Posts by Doctor Syntax

Can't get that printer to work? It's not you. It's that sodding cablin.... oh beautiful job with that cabling, boss

Re: Blame the Cable

Way, way more than two. Does it use H/W control & if so which lines? (Memory says there were a couple of alternative conventions.) Then there are D25s & D9s. With D9s whoever laid out the board headers hadn't been told that the pin numbering on a header isn't the same as that on a D connector so a plain ribbon cable won't help*. And if all else fails a wrong gender connector can be thrown into the mix.

* Got caught out by that one in reverse back in the early days. Spotted that the pin numbers on a 26 way header didn't correspond to the numbers on the D connector & started to wire up a custom cable. Oh, look, if you just use a ribbon...

Stealthy Linux backdoor malware spotted after three years of minding your business

Re: What backdoor?

The linked article has the details. It installls the appropriate config files for systemd to start it up like any other service.

UK government gives Automated Lane Keeping Systems the green light for use on motorways

Re: 37 MPH...

but they generally stay in the first lane "out of the way" so to speak (unless over taking)

For some values of overtaking. The M62 eastbound from Chain Bar comes to mind with HGVs joining from the M606. Two lanes of HGVs grinding up the hill with at best a speed differential of about 0.1mph and not necessarily in favour of the vehicle in the "faster" lane. Eventually, long after my time using it, it got a much longer slip lane.

Re: Thought experiment

"The logs might be rolling back relative to the lorry, but relative to the lamp post next to it, it'll still be moving forwards."

Not necessarily. Last year I was driving up a steep hill near home. Previously, after descending the hill I'd passed a big trailer loaded with hay bales making its way to the hill. Near the top the trailer had had a partial load-shed. These bales are large cylinders, about 2 metres dia & about the same length packed into wrappers. They're heavy. Fortunately the bales had come off askew and run into the site of the road otherwise they'd have been able to roll downhill for a few hundred metres to confront whatever was following.

Re: Rolling roadblock ...

"It has the potential to significantly reduce the duration of any jam, to the benefit of all motorists using that road."

It might, but not in the way you think. Self-driving car maintains gap to car in front. Car from adjacent lane pops into the gap. Self-driving car slows to maintain gap. Next car in adjacent lane does same. The lane with the self-driving car becomes static, the adjacent lane at least partially empties into it in front of the self-driving car leaving room for some of the traffic in the lane adjacent to that to move over.

Re: Biting the hand of reasonability

"we really can't test the safety of systems incrementally on *live humans."

Perhaps at the university of Minnesota?

Re: UK Transport Minister

Or no further knowledge at all.

Re: Naysayer

"I don't trust this government but they might be right that 'smart' motorways are safer but it doesn't matter."

As a driver I try to avoid them as far as possible. I look on the hard shoulder as being a backup. Over the years I've had to use it about three times. The notion that you'll be able to make it to a refude is sheer optimism. I wonder if anyone in DoT drives on motorways. If they do I'd hate to be a passenger with them. It's all reminiscent of that famous non-driving Minister of Transport, Barbara Castle.

Re: Idiocy

There'll be a lot of synergy between the two - but not in a good way.

UK government resists pressure to hold statutory inquiry into Post Office Horizon scandal

Re: Statutory inquiry

Dammit. "not presented"!

This seems to be a serious lack of political judgement. It's become a public scandal. There are brownie points to be gained by clearing it up. Failing to do so could lead to suspicions that BoJo or some of his henchmen had some involvement. On the assumption that they didn't there seems to be no good argument for digging their heels in. Being dragged kicking and screaming into giving in, as seems possible, looks like a lack of authority; setting up a statutory enquiry in the first place would have looked like wielding it.

Re: It's not just an IT scandal

" It's a gross miscarriage of justice that has shown gaping flaws in the UK's judicial system and its unwarranted deference to the establishment."

Could you please take us step by step through your argument here, paying particular attention on why deliberate concealment on the part of the prosecution is a flaw in the whole system or the result of deference. It would help if you could illustrate this from your experience of trial procedure.

Re: If statutory inquiry takes too long, that is a fault of the statutory inquiry system

Firstly, public figures are accountable if evidence exists against them. Secondly, were the management of the Post Office public figures - had you, for instance, ever heard of any of them?

Re: Statutory inquiry

Evidence was produced. By the prosecution. What was lacking was evidence to refute the prosecution's case.

It is not the judge's role to investigate and seek out evidence.

What seems to have happened here is a failure (for want of a better word) of the PO to provide the defence with information about the flaws in the system. This disadvantages everyone else involved in the trial from find out the fact.

Re: Statutory inquiry

"Why did judges not know about software evaluation, CHECK or CREST certified technical testing of software, how System Administrators manage user accounts and query the PO lawyers on them?"

These were, or should have been, facts brought to the attention of the juries. It is the juries who determine facts, not judges although the latter do sum up the evidence for the jury as well as acting as referees in terms of application of the law.

