Posts by Doctor Syntax

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

Re: Tune in, turn on, then say goodbye

"if potential customers stop buying subscription-based stuff"

Marketing have put in an awful lot of work to ensure they don't.

Re: Physical media is still the best

"I'm not paranoid. I'm experienced."

They really are out to get you so it's the only wa to be.

Re: re: streaming services and content

Mythbox FTW.

Re: re: streaming services and content

The "g" stands for "group", not "guy".

Re: re: streaming services and content

Belfast had a dental supplier who branched out into video rental. It seemed an odd pairing. He said there was far more money tied up in the video side.

In case you're curious I used to buy plaster of Paris there.

Re: Dubbed Content

"It might make sense for some people in specific situations, but for the average Joe (and myself), buying is much more advantageous."

The "some people" are the vendors. They matter Average Joes don't.

Re: Dubbed Content

That still falls short of the Clangers approach - don't speak it, just play it on a Swanee whistle.

Re: Dubbed Content

Scotland must have been worse off. We usually timed holidays to miss the 12th and travelling through Scotland, at least on the return, the shops would already have been full of "Back to School" promotions.

Re: You know you're old when...

Milk in tea is optional undesirable.

We're being very unfair to the media industry. After all, they sold us content on vinyl. Then they sold us the same content on cassette and then on CD. If we bought the same thing from them three times why should we refuse to keep buying it now?

What's more, people will go along with it. How many potential BMW customers will tell the salesman it's a deal-breaker?

Re: TomTom Lifetime Maps

"only the lifetime of the product"

If the product is still functional (give or take the updated maps) it's still alive.

Re: Before computers we used to make stuff that worked

"This comment is quite funny if you grew up in 1970s Britain."

Not so funny if you were already an adult and were paying for it.

The engineering involved a great deal of precision. It had to do to ensure it lasted exactly long enough to get to the other side of the factory gate.

Re: Tune in, turn on, then say goodbye

Pitchforks! Don't forget pitchforks. Ans tar and feathers.

Re: Physical media is still the best

"except... EMAIL. That most basic of digital services."

Your ISP is even more basic of course.

But I download all email. I might then delete it (the deleted folder is set up to really delete stuff after 6 months) but otherwise it's cheaper than having extensive storage on the paid for service and safer than a free service.

"The consumer doesn't see it that way at all. "

And sooner or later one of the consumers who doesn't see it that way is going to get mad and take it to a small claims court to get their money back - and win. What happens then?

The new CFO is going to be in for a shock. Once other consumers get wind and start emulating that, then the original sales income starts bleeding away. There's no point in sending a fancy lawyer to defend each claim; it will cost more than the claim and, given the nature of the small claims route, they can't recoup the costs even if they win so it just bleeds money faster. If it was a class action they could afford to get the lawyers involved and limit the losses. It might be cheaper to back pedal and resume support or just liquidate the company.

BOFH: Selling the boss on a crypto startup

Dammit. My fingers seem to want to refuse to type the book's annoying "schema are"! If that's what the downvote was for, you were quite correct.

Re: and Derek!?

The BOFH obviously rates him as a dangerous opponent. It's going to need something very crafty to deal with him. Windows, lifts and stairwells aren't going to suffice; attempts to use them could even backfire.

Medium and media have the same problem as datum/data.

Worse, I have a book on XML Schema by an author (or maybe his editor) who obviously thought they were clever enough to know "schema" followed the same pattern and was a plural noun. It isn't. Schemas seems to have become acceptable as a plural alongside the original schemata. But the frequent use of "schemas are" sets my teeth on edge. Oh well, I don't need to read about XML very much these days.

Bosses have always ben fungible. BOFH & PFY, not.

Decentralized IPFS networks forming the 'hotbed of phishing'

Re: Bit rich to blame ipfs

A big problem here is that marketing departments persist in training customers to be phished by repeatedly sending out emails indistinguishable from phishing. The emails purport to come from the company but actually come from a spamming digital marketing company and invite the recipient to click on links. The worst of all are those (banks I'm looking at you) who include links that require a log on. They may claim to have undertaken anti-phishing training but to send out such emails they must regard responding to such emails as normal and their resistance to them is likely to be weak. And, of course, their victims customers are being trained to be phished.

The most useful thing the Online Safety Bill could do would be to include a clause punishing such behaviour with a mandatory 1% global turnover fine. Preferably doubling it for each successive batch sent.

This is what to expect when a managed service provider gets popped

"The reason is quite simple: for proper IT organisation you need expertise at multiple levels and money."

This is a managed service provider. Providing multiple levels of expertise is their job. It's not some small fashion retailer down the street, this is what they do for other people for a living. The entire business is paid to provide expertise.

FWIW my last gig before I retired was at a digital print service provider. Not quite the same as this but providing a secure IT-based service was their job. A separation between the office and the production system was absolutely fundamental to the way they worked. That was the best part of a couple of decades ago; it could be done then and its should be done now.

