Posts by Doctor Syntax

Predictive Dirty Dozen: What will and won't happen in 2022 (unless it doesn’t/does)

Re: "All office chairs are gaming chairs"

I didn't know peanuts had gas rams.

No, that is a gas ram in the pocket.

Re: I predict that Toyota is going to remove functionality ...

"the UK Government will seriously propose the concept of completely removing private car ownership"

The DoT has been at that game ever since the days of Barbara Castle, the non-driving Minister of Transport of the 1960s. The notion that the plebs can go wherever and whenever they please sticks in the Whitehall craw.

You've stolen the antiglare shield on that monitor you've fixed – they say the screen is completely unreadable now

Re: HAZMAT suit please, nurse, gloves please!

"cough mixture into the keyboard"

I hope that was before consumption.

You geeks have inherited the Earth, but what are you going to do with it?

Re: @Doctor Syntax

"There are still plenty of those around but younger ones did sociology, psychology and proudly avoided all STEM and then got their degrees in Eutruscan pottery or something."

Things are less predictable than you think. None of my friends who wrote the book - another local history book as it happens - have a stem background. The oldest is well into her 80s. As it happens her husband was a maths teacher but I've seen no sign of him taking any interest in using IT. Another of our local history group, very active on YouTube, was a German teacher. In fact I know quite a few people of my age or older (and I'm long retired) whose backgrounds or interests are in the arts just use computers as an everyday tool. So too, no doubt, do your Etruscan ceramicists.

Re: "impossible to imagine how the global pandemic would have played out without it."

Medical research would have been somewhat less advanced and it would have taken longer to distribute the genetic sequence of the virus. Clinical trials would have proceeded more slowly and it would have taken longer to forge supply lines. OTOH we wouldn't have the the Covidiots undermining things and arguably a few countries might have had saner, more capable governments running things. It's not easy to see how those factors would have balanced each other out.

In general hunter-gatherer societies understand their environment pretty well and have low impacts on it, partly because that mode of life only supports a low population density. Farming supports a high population density with a different skill set and even at its most primitive has a higher environmental impact.

Both depend on extensive but different skill sets. It would be wrong to suggest that hunter-gatherers depend on luck rather than skill. Chance, in the form of external factors, can affect both. The plague hit the Western European population hard in the C14th but a climatic fluctuation had an impact of similar scale a generation earlier.

The last few decades have spread computer literacy beyond anything that could have been imagined in the last few years. Although we now find our families calling on us for IT support 30 years ago it would have been inconceivable that that requirement could even exist. We now have old ladies in their 80s collaborating to write books with their laptops. It's a pity the bloody printers can't run off a couple of hundred copies without some of the pages being bound upside down but that's a separate matter.

Farming and settlement didn't turn us from slaves to anything. They turned us from hunter-gatherers to settled populations with more complex social structures in which slavery became possible.

Re: History is bunk

But when an influenza vaccine became available it was deployed on an annual basis.

People just got on with the plague as well. In the C14th visitation it killed between 30% and 50% of the Western European population depending on whose estimates you use with no estimates that I'm aware of for its effects in other regions. In the C15th outbreaks the parish registers make sobering reading;what are normally mixtures of baptisms, marriages and burials become simply lists of burials or even lists of names with no explanation at all, presumably because the parish clerk thought none was needed. They knew of no precautions or cures that worked.

You may not have thought as far as that but you can bet that it's in the back of every epidemiologist's mind every time a new disease emerges with the potential to become a pandemic. We do have working precautions we can take and some treatments. That's why we see vaccinations, isolation, masks, social distancing and testing. Archaeologists in a thousand years time will be able to pick up the test kit/mask horizon. Let's hope it's a shallow one.

It's the day before the grand opening but we need a firmware update. It'll be fine

Re: Windows upgrade in process

I'd call that a realistic demonstration.

Not the kind of note you want to see fluttering from an ATM

Re: Its the graphics

Isn't that what I wrote? It will be in the future.

Re: Its the graphics

I think it's a case of when you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail.

Re: Its the graphics

Of course Linux is good at graphics. But you'll find a few people not far removed from these hallowed halls who seem to think it's all command line.

Who you gonna call? Premium numbers, but a not-so-premium service

Re: One of my earliest hacks ...

We used to get calls for a local garage. More recently it's been for a not quite so local safe supplier. I wondered if their letter-head had some not too legible script but they say no. I hope their customers have better luck with their combinations.

