Posts by Doctor Syntax

Facebook fined peanuts after Giphy staff quit and firm didn't tell UK competition regulators

The best answer would be fines to be stated only as fractions of global turnover. It's one thing to set the upper limit on that basis but quite another to have the regulator actually think in those terms rather than currency units. And make the lower limit a "material" fraction.

Have you tried restarting? Reinstalling? Upgrading? Moving house and changing your identity?

Re: Occasionally, you get a straight answer

The link might be useful for more the paywalls. Sometimes there's a search result quoting some of the page but the link goes nowhere and it's not on archive.org. It might well retrieve content there as well.

Re: Ask other users in our forums...

"Larger companies often have so many customers that there isn't enough room on the planet for the call centre that would be big enough to deal with them"

The solution to that is to get stuff right first time enough times that the calls per customer are few enough that you can find room for a call centre.

Re: Ask other users in our forums...

It's a bit annoying that you have to explain to an ISP help desk what Usenet is, that it's not a web site but has its own protocol and that it is actually part of their bundle of services.

And, yes, there were one or two very old posts on the forum with a slight hint that it might be DNS - which it was.

"It's rather like owning a domain for email"

And I just got a reminder of why this is a good idea.

A spam on one of my domain mailboxes. Hmmm. Who did I give that one to? Obviously set up in December but I can't find any emails sent to it. Then I had a vague recollection of being asked for an email address in the course of a phone call but neither SWMBO nor I can remember which of us was asked let alone who by. Pity as now I don't know who to hold a grudge against but if whoever it was actually does need to contact us they'll get their email bounced with advice that flogging an email address you need to a spammer isn't good for business.

If they really need to get in touch they'll need to find some other way of doing it. Very apologetically.

"Toyota have decided that using the heated seats in their cars requires a yearly subscription."

That possessive pronoun tells you a lot about Toyota.

Re: A is for a certain online bank

OTOH if I were signing up for a trial I'd want to give them a disposable email address in case they turn out to be spammers.

And then demanded £40 for the privelege, despite admitting the equipment they supplied was the issue.

You didn't try the phrase "Not of merchantable quality"?

When I was on Be their router stayed in its box, I had an existing ADSL router which I kept using. On moving to FTTC I switched to the PlusNet provided fibre modem and router. However they subsequently tied down the router which stopped me updating my DHCP settings, something I reckoned was none of their business so I've replaced both with my own fibre modem/router.

On the whole I prefer to buy my own H/W provided it's not the ISP's branded home hub type of box. It removes it from the ISPs control and makes it easier to switch ISP should that become necessary. It's rather like owning a domain for email; I might use an MSP to serve the domain but I can switch registrar and/or MSP if things start to go downhill.

Re: Occasionally, you get a straight answer

"their customer support was commendably honest"

Whilst it's good to find people like that in business I can't help thinking "If only they'd gone into politics instead."

Polly wants a snapper? Parrot swipes GoPro for sweet views of New Zealand's Fiordland

Sometimes you just get fed up with tourists and their bloody cameras everywhere.

Privacy Shield: EU citizens might get right to challenge US access to their data

If the data subject has dealings with some business or organisation which collects PII then that entity should be solely and directly responsible to the data subject for their own misdeeds or those of any third party for whom they are an agent or to whom they outsource. The data subject should not have to deal with any third party or any foreign jurisdiction to obtain redress. In the event of that entity ceasing to exist the responsibility should devolve personally to its former directors, officers or owners.

Re: True in every way in fact

To a large extent I think it's a matter of enforcement. GDPR lays down a lot of requirements but it doesn't provide any means of pro-actively enforcing them. It takes an individual complaint to go to court to say whether such and such an arrangement invalidates them. Trade negotiators, of course, have traditionally wanted to do a bit of hand-waving to ignore them and it's taken the likes of Max Schrems to get any movement - hopefully that's changing.

I think if compliance really starts to be taken seriously there'll have to be some sort of arm's length arrangement if the US corporations want to stay in the game. Rather than establish EU data centres and/or subsidiaries they come to a franchise arrangement. An EU owned. managed and staffed company operates a DC using IP and branding licensed from the US parent under a contract under EU law (a difficult concept for US governments to grok) specifically limiting data transfers to those required to perform transactions.

"it would give EU citizens more privacy rights in the US than Americans currently enjoy."

Does that mean twice as good? As in twice as good as nothing?

I doubt the ink will be dry on any agreement before Max Schrems' next lawsuit goes in.

