Posts by Doctor Syntax

If you're Intel, self-driving cars look an awful lot like PCs

"You may have noticed that PCs are edging in that direction."

Yours may be, mine isn't and won't.

One-size-fits-all chargers? What a great idea! Of course Apple would hate it

Re: Apple don't like it?

" maintaining support for their connectors for a decade at a time does somewhat slow down change."

You (and Apple) say that like it's a bad think. So many USB cables and never the one that fits whatever gadget I'm holding.

Stop worrying that crims could break the 'net, say cyber-diplomats – only nations have tried

Certainly not in the case of kleptocracies.

UK Ministry of Defence apologises – again – after another major email blunder in Afghanistan

You might not be able to implement safeguards against everything but you should implement an obvious one to something with such a long history of errors with potentially extremely serious consequences.

Britain publishes 10-year National Artificial Intelligence Strategy

Another Homegrown Unbeatable BRItish System.

Database containing personal info on 106m people who traveled to Thailand found open to the internet – report

Re: 106 million records

The difference is that when it's on somebody else's computer it needs to have an external connection. If it's on your own you need to make the additional error of exposing it to the internet.

Thatcher-era ICL mainframe fingered for failure to pay out over £1bn in UK pensions

Re: Future events for diary.

Given that the client is DWP this is a case where insourcing might have been worse.

Macmillan best-biscuit list unexpectedly promotes breakfast cereal to treat status

Re: Relax everyone, it's not important

Sawdust? You think in a year's time we'll be able to get sawdust?

I've called them Wheelbarrow Wheels for a long time but I realise you've nailed it.

Re: Nice...

You say either and I say either.

Re: Royal Scot

Add Gypsy Creams to the list of the departed. I believe they've been brought back under the PC name of Romany Creams but I've never seen them.

Despite the divergence of views on individual biscuits can we agree on one thing? Any product which is reduced in size from its original should be permanently disqualified.

Obvious case of having handed decision making to AI.

JEDI contract might be no more, but case should live on, says Oracle: DoD only wants Amazon, Microsoft for new cloud deal

"Cases do not become moot simply because a defendant issues a press release claiming to have ceased its misconduct,"

Nice example of prejudicial PR.

Let's not forget that lawyers have children to feed although US litigation lawyers would probably feed them to alligators if the money was right.

US Congress ponders setting up permanent UFO investigation office

Can gravy trains fly?

Edge computing has a bright future, even if nobody's sure quite what that looks like

I give it a couple of years and we'll have the Individual Device capable of performing all the work local to the user either standalone or only needing a remote server for communication with other Individual Devices or maybe some central storage. No, not at all a Personal Computer or anything like it.

Fix network printing or keep Windows secure? Admins would rather disable PrintNightmare patch

"We have asked Microsoft for further comment and will report back accordingly."

Their comment might be unprintable.

Don't forget to leave a rating: Amazon chairman meeting with UK prime minister to talk taxes

Re: he will discuss the “challenges” of taxing giant tech corporations in a digital economy

Ignoring your joke alert and treating it seriously. Any simple tax code will quickly run into the fact that the real world is full of corner cases.

For instance take the idea of taxing a company on revenue rather than profits. What happens when a company goes through a difficult patch, as many have done recently, or is starting up and ploughing receipts back into building its infrastructure? Revenue exceeds expenses so the business is running at a loss. Taxing it on revenue simply helps run it into the ground in the former case and in the latter, at best, stops it developing into the tax generating enterprise it could become.

What happens if a company has no revenue but happens o be holding some asset which is growing in value so that its value is increasing?

Re: towheaded

Yes, but does it refer to the outside or the inside? Or both?

Do you write a special law naming Amazon (and guess what Amazon would do about that before it even got to Royal Assent) or do you write a law that taxes every company on income even if their expenses exceed that and they're currently running at a loss?

If it was a tax dodge why didn't you adopt it? Too high minded or you took a look at the risks of going freelance and decided it wasn't for you?

