Posts by Doctor Syntax

Cisco: Don't use 'blind spot' – and do use 'feed two birds with one scone'

Re: Blind spot

"Octopus eyes are weird."

Convergent evolution in action.

Re: Boycott The Language Marxists-Nazis

Not the old British Library Reading Room in the BM? That's the one that normally gets the credit.

Re: "English has more words than any other language, , by a factor of two or three"

Also should one take into account the multiple meanings of some words sequences of letters?

Are we still allowed to say positive and negative in relation to electricity? I suppose positive is OK but maybe we should refer so an abundance of electrons for the other.

Re: "hanging processes"

And don't forget black vs red as indicating credit vs debit (and, oddly, a positive vs negative balance). And although red might be derogatory there a red-letter day is something special.

Re: Boycott The Language Marxists-Nazis

I think you're confusing Marx and Engels. Engels certainly had Mancunian connections.

Re: Get a life, hand-wringers & namby-pambys.

I suppose it would depend on the area concerned but such bans could be considered demeaning to the local culture where such usages are traditional.

Re: Scones

"the Scone of Stone"

That's what comes of letting them dry out. You should leave no scone unturnedeaten.

Re: Scones

Surely they don't want to trigger all those arguments about how it's pronounced. It should, of course, be pronounced with a short O.

A knowledge of history is reassuring. It's essentially Puritanism. The Puritans tried to regulate everyone's thought in the late C16th/early C17th. They were followed by the considerably less restrictive late C17th & C18th. Then we had the Victorian values of the mid o late C19th followed by the Edwardian period, flappers and the swinging sixties. We're back in the Puritan phase again but this too will pass and its proponents will be derided just as their predecessors were.

This upstart is selling tickets for a SpaceX trip to the world's first private space station

Is it going to be funded on the "Restaurant at the end of the Universe" basis - I pay a small amount now and by the time it's ready the accrued interest will be enough to pay for it?

The Hubble Space Telescope is sinking! Two startups want to save it for free

Hubble & JWT complement each other in that they observe different parts of the spectrum. Unless there's a Hubble replacement planned it would be unfortunate if it were allowed to fall out of the sky.

Sonatype axes 14 percent of staff, reminds them not to talk to the press

"gave employees strict instructions not to talk to the press"

If you don't want anyone talking to the press it might be better to keep them all as employees.

The world of work is broken and it's Microsoft's fault

It's pointless saying that this (say email or meetings) are a waste of time and that (Excel or Word) are productive. It depends entirely on the value of the outcome.

Microsoft disarms push notification bombers with number matching in Authenticator

"zero-trust architectures, which take the position that anything or anyone trying to climb onto a network can't be trusted or given access until verified"

Unfortunately this conflicts with my position that anything pushing a text or email at me can't be trusted until verified.

Microsoft Azure CTO believes confidential computing is the future of targeted advertising

Let us be specific here. "User" as "owner or representative of the owner" where "owner" means "whoever paid for the purchase of the computer" despite Microsoft apparently being firmly convinced that they own all of them.

Thank you Mr Russinovich for confirming my suspicions about trusted computing. It's not provided for the user of the computer to trust, it's for the (OS) vendor.

Brexit Britain looks to French company to save crumbling borders and immigration tech

"Exports to the EU are the highest they have ever been"

Citation needed.

Two Microsoft Windows bugs under attack, one in Secure Boot with a manual fix

"to successfully exploit this flaw, an attacker must have physical access or local admin privileges on the targeted device."

With physical access secure boot can just be turned off.

Musk decides to bury dead Twitter accounts, warns users follower counts could sink

"it'll be a small amount of disc space"

But that avoids buying more disks and, one presumes, the arguments about paying for them.

Meta CEO doesn't Zuck at Brazilian jiu-jitsu, apparently

Maybe he should have a face-off with Putin. If it comes to a draw they could decide it in a judo/ju-jitsu tournament.

You'll [BZZ] like Intel’s [BZZ] NUC 13 Pro once the fan [BZZ] stops blowing

Re: Americans can't hear fans.

Mine's worse when it's quiet althougt it would have been the noise of working in mills in the school holidays that caused it.

I suppose it varies.

Re: Interesting idea...

"Small, light, durable, you could chuck it into a normal backpack, and not worry at all."

A Raspberry Pi would do that if you could get hold of one.

But if the concern is something light to carry but relying on plugging it in at home and office why carry a computer at all. You could just carry data on a portable drive. If you're also concerned about having a PC configured to your exact software requirements, perhaps a bootable drive would do.

Re: Americans can't hear fans.

Tinnitus helps. It masks the fans & vice versa.

Beijing raids consultancy, State-sponsored media warns more to come

Maybe you don't remember the old Cold War days. You find a few of your spies have been arrested. You then arrest the odd innocent (or possibly not) tourist as a spy. A few days later an exchange takes place before the press or, depending on requirements, on some badly lit bridge in Berlin at night.

Of course this being now, Berlin won't fit the bill and they'll have to find another badly lit bridge.

