Posts by Doctor Syntax

Hudson Rock yanks report fingering Snowflake employee creds snafu for mega-leak

It seems likely that things will become clear before too long. If Hudson Rock are proved correct I hope they rub it in.

Microsoft could be about to write a fat check to stave off cloud antitrust complaint

Lose, yes; but not enough to have a serious effect.

Re: WTF?

"I've read that headline ten times and I still can't tell what it means."

Try reading the article to find out.

Re: Fat check

One of Maxwell's equations?

Hubble plays spin the bottle with last few gyros

Given the current interest in developing systems to de-orbit or alternatively to boost orbits perhaps it's time to look at launching an add-on that would both prolong Hubble's orbiting life and take over the the role of the failed gyros. It would prolong its life without requiring a manned mission and serve as a technology demonstrator for one of the commercial companies. As Hubble and Webb complement each other keeping Hubble operational would be like a worth-while thing to do.

Boeing's Starliner finds yet another way to not reach space

Re: The new Spruce Goose?

"the inaugural manned flight of Starliner"

Even that sounds optimistic.

Re: What was the fault?

For some values of "right thing". A better thing would be to start asking why they got to this situation before going any further. The best thing would have been to have not got into this situation at all. There's a huge gulf between right thing and best thing.

Crooks threaten to leak 3B personal records 'stolen from background check firm'

Something a bit odd here. 3B records < 300B bytes of data. That's not much data per record.

It's about time any business of this nature that can't keep control of its data is sued into oblivion along with all its directors and officers.

Google finally addresses those bizarre AI search results

"your grandchildren, present or future."

Present.

One of them already on a vocational university course and at the age that this is being proposed, the other 3 years behind but already clearly heading for an engineering career. However, he's also quite competitive in a sport. That may not come to anything but the point is that those who become really successful at anything are usually seriously engaged in it by the time they're 18. Diverting them into a weekend a month for a year is really going to cap their achievements. Would a Lewis Hamilton or Ben Ainslie have succeeded if they'd been sidetracked like this? It's not my grandchildren, it's the ones we need to depend on for the future. It's potentially pulling down the best to the level of the mediocre.

"Points for a non-moving violation? Seems iffy, at best."

AIUI existing legislation allows for this if the vehicle is being used in commission of an offence. It also allows for the vehicle to be seized and forfeit. Fly-tipping is an offence. I'm afraid things are getting rather desperate when new laws are being touted, apparently off the cuff, along with National Service. I don't know why this National Service thing seemed a good idea. Those my age grew up with that as a looming threat over our teenage years, were lucky enough to have been just young enough to avoid it and can see no good reason to let it interrupt our grandchildren's careers.

"Fly tippers to get points on their driving licence"

Possible under existing legislation. In fact they could even have their vehicles seized under existing legislation.

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

"naturally occurring and coherent aggregate of one or more minerals."

It depends on where your salt comes from. Salt crystallized out by boiling seawater is neither naturally occurring not an aggregate".

Energy buffs give small modular reactors a gigantic reality check

"Technically we could be colonizing the stars"

Could you fill in the detail a little, please. I'm sure a lot of us would like to know about this startling news.

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Re: The best use of a screwdriver

"not as hard as a hammer"

There's your problem. Not enough to threaten machinery back into operation.

Re: "Screw"drivers?

Doesn't the scalpel count as cheating?

Re: Excessive force

You had a ship in your science lab?

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

Trouser turn-ups going out of fashion was a great loss to forensic science, or so I was told by some of the older staff.

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

At least you know it's not in one of the cans.

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

"a highly sophisticated filing system"

AKA the one heap filing system: "I know where it it, it's in that heap".

OTOH when manglement insisted I clear my desk I swept everything into a filing pocket in the desk pedestal, never to be seen again.

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

Time Team takes us to the archaeology heap conundrum. The feature that's the key to the site is always under the spoil heap;

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

Empty desk, empty head.

Re: "Screw"drivers?

"screwdrivers are for situations requiring a wedge."

Except for supporting the bottom of a door while you hang it. For that the proper tool is a chisel,at least an inch wide, bevel side down so you can adjust the height of the door by pressing your foot on the handle. Pro-tip from my dad who was a joiner.

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

"As somebody with an eternally messy office"

Are we twins, separated at birth?

Re: What's in a name?

"and still gets ribbed about this by the family"

And who's to blame for propagating that one, wewonder.

UK may not hit goal of 95% mobile coverage, commons committee warns

Re: Devon

"the one place where you probably don't need it, because you have Wifi"

Until you have a power failure. You can always use POTS at home... except that's being turned off as well.

Re: Should never have switched off 3G

"But i guess there's no profit in maintaining such a fallback system"

If the requirement* is to maintain it where there's no 4G coverage it doesn't matter whether there's specific profit in it or not, it just becomes part of the overall cost of doing business.

* A requirement as in "you need to do this to retain your network licence".

Researchers warn robot cars can be crashed with tinfoil and paint daubed on cardboard

Re: Have they done the same experiment

No real data although there was extensive research to look into it.

Cisco's emergency caller can send first responders to the wrong location

Re: So they goofed

"published the problem without pressure from some hacker threatening to go public."

How do you know there wasn't

Tesla slams advisors for not loving Musk's $44.9B payout

Re: he'll pardon himself

There's this thing called reality. In your imagination he may have been convicted of misdemeanours because of the excellence of your legal arguments. In the reality of the court of law he was convicted of 34 felonies because of the excellence of the prosecution's legal arguments, the evidence and the judgement of 12 US citizens. They didn't listen to your arguments.

