Posts by Doctor Syntax

Make assistive driving safe: Eliminate pedestrians

Re: Changes to the Highway Code

When I learnt to ride a bike the Highway Code said to ride just far enough out into the road to avoid drain covers. 1 1/2 feet would have been the maximum, not the minimum.

"Towns aren't planned"

Two words: Milton Keynes.

Re: On foot, on crutches, in wheelchairs

I live in an area where we have several lanes with no footpaths. It's also a popular sight-seeing area so we frequently have walkers. As the lanes have quite a lot of bends, one has a couple of right-angled bends made blind because of retaining walls on the inside. The sensible thing to do here is ignore the facing the traffic bit - keep on the outside of every bend where you can be seen by oncoming traffic. On the whole people seem to walk at random. As some of them will have driven here you'd think they'd have a driver's perspective on it but it doesn't really seem to work. Given that I've seen one idiot park up on the short stretch between a cross-roads and the worst of the blind bends maybe it's not too surprising.

You should have had an older model. They don't have any dangerous road safety features.

SWMBO's little Suzuki doesn't actually jam on brakes, it just flashes warnings which is annoying enough. It's done that to me a couple of times when braking would have been dangerous and she says it complains when she pulls out to pass parked cars.

If I ever get a new car I hope the consequences of this rubbish have made themselves clear enough for such features to be banned.

'Boombox' function sparks Tesla recall

Re: not really a recall?

And neither can anyone else which is even better.

BOFH: The Geek's Countergambit – outwitted at an electronics store

Re: Dibert has the answer

Oops. Ted.

Re: Dibert has the answer

If it was Red we'd certainly know the outcome.

Re: Dibert has the answer

The current Dilbert story seems as if Scott Adams has been reading BOFH.

UK regulators accept Google's Privacy Sandbox promises

Re: "questions remain"

No doubt they'll still charge their customers, the advertisers, the same and tell them the ads were targeted.

UK government's chief digital officer departs

Re: So her role

Actually it's probably the essential first step. If you're going to solve a problem - or problems in this case - you need to identify it.

Real-time software? How about real-time patching?

Re: Site Acceptance Test

They must have been wanting to impress you. Far safer to use an anonymous car than a mobile target. And that's not counting the risk of puncturing your skull on the untrimmed bolts holding the armour in place if it was anything like the L/R I once had a lift in.

Re: Portable? Shirley you mean luggable ...

Also running Kermit?

For a while I ended up with an Osborne or similar luggable as an office terminal. I'm not sure it would have been as generous as a 7" screen but with MSDOS and Kermit as a terminal emulator it did the job. It might be the reason why to this day I find a 6" terminal window more than adequate for the command-line.

Your data centre UPS could feed power to the smart grid, suggests research

Re: Am I Missing Something

The situation with a UPS is you have to assume you're going to need all of it starting a second from now.

As to your fleet example, a major blackout might strike about 3 in the morning and only affect the area round the depot. That doesn't mean your customers will also be affected. You're still going to want the fleet fully charged. Your sales and customer service departments aren't going to be happy if the bean-counters did a deal without telling them.

This does have the feel of a report done by people who don't live in the real world have some proposition they want to sell to the bean-counters. The mention of "cost centre" is a give-away.

NASA's InSight probe emerges from Mars dust storm

A brisk journey over some rough terrain might help.

UK government gifts new £250m hosting contract to its own joint venture

Re: Do I understand correctly

If only.

It seems as if they only own a quarter of it anyway. If they were serious about meeting their security requirements they'd own all of it.

English county council blasted for 'inept project management' in delayed SAP replacement

Maybe now's the time to get started on that.

Perhaps they should have told HR to boot itself out and replace itself with one that could competently work out what it needed.

Microsoft offers 'open' app store to draw regulators away from Activision takeover

Once the acquisition is approved there might be a slight bug in the next update or, if approval takes long enough, a forced update to Windows 12 will deal with it.

Car radios crashed by station broadcasting images with no file extension

Re: GIGO for the goddesses sake!

And another 90% for not having a factory reset, even as a H/W jumper.

KDE Community releases Plasma 5.24: It's eccentric, just like many old-timers

Re: Kameleon Desktop Environment.

"It just seemed to keep getting in my way when I wanted to do stuff."

That's the converse of my experience. I can customise it to work and look as consistently as possible from one generation to the next. It does what's needed when its needed and mostly keeps out of the way otherwise.

There's one thing I wish they'd reinstate from version 3; the ability to set the panel unhide trigger to be a corner rather than the entire edge. Rationale: a typical maximised application is likely to have stuff at the bottom of the window that needs access even if it's only the scroll bar down button and taking the mouse down to that bounces the screen bottom panel back up to cover that critical bit of the screen for a couple of seconds. Limiting the unhide to the bottom left worked well.

5G masts will be strapped to lampposts and traffic lights – once £4m project figures out who owns them

Re: 5G is no more harmful than 4G LTE

"How is the black box that transmits 5G any different to the white box that transmits my wifi signal?"

Or the small white globes that transmit even higher frequency radiation from my light fittings.

"Some set a phone mast in Birmingham on fire a couple of years ago, claiming it was some kind of mind control ray sponsored by the Illuminati and Bill Gates"

They were correct and, indeed, living proof about mind control. They just misidentified who sponsors it.

FBI seizes $3.6bn in Bitcoin after New York 'tech couple' arrested over Bitfinex robbery

The trick is choosing the time to get out.

It might still have been a sticking point when they got to court. Go for the charge that's easiest to prove.

Re: So, Lisa Monaco nabbed Ilya Lichtenstein

"sorry you didn't get the joke, old boy"

No, old boy. Intended to have been posted as a top-level comment, not onto existing thread.

