Posts by Doctor Syntax

What's this about a muon experiment potentially upending Standard Model of physics? We speak to one of the scientists involved

Re: Penny in the air?

"Maybe I can get a promotion to manglement when I return to work ... ?"

No, you need to do more work on your IQ.

‘Can COVID-19 vaccines connect me to the internet?’

Re: Not necessarily conspiracy nuts

This is all very well except people are prepared to believe the most far-fetched ideas rather than the simple ones. Schools have been doing a terrible job of teaching critical thinking for generations.

Re: The logic of the conspiracy nuts baffles me.

"complaining about their slow broadband and lack of connectivity"

And insisting that the next generation of mobile technology interferes with their brain (true but not in the way they mean) or gives you the disease de jour.

The answer's "no" but the good news is that it doesn't lower your IQ any further.

Well done. You dodged the comment about Bill Gates having plenty of bucks.

Or maybe you didn't.

Feature bloat: Psychology boffins find people tend to add elements to solve a problem rather than take things away

I rather like the saying that a design isn't complete until there's nothing left that can be taken away. It took me years to realise that that was so often the case.

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

"It's suggested this won't happen again"

What won't happen again?

This particular problem - maybe not now it's fixed unless, of course, somebody reverts to an older version or looks at the new code and thinks "That's not right for a child"?

Or developing against an insufficiently detailed spec that assumes culturally specific knowledge on behalf of the developer?

British gambling giant Betfred told to pay stiffed winner £1.7m jackpot after claiming 'software problem'

Re: If BetFred have a valid legal case ...

Maybe the S/W came with an industry-standard deny-all 50 page EULA but in this case the end-user was BetFred.

I suppose rigorous testing was dismissed as an unnecessary expense.

Website maker Wix embarks on weird WordPress-trashing campaign, sends 'influencer' users headphones from 'WP'

Re: Exit Strategy

Ditto but in my case it was looking at what the pages are like with NoScript in operation: a big list of links.

Ex-Geeks staff lose legal bid to claw back withheld training costs from final paycheques

OK, let me rephrase that. Does it have many employees who wouldn't be/haven't been in this position on leaving early?

I wonder if Geeks Ltd employs many experienced staff who didn't have to pay for training.

Apple extends Find My support to third-party vendors including Belkin, Dutch bike maker VanMoof, and Chipolo

When they can track SWMBO's specs I might buy.

Belgian police seize 28 tons of cocaine after 'cracking' Sky ECC's chat app encryption

Re: Encyrption back door?

"So presumably either the messages were not encrypted, or the platform got hacked and someone installed a keylogger."

Or the service mediated the key exchange and kept copies or was being monitored.. End to end encryption is fine so long as nobody else knows the keys.

UK reseller sues Microsoft for £270m in damages claiming prohibitive contracts choke off surplus Office licence supplies

Re: "Earlier this year it slashed the length of support perpetual licence holders could expect."

"Perpetual for the life of the machine was their usual claim in the olden days."

IOW they didn't mean perpetual.

Somehow I can't work up much sympathy about someone not being able to make enough money out of selling Office licences.

Privacy activist Max Schrems claims Google Advertising ID on Android is unlawful, files complaint in France

Re: This is so Googlish...

"Clearly welding extra money on phones for development of Android isn’t going to be favourable with users"

Go back to your 2nd paragraph. Android was and OS project before Google took it over - and they still have to make the kernel OS because of GPL. If the smartphone manufacturers had chosen to collaborate in developing it - as, for instance, Intel has with the kernel - they could have provided themselves with a GPL core. It would still have raised the problem of non-collaborating manufacturers trying to use it so they'd need to have added a non-GPL collaborative userland. Of course the costs would have been added to the purchase cost but spread out over many of millions of units and wouldn't favour one make over another.

TL:DR It didn't have to have turned out as it did.

Personally, I don't trust banks trusting a mobile OS.

Re: Worth noting

There's an entirely different way of looking at this.

An OS is simply a part of a computing device. Without one the device is incomplete. A vendor can develop their own, buy it in or, as a middle way, develop one in collaboration with other vendors. Developing their own was, of course, the original way of doing things.

The OS can be supplied to the purchaser by various means. It could be licences as a one-off payment as part of the original package. It could be leased. It could be a mixture of initial payment with an optional support contract. It could be ad-supported. And, of course, the collaborative development approach* has enabled the free download of Linux and the BSDs inter alia.

