Posts by Doctor Syntax

Don't forget to leave a rating: Amazon chairman meeting with UK prime minister to talk taxes

If it was a tax dodge why didn't you adopt it? Too high minded or you took a look at the risks of going freelance and decided it wasn't for you?

Re: he will discuss the “challenges” of taxing giant tech corporations in a digital economy

"The challenge is simply to grow a backbone"

Nothing to do with taxes is simple.

"it also killed small haulage businesses"

And so is now becoming part of an economic problem that even HMG has got round to noticing.

Twitter offers to cough up 80 days of annual sales to settle 'false' user count lawsuit

"Twitter has offered to pay $809.5m"

As it's the investors own money it would be a zero sum game were it not for the addition payments to the lawyers to sort it all out.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and we should feel fine

Re: Machine Learning

Now that a level of sanity has returned to the phone markets I would expect a "quality" phone to be good for at least 5 years

It depends on what you mean by a quality phone but I suspect Jedit's post is closer to the mark. A quality phone that lasts 5 years isn't going to bring continuing profits.

Re: Some rotten foundations and missing bits

For dates, add in the likes of "Friday in the octave of Easter 1312".

But "instant access to cells in spreadsheet files as if it was a database?" - isn't use of spreadsheets as databases part of the problem?

Re: How about weeding the wrong and obsolete technical 'documentation'

At best "weeding" isn't going to bring a RoI in sufficient time. In reality we all know what happens if you chuck out old documentation. Murphy arrives bearing a slightly broken piece of kit you thought had been chucked out but is (a) indispensable and (b) irreplaceable.

Re: Most of the problems have been solved

"the differences between 1/2 and 3/4 are significant"

That sort of thing is the problem. if Xv3 is so different to Xv2 it really shouldn't be Xv3 at all. It should be Yv1. There may still be a market for X to be supplied for some time to come but without the demand that Y be back compatible with it.

"But if we're not chasing the upgrade, what shall we do?"

An ever-lasting chasing of the industry's tail. Fixing the bits which were broken by the last fix of things which weren't broken followed by another bout of fixing things that aren't broken.

Re: Does it work though?

"You'd have to go to BSD to get something less bloated, more understandable, and something you're more in control of."

Size, maybe but in terms of understandable and in control of, Devuan seems to fit the bill.

A low-key good experience for Thor-oughly new penguins: Elementary OS 6, aka Odin

Re: "a Flatpak-only app store is the future"

It could be worse. It could be Snap.

I looked at Flatpak briefly. It requires that a Flatpak system be installed for the particular OS including the window manager. There was an version that seemed from the description to fit my case. It didn't.

As far as I can seen all these schemes seem to be a means of exchanging one lot of dependencies for another. Putting a directory with the application's dependencies in /opt is as effective as any but it's an old idea and, therefore, not shiny. Sigh.

-Werror pain persists as Linus Torvalds issues Linux 5.15rc2

Re: ssl?

Sort of - I think it was valgrind rather than the compiler which generated the errors. If you're doing something out of the ordinary like that you should have a comment to say why.

So I’ve scripted a life-saving routine. Pah. What really matters is the icon I give it

Re: Try living in a building...

"get them to arrange with the Royal Mail to assign a number to the building"

Maybe it might be easiest to decide on a name, get a nameplate made and stick it on the house (assuming it's not listed) because from my experience it might well be possible to get the Royal Mail to do that. Our house has had a name ever since my parents move in in 1968. It's carved in 6" high letters on a block of stone beside the gate. A few bills and the like had the name slightly wrong. Eventually I discovered that it was wrong in the PAF file that so many businesses take as the immutable standard. I rung Royal Mail to get it changed. This, of course would involve all sorts of official verification and the like, no? No. It was changed just like that. Of course things may have changed in the last 20 years.

Re: Address oddities

"Nearby Town"

I think that should be "Post Town". Nearby is not guaranteed.

It's US address formats that annoy me. They seem to always have a line for "City" but, of course, they treat as a world-wide standard address format even where it's geographical nonsense. This even pervades genealogical S/W where it can be historical as well as geographical nonsense.

