Posts by Doctor Syntax

Microsoft has a workaround for 'HiveNightmare' flaw: Nuke your shadow copies from orbit

Re: AC Naturally

All attacks are local for some value of local.

Even Facebook struggles: Zuck's titanic database upgrade hits numerous legacy software bergs

Re: Didn't know they were still using MySQL

"Or they could ask Oracle for help"

As it's Facebook that sounds like a good idea.

UK celebrates 25 years of wasteful, 'underperforming' government IT projects

Re: Competence

"top civil servants and minister who actually have personal experience of IT and understand it"

Dido would claim that. So would Hancock, he of the personal app. Dunning-Kruger explains a lot about government over the last few decades.

Re: Asked whether they thought the criticisms were fair, a government spokesperson...

I think your sympathy is misplaced. They reel out the usual meaningless boilerplate, collect their money and carry on.

Re: The main problem is...

"a manager can manage anything"

And a politician, trained in PPE, classics or some arts subject, can govern anything.

Tech support scams subside somewhat, but Millennials and Gen Z think they're bulletproof and suffer

It's a pity Microsoft are concentrating on phone scams. The most frequent emails on my old Hotmail account are threats purporting to come from Mcrosoft to close the account ( a few of the les competent are emailing a Hotmail address threatening to close a gmail account!) and it's very rare to see any of these trapped by Microsoft's spam filters. This is surprising given that they are 100% effective at other scams.

The other group that get through a would-be leads generators touting "their" SEO or web development services. They get my "prospective supplier" questionnaire which gently leads them to the realisations that they look unconvincing and they've paid good money for a crap email list.

Re: Wasting their time

Unless you need the phone for something else you don't need to spend your time wasting theirs.

"That sounds very interesting. Oh, there's someone at the door. Could you hold on a minute & I'll be back."

Eventually hang up the phone.

One salesman got that treatment twice. Then his manager rang to say they had trouble getting through with the phone. Slow learners.

"the vast majority of them ARE Indian."

It's probably the local language that makes them less suspicious.

Exsparko-destructus! What happens when wand waving meets extremely poor wiring

Re: Less poor wiring than poor building

For a few years we had a house like that. The insurance or building society insisted in the installation of a firebreak, some sort of mineralised panels which didn't look very substantial.

At about the same time I wasn't very pleased to discover that at work someone from facilities had visited the machine room to do work on the riser and had drilled a few holes in similar panels leaving a good deal of mineral dust about the place, this being back in the days of tape backups.

Spanish cops cuff Brit bloke accused of playing role in 2020 celeb Twitter hijacking

Re: Why not ask UK?

The NYT article refers to "his current home in Spain".

The old New: Windows veteran explains that menu item

Re: Typo!

OK >

"For people with a document-centric view of the world, programs aren't really things that you think about. What you really work on are documents."

Not really. The default action on my desktop when opening a JPEG, or PNG is to open it in Gwenview which has limited editing options (flips, crop and change resolution) but on the right click menu there are a whole selection of others including Gimp and Pinta, neither or which are what you'd choose just to open a file for a quick look. The document and the means by which you view and edit it are both considerations. The document-centric view is that one takes primacy over the other in the user interface.

The people with a document-centric view know and care about the sorts of documents they work on. It's not necessarily the same sort of document for everyone.

Re: Always an important consideration

"I think that a cascading start menu should always be present, because search is only useful if you know what you're looking for, rather than what sort of thing you're looking for"

And that means that it should be organised on functional lines, not alphabetical.

Re: Always an important consideration

"TL/DR - stop moving stuff for the sake of moving it and/or at least explain why it's being moved"

That should apply to every interface for every piece of software.

Also, if possible, add a "Classic" option to get everything back to the way it was. "Classic" might trail current by about 2 versions, only adding in the stuff from the brevious Classic that has proved its worth in the interim.

Re: Always an important consideration

"This fifty year vet uses whichever is the quickest."

Or most suitable to the way of working.

If you have several projects on the go, each with several-to-a-lot of files involved the one you want at the moment might well be off the end of a Recent... menu (the alternative is a menu so long it takes ags to find anything). In that case a folder for each project - with sub-folders as the project grows) holding the relative documents is the way to go. For app-centric is probebly best.

At the moment I'm busy with a sort of recreation of the old Windows Cardfile program - but for Linux, of course - which will hold text, image or tabular "cards" with a view to it holding a lot of project resources.

Troll jailed for 5 years after swatting of Twitter handle owner ends in death

Re: re: And people say 'there is no justice'....... They're right!

