Posts by Doctor Syntax

Firefox 91 introduces cookie clearing, clutter-free printing, Microsoft single sign-on... so where are all the users?

"ever day I encounter at least one website with which it simply does not work at all"

I find that frequently with different browsers but that's because they won't display at all without a shedload of javascript servers being allowed.

"People get Chrome mainly to navigate their Gmails since there is no native app"

Gmail is still just mail isn't it? Any of the regular native mail clients will handle it including Thunderbird and its Seamonkey relative.

"linked to a Microsoft account (as are almost all consumer PCs)"

That stopped me in my tracks. Quite true no doubt. It's as if the monopoly investigation never happened and a clear indication that it's well past time there was another.

Chocolate beer barred from sale after child mistakes it for chocolate milk

Re: hmm what will reg readers' opinion be on something modern

'what's wrong with vim'

It's not vi.

The web was done right the first time. An ancient 3D banana shows Microsoft does a lot right, too

Re: 30 years ago....

30 years!

The business I worked for was moving - mostly had moved - from London to Leeds. I hung on until the summer because of my daughter's GCSEs. The move involved taking an HP-UX system up the road. I'd always assumed the physically huge, even for the time, drives were more or less bomb-proof. In fact the engineers heaved a sigh of relief when they were slotted back in the rack, powered up and fscked successfully.

Because of the circumstances my daughter started 6th form college that September. This September her daughter starts in the same college.

30 years!

Scientists reckon eliminating COVID-19 will be easier than polio, harder than smallpox – just buckle in for a wait

Re: Fairly worthless comparison

"t seems even that potential treatments are actively forbidden by governements and fraudulently badmouthed by leading scientists."

It appears that you've been looking in the wrong places. Perhaps you've been looking at bleach and the like.

CPAP

Dexamethasone

There's a couple of effective treatments to be getting on with. Search for the RECOVERY trial. You'll find at least one more that's been found effective and several to be trialled.

But have you stopped to think why vaccines are getting the most publicity. There are a couple of reasons. One you might have heard of - it's a well known saying about the relative merits of prevention and cure. The other - well, try to work it out for yourself.

Experience is a dear teacher but you seem to be one of those who will learn by no other.

Re: We Could, But Should We?

I don't suppose there were too many estimates of the environmental consequences either (hint - a very large global death rate would have been environmentally beneficial given that it's the human population that's the big problem). However the political effects of letting a pandemic run its course are not good as soon as people start weighing up the probability that they might not be in the survivors.

"The scientists warned eradication could take years"

It's a bit like saying science advances one death at a time except this is going to be the anti-vaxers. "Years" seems right.

Re: We Could, But Should We?

"the Government's own estimate was that lock down had killed 25,000 (actually dead before July) and would kill another 185,000 (missed cancers etc) in years to come. Those were not dead 'of covid' or 'with covid' but specifically 'without covid' / due to lock down effects."

Could we please have a citation for that to make sure you're claiming direct effects of lock down and (are there any mechanisms suggested for this) rather than deaths due to treatments not given because hospital and specifically ITU beds were occupied by COVID cases?

Engineers work to open Boeing Starliner's valves as schedule pressures mount

Re: Doesn't inspire confidence

But don't forget the WD40.

Best qualiy strategy

The Board and C suite should be on the first crewed flights. Branson and Bezos have set a precedent for this.

Activist raided by police after downloading London property firm's 'confidential' meeting minutes from Google Search

It's not all bad

They seem to have achieved a Streisand result.

If, however, he was actually arrested rather than just questioned it would appear to have been done in the wrong order. At the very least they seem to have risked a wrongful arrest suit.

Re: Loss of income? Inconvenience?

"Clearly, the property developer should have also immediately self reported to the ICO"

Only if the data was of a nature that required that.

Re: Loss of income? Inconvenience?

If the files were sitting around openly on the web then the expectation should have been that this could happen. If they didn't want that they shouldn't have left them sitting around in the open but it was entirely their own fault that they didn't ensure reality and intent didn't match.