Re: he will discuss the “challenges” of taxing giant tech corporations in a digital economy

"The challenge is simply to grow a backbone"

Nothing to do with taxes is simple.

"it also killed small haulage businesses"

And so is now becoming part of an economic problem that even HMG has got round to noticing.

We're all at sea: Navigation Royal Navy style – with plenty of IT but no GPS

Re: "two main reasons why the Royal Navy no longer uses [paper charts]"

"One, we've never lost everything," said the captain

A man who's never heard of tempting fate. Or Murphy.

Twitter offers to cough up 80 days of annual sales to settle 'false' user count lawsuit

"Twitter has offered to pay $809.5m"

As it's the investors own money it would be a zero sum game were it not for the addition payments to the lawyers to sort it all out.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and we should feel fine

Re: Machine Learning

Now that a level of sanity has returned to the phone markets I would expect a "quality" phone to be good for at least 5 years

It depends on what you mean by a quality phone but I suspect Jedit's post is closer to the mark. A quality phone that lasts 5 years isn't going to bring continuing profits.

Re: Some rotten foundations and missing bits

For dates, add in the likes of "Friday in the octave of Easter 1312".

But "instant access to cells in spreadsheet files as if it was a database?" - isn't use of spreadsheets as databases part of the problem?

Re: How about weeding the wrong and obsolete technical 'documentation'

At best "weeding" isn't going to bring a RoI in sufficient time. In reality we all know what happens if you chuck out old documentation. Murphy arrives bearing a slightly broken piece of kit you thought had been chucked out but is (a) indispensable and (b) irreplaceable.

Re: Most of the problems have been solved

"the differences between 1/2 and 3/4 are significant"

That sort of thing is the problem. if Xv3 is so different to Xv2 it really shouldn't be Xv3 at all. It should be Yv1. There may still be a market for X to be supplied for some time to come but without the demand that Y be back compatible with it.

"But if we're not chasing the upgrade, what shall we do?"

An ever-lasting chasing of the industry's tail. Fixing the bits which were broken by the last fix of things which weren't broken followed by another bout of fixing things that aren't broken.

Re: Does it work though?

"You'd have to go to BSD to get something less bloated, more understandable, and something you're more in control of."

Size, maybe but in terms of understandable and in control of, Devuan seems to fit the bill.

A low-key good experience for Thor-oughly new penguins: Elementary OS 6, aka Odin

Re: "a Flatpak-only app store is the future"

It could be worse. It could be Snap.

I looked at Flatpak briefly. It requires that a Flatpak system be installed for the particular OS including the window manager. There was an version that seemed from the description to fit my case. It didn't.

As far as I can seen all these schemes seem to be a means of exchanging one lot of dependencies for another. Putting a directory with the application's dependencies in /opt is as effective as any but it's an old idea and, therefore, not shiny. Sigh.

-Werror pain persists as Linus Torvalds issues Linux 5.15rc2

Re: ssl?

Sort of - I think it was valgrind rather than the compiler which generated the errors. If you're doing something out of the ordinary like that you should have a comment to say why.

So I’ve scripted a life-saving routine. Pah. What really matters is the icon I give it

Re: Try living in a building...

"get them to arrange with the Royal Mail to assign a number to the building"

Maybe it might be easiest to decide on a name, get a nameplate made and stick it on the house (assuming it's not listed) because from my experience it might well be possible to get the Royal Mail to do that. Our house has had a name ever since my parents move in in 1968. It's carved in 6" high letters on a block of stone beside the gate. A few bills and the like had the name slightly wrong. Eventually I discovered that it was wrong in the PAF file that so many businesses take as the immutable standard. I rung Royal Mail to get it changed. This, of course would involve all sorts of official verification and the like, no? No. It was changed just like that. Of course things may have changed in the last 20 years.

Re: Address oddities

"Nearby Town"

I think that should be "Post Town". Nearby is not guaranteed.