Having taken back control we in the UK, of course, have nothing to worry about.

Amazon stretches working life of its servers an extra year, for AWS and its own ops

Re: AD Revenue

The Continue without Prime link will be 1 pixel high and white on white in future.

Re: "servers have a useful life of five years"

I suppose H/W failure might be due to failed electrolytics rather than semiconductors. There must be a trade-off between depreciation and disruption due to failure of in-use servers.

What's driving the extended lifetimes at Amazon and Google (reported a couple of days ago) may be that shortage of components is demanding it. If thay can't get enough components and have to chopse between not expanding capacity and putting up with more in-use failures it's not hard to work out which way they'll go. They're making a virtue out of a necessity.

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

I wonder if the solution to this would be to check if the problem is fixed, redisplay the dialog if it isn't, check once more, if still not fixed display a dialog with a fixed time of, say 15 seconds, check again and if not close down the machine, which the fixed time dialog will have warned about.

Re: I was once responsible ....

Back in the days of character terminals we used MOTD to broadcast a message at logon reminding users to log off. This ended with This includes you $NameOfMostRecentOffenderWe'dHadToLogOut It was remarkably effective. Eventually we had to remove that bit because the last name had been there so long.

That's a signature move: How $320m in Ether was stolen from crypto biz Wormhole

Re: So, ETH was lost to bad code, and now new ETH has magically been added

What's the percentage of Dunning-Krugerands stolen via buggy S/W vs similar losses of fiat currency?

European watchdog: All data collected about users via ad-consent popup system must be deleted

Re: Current ads on Amazon are

I think your experience demonstrates clearly that the advertising networks are just selling junk data. The Amazon ads you see on Facebook are the result of Amazon being sold eyeballs characterised as having particular characteristics. Amazon don't know that they actually belong to a customer whose purchasing history is available.

Your experience also demonstrates that, like all current search engines, Amazon's search engine is pretty crap and would rather throw an irrelevant result at you rather than nothing at all. I was using a better search engine - written in FORTRAN, I believe, back in the 1980s. I think the difference was that the old engine was written to a requirement to produce good results. Modern search engines are written to a requirement to produce results.

Re: Contextual advertising...

"Google thinks I'm a retired person with arthritis, at risk from shingles and that I have a newborn baby... I am not retired, I don't have arthritis, shingles isn't a risk factor and I don't have a newborn baby!"

To rephrase that: Google has data to sell to advertisers to indicate that you're these things. Advertisers will buy it because they've no data that says differently. Google, therefore, will be able to keep taking their money.

Google aren't trying to sell you anything. They're not even interested in selling you anything. All they're interested in is selling advertising to advertisers and the more they can charge the happier they are. That data is worth as much to Google as an equivalent amount of accurate data because they can charge for it regardless. Whether it's worth as much to the numpties who buy it is a different matter.

And, of course, because we've taken back control the EU court decisions don't count here.

Thank goodness we've taken back control and don't have to put up with this officiousness.

Grab some tissues: Meta's share price tanks after Facebook emits latest figures

Re: Nice, but that now ?

"give me an alternative and ill gladly jump ship."

Email? Telephone? Even in these days, face-to-face meeting (you did say "in the area")?

How did you communicate with them before FB?

Jeff Bezos adds some more overheads to his $485m yacht by taking down historic bridge

Re: Meh

"The only people better off are yacht manufacturers"

This is true providing "manufacturers" includes the shipyard workers and the suppliers of maerials and components. Then ultimately you have to include the shops where the workers spent their money and the tax authorities.

Re: Can't they remove the masts, simply?

"This shipyard has mega yachts before"

This is the root of the problem. Nice as it would be to simply tell Bezos "Nice boat, but you'll just have to sail it up and down the canal because it can't go any further" reality is that they probably want to keep the shipyard in business contributing to the city's economy. Longer term they should maybe look at relocating the shipyard as being preferable to keeping dismantling the bridge or losing the business.

Of course they could replace the bridge with something equally iconic but designed to open. If all else fails a sightseeing visit to the Tower of London might help.

Court of Appeal ruling offers hope for UK umbrella firm workers chasing holiday pay

Re: Lies

Probably a few other incentives in play.

Reputedly the IR has tried this on for years and been rebuffed. Their PAYE system is a system designed by employees on a payroll for employees on a payroll. Payrolls are what they understand.

Also the Paymaster General of the time, AKA Red Dawn, was from the left of the party. She would be unlikely to look favourably on workers who weren't unionised.

