Posts by Doctor Syntax

The planet survived six hours without Facebook. Let's make it longer next time

"Pity the lonely, unloved Facebook network admin"

Pity? Unloved? No, we applaud and love him or her and wish the rest of them would follow suit.

Which is pretty well the point being made a couple of paragraphs above.

Fatal Attraction: Lovely collection, really, but it does not belong anywhere near magnetic storage media

"Again, I would suggest looking for another reason to explain the disk not working."

QIC: Quarter Inch Cartridge, a tape format.

Re: Not a PC but a monitor

We had a couple of models of Zilog, all with their monitors & keyboards sitting on top of them. On one model the monitors wee stable, on the other they would continuously wobble, presumably because of the fields of something - disk drives? - just below them.

Re: Plodigy strikes again

Damage limitation?

Re: Why fridge magnets can actually erase data more easily than those Neodym

Not only that, the smaller and closer together the poles are the easier they'll cancel each other out at any distance from the magnet.

Headquarters and General Supplies. Proops. Henrys. All gone.

So the fridge door, computer casing or whatever is going to act like the keeper across the poles of a horseshoe magnet and contain almost all of the field between the poles leaving little to leak out.

"But will it survive? Turns out, yes."

IME, on a sample of one: no.

There's a lot to be said for making PC casings out of plastic or aluminium.

Just a thought - are fridge magnets all or predominantly magnetised with the same orientation? If they're random or better still each ha two poles with opposite orientation (like a horseshoe magnet) then the net field on the other side of the cover should be low to nil.

Clearview CEO doubles down, claims biz has now scraped over ten billion social media selfies for surveillance

Re: It's happening

I think he might have meant "We never wanted to be found out this way."

Judge rejects claims Cloudflare should be held responsible for customers' copyright infringement

Re: Missing the point

"Cloudflare and their fans like to use analogies like postal service, road builders, and power companies. Illegal stuff happens and it's nobody's fault."

It very obviously is somebody's fault. It's the fault of those who post the stuff to the website. However the plaintiff's lawyers will argue (to the plaintiff) that the most they can be sued for is pennies because that's all they have but here's a big corporation, Cloudflare. They have money. The fact that Cloudflare is simply, blindly passing 1s and 0s along, just like the ISPs or anyone else in the transmission chain is not made obvious to the plaintiffs until they go to court. They lose but no doubt their lawyers still get paid.

The best way of stopping it would probably be to send cease and desist letters to the hosting companies. That would give them the option of suing if the offending material isn't taken down but unless the hosting company ignores it there's no money to be made out of that.

Re: "We agree with the district court’s reasoning"

"I haven't read the full judgment, but the judge's reasoning described in the article is quite different"

I've read it. The judgement is in terms of what the plaintiffs were actually claiming.

The nub of the complaint against Cloudflare AIUI is that it made the website load faster. In terms of the analogy it's like blaming the road makers for laying down black top over a rough track which enabled a faster getaway. Long story short - it didn't make any difference, they'd have gotten away anyway.

BOFH: You. Wouldn't. Put. A. Test. Machine. Into. Production. Without. Telling. Us.

Re: The guy's here...

Just use an easy to remember phrase like "correct battery horse staple".

Like?

Re: This week

Don't forget to test the procedure for replacing all the user IDs.

Re: Ah, yes.

I suppose the old production servers were also decommissioned and their backups destroyed to avoid any risk of data leakage.

Re: Testing 1 2 3

Anderson shelters?

As of today my soon to be ex-bank are still using covid as an excuse.

Re: Test into prod?

"Good thing we backup our test servers."

But don't tell the users until you've let them sweat a bit.

Facebook, Instagram finally end days of uptime by returning to some downtime

"We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused."

Not that I have any sympathy for inconvenience caused to advertisers* - the more the better in my view - but this is another victim-blaming pseudo apology. What they're really saying is more like "If you were better organised you'd have worked round it.". They are most carefully removing themselves from any shadow of blame.

