Posts by Doctor Syntax

Europe completes first phase of silicon independence project

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

"A private company sold privately"

It was a listed company prior to the SoftBank bid.

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

Coalition government requires that you're able to put a coalition together. Sometimes that seems difficult.

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

"This isn't just the issue of the astronomical cost of a modern fab, but also the very limited number of people with the skillset to utilise it."

Isn't some of the critical fab plant actually made in the EU? They might not be that short of skills.

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

"The Tories only see business opportunities that pay back in the first year or so."

You overstate the case. They don't see any business opportunities at all. They only see votes.

BOFH: The vengeance bus is coming, and everybody's jumping. An Xmas bonus hits me…

Are we going to see the PFY traded in for a younger model? After all, he's been on the go for far too long for the Y to apply.

Tesla disables in-car gaming feature that allowed play while MuskMobiles were in motion

Re: Back to horse-drawn buggies please!

One of my ancestors was killed falling from his horse on his way back from market. I'd always assumed it was because he was drunk. Now I have an entirely new hypothesis.

Db2, where are you? Big Blue is oddly reluctant to discuss recent enhancements to its flagship database

Re: It's still a thing?

It used to be that products went to CA to be treated like that. Now it's IBM.

Boffins' first take on asteroid dust from Japanese probe: Carbon rich, less lumpy than expected

Re: Box of Legos

"It's the difference between mailing a box of Legos and mailing a completed Lego kit without it coming apart in the mail."

It also involves assembling the Lego kit without having a Lego kit to assemble or anyone to assemble it. Once you've considered the difficulty of that you have to ask yourself why you have to consider the additional difficulty of mailing it; it's hard enough without adding that.

Re: Just over 5g collected?

And in a vacuum you can't even suck it up.

Re: No advance on 1953

Having assumed and extrapolated we can produce testable hypotheses. So far nobody has succeeded.

"life is almost a certainty"

I'm not sure about that. It involves molecules bumping into each other in a way that produces some quite precise structures. Without enzymes to catalyse the reaction I don't think amino acids in aqueous solution are going to polymerise very readily ti produce any protein let alone a protein that does something interesting such as catalyse the polymerisation of amino acids. It's chicken and egg on a smaller scale.

Even the simplest organisms we see are highly evolved. People have been thinking about this for a long time but I don't think anyone has yet come up with a set of simple structures which could coalesce into something capable of self-propagation let alone the set of circumstances that could produce them. Clearly it happened as we're here to discuss it but it still seems to have been a very unusual set of circumstances and by no means, I think, inevitable.

Re: Or you could just look for cylon mitochiondria...

"Panspermia is an uncalled for complication."

And a way of throwing the problem over the wall.

Life is an improbable but not impossible means of perpetuating the consequences of improbable but not impossible events. The only reason we know that it isn't impossible is because we're here to discuss it.

It's improbable that it would have started here but it's equally improbable that it started in any other given place and if it did start anywhere else it's improbable that it would have got from there to here. On the balance of improbabilities I'd settle for Earth as the least unlikely option. Yup, Occam's razor.

Fisher Price's Bluetooth reboot of pre-school play phone has adult privacy flaw

Re: edutainment

It sounds like a case of "if we do we can charge more for it".

Re: Brrrrring

Immediately after before calculating the price.

Wifinity hands customers bills for Wi-Fi services they didn't want but used by accident after software 'glitch' let 'fixed term' subs continue

I'm sure the military advice would be to retreat in good order. Maybe the mess their billing is in won't let them do that because they can't distinguish who should have been billed & who shouldn't.

Electric fastback fun: Now you can surf the web from the driving seat of your Polestar 2

Re: Cue the anti-moving work-around in 3, 2, 1...

If they're wankers they'll tell you it's their right.

A proposal to beat below-the-belt selfies: Crowdsourced machine learning using victims' image stashes

Re: Timescales

I assume the week was intended to gather the training data.