The juries (and, for that matter, judges) didn't know because they were not resented with evidence of it.

Shadow over Fedora 34 as maintainer of Java packages quits with some choice words for Red Hat and Eclipse

Re: Hell has frozen over!

It's a start.

I used that for a while. Eventually I was concerned that as other stuff moved on there might be a problem with backward compatibility. Specifically stuff I expected to work in Lazarus didn't seem to work on TDE so eventually I moved on.

"If not, it is likely you would much prefer that to the current state of KDE."

First question, yes.

Second more complex. The one thing I missed in 4 and still miss in 5 is the ability to confine unhiding an auto-hid panel to a corner rather than to the whole edge. And 5 certainly wasn't ready for the big time when incorporated into Debian & via that into Devuan (and it wasn't an LTS version either). The current version (as in Mint), however, seems fine.

An exception is that Gwenview seems to have acquired some misfeature that I take to be an effort at response to gestures; when scrolling thorough a n image it will suddenly decide that what I really intended was to swith to the next image even though I hadn't taken advantage of the specific button provided for this. However that's not been enough to prompt me to look very hard to see if it can be turned off. On the whole It's still a better option for me than, say Cinnamon which would be my second choice. And "choice" really is the relevant word here.

"the first time since GNOME 3.0 came out that there's a real rethinking of the basic desktop experience."

As an onlooker from a safe distance I wonder to what effect? That last real rethink prompted two new desktop projects to reinstate the original desktop experience. Would it actually be something that would lure me away from KDE?

At least in the Linux/BSD world we don't have to just get on with what a vendor chooses to inflict on us.

Does the boss want those 2 hours of your free time back? A study says fighting through crowds to office each day hurts productivity

Re: What an outdated view

"remote working does not allow teams to collaborate"

Of course it doesn't. You'd never be able to create something like an operating system kernel or all the rest of the S/W than makes an OS or package it for distribution working that way.

Re: No company ever forced its staff to do 90 minute commutes...

That's only half of it. The other half would be stopping the brownfield sites nonsense. A brownfield site is where there used to be jobs. Convert those to housing and there are (a) less places where jobs could be created and (b) more people looking for jobs. Do that and the area's commuting problems get worse.

Can HMG make things worse than that? They surely can. In an old rural industrial area like mine there are a lot of older houses. They're part of the character that planners want to keep. We have one or possibly both sides of the road lined with parked cars because there's no off-street parking, no off-street anything except the house & back yard or maybe 6 feet of empty space in front of a basement or six feet of path and flowerbed. So by mandating EVs as the only available vehicles where are the replacements for the current parked vehicles going to be charged? If it becomes impractical to own a car any longer and no local employment WFH is going to be the only option other to create an underclass of people who can't find any work they can get to. Does the new, shiny neighbourhood plan make provision for dealing with this? Of course it doesn't. It's a plan for the last few decades rather then the next few.

Re: Up next

As per TFA - it might be obvious but there's still manglements to persuade.

Re: No company ever forced its staff to do 90 minute commutes...

I don't know where you work but a great proportion of jobs are in cities so large that they require a few thousand square miles of commuter belt to house the workers. Property within 15/20 miles of work is likely to be hideously expensive and it's only practical to supply a small percentage of that space with single ride public transport so that property in that percentage is also likely to be hideously expensive..

Yes, "we" as a society have done this to ourselves. "We" as a collection of individuals haven't. It's been an article of planning policy for all my working life and earlier to separate workplaces and homes. It was done in the name of getting rid of slums surrounding factories. No thought was given as to how the gap between the two was to be bridged; hand-waving assisted public transport was probably envisaged.

It was stupid. It is stupid. Will you ever get the planners to admit it was stupid? Not until the whole lot collapses in a heap. Hopefully the present situation might give it the push it needs but if the "come back to the office" movement succeeds we're going to have to wait for an even bigger failure.

Re: "Maybe a handful of people can work remotely"

Time to get out whilst there's a company to get out from if that's their grasp of what's happening around them.

Harrow? Out in the Chilterns and beyond there are fields where these grey woolly things live.

Re: You misquoted your own poll

For those commuting by train this days in, days at home alternation is going to play havoc with the economics of season tickets.

"near-weekly suicide attempts by fellow Tube users."

Sheep on the line was one of British Snail's excuses in my commuting days. Less funny were the couple of occasions of sleepers on the line (wooden or possibly concrete, ties in USian-speak) somewhere around Ruislip.

Words to strike fear into admins' hearts: One in five workers consider themselves 'digital experts' these days

Re: Lusers vs. IT Gods

How long did the CIO lag before moving the "official" network to TCP/IP - or just to yours?

Re: Digital experts....

"until I am thick"

That should curtail the length of screaming.

Actually, the best way to kill this particular issue would have been to murmur something about auditors.

