Posts by Doctor Syntax

Of all the analytics firms in the world, why is Palantir getting its claws into UK health data?

"We haven't had anything you could call a Labor government since the seventies."

I'm not sure I'd call the present govt. Tory. One of the clown's first actions on gaining power was to turf out several who more clearly were conservatives.

Boffins show sleight-of-hand tricks to Corvids, find they are smarter than people

Re: Bird brain ?

It just goes to show size doesn't always matter.

Brit IT firms wound up by court order after fooling folk into paying for 'support' over fake computer errors

First thoughts are that Companies House were acting to the limit of their ability - fraud prosecutions, which would appear to be appropriate, aren't in their remit. But given that the alleged director wasn't in control of the company, isn't there an offence under the Companies Act here?

Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language

"a male rooster"

What other kind is there?

When security gets physical: Mossad boss hints at less-than-subtle Stuxnet followup

Explosives in the marble certainly beats spreading nitrogen iodide on the floor. But why marble?

Mark it in your diaries: 14 October 2025 is the end of Windows 10

Re: 2025? That long?

"millenials raised by their smart phone, might have different ideas about the average office desktop they want to use."

I doubt many of them are using just their smartphone for working at home.

Orbex is creeping towards orbit from a UK launchpad, but first there are courts, birds, and billionaires to overcome

Povlsen has invested a substantial sum in another space port in Shetland.

In that case that objection should be easily dealt with "if you don't object to mine I won't object to yours".

It reminds me of the time when a pub kept objecting to someone converting a house a couple of hundred yards or so away as a restaurant. The objections were based on the house not having any parking. Neither did the pub which was less than a hundred yards away from a cross roads with traffic lights and whose parking lines extended most of the way to the house. Surprisingly the would-be restaurateur gave up instead of making the obvious objection next time the pub's license renewal was due.

IBM pulls up the ladder behind some supercomputer customers

About 1990 the drives for HP disk cabinets (about a small USB stickfull in modern terms were huge and hugely heavy. There was a crane to ift them in and out which consisted of a steel bar that fitted over the cabinets and a sling with a pulley system to lift the drives. Same job but portable enough for the field engineers to bring with them instead of having to have one permanently on site but they did look a bit dodgy in use.

Do you come from a land Down Under? Where diesel's low and techies blunder

Re: Me too!

Moral of the story - if you're going to do a customer demonstration make sure you rehearse it first.

Re: Alternative steps

"find out who's siphoning diesel out of the storage tank."

I'd never thought of this aspect before but is generator diesel marked in the same way as agricultural "red diesel"? If so a quiet call to HMRC and a spot check on the offender's tank's content might save the need for involving the CEO.

Want to keep working in shorts and flipflops way after this is all over? It could be time to rethink your career moves

"unless it is an extreme case involving them making you brave blizzards and dodgy moorland roads."

My last gigs before hanging up the invoice book for good did indeed commuting over a dodgy moorland road with occasional blizzards. Not that visibility of about three metres would stop some idiot Merc driver overtaking.

The AN0M fake secure chat app may have been too clever for its own good

Encrochat and ANOM's predecessor, Phantom Secure, started off as, shall we say, independent efforts. Their getting compromised could have been put down to bad luck and hoped for better next time. Now that criminals have been told explicitly that such off the shelf systems can't be trusted individual gangs might start commissioning their own. That introduces its own trust problems of course but assuming many of them aren't a multiplicity of small networks are going to yield much less reward for the effort needed to break into them.

The alternative is that they simply move to using mainstream end-to-end systems giving even more weight to calls for these to be backdoored. The ongoing existence of separate criminal systems should really be an argument against the Patels of this world demanding that the rest of us shouldn't have secure communications for out legitimate day-to-day lives.

How cynical is it to wonder if these public pronouncements are an attempt to bring that situation about?

Linus Torvalds tells kernel list poster to 'SHUT THE HELL UP' for saying COVID-19 vaccines create 'new humanoid race'

Re: Critical Thinking

Questioning the betters is fine. It requires recognising the betters, recognising why they are the betters and why the answers they give are more likely to be right than the opinions of some eejit they found on the net who can't tell the difference between biology and telecommunications technologies.

Re: Why all the thumbs down?

Difficult to educe their wealth, certainly. Worth is a different matter.

Re: those who fear evolution, demonstrate it

"I am pro-safer-vaccines"

Just so long as you don't catch something nasty and die from it while you're waiting for the safer vaccine to come along.

Re: Man makes idiotic statement on a mailing list...

