Posts by Doctor Syntax

A 'national security' issue: UK.gov blocks Nvidia's Arm deal for now, inserts deeper probe

Re: That trade deal with the US to make up for Brexit...

World Beating is not just even a vain boast !

FTFY

Re: The Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)

I think of it as Culture Media. You can grow very nasty things in culture media.

How free does a society remain once monopolists get to work?

Re: That trade deal with the US to make up for Brexit...

"meant to be, eventually, a grand US trade deal"

Meant to be and reality don't necessarily coincide. In this case you also have to take into account who it was who was doing the meaning.

40 million meeting rooms are yet to get video gadgets

People can confer by phone? Who knew?

SAP patent not inventive enough to get legal protection, judge rules

Re: "There is no inventive concept that provides something more than the abstract idea itself"

"if patent offices were required to perform an assessment of that kind they'd need a lot more resources and expertise, and the process of granting a patent would become an awful lot more expensive than it is at present."

Taking into account the damage weak patents are doing, do you really think that would be a bad thing?

Re: "There is no inventive concept that provides something more than the abstract idea itself"

At least the courts are starting to notice. What I'd like to see next is a party losing a patent infringement case successfully claiming its costs against the USPTO on the basis that if the office hadn't issued the patent they wouldn't have incurred their costs. That would make them tighten up their scrutiny.

Not only MSPs: All cloudy firms are in line for UK security law crackdown

Expect to find mandated back doors for spooks your local council.

Northrop Grumman throws hat in the ring to design NASA's next-gen Lunar Terrain Vehicle

But the passenger always knows better than the driver.

Wondering what to do with those empty offices? How about a data centre?

I'm not surprised the press release didn't provide links. Except for aspirations it appears to be an empty high ceremony management process framework. Maybe hitting the COP event with PR was more significant than having something that could actually be pointed to. It's not clear how the issues raised in other comments here are to be met.

The lowest impact data centres will be those in places where there is ample renewable energy and/or low external temperatures for cooling, such as Iceland and Norway.

If the gains are purely in terms of repurposing empty urban buildings then there are better options. We currently have a separation between residential housing and workplaces. The commuting that results from that should be seen* as unsustainable. The best solution would be to convert some workplace space into housing for people who work in the remaining workplaces and move other work out into the surrounding, currently residential, communities. This is not aided by the short-sighted conversion, in areas like mine, of the few remaining former industrial sites into housing.

* And probably will be when it's too late.

Does this "blueprint" actually exist? It's not easy to make out what it might be worth without reading it. Odd, I thought, there's no link in the article.

Obviously the place to look is the OpenUK site. There's the press release on which the article's based. I found a "Read more" link which simply went to a similar article in Computer Weekly. A quick search reveals a few more similar articles based on the press release. Maybe the Eclipse site has a link. Nope, the Eclipse site doesn't even have any mention of it.

Maybe the press release is the actual "blueprint".

It's not even April 1st.

Another brick in the (kitchen) wall: Users report frozen 1st generation Google Home Hubs

Re: Items that fail to work...

It would depend on the jurisdiction. Some have consumer protection law, some don't.

Sheffield Uni cooks up classic IT disaster in £30m student project: Shifting scope, leadership changes, sunk cost fallacy

I've been in a situation where I'd rather have been given what they programmed in the first place. What they (client's client) extracted appeared to have had several fields concatenated into one. They had to be taken apart again. I even had to get them to add a flag to tell me just what it was they'd done.

Re: Contractors

It can also happen when contract admin forgets to renew the contracts or there's a freeze on spending.

Re: What this boils down to

Expensive lessons are likely to be buried in unmarked graves.

Splunk CEO jumps ship, share price slumps despite surging growth

Maybe the increase in revenue triggered the bonus he was waiting for.

Intel's recent Atom, Celeron, Pentium chips can be lulled into a debug mode, potentially revealing system secrets

Yet again I have to wonder about this trusted platform stuff. Just who is it who's supposed to trust it? Or is it a case of getting rid of the difficult bit in the title?

There's only one cure for passive-aggressive Space Invader bosses, and that's more passive aggression

I remember one manager who had a habit of getting too close in conversation. However as he was definitely one of the exceptions good guys I was prepared to put it down to his thick glasses messing with his perception of distance.

Re: Workplace Bullying

A lot of whooshes in those downvotes, I think.

Tech bro CEOs claim their crowns because they fix problems. Why shirk the biggest one?

Public transport, of course, does suffer from spikes of demand. But that applies to transport in general. It's the commute to and from work. Planning, at least in the UK, has, for decades, ensured increasing separation between where people live and where they work.

Re: But it's up to us

"Zoom doesn't work on older computers (e.g. Vista etc)"

Zoom works on Linux. When SWMBO was running her patchwork classes remotely they met by Zoom and, of course, her laptop runs on Linux.