As to intercepting all message flows the article contains this: "I reckon it would be dead simple to build a filter on the receiver." The interception takes place on the receiving device which means the user downloads the filter(s) as required. This has the advantage that, given the tendency to remote medical consultations, there may be a legitimate use case for such traffic.

Belgian defence ministry admits attackers accessed its computer network by exploiting Log4j vulnerability

One thing that might help would be to have a practice of publishing a series of unit tests with the module that it must pass. The unit tests may be added to but not changed or removed.

A business could then adopt a rule of only using external projects that follow this practice, that the version used passes the tests and possibly running some sort of acceptance review that the tests are sufficient.

A further rule would be to not use the library in a way that isn't covered by the test nor depend on some such side-effect. If, for instance there was no test for use after free then this should not be used even if it were found to work; the implementation might be changed and/or a test introduced in a subsequent release.

In essence this solves the problem posed in TMMM: is the product defined by the spec or the initial implementation? It's neither, it's defined by the tests and something not covered in the tests is not part of the specification and not to be relied on to remain unchanged.

This particular problem seems to be the result of creeping featurism. Eliminating that would be a good idea. Did someone say "Do one thing and do it well"?

UK's Defra and Ministry of Justice facing £120m IR35 tax bills thanks to inaccuracies in assessing contractors' status

Simple explanation. CEST had still put too many outside IR35. HMRC can't tolerate that so Something Had To Be Done. Other govt departments are sitting ducks. If they'd tried it out on private sector clients they'd be having to argue it out in court.

US bags Russian accused of bagging millions after stealing pre-release financial filings

Re: Why only 66%?

I suppose if they bet on, say a price rising on a good report and it turns out that the market expected an even better report the price might actually fall.

They not only have to know what the information says, they also have to make a correct guess as to how the market will react to the news and they're not always going to succeed.

Re: ??

Of course they're questionable. That's what defence counsel are for. Maybe Russian courts are different.

Diagnosis confirmed: Oracle has a case of healthcare cravings, bought Cerner for $28.3bn as the cure

Re: Voice Digital Assistant

In my local GP's surgery they type their own notes. I'm not sure if they'd always wish the patient to hear what they say. In any event "Only the uaser interface will change" is not what the user usually wants to read unless the original was really bad. It seems to be a basic law of computing that big UI changes are always for the worse.

I suspect one other thing will change: licensing.

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Re: 8-bit

If you followed the link in a previous post you'd have seen it's 8 bits per colour channel plus alpha so 32 bits in all.

Re: Incredible

And how many semi-colons?

Log4j and Omicron: Brothers in harm, mothers of invention

A simple find will locate any.

It's not difficult to find out what packages (or libraries) are installed on a Linux system. Debian and, I suppose, others have a mechanism for seeing what's installed. Debian has several options including synaptic which gives a sometimes useful commentary. It tells my that the Apache package isn't installed and that 2.17 is already available if I wanted to install it. It also tells me that I've got a Java successor, Logback, and a C++ API modelled after log4j which raises the question as to whether they might be bug-for-bug emulations of the original.

Luxembourg judge hits pause on Amazon's daily payments of disputed $844m GDPR fine

Re: The ruling had nothing to do with data security or leaks...

Given some of the "targeting" it looks as if they have a good excuse.

Wi-Fi not working? It's time to consult the lovely people on those fine Linux forums

Re: "first read the fine forum thread until the end"

"USB thumb drives are specially prone to fix themselves by simply going through the physical option of this particular step."

You have to turn it round at least once before it can be successfully reinserted. Roumour says this disturbance fixes the loose joint that had caused it to go bad.

You didn't check the Access Point first?

That's not entirely a joke because I have one that sometimes goes into a sulk and has to be rebooted.

Been there, done that. 10 years ago there'd probably have been a WiFi indicator LED somewhere. There's little chance of that these days.

Bad things come in threes: Apache reveals another Log4J bug

Re: An ancient memory

But just think of all the insulation they'd provided.

The Filth Filter is part of the chipset, honest. Goes between the TPM and SEP. No, really

Re: A little nervous sometimes...

