Posts by Doctor Syntax

Europe proposes tackling child abuse by killing privacy, strong encryption

Re: how can they do their job?

I'd go further than that. Any legislator planning to vote for this should publish all their online credentials, banking, email, trading etc. and then postpone the vote for a year.

Re: Scunthorpe

then emails it randomly to an address from a large list of legislators and other supporters of banning E2E encryption. And then tells the police about it.

FTFY

IBM's autonomous Mayflower ship breaks down in second transatlantic attempt

We sail the ocean blue,

But our ship is going nowhere;

On land you'll find the crew

Still working on the software

MIPS discloses first RISC-V chips coming in Q4 2022

Re: The site is experiencing technical difficulties.

Looks OK to me.

Half of developers still at screens even during breaks

Does visiting SackOverflow count as taking a break? I thought it was a development process.

Virginians sue to block rural Amazon datacenter

Re: While you're at it

Maybe DCs should be colocated with offshore wind farms. Plenty of cooling and electricity supply close to hand.

Palantir summons specter of nuclear conflict as share price collapses

Re: GDPR...

Does voluntary count if there's not GDPR to back it up?

The world according to Karp.

Re: GDPR...

And a lot of other businesses losing markets because we lose equivalence with the EU. But never mind, we've taken back control.

An international incident or just some finger trouble at the console?

Re: always do the secondary

"Mind you, the fact that so many Linux systems have colour aware ls"

Whatever the background you can be sure that the colour choices will make on file type more or less illegible. As to vim - use real vi, or at least the FOSS nvi.

Dammit.

Yes, it's a city but I could never view it as other than an extremely pleasant small town.

I rate it as one of the pleasantest places I've lived in.

Re: Secure P@55w0rd$

Everyone else uses passwords that deliberately confuse them. Unless, of course, they use genuine random passwords and a password manager.

Re: BFR

Fast Fourier Transport

One of our NI friends was in the greenfinches - women special constables t(hink PCSO with a smart green uniform). One day she was on duty with a patrol in Lisburn, our local town*, when they encountered an unoccupied car in a control zone, i.e. an area where it was forbidden to leave a vehicle unattended. A group of French visitors emerged from a nearby shop. They deployed the "No spik Eenglish" tactic & were allowed to get away with it. If I'd been passing I might have suggested, within earshot, getting the bomb squad in to carry out a controlled explosion, just to see if that prompted a rapid language acquisition.

* Yes, it's a city but I could never view it as an extremely pleasant small town.

Re: Typing is not a good idea.

Cut & paste eliminates one set of possible errors. It doesn't absolve you from doing it carefully.

Yahoo Japan strives for universal passwordless authentication

"the company is fond of using techniques that allow Apple’s iOS and Google’s Chrome browser to read and enter incoming one-time passwords so that users have nothing to do to arrange authentication.....The percentage of inquiries involving forgotten login IDs or passwords has decreased by 25 percent "

So the thieves don't have to bother getting the password reset nowadays - hte phone is its own security.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/08/crypto-muggings-thieves-in-london-target-digital-investors-by-taking-phones

Jeffrey Snover claims Microsoft demoted him for inventing PowerShell

There's a saying that software reflects the organisation chart of the company that produced it. Perhaps it reflects the corporate culture as well.

Re: I would get it fired for inventing Powershell

You'd think equals would be =

Nope. I'd expect it to be an assignment.

Greater than >

Nope, I'd expect it to be a redirection of output.

The first is a universal issue in languages, differentiating between an equality test and an assignment. The latter isn't universal but it becomes an issue in a language that has to deal with redirecting data flows.

Re: I would get it fired for inventing Powershell

The essence of the Unix approach is that the shell provides the control structures with very few builtins. All the heavy lifting is done by other programs; that puts them all on an equal footing, including any you might care to provide yourself.

Email domain for NPM lib with 6m downloads a week grabbed by expert to make a point

"longstanding security holes in npm"

Does this mean there's actually security in which to have holes?

India's ongoing outrage over Pegasus malware tells a bigger story about privacy law problems

Nor the UK, dammit.

"India's outdated and insufficient legal framework for protecting trade secrets."

OTOH there's something admirably forward-thinking about a supreme court which can set up its own Technical Committee to investigate its national government for illegitimate targeting of individuals. I can see why the US gvmnt might not like that. Not the UK gvmnt

Cryptocurrency laundromat Blender shredded by US Treasury in sanctions first

Some of which may, just possibly, be legitimate.

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

Re: 10 base 2 network

OP said "in the zone". People who are in the zone finish a job when it's done and done right. They also don't have a clues as to what to put in timesheets so invent stuff.

Re: Oh My!

Make sure the beancounters are always last in the queue.

Re: Full names please.......

Way back, one of the leading barristers in N Ireland had the car registration FIB 1.

Re: Cruel parents

Could have been worse, He could have been in the pathologist's office.

Re: Full names please.......

"still we failed to notice that one of them ended up with the initials of a Personal Digital Assistant"

Although her forenames are unexceptional we should have spotted the significance of her initials. I think it caused a bit of an issue when a post-grad student was already a DR.

Google Docs crashed when fed 'And. And. And. And. And.'

Re: Absurd

This seems to be even worse according to TFA. It's some sort of predictive text mechanism.

Alibaba launches collaboration suite for smart glasses

Re: Cool?

There's probably a new generation of kids who didn't know that. That'll be why they're making them again, thinking they're cool.

