Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK chemicals multinational to build hydrogen 'gigafactory'

One winner would be nice. As things are at present they all have problems scaling up.

Re: Quick charging

"Practical, ubiquitous battery-EV HGVs are within touching distance."

Practical, maybe. Ubiquitous? Do we have the raw materials to make them ubiquitous? In this context "materials" includes copper and that's going to be a problem for hydrogen/fuel cell/electric motor systems as well.

"But to create hydrogen without releasing CO2 at all, you need renewable electricity and electrolysis"

You also need a water supply. The state of the reservoirs round here today is a reminder that that can be easily overlooked.

UK government refuses public review before launch of NHS data platform

General knowledge tells me we may have a major problem keeping private data private.

Your "wedge" might be a Freudian typo.

Re: Remoaners

A bad decision is a bad decision. It doesn't get better because it's been implemented. Far from it. Making and implementing it are only the start of the problem.

If we don't lay the consequences at its door we're not going to learn from the mistake. We also need to be vigilant that those consequences don't lead us into a constitutional crisis. BoJo's antics have nearly got us into one already in the last few weeks.

Re: Last

Your recall is faulty. It was a very narrow majority of a population which was extensively and systematically lied to by those who wanted to escape adult supervision.

Re: Trust is non-existent

This is what happens when you have a government without adult supervision. Why do you think they wanted Brexit?

WHat makes everyone think Palantir will get it and not Infosys?

Security flaws in GPS trackers can be abused to cut off fuel to vehicles, CISA warns

Make type approval a requirement for any such attachment that can affect the safety of the vehicle.

After 40 years in tech, I see every innovation contains its dark opposite

Re: Tie me down

What really annoyed me was having to sort out somebody's BASIC written in FORTRAN - just after we'd both come off a 5 day FORTRAN course. I say fize - I don't know what they did on the first day because I'd only joined it on the Tuesday & didn't seem to have missed anything.

Re: a planetary-scale "ignorance amplifier"

I don't know if Foyles is still there - it's a long time since I exposed myself to London - or if they've sorted themselves out if they are. But they laid out their shelves by publisher. This way Addison Wesley, that way Prentice Hall...

You might know the book you wanted and even the author but unless you knew the publisher you had to walk round from one set of shelves to another hoping you'd come across it.

No wonder the bus shelter outside had a poster reading "Foyled again? Try Dillons."

Hush now: Baby talk has common features across languages and societies

Re: allgone lettuce

More likely adults are taught to communicate with children in that manner as it's all the brain can deal with at an early stage of development. With a rudimentary grammar and very restricted vocabulary there's a limit to what can be communicated. As the brain and its language centres develop more complex grammar and a greater vocabulary enable richer communication.

SoftBank reportedly moves London IPO out of Arm's reach

"long, slow. death of ARM in terms of any British connection"

Maybe not that slow.

Sage accused of strong-arming customers into subscriptions

Re: Strong arming doesn't work

Never give a customer reason to review the marketplace.

Disentangling the Debian derivatives: Which should you use?

Re: APT was a killer feature

"There's something about systemd that puts me off trying the likes of Debian and its derivatives"

Devuan is a systemd-free Debian. Best of both worlds.

Re: .....and then there's folk who want to flee from Apple.....

It looks a bit cluttered to me - or do those panel things at top and bottom autohide if you want them to? and then there's the latest idea of cluttering up the title bar with extra controls.

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.

Debian just boots into the installation program – there's no way to "try before you buy"

Typing "debian live image" into DuckDuckGo brings up https://www.debian.org/CD/live/ as the first hit - the way in to official live images and unofficial images with non-free software included. It will take a little more clicking to get to the list of images but there are images for several desktops. Yes, the route to get them could benefit from some tidying up but they're readily available.

At https://www.devuan.org/get-devuan the first option listed is a live image, available in any desktop you want so long as it's Xfce. Again a few additional clicks are needed before you're downloading from a mirror.

One thing I would complain about with Debian - and hence Devuan - is that for a long term support distro there's a strange reluctance to ship an LTS version of KDE.

North Koreans spotted harassing SMBs with malware

Re: Fix

And if you follow the link to the first report in the article and read all of that you'll find the executables named there are all .exe files. There's nothing to stop a Linux executable being tagged as .exe but it's usually only done on Windows.

In the context of this article SMB also means Small and Medium-sized Businesses.

TLA overloading is a bitch.

