Posts by Doctor Syntax

The planet survived six hours without Facebook. Let's make it longer next time

Re: Without Facebook...

"email is clunky and awkward"

With email I have a local archive of all manner of things - business transactions, private and my long-closed freelancing business, family stuff, family history stuff, local history stuff, everything I've been interested in and felt the need to keep going back for years.

To some extent it is clunky and awkward because even with some rules-based stuff, because no email client I've seen has been designed to do half what an efficient office filing system would do but it's a different league to depending on somebody else's computer to do it for me.

Messages are not always ephemeral.

Re: Without Facebook...

"Isn't FaceBook?"

I suppose if you have two addicts typing online together it doesn't look like i's async.

OTOH I mentioned a genealogical one-name study in another comment. I remember an occasion where we were both online at the same time after one of us - can't remember which - had just got a break on a line. The conversation went on by email as each of us kept working on it. I said "at the same time" - here it was lunch time, I've no idea what time it was in California where he lives. By the end of my lunch (and probably Bargain Hunt as well!) we'd sorted out the entire line between us.

Re: Login with FaceBook

A useful learning experience for them.

Re: Can't?

"You can. All it takes is the willpower."

You're right. I don't have the willpower to set up an account so I can cancel it.

Re: Rant!

You want access to that information? Get a Facebook account!"...

You want me to get a Facebook account? Get another customer.

Re: Life goes on...

And there are other MSPs who offer paid for services without the data leaching. They're not expensive - even for a Yorkshireman.

In fact the only gmail address I use is the one that takes incoming mail from a website contacts page and, because it's a group's page, not mine, it needs to be separate from my private MSP account. And good luck to Google monetising whatever they search from that.

Bottom line, there are many options for communicating with others. Selecting one that rewards toxicity, even if your own use isn't toxic, is a matter of choice, maybe even a matter for your conscience.

Re: Without Facebook...

Our daughter went off for 3 years post-doc in Australia. We regularly spoke on the phone. It's a service that long pre-dates Facebook, WhatsApp and the rest and I fully expect to post-date them as well.

Re: Without Facebook...

"The first two options don't work because most of my friends don't know each other."

Do they need to?

I have a couple of mailing lists, one is a local history group and the other is a genealogical one name study group. Although to an outsider their interests might appear to overlap, in practice there's little in common other than my own involvement.

"Delete your faecebook accounts"

Sorry, won't can't.

Re: Life goes on...

Last time I looked Gmail was a mail service provider. OK, it's Google so I suppose if you access it via the web you'll get ads but why do that - pop.gmail.com port 995 works perfectly well.

Re: Without Facebook...

Email. Phone. Snail mail.

Re: It will take a while

"it isn't what the cool kids use"

And all the better for that.

Re: It will take a while

"Yes - but you need to figure a way to pay for it, or to have it truly distributed"

Like Diaspora?

The actual problem is that these networks connect people and some people are antisocial so how do you keep those out?

Re: Without Facebook...

"how would I keep up with old friends I've not seen since 1992?"

Email. Phone. Snail mail.

If Facebook didn't exist it wouldn't have to be invented. The only thing wrong is that somebody did.

Efficiency or hubris?

"Efficiency had won over redundancy."

Zuck has made his position clear - everyone should use Facebook for communication with each other. Perhaps this was taken literally which mean there was no communication network other than Facebook's. No back-channel to manage the infrastructure. If you think you're all the communication the world needs why would there be?

"Pity the lonely, unloved Facebook network admin"

Pity? Unloved? No, we applaud and love him or her and wish the rest of them would follow suit.

Which is pretty well the point being made a couple of paragraphs above.

Brit MPs blast Baroness Dido Harding's performance as head of NHS Test and Trace

Re: Share the blame

"more complex than"

Surely that should have been "as complex as"

Re: Share the blame

The public sector in the form of local government already had a remit for test and trace. Either it's not central government therefore had to be replaced because controlling things is what central government likes to do or, possibly, its very existence was overlooked.

As to app development, Google and Apple had got together (and how often can that be said) to provide the necessary underpinnings but HMG wants a Homegrown Unbeatable BRItish System because that's the nature of the current HMG.

Just more blundering in both cases.

Zero-day hunters seek laws to prevent vendors suing them for helping out and doing their jobs

Publish the cease and desist letter. Then let the company's customers wonder just what's wrong, how bad it is, and why they're doing this rather than fixing it.