Re: slack web security

Illegal on what basis? There's nothing in the report to say it would have come under GDPR. It doesn't appear to have been a plc so it seems unlikely that there would have been any financial regulatory implications. AFAICS they might well have regarded it as commercially confidential information in which case their only responsibility would have been to themselves.

Re: I wonder

"The fact that it was indexed on Google and directly accesible means that no password was required at all to access the data."

And if they'd reviewed the logs properly Google's crawler should have been in there as well. Didn't they arrest anyone from Google?

Samsung boss Lee Jae-yong awarded Get Out Of Jail Free card

If Samsung is currently so dependent on the continued availability of one man it's time they looked into succession planning.

Russian Arm SoC now shipping in Russian PCs running Russian Linux

"a 2010 decree requiring use of open products. Baikal said all software installed on the machines is approved by Russia's Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications and Ministry of Industry and Trade"

So now we know what they mean by "open".

Re: ambition comes at a price on the desktop

"I’d barely see most of my colleagues"

You say that as if it's a bad thing.

Apple responds to critics of CSAM scan plan with FAQs, says it'd block governments subverting its system

Re: Think about it the next time you vote

Or a phone running LineageOS?

I don't know about Google key-logging but I'm not happy about the way a recent update has resulted in all the F-Droid sourced apps are move off the favourites page every time it restarts which, with my frequency of failing to recharge, is fairly often.

Trust. Hard to gain. Easy to lose. Even harder to regain.

GitHub's npm gave away a package name while it was in use, causing rethink

Re: domain name system

Even if it's no longer being actively managed it might still be being hit for downloads and hence of wider interest. Don't devalue stability.

New GNOME Human Interface Guidelines now official – and obviously some people hate it

Re: Sticking up for Gnome 40

"but this is a trend across all OS at the moment"

That's no excuse.

Re: More forks coming

The benefit of separating desktop layer from the underlying OS is that the user can continue using whatever it is that they think works best for whatever it is they need to do. Where the desktop is integrated users have to accept whatever brain farts the vendor inflicts on them, whether it works or not. I see no indication that this in any way inhibits proprietary vendors from fixing what wasn't broken to any degree at all. In the FOSS world we can just ignore it.

Re: "the user experience (UX) strategy for the project."

UX rather than UI is always a bad start. The requirement of an interface is to present a user or client with a means of interacting that remains consistent even if the implementation changes.

I read that when Apple designed the original Mac UI they tested it with new office hires. At that time few would have had much experience with computers and none with GUIs so they were able to find out what worked best without the subjects having prior expectations.

My protocol for conducting a test would require three people for each test.

A tester who has no experience of the product being tested and a list of things to be achieved.

An expert from the design/development team. The tester is only allowed to ask and the expert is only allowed to answer questions of the pattern "Where does it tell me how to xxxxx?"

The third person is an invigilator whose nominal role is to enforce that rule but in fact is there to prevent violence between the other two.

Re: Bug: "deactivate laser" and "destroy planet" buttons adjacent | WONTFIX

"if you put them together then I automatically know that you know nothing about UI "

And you know where that appeared from in 1995, don't you?

Re: Who cares?

"decorates windows to look like XP"

Now that's just cruel.

Electrocution? All part of the service, sir!

Re: "The power lead approached the PC..."

"o ensure they would never be accidentally reset to 110V."

Never? You underestimate the power of the luser.

AI algorithms uncannily good at spotting your race from medical scans, boffins warn

It sounds very much like what archaeological osteologists have been doing for years.

All your DNS were belong to us: AWS and Google Cloud shut down spying vulnerability

Re: ISP Routers

"routers are often key components for the ISP's service so can't be easily switched out"

PlusNet's can be switched out. I've recently done this after discovering that they'd reconfigured theirs from their end (itself a worry) with the net effect of me not being able to configure my DHCP as I wish.