Re: Buried the lede

The difference is that car manufacturers have spent many years concentrating on refining their products to make sure cars just work. The IT industry has spent years adding more an more complexity so that computers all too often continue to only just work. However, with encouraging the motor industry with aspirations to self-driving cars they seem to have found a way to close the disparity.

The news will delight IT administrators charged with supporting them

So it should: "You're an expert now. You fix it."

UK Court of Appeal rules Tiny Computers' legal remains can sue Micron and Infineon over 2002 DRAM price-fixing cartel

I'd have thought that any money due as a result of price fixing would be to those who actually paid the fixed prices: those who bought the computers.

PCs continue to sell like hot cakes and industry can barely keep up with demand – analyst

It looks as if not everyone agrees with the notion that you can do everything you need to do on a tablet.

Emotet malware self-destructs after cops deliver time-bomb DLL to infected Windows PCs

My immediate thought was why wait several months? Was it that the malware only checked in with its C&C server at rare intervals or was it time taken to gain political/legal backing?

Don't cross the team tasked with policing the surfing habits of California's teens

Re: PCB Assembly

Sometimes this - deservedly - backfires on the unions.

For some reason the union representing scientists in the NI Civil Service (a) seemed to have more money than those for the general service grades and (b) was quite complacent about the fact that we were paid less than the equivalent general service grades and had crap promotion prospects.

One day they inveigled everyone to take a day off which wasn't quite called a strike because pay negotiations were going badly. Afterwards it transpired it wasn't even our pay that was being negotiated, it was general service grades'. A union official came to try to pacify the staff and got roasted. In this case the staff kept their jobs but the union must have lost at least 30 subscriptions members.

Re: High-level manglement can be just as much a nuisance as unions

"What I was proposing was that they had to do some work, instead of enjoying expensive lunches at fancy restaurants."

Until some more entrepreneurial firm realised the advantages, took their work and ate their lunches.

Re: Free school meals

"From now on I attach this thank you message to my every post until they fix battery drainage problem they introduced in iOS 14.4.2."

At least that'll be one AC we can recognise.

US Supreme Court puts a stop to FTC extracting big bucks from crooks to refund victims

Re: How strange

Only if it has the legal right to do that. It appears that it doesn't. The remedy lies with the legislators.

BOFH: Postman BOFH's Special Delivery Service

But not neessarily the intended front garden IME.

Re: Peace and quiet

"anyone who thinks saving money on work space will pay in spite of increasing the stress and discomfort levels on workers, is a moron."

Sadly, there's no shortage of those in manglemnt.

Re: Peace and quiet

"I think I'm running a bit of a temperature"

Without explaining that it's your laptop that's running a bit hot.

Re: Peace and quiet

And that's against strong competition.

India seeks locally developed open source CRM and ERP for government users

Re: Here we go again...

"All companies"

last time I looked India was a country and not a company. I can certainly see a logic in this from the point of view of data sovereignty.

OK, so we don't have a flying car yet, but this is possibly even better: The Internet of Beer

I remember an outfit that was stealing them and melting them down for scrap. I don't think the tracker would help with that. The cheeky bit was that the forensic lab started out as a wing of an industrial lab and they were bringing the ingots in to the industrial side to get an analysis to show when they were sold on.

Something went wrong but we won't tell you what it is. Now, would you like to take out a premium subscription?

An interesting feasibility study. Work out how many possible calculations are possible for n digits. Then work out where you're going to get a list of "right" answers against which to validate them.

Re: Preemptive Ticket Closing?

"a well-known Outsourcing Company (known for comprehensively screwing customers)"

You worked for all of them?

My current point of interest is a login screen which will throw an error on the first attempt irrespective of what credentials if any are given to it. It might, I suppose, be an attempt to discourage any bot with a set of leaked credentials for the site. I now just click on the login button before entering anything and then log in.

I suppose an ideal way of handling those would be to automate bundling up the entire pile of crap and bundle it back to the third party's support email - assuming they have one and failing that the CEO's email address and simply advise the user that there's been an error which has been passed to $Named£rdParty. Bonus points for giving the user the ticket number to chase up themselves.

39 Post Office convictions quashed after Fujitsu evidence about Horizon IT platform called into question

Re: Lock up

"It aint gonna happen, most will have either moved on or more likely gone into retirement by now."

No reason not to prosecute.

Microsoft loves Linux – as in, it loves Linux users running Linux desktop apps on Windows PCs

"the fragmentation of desktops and distributions still stops it from ever happening."

Ah, yes. The fragmentation of desktops. Nothing like Windows where W10 is just like W7 is just like W2K etc (leaving out a couple that even Windows fans would be hard pushed to praise).

I've got news for you. If you run Windows you're stuck with whatever look MS push out today. If it doesn't work for you, tough, just use it all the same. If you have a choice of desktops you have...well...choice. Maybe that's too hard a concept to deal with?

What's that? You can change the wallpaper? That's fine.