"Vice has acquired code from An0m, an encrypted messaging app that was actually an FBI honeypot, and it appears to be cobbled together from open source apps."

Did they provide the source code if demanded?

Being declared dead is automated, so why is resurrection such a nightmare?

Re: Written in Pascal, of course.

None of the above. What I had in mind was https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Re: The title is optional

Try the handling charge ploy.

Re: ringing up

This was an alumnus annual so I doubt there was a website. And given the current habit of dragging all manner of JavaScript with an ever greater fan-out of dependencies, all unverified, I'm not going to go looking for and clicking on random websites.

It wasn't difficult to find the phone number of the college concerned.

Re: The un-deading command

Written in Pascal, of course.

That really isn't the best way to handle it. Banks (or whatever it was) can be difficult when you go the official route - his executor closing the account. They will certainly be a great more difficult if they learn that access was gained by false representation.

"Another pension provider requires me to get a proof-of-life signed by a JP or a doctor every now and then."

One of mine requires a person of suitable standing such as business owner. My semi-retired bookseller neighbour did that. Another included a relative in the list; after checking it turned out that a spouse was acceptable - I don't know why because they would have a vested interest in the pension provider not being aware that the pensioner was now visiting the great Post Office in the sky.

Re: The title is optional

I've mentioned a similar circumstance before. I eventually stopped the mail by ringing up and telling them there would be a £10 handling charge for all mail returned in the future.

Re: The title is optional

Related to the De'Aths

Re: In the UK we have the DVLA

"Seems I dodged a bullet there,"

So did I.

During COVID my BiL was terminally ill with cancer. His car reg. was up for renewal or SORN. His non-driving wife, despite having worked as a secretary didn't know what to do and in any case they didn't have a computer. It had got to about the lst available day when something had to be done. She told me the DVLA (actually the NI DVLA) reference so I went online for her to enter the SORN. He died a few hours later.

IT departments often regret technology buying decisions

Re: Glaringly obvious

"Why the hell not? That would seem to be the most obvious cause and would seem to be a logical question."

As has said above, the C-suite and the like are Gartner's customers and the C-suite and the like are the people who make the puchasing mistakes.

Gartner aren't going to tell their customers something they don't want to hear. They're sailing close to the wind as it is with this report. No wonder they've turned up the jargon to bury it.

Re: Psychographics

Psychobabble.

Re: Psychographics

s/Oracle/Usual suspects/

Re: Psychographics

Why the joke alert?

Is the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope worth the price tag?

Re: Yes, it is

"Aircraft - £0, we couldn't afford them."

And we can't build them either. That's the cost of abandoning projects. TSR2 was a long time ago but in its aftermath the Harrier was the last gasp of the UK being able to defend itself by its own efforts.

Re: And the answer to the question is

The usual trade-off is time/quality/budget, pick any two. But that doesn't work when you're developing new technology as there are so many unknowns. You get to pick one: quality, the spec you want to meet and the real timescale and budget to achieve that become what they are. If you don't like the way they're working out the only option is to cancel. If you cancel you get nothing of your primary objective although you might also get some by-products in the form of the technologies that emerged from your development process. In the latter respect it would be interesting to know what products, possibly everyday products, emerge from the JWST.

I suppose the beancounter interpretation would be that as it exceeded so many of its design criteria it shouldn't have been as expensive as it was but that's just beancounters. The nature of something that you can only test properly when it's in orbit means you have to hope you can go and fix it if it doesn't work properly first time as happened with Hubble. This one's not Hubble so nobody's going to fix it. Nor are you likely to get to build a Mk II if the original has a problem.

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

Re: It's still going on

if File Manager is opened to a directory on the memstick, technically the memstick is in use

FTFY

Re: Exchange

That presupposes a company standard way of doing things that meets the companies needs.

That sentence implies quite a lot of preparatory work. What stands out here is that all too often that's not been done so either there's nothing to teach or what's taught isn't guaranteed to meet the needs.

Re: Exchange

"Therein lies a potentially big problem...e-mails should be regarded as transitory, not as formal records"

Why?

In the sort of situation you describe there are likely to be additional documents of some nature with the emails as covering notes, just as they would have been exchanged by letter post back in the day. But also in that situation Alice or Agatha and Bob or Bill, whoever are authorised to act for their companies, can agree on a final version by email.

I've written elsewhere in these comments that the significant unit of communication is the thread, not the individual messages. In the situation you describe the back and forth emails between managers will actually keep track of the changes. They might not be able to handle any more rigorous form of change control but email with its threading will be the one thing they can and will handle.