"Why would you be looking at a customer's photos?"

Or any other data? The computer may be a business computer containing commercially confidential material. It may be very convenient for a government to oblige, as the OP implies, a repair shop to check for any possibly illegal material on any computer they might get in their hands in the course of business but it means (a) they're probably cheating in requirements for getting a search warrant if they were to do it themselves, (b) they're trying to get the shop to do a lot of unpaid work on their behalf or charge it to the customer and (c) they're placing an undue burden on the shop in terms of what commercially sensitive information they may come across. As you say, best to keep clear of all user data.

Fans of original gangster editors, look away now: It's Tilde, a text editor that doesn't work like it's 1976

You were praising Borland's UI earlier. Haven't you come across Lazarus?

Shhh. You'll bring out all the complaints about strange key combinations.

Re: One to rule them all

I think it's because I mentioned "average" and half are from folk who are above average and half below. Confusing, I know, given that 90% or el Reg readers are above average.

vi is for far more than config files or even coding. On and off over the years I've been using it to massage data files from one format to another. Fair enough, it could be done with sed but if you have to open the file anyway to see what you've got & what needs to be done it's just easier to use the built-in bulk updates.

Thank you, FAQ chatbot, but if I want your help I'll ask for it

Re: I am here to help. What can I do for you today?

I think even for the Grauniad that would be a bit too much of a misprint.

Re: HR Tool could be used as an anti- pattern - or how not to design a tool.

But never the sharpest in the box.

Re: Intelligent websites?

I bought some cartridges for a Brother printer a few weeks ago. It's now offering me more cartridges for a different Brother printer. The web site seems a bit too busy at the moment what with it being "holiday" peak buying season but it often tries to greet me by name, at least I think it's trying to but the name field is empty.

Re: How about Toast?

Or if you live in Yorkshire, their own breed of golden bread known as a "terst"ed teacake!

You seem to be offering a southerner's pronunciation. Would you like any help with that?

Re: I am here to help. What can I do for you today?

"given that the Grauniad rates Suffolk as the best in the country"

So is that Norfolk or Sussex?

Re: I am here to help. What can I do for you today?

"Even the dratted "help" pages give no guidance."

The best tactic when buying anything even vaguely technical is to find out if you can download the user manuals. Eliminate those that don't from consideration. The rest should give you some guidance as to what they can do. Remember that if something you'd expect the product to do isn't mentioned in the manual assume it can't actually do it.

You're in luck if it can deal with anything that is.

Re: HELLFULL BROWSER PLUG IN NEEDED

Only eight out of ten, I'm afraid. You should have looked up their CEO's email address instead. There's a useful website for that.

I stopped doing ebay feedback except to give negative responses to these spam being negative customer service and sometimes the spam would arrive after I'd given a positive response.

"sure fire guarantee of a terrible website if you are being asked to rate it before you've used it."

True, but they discovered they got better ratings that way.

Confirmed: James Webb Space Telescope team plans launch for this Xmas Eve after data cable fix

Re: amazing Birthday present, thanks EU tax payers!!

Let's hope clowns are not involved in the launch.

"a function of employing people for so long, not necessarily in actual capex on equipment."

When you spend actual capex on equipment how do you think that actual capex is actually used?

Some on vendor's shareholders' dividends and some on vendor's execs' bonuses for sure, but a lot will go on employing people to make the stuff, some on the vendor's actual capex to buy the equipment used by the employees (see how actual capex is used), some to buy services and some to buy materials. The money spent buying services and materials will be used by the vendors in ways remarkably similar to that used by the vendors of whatever was bought as actual capex.

TL;DR Whatever the accountants' heading, buying stuff means people are employed to provide it.

US distrust of Huawei linked in part to malicious software update in 2012

Re: Ah, so this is the replacement of the infamous motherboard chip

What makes this malware so mal is that it was clever enough to remove all evidence that it was ever there. As with the chip, lack of evidence is a sure sign of guilt.