Posts by Doctor Syntax

Before I agree to let your app track me everywhere, I want something 'special' in return (winks)…

Re: 21st century lamp columns ... incorporating sensors that can receive and transmit

OTOH it's as good a way as any to sell cotton T-shirts. Cynical? Mio?

BOFH: 'What's an NFT?' the Boss asks. In this case, 'not financially thoughtful'

Re: well played Simon

The other day I came across an article on how to dd an old SCO disk and turn it into a VM. I think I'll dic out my old dual boot SCO laptop and try it for old times sake.

Re: Must try

Another? What happened to the last one? It must only be a couple of weeks or so ago that he started.

Re: I expect Simon the PFY to split the proceeds

" FreeBSD is good, but as the name might suggest, it is free."

In SCO terms that doesn't mean too much. SCO had OpenServer but it wasn't open.

Re: Turings?

And back in the day the Punt was at parity with the £ so those were accepted as well.

Re-volting: AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization undone by electrical attack

Re: Really?

And with that degree of access there are very likely a lot of easier ways.

COVID-19 cases surge as do sales of fake vaccination cards – around $100 for something you could get free

Re: A long way still to go

"Many of the people you're talking about prioritizing are younger and therefore less likely to get seriously ill from the disease."

Although they would be less likely to become seriously ill themselves those they infected might not be so fortunate..

Firefox 91 introduces cookie clearing, clutter-free printing, Microsoft single sign-on... so where are all the users?

Re: Nice fonts

Try Palemoon or Waterfox.

"web designers only test their sites on Chrome these days"

Web designers test their sites? Who knew?

Re: That's not a very useful option

Mostly I use Seamonkey and that gets closed at least every time I turn the laptop off - which might be several times a day. But there are very few sites which get a free pass on NoScript (or Cookies Exterminator).

For the intersect of those that really require Javascript and those I feel I need - which is quite a smal setl - I fire up Palemoon set to be amnesiac - and then close it down again once I've finished. It's fast - no more than about 4 seconds* and most of that is slewing the cursor to the menu and selecting it - so why not? I'm then happy to select all cookies with a mental "and much good may it do you". Why Palemoon? Because its got a saner UI than Firefox.

* I just tested that by counting and I was probably counting a bit too fast.

"I still think Firefox is the best browser there is"

Despite its UI going steadily down hill? I prefer to use its derivatives.

Do you? I have a gmail address used as the end point of a contact page on a web site and I don't remember setting up anything like that. They have thrown a few emails with "helpful" hints as about security and meaningless critical alerts but on a quick look there doesn't seem to have been anything since the end of 2019.

Re: "browser is still struggling for market share"

Windows 10 isn't the product. Its users are.

"does anyone think if enough of us make these points they'll listen?"

No. UX designers have much in common with marketroids. None of them listen.

"ever day I encounter at least one website with which it simply does not work at all"

I find that frequently with different browsers but that's because they won't display at all without a shedload of javascript servers being allowed.

"People get Chrome mainly to navigate their Gmails since there is no native app"

Gmail is still just mail isn't it? Any of the regular native mail clients will handle it including Thunderbird and its Seamonkey relative.

"linked to a Microsoft account (as are almost all consumer PCs)"

That stopped me in my tracks. Quite true no doubt. It's as if the monopoly investigation never happened and a clear indication that it's well past time there was another.

El Reg talks to Azure Data veep as Microsoft flicks the switch on Azure Arc for SQL Managed Instances

"there is no thought process that we have around changing…"

Not so much weasel words as a whole nest of pine martens.

Chocolate beer barred from sale after child mistakes it for chocolate milk

Re: hmm what will reg readers' opinion be on something modern

'what's wrong with vim'

It's not vi.

The web was done right the first time. An ancient 3D banana shows Microsoft does a lot right, too

Re: 30 years ago....

30 years!

The business I worked for was moving - mostly had moved - from London to Leeds. I hung on until the summer because of my daughter's GCSEs. The move involved taking an HP-UX system up the road. I'd always assumed the physically huge, even for the time, drives were more or less bomb-proof. In fact the engineers heaved a sigh of relief when they were slotted back in the rack, powered up and fscked successfully.

Because of the circumstances my daughter started 6th form college that September. This September her daughter starts in the same college.

30 years!

Scientists reckon eliminating COVID-19 will be easier than polio, harder than smallpox – just buckle in for a wait

Re: Fairly worthless comparison

"t seems even that potential treatments are actively forbidden by governements and fraudulently badmouthed by leading scientists."

It appears that you've been looking in the wrong places. Perhaps you've been looking at bleach and the like.

CPAP

Dexamethasone

There's a couple of effective treatments to be getting on with. Search for the RECOVERY trial. You'll find at least one more that's been found effective and several to be trialled.

But have you stopped to think why vaccines are getting the most publicity. There are a couple of reasons. One you might have heard of - it's a well known saying about the relative merits of prevention and cure. The other - well, try to work it out for yourself.

Experience is a dear teacher but you seem to be one of those who will learn by no other.

Re: We Could, But Should We?

I don't suppose there were too many estimates of the environmental consequences either (hint - a very large global death rate would have been environmentally beneficial given that it's the human population that's the big problem). However the political effects of letting a pandemic run its course are not good as soon as people start weighing up the probability that they might not be in the survivors.

"The scientists warned eradication could take years"

It's a bit like saying science advances one death at a time except this is going to be the anti-vaxers. "Years" seems right.

Re: We Could, But Should We?

"the Government's own estimate was that lock down had killed 25,000 (actually dead before July) and would kill another 185,000 (missed cancers etc) in years to come. Those were not dead 'of covid' or 'with covid' but specifically 'without covid' / due to lock down effects."