It would have been feasible for smartphone manufacturers to have got together to develop a Linux distro which could have been provided to their customers as part of the one-off payment for the device. However Google has managed to divide and conquer them with its own Linux distro at the ongoing expense to their customers of eternal slurping.

*If you look carefully you'll find that H/W makers such as Intel contribute a lot of Linux development so in fact one-off payment as part of the the H/W applies even if you run some other OS. We Linux users thank you Windows users for your contributions.

Re: "We may see a market for paid mobile OSes start to develop."

How about we make that paying for a specific service such as email? In that case, yes. I pay for a domain and for someone to provide an email service for that domain. It gives me the freedom to choose not to use an ISP email address and hence to change ISP if I wish and also freedom from having my activity tracked by "free" email providers.

I need to have a gmail address as the system ID for my Android phone. It's actually a garbage address with no meaningful personal ID attached - and now Google seem to want me to provide its profile with a date of birth on "legal" grounds. The legality of that demand seems to be negative under GDPR.

Re: That's what you get when software has to cost nothing

"an old spare tower PC I had at the time, I ended up with a very expensive doorstop"

Almost by definition something that's old and spare is no longer expensive as you'd already written off its value. And if you'd kept the Windows distribution disk (or did you transfer the licence to another machine) you'd have been able to reinstall it.

Re: That's what you get when software has to cost nothing

"They are just people who need a tool to accomplish a job and use the best one they can find or afford."

I seem to spend a lot of time these days putting together various PDFs including the weekly one for my wife's patchwork group* and the more occasional but bigger ones from our history group's out of print books**. I've no idea what Windows & Mac software would be would do or cost but in all cases final assembly is done by the simple pdfunite, image manipulation by Gwenview, Gimp, Pinta and Kolorpaint as required, OCR of scanned pages*** with ocrmypdf****. Vi is the tool of preferences for sorting out the OCR artefacts although sed would be an alternative. QGIS handles occasional mapping work. LibreOffice, of course does the word processing and spreadsheets and conversion to PDF. I seriously doubt that I could find a more useful set of tools for any amount of money whether I could afford it or not.

* SWMBO does her illustrated notes by hand, rather like that old book on BASIC, I do the photography. NextCloud syncs the results between our laptops, both of course, running Linux.

** The PDFs produced for the printers with whatever tools were used there are far too big. I discovered that Word lies when it "crops" images. The .docs were bloated by masked by uncropped images, in one case multiple copies. From LibreOffice it was a case of Edit with external program using Gwenview to crop and reduce the resolution.

*** The scanner on my Brother AIO saves PDFs to an ancient Buffalo NAS which I assume runs an ancient Linux, otherwise I'd point it at the Pi running NextCloud on a more recent Linux.

****The inevitable OCR layout curdling resulting from the image not being precisely aligned for scanning is dealt with by a tool I knocked up years ago using Lazarus to deal with the same problem in downloads from archive.org. I could have used Delphi for that. I last used Delphi about the same time as I last used MS Office - about 14 or 15 years ago.

Re: That's what you get when software has to cost nothing

"Tell, what I am missing out at?"

All the BSODs. Surely you miss those (like a hole in the head).

Re: That's what you get when software has to cost nothing

You don't get the phone that runs Android for free. The phones might cost a bit more without the Google contribution but the underlying co-operative development model of Linux would still minimise that.

Greenland's elections just bolstered China's tech world domination plan

Re: Nothing rare about rare earths

Wine. Mmm.

"But keeping the chinese out of the loop would probably be a good idea."

I don't doubt they'd want to keep the US out as well.

The consequence of not mining something today is that it's still there to be mined tomorrow.

DoorDash delivery drivers try to manipulate the food biz's payment algorithm to earn a living wage in gig economy

Re: Workers, unite!

The C19th introduced the large scale waged economy, replacing the self-employment industrial* economy of previous centuries.

* Agriculture was a different matter.

Re: Pimping 2.0

"traditional employment models"

It depends on what you mean by "traditional".

A tradition hereabouts was that of the domestic textile industry which was essentially that of self-employment. In fact my father was the only one I can trace in my male line who spent his entire working life in what you probably consider a traditional employment model.

Cybercrooks targeting UK organisations started 2020 strong only for attacks to wither away by Christmas

Maybe they'd made their annual quota early.

Are these numbers of all attacks or just the ones that succeeded? If the latter it could be that at last some businesses are starting to take security seriously.

Yahoo! Answers! will! be! wiped! from! the! internet! next! month!

Re: Acronym

You forgot to ! the !s.

Re: "since it was getting less and less eyeballs"

It helped if you squinted at the answers.

