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft

Re: Why would that pose difficulties for a passenger jet?

Set the flight deck below the level of the nose, The slope of the windscreen would need to be reversed.

Europe's largest local authority slammed for 'poorest' ERP rollout ever

"a severe lack of Oracle skills, experience and capabilities"

Beancounters' parsimony on staffing levels leaves them without beans to count.

Top 10 billionaires make nearly $64B in post-Trump election stock surge

New recruits for his staff? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy4gd8xx93yo

I suppose they've got a few months to cash in before Trump actually gets into office, starts with the tariffs and tanks the economy - theirs and ours alike.