Posts by Doctor Syntax

Visual Basic 6 returns: You've been a good developer all year. You have social distanced, you have helped your mom. Here's your reward

"So does the community edition of Delphi"

No it doesn't. Not even my ancient Professional copy of Delphi has done that for years.

No Linux support.

Lazarus is where it's at.

Nasdaq's 32-bit code can't handle Berkshire Hathaway's monster share price

Re: Use of floating point numbers ?

The much maligned Imperial system of weights and measures had little islands of binary sanity. Apart from ha'pennies and farthings in currency there were pounds and ounces (binary ratios are particularly suitable for weighing) and stones, quarters and hundredweights. It was just the bridge between pounds and stones which was irrational.

British bank TSB says it will fix days-long transaction troubles tonight

"The company should be aware of the negative publicity that outages can generate, with the problems of 2018 having caused the previous CEO to lose his job and cost the bank £200m."

It needs to cost a bank far more than £200m before lessons get learned.

'A massive middle finger': Open-source audio fans up in arms after Audacity opts to add telemetry capture

Oh, look

Only the second (and third) post. I suppose it makes an improvement on a first post going so massively against the grain.

Re: F**k It

The move was audacious.

Broadband plumber Openreach yanks legacy copper phone lines in Suffolk town of Mildenhall en route to getting the UK on VoIP

Re: "The handset will plug into a router"

Until there's a power cut. That's where the original, still connected handset comes into its own.

"The legacy copper network has proven particularly expensive to maintain as the cables and telephone poles used are exposed to the elements, and thus susceptible to weather damage."

My telephone connection is entirely underground except for the green footway boxes connecting bits of underground cables together. My neighbours' connections are all strung from posts for the last few 10s of metres. If/when fibre connections replace them are made my guess is that all of them, including mine, will be overhead.

Privacy activist Max Schrems on Microsoft's EU data move: It won't keep the NSA away

Simple rule of thumb. If your data is processed by any large business it's probably not private and if it's processed by a US corporation or other business with a SU exposure it's certainly not private.

Gone in 60 electrons: Digital art swaggers down the cul-de-sac of obsolescence

Re: That's a feature, not a bug

"gives more money to the content creators"

Maybe. To the publishers, certainly.

I wonder whether 2021 digital technologies will still be available in 2031.

FTFY

Re: Technology repeating

Nothing new under the sun.

It's still an over-elaborate and dubiously reliable solution to an already solved problem.

Google will make you use two-step verification to login

I finally gave them the start of the Unix epoch and it kept them quiet. If enough people did that maybe they'd get the message that they're being treated with exactly the amount of respect they deserve.

Re: Usability?

"Once again the addition of more security will result in more work for the user."

Translate that to "the most minimal password the user can contrive".

Re: Are these people real?

The question to ask is why do these bastards want a password? If it's to protect my interests then I'll use a random string of characters and let KeePass do the heavy lifting. If it's for some arcane purposes of their own (hello iPlayer BBC Sounds) it gets Passw0rd1 or something appropriate.

China sprayed space with 3,000 pieces of junk. US military officials want rules to stop that sort of thing

Re: China does not care what the USA says

"They will only change if debris falls on Xi Jinping's head."

I see Beijing is just about within reach of the the current bit of pending fallout. A touch of Karma is all that's needed.

Which? warns that more than 2 million Brits are on old and insecure routers – wagging a finger at Huawei-made kit

Re: "white-label devices sourced from China"

That does assume there is such a thing as secure kit as opposed to the choice of kit whose insecurities have been discovered and kit whose insecurities remain unknown. Yes, I'm feeling pessimistic today.

Re: Tech is slowly taking control.. because we let it.

"Here's a suggestion to ISPs: supply non-configurable routers."

I'm not happy with that idea. My ISP in effect did that. They "upgraded" remotely and took away my ability to run admin level. They've frozen me out of being able to make changes to the DHCP settings I had in place. I suppose the best thing would be to replace it but then it's a matter of finding smething that's neither a load of cack nor over-priced. In my case overpriced would include paying for an included wireless access point as the location of the master socket isn't the best place to get a good signal out.

JET engine flaws can crash Microsoft's IIS, SQL Server, say Palo Alto researchers

MicroSoft's response

Go away, little people. Stop bothering us.

Basecamp CEO issues apology after 'no political discussions at work' edict blows up in his face

Re: What part of that so people have issues with?

It might be a case of "Mission accomplished, everyone else: as you were.".

