Posts by Doctor Syntax

Wi-Fi not working? It's time to consult the lovely people on those fine Linux forums

Been there, done that. 10 years ago there'd probably have been a WiFi indicator LED somewhere. There's little chance of that these days.

Bad things come in threes: Apache reveals another Log4J bug

Re: An ancient memory

But just think of all the insulation they'd provided.

The Filth Filter is part of the chipset, honest. Goes between the TPM and SEP. No, really

Re: A little nervous sometimes...

"Why would you be looking at a customer's photos?"

Or any other data? The computer may be a business computer containing commercially confidential material. It may be very convenient for a government to oblige, as the OP implies, a repair shop to check for any possibly illegal material on any computer they might get in their hands in the course of business but it means (a) they're probably cheating in requirements for getting a search warrant if they were to do it themselves, (b) they're trying to get the shop to do a lot of unpaid work on their behalf or charge it to the customer and (c) they're placing an undue burden on the shop in terms of what commercially sensitive information they may come across. As you say, best to keep clear of all user data.

Fans of original gangster editors, look away now: It's Tilde, a text editor that doesn't work like it's 1976

You were praising Borland's UI earlier. Haven't you come across Lazarus?

Shhh. You'll bring out all the complaints about strange key combinations.

Re: One to rule them all

I think it's because I mentioned "average" and half are from folk who are above average and half below. Confusing, I know, given that 90% or el Reg readers are above average.

vi is for far more than config files or even coding. On and off over the years I've been using it to massage data files from one format to another. Fair enough, it could be done with sed but if you have to open the file anyway to see what you've got & what needs to be done it's just easier to use the built-in bulk updates.

Re: One to rule them all

"The only features an average user needs to know are how to open a file, navigate to the correct place (line), alter text and save the results."

That's all the average user knows. That's why they're average users. The average user might repeat that sequence a lot to change the same string in a lot of places because the average user doesn't know how to do an all instances change. If that was common knowledge amongst more users then you might be including it in the list of things the average user needs to know.

Repeat for all the other good tricks an advanced editor can do because a lot of users would find them useful from time to time. That way you raise the bar of what's average.

Thank you, FAQ chatbot, but if I want your help I'll ask for it

Re: I am here to help. What can I do for you today?

I think even for the Grauniad that would be a bit too much of a misprint.

Re: HR Tool could be used as an anti- pattern - or how not to design a tool.

But never the sharpest in the box.

Re: Intelligent websites?

I bought some cartridges for a Brother printer a few weeks ago. It's now offering me more cartridges for a different Brother printer. The web site seems a bit too busy at the moment what with it being "holiday" peak buying season but it often tries to greet me by name, at least I think it's trying to but the name field is empty.

Re: How about Toast?

Or if you live in Yorkshire, their own breed of golden bread known as a "terst"ed teacake!

You seem to be offering a southerner's pronunciation. Would you like any help with that?

Re: I am here to help. What can I do for you today?

"given that the Grauniad rates Suffolk as the best in the country"

So is that Norfolk or Sussex?

Re: I am here to help. What can I do for you today?

"Even the dratted "help" pages give no guidance."

The best tactic when buying anything even vaguely technical is to find out if you can download the user manuals. Eliminate those that don't from consideration. The rest should give you some guidance as to what they can do. Remember that if something you'd expect the product to do isn't mentioned in the manual assume it can't actually do it.

You're in luck if it can deal with anything that is.

Re: HELLFULL BROWSER PLUG IN NEEDED

Only eight out of ten, I'm afraid. You should have looked up their CEO's email address instead. There's a useful website for that.

I stopped doing ebay feedback except to give negative responses to these spam being negative customer service and sometimes the spam would arrive after I'd given a positive response.

"sure fire guarantee of a terrible website if you are being asked to rate it before you've used it."

True, but they discovered they got better ratings that way.

Re: Despising the company/customer loyalty

This is CEO-grade stupidity. Properly thought though, customer churn is an opportunity to win customers. Banks, telecoms, whatever all assume they'll gain as much as they lose on churn so don't care enough about those they lose. If one was to invest in customer services they'd lose less and pick up the churn from their competitors for a net gain.

Where does the money for improvement come from? Easy - cut the marketing budget. In fact stopping pissing off existing customers with marketing spam is a customer service win in itself.

Re: Shell energy

"I'm glad I'm out of there. The new company is much more professional about the design process."

I hope that's a non sequitur.