A real but watered-down apology would have been "We apologise for causing inconvenience".

* Actually, it's not advertisers caught up in this. It's the advertising industry. Advertisers are the the advertising industry's customers.

Microsoft vows to make its Surface laptops, Xbox kit easier to fix by 2022

Re: I'll believe it when I see it.

"Change starts with design"

Designers are now complaining they're having to ditch all the hard-won progress they've made in unrepairability.

Quantum computing startups pull in millions as VCs rush to get ahead of the game

For the gold rush it was shovels. What do quantum computing companies buy?

Get real: Say what you like about your app but don't be surprised if I trollsplain

Re: Ultimate marketing

Customer: I don't think much of this. Why do you call it the ultimate meal?

Waiter: You're eating the last customer to order an ultimate meal, sir.

Re: Ah yes, just in time for the Christmas ads

Maybe they have a stock control problem and it really is the red flannel shirt etc.

Motivated by commerce, not conscience, Google bans ads for climate change consensus contradictors

Re: one who questions the orthodoxy

There is ample basis for avoiding burning fossil hydrocarbons where substitutes exist. Hydrocarbons are multi-use materials, usable as fuels and as the starting point for industrial processes. In the first role it's often open to substitution, in the second not so often. The stuff that's been burned needlessly isn't available as a substrate. In similar vein the hydrocarbon used to make one-use plastic bags can also be substituted with paper.

You don't need to believe or not believe in anthropogenic climate change, nor do you have to realise change in climate and sea-level changes are inevitable to realise that finite supplies shouldn't be exhausted where substitutes exist.

At some future date, and maybe not that far into the future, our descendants will be blaming us for the sheer waste of current usage.

Zoom-o-cracy: Wales MP misses vote, allowing COVID-passport rule change, blames the IT dept

Looking to the future

Who'll be standing in the by-election after he visits the BOFH to complain in person? Could we see PFY MP?

Outgoing UK Information Commissioner issues warning about the independence of her office

Re: Logic failure

Yup. Spotted that too late.

Logic failure

"a Brexit dividend for individuals and businesses across the UK"

In this particular respect I think that's OR rather then AND.

In general neither is the more likely outcome.

Windows what? PC makers have bigger things on their minds

"However, we believe the vast majority of PC demand is non-perishable"

As soon as supply catches up with demand I think built-in obsolescence will be deployed to make PCs perishable again.

Ireland signs up for plan to make Big Tech pay 15 per cent tax everywhere

It all sounds very well except for the uncomfortable feeling that if a corporation has any US connection, even so much as e staff member on a flight over US territory, the US will claim all of the 15%

Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry awarded to boffins studying complex systems, organic catalysts

It's also a nice endpoint when you're preparing a carbon dating sample for the scintillation counter. Char sample to carbon. Heat with lithium to form lithium carbide. Add water (oh, look, South Belfast water supply from Silent Valley has radon in it) to form acetylene. Clean up the acetylene at low pressure given acetylene's tendency to explode. Convert to benzene.

"Scientists earlier thought there were only two types of catalysts: metals and enzymes."

I remember we used to use vanadium pentoxide to catalyse 3C2H2 -> C6H6

Nothing says 'We believe in you' like NASA switching two 'nauts off Boeing's Starliner onto SpaceX's Crew Dragon

Now there are a couple of spare seats I'm sure a couple of the Boeing board or C-suite will want to muscle in. After Branson et al put themselves in the fornt of their queues. RHIP - Rand Has Its Privileges. Surely they're not worried about the H.

.NET Foundation boss apologizes for pull request that sparked community row

Re: What a shame

"act as if they apologised when they in fact had not"

All too often the apology is for any "inconvenience" or, in particularly egregious instances, "distress" caused.

No! That's really hidden victim blaming. It's just polite wrapping for "sorry you're such a wimp".

What the apology should be for - and explicitly for - is getting it wrong.

