Posts by Doctor Syntax

Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web NFT fetches $5.4m at auction while rest of us gaze upon source code for $0

I think "proving originality" might be too strong a phrase. Viewers of Fake or Fortune will be familiar with catalogues raisonnés and institutes or even individuals specialising in authenticating the works of dead artists. Sometimes a reasonable case can be made for rejecting an object by the presence of later materials (but was it later retouching?) but all too often actual proof is out of reach. In such cases it seems to come down to personal opinion and a better approach would be to say "It's not possible to be definitive but these are my observations and this is my interpretation of them" allowing for the situation that opinions will differ between experts and over time - which will happen anyway. Being upfront about this would, however, rather get in the way of such high-priced sales.

"hacking away on a NeXTcube workstation at CERN"

Perhaps the workstation would have been a better collectible item.

Battery recycling boosted by dentist-style ultrasonics, if manufacturers can cooperate

Re: This is news

Or simply regulate to require easy recycling. If the constituents are sufficiently valuable and the products economically recyclable, preferably by an industry standard process then recycling becomes a business opportunity, it will happen; if not by the manufacturers themselves, then by third parties.

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone

Last sentence ...

... ouch!

We now have two major instances of wild-life successfully moving into areas which have been evacuated. It raises questions of how they are able to do this given that the radioactivity levels are reckoned to be lethal. Is this selection of species and maybe even individuals of species which are more tolerant? Are the estimates of lethal levels too low?

Probably the former, I suspect. There are parallels in that a few select plant species are capable of living on soil conaminated by lead mining, for example.

Microsoft wasn't joking about the Dev Channel not enforcing hardware checks: Windows 11 pops up on Pi, mobile phone

"What I dont get is why?"

Microsoft has managed to get H/W manufacturers to ship Windows on pretty well every desktop. This is not only to their immediate advantage in terms of sales, it keeps other options more or less out of the market place except where the H/W vendor also has their own OS.

Periodically rendering existing H/W obsolete by introducing a new version, making the old one EoL and blocking the new one on a lot of old H/W does the H/W vendors a favour.

Linux, on the other hand, keeps old H/W alive a lot longer. If you were a H/W manufacturer which OS would you rather continue to install as standard?

Re: You're nuts

Not that I'd want to praise Windows but W7 Starter was shipped on my MSI nettop that came with 1Gb and had a 2 Gb limit.

As to whether it was able to do anything useful, I've no idea because for actual use I installed Linux. Apart from being used for work whenever I wanted something really portable it's also been used as to test new releases. Debian Bullsblood & Devuan Chimaera with KDE have finally found its limits - or have they? They're still in a pre-release state.

Jeff Bezos names the fourth person for the first New Shepard flight: Wally Funk

Re: About bloody time too!

I'm hoping to see Branson announce he's working on a repair mission for Hubble. That would inspire Bezos & Musk to start in competitions and one of them might get there.

Leaked Apple memo tells employees that they'll be coming into the office at least 3 days a week from September

Re: Tough Call

"I'm an old git, and I assume that with enough time, thought, tools, etc. that things could be made to change."

Git is, of course, one of the tools that enables remote development teams to work.

"our unbelievable product launches"

I wonder if, on reflection, she might have worded that differently.

IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster, sources say

"everything should go fine provided everyone follows the instructions emailed to them."

Can anyone spot the flaw in this logic?

Re: "laid the blame on IBM CFO James Kavanaugh"

"IBM does have a CTO, right ?"

He's the one trying to send an email saying "told you so."

Cross-discipline boffin dream team issues social media warning: FIX IT NOW!

Not so much extending adolescence but in many cases causing regression in those well past it.

You wait ages for a neutron star and black hole to collide, then two pairs come along at once

Re: What about the buses?

We hope buses don't collide that often.

As to bus bunching, there is an explanation. If a bus is slightly delayed at one point there are, on average, a few more people to board (and subsequently alight) at the remaining stops. Each extra person boarding and alighting takes more time so the bus is more delayed. Those extra people would have been picked up by the next bus so it runs a little faster and catches up with the first bus. Apply in reverse for a bus running early, it catches up with the previous one hence bus companies instruct drivers not to get ahead of schedule.

UK artists seek 'luvvie levy' on new gadgets to make up for all the media that consumers access online

Re: What free stuff?

Would that be the art in posters, for which I assume the artist gets a fee, or graffiti?

UK Cabinet Office's spending on cybersecurity training rises by 500% in a year

Ministers were said to have "expressed surprise at the presence of CCTV in the office"

Standard BOFH procedure.

