Posts by Doctor Syntax

The ideal sat-nav is one that stops the car, winds down the window, and asks directions

Re: Garmin

The newer Garmins don't verbalise the "recalculating", they just show it on the screen.

Sometimes they need to verbalise "Woah. Stop now and back up."

A while ago I came face to face with a stuck HGV in a local hamlet. It had finally come to rest, unable to go backwards or forwards having obviously done Dabbsy's dad's trick of turning left a few yards too soon. The driver must have driven a mile or so of increasingly narrow and unsuitable roads having first been lulled into a sense of false security by several hundred yards of dead-straight road.

Wherever he wanted to go he shouldn't have started from there.

Do not try this at home: Man spends $5,000 on a 48TB Raspberry Pi storage server

Re: The engineering gospel

An excellent method of removing stray PHBs and beancounters from the vicinity. Pity about the rate of fire.

Re: '"how far can I push this before it gets silly". A true engineer'

Whether it was good engineering depends on whether it was well optimised for its target. It would appear that the optimisation was for cost, not CPU use.

However a Pi with a single disk and Nextcloud is quite a handy domestic server although over the last few releases log-on seems to have got rather slow - or is it just mine? Anyway there's no need to log on very often.

Future of the three NHS bodies managing health tech in doubt after £2.1bn cash injection

Re: "Health secretary signals shack-up could be on the cards"

Or the previous Health Secretary.

"strikes me as odd"

Alternative: "The benefits are not immediately obvious".

UK Telecommunications Act – aka 'power to strip out Huawei' – makes it to the statute book

Re: Huawei has always unsurprisingly denied it is a stooge for the Chinese Communist Party

"probable that the code and practices of other vendors are just as bad - they just haven't had such a bright spotlight turned on them."

It's not just the quality consideration. Without being able to inspect the code it's possible backdoors could be hidden in there in the way they can't by Huawei

It's the apparent "better the devil you don't know" approach I find worrying. It leads on to the wondering whether it's stupidity or whether the backdoors do exist and are left ajar for the TLAs.

Ubuntu desktop team teases 'proof of concept' systemd on Windows Subsystem for Linux

"Dists were using upstart"

Another source of problems I have a bad memory of.

However as it didn't take over so many distros it was easier to ignore it than complain.

As recently as that?

1) Easy to configure. If I want to change how an init-script controlled service behaves, I sometimes can do that by changing a 12 line init script. And at other times, I have to wade through hundreds of lines of uncommented shellcode. I prefer a unified way, where the same syntax is concise, and applied to every service in the same way.

If I want to change an init-script I can see exactly what it does. The workings are exposed, however many lines there might be. I can run the code from the command line and step through it if need be. If I change a config file I'm just relying on a black box to do something, hope it's right and submit a bug to be marked WONTFIX is it isn't.

2 & 3) See 1 above.

AFAIK the Gnome crowd are trying to make systemd essential to their stuff. As far as I'm concerned they're welcome to each other but if too much other stuff just assumes systemd and its tentacles are there to be used then it could become worrying time to move to BSD.

"for too long Linux (and the rest of us) has been riding on the ancient UNIX/POSIX design"

The reason I use Linux is that it implements that design.

Re: @jake - "2 users though have frequently requested systemd support"

They have the signing keys for secure boot. So long as you can turn that off it's not an immediate problem but in essence it's a dangerous monopoly. If systems are sold with BIOSs that don't provide for that they have control of what can be booted on a PC. Strange things seem to be happening in the world of BIOS - my current laptop has a very strange one without the many parameters you could tweak on AMI and the like.

A tiny island nation has put the rights to .tv up for grabs – but what’s this? Problematic contract clauses? Again?

Re: Nice article

"It only has value for the marketing departments."

Only? They usually seem to have too much money to waste if that they splash on advertising is anything to go by.

It's fake ooze, don't fall for fake ooze: Alien fossils found on Mars might just be simple chemistry, uni pair warn

Re: I know how we can identify it

Ask our resident Martian.

Amazon tells folks it will stop accepting UK Visa credit cards via weird empty email

Re: It appears we are just behind Australia

Hence this move instead.

Re: My email wasn't blank...

VISA can charge whatever they want get away with.

If a few other merchants follow suit they won't get away with it for long.

Re: My email wasn't blank...

I wonder if the email was entirely HTML (except for visible sig) and the client set to plain text. That can lead to apparently empty emails even when there are a few megs of images included.

Re: My email wasn't blank...

"However, I am really surprised Amazon chose to take this public."

If they're going to stop accepting a major payment method they could hardly keep it quiet. It would have been an even bigger story if it just stopped without warning on January 19th.

A 'national security' issue: UK.gov blocks Nvidia's Arm deal for now, inserts deeper probe

Re: That trade deal with the US to make up for Brexit...

"there was never meant to be a US trade deal"

I'm sure there was meant to be a US trade deal. Lots of things get meant, some of them for as long as several hours.

Re: That trade deal with the US to make up for Brexit...

World Beating is not just even a vain boast !

FTFY

Re: The Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)

I think of it as Culture Media. You can grow very nasty things in culture media.

How free does a society remain once monopolists get to work?

Re: That trade deal with the US to make up for Brexit...

"meant to be, eventually, a grand US trade deal"

Meant to be and reality don't necessarily coincide. In this case you also have to take into account who it was who was doing the meaning.

40 million meeting rooms are yet to get video gadgets

People can confer by phone? Who knew?