The first real robot war is coming: Machine versus lawyer

Re: Pass the popcorn

I read the other day that some singer announced anyone was welcome to use her voice for deep fakes providing they gave her half the proceeds. That seems to be a good way of getting ahead of the game.

Re: sequels, prequels, and "reimaginings"

"Others come up with something I find interesting and occasionally make it past series 2 without being cancelled."

Maybe interesting material runs its course fairly quickly while the turd mines are limitless.

Of course Russia's ex-space boss doubts US set foot on the Moon

Re: about 4 years ago...

2drink the stupid kool-aid"

Maybe that's his problem. About 79% proof.

The future of cars may be self-driving EVs gossiping about their humans and traffic

Re: Lots of good uses for it technically

"but I'm fine if I can just read or watch a TV show or whatever."

Until you're needed at 0.25 seconds notice, to cope with whatever situation the automation can't handle.

All it knows is that there's someone there to answer the phone, not who that is.

Here's what the US Army picked for soldier-worn tactical USB hubs

But if radio communications are still unreliable how does all this help? Soldier-to-soldier Bluetooth & a whole line of squaddies from battalion HQ to the front line?

T-Mobile US suffers second data theft within months

"as of now, we have no evidence indicating any information involved has been used for financial fraud or identity theft."

This, of course, is just basic weaselling.

"as of now, we have no evidence indicating any information involved will not be used for financial fraud or identity theft." would be equally valid.

On the whole it sounds like they're just hoping for the best. Is that just a continuation of their infosec approach?

China lands mysterious reusable spacecraft after 276-day trek

Re: Excellent planning.

Hey, here's an idea. If we just keep everything together we only have to keep one place supplied with liquid nitrogen...

Datacenter fire suppression system wasn't tested for years, then BOOM

Re: death trap

"You have obviously never suffered from nicotine addiction"

You don't have to be an addict to suffer from smokers' addiction. It's why smokers get no sympathy from the rest of us.

Re: Err

Don't expect marketing to read any meaning to a slogan. How would they be able to do what they do if they did that?

Re: What are the odds?

Could your maintenance work have interfered with its cooling?

Sometimes shooting the messenger is the right thing to do.

Users complain over UK state-owned bank's services as Atos eyes the exit

The guilt has to be shared out with those signing off the milestone. That task needs to be in the hands of someone prepared to say "That's no good enough." with a view of "good enough" that's not based on simply meeting a schedule.

Re: What's up Doc?

It's always been the case. Almost 60 years ago, back in the days of unredeployment under Harold Wilson I came to the conclusion that the Labour Exchange staff were on the wrong side of the counter.

Re: No mention of Linux

"some issue with the Firefox engine maybe?"

The issue being that they didn't test with it and therefore didn't tweak for it. Why their site is so badly written that it has to be tested and tweaked for each individual platform is a different matter - I think it's because that's been the industry standard way of doing things for about a couple of decades.

Re: No mention of Linux

Just the marketing/crayon department complex. There's no differentiation or design kudos for something that looks plain vanilla even if plain vanilla Just Works.

we're sorry that some customers have not received the high standard of service that they have come to expect from us

Re: Halcyon Days

More recently, of course, Horizon would have cocked up the sub-Post Offices balance and sent the kindly old person to jail for fraud.

Of course as soon as they were no longer able to conceal this the convictions were quashed and a crack team got onto the job of ensuring the victims were properly compensated. What's that? They didn't?

“The new website authentication system is completely broken. I enter my details and 2FA code but still get stuck in an endless loop of login > enter code > back to login > enter code > back to login,”

Are they taking lessons from PayPal or vice versa? I've had the same experience there.

European companies form space jam to secure comms sovereignty with satellites

Re: This would almost be OK, if….

If there were a real business case for it, VCs would invest quick-time.

Define "real business case". In VC terms it's something with a relatively quick payback time in terms of becoming a profitable business that can be sold on. Infrastructure projects tend not to be. Although they may be enablers for a lot of economic activity they may even become money pits for those owning them because they need to be maintained or updated. When the economy is tight private ownership doesn't necessarily have the money to put in so they then get nationalised (e.g.British Railways). Then they become political footballs; next time money's tight government decides it can't afford them either so they get cut (Beeching) or (ineptly) re-privatised.

Another satellite constellation. The astronomers will be delighted.

A right Royal pain in the Dallas: City IT systems crippled by ransomware

Re: One Network...

"the court system needs to collect fines and pay jurors"

That shouldn't stop cases being heard. The system being out shouldn't even jurors being paid - there are such things as cash payments and paper records.

Dump these insecure phone adapters because we're not fixing them, says Cisco

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

2nd harmonic good, 3rd harmonic bad.

I remember reading a report of someone who'd creates a setup to add various amounts of various types of distortion for a listening panel. The listeners preferred to sound with some 2nd harmonic (or maybe a slew of even harmonics) distortion added.

Hubble spots stellar midwife unit pumping out baby planets

I'd better not tell the wife. She might want to send them a card and I dread to think what the postage might be.

Slack adding generative AI to interact with colleagues, so you don't have to

"so nobody will have a record of what was agreed in meetings"

I don't see the problem here.