Posts by Doctor Syntax

Scraping public data from the web still OK: US court

Re: Just for bots

Probably a good match for some agencies' job ads.

You'd need to define authorised access and scraping.

Re: Misdirection Of The Public......Again!!

@A/C

Do you have a vested interest in violating the public's privacy?

It cuts both ways. If they block access for those not in the anointed few they can't complain if the rest of us ignore them. Even less can they complain if we choose to use some other site that doesn't have the same attitude.

Re: site stupidity.

Once upon a time robots.txt was there to stop scraping but that seems to have worked on the principle of a gentleman's agreement. There are no gentlemen in big tech any more.

IBM ordered to pay $105 million to insurer over tech project's collapse

"IBM has form in screwing over its salespeople."

Maybe it's mutual. The salespeople are screwing over IBM by selling what can't be delivered.

Twitter faces existential threat from world's richest techbro

As with others, I can't see Twitter as being comparable in any way with a rain forest. It's true that when a brand gets taken away from its originators it's apt to go down the tubes. And, do you know, in the case of Twitter, I couldn't care less.

An early crack at network management with an unfortunate logfile

"I became convinced that no one ever read it"

Always assume that in X months/weeks/days (and it's always sooner than you anticipate) you will be confronted with this piece of code to fix or amend and you won't even remember which idiot wrote it. What would you want in the way of documentation and can there be too much of it?

Twitter preps poison pill to preclude Elon Musk's purchase plan

Re: How many

This is a difficult question to answer. The number seems to keep going up with no indicaation that we've got to the final total.

"Another thing worth mulling is, where would the $43billion come from."

Debt. If he's got that value in assets he can use that as collateral against a loan. Once he's got the company he lumbers it with the loan. Even better is the possibility that he finds someone else to sell it to; after a few cycles the amount of debt sinks the company and Twitter has tweeted its last. Normally I'd think that's a bad thing (e.g. Maplin) but I'm prepared to make exceptions.

Re: Poison pill

"somebody who is a bit of a dick"

And in some cases a complete dick.

A plague on both their tiresome houses.

Re: 'I have much trouble agreeing with'

"So, wait, you're for or against free speech?"

Yes.

Cybercriminals do their homework for latest banking scam

Re: Tell me again...............

"(2) How my sofa is SO much more convenient than an actual bank

(3) How my laptop is SO much better to deal with than a real person"

The reality these days is that actual bank branches are becoming increasingly remote and when you finally complete the treck to one the staff are disempowered and unable to do anything except tell you to go online or ring. Having dissuaded everyone that it's not worth visiting their "local" branch they can close if due to lack of business.

Trying to phone, of course, results in getting a recorded announcement that they're experience an unusual number of calls (for at least the last decade) and you should go online,

The fact that this exposes you to fraud is your problem, not theirs.

Re: be wary of anyone providing personally identifiable information as proof of their legitimacy.

Hello NatWest HSBC, looking directly at you.

Re: You're the bank, do it yourself, that's the natural response.

I take it that this was your former bank.

"What's the past of least risk with greatest reward? "

Path?

Climate model code is so outdated, MIT starts from scratch

Re: A language they cannot read?

You probably discovered it's possible to write a BASIC program in any language.

You can buy a company. You can buy a product. Common sense? Trickier

Re: 'twas ever thus

I worry when it looks as if that stuff has been programmed in someone's sleep. Especially if it's in /etc

Re: 'twas ever thus

"If you're lucky, the windows may be included as well."

I've seen a Will where the testator specified the window panes were to stay with the house. However it was a C16th Will and at that time glass was so expensive that if you had more than one house you might take the glass with you when you went from one to the other.

Re: 'twas ever thus

As regards light fittings, if you've chosen them to your own taste as part of the decor it mages sense to take them. We brought four wall lights here from our last house. I can't remember what we put in their place - probably the sintered spelter pseudo-baroque monstrosities that were in the house when we bought it.

COVID-19 contact tracing apps were suggested as saviors. They sometimes delivered

In the UK HMG seems to have somewhat surrendered to the "Let's just forget all about it." wing of the Conservative party so it's not surprising the whole thing is being wound down. It didn't help that the whole thing was given over to someone who's competence is among the lest trusted in the UK IT community. Also the first element - Test - seems to be overlooked; why else have free lateral flow tests been wound down? If you can't test you can't trace.

IBM not cooperating with discovery, say attorneys in age-discrimination case

An good question. Probably half the answer is that the concept of self-incrimination only applies to criminal cases and the other half from the fact that lawyers' children can't be allowed to starve, or something like that.

"They should hang their heads in shame."

Same? You're attributing to them a character trait they don't have.

Perhaps they should direct IBM's clients' attention to this. Something along the lines of "Why are you paying an IT company that can't even run off a simple report from it's own HR system?".

Review: Huawei's Matebook X Pro laptop is forgetful and forgettable

The wbecam and audioconnectors position might be right for hunt and peck typists. hunched over the keyboard.

Auctioneer puts Space Shuttle CPUs under the hammer

It must have gone up a bit since I first read it. Hang in there. You might get it up to a couple of percent.

But think of the tax write-off.

The advantage of selling something physical. It seems the NFT of Jack Dorsey's first tweet attracted bids in the low hundreds of dollars when re-offered for sale.

Atlassian comes clean on what data-deleting script behind outage actually did

Re: well

They should take from this the fact that paranoia is a basic requirement in system administration.