Signal banned for booking obviously targeted ads? That story's too good to be true, Facebook claims

No, just one house. A blue plaque on the other.

WTH are NFTs? Here is the token, there is the Beeple....

"Does that make the entire blockchain illegal?"

If it does it will probbly make it more valuable. Such is the way of the world.

Yahoo! and! AOL! sold! for! $5bn! as! Verizon! abandons! media! empire! dreams!

4.4 + 4.8 = 5

That's not a media empire dream, it's a nightmare.

Philanthropist and ex-Microsoft manager Melinda Gates and her husband Bill split after 27 years of marriage

Don't be mean

Think about the mode.

Or to spell it out, wealth concentrated in the hands of the few doesn't benefit mankind if vast numbers are in poverty.

When I read about people raising "incredible children" I wonder why they didn't raise them to tell the truth.

but hey people are still given little choice but to buy it

FTFY

"A 'piece of crap' has nearly 90% of the market, Linux has 8%."

Which is not surprising after decades of strong-arming manufacturers to pre-load it onto just about every PC on the planet except for Macs. Even a laptop bought without Windows comes with an un-activated copy of Windows on it.

By your argument a diet of burgers and Coke must be one of the best humanity could subsist on.

Don't confuse heavy marketing with excellence of product.

Microsoft demotes Calibri from default typeface gig, starts fling with five other fonts

Re: American Psycho

"like a paint catalogue's white tint page, with fifty different names for the same shade of white."

From experience working with equivalent in textiles the many shades of white and many shades of black are real, especially when you run chromatograms of the latter.

Re: Solution looking for a problem?

The Techcrunch article linked previously shows them all to have different metrics. That's a significant difference because it buggers up layouts.

Upvote for Ladybird books - fond but distant memories of teaching the kids to read. Not so much for your Oxford Reading Tree which want to use Javascript to do anything at all - why?

Re: Bah!

I think I know enough about fonts (use Arial, or else improve things by using any font that doesn't have either the India/lima/one or Oscar/one problem)

FTFY

Re: word doc != artwork

"for the time required to extract said artwork "

Right click>Edit in external tool>Save from Gwenviews

Takes seconds, always assuming that what's embedded isn't some stupid resolution or a humungous image of which only a tiny portion is on view. (I had a word document which included two tiny portraits. It turned out that both were on the same original image of a page and the entire page image was embedded twice. Why do WP programs say "Crop" when they don't mean it?)

Re: re: No substantial changes;

"One step forward, two steps back."

That's not how Microsoft see it.

Re: Don't forget the users with reading difficulties

"Some will blame it on their software and the only solution is to get a Office 365 subscription to fix it."

Anew version of the ploy that worked so well when every new version of Word had a new .doc format that wasn't backward compatible.

Re: Microsoft’s new default font options, rated

It reminds me of the stencils we used to label diagrams before Letraset arrived.

Terminal trickery, or how to improve a novel immeasurably

I remember an HP SE arriving to remove the shipping strut from a new tape drive to find I'd already done it. At that time TORX screws were new and fairly uncommon but I happened to have a set of bits in my screwdriver set. That was the set with the Intel Inside sticker. It fell off the back of some tower box I was working on and stuck rather more firmly to the screwdriver lid so I left it there.

Re: I'm a word wrangler...

Yes, we've noticed.

Re: Novel interference

It's not unique to novels. Even here typing gets corrupted between clicking Submit and its reappearing in larger font as a posted comment.

For anything longer it's advisable to take a newly cooked bit of prose and leave it to rest as they say on the cookery programmes.

Intel laid me off for being too old, engineer claims in lawsuit

Moral of the story: if you're already freelance you have the best management you'll ever find so don't go permie.

Re: Another one?

"So in fact the cause-effect relationship might be just the other way round"

That's what I was thinking except the hostility doesn't need to be particularly ageist. It can be generalised hostility to staff who are regarded as an unnecessary expense. Those staff who can get out do so.

Bill to protect UK against harmful foreign investment becomes law

Re: re: Jaguar

I can remember Mt Gannex himself talking bollocks about 'the white heat of technology.

Shortly before cancelling TSR2.

UK watchdog would cease to enforce data protection law if Supreme Court sided with Google, its lawyer tells judges

Seconded. Gareth's court reports are excellent.

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

"And remember, there was no Internet to look these things up!"

Even when there was, it would be on the end of the cable you were trying to sort out.

Re: "Well Analysis - New Knowledge"

Obligatory https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-08-19

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?