Could we please have a citation for that to make sure you're claiming direct effects of lock down and (are there any mechanisms suggested for this) rather than deaths due to treatments not given because hospital and specifically ITU beds were occupied by COVID cases?

Engineers work to open Boeing Starliner's valves as schedule pressures mount

Re: Doesn't inspire confidence

But don't forget the WD40.

Best qualiy strategy

The Board and C suite should be on the first crewed flights. Branson and Bezos have set a precedent for this.

Activist raided by police after downloading London property firm's 'confidential' meeting minutes from Google Search

It's not all bad

They seem to have achieved a Streisand result.

If, however, he was actually arrested rather than just questioned it would appear to have been done in the wrong order. At the very least they seem to have risked a wrongful arrest suit.

Re: Loss of income? Inconvenience?

"Clearly, the property developer should have also immediately self reported to the ICO"

Only if the data was of a nature that required that.

Re: Loss of income? Inconvenience?

If the files were sitting around openly on the web then the expectation should have been that this could happen. If they didn't want that they shouldn't have left them sitting around in the open but it was entirely their own fault that they didn't ensure reality and intent didn't match.

Re: slack web security

Illegal on what basis? There's nothing in the report to say it would have come under GDPR. It doesn't appear to have been a plc so it seems unlikely that there would have been any financial regulatory implications. AFAICS they might well have regarded it as commercially confidential information in which case their only responsibility would have been to themselves.

Re: I wonder

"The fact that it was indexed on Google and directly accesible means that no password was required at all to access the data."

And if they'd reviewed the logs properly Google's crawler should have been in there as well. Didn't they arrest anyone from Google?

Samsung boss Lee Jae-yong awarded Get Out Of Jail Free card

If Samsung is currently so dependent on the continued availability of one man it's time they looked into succession planning.

Russian Arm SoC now shipping in Russian PCs running Russian Linux

"a 2010 decree requiring use of open products. Baikal said all software installed on the machines is approved by Russia's Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications and Ministry of Industry and Trade"

So now we know what they mean by "open".

Re: ambition comes at a price on the desktop

"I’d barely see most of my colleagues"

You say that as if it's a bad thing.

Apple responds to critics of CSAM scan plan with FAQs, says it'd block governments subverting its system

Re: Think about it the next time you vote

Or a phone running LineageOS?

I don't know about Google key-logging but I'm not happy about the way a recent update has resulted in all the F-Droid sourced apps are move off the favourites page every time it restarts which, with my frequency of failing to recharge, is fairly often.

Trust. Hard to gain. Easy to lose. Even harder to regain.

GitHub's npm gave away a package name while it was in use, causing rethink

Re: domain name system

Even if it's no longer being actively managed it might still be being hit for downloads and hence of wider interest. Don't devalue stability.

New GNOME Human Interface Guidelines now official – and obviously some people hate it

Re: Sticking up for Gnome 40

"but this is a trend across all OS at the moment"

That's no excuse.

Re: More forks coming

The benefit of separating desktop layer from the underlying OS is that the user can continue using whatever it is that they think works best for whatever it is they need to do. Where the desktop is integrated users have to accept whatever brain farts the vendor inflicts on them, whether it works or not. I see no indication that this in any way inhibits proprietary vendors from fixing what wasn't broken to any degree at all. In the FOSS world we can just ignore it.

Re: "the user experience (UX) strategy for the project."

UX rather than UI is always a bad start. The requirement of an interface is to present a user or client with a means of interacting that remains consistent even if the implementation changes.

I read that when Apple designed the original Mac UI they tested it with new office hires. At that time few would have had much experience with computers and none with GUIs so they were able to find out what worked best without the subjects having prior expectations.

My protocol for conducting a test would require three people for each test.

A tester who has no experience of the product being tested and a list of things to be achieved.

An expert from the design/development team. The tester is only allowed to ask and the expert is only allowed to answer questions of the pattern "Where does it tell me how to xxxxx?"

The third person is an invigilator whose nominal role is to enforce that rule but in fact is there to prevent violence between the other two.

Re: Bug: "deactivate laser" and "destroy planet" buttons adjacent | WONTFIX

"if you put them together then I automatically know that you know nothing about UI "

And you know where that appeared from in 1995, don't you?

Re: Who cares?

"decorates windows to look like XP"

Now that's just cruel.

Electrocution? All part of the service, sir!

Re: "The power lead approached the PC..."

"o ensure they would never be accidentally reset to 110V."

Never? You underestimate the power of the luser.

AI algorithms uncannily good at spotting your race from medical scans, boffins warn

It sounds very much like what archaeological osteologists have been doing for years.

All your DNS were belong to us: AWS and Google Cloud shut down spying vulnerability

Re: ISP Routers

"routers are often key components for the ISP's service so can't be easily switched out"

PlusNet's can be switched out. I've recently done this after discovering that they'd reconfigured theirs from their end (itself a worry) with the net effect of me not being able to configure my DHCP as I wish.

As the original setup had a separate VDSL modem a combined unit has actually taken the box count down.

"(?Benign)"

Bind9, maybe.

Google: Linux kernel and its toolchains are underinvested by at least 100 engineers

Re: Please stop calling computer programmers "engineers".

In the UK that might be the situation. What were the requirements in ancient Greece where the name, if not the role, originated? Applying your own definition, even by law, does not give you the rights you might think you have over language. ISTR a US state discovering that the hard way in respect of "engineer".

Re: The mythical man hour

Yup. When I read it & noted his name it struck me as a touch of nominative determinism. It sounds like far too many.