When free and open source actually means £6k-£8k per package: Atos's £136m contract with NHS England

It would be good to think that politicians would realise that "going digital" or being "data driven" involves more than making the announcement, showing each other PowerPoints about it and discovering the hard way how to handle more than 32K rows of data. They should at the very least work out what might then be their core competences - stuff that they shouldn't outsource but have in-house.

Re: What is FREE?

Given that R is sitting, ready packaged, a my and I guess most Linux distros' repositories this doesn't seem to be a massive task. £6k for something that can be done with apt install r-recommended?

Re: Coincidence?

Freelancing is small scale outsourcing. It's the sort of task that could and should have been handled at that scale.

The M in M1 is for moans: How do you turn a new MacBook Pro into a desktop workhorse?

I don't think fish microwaver in the office and closet go together. Someone knows who they are.

Hubble telescope in another tight spot: Between astrophysicists sparring over a 'dark matter deficient' galaxy

Re: Forgive my ignorance but...

"Maybe we are just bad at estimating the mass in a galaxy but there's a lot of very smart people doing very detailed calculations and they all seem to be finding mass missing."

But there are also a lot of very smart people trying to work out what form the missing mass takes and so far have come up with a variety of possible explanations as per your list but some of them are hypothetical and those which aren't, such as neutrinos so far haven't been shown to exist in sufficient quantities.

Sometimes science predicts things which are yet to be discovered. Predictions based on gaps in a theoretical framework have often been successful, as in particle physics. Predictions based on a gap in observations, such as phlogiston or luminiferous aether less so.

Hmmmmm, how to cool that overheating CPU, if only there was a solution...

Re: Anybody who knows anything about plumbing ...

Your mains water supply is a source. Your CH system isn't, it simply holds water that the source supplied. You're not coupling two sources together.

UK's competition watchdog preps to shoulder post-Brexit workload from European Commission

"Whether this activity is a sign that the CMA is ramping up its position to protect consumers – or merely taking on board the extra workload following Brexit – remains to be seen."

Getting swamped by it all seems more likely.

India's IT minister angry that Twitter broke local law by following US law

Re: This is interesting

But will it be able to share data with Facebook Scotland, Facebook Wales and Facebook N Ireland?

Re: This is interesting

"Is the company mandated to break local law?"

No. If there's a conflict between local law and the law of the country in which it's head-quartered it means it can't operate there.

Re: What a wonderful law

please remind the US based companies the rest of the world exists and has different rules.

I was fired for telling ICO of Serco track and trace data breach, claims sacked worker

Re: Avoidance of responsibility

" or supply services as a business"

And who do we have to thank for that being a non-starter in so many cases? HMRC.

Hubble’s cosmic science is mind-blowing, but its soul celebrates something surprising about us

It will fall - and, unfortunately maybe has fallen - victim to long term operation in a hostile environment combined with a lack of means to service it without the Shuttle.

The end of the Shuttle programme may well have been in part due to budget cuts but also due to the fact that it had shown itself to be unsafe to an extent that was no longer acceptable.

BMA warns NHS Digital's own confidentiality guardian could halt English GP data grab unless communication with public improves

Re: Effective use of data...not

I'm going to an event this weekend that requires evidence of a -ve lateral-flow test which is my first experience of this - take the test, go to an NHS site and record the result.

Nicely made up kits (we used to make up kits for scenes of crime officers so it's something I notice) with a nice clearly written protocol. But it relies entirely on honesty in recording the results and when it's to qualify for entry to some event I'm sure some will just dispose of the test strip unused and then report a negative result.

Reporting it was interesting too. As is standard practice with gov.uk sites it declared itself to be an alpha site - will they never decide something should be of release quality before it's released. And it really was alpha quality - it barfed on my post-code which couldn't be recognised due to a "technical issue" (is it yet another organisation running on a copy of PAF more than two decades old?) and ring 119. 119 was a D & D maze of "press 1" or "press 2" with the odd exhortation to use the web-site which had directed me there. Eventually I spoke to an agent on a dodgy line - one of her questions really rendered me momentarily speechless - after telling her initially why I was ringing I was asked how I heard about this service!

Oh well, at least Dido In Disaster Out couldn't have influenced the design of the test kits.

In reality its probably just one more bit of paper-work

Ouch! When the IT equipment is sound, but the setup is hole-y inappropriate

Re: Hot Desking

Nothing says to your employees "we don't care enough about you to provide you with a small personal space" like hot-desking.

Replacing all the tall partitions with lower ones so that the partition mounted bookshelves were way over there by the window and at the same time moving another department with a loud dot-matrix printer right behind you said much the same thing.