Twenty years ago we were doing business whereby additions to a contract and consequent additions to the agreed data dictionary, inter-developer discussions of additions to the XML schema and test data were all carried out by email. Only samples of the final product required anything more. It wasn't difficult and it didn't lead to any problems even though one of the other parties was one of the notorious Usual Suspects in the realms of outsourcers.

Make sure users have the options needed are matched to the UserID. However, don't do this they way I once saw - just one interface to the entire suite so it included all the functionality.

Re: Exchange

How many times do we read this?

And why? Because email clients are badly designed. Their defaults for handling read mail are unhelpful to non-existent. To some extent it's because email clients originally started out as message handling systems. Usually they now manage to link messages into threads but all to often that seems to be an afterthought and not a core function (see 3 below).

How about something fairly simple:

1. The inbox is a list of unread messages. The moment a message is read it is removed from the inbox and cannot be replaced.

2. The Trash is a queue of messages or threads waiting to be deleted according to some set of rules - time or quantity related doesn't matter so much. Once the criteria are met it's gone for good. While it's in there any message or thread can be retrieved.

3. The unit of interest is not the message, it's the thread/discussion/conversation/call it what you will. Messages are their components. A singleton message - one with, as yet, no reply - is simply a component of a thread with one item; all threads start this way. Placing sent messages in a separate "Sent" folder where they won't get matched up with their replies or the messages to which they themselves are replies is just stupid.

4. By default all sent and all read messages initially get placed in a common folder. We'll call it something such as "Current". The contents of Current are presented as threads, not individual messages (see 3 above).

5. We don't want Current to grow indefinitely (the clue's in the name) so we'll have some sort of ageing rules to move threads that haven't been added to or read for some time into less current folders. The ultimate such folders will be archives, probably on a yearly basis.

6. In addition to such core management the user can devise any additional organisation they please, hierarchical, cross-referenced or whatever. For extra points such folders can be represented in the OS filing system. That means that if you cave a folder for Project Rhubarb you can drag the email client's folder of email threads relating to Project Rhubarb into it as a sub-folder. Or when you opt to create such a folder in the client you can elect to place it there.

7. Some of 6 could be automated by rules - all emails from example.com addresses can be set up to go into Example Inc's folder. All emails from the banks' email addresses go into the relevant bank's folder in the Finance folder and so on. There's a mass of possibilities for helping and guiding the user to good practices.

8. Nothing described above need represent the actual storage of the threads and the messages which are their components. That can be done by using a plain old database. The client's folders are just pointers into the data. The "threads" in the OS folders are just files that contain sufficient information to tell the client where to find them on a read-only basis.

9. If the users really want to shove a file back into the Inbox to deal with later and can't, then maybe a Pending tray could be provided.

Suddenly IT were deluged with irate staff wanting to know what had happened to features they used in Office.

"Sorry, not an IT decision. You'll need to speak to $GuiltyParty."

Re: Exchange

Maybe not yours, but whose job is it?

BOFH: Would I lie to you, Boss?

Folks - are we taking something for granted here? Namely that the "company's insurance auditors" really are company's insurance auditors and not some of BOFH's cronies?

Mars helicopter to take a breather, recharge batteries

Re: In that case....

"they don't have a locker on Mars."

Are you sure about that?

So why didn't they....

"This is because unlike earth dust it has not been subject to water so it has sharper edges than Earth dust which tends to be rounded."

I thought wind-blown sand on Earth was very rounded.

Re: Thanks NASA!

Atheism is, of course, a belief system and has its fundamentalists ("There is no God and Dirac is his prophet"). Agnosticism, not so much.

60 million in the Matrix as users seek decentralized messaging

Re: What I'd like to see

"The last thing I want is to try to reach someone who then has to have an account with some service"

How do you envisage finding that someone if they don't have an account with some service? They, and, come to that, you, would need to have a unique ID. Who manages IDs in order to ensure uniqueness? You then need the system to be able to contact them. How do you manage that without using some form of service mapping the ID to some communications address?

Example: "I want it to be as easy as group chats or group calls on my phone"

The telecoms companies provide the ID, and map ID to the handset and locate the handset in the mobile network.

Digital burglary at recruitment agency Morgan Hunt confirmed

From what they said it seems like it might not have been an unauthorised third party, just an authorised one being naughty. Has the third party develop sufficient public liability insurance? And have Morgan Hunt informed the IOC?