6. All of the above.

Australian PM and Deputy threaten Facebook and Twitter with defamation liability for users' posts

Re: You keep using that word...

Free from what?

This is a variation on the "Me freedom to extend my fist stops short of the end of your nose" classic.

If a country has freedom to defame than it lacks freedom from defamation. What you have in reality is not limitless freedom but a choice of incompatible freedoms.

If the service needs moderation and moderating it at scale is not feasible than the service itself should be considered infeasible.

Every Little Helps: Former Tesco boss Dave Lewis to advise UK govt on supply chains

On second thoughts just in time logistics used by manufacturing hasn't helped either.

"a series of measures to relieve pressure on vital supply chains, including by streamlining the testing process for HGV drivers, creating skills bootcamps to train up HGV drivers, as well as introducing short-term visas for fuel drivers, food haulage drivers and poultry workers to ease pressures facing these supply chains."

There's a list of fire-fighting activities if I ever saw one. If Lewis's is expected to concentrate on that things aren't going to be fixed. A lot of our problems are decades old. They stem from governments keeping retail price inflation* down by sourcing more and more stuff from the cheapest manufacturers world-wide. The retailers were complicit in that. Appointing someone from a manufacturing background would have made more sense.

* By ignoring housing as part of the cost of living they let actual inflation rip, fuelling it with low interest rates.

Re: Focus on essentials first

"There isn't a worker shortage... there's a shitty job/wage environment problem."

This isn't an either/or situation. It's a long and short term situation.

Employment factors combined with Brexit might have left us short of HGV drivers but that doesn't mean that simply upping wages will suddenly materialise a sufficiency of drivers. It simply means that drivers are being shifted to whoever can pay the most. In some instances that means your rubbish won't be collected because bin lorry drivers are being poached by transport companies.

New drivers have to be trained and tested. The capacity for both is limited. Even if training suddenly stepped up there needs to be an increase in testing and that means either training more testers (which takes time and presumably means diverting some existing drivers into doing that with short-term knock-on effects) or shortening with the existing testing. HMG seems to have settled for the latter; we'll have to see what the road safety consequences of that are in the coming months.

England's Data Guardian warns of plans to grant police access to patient data

Re: A Slippery Slope into Archaic Anarchic Rule with Reigns and Reins of Terror

"Lessons have been learned in NI"

Evidence says not, or, at best, that they've been forgotten.

"The threat of violence in NI is very real."

I'm afraid you're right. I spent 14 years dealing with some of the consequences back in the '70s & '80s. Unfortunately we've got a government that hasn't learned its history and is on course to repeat it.

"disclose information to police without breaching any obligation of patient confidentiality"

The logic in this seems strangely familiar....

Ah, yes, I remember. We can leave the EU without reimposing a hard border in Ireland and without creating a new one in the Irish Sea. Perhaps it would be as well to see how that conundrum can be solved before creating a new one.

Microsoft turns Windows Subsystem for Linux into an app for Windows

Re: Found a shortcut

Along with a support ticket each year month to say "When are you compiling for linux"

Schools email marketing company told us to go away when we told them of exposed database creds, say infoseccers

"taking steps to ensure security of our systems as we always have done"

Did he even stop to think what he was saying?

Opt-out is the right approach for sharing your medical records with researchers

Re: Shirley there must be an acceptable third option

"until they grow up"

Optimist!

Boeing's Calamity Capsule might take to space once again ... in the first half of 2022

Re: ‘Oxidizer and moisture’ eh?

You'd think they'd want bragging rights like Branson & Bezos.

.NET Foundation focuses on 'issues with the community' after executive director quits

"The relationship between large corporations and open source is often strained."

I think many of them looked on it as a PR move. I made them look trendy, hip, cool or whatever. The fact that it has legal significance for the way software is developed passed them by - and maybe bypassed their legal departments. It doesn't seem to be the prerogative of large corporations either as some startups seem to have done the same.

Fatal Attraction: Lovely collection, really, but it does not belong anywhere near magnetic storage media

"Again, I would suggest looking for another reason to explain the disk not working."

QIC: Quarter Inch Cartridge, a tape format.