As the original setup had a separate VDSL modem a combined unit has actually taken the box count down.

"(?Benign)"

Bind9, maybe.

Google: Linux kernel and its toolchains are underinvested by at least 100 engineers

Re: Please stop calling computer programmers "engineers".

In the UK that might be the situation. What were the requirements in ancient Greece where the name, if not the role, originated? Applying your own definition, even by law, does not give you the rights you might think you have over language. ISTR a US state discovering that the hard way in respect of "engineer".

Re: The mythical man hour

Yup. When I read it & noted his name it struck me as a touch of nominative determinism. It sounds like far too many.

Re: Fool

I think his initial post in this thread is probably the explanation. He wanted to do kernel development work and to be paid for it. Of course that was always a possibility by getting a job with one of the corporations that actually does kernel work.

Re: Fool

"I was pointing that out because it's not immediately obvious."

IOW it's something you're reading into the post so you can disagree with it.

Re: Fool

"Not only do they have a defined person or organisation to take action against if the system should fail, but because they've bought in something, the law offers various protections in the event that the system fails in some way."

Believing that is what comes from not reading the EULA.

Re: Fool

"Corporations should never be allowed to use someone's work without payment."

Could you quote any of the open source licences which say this? Because unless the licence makes that stipulation they are allowed to do so. They're allowed by the developers who release the code that way. It might personally offend you your opinion only counts if you're one of the developers and somehow I don't think they care about taking advice from you.

Do you even know why the GPL came about? It was because RMS got pissed off with his work being taken closed by a corporation for no payment. He devised the GPL so that no corporation could do that again - not the "without payment" bit, but the taking it closed. That's what matters in the open source world.

Re: Fool

"The Linux license could be changed"

Only by getting the buy-in of all the contributors who've provided material under the GPL or by replacing that by those who disagree or can't be traced. Or the buy-in of the heirs of those who've died.

Re: Fool

AKA "the tragedy of the commons".

Re: Fool

"Everything is in fact valued in money, and all valuable things have a monetary value. "

Ahah! Somebody who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Re: Linus' bugs

It sounds to me like Linus & Google were saying the same thing.

Q: Post-lockdown, where would I like to go? A: As far away from my own head as possible

Re: The Moon - the next rubbish tip

How does he verify that it happened? Cynical, moi?

Your Computer Is On Fire, but it will take much more than this book to put it out

"Detailed diagnosis of tech industry delusion falls short of prescribing a cure"

Not necessarily to be held against it. Zeroth law of problem solving: in order to solve a problem you've got to know there is one. 1st law of problem solving: In order to solve a problem you've got to know what it is.

OTOH I'd make no such concessions to cryptocurrency "mining".

SolarWinds urges US judge to toss out crap infosec sueball: We got pwned by actual Russia, give us a break

It still makes no sense. The shareholders are the company - it's a company of shareholders. Unless there are different classes of shares the value they say was being directed to the shares of large shareholders was also directed to the shares of smaller shareholders. The crash in share values that affected them also affected the large shareholders.

A successful suit involves shareholders' funds being paid to shareholders to compensate them for loss of value plus lawyer's costs. Without the expenses it's shareholders shifting the remaining money from one pocket to another. With the costs..... Can anyone spot who actually makes money out of this?

Please, no Moore: 'Law' that defined how chips have been made for decades has run itself into a cul-de-sac

Industry (not necessarily Moore) treated the observation as indicating an exponential curve. The early stages of a sigmoidal growth curve look very much like they're exponential. It's usually sigmoidal growth that best describes what can be achieved in the real world.

Re: Moore's law expired in 1975

the reasons you might want to upgrade it mostly relate to IO rather than the CPU S/W dropping support for older but viable H/W.

FTFY

Das tut mir leid! Germany's ruling party sorry for calling cops on researcher after she outed canvassing app flaws

"Some things never change in infosec."

And not just in infosec. Paging Ms Streisand.