Re: One of my earliest hacks ...

"this time, they changed the pub's number, not mine."

You'll still get calls from people who "know" the pub's number. Never mind, the wrong numbers still count on BT's bottom line.

Re: Wrong number

However in terms of the UK the leading two digits after the country code and the first digit of the first block of four signify discrete geographical areas. My current phone number has the same first two leading digits as an old one - from nearly 200 miles away.

+44 xx xxxx xxxx might be an international standard but +44 xxx xxxxxx is apt to be more meaningful to users. But, hey, what do users count for in international standards?

On Christmas night, a computer logs a call to say his user has stopped working…

Re: Sexing goldfish using MS Office

Word might not have got round to it yet but isn't it a function in Emacs?

Re: It's all broken...

"It is CRISP."

Is it also deep and even?

Tesla disables in-car gaming feature that allowed play while MuskMobiles were in motion

Re: Removing distraction = good

I can think of at least one local road junction which needs a roundabout or possibly a pair of mini-roundabouts. The frequent accidents there are mostly, if not entirely, the consequence of the appalling sight lines.

Re: Back to horse-drawn buggies please!

One of my ancestors was killed falling from his horse on his way back from market. I'd always assumed it was because he was drunk. Now I have an entirely new hypothesis.

Belgian defence ministry admits attackers accessed its computer network by exploiting Log4j vulnerability

Re: Old school.

That " do one thing , do it well " is a long forgotten base of how we done things in the past.

Exactly. What could possibly go wrong?

One thing that might help would be to have a practice of publishing a series of unit tests with the module that it must pass. The unit tests may be added to but not changed or removed.

A business could then adopt a rule of only using external projects that follow this practice, that the version used passes the tests and possibly running some sort of acceptance review that the tests are sufficient.

A further rule would be to not use the library in a way that isn't covered by the test nor depend on some such side-effect. If, for instance there was no test for use after free then this should not be used even if it were found to work; the implementation might be changed and/or a test introduced in a subsequent release.

In essence this solves the problem posed in TMMM: is the product defined by the spec or the initial implementation? It's neither, it's defined by the tests and something not covered in the tests is not part of the specification and not to be relied on to remain unchanged.

This particular problem seems to be the result of creeping featurism. Eliminating that would be a good idea. Did someone say "Do one thing and do it well"?

Europe completes first phase of silicon independence project

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

According to the link ETH Zurich is participating.

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

"A private company sold privately"

It was a listed company prior to the SoftBank bid.

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

Coalition government requires that you're able to put a coalition together. Sometimes that seems difficult.

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

"This isn't just the issue of the astronomical cost of a modern fab, but also the very limited number of people with the skillset to utilise it."

Isn't some of the critical fab plant actually made in the EU? They might not be that short of skills.

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

"The Tories only see business opportunities that pay back in the first year or so."

You overstate the case. They don't see any business opportunities at all. They only see votes.

BOFH: The vengeance bus is coming, and everybody's jumping. An Xmas bonus hits me…

Are we going to see the PFY traded in for a younger model? After all, he's been on the go for far too long for the Y to apply.

Db2, where are you? Big Blue is oddly reluctant to discuss recent enhancements to its flagship database

Re: It's still a thing?

It used to be that products went to CA to be treated like that. Now it's IBM.

Boffins' first take on asteroid dust from Japanese probe: Carbon rich, less lumpy than expected

Re: Box of Legos

"It's the difference between mailing a box of Legos and mailing a completed Lego kit without it coming apart in the mail."

It also involves assembling the Lego kit without having a Lego kit to assemble or anyone to assemble it. Once you've considered the difficulty of that you have to ask yourself why you have to consider the additional difficulty of mailing it; it's hard enough without adding that.

Re: Just over 5g collected?

And in a vacuum you can't even suck it up.

Re: No advance on 1953

Having assumed and extrapolated we can produce testable hypotheses. So far nobody has succeeded.

"life is almost a certainty"

I'm not sure about that. It involves molecules bumping into each other in a way that produces some quite precise structures. Without enzymes to catalyse the reaction I don't think amino acids in aqueous solution are going to polymerise very readily ti produce any protein let alone a protein that does something interesting such as catalyse the polymerisation of amino acids. It's chicken and egg on a smaller scale.