IBM creates a COBOL compiler – for Linux on x86

Re: COBOL

I once got a handed a system to work on of which the C component was obviously somebody's "My first C program". "Somebody" was the boss and he'd been a COBOL programmer. He'd discovered macros and introduced a few - MOVE was one - to make it a bit more COBOL like. As I worked on it I realised that some of the code I needed to modify was wrapped up in some of the instances of the macros so eventually (fairly quickly, in fact) I just ran the whole thing through cpp. This was actually the distant 2nd or, as I discovered some months later, 3rd biggest problem that the system had.

LG Electronics finally gives up cellphone business

Re: Damn

"Have had it for four or five years."

That's LG's problem - people forgetting they're supposed to keep sending their phones for landfill.

Their 'next job could be in cyber': UK Cyber Security Council launches itself by pointing world+dog to domain it doesn't own

Re: Why?

"If the answer to the above is yes then can someone please tell me (us!) what the reason is?"

Because no govt dept. wants to be left without one.

Re: ballet dancers

They spent too much time at the barre.

"Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport"

A good example of why I prefer to leave the second comma out of their name.

Yep, you're totally unique: That one very special user and their very special problem

Re: Universal Ergonomics

I usually explain that they're specially designed to be equally incomprehensible in all languages.

Re: (Can't...stop...the... voices....)

NextCloud on a Pi as the NAS. Nextcloud client on the laptop just has a look round on start-up, syncs if it finds a network with the server on it, shrugs & waits until next time if it doesn't. As the server has a shared folder sor stuff that I have to work on for SWMBO it quietly syncs the two laptops.

Re: (Can't...stop...the... voices....)

"I am NOT spending the rest of my life being blamed for the fact that she lost all of her photos for the fifth, sixth, and seventh time."

When my cousin's wife lost all her photos and everything else for the first and only time - Windows & ransomware - it was a live Linux CD that got them back (early ransomware wasn't that clever, it didn't actually overwrite the original files) and installation of Linux that has stopped it happening again.

Re: (Can't...stop...the... voices....)

Having to open a terminal to get something to work is rare. Choosing to open a terminal because it's easier and/or less opaque than the GUI alternative is less so.

A more frequent use of a terminal session is do stuff like whois or ping because I like to see who and what might be lurking behind some link somebody's trying to interest me in. The most frequent, of course, is to use a Real Editor if I've got some big chunk of text to operate on.

Yep, the 'Who owns Linux?' case is back from the dead

Re: Does the verdict on Oracle vs Google

SCO, as was, did not come from any sewer. SCO were a perfectly respectable company selling a good small-system Unix*. It was the basis of a lot of SME on-prem business systems in the '80s, '90s & early 00s.

However their pricing reflected a near-monopoly situation. When Linix came along they didn't have sufficient commercial nous to recognise viable competitor when they saw it. They should have adjusted their price. Not to zero but to one which reflected their quality advantage over early Linux but recognising that they were competing with free-as-in-beer in terms of functionality.

After the ensuing debacle resulting from Linux becoming a suitable platform for running the likes of Oracle & Informix they were bought out by a business that decided that litigation was their only salvation. That's when things got awry.

*Originally they were a reseller of Xenix but then took over development of the next generation.

Binraider:"The case has already been tested in court at length; denied."

TFA:"SCO Group mostly lost"

The key is in that word "mostly".

Re: @FIA - A real cancer

"There are not many Linux users in the world"

I take it you're an iPhone user.

Subaru parks plans to make 58,000 cars due to brakes on silicon supply chain

At some point you have to get from the (allegedly) unreliable mechanical/analogue domain to the (allegedly) reliable electronic/digital domain. Something that sensors handle. So far my not very automated car has had two wheel rotation sensors fail.

Re: a more basic and less expensive car.

"How will the punters tell our car from any other maker's?"

Because it does what its driver tells it and not something of its own volition? Sounds like a win to me - I like the car I drive to behave predictably.

Over a decade on, and millions in legal fees, Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle in Java API legal war

Re: Dictionary definition required

I suppose there are no mirrors to be found on Oracle premises.

Re: "Code"

"they copied the 11k LOC directly"

And any time you stick in include at the top of a program file you do they same thing (give or take the actual number). Aren't you glad Google won?

Re: Libel? Slander?

"sn't that illegal?"

It might be contempt of court.

Re: Classifying them like utilies....

"Phone companies aren't allowed to kick people off their networks for saying things they disagree with"

But they don't broadcast it either.