FBI spams thousands with fake infosec advice after 'software misconfiguration'

Re: Whoever did what

Krebs's article explains. It sounds weird. Weird as in "what were they on?". The sign-up process resulted in a one-time code emailed to the new user's email address. So far so 2FA. But the email seems to have been generated client-side and sent to the server with a POST request which included as parameters not just the email address, but also the subject and body so by feeding POST requests to the server the server would send out whatever emails were requested.

No weak passwords required: no passwords required at all. Apparently IE was required, however. I suppose it stopped those wicked Linux users getting access.

Linus Torvalds releases Linux 5.16 rc1 with new performance-enhancing memory tech

An Oracle employee running Postgres?

Boffins use nuclear radiation to send data wirelessly

Re: a small step

But very difficult to block once you've got it working.

BOFH: You drive me crazy... and I can't help myself

Re: Same energy

Tell us more.

A problem shared is now somebody else's.

"dealing with a sales person"

Say what you like about crabs, but they're not fussy eaters.

Re: Alternatively. . .

I once spent a couple of very cold, wet, smelly days watching the contents of a pig farm slurry pit being pumped out* to see if any of the thousands of bones looked human. None did.

* Result of a false tip-off to the police. There were a few of those over the years in the search for Thomas Niedermayer.

Concentrated Sulphuric acid and 95%+ Hydrogen Peroxide potassium dichromate?

Makes chromic acid. We used it to disinfect used bacteriology kit. Very effective disinfectant. The H&S briefing for the lab assistnat was to simply drop a few sheets of filter paper into it so she could see them instantly disappear.

Re: Lime?

Lime's not needed. Just follow the carpet with a concrete pour. Next week the steel starts to go up.

The Ministry of Silly Printing: But I don't want my golf club correspondence to say 'UNCLASSIFIED' at the bottom

Re: Shared printers

Said document examiner, like me was a biologist so he was head of a forensic science biology department. The medical examiners would have sorted that out before the exhibits even arrived in the lab.

Re: Shared printers

" It must be handwritten because it gets sent for handwriting analysis."

It makes a big difference when you have to be prepared to stand over your conclusions in the face of cross-examination.

Due to the organisation of the forensic lab my boss was also a questioned documents examiner. They kept strictly to comparing texts to say whether they had been written by the same hand. In terms of characteristics of the writer they weren't even prepared to say what the gender might be.

Re: Back in the early 90's

Obligatory https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-05-02

Re: Way Back...

"stuck them down in the new order"

Don't stick them, staple them. Easier to rearrange again. Downside: punctured fingers.

Re: Back in the early 90's

Along with Ashton-Tate.

Re: Amateur Opera Society Newsletter

Was it running on an Alto?

Re: "personal printing"

"intuitive icons"

Multilingual: equally incomprehensible in all languages.

Re: Way Back...

"Great, we could type up and print our own letters, then we had to send them to the typing pool who retyped them"

We had the same experience with witness statements which couldn't be on plain stationery (II|RC there were 4 different pre-printed variants to cope with single and multi-page statements). This was referred to as "sending them to have typing errors inserted".

He called himself the King of Fraud. Now this bot lord will reign in prison for years

Re: "Zhukov boldly devised"

"but that's one step above lawyers"

Citation needed.

Re: Dumb

"he could have started a legit company"

I've come across occasional cases where the only explanation seems to have been an a deliberate decision against making money legitimately.

Re: So we're feeling bad for the ad slingers now?

And yet advertisers complain are said to complain about ad-blockers eliminating the half that doesn't work. Or is that just the advertising industry? If the latter then I find it difficult to distinguish their morality from Zhukov's.

BT's Plusnet shows Google how it's done as email woes enter their third day

"What would you suggest?"

Mythic Beasts.

Re: How do you communicate?

And above all, don't suggest social networking.

As System76 starts work on its own Linux desktop world, GNOME guy opens blog, engages flame mode

Re: I like Gnome

"click on the next meeting in the calendar -> make sure I've blown my nose and trimmed the nostril hairs"

Maybe change that sequence a little.

There's no Huawei back now: Biden signs law that forbids US buyers acquiring kit on naughty list

But quite often kit from "US companies" is Chines-made.

Re: Proof, if we ever needed it, of our weakness

"Motorola, Alcatel(-Lucent), Nokia, Nortel"

Upvoted but you make Martin's point. Those aren't the UK firms which had been killed off earlier.

HP's solution to running GPU-accelerated Linux apps on high-end Z workstations: Rely on Microsoft's WSL2

How the mighty have fallen.

Apps made with Google's Flutter may fritter away CPU cycles. Here's what the web giant intends to do about it

"Flutter may fritter away CPU cycles"

I don't think it's alone in this.

WTF is 'Computing First Networking'? Think load balancers for the age of edge

Oh, look. Somebody's just invented renamed client/server and PCs.

Re: The only real innovation here ..

"Honestly, it is as if everyone has been wholesale acquiring marketing people from the cosmetics industry."

Gartner could supply the cosmetics industry any day.