Posts by Doctor Syntax

Running joke: That fitness gadget? It's, er, run out

Re: Tried and tested model

Or c) you find somebody gullible enough to buy it - the advertising industry.

Re: Thanks for the video Alastair

When looking for our first house in N Ireland we walked away from two. The first one we didn't realise was prefab until getting a survey which pointed out that the roof ridge was a steel tube, presumably propping up the gables against each other. Fortunate - it was before the Troubles got under way and I think it was a bit further south in Co Down than would have been healthy for me in my subsequent career. The other was very obviously largely composed of asbestos panels; a pity as it came complete with an Iron Age ring-fort.

OTOH they can be very good properties; an aunt and uncle lived in one for most of their married life until they had to move to sheltered accommodation. The whole street of semis is still there and not immediately prefab unless you're told.

The wonky prefab lab with a metal frame and precast panels was a different matter - a slight shifting of weight on the floor would cause the reading on a balance on the adjacent bench to change.

Re: Incompatible because..

"IoT promises to be worse by several orders of magnitude."

If you start from the premise that IoT is bad per se then a confusion of standards to hold it back is a Good Thing. It's the Tower of Babel principle.

Re: Pine from Ikea?

"within easy reach of both the Leeds and the Nottingham stores"

I don't know about the Nottingham store but I don't associate "easy" with the Leeds store. The last straw was a notice forbidding taking trolleys up to the top deck of the car park. What do the stupid idiots think I'm going to do when the car's up there? Normally I'd have brought the trolley back down but in the circumstances left it up there for badness' sake.

Boffins from China push quantum computing envelope for 'supremacy' in emerging photon field

Re: Usefulness ... ?

And the nails being elastic will vibrate so even is there are no vibrations coming from the environment after the ball hits the first nail the rest of them will be vibrating slightly before it gets to the second. Don't forget the influence of the grain of the wood...

The real world is full of little details that get in the way of predictability.

Proteins fold themselves consistently, they're all built systematically by adding one amino acid to another so it should be possible to calculate the forces that will determine the new configuration from the old as each one is added - but informed guesswork, i.e. AI, is better at working out the configuration from the sequence than predictions based on things we should, in theory, be able to work out.

Re: Except it doesn't

Mirrors, certainly. Smoke might get in the way.

Re: The first transistor...

The first transistor wasn't presented as a computer which isn't surprising as a single transistor isn't enough to make a computer.

Is it Turing complete?

Or, to put it another way, it's a physical laboratory set-up that's difficult for a classical computer to simulate but how well can it simulate a classical computer?

The nightmare is real: 'Excel formulas are the world's most widely used programming language,' says Microsoft

Re: Shouldn't that be "a horde of spreadsheets"?

A sum difference of spreadsheets.

Six of one and A2+C4 of the other

Re: Database AND programming!

It's a bigger gun to aim at the foot.

Marine archaeologists catch a break on the bottom of the Baltic Sea: A 75-year-old Enigma Machine

Re: Old typewriter

Except that nobody's sufficiently in the know to know what's valid, don't you know.

Re: Old typewriter

"I'm not sure why they'd dump them when the war had ended"

The German PTB, not realising Enigma had been cracked, ordered them to be dumped. Rather like our PTB ordering Colossus to be scrapped.

Scotch eggs ascend to the 'substantial meal' pantheon as means to pop to pub for a pint during pernicious pandemic

Re: Why do you need rules?

The evidence seems to be telling us that even when people are warned they're so disregarding of them as to constitute a danger to the rest and that enforced rules are needed.

Re: It's all bollocks

I'm not sure what you're disagreeing about. Just about everything you go on to say is an example of the government not thinking things through. Take, for instance this:

"The failures in lockdown 1 were largely down to the government failing to react quickly enough."

Which is part of the point I was making. They were at least a week late in starting - chasing after events.

It went further. Those of us of a certain age were advised not to go out at all and arrange for food deliveries etc. Good luck with that, nobody bothered to tell the supermarkets and on that basis you could starve to death before getting a delivery data so we ended up with our daughter doing shopping for us for months.

Good idea but (a) too late and (b) the detail was being left to somebody else.

The current kerfuffle about substantive meals is another example: come out with a vague statement without thinking through so that the detail is left to others so that as you put it, people and media look for loopholes.

Re: Why do you need rules?

It's taken me a good while to see the parallel with life in N Ireland. On the one hand there was a terrorist campaign which could kill you but on the other you had to get on with life. So there were rules and the bulk of the population got along with them, the exceptions mostly being those who were part of the problem.

There were considerable differences. For a start the overall risk was lower and the risk distribution was different. A big difference was that it was impossible to be in denial; if your regular pub was a smoking ruin you could see it was a smoking ruin. You can't see a virus so there's scope for Covidiots to tell themselves and those around them that it doesn't exist.