Re: Photo of a wall re delivery to the wrong address

"Couriers don't seem to realise that whilst their legal customer is the sender the real customer is normally the recipient."

I've had this argument with one courier in the past. The address they'd been given was incorrect. They wouldn't change it on the basis that only the owner of the goods could do that. Just who did they think the owner was?

Dammit. Shoe museum!

Re: Try living in a building...

The house in which I grew up had a name and a number. The name was far more useful. There were only two houses on the lane. Ours was number 16.

Re: Try living in a building...

I have some of that experience. Like most along the lane we only have a name. There are only about half a dozen numbers and several of those are variations:1, 1a etc. There's another lane with almost the same name a few miles.

Re: Ah yes…

"and on one memorable time it was an 80 seater coach"

Ah, yes. Coach navigation. Coach from God's Own County to Victoria coach station. There were two drivers on board who swapped over at a half-way stop. The one who took over for the second leg got into slight navigational difficulties trying to follow the company's official route into the north London stop Golders Green bus station. I overheard a snippet of conversation "Shall I go right way or t'way I know?".

I noticed we came to a crossroads close to the bus station at right angles to the usual approach.

Nevertheless an improvement on the driver who, immediately after leaving Victoria, spread some forms over the wheel and started catching up on his paper-work while threading his way through central London.

I take it "14 Avenue" does at least have a town name added. I knew of an accounts database which, for years, had a distributor's address as street number "High Street, Somerset". I suppose most people with a smidgeon more knowledge of English geography the whoever entered it would make a reasonable guess. It was years before we sere in that part of the world and SWMBO wanted to visit the shore museum there. (No, I've no idea either.) Yes, there the business was, at the appropriate number in High Street, Street, Somerset.

Microsoft doles out Office Long Term Servicing Channel for cloud refuseniks

For those scenarios, there is the "locked-in-time" version of the productivity suite.

For those scenarios there's also LibreOffice. I wonder how much that weighed on Microsoft's decision making.

Is it OK to use stolen data? What if it's scientific research in the public interest?

Re: when is collected data stolen?

Would the folk songs collected by Cecil Sharp have been in copyright?

I'd have thoughts that data quality issues might loom at least as large as ethical. Provenance? Sample selection? Accuracy? Repeatability with independent data?

However, psychology, social sciences, AI - probably no problem.

Electron-to-joule conversion formulae? Cute. Welcome to the school of hard knocks

Re: Ask the dog - it has an 80% success rate

I think most of us have been on both sides of that in our time.

Re: "a multitude of fresh qualifications counted for naught"

And especially if the PFY can make acceptable tea.

WTF? Microsoft makes fixing deadly OMIGOD flaws on Azure your job

Re: "fixing deadly OMIGOD flaws on Azure your job"

Was "expert security off your hands" ever anything more than hype? But as regards to the volume of usage I thought Linux was the dominant OS on Azure these days. Is it just OMI that's less frequently deployed?

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81

Re: Wobbley rampacks

It looks as if a great many in IT in the UK of my son's generation started out on the Spectrum. In my generation it was punched cards. In our grandchildren's generation it's likely to be the Pi but I suspect for many the Pi will be eased out by the smartphone and the laptop. I wonder how that will work out.

Dowden out, Dorries in: Is UK data protection in safe hands?

I see one of her first acts has been to overturn a listed building status to allow demolition. It was an emergency listing put in place just after demolition was announced. How good of her to give a few seconds grace to allow for a full debate on the status.

Is UK data protection in safe hands?

No, irrespective of whoever's in charge of the department of culture media. When a government's entire raison d''etre is getting out from under a regulatory regime which seeks to protect citizens' rights none of its party can be trusted with data protection.

De-identify, re-identify: Anonymised data's dirty little secret

Re: "Control and accountability disappears when you hand it over."

"Yes, the controller is not responsible for this, but why should they?"