SAP patent not inventive enough to get legal protection, judge rules

Re: "There is no inventive concept that provides something more than the abstract idea itself"

"if patent offices were required to perform an assessment of that kind they'd need a lot more resources and expertise, and the process of granting a patent would become an awful lot more expensive than it is at present."

Taking into account the damage weak patents are doing, do you really think that would be a bad thing?

Re: "There is no inventive concept that provides something more than the abstract idea itself"

At least the courts are starting to notice. What I'd like to see next is a party losing a patent infringement case successfully claiming its costs against the USPTO on the basis that if the office hadn't issued the patent they wouldn't have incurred their costs. That would make them tighten up their scrutiny.

Not only MSPs: All cloudy firms are in line for UK security law crackdown

Expect to find mandated back doors for spooks your local council.

Northrop Grumman throws hat in the ring to design NASA's next-gen Lunar Terrain Vehicle

But the passenger always knows better than the driver.

Wondering what to do with those empty offices? How about a data centre?

I'm not surprised the press release didn't provide links. Except for aspirations it appears to be an empty high ceremony management process framework. Maybe hitting the COP event with PR was more significant than having something that could actually be pointed to. It's not clear how the issues raised in other comments here are to be met.

The lowest impact data centres will be those in places where there is ample renewable energy and/or low external temperatures for cooling, such as Iceland and Norway.

If the gains are purely in terms of repurposing empty urban buildings then there are better options. We currently have a separation between residential housing and workplaces. The commuting that results from that should be seen* as unsustainable. The best solution would be to convert some workplace space into housing for people who work in the remaining workplaces and move other work out into the surrounding, currently residential, communities. This is not aided by the short-sighted conversion, in areas like mine, of the few remaining former industrial sites into housing.

* And probably will be when it's too late.

Does this "blueprint" actually exist? It's not easy to make out what it might be worth without reading it. Odd, I thought, there's no link in the article.

Obviously the place to look is the OpenUK site. There's the press release on which the article's based. I found a "Read more" link which simply went to a similar article in Computer Weekly. A quick search reveals a few more similar articles based on the press release. Maybe the Eclipse site has a link. Nope, the Eclipse site doesn't even have any mention of it.

Maybe the press release is the actual "blueprint".

It's not even April 1st.

Another brick in the (kitchen) wall: Users report frozen 1st generation Google Home Hubs

Re: Items that fail to work...

It would depend on the jurisdiction. Some have consumer protection law, some don't.

Sheffield Uni cooks up classic IT disaster in £30m student project: Shifting scope, leadership changes, sunk cost fallacy

I've been in a situation where I'd rather have been given what they programmed in the first place. What they (client's client) extracted appeared to have had several fields concatenated into one. They had to be taken apart again. I even had to get them to add a flag to tell me just what it was they'd done.

Re: Contractors

It can also happen when contract admin forgets to renew the contracts or there's a freeze on spending.

Re: What this boils down to

Expensive lessons are likely to be buried in unmarked graves.

Splunk CEO jumps ship, share price slumps despite surging growth

Maybe the increase in revenue triggered the bonus he was waiting for.

Intel's recent Atom, Celeron, Pentium chips can be lulled into a debug mode, potentially revealing system secrets

Yet again I have to wonder about this trusted platform stuff. Just who is it who's supposed to trust it? Or is it a case of getting rid of the difficult bit in the title?

There's only one cure for passive-aggressive Space Invader bosses, and that's more passive aggression

I remember one manager who had a habit of getting too close in conversation. However as he was definitely one of the exceptions good guys I was prepared to put it down to his thick glasses messing with his perception of distance.

Re: Workplace Bullying

A lot of whooshes in those downvotes, I think.

Tech bro CEOs claim their crowns because they fix problems. Why shirk the biggest one?

Public transport, of course, does suffer from spikes of demand. But that applies to transport in general. It's the commute to and from work. Planning, at least in the UK, has, for decades, ensured increasing separation between where people live and where they work.

Re: But it's up to us

"Zoom doesn't work on older computers (e.g. Vista etc)"

Zoom works on Linux. When SWMBO was running her patchwork classes remotely they met by Zoom and, of course, her laptop runs on Linux.

FBI spams thousands with fake infosec advice after 'software misconfiguration'

Re: Whoever did what

Krebs's article explains. It sounds weird. Weird as in "what were they on?". The sign-up process resulted in a one-time code emailed to the new user's email address. So far so 2FA. But the email seems to have been generated client-side and sent to the server with a POST request which included as parameters not just the email address, but also the subject and body so by feeding POST requests to the server the server would send out whatever emails were requested.

No weak passwords required: no passwords required at all. Apparently IE was required, however. I suppose it stopped those wicked Linux users getting access.

Linus Torvalds releases Linux 5.16 rc1 with new performance-enhancing memory tech

An Oracle employee running Postgres?

Boffins use nuclear radiation to send data wirelessly

Re: a small step

But very difficult to block once you've got it working.

BOFH: You drive me crazy... and I can't help myself

Re: Same energy

Tell us more.

A problem shared is now somebody else's.

"dealing with a sales person"

Say what you like about crabs, but they're not fussy eaters.

Re: Alternatively. . .

I once spent a couple of very cold, wet, smelly days watching the contents of a pig farm slurry pit being pumped out* to see if any of the thousands of bones looked human. None did.

* Result of a false tip-off to the police. There were a few of those over the years in the search for Thomas Niedermayer.