Re: Shell energy

"So much faffing about to do a trivial thing."

It was probably a key field for them with all sorts of other data linked to it. It should have been trivial but bad system design made it not so.

Having failed to find any appropriate options on the website you try phoning only to be told by recorded message, after finding no useful options on the ACD, that it might be quicker to go to the website.

I can only assume that every CEO has a nephew who's good at games on a console and therefore knows so much about computers that they can be put in charge of the company's entire IT operation.

Re: I am here to help. What can I do for you today?

"usually at least as dysfunctional as the website."

Invariably more dysfunctional, just to disprove your assumption that nothing could be worse than the website.

Confirmed: James Webb Space Telescope team plans launch for this Xmas Eve after data cable fix

Re: amazing Birthday present, thanks EU tax payers!!

Let's hope clowns are not involved in the launch.

"a function of employing people for so long, not necessarily in actual capex on equipment."

When you spend actual capex on equipment how do you think that actual capex is actually used?

Some on vendor's shareholders' dividends and some on vendor's execs' bonuses for sure, but a lot will go on employing people to make the stuff, some on the vendor's actual capex to buy the equipment used by the employees (see how actual capex is used), some to buy services and some to buy materials. The money spent buying services and materials will be used by the vendors in ways remarkably similar to that used by the vendors of whatever was bought as actual capex.

TL;DR Whatever the accountants' heading, buying stuff means people are employed to provide it.

Wait for the reports that the launch was aborted to avoid a collision with several reindeer and a sleigh.

US distrust of Huawei linked in part to malicious software update in 2012

Re: Ah, so this is the replacement of the infamous motherboard chip

What makes this malware so mal is that it was clever enough to remove all evidence that it was ever there. As with the chip, lack of evidence is a sure sign of guilt.

East Londoners nicked under Computer Misuse Act after NHS vaccine passport app sprouted clump of fake entries

Re: Why bother?

Take another look at the table.

Look at the bit that says [These data should be interpreted with caution. See information below in footnote about the correct interpretation of these figures]

So read the footnote. If you don't understand it then please don't try to read anything at all into the table because you're not understanding that either.

Now look at Table 1 on p12 because that tells you unequivocally what you actually need to know. It's essentially the same table that I pointed out in a reply to another post (you again?) trying to make something out of another report.

Re: Why bother?

I looked at your reference.

Let me direct your attention to Table 7 on p34. It lists vaccine effectiveness for 1. Infection, 2. Symptomatic disease, 3. Hospitalisation and 4. Mortality. Under those headings Pfizer-BioNTech and AstroZeneca respectively score 1. 75 to 85% and 60 to 70%, 2. 80 - 90% and 65 to 75%, 3. 95 to 99% and 90 to 99% and 4. 90 to 99% and 90 to 95%. Moderna has results listed for fewer categories: 2. 90 to 99% and 3. 95 to 99%. [1 to 4 are my numbers to represent rows in the table]

In what way do you argue this table, from the report you cited, supports your contention?

Re: The Yellow Advertiser

Multi-tasking would be a good thing.

Newly discovered millipede earns its name by being the first to walk on one thousand legs

Re: So. many. legs.

It would be well-equipped to give any would-be predator a good kicking.

Great zoological name.

In no time at all, however, some lumper* will come along and insist it's part of some other genus.

*The group taxonimsts is divided into two subgroups, lumpers and splitters who respectively lump multiple genera, families etc. into fewer, larger ones and split general, families etc into multiple smaller ones. This taxonomy of taxonomists is meta-taxonomy.

Cryptocurrency 'rug pulls' cheated investors out of $8bn in 2021 – report

Re: Gosh!

"What happened to sense? It used to be common."

That was just getting rid of the difficult bit in the title.

"Scams represent a huge barrier to successful cryptocurrency adoption"

I'm sure there are a few people out there who think the complete opposite.

It never ceases to amaze me that there are people sufficiently astute to amass large wodges of cash who are then insufficiently astute to fail to spot these scams.

US Commerce Dept says China has brain-control weaponry

Re: "Nudge"

Probably true in terms of intention but not very well implementd. A competent psyops job would have completely squashed conspiracy theories by undermining them rather than just trying to contradict them. Just launch counter conspiracies that the original conspiracy theory was the work of deep state/Zionists/Islamists/white supremacists/whatever else triggers the group being aimed at.

Google joins others in Big Tech: Get vaccinated – or you're fired

Re: I'll bite :)

At a guess - the only one in the office up to that point who had Covid.