Let's turn that round. Why shouldn't they be? They are the ones with whom the data subject has a relationship. They are the ones who undertook - or should have done - to handle the data carefully. They have a duty of care. Part of that includes care in their choice of who they entrusted to process the data if they didn't do so themselves. The processor is the controller's agent. The controller should be responsible tor the actions of the agent.

That doesn't let the agent of the hook, of course, and, indeed, they would presumably be liable to the principal for breach of contract, but the data subject should have a very clearly identified body from whom to claim redress.

The problems with the Privacy Figleaf are that the US jurisdiction doesn't give allows the contractual obligations to be overruled. If that were not the case it seems to be accepted that the EU data subject would be able to take action against the processor in the US; that, I think, in unacceptable, the data subject should be able to take action in the jurisdiction where the original transaction occurred and against the other party in that transaction, the data controller.

Re: "Make re-identification of de-identified data illegal"

And the Act also allows for personal penalties. How many of those have you heard of. Things need to be moved on: personal, not just corporate, jeopardy needs to become the norm.

Re: No....Not Really a "Straightforward Soution"....

None of the examples in the article falls into that category. However the concentration of data that the likes of Equifax accumulate could also be regarded in the same way. When a business holding that much data guards it so badly there should be personal penalties for senior management. It might take a few prominent cases of CEOs or board members jailed but not too many. Management needs to be put into thinking along the lines of "This stuff could be dangerous to me ".

There's a fairly straightforward solution. Make re-identification of de-identified data illegal with personal responsibility for some person in senior management. The newspaper editor, the marketing manager or even better, the CEO get a criminal record and go to jail. And for good measure the company loses any govt contracts it may have, forfeiting any outstanding payments for work done.

The only way to deal with excess data is to make it toxic. That will give businesses second thoughts about collecting it in the first place and make them very, very careful about how they use it.

Re: The article said it best.

"in this case I'm talking about data collected from participants with informed consent and ethical approval."

Which is a different matter if it's still being use within the scope of the original consent, even if there are multiple research partners.

UK funds hydrogen-powered cargo submarine to torpedo maritime emissions by 2050

Re: £380K

The Beeb also suggested journeys between Glasgow & Belfast and that whisky might be a suitable cargo. Given that both countries produce it (give or take a spelling variaton) it looks like a coals to Newcastle job in both directions.

BT Wholesale wants the channel to give SMBs a nudge before copper sunset in 2025

"They could probably do that tomorrow if they wanted to but they are holding off to give time for people to switch to a VoIP alternative."

Unless they can find a way to power VoIP over the line they don't have an alternative. One of the characteristics of the analogue service is that it continues to work when the lights go out. Discovering that the backup battery has died when the lights go out should not be an option.

"without any apparent sense of irony"

Not a problem. One of the requirements for working in BT is the ability to suspend disbelief (or alternatively, to suppress disgust - I failed at both).

Microfluidic processor brings us one step closer to a future of squishy DNA computing

It has to be a disadvantage if a single bug can eat your entire computer.

Brits open doors for tech-enabled fraudsters because they 'don't want to seem rude'

The advice included how to spot scams – and this belter of a top-tip, which read: "Don't click on any links… if you've received a suspicious message."

Much the same as an email from the bank warning about phishing emails and stuffed full of links to click. The trouble is that half marketing people completely lack the self-awareness to realise that their emails are indistinguishable from the phishing emails they're warning about and the other half probably see nothing wrong in clicking on aany link in any email they receive and sooner or later are going to let ransomware into their company.

Dammit. I never thought of that line. I'd just say "Could you hold the line a minute." If I'd thought to encourage them like that I could have probably kept them on another 40 minutes. Mind you they did ring back to say they'd lost the connection ...

Open redirect on UK council website was being used for Royal Mail-themed parcel payments scam

"We recently became aware of an issue relating to the website ... As a company, we have a strong track record in delivering robust security"

Cognitive dissonance at its finest.

anyone who has ever clicked a link in a genuine marketing email spam

FTFY

You can 'go your own way' over GDPR, says UK's new Information Commissioner

"He could employ Baroness Harding"

Don't

even

think

it.

