Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK energy watchdog slaps down Capita's £130M smart meter splurge

"Back in 2012, the government created a legal obligation for energy suppliers to make sure they completed the rollout of smart meters by the end of 2019. Subsequently, it pushed back the deadline three times, first to the end of 2020, then 2024, and then 2025. As of February 2023, the government launched a consultation on plans to have smart meters installed in 80 percent of homes and 73 percent of small businesses by the end of 2025."

They should, by now, realise that there's a substantial customer resistance, that they've got about as far as they're getting, that it was a Bad Idea and they might as well quit while they're behind.

I suppose what stops this from dawning on them is that it looks just like so many other HMG projects - behind schedule and over budget - that they think that with time and budget it will get there in the end if they really want it.

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

Re: You'd think

The problems always start at the top.

Re: You'd think

"But if needs be, the "financial services" could be on a parallel terminal from postal services or general sales."

The thing is, there are a LOT of back-end services and not enough space for all the parallel terminals. It has to act as all those parallel terminals. I suppose these days a browser directly accessing all those back-ends would be the way to do it but the services would still have to be written by someone with a bit of programming nous, say enough to know not to commit half-complete transactions.

Re: Administrators are required

"The PO clearly needs hand-holding"

Don't ypu mean hand-cuffing?

Re: Paul Patterson as witness for the defence?

I think it was statute law that was responsible. ?PACE Police And Criminal Evidence Act.

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.

WP Engine revs Automattic lawsuit with antitrust claim

Re: Did you sign a contract?

I think the issue here is publishing something as FOSS - or maybe "jumping on the FOSS bandwagon" would be a better phrase - without thinking it through. Failing to have done so is no excuse for behaving like a sulky kid.

If he'd started off with a more restrictive licence than it wouldn't have been such an issue; a different one, maybe but not one that resulted in writs.

"open source WordPress software"

For some value of "open".

Google decides Europe's political ad rules are too hard to implement at scale

"Google has decided the European Union's Regulation on Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising will be so hard to comply with it's better off not trying."

Mission accomplished. All the careful drafting paid off. Culd we please have this replicated in the UK

O2's AI granny knits tall tales to waste scam callers' time

A worthy project. What I'd really like is something like this on my own phone line to detect the calls urging me to get a smart meter fitted.

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

Re: Bad comms as well as bad practice =

the guy that told him to leave it in place should have been aware of where "in place" was

And become the one responsible for checking it back in.

Re: Mansearching

That's what the missus calls "mansearching"

Which is why it's always so satisfying to find SWMBO's glasses, car keys etc.

Re: Multi-Fail

"And it's standard operating theatre practise - you count everything (instruments, swabs etc) before starting and count everything at the end to make sure you've not left anything in the patient."

A week ago after dental treatment. Dentist & assistant counting the instruments. Me, sitting up but looking down: "There's on of the floor".

Re: Multi-Fail

"found a box-end wrench I'd mislaid and forgotten."

Embarrassed garage owner: A few hundred yards after collecting my car after a service it developed a loud rattle from the front O/S wheel. Returned to garage where the hub-cap was removed along with the socket spanner that had been left on a wheel nut.

Academic papers yanked after authors found to have used unlicensed software

Right now Flow-3D's sales and marketing department should be giving their legal advisers a good kicking. Why? Well, what's the message from this? That publishing a paper based on use of their product is a reputational risk.

Re: The connection is copyright

"Reputation can be an important thing to researchers and those looking for other research to build from."

Accord reputation on the basis of openness to solve that problem. In fact, natural selection may eventually help. As Universities get more an more strapped for cash and cut down on library subscriptions it will be articles in open on-line journals that get cited more and the less open ones become backwaters to avoid.

"As to the pay per view publication, most authors prefer to publish in established journals to gain widespread recognition."

What academia needs to do is to regard the openness of the journal as a mark of its status.

JStor

Then there's JStor. I did a quick check and they have papers I wrote long ago on there. I can pay to download a copy of my own work. Did they ever ask for permission to take money for them? Of course not. The really annoying thing was that at least one of them was in a free publication at the time.

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

Re: This is why ergonomics matters

"Where else can they safely put the blade needed to open the box?"

Wherever they put it when they were writing down the numbers using the paper system. Or did they tape a pen to the blade?

Re: Am i old in knowing about SSADM?

It might be a case of the users not actually grasping how they'd use it if you just told them about it - and even if the customers had been consulted it would probably have been the management who answered. With hindsight they should have made up a few prototypes and let the end users loose with them. Even then it might not have worked as from TFA only some branches came up with taping the knife to the reader so they might not have learned from that.

Five Eyes infosec agencies list 2023's most exploited software flaws

Yes, last year's access ports. What they're using now will be listed next year.

Mozilla's Firefox browser turns 20. Does it still matter?

"There was a time where the browser space was absolutely the front line of an open, safe, equitable internet," our source said. "Mostly that was about, frankly, preventing Microsoft from taking over the internet."

That worry faded over time, and four years after the 1.0 release of Firefox, Google Chrome debuted.

So now the worry's about Chrome taking over the internet.

Admins can give thanks this November for dollops of Microsoft patches

Re: Selecting a file

"The Christmas turkey for those of us NOT in the USA."

And for those not interested in eating meat with all the flavour of cardboard - goose.

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).