Re: Illogical policy

Now look across at the columns for hospital admission and death. D'ya feel lucky, punk?

And also look at the notes referred to above the table and on the next page.

Re: I'll bite :)

"People actually knowledgeable on this subject should now point out where I'm wrong"

I won't 'cause you're not.

Re: I'll bite :)

Because it's a matter of managing probabilities. Vaccination very substantially reduces the probability of catching a serious infection. It does not eliminate it. This is true of all the measures, all the social distancing, all the mask wearing, all the closure of premises. The lot.

My daughter, double vaccinated, still got an infection from her son, at that stage under the vaccination age here. It wasn't as bad as it might have been and will undoubtedly have increased her future immunity. She has still had a booster. Why? Because there's a new, more readily spread variant going about, resisting which needs all the strength the immune system can muster. And because, like me and SWMBO she's a bilogist, in her case a neuroscientist now working in clinical trials AND SHE UNDERSTANDS THIS STUFF.

Gnu Nano releases version 6.0 of text editor, can now hide UI frippery

As long as there's a UI to faff about with nothing is ever finished.

National Cyber Strategy will lead to BritChip for mobile devices by 2025, claims UK.gov

"Having a coherent national cyber strategy will be essential if UK wants to be recognised as a science and tech superpower for scientific research, innovation, and leading edge in critical areas such as artificial intelligence."

Having some achievements might do that but the usual tub-thumping strategies never seem to produce those.

CompSci boffins claim they can recreate missing lines in log files

Re: That there real world...

OK, I get that. What they seem to be doing is cleaning up real world logs to present their system's best guess of what the logs should look like to train another system to spot discrepancies in real world logs.

What could possibly go wrong?

Scenario 1: Say they get 90% of the input doing one thing, 5% doing something else and 5 off 1% doing individual other things. They decide that the 90% is what's right, clean up the remaining 10% to look similar and train the second system on those. The second system gets more examples of the 5% & starts flagging them as errors. In fact that was a legitimate outcome but because the imputation system fudged the data the second system was mistrained. Note that in order to do its thing the imputation system must have noted these variations and could usefully have flagged these as something to be reviewed by an actual real live expert.

Scenario 2: Same sort of results but all the discrepancies are simply failures in the logging system. The second system starts throwing errors looking at real world data because the logging system is making similar errors. The logging system is not fit for purpose and no amount of cleaning of the training data is going to fix it.

The application area seems to be logistics. Any time I've been on the (non-)receiving end of a logistics error it's been fairly clear to me that something hasn't been scanned in or out when expected. What's missing is Real Intelligence when designing and implementing the system to raise and alarm in real time when the expected has failed to happen. No amount of Artificial Intelligence applied after the event is going to fix the problems in anything like an effective manner.

Re: Example?

It's still no clearer exactly what they're doing because it's just a pile of jargon. It's the "recurrent event imputation" that concerns me. The nearest I can make of it is "There's usually an event of type X here but there isn't in this case so let's add one." Possibly it means something different and got lost in translation from the Korean.

It will be added to systemd in the next release.

When product names go bad: Microsoft's Raymond Chen on the cringe behind WinCE

Re: Supreme head of information technology

Some people only learn by experience.

US lawmakers want to put NSO Group, 3 other spyware makers out of business with fresh severe sanctions

One letter wrong If it had been NSA there'd have been no problem.

Web3: The next generation of the web is here… apparently

Having said all that Signal delivers a good deal of what Tom suggested although in different ways. Being free with no promotion budget, however, it doesn't get the same publicity as the big tech services.

I think a phone is more likely to be lost and picked up or stolen than the phone company being socially engineered unless the victim is being specifically targeted.

I really don't like the idea of a phone being used as personal ID irrespective of whether it's via mobile number or IP address - there seems to be too much opportunity for stuff to go wrong. Even something simple such as a flat battery at an inopportune moment could stuff up your urgent 2FA driven transaction.

Whenever your device's IP address changes, it sends a message to each of your friends saying, "Hey, my IP address has changed.

Depending on the rate at which IP addresses change the whole thing falls apart as such messages cross each other in the net.

You cease to become you if you lose your devicephone and somebody else becomes you if the phone gets stolen.

Re: Forget technology

"I don't think Web 1.0 provided decentralisation to the extent that we're now talking about. It still relied on servers run by third parties."

The third parties came along later. It started with places like CERN running their own servers; or does that count as Web 0.1?