A lot of would be exporters into the EU are now discovering the hard way how red tape works. Previously they weren't really exporting, just selling into a part of their home market that happened to have a bit of water in the way. Now they're really trying to export and it's more complicated than they thought, especially when it's some sort of agricultural product.

You want us to make a change? We can do it, but it'll cost you...

Re: Lines of Code - negative defects

Somebody or other's law: When a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a useful metric.

Re: Less than one character per week

"How long will it take to fix this issue?"

If I knew that I'd have fixed it already.

Re: In my experience...

"a cost-saving exercise (of the sort that always costs more in the long run,...)"

But for James it would have been a money making exercise.

Re: "he worked out the coding of the lock file [..] and updated the lock himself

AFAIK he'd paid for the package. The support contract was being sold on as an extra.

I'm quite used to the situation where a package is sold and a support contract is optional but selling a support contract and trying to lock the customer out if they don't keep paying is taking the piss in my view.

There were some interesting features to the S/W:

- It was supposed to be based on Informix. Some Informix tools were supplied for reporting but it wasn't written in it for reasons which became apparent.

- They included some files with .sql suffixes which were supposed to be the DDL to set up the database. They weren't even SQL although possibly their S/W would read them to add some tables. They didn't comprise the full set.

- They provided a bcheck* program to check the database. The supplied Informix package also provided bcheck. The bchecks were different. Either would complain there were "errors" if the alternative bcheck had been run first. The DB was OK, it was just that the two products were setting a flag or label differently.

- There were the usual Informix system tables which included indexes. It became clear that the system they provided couldn't have run efficiently with just the indexes listed. When I needed extras for reports I was writing I investigated further with bcheck and discovered that there were indeed more indexes, they just hadn't told Informix's sysindexes about them. Clearly they'd set up the database with some other tools and copied in the Informix system catalogs from a rather less fully featured database to keep the Informix tools more or less happy. I hacked sysindexes with SQL to add in some of the missing entries.

I'm pretty sure that what they'd done was use a C-ISAM package** of which there were a few - possibly even a FOSS one - to write the software, marketed it as being based on Informix and sold some Informix tools along with it although they didn't have a chance of working as well as they might. On the whole I think it balanced out as six of one, half a dozen of the other.

I've often wondered if it was the same crowd who flogged a warehousing system to my ex employers about the time I was being eased out. Some time previously we'd proposed adding warehousing to the existing stock and SOP system - it only needed a couple of extra tables to describe the racking an the additional screens to support it. That had been turned down. Some crowd claimed to be offering an Informix-based system running on VMS sold them a free-standing warehouse system. I knew very well that there wasn't Informix on VMS; we'd been one of the guinea pigs when such a thing was attempted and abandoned. They countered that by claiming to have the database source code It must have been the same thing - an application built on a C-ISAM package. At least I was out of it before I had to cope with trying to keep two separate systems giving their views on stock levels.

* bcheck was a diagnostic for the b-tree indexes.

** Informix Standard Engine, even in its pre-SQL version was based on a C-ISAM package of their own (AFAIK) devising.

"Ever found the time and cash demanded by a vendor was vastly more than truly required by the actual change?"

I had a client who managed to do that all on his own.

I did occasional support work for him but the vendor still required a support contract with themselves. To enforce this they had some sort of lock on the system which involved periodically running something - I'm not sure if they logged in remotely, sent him a file to run or just gave him instructions to do it himself. I kept well clear of that. What they didn't do was provide actual updates to the S/W so in that respect they weren't providing anything in particular, just occasional problem solving.

My remit had been a bit wider as general Unix and DB admin stuff. I'd very quickly come to my own view of their S/W and, in fact, one of the things I was doing was writing bits & pieces round it to do stuff the client wanted. Eventually he realised that their support contract was providing him with nothing and he worked out the coding of the lock file that had to be changed every 6 months or so, ended the contract and updated the lock himself.

Right to contest automated AI decision under review as part of UK government data protection consultation

Re: Community AI project

But you're not looking at it from the government's PoV. Their AI would be "no need for further elections, keep things as they are". And it's they who make the rules.