I do wonder, however, if a managed service provider could be vulnerable via one of their customers. If so then segmentation between customers should be standard.

I wonder if such businesses take elementary precautions such as keeping their office systems separate from those they use for providing the customer service. And maybe even segment the latter so that if one segment gets popped it doesn't affect the whole customer base so they really can say "only a small number...." and mean it.

Nearly all protein structures known to science predicted by AlphaFold AI

Re: AI

Maybe it should be the trials and approvals that carry the rights to be licenced, along with the methods of synthesis if these are novel.

A molecular structure is, if not a natural occurrence, at least a possibility of nature. It should be no more patentable than an algorithm. Proving that a substance is an effective and safe treatment and in what circumstances, on the other hand, is what makes it valuable.

Re: AI

"Traditional modelling methods (10 years or so ago) would take the model of the amino acid sequence, simulate heating to a high energy state so the chain moves around a lot in to random confirmations and then reduce the temperature and simulate the rearrangement in to a low energy conformation. "

I'd have thought a more productive approach would have been to simulate the synthesis, adding one amino acid at a time. As each emino acid is added there must be relatively few low energy configurations which wouldn't involve a reconfiguration of the existing molecule so substantial as to require significant energy input.

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

Re: Wow

"No, that's a classic example of selection bias. We've forgotten all the crap that died right away and we only take note of the few survivors that are still around."

Many of us remember the pain of dealing with the low quality of 70s stuff & forget that anything that lasted actually belongs to those times.

Re: Ebay

So the contents mostly just flow through eBay once whilst teh boxes keep going round and round.

Re: Even worse for software

"Not scruffy warez fans, but CEOs."

Sorry, but I find this a bit confusing.

Re: Comments to On-Call articles

"Sometimes I even get the feeling that the articles themselves have more purpose in seeding these discussions than anything else."

This one seems to have been very sparsely seeded. How did they get from looking for a connector to discovering the typewriter and then the rest of the furnishings were hot?

Why Intel killed its Optane memory business

Bubbles. Memistors. Optane.

We see them come, flatter to deceive and then go. It would be nice to be able to spot in advance the ones that are actually going to actually stick.

There is a path to replace TCP in the datacenter

Re: Translation.

"I'll just pick on the poorly-chosen example and ignore the significant points."

Whoooosh!

edakka saw the point even if you didn't. The print-out might not be for the user who generates it, it might be for someone else in a different place. They don't want to walk 2000 miles over here to pick it up.

Fair enough, the use case might be a picking list to be sent to the warehouse printer but it might still be 10 miles away. Even if it's just next door they don't want to walk over to collect it.

Re: Translation.

The job TCP was designed to do, has done and continues to do is to provide what looks like a reliable connection over a wide-area network which was not necessarily reliable and just fired packets around which is not a connection-oriented thing. There was always UDP as an alternative, relying on higher level protocols to fix up the reliability bit if it was needed.

In an environment where the connectivity can be taken for granted TCP isn't necessary so they could have been using UDP anyway although I doubt that that's what he's suggesting.

We use TCP/IP on our LANs because it's there and easier than having to worry about whether your printer is local rather than in head office 2000 miles away. It's worth remembering that your LAN's TCP packet, inside which your data sits, itself sits inside an IP packet which is designed to be routed over a WAN even though it's delivered locally inside and that sits inside an Ethernet packet. If this is using point-to-point fibre it won't need the IP packet or the Ethernet packet.

Before that there were other networking protocols for local networks so in a sense it goes back to those days.

Hints about SUSE's 'Adaptable Linux Platform' emerge

Having a Linux kernel there may be convenient to those instances providing additional Android or Debian addons. But from the PoV of the basic architecture is it any more than a shim that could be replaced by something else such as FreeDOS if it suited Google? Although much is said about Microsoft wanting to take Windows users into their cloud a Windows PC is still very much more obviously a Windows box than a Chromebook is a Linux box.

Scientists use dead spider as gripper for robot arm, label it a 'Necrobot'

Why stop there? Train a live spider. For additional functionality it can deal with insect pests during downtime.

FileWave fixes bugs that left 1,000+ orgs open to ransomware, data theft

You'd think that by now the word would be out. But it isn't.

Eutelsat and OneWeb to join forces across orbits in $3.4b merger

Re: RoI

"But I’m sure some politicians will do well out of the deal"

They already got what they wanted out of it.

Having been embarrassed by being shut out of EU space ventures as a perfectly foreseeable but surprisingly unforeseen consequence of Brexit they now had an announcement as to how they obviously didn't need to be in the EU for a space venture (by spending a few hundred million of taxpayers' cash).

Selling out to Eutelset isn't quite consistent with that. Keeping One Web HQ in London (at least for the time being, of course) has saved some face and the egg on it will go largely unnoticed in the current political upheavals.