If you read the Krebs link posted above it seems that Chris G is in agreement with the judge whose options were limited by the plea the prosecution had accepted.

Re: Sentence should have been far longer

That seems to be the other side of the plea system. It might result in many wrongful convictions but it can also result in inadequate sentences.

It appears that he was one of a conspiracy. It would be good to think that the other conspirators have also been traced and dealt with.

Everyone cites that 'bugs are 100x more expensive to fix in production' research, but the study might not even exist

I've always vaguely thought that the sort of quotes about an error discovered in step N after it was made being a power of N more expensive to correct was based on an assumed process of going back to the step where it was made, working through the whole development from there and the ultimate cost was based on the cost of each step so that the 100 times cost reflected a 10-fold cost from moving from one step to the next multiplied by a further 10-fold cost moving from that step to where you were. Whether the implied assumption was valid or that the costs were really an order of magnitude a matter for debate, of course. As the article implies it's the sort of assumption that gets easily thrown off the top of the head by an instructor in a course on development...

What is clear is that once something is in deployment the costs of fixing a bug might be insignificant compared to finding and fixing all the faulty data that's now out there.

England's controversial extraction of personal medical histories from GP systems is delayed for a second time

"There is something odd with The Home Office being able to get any Home Secretary to go native immediately upon appointment "

The former Home Sec who is currently Health Sec (something to reflect on) gave an account of how it was done in an interview with the Times. It was so effective he didn't even realise exactly what it was he was describing. OTOH some of them seem to start native.

After all, he can't consider it confidential.

"You shouldn't have the option to opt out."

Can we have the URL where you've published all your medical data?

"Former health secretary Hancock was said to be a passionate supporter of data sharing...r an affair that appeared to contravene COVID-19 restrictions was made public... The ICO is investigating that data leak."

Odd, isn't it? When it's someone else's data it's "sharing", whenit's his own it's a leak.

Good news: Jeff Bezos went to space. Bad news: He's back

Re: Oh dear

" watched it live as a teenager and now feel very old."

You should worry. I watched it in my mid-twenties.

Lawn care SWAT team subdues trigger-happy Texan... and other stories

Roundup and lawn care are not compatible.

Re: The Lawnmower Man

"Ah, the joys of Tory's and their Shires."

What is it that Tory owns that owns Shires?

Re: Bloody hell, nobody told me the police would cut my lawn!

Also, if you have spring bulbs planted in the grass you don't cut the grass until their foliage has died back. Maybe people don't do that in the US.

Happy 'Freedom Day': Stats suggest many in England don't want it or think it's a terrible idea

Re: H&S

Mask wearing predominantly comes down to protecting others so it's not a matter of employees wearing masks to protect themselves. If the employer failed to mandate mask wearing for all those not exempt then the argument would be that they failed to maintain a safe working environment.

Re: I have some sympathy for Boris

I have none. The job of a PM is to make the hard decisions. If he's not willing to do that he shouldn't have schemed to get the job in the first place.

Re: Apple/Google app

The real problem is in taking an indicator with a very likely high rate of false positives as being definitive. It should be no more than indicative of the need for a further test.

Re: "a shift of emphasis onto greater personal judgement and responsibility"

Washing hands is what BoJo's been keenest on all along. Clearly Freudian.

Re: No we've proven that coronavirus is very virulent and deadly

One of the things you learn as a biologist is that the outliers don't tell you about the general case. The general case here is that last winter was an abnormally low flu year.

Re: SNAFU

What do you understand by the term "lagging indicator"?

Re: SNAFU

"Thatcher was one of the last UK prime ministers with a scientific background,"

There were others?

Windows 10 to hang on for five more years with 21H2 update

Re: PR disaster

Who cares if they're abandoned and out of date? They're locked in so their feelings don't count. They'll just have to buy new kit and that means more money for Microsoft.

Re: Same old windows 10

Similar experience with previous laptop - someone in our loal history group had a query about W10 Mail. Interrupting its update completely broke W10 which wasn't really a problem as I only left it there in case I had to return the H/W as faulty and I'd taken the precaution of making restore thumb drive.

As it's now been replaced by a new laptop (got really fed up with a miserable 15" screen) I recently dug out the restore device and tried to restore W10 with thoughts of passing the laptop on. What's germane to the present discussion - it repeatedly failed with unexpected reboots until I went into BIOS and switched secure boot off.

Re: They will have to support Windows 10 for longer than five years

"Just seek the cheapest Lenovo Ideapads with AMD Athlon CPUs."