Even the simplest organisms we see are highly evolved. People have been thinking about this for a long time but I don't think anyone has yet come up with a set of simple structures which could coalesce into something capable of self-propagation let alone the set of circumstances that could produce them. Clearly it happened as we're here to discuss it but it still seems to have been a very unusual set of circumstances and by no means, I think, inevitable.

Re: Or you could just look for cylon mitochiondria...

"Panspermia is an uncalled for complication."

And a way of throwing the problem over the wall.

Life is an improbable but not impossible means of perpetuating the consequences of improbable but not impossible events. The only reason we know that it isn't impossible is because we're here to discuss it.

It's improbable that it would have started here but it's equally improbable that it started in any other given place and if it did start anywhere else it's improbable that it would have got from there to here. On the balance of improbabilities I'd settle for Earth as the least unlikely option. Yup, Occam's razor.

Fisher Price's Bluetooth reboot of pre-school play phone has adult privacy flaw

Re: edutainment

It sounds like a case of "if we do we can charge more for it".

Re: Brrrrring

Immediately after before calculating the price.

Wifinity hands customers bills for Wi-Fi services they didn't want but used by accident after software 'glitch' let 'fixed term' subs continue

I'm sure the military advice would be to retreat in good order. Maybe the mess their billing is in won't let them do that because they can't distinguish who should have been billed & who shouldn't.

Electric fastback fun: Now you can surf the web from the driving seat of your Polestar 2

Re: Cue the anti-moving work-around in 3, 2, 1...

If they're wankers they'll tell you it's their right.

A proposal to beat below-the-belt selfies: Crowdsourced machine learning using victims' image stashes

Re: Timescales

I assume the week was intended to gather the training data.

As to intercepting all message flows the article contains this: "I reckon it would be dead simple to build a filter on the receiver." The interception takes place on the receiving device which means the user downloads the filter(s) as required. This has the advantage that, given the tendency to remote medical consultations, there may be a legitimate use case for such traffic.

UK's Defra and Ministry of Justice facing £120m IR35 tax bills thanks to inaccuracies in assessing contractors' status

Simple explanation. CEST had still put too many outside IR35. HMRC can't tolerate that so Something Had To Be Done. Other govt departments are sitting ducks. If they'd tried it out on private sector clients they'd be having to argue it out in court.

US bags Russian accused of bagging millions after stealing pre-release financial filings

Re: Why only 66%?

I suppose if they bet on, say a price rising on a good report and it turns out that the market expected an even better report the price might actually fall.

They not only have to know what the information says, they also have to make a correct guess as to how the market will react to the news and they're not always going to succeed.

Re: ??

Of course they're questionable. That's what defence counsel are for. Maybe Russian courts are different.

Diagnosis confirmed: Oracle has a case of healthcare cravings, bought Cerner for $28.3bn as the cure

Re: Voice Digital Assistant

In my local GP's surgery they type their own notes. I'm not sure if they'd always wish the patient to hear what they say. In any event "Only the uaser interface will change" is not what the user usually wants to read unless the original was really bad. It seems to be a basic law of computing that big UI changes are always for the worse.

I suspect one other thing will change: licensing.

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Re: 8-bit

If you followed the link in a previous post you'd have seen it's 8 bits per colour channel plus alpha so 32 bits in all.

Re: Incredible

And how many semi-colons?

Log4j and Omicron: Brothers in harm, mothers of invention

A simple find will locate any.

It's not difficult to find out what packages (or libraries) are installed on a Linux system. Debian and, I suppose, others have a mechanism for seeing what's installed. Debian has several options including synaptic which gives a sometimes useful commentary. It tells my that the Apache package isn't installed and that 2.17 is already available if I wanted to install it. It also tells me that I've got a Java successor, Logback, and a C++ API modelled after log4j which raises the question as to whether they might be bug-for-bug emulations of the original.

Luxembourg judge hits pause on Amazon's daily payments of disputed $844m GDPR fine

Re: The ruling had nothing to do with data security or leaks...

Given some of the "targeting" it looks as if they have a good excuse.

Wi-Fi not working? It's time to consult the lovely people on those fine Linux forums

Re: "first read the fine forum thread until the end"

"USB thumb drives are specially prone to fix themselves by simply going through the physical option of this particular step."

You have to turn it round at least once before it can be successfully reinserted. Roumour says this disturbance fixes the loose joint that had caused it to go bad.