If the exchange was in HK a US court might not have jurisdiction over the theft.

Re: So, Lisa Monaco nabbed Ilya Lichtenstein

After getting their Bitcoin tracing skills up to speed will the FBI work back further to trace the history of the loot before it was deposited in the exchange? It would be a shame to hand it all back if they can't be sure it was legit before it was nicked by these two.

Cynical? Moi?

Or a cloud provider in any other country where a search warrant could be obtained.

It just goes to show that law enforcement can get results by simply using the age-old due process.

And it also goes to show that somebody else's computer you don't control is somebody else's computer you don't control.

Microsoft says the internet is the nicest it's been since 2016. Obviously they didn't look at The Reg comments

Re: Really?

"For this 'research' I would like to know how the Rejects of Redmond selected and rated the sites in more detail."

This is the default approach to take to any form of survey. Who's running it and what axe are they grinding?

UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

I remember something about "making the UK the best country to do business online" or similar bragging. Not if you're a punter, it isn't.

UK science stuck in 'holding pattern' on EU funding by Brexit, says minister

Re: Why do British universities think they're still entitled to EU funding?

"Brexit is a process,"

It may have been a process but it's already been done. Boris did it. Surely he wouldn't be fibbing about that, would he?

Re: Brexit got done

The N Ireland situation was always going to be a problem.

It's very simple to state: the Good Friday agreement was predicated in N Ireland being in the EU (or possibly the Republic being out of it) so as to avoid a hard border. The UK is the United Kingdom or Great Britain and Northern Ireland is predicated in N Ireland. Having the UK out of the EU, NI being in it and NI also being in the UK is a logical contradiction.

The Protocol was the Brexiteers' fiction to try to pretend there wasn't a problem It would never stand up to reality. And let's not beat about the bush - it was the direct and unavoidable consequence of Brexit.

It's going to continue to be a problem unless the UK gets broken up and that would be an even bigger problem.

Re: Brexit got done

"Some Brits have this tendency of proudly claiming they are the fifth greatest in the world,"

Fifth greatest? Our problem is our Glorious Leader claiming us to be the greatest, not fifth greatest, at all sorts of things about which he hasn't a clue.

Brexit, the gift that keeps on giving taking.

Google Cloud takes a gap year. It may come back with very different ideas

Re: Or perhaps ...

What you describe is probably a people problem. The problem may lie with the wrong people administering the systems. Equally it might lie with the people holding the purse strings and your sysadmins & DBAs may have equivalent but different problems in getting the sign-offs to provide you with your test server. But ultimately you're using somebody else's computer as a sticking plaster to cover the self-inflicted wounds of a dysfunctional company.

Nobara Project brings whole bunch of extensions so you can frag noobs on Fedora 35

Distros intended for users who just want a platform to run whatever it is they use their computer for don't usually want and a better off without distros that push the state of the art. Bleeding edge distros exist for a different audience.

Do you trust your provider farther than you can throw them? Cloud priorities shifting in post-COVID world – IDC

with "trust" now apparently the biggest issue.

It takes time to get priorities right. It should always have been.

To err is human. To really tmux things up requires an engineer

Re: Step outside

Ever since W95 we have had Maximise and Close buttons next to each other. That has carried over to become the default in KDE. It's not such a problem now because it's normal to throw up a dialog if close has been hit with unsaved data. Back then it was unlikely that any legacy application, a.e. just about everything, would make such a check because accidentally hitting close was so unlikely.

For those unfamiliar with GUIs pre-95 close was on the system menu, on the button at the opposite end of the title bar to the minimise & maximise buttons.

A nice welcome to the job. Always good to have a boss on the defensive.

And welcome to el Reg.

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

Re: Dialogs.... time for

Long go SWMBO was working in a QC lab. Her supervisor changed the pH results to be acceptable. It didn't change the pH of the product.

Re: Users, no matter how long they might use an application, never mind their instructions

"Move back slowly until the last straight kerbstone"

No kerstones, just a dry stone wal...

Re: automated diagnosis

It's one thing automating that in-house. When a supplier does that it starts verging on looking creepy and in general the more security concious of us object. Having the user run diagnostics is one way round it. The other is to dump the information and pop up a dialog for the user to email it, showing the user exactly what's in the email so they can check.

Re: users eh?

I've no objection to studding a baseball bat with nails but a cricket bat? No.

Re: I was once responsible ....

MOTD only showed until the main application menu appeared. It's possible, of course, that some elements of the main application could have got burned in...

Re: Just like me and trackpads

"Even managed to settle down MeDearOldMum's recalcitrant unit "

I thought you were your MeDearOldMum's recalcitrant unit.

Re: Return code ignored

When I wor nobbut a lad I spent school holidays working in a worsted mill. In practice anyone in the workflow to produce a piece of cloth was inspecting the previous stage's work because if it wasn't right they couldn't do their own job properly. That was what enabled the mills to produce a high quality produce.

Applying that principle to the situation you describe I'd say it was the programmer's job to question the spec otherwise the product is likely to be industry standard crap.

In practice pretty well any programming work I did was under what I suppose is now an extinct title of "analyst programmer". On a rare occasion where someone had delivered an alleged specification I spent quite a while chasing him to clarify ambiguities.

Re: Simples...

And if you're doing something more complex you might need to save the work in its interim form to resume later. With several different layers in use .xcf is what you need. Exporting to .png or whatever is just what you don't need.

Photon fantastic: James Webb Space Telescope spies its first starlight

Re: I'm not worried any more

Actually I now understand the reference to fractions of microns in a previous article . In effect they're polishing the mirror now. In spaaace.