I don't see how we get round the last problem except the Covidiots discovering things the hard way. For the rest of us, however, we do need rules because they are essentially a codification of what the risks of infection are and how to avoid them. The rules will evolve as the mechanisms of infection are better understood and as treatments improve and vaccination is introduced.

Re: It's all bollocks

It depends very much on the force/Chief Constable. Some have been very unhappy about this from Lockdown 1.0. It stems from the fact that we have a government that doesn't do detail, doesn't think things through. Right from the start policy has been chasing events instead of trying to get in front of them. I see they're now getting round to the idea that contact tracing should lead to testing and that the app should be able to provide payments for those it tells to isolate just like the manual tracing. And - who knows - they might even get round to deciding whether or not vaccination certificates will be issued.

There are two sides to every story, two ends to every cable

Only half a dozen? Any link to an old Dilbert strip is usually good for half an hour.

Re: 'Tis the season after all

Oh yes it is.

Also in fairness cash machines are usually mouse-free.

Intel Labs unleashes its boffins with tales of quantum computing, secure databases and the end of debugging

Re: "once a human expresses his or her intention to the machine"

Obligatory https://www.techwell.com/sites/default/files/shared/treeswing.jpg

Anything about processors that don't leak information?

Salesforce's Dreamforce shindig hits new levels of nauseating online as... Oh god. Is that James Corden?

Re: James Corden

He seemed to be very popular. for no reason I could see. I used to wonder if it was just me; clearly it isn't.

I remember Richard Whitely hosting an internal BT motivational* event. He had the grace to appear embarrassed by it so my regard for him went well up. Perhaps senior BT managers joined ferrets in his "never again" list.

* Motivational in that it motivated me right out of the company for good. Otherwise best described as "insulting the staff's intelligence".

It's a corporate presentation by salespeople who sell software for salespeople to salespeople. Who would expect any mitigating elements at all? It's lucky it didn't collapse into a black hole capable of sucking all intelligent thought out of the universe.

Re: Please help

It means .... BINGO!!!

Where's the mysterious metal monolith today then? Oh look, it's atop a California mountain

Not quite a monolith but here's one scheduled for Blighty - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-55160220

LibreOffice 7.1 beta boasts impressive range of features let down by a lack of polish and poor mobile efforts

Re: "Across the free software world we have a problem in getting people to pay for things"

"Yes, everything was born because Stallman didn't want to pay for things."

Actually it was because somebody took what he'd written without even consulting him and wrapped it up in a proprietary package. Not surprisingly, he was pissed off by it.

Re: Failings in Mobile

Osborne 1! I don't think it was an Osborne but I had another luggable as my desktop about 86/7 for a while. I've usually had terminal windows about the same size ever since. But the thought of one of those and a printer....

Re: Annoying little Libre ? well...........

Quite. And it was indeed he who raised the same objection almost a year ago.

Re: Annoying little Libre ? well...........

"the rather rude, and very pushy install on all Linux distros I have treid, which then prevents the install of Apache Open Office"

Somebody - possibly yourself - has raised this issue in the past.

It simply isn't the case. I have both LO and OO installed on Devuan side by side. Neither tries to block the other from installing. KDE, and I presume other DEs can be set up to make either the preferred application to open a given document type. In fact I've found that when installing a new LO version KDE sometimes gets confused and sets OO as the default application.

Of course one aspect of this is that the default Debian version of LO is so old by the time a Debian Stable is released that it gets replaced by the version from the LO download site immediately after installation.

And how does "carving up the boot process" affect installation?

Digital Sovereignty and funding

I'd have thought NextCloud would have been more relevant to digital sovereignty. There are quite few hosted offerings from European service providers and I think that really does need some polish - and a policy of not dropping important features (including the ability to view, let alone edit LO documents online) in minor releases. Perhaps the EU could put some funding into such projects.

Funding of LO came up here some time ago. AFAICR they'd painted themselves into a corner of not being able to put donations into development so those of us who have been prepared to pay via donations have suddenly started wondering what's the point.

Re: Whilst I agree that cloud collaboration is important these days...

I'm not sure I'd want to edit but being able to read a document might come in handy as might dunning a presentation from Impress from a device with a micro-HDMI connector.

Don't forget, it's a beta, not a Microsoft final release.

Glastonbury hippy shop Hemp in Avalon rapped for spouting 'plandemic' pseudoscience

Re: Glastonbury

Go back to the article. "Hurts nobody" might be a tad optimistic - people believe this garbage and reject sound advice because of it.

Re: Glastonbury

How's Guinevere?

Re: overwhelming evidence ?