Re: While I appreciate the honesty...

A good place to start would be to build the option to restore into the automated system. Move the data to a reserve location and only delete it a few days afterwards when it's clear there were no issues. Pretty well very desktop system and every email client has that; it's there for a reason. No, the reason isn't to archive the emails once you've read them.

Measure twice, cut once.

BOFH: The evil guide to upgrading switches

Re: rule 1

I had a screwdriver set with an Intel Inside sticker. It fell of the case of the kit I was working on and stuck to the screwdriver lid so I left it there.

"we can probably fix it with a firmware flash in a couple of hours."

This was the switch which was just borked by a firmware flash so are we looking at a previous Choose your own adventure?

A. Go without a new coffee machine.

B. Break into the server room at dead of night by fixing the security cameras and access control to administer a firmware update that will bork the switch recoverably.

Elon Musk's latest launch: An unsolicited Twitter takeover

Re: Funds?

That's why it's cheaper to borrow. The value of assets is collateral against the debt. If the debt defaulted the lender would take over the assets.

The downside is all on the victim the company being bought. That ends up being saddled with the debt. The interest and payments can become a money pit. Maplin is an example UK readers will be familiar with.

Infosys quits Russia, ending UK political and tax scandal … maybe

Given the exodus of IT professionals from Russia it might be more a matter of the employees leaving Russia rather than the business. If they were working for non-Russian InfoSys clients as TFA says they could still be doing so in Armenia or wherever.

As regards Boris, don't rule him out when thinking who might have a hand in the leaks - about Sunak's green card as well as his wife's taxes. Any time he's been in political trouble it's Sunak who gets seen as the possible successor.

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

Re: Live Free or Die

Systemd? What systemd? It's a matter of choice. It's also not part of the kernel.

Re: How about Quicken?

The Windows - or in this case Quicken - balls in the vice subscription approach.

Re: Dell XPS Ubuntu version discontinued in the UK

Any Linux-enabled Dell I've looked is way above my budget and AFAICR a poxy small screen job. The current laptop, as near as it gets to be suitable for ageing eyes, came sans-OS from PC-Specialist. In fact they seem to build them with the Windows in the form of an installer but not installed, IYSWIM but installing it would presumably cost money so you still have to blow it away.

Re: Helped by Microsoft

"to the point that a tipping point is probably imminent where learning a new Linux environment is as difficult."

I'm not sure that that's what you meant to say.

Re: WTF

I really suggest you go back and read the original comment.

He downloaded it from a hardware vendor's website.

Not a community website.

Not a distro's website.

Not Sourceforge.

A hardware vendor.

The only one here who thinks it's somebody else's fault is you.

Re: WTF

Why? He downloaded it from the NVidia website? Don't you think it might be their problem?

Re: Simple? My arse!

Yes, Pinta does a lot of what I need - largely adding extra layers to old maps. Check out the .ora file format as it preserves each of the layers as a .png inside a zipped file. Simple cropping, resolution changing - Gwenview. More complex stuff goes to Gimp.

"Though Windows Store is perhaps a worse example of a festering hole of crap applications Ubuntu or RedHat repos."

IoW it isn't a tookkit problem, GTK or otherwise. It's that designers took over the look from developers, all wanting to show off their "creativity".

"The appearance of applications shouldn’t clash with each other or with the desktop UI."

I'd suggest consistency of function is more important than consistency of appearance. You're never going to get consistency of appearance with, say cross-platform applications. Either they present one appearance on multiple platforms and get slated for not looking native or they're made to look native on their platforms and then there will be complaints about them not looking like the tutorials.

The worse problems are in functional design. There would always be the occasional individual developer or small company going off at a complete tangent and usually producing something really awful, very likely because they wanted to show how different they could be. But the mainstream started off with the old character based CUA and evolved interfaces which were consistent in at least general approach even if their cosmetic appearance varied slightly from one vendor to another. Now we seem to have all manor of variations. Ribbons, flat design, minimalism achieved by removing functionality, or at least hiding it. We have iconography that looks like it was designed in crayon by a three-year-old with no artistic inclinations or a Babylonian making an attempt to draw hieroglyphics with a cuneiform tool set. The best you might hope for is consistency in the current release of a vendor's product line as each team of designers tries to look cooler than their rivals.

Re: ... and to a racing driver, F1 isn't hard, either

"But why do you want to re-arrange a menu?"

Back in '95 and for a few years after that You could arrange the Windows start menu to be easily navigable to find what you want. In recent years it seems to have become an illogical mess. If I pop up the KDE menu it's organised by application group - graphics, internet, office etc. If one of those gets too large I can subdivide it, maybe shunt the less used stuff into a sub.menu. If something seems to fit more than one category I can enter it into those categories.

Of course the expert Windows users go into search and type in the application name. Yes, after all their railing about its supposed prevalence in Linux, they've reinvented the command line.

"99% of users don't."

I think the word you were looking for is "can't".

Re: One reason to stay with Windows - Outlook

"-> Thunderbird's UX is horrible

I wonder who put it together. Somebody who has no idea how to design GUI software, I guess."

Standard practice these days. There are options that retain the original interface. Someone will be along to say they look like something from the '90s like that's a bad thing.

Re: The joys of Linux

My little experience of Windows is that it takes ages and demands reboots - the downloads appear extremely slow compared to Linux update. YMMV.

Re: "Linux Desktop"

I'd forgotten that W8 was so wildly popular that it was replaced by 8.1.