Switch off the mic if it makes you feel better – it'll make no difference

I'm pretty sure I've come across wall-as-a-speaker before but it only comes round every few decades. Maybe that's a comment on general views of its desirability.

Re: Four......

I'm sure if you search news reports hard enough you'll find reports from c 1980 of a police investigation which involved digging a trench near the practice tee of a Co. Down golf course (Crawfordsburn IIRC). It will include mention of police taking away samples in white plastic bags. In fact nothing of significance was found (it was one of several reports alleging buried bodies, all false) but it was like a golf ball mine. A lot of police officers were keen golfers and the bags were clear plastic, full of golf balls.

Back in those days the golf club restaurant served such delicacies as chicken in a basket....

RAD Basic – the Visual Basic 7 that never was – releases third alpha

Re: Xojo

I'm sure there was a REALBasic, although maybe with different capitalisation, long before Macs. Probably on CP/M.

BT signs deal with AWS with aim of speeding up digital transformation

Re: Supercharge BT and drive its return to growth

There were two parts to the mobile venture. There was the network part, CellNet, and the customer facing part, BT Mobile, originally the merger of the phone, paging and voicemail services.

It was already growing rapidly when they split it off - remember it was a share split, not a sale so BT got no cash for it. Any competent telecoms management should have seen mobile had to be part of their future and faced down the naysayers. To get back in required giving Deutsch Telekom 1/8th of the business, probably a bargain but something that should never have been necessary.

As to cable, you're quite right, of course. It's something most critics forget when complaining about fibre - BT was compelled to make a very late start.

Re: AWS?

This is BT. Please don't assume that because it has competency in some levels that that implies competency in top management.

Re: Supercharge BT and drive its return to growth

To say nothing of the fact that they decided they didn't need to be in the mobile market. The regulated bit always irked them. That's why they made disastrous investments in things they didn't understand because they thought there were fat profits in unregulated ventures.

"More buzz words than you can shake a stick at."

Indeed. And those at the workface can only watch yet another lurch in direction.

Twitter buyout: Larry Ellison bursts into Elon's office, slaps $1b down on the desk

Re: Where's the mindwash

Is it the one in the room?

Re: Customer support

At some point either the advertising budget runs out or manglement starts to take a look at what they get for their money. I suspect that right now there's an advertising bubble as the entire consumer side of the internet seems to depend on it and that it's going to get very messy when it bursts.

Re: It could have been worse...

This has been explained a number of times but try this exercise.

Look at the things you own. Include any investments, pension rights etc. How much money would they be worth if you sold them? (For this purpose just take the present valuation less the outstanding amount of any loans taken to buy them.) That, plus any money you have in the bank or your pocket, is what you are worth in the way in which these personal valuations are made.

How much of that could you actually spend? Only the money in your bank and your pocket; this is what's known as liquid assets. You probably wouldn't even want to spend that much on a single purchase. If you wanted to buy something big you'd have to sell some of the other stuff or borrow against its value and possibly get some of your mates to chip in if it's something that they might want to share.

Shareholders turn the screws on IBM and its gag orders

"an IBM spokesperson declined to comment."

Obvious. He'd been gagged.

Arm China CEO refuses to go despite SoftBank taking control

Re: B b b Boris

I'm sure he manages to convince himself of anything, sometimes for hours at a time, until he needs to convince himself of the opposite. He probably thinks that works on other people as well.

TurboTax to pay $141m to settle claims it scammed millions of people

Re: "we admitted no wrongdoing"

I find it amazing that they have to promise not to make mis-leading claims. Isn't making such claims illegal in the US? Or do US businesses only have to obey the law when they promise to do so?

TFA describes the states as suing Intuit. That's the source of the problem. A civil suit can be settled like this with no admission of wrongdoing; in a criminal prosecution the only way to stop it going to a full trial with witnesses giving evidence would be a guilty plea.

Outlook bombards Safari users with endless downloads

Re: Until Microsoft determines the cause of the problem

There's nothing like proper testing and this is nothing like proper testing.

Elliott Management to WDC board: Spin out or sell flash biz

Re: Confused

"what exactly can the two parts do when split that they can't do now?"

Ether:

Have a sum of share prices for the two parts a bit bigger than Elliot paid for their shares or

At least one of the halves can be bought up with a leveraged buy-out leaving Elliot with more money and somebody else with debt.

One of the remarkable things is that Elliot and their ilk seem to be able to offer what I assume they will insist are informed opinions on so many varied industries. If they're so smart one has to wonder why they don't generate their own product ideas and build up businesses to exploit them. Surely it couldnt be that breaking things is easier and requires less knowledge than building them?

AI helps scientists design novel plastic-eating enzyme

Re: Breaks it down?

The linked article says it breaks it down into monomers, presumably ethylene terephthalate that can then be reused. The intent seems to be to use the enzyme in an industrial process rather than release the bacterium which already exists in the wild.

Re: End of the Polymeriferous Period

The enzyme evolved in bacteria in the wild, presumably in temperatures <30C, so forget about the risk of escape. For an industrial process the less the energy input the better so as low an optimum the better. It may well be, of course, that although the wild-type optimum may well be higher although it can work at ambient temperatures.

Re: End of the Polymeriferous Period

According to the summary this enzyme breaks it down to monomers. Presumably in vivo there are other enzymes to convert the monomers into something the existing bacterial enzymes can use.

Re: alchohol?

Make that alchohohol for Christmas.