Posts by Doctor Syntax

My smartphone has wiped my microSD card again: Is it a conspiracy?

Re: Works for me

Thanks. I'll bear that in mind if my 4 is ever delivered.

Were these tracks bought via some route that involved payment to Google? No?

Maybe it's related to this: if my phone is switched off or, as is more likely, the battery has run down because I haven't used it for several days, all the apps downloaded from F-Droid disappear from the main UI pages. They can be copied - or is it linked? - back from the alphabetical list of available apps but not immediately as they're also hidden from that for several minutes. It may be a bug, it may be a gentle hint from Google that they don't like it when I fail opt not to to give them some money. Cock-up or conspiracy, take your choice, the result's the same.

Rejoice! System Administrator Appreciation Day (SAAD) is nigh

Obvious: a new roll of carpet, a year's supply of quicklime, a new spade and a screwdriver set for loosening window frames. Sysadmins deserve to be supported in their hobbies.

Deploying disaster-proof apps may be easier than you think

Re: Calculating Risk

"These reps though, are on a learning curve, so they are in the dark as much as us consumers."

That'll be their excuse.

"There's still a lack of clarity about who takes ownership of the resiliency issue when it comes to cloud,"

Could this have anything to do with cloud sales weasels' pitches?

London Stock Exchange CEO still aiming for dual Arm listing

Re: Read it carefully

Read it carefully indeed.

Perhaps you didn't read enough of it to get as far as this quote: "We would be concerned for the long term future of the company's global HQ remaining in Cambridge if Arm lists exclusively in the USA and we will always fight to defend our members jobs in Cambridge."

That was from a trade union, not an accountant, a government minister or official or a stock market representative. The union thinks it makes a difference.

DiDi in deep doo-doo over 64 billion illegal acts of data collection

DiDi, don't do dat.

Re: Nobody is that bad

"pretty much every web site not covered by the GDPR"

And plenty that are.

Without going into China's handling of th internet in other ways, this fine is something Western regulators could learn from.

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

Re: Bank of England going to trade show

Even in the non-currency security printing business things are never taken anything less than seriously. It's the high tech end of the (non-electronic) printing industry. It's not just the designs and engraving, it's also the paper and the inks including, in some cases, print that's raised above the surface of the paper.

Re: Don't know if it's just that my coffee hasn't kicked in yet...

Rich was sent there to cover for field service so at least one of them was field service. Quite possibly the other one was sales & he was the one called somebody else out.

UK lays world's longest autonomous drone superhighway

There are indeed. And this trial doesn't cover any of them.

"Here in the UK we don't have the remote locations, at least very few"

And fewer still in a T shape between Reading,Oxford, Coventry and Cambridge.

"With such a load capacity, a human body could even be put in a protective cocoon and flown to another hospital if some emergency treatment was needed."

And when the medically unattended passenger is DoA it'll be a bit of a problem determining place of death.

CityFibre loses appeal against Openreach discounts for ISPs

So CityFibre don't want to compete by offering their own discounts. Noted.

British intelligence recycles old argument for thwarting strong encryption: Think of the children!

No paper of this nature should be given credence unless its authors are prepared to expose themselves in the way they'd expose others: they should include all their online credentials for banking, shopping, email and everything else.

If they do include such details then the paper shouldn't be given credence as the authors are either outright liars or stupid.

Re: Quite apart from online...

"I'm a fan of the jury system. Pick people at random."

I vaguely remember on jury trial. Accused was a hospital worker. Petty thefts of patients' ' property started when he was put on the ward. Some property was marked with a powder. He wasn't caught with the property on him but he did have the marker. Thefts stopped when he was removed from the ward.

Not guilty.

Outlook email users alerted to suspicious activity from Microsoft-owned IP address

Touch wood it seems to have stopped.

At least it wasn't just me. I started getting these alerts on a couple of accounts coincident with going on holiday and logging in from a different location. When they continued when I got back I thought MS were getting just a tad too suspicious. I should have realised that incompetence was more likely than an excess of competence.

UK chemicals multinational to build hydrogen 'gigafactory'

Re: Steptoe and Son is the future!

No way. Think of the methane. And that's the least of the problems. he ICE enabled a massive clean up of city streets.

Re: "the increasing urgency to decarbonize transportation"

Has anyone worked out how they get to all those places they glue themselves onto?

Re: "the increasing urgency to decarbonize transportation"

Quite. And you're never going to get the Greens to admit that they're the reason we didn't do it years ago.

"then crack the water to hydrogen as it's quite energy intensive"

You're right about the sea water. But the energy going into splitting the hydrogen out of water is the energy you're looking to get back (allowing for losses) by recombining hydrogen with oxygen. The hydrogen is a storage and distribution medium for that energy.

Having said that I don't actually like hydrogen on safety grounds.

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.

Judge approves Twitter's request to hurry along Musk trial to October

Re: An elongated fine?

"Why would Musk settle for any more than $1bn"

He doesn't have to "settle". He just has to do what the court tells him to and if that's the full $44bn that's what it will cost him.

Microsoft floats Cloud for Sovereignty

Beware of the weasel

Drilling down through the links in the Microsoft waffle I find the statement: "we defend our customers’ data from improper access by any government in the world."

I take it that a demand under the CLOUD Act would not be considered "improper" because it's sanctioned by law. In fact I recall Microsoft were pleased at the Act's passing, not, as far as I can make out, because it strengthened their hand when some US functionary didn't want to go through the proper channels in Ireland, but because it clarified things for them. US functionary now says "jump" and Microsoft can jump without any comeback from the affected customer.

Drilling further I find out how they're going to do this: "a contractual commitment to challenge government requests for data". "Challenge" not "defy". I read this as saying that they'll make sure that a demand under the CLOUD Act meets its requirements and is, therefore, proper.

What seems to be needed is an arm's length agreement whereby the EU data centres would be run by a self-contained EU-owned business over which neither Microsoft nor any other business within legislative reach of any non-EU government had any power to demand access. Does it provide for this?

UK government refuses public review before launch of NHS data platform

Re: 3 steps to dystopia

And did you check on his wife's family?

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.

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.

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.

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