Re: Not a PC but a monitor

We had a couple of models of Zilog, all with their monitors & keyboards sitting on top of them. On one model the monitors wee stable, on the other they would continuously wobble, presumably because of the fields of something - disk drives? - just below them.

Re: Plodigy strikes again

Damage limitation?

Re: Why fridge magnets can actually erase data more easily than those Neodym

Not only that, the smaller and closer together the poles are the easier they'll cancel each other out at any distance from the magnet.

Headquarters and General Supplies. Proops. Henrys. All gone.

So the fridge door, computer casing or whatever is going to act like the keeper across the poles of a horseshoe magnet and contain almost all of the field between the poles leaving little to leak out.

Clearview CEO doubles down, claims biz has now scraped over ten billion social media selfies for surveillance

Re: It's happening

I think he might have meant "We never wanted to be found out this way."

Judge rejects claims Cloudflare should be held responsible for customers' copyright infringement

Re: Missing the point

"Cloudflare and their fans like to use analogies like postal service, road builders, and power companies. Illegal stuff happens and it's nobody's fault."

It very obviously is somebody's fault. It's the fault of those who post the stuff to the website. However the plaintiff's lawyers will argue (to the plaintiff) that the most they can be sued for is pennies because that's all they have but here's a big corporation, Cloudflare. They have money. The fact that Cloudflare is simply, blindly passing 1s and 0s along, just like the ISPs or anyone else in the transmission chain is not made obvious to the plaintiffs until they go to court. They lose but no doubt their lawyers still get paid.

The best way of stopping it would probably be to send cease and desist letters to the hosting companies. That would give them the option of suing if the offending material isn't taken down but unless the hosting company ignores it there's no money to be made out of that.

Re: "We agree with the district court’s reasoning"

"I haven't read the full judgment, but the judge's reasoning described in the article is quite different"

I've read it. The judgement is in terms of what the plaintiffs were actually claiming.

The nub of the complaint against Cloudflare AIUI is that it made the website load faster. In terms of the analogy it's like blaming the road makers for laying down black top over a rough track which enabled a faster getaway. Long story short - it didn't make any difference, they'd have gotten away anyway.

BOFH: You. Wouldn't. Put. A. Test. Machine. Into. Production. Without. Telling. Us.

Re: The guy's here...

Just use an easy to remember phrase like "correct battery horse staple".

Like?

Re: This week

Don't forget to test the procedure for replacing all the user IDs.

Facebook, Instagram finally end days of uptime by returning to some downtime

"We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused."

Not that I have any sympathy for inconvenience caused to advertisers* - the more the better in my view - but this is another victim-blaming pseudo apology. What they're really saying is more like "If you were better organised you'd have worked round it.". They are most carefully removing themselves from any shadow of blame.

A real but watered-down apology would have been "We apologise for causing inconvenience".

* Actually, it's not advertisers caught up in this. It's the advertising industry. Advertisers are the the advertising industry's customers.

Microsoft vows to make its Surface laptops, Xbox kit easier to fix by 2022

Re: I'll believe it when I see it.

"Change starts with design"

Designers are now complaining they're having to ditch all the hard-won progress they've made in unrepairability.

Quantum computing startups pull in millions as VCs rush to get ahead of the game

For the gold rush it was shovels. What do quantum computing companies buy?

Get real: Say what you like about your app but don't be surprised if I trollsplain

Re: Ultimate marketing

Customer: I don't think much of this. Why do you call it the ultimate meal?

Waiter: You're eating the last customer to order an ultimate meal, sir.

Re: Ah yes, just in time for the Christmas ads

Maybe they have a stock control problem and it really is the red flannel shirt etc.

Motivated by commerce, not conscience, Google bans ads for climate change consensus contradictors

Re: one who questions the orthodoxy

There is ample basis for avoiding burning fossil hydrocarbons where substitutes exist. Hydrocarbons are multi-use materials, usable as fuels and as the starting point for industrial processes. In the first role it's often open to substitution, in the second not so often. The stuff that's been burned needlessly isn't available as a substrate. In similar vein the hydrocarbon used to make one-use plastic bags can also be substituted with paper.

You don't need to believe or not believe in anthropogenic climate change, nor do you have to realise change in climate and sea-level changes are inevitable to realise that finite supplies shouldn't be exhausted where substitutes exist.

At some future date, and maybe not that far into the future, our descendants will be blaming us for the sheer waste of current usage.