"I wear mine because it just keeps others happy"

Have you considered the possibility that it keeps others happy because it keeps them safe from you and gives them the impression, perhaps misleadingly, that you take protecting others seriously? It's the others wearing masks that contributes to keeping you safe.

Re: People turning to nonsense

"P = Chance of getting the virus (very small) x Chance of getting a bad reaction (small) x Chance of dying (age related but extremely small for < 30's increasing to high for > 75's)"

What does this mean. You're conflating two outcomes, a bad reaction and dying. Yes, dying is a bad reaction but I think you're meaning a bad reaction short of death. These are two separate probabilities so you need a separate calculation for each.

"You still have a chance of passing it on but with 60's+ vaccinated, the younger population could continue largely unaffected."

There are a couple of issues with this sentence.

Firstly, If we have a vaccine which is 90% effective (the initial value for Pfizer) that would mean that between myself and SWMBO there would be a 20% chance that at least one of us would not be effectively protected. I don't find that particularly reassuring. I don't even find it reassuring that it's now improved to a 10% chance. From the 30,000 feet point of view that government has to take that seems good. From the ground level, individual point of view, not so good.

Secondly, although many of the younger generation would continue unaffected not all would be. Again, this might be a good thing unless you're one of those who finds themselves affected.

AFAICS the most effective thing about vaccination from an individual point of view is not the probability that it protects directly but the lowering of the probability of being exposed to infection by lowering the total number of infected individuals in the population. For this to happen it not only needs to protect against developing symptoms (which is what the trials have largely measured) but also to protect against asymptomatic infections which I think was tested by Oxford/Astro-Zeneca but not by the others. It worries me that HMG seems to be only talking about vaccination vulnerable groups(in descending order of vulnerability and carers and front-line NHS workers despite having ordered more than enough for the whole population.

Re: Glastonbury

Pandering to the credulous seems to have been a local industry there since the middle ages and the monks ran short of cash. Arthur's tomb (alleged) came to the rescue.

.org owner Internet Society puts its money where its mouth is with additional IETF funding

Backlash amongst the general public? The general public has never heard of IETF or ISOC.

Amazon’s cloudy Macs cost $25.99 a day. 77 days of usage would buy you your own Mac

DTBYO

Days to buy your own. A new and useful metric for renting anything, cloudy or not.

Re: Always do the sums

I thought that as far as Macs were concerned supporting the box itself actually is the cost of the box - if anything goes wrong you're supposed to get another.

More seriously, if you're concerned about the security and monitoring of a box do those concerns really go away for one that's connected to your network but not within your physical reach? As to patching this is entirely out of your control and you have to rely on the third party and this particular option, AIUI, is specifically not on the current OS version.

President Trump's rushed-through H-1B techie visa crackdown halted by federal judge

Re: This will end up in SCOTUS

"the outgoing Trump administration is bequeating the incoming Biden administration a huge heap of problems"

AFAICS it's been doing that for the last four years.

When it comes to taxing tech giants, America is out, France is in, Canada and Indonesia are going their own way

Global consensus might simply amount to everyone except the US.

Re: With Covid emptying States' coffers, and those companies seeing increasing revenues....

"who do you think will end up paying, Amazon customers or Amazon shareholders?"

In the first case who do you think the customers will blame, Amazon or government?

In the second, how many Amazon shareholders vote in French elections?

HPE to move HQ from Silicon Valley to Texas, says Lone Star State is 'attractive' for recruitment, retaining staff

Isn't that the part of Texas with the particularly patent-friendly court?

Arecibo Observatory brings forward 'controlled demolition' plans by collapsing all by itself

Just a thought - is it possible some administrative function has been paying insurance on it for the last 60 years?

Cayman Islands investment fund left entire filestore viewable by world+dog in unsecured Azure blob

Let's take pharmaceuticals - my daughter works in clinical trials.

You might think that the end product is a medicine. So it is, but before that hits the prescription pads e-prescriptions there's another product - a huge stack of documentation to be submitted for approval. That documentation isn't collated by sorting through bits of paper, it's put together on computers including laptops of people like my daughter.

Those laptops are going to contain personal information about the trial patients - subject to GDPR - and including medical history. I'm not familiar with the regulations regarding that but I assume that it is subject to regulation over and above GDPR. The results of the trial will affect the share price so it's going to be subject to financial regulation as well. Beside all that the fact that it's also company commercial in confidence information is almost a minor consideration. As the trials workers are apt to be based where the patients are and not necessarily in head office there's also a need for secure communications with HO.

Any pharmaceutical business that doesn't think it isn't also an IT business to handle all that with an appropriate degree of securely needs to think again.

Does electricity have the same risk profile?

Oops.

I wonder how many tax authorities have spotted it.