Your "cheapest" might still be too dear for many. Why should perfectly good equipment be sent to landfill?

Re: okay...

"maybe fewer projects might lead to more rapid development."

Rapid development often equates to people fixing things that weren't broken. From 4 onwards KDE fixed the idea of a hot corner to unhide the task bar so now just venturing anywhere near the edge pops it even if you were just aiming for the scroll bar on a window at the bottom of the screen...

Re: okay...

Let's just take some time to think out the multiple desktop choice thing in Linux. Simple guide:

Some folk prefer a smartphone style approach - nothing but apps on the desktop. For them Ubuntu's Unity fits the bill. No need to hop once they've settled on it.

Some folk prefer a minimalist, clear desktop approach. For them Gnome fits the bill. No need to hop once they've settled on it.

Some folk prefer a maximalist approach - anything you like on the desktop, apps and data. For them KDE fits the bill. No need to hop once they've settled on it.

Some people prefer just data files on the desktop. There doesn't seem to be anything that actually enforces this but KDE is OK - you don't have to put anything there if you don't want to. Again no need to hop once they've settled on it.

The one really disruptive event took place a few years ago when Gnome grew a hair shirt and took a really minimalist turn. Mate and Cinnamon arose from projects to resurrect the previous Gnome (Mate) and reimplement it with the new Gnome underpinnings (Cinnamon). Those and XFCE sit around somewhere in the middle. They all have their adherents, as do Enlightenment and again, once they've settled there's no need to change.

Basically, to mix metaphors, it's horses for courses and no need to change horses in mid-stream. Unless, of course, changing horses out of curiosity is something you want to do; there's no accounting for folks which probably must also explain why so many people complain bitterly about Windows but simply put up with whatever Microsoft deigns to shovel out month by month and half-year by half year.

It's choice, If you don't relish the thought that you can choose the desktop approach that most suits you, maybe you're suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

FWIW SWMBO has a mixture of files* and apps (just Seamonkey and Zoom) on KDE whilst I also use KDE but with only files* on the desktop with most used applications on the panel (task bar in Windows parlance).

* In reality files and folders.

The lights go off, broadband drops out, the TV freezes … and nobody knows why (spooky music)

Re: What is this meter thing and cut-off valve all about??

For the first 14 years of my life we also used spring water via a short run of lead pipe. Part way through that a long copper pipe was installed to bring the municipal supply so the kitchen had 3 taps, hot, cold and spring. We still used the spring water for drinking. The discharge was into the head goyt of a disused mill dam; it had probably been will filtered through the silt before making its way into the river.

BTW the problems with lead internal plumbing really arise if the water is left to sit all day in heated but unoccupied houses. That house was occupied 24 hours a day and certainly not heated.

Re: ...they try to fob you off with jargon

Use a local tradesman, preferably someone who's been recommended.

To succeed running his own business he has an incentive to do a good job to get repeat business and word of mouth recommendations. Someone working for or, more likely, subcontracted to what is essentially a ticketing operation had an incentive to close down tickets. The two are different incentives and only one works in your favour.

" I praised him to the heavens."

Probably got him fired.

Refreshing: An Office update that won't frighten the horses

Ah, but it's only space that the users were using. The important people, Microsoft , have given themselves a bit more space which is appropriate as it's their PC it's running on.

NASA fixes Hubble Space Telescope using backup power supply unit, payload computer

Fingers uncrossed.

Iffy voltage: The plague of PC builders and Hubble space telescope controllers alike

Re: Breaking the cardinal rule of IT

This one worked. Hooray!

Re: fingers and toes crossed

It's already switched itself off. It's switching it back on again that's tricky.

BOFH: But soft! What light through yonder filing cabinet breaks?

Long ago our lab acquired a greenhouse to maintain cannabis plants which were due to become court exhibits. My office mate at the time said that it was the only greenhouse in Belfast where cannabis plants were hiding the tomato plants rather than the other way around. I suppose that could all be updated nowadays aboyt the bitcoin mine being used to hide the cannabis farm or vice versa.

That's to dispose of the biological detritus.

This page has been deliberately left blank

Well, TFA says his error so it sounds like he got what he ordered. Should've gone to SpecSavers*.

* Seen at the recent Yorkshire Festival of Motorsport on the back of a half-size model of a camper van which was actually a trailer.

Google demonstrates impractical improvement in quantum error correction – but it does work

Simple solution. Let the computer generate a superposition of all possible outcomes & then pick the right answer. Or the one you like best.