50 lines of Bash to bring a Wordle fan out of their shell

"And if we really fancy a text-based challenge, perhaps we'll fire up Vim."

Easier than getting out of a Windows update according to https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-update-needs-eight-hours

They're built in? That means the NYT paid about $400 a word. Their regular journalists must be fuming.

America's EARN IT Act attacking Section 230 is back – and once again threatening the internet, critics say

"claiming that online service providers are disinterested "

Disinterested or uninterested? If they're disinterested they could weigh up arguments and come to a decision without having any motivations of their own to affect that decision. If they're uninterested they wouldn't bother.

Oracle Linux appears somewhere unexpected: The Windows Store

I don't expect to see Devuan in that list so I'll just keep running it on bare metal.

Breath of fresh air: v7.3 of LibreOffice boasts improved file importing and rendering

7,2,5 is now showing as the more extensively tested version.

UK's new Brexit Freedom Bill promises already-slated GDPR reform, easier gene editing rules

Yes Minister, episode 1. Getting rid of the difficult bit in the title.

Re: OK.

"you can probably still buy one equally good."

Probably. But maybe it wouldn't be.

How would you know? It would look the same and if there was no requirement to label hormone or antibiotic produced meat there'd be no way of telling.

Re: Marmite

"e.g. in Ireland, where what we call bacon is known as rashers"

I never heard that when I lived in NI. Maybe it's a regional thing.

Re: OK.

"(also, significant CO2 reduction from less cow-farting, double win!)"

The cow-farting issue is CH4 which is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. The solution to this, of course, is instead of feeding plant material to cows it can be fed to vegetarians so they can produce the CH4 instead. Vegetarian produced CH4 is good for the planet - or something like that.

Re: OK.

However, I did not vote to be able to buy and eat "Frankenstein" food.

But you did. You voted to give HMG powers to remove any or all of the protections that the EU provided.

You should really have asked yourself what would be the point of a government seeking that power if they didn't intend to use it, why would they intend to use it other than removing regulations intended to protect the public, whether removing such protections would harm the public and whether you were, in fact, a member of that public.

You're obviously not alone in having failed to ask yourself those questions. If it were only yourselves lumbered with the consequences I wouldn't be concerned. Unfortunately the rest of us are also affected.

Re: Clause 1 of the bill

That's OK. The Gray report studiously avoids the term. "Gatherings" is the approved term.

Comcast fixes broadband cables 'peppered' with holes after Oakland drive-by shooting

Re: Murrica!

Convolution.

New York Times outlays seven-figure sum for 1,900 lines of JavaScript – yes, we mean Wordle

Re: In before ...

It's all these kids who had a Spectrum as a birthday present once upon a time now have the mistaken idea that they invented it all. In due course they'll get the same treatment from those who had smartphones when they were children.

Re: In before ...

"yes pen because of their superior intellect"

SWMBO has an interesting twist on this. She'll hand me a part-done crossword and say "Can you get me any?"

As like as not when I supply an answer she'll say "I'd thought of that one but I haven't written it in."

Re: In before ...

Well played, sir!

Attack on Titan: Four Japanese Manga publishers sue Cloudflare

Don't be silly. It's the best justice money can buy.

Waymo sues California's DMV to block autonomous car crash data from publication

Re: Should chatbots even be the first contact ...

Put the resources that would be used to develop and test the chatbot to providing qualified human support instead.

Re: Answer is easy

Cake and eat it situation. Perhaps they're keeping a seat ready for BoJo in the board room.

When forgetting to set a password for root is the least of your woes

Re: Telnet from a terminal?

As I read it Doug was on terminal at client site & telneted from there to his office.

"at our place"

No 10 or the Cabinet Office?

Re: Nobody told me I wasn't allowed to do it.

This is The Register. It happens.

How did we get to discussing how threads go OT?

Re: Nobody told me I wasn't allowed to do it.

"80%+ of development is handling things going wrong"

It should be. It seems to be less and less the case. Sometimes just working out that things have gone wrong would be a start. Simple things like run a report at 5 mins past the hour to list everything that should have been in that hour's shipment but is still unshipped. It's just easier to let the customer complain.

Citrix acquired by private equity, will be paired with Tibco in $16.5bn deal

Time for their customers to review the market.

Machine learning the hard way: IBM Watson's fatal misdiagnosis

Re: flights of fancy

Or a surgery in the west of Ireland.