TL;DR He's a convicted felon and he can't pardon himself if he gets back into power.

Re: he'll pardon himself

Maybe you missed the news but he's been convicted of 34 counts of felony, not misdemeanour.

Re: Any agreement should be terminated if it works out differently than my expectation.

It's as well to remember that a company's money belongs to the shareholders, not to the directors. Unless the shareholders agree to it the directors were amiss in making the offer in the first place.

Re: he'll pardon himself

"Go to Jail"

Is that the likely sentence? What I've read suggests not. One of the options seemed interesting - supervised release. Trump subject to several years of supervision is an intriguing prospect although maybe not for whoever's given the task of supervising him.

Twitter 'supersharers' of fake news tend to be older Republican women

Self-fulfilling prophecies

Given the number of people willing to hurl allegations of all manner of things, but largely self-interest against anyone standing for any political assembly it's very likely that the only ones who'll put up with it are self-serving narcissists. Beware of creating the exact thing you don't want.

Re: Did you see Ken Burns' commencement speech to Brandeis graduates?

"I feel that we still have more in common with each other than differences."

Unfortunately there's an advantage in being able to persuade people that they're one of "us", that those over there are "them" and then setting up as the champion of "us" against the machinations of "them". As there will be someone equally active doing the same thing in the other group there'll be no shortage of evidence to bolster the argument.

The US seems to be in a particularly difficult position to avoid this, There needs to be at least some part of the state which is above politics and the legal system needs to be part of that. It becomes easy for someone like Trump to characterise a trial he's lost as politicised if officials such as At tourneys General are elected and judges are appointed by elected governors or presidents. It also helps if head of government and head of state are separate offices with the latter able to gain respect across the board as the role needs to represent the common good.

Snowflake denies miscreants melted its security to steal data from top customers

Re: What do they do?

If your company is handling data correctly, you drop all personal data in the ETL scripts.

There's that word again: "if".

Doing it properly takes time and time is money.

Endless OS 6: How desktop Linux may look, one day

Re: GNOME?

I read it more as an observation on the cynicism of CEOs going woke.

Re: Perfect for elderly relatives

I think I can see your problem. It's gMail.

Free email providers are all very well until you realise you're locked in and they morph into something you don't like.

Re: Yet another distro

"In order to keep these machines running I have been installing Linux and help fitting SSD's in some cases."

Afraid I only have one upvote to give.

Re: Wayland?

"Why would you expect using the vastly more complex and complicated phone to be trivial?"

At least the mobile phone doesn't have heavy, fast-moving parts.

US senator claims UnitedHealth's CEO, board appointed 'unqualified' CISO

"and, as appropriate, hold these senior officials accountable."

If that happens it might cause changes of attitude more widely.

Mystery miscreant remotely bricked 600,000 SOHO routers with malicious firmware update

Re: unhappy security researcher?

This sounds more convincing. Only one ISP's network affected. An ISP that has financially burned a number of people, probably some with sufficient technical nous to pull this one off.

Re: Damage

"An ISP bricking a device is not unheard of and is likely much more common than we know."

Mine partially bricked their router for me by disabling the administrative login from the LAN side. As I had allocated pert of the DNS range for fixed IP/MAC mapping I discovered that the hard way - I couldn't revise or extend it for replaced devices.

Replaced it because, apart from anything else, leaving an admin port open exposed it those even less trustworthy then the ISP who did this.

Re: Remote control router ..

I replaced the default router with my own.

Windows Subsystem for Linux gets enterprise friendly and plans a settings interface

"management enhancements to make the platform more attractive to enterprise administrators"

Does "enterprise administrators" mean "admins who only know Windows"?

Codd almighty! Has it been half a century of SQL already?

We also write in C or C++ instead of assembler, let alone machine code.

The entire art and science of programming is to present the requirement in as high a level way as possible. Indeed, that's been the way since assembler replaced writing binary by hand and binary replaced plug-boards and the like. The computer is very good at doing all that parsing and translating. Composing your logically structured object directly would be much harder and more error prone than letting the engine parse your SQL for you.

Re: Funny thing: everybody thought that functional languages were too complicated

"Turbo Pascal ... on tiny 8-bit CP/M machines like my Apple ][ clone with a Z-80 card."

You didn't use Apple (i.e. UCSD) Pascal?

Re: Everybody forgets Informix

A dial-in modem would have obviated the need for a visit. Your problem probably wasn't an absolute running out of space as a long transaction that ate the available log allowance.

By logging the dial-in port I discovered that what they did was upload the source for a program that did that, compiled it on the local box and ran it. I suppose your magical floppy might have had the source or possibly a executable. I believe that was eventually fixed by enabling the system to add its own emergency temporary log, probably because nobody liked allowing remote access any more.

Two big computer vision papers boost prospect of safer self-driving vehicles

Re: The primary missing element

The other thing about human vision is the ability to place the identified objects in 3-dimensional space and compute their trajectories, primarily relative to oneself. I suppose we have to thank a long evolutionary history of hunting, being hunted and swinging through treetops for helping us to drive and, of course, play cricket.

Re: Naples, anyone?

I have, however, seen many drivers on UK motorways who don't seem to realise that pulling out isn't sufficient to overtake, you also need to go faster.