Re: RoI

"those in the know credit him and Alistair Darling for an amazing response to the Global Financial Crisis."

Responding is one thing. Having been a component is another.

Consider this:

Policy: tie interest rates to a measure of inflation.

Make the measure one which excludes the cost of housing.

Outsourcing of manufacturing to China lowers inflation.

Low interest rates lead to lots of cheap loans.

Cheap loans raise demand in housing market.

House building doesn't keep up so prices rise.

People living in houses whose value has gone up take out more cheap loads are taken out against the increased value just because they can.

Politicians: "Nothing to do with us, banks set interest rates & make loans. Never mind the interest rates, just look at the low inflation (excluding house prices)."

Meanwhile outsourcing leads to people losing their jobs.

People who lose their jobs can't service the loans they took out irrespective of how cheap they were.

?

Even as a non-economist bystander I could see this wasn't going to end well. How on Earth could anyone who adopted this policy in the first place be reckoned as anything short of a disaster. Admittedly he wasn't the only one who did so but he was one who did so and in an influential economy.

And look at the collateral damage: interest rates influence the value of pension funds. Pension schemes developed black holes, The black holes affected the share values of the companies that ended up diverting revenue to plugging them. Share values affect the valuations of pension funds invested in them so everyone's repairs widened everyone else's black hole. Just to make things worse the feedback loop had been given an additional kick downhill by removing pension funds' tax allowance on dividends. Final salary schemes became history. Pension funds are still trying to plug their black holes.

But he could bask in the reputation of presiding over a period of low inflation.

Chinese booster rocket tumbles back to Earth: 'Non-zero' chance of hitting populated area

With luck, there is every chance that whatever returns to Earth will simply fall into the ocean. onto at least one of the team who decided this was acceptable.

Charter told to pay $7.3b in damages after cable installer murders grandmother

Re: Alleged?

"Was any of that proven in court?"

The sentence before the one quoted starts with "It was alleged in evidence". In that case it seems likely that the allegation of theft was given as a sworn statement. In the absence of anything to the contrary I think this needs to be accepted as proven, especially in the view of the outcome.

"The most the employer is guilty of is not having a properly-implemented vetting process for employees expected to be visiting vulnerable customers,"

Only that?

Hmmm. I'd think that that's really quite a lot.

Fedora sours on Creative Commons 'No Rights Reserved' license

Re: Patently oblivious

You would need to look at each licence in turn and there are too many for the article to consider. Even if a licence includes a patent licence it can only do so in regard to any patent rights the publish holds. Third party patents are still a risk.

This page lists media from LO under CC0: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Category:Content_licensed_under_CC0

It's not a clear statement that there are no other files under that licence but there but it seems that devs are encouraged to use CC0 for media so it's not surprising that so many CC0 files are found.

Martin Shkreli, out of prison for running a Ponzi scheme, now pushes Web3 thing

Perhaps the condition of release for such criminals should be that for the next 20 years they always introduce themselves with the words "I am a convicted fraudster and you should not trust me with your money.".

Even then they'd probably get some takers but at least they couldn't say they hadn't been warned.

Culture shock: Ransomware gang sacks arts orgs' email lists

Re: Ha ha

If I get spam from someone I've dealt with previously, check its route & find it came from Mailchimp* and complain that PII has been passed on to a third party without my permission the response is usually mystification. They don't even realise that that's what they did.

* Other "trusted third parties" are available.

James Webb, Halley's Comet may be set for cosmic dust-up

"It's fairly easy to get a telescope tube in space to radiate down to a pretty cold temperature - enough that it has no background at JWSTwavelengths"

Only if you shelter it from the sun. That would very likely require a larger shield, requiring larger supports, more mechanish to fold out. Both tube and larger suhshield means more volume. More volume means a bigger nose cone. Still more mass. More fuel to get them into orbit. More mass yet.

"Webb gets around Hubble's primary limitation of having a limited observational wavelength [by] It doesn't lock its mirror in a tube"

I'd have thought that it was more a case of being a big lump to get into space as it is without the added complication of a tube. Even more significantly the tube itself would have to be protected from solar heating, otherwise its IR radiation would dazzle the instruments.

UK immigration systems delayed by extra Ukraine visa work

Re: began in 2013 and was expected to be completed in 2017

"often without looking beyond UK borders"

Oh, but we did. We knew there'd be borders on the other side. Pointing that out was "Project Doom".

Microsoft warns Windows 10 patch broke printing for some

Re: I get the impression

OTOH printing is something you expect an OS to be able to just do.

Software issues cost Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess his job

"Cariad has to be much faster to deploy basically on a weekly basis"

As opposed to when it's ready, fully tested and good to go?

How about concentrating on the basics what makes it go and what makes it stop without all the fiddly bits that should be the driver's concern but end up as distractions?