Google to auto-enroll 150m users, 2m YouTubers with two-factor authentication

Re: Telephone numbers are not credentials

I think he said "If you use 2FA whoever's got hold of your phone is efectively you".

Re: Mandated? No thanks.

One hoop too many is demanding the set up of an account for a one-off purchase or maybe not even a purchase (yes, BBC with iPlayer, this includes you) but demanding a user ID for no good reason at all.

Facebook rendered spineless by buggy audit code that missed catastrophic network config error

Quis audit auditors - or something like that.

Microsoft's problem child, Windows 11, is here. Will you run it? Can you run it? Do you even WANT to run it?

Re: why some (but not all) of our Windows 10 machines won’t mount a particular network share

"An ancient network share at Deficiency House only supports the SMB1 protocol."

But does it support non-SMB protocols? I ran into that a few Debian/Devuan generations ago. Then I realised it also supported FTP. KDE's network share mechanism supports that. Maybe Window's does too.

"Available on the Widest Array of Choice in Devices,"

The apologists' play-book for that is not only already written, it's looking quite dog-eared: "only a small proportion of users....".

We have some sad news about Facebook. It has returned to the internet after six-hour mega outage

That bit was true. For six hours it wasn't.

No return of the JEDI: Supreme Court declines to hear Oracle's challenge to now-dead cloud deal

Now pick up your toys and put them back in the pram.

UK's £5bn National Cyber Force HQ to be sited in Lancashire beside Defence Secretary's constituency

Re: Lancashire Tech Step-by-Step

I'm not sure what it was but it was neither of those.

Firewalls? Pfft – it's no match for my mighty spares-bin PC

No. Always be prepared to go back for suitable money.

I take your point but there's an old adage "Don't get mad, get even". And one way of getting even is to get the money.

Re: I could post my history of 'temporary' bodges .....

Or ruins his hobby.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the BBC stage a very British coup to rescue our data from Facebook and friends

It all seems very vague. Perusing through the linked articles I find it talking about data taken from media. What data? What media? Then it would be processed in the user's device. How? Finally this quote seemed to be their answer to Why?

"The results of this processing might, for example be a profile of the sort of TV programmes someone might like or the sort of theatre they would enjoy."

So it's yet another attempt to double-guess me, rather like $RetailSite trying to sell me a fridge because I just bought a fridge or the garage that started texting me with their new car advertising when I just bought a car from them. It might answer their Why? but it certainly doesn't answer mine.

UK.gov presents its National Space Strategy: Space is worth billions to us. Just don't mention Brexit, OK?

Re: There's a reason why large rockets are launched from out of the way places

Think polar orbits. Of course if Scotland goes Indyref then that's ruled out.

Re: "Space is worth billions to us"

"but call on him to go further"

... and stay there.

Danish artist pockets museum's cash and calls it art... and other stories

Re: Great (blank) future

Correction:

not some non-dabbling dilettante

2FA? More like 2F-in-the-way: It seems no one wants me to pay for their services after all

Re: "Something I know" isn't ....

"sent by means of non-arriving SMS messages"

Just this.

Tried to make a payment this morning. After jumping through the hoops of enter password again and enter two digits from security code again they send a text. Phone which was supposed to be charging wasn't.. Hastily plug it in properly. Request resend. Request it again. Nothing. Eventually 3 texts arrive by which time the payment page has timed out. If I try to go through the whole thing again will it send duplicate payments? Who knows with this wunch of bankers? Thank goodness I still have a cheque book.

"Authentication proves that you are consenting to this security check."

By the time you've entered the password a second time and entered two digits of the pre-arranged security code a second time the SMS, should it arrive before time out seems a bit superfluous in terms of authenticating that you are consenting to the check.

And let's remember that the bank, should they ring you up, will be totally unable to distinguish themselves from any random phone phisher.

They will also fail to reply to any emails requesting that they confirm whether of not the marketing spam, laden with links, sent in their (noreply) name from some 3rd party professional spammer digital marketing company professional spammer is really theirs or not.