It's US address formats that annoy me. They seem to always have a line for "City" but, of course, they treat as a world-wide standard address format even where it's geographical nonsense. This even pervades genealogical S/W where it can be historical as well as geographical nonsense.

Re: Photo of a wall re delivery to the wrong address

"Couriers don't seem to realise that whilst their legal customer is the sender the real customer is normally the recipient."

I've had this argument with one courier in the past. The address they'd been given was incorrect. They wouldn't change it on the basis that only the owner of the goods could do that. Just who did they think the owner was?

Dammit. Shoe museum!

Re: Try living in a building...

The house in which I grew up had a name and a number. The name was far more useful. There were only two houses on the lane. Ours was number 16.

Re: Try living in a building...

I have some of that experience. Like most along the lane we only have a name. There are only about half a dozen numbers and several of those are variations:1, 1a etc. There's another lane with almost the same name a few miles.

Re: Ah yes…

"and on one memorable time it was an 80 seater coach"

Ah, yes. Coach navigation. Coach from God's Own County to Victoria coach station. There were two drivers on board who swapped over at a half-way stop. The one who took over for the second leg got into slight navigational difficulties trying to follow the company's official route into the north London stop Golders Green bus station. I overheard a snippet of conversation "Shall I go right way or t'way I know?".

I noticed we came to a crossroads close to the bus station at right angles to the usual approach.

Nevertheless an improvement on the driver who, immediately after leaving Victoria, spread some forms over the wheel and started catching up on his paper-work while threading his way through central London.

I take it "14 Avenue" does at least have a town name added. I knew of an accounts database which, for years, had a distributor's address as street number "High Street, Somerset". I suppose most people with a smidgeon more knowledge of English geography the whoever entered it would make a reasonable guess. It was years before we sere in that part of the world and SWMBO wanted to visit the shore museum there. (No, I've no idea either.) Yes, there the business was, at the appropriate number in High Street, Street, Somerset.

Microsoft doles out Office Long Term Servicing Channel for cloud refuseniks

For those scenarios, there is the "locked-in-time" version of the productivity suite.

For those scenarios there's also LibreOffice. I wonder how much that weighed on Microsoft's decision making.

Is it OK to use stolen data? What if it's scientific research in the public interest?

Re: when is collected data stolen?

Would the folk songs collected by Cecil Sharp have been in copyright?

I'd have thoughts that data quality issues might loom at least as large as ethical. Provenance? Sample selection? Accuracy? Repeatability with independent data?

However, psychology, social sciences, AI - probably no problem.

Electron-to-joule conversion formulae? Cute. Welcome to the school of hard knocks

Re: Ask the dog - it has an 80% success rate

I think most of us have been on both sides of that in our time.

Re: "a multitude of fresh qualifications counted for naught"

And especially if the PFY can make acceptable tea.

WTF? Microsoft makes fixing deadly OMIGOD flaws on Azure your job

Re: "fixing deadly OMIGOD flaws on Azure your job"

Was "expert security off your hands" ever anything more than hype? But as regards to the volume of usage I thought Linux was the dominant OS on Azure these days. Is it just OMI that's less frequently deployed?

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81

Re: Wobbley rampacks

It looks as if a great many in IT in the UK of my son's generation started out on the Spectrum. In my generation it was punched cards. In our grandchildren's generation it's likely to be the Pi but I suspect for many the Pi will be eased out by the smartphone and the laptop. I wonder how that will work out.

Dowden out, Dorries in: Is UK data protection in safe hands?

I see one of her first acts has been to overturn a listed building status to allow demolition. It was an emergency listing put in place just after demolition was announced. How good of her to give a few seconds grace to allow for a full debate on the status.

Is UK data protection in safe hands?

No, irrespective of whoever's in charge of the department of culture media. When a government's entire raison d''etre is getting out from under a regulatory regime which seeks to protect citizens' rights none of its party can be trusted with data protection.