Re: She was trying to open the hinges.

My first laptops did indeed present the logo to the user. At some point that changed. It signalled the vendors deciding that marketing was more important than their customers.

At one time it seemed more or less universal for ports and connectors to be colour-coded, especially PS-2 keyboard & mouse ports.

I suppose the crayon department objected on aesthetic grounds. Maybe that's why laptops seem not to have LEDs on the network ports now although that could just be the bean counters.

Re: He had three degrees

"A degree means you have knowledge. It does not mean you have intelligence."

It may simply be that the knowledge is different to yours. A knowledge of microscopes doesn't necessarily mean a knowledge of microprocessors and vice versa.

Bug at payments processor WorldPay swipes £2k+ per ride ticket from Brighton Pier revellers

Rather more than the locals are happy about, so I'm told.

What you need to know about Microsoft Windows 11: It will run Android apps

"Windows 11 has a new KDE-esque user-interface"

They've caught up!

"Win32, .NET, UWP, Xamarin, Electron, React Native, Java and Progressive Web Apps"

The really sneaky thing would have been to add iOS and/or MacOS to that list.

Treaty of Roam finally in ashes: O2 cracks, joins rivals, adds data roaming charges for heavy users in EU

Re: If it's not on the side of a bus...

In order to become a saint he needs to be responsible for two miracles. Does getting people to trust him count as one?

Re: As Soon As They Could...

Do you really expect your UK only prices to go down? If so you've just missed an opportunity for a couple of S African brothers to look after your Bitcoins.

UK urged to choo-choo-choose hydrogen-powered trains in pursuit of carbon-neutral economic growth

"I think we should just put a wind turbine on top of the train."

Sorry, they wouldn't fit in the tunnels. Fit them in front or behind instead.

Re: Huh

You could produce the steam by converting the hydrogen into oxygen dihydride.

Re: No all electric

Could the catenary be lowered and raised quickly enough for momentum to carry the train past a bridge? That would mean that a 3rd rail would only be required in tunnels where the risk would be less?

UK watchdog fines biz £130k for 900,000+ direct marketing calls to folk who had opted out

Said it before, I'll say it again. What's needed is legislation to enable recipients to be able to dial a code, say in the 147x range to register a spam call. Once sufficient complaints have been made their telephone account is credited with a fee - more if the number is TPS registered, which is charged to the caller plus a handling fee. The call arrives from a different network - that network gets charged and can pass on its own handling fee and tough on them if they don't keep tabs on where the call comes from. Abuse would be limited PDQ by credit control of the caller's telecoms provider.

In practice the threat of this and the cost of developing the systems to set it up would be such that suddenly the insoluble problem of controlling it by the telecoms industry would suddenly be solved.

Pyjama bottoms crew, listen up: In 2022 we'll still be at home

Dammit. Their!!!

Next thing I'll be putting in grocers' apostrophe's.

"People say we do most of our collaboration by the watercooler"

Looking back on my time in offices I have vague recollections of their being water coolers but I certainly don't recollect anyone congregating around them.

Stupid things anyway - just the opposite of what you need to make tea.

Re: Workday

I suppose their products are aimed at supporting in-office working. Follow the money.

Re: Be careful what you wish for

I suppose for those companies who want to get rid of staff without the cost of pay-offs it'll be a good investment. IBM are likely to be a big customer.

Re: Thing of the past

In due course there'll be money in doing what was done to C18th & 19th cottages - buying up two or three and knocking them through into one.

Re: Thing of the past

"I think we may be looking at a hybrid situation, where employers will be renting out offices closer to workers or we may see more co-working spaces (shared with many companies) where employees would go instead of their company main office."

Where I live it would appear to have been a no-brainer to turn redundant mills into such facilities. Mills and housing were built in close proximity. But those with no brains, the planners, set their faces against such ideas and for decades the policy has been to separate homes from workplaces so now the surviving mill buildings are brownfield sites to be demolished and turned into more homes for people who won't live near their workplaces unless they actually work at home.

There's no 'Skype' in Teams: Microsoft lets signing key for its Debian Skype repository slip gently into the night

"We sense the dead hand of a bot at work."

Not necessarily. I've encountered (possibly) human customer disservice agents with about the same level of usefulness.

UK health secretary Matt Hancock follows delay to GP data grab with campaign called 'Data saves lives'

Re: Politicians talk bollocks

And for most other reports about politicians.

Re: Fix the existing problems before making a profit

Yes but which nation. As Wales & Scotland are both to be treated as separate nations we have separate Welsh & Scottish (& N Irish) National Health Services so by default the remaining NHS is the English National Health Service.