Footnote in the Yes Minister scripts: "Terry Wogan was a talk show host. He talked and his guests listened."

It's as well to remember that the famed Linus outbursts were the exception after gentler attempts at persuasion had failed. If the eejit persists a more robust response might still arrive.

Re: In a stockyard...

We also have our own coronaviruses which have evolved along with us. In prehistory with small human populations with little contact between groups a newly species-hopped virus that was lethal would be unlikely to propagate far unless it evolved. In other words there would have been effective selection pressure in the past.

What's new about this one is that it's hit us when we've got large, densely packed population centres with large-scale fast travel between them. We need to find a new way of exerting selection pressure and vaccination is one way of doing that.

Whatever you've been doing during lockdown, you better stop it right now

Re: only to find they have printed 700 pages bearing just …

You're mixing up spacing of glyphs with their size. Courier may have its glyphs in similar sizes but printing them readably depends on the spacing being more or less right which a recalcitrant printer might not bother with, especially if it realises that Mr Dabbs is the user victim.

It was an occasional occurrence at the biological suppliers where I once worked. It was based in an old Victorian villa & there'd a few escapes of rats which had bred. Hollow walls, hollow floors - plenty of spaces for them.

There was a mitigating factor. One of the managers, in charge of preparing microscope specimens for schools, stayed behind one night with an air-gun and shot one. Realising that it had a good chance of being infected with trypanosomes which would give him a batch of slides he went off to get a syringe. When he came back the body had been dragged away, presumably to be eaten by the other rats.

"Breakfast Leftovers in Edit Suite 1" and "Room 12F.1 After A Six-Hour Workshop"

No "Dead rat under the floor tiles"?

We don't know why it's there, we don't know what it does – all we know is that the button makes everything OK again

Re: The light..

If the light was on - it meant there was power, and it was turned OFF to standby.

FTFY

Looks across at TV. Red light on, screen off. CBA to wander into the other room to see the TV with a blue light on and screen off.

Nothing strange at all; standard practice these days.

BT promises firmware update for Mini Whole Home Wi-Fi discs to prevent obsessive Big Tech DNS lookups

The explanation's a classic case of "It's not a bug, it's a feature."

Women techs fume, offer crowdsourced fixes as Michelle Obama's online keynote crashes

"Unforeseen server conditions"

So unforeseen that they didn't foresee the need for any resilience.

Student Loans Company splashes out on 20,000 cybersecurity training courses – for just 3,300 employees

If the individual account balances are lower for a broadly similar overall total then Wonga & Balckhosre must have more individual accounts. All things being equal (which, admittedly, they're probably not) implies that they'd neet more employees than SLC.

Biden cancels Trump's bans on TikTok, WeChat, other Chinese apps

Perhaps TikTok would add a further irony be allowing Trump to have an account.

FBI paid renegade developer $180k for backdoored AN0M chat app that brought down drug underworld

Even if the ploy was running out of time there's no excuse for publicising it like this. Far better to have said "brilliant operation by our agents to break into what was a secure system" etc. In the mean time set the guy up producing the next generation product.

Unless, of course it was really a break in and the dev being thrown to the wolves was singularly uncooperative and they're taking revenge.

Re: Just think and consider for a moment ...

"What was the percentage of people who used ANOM and were NOT engaging in criminal activity?"

According to the article - zero. Unless, of course, there were more messages over and above the 100% which were criminal.

There are a lot of people out there who'd like to fire Jeff Bezos into space – but he's doing the honours himself

Re: Drake V2 ?

Qicklime in spaaaace.

FBI drops subpoena to identify readers of USA Today article about shootout with agents

Re: I've been banging the same drum...

Even to the extent that these might be good reasons it shouldn't be kept a second longer than needed. What's that? IPA?

Australian cops, FBI created backdoored chat app, told crims it was secure – then snooped on 9,000 users' plots

Re: Rozzers: 1, Ne'er-do-wells: 0

One own goal was scored by whoever decided a self-back-pat was needed and blew the whole thing with a press conference.

Sold: €15k invisible sculpture that's a must-see for art lovers

Re: Should get a better dictionary

True but it just moves the problem on. What's an artist?

Re: Art!

I read somewhere that after the original display the bricks were either returned to whoever they'd been borrowed from ro otherwise disposed of. When it was brought back be ?popular demand a new set had to be obtained.

Just when everyone thought things might be looking up, Dido Harding admits interest in top job at NHS England

Re: In fine tradition?

The Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

Re: £37 billion

"So I grade Harding 9/10 for brazen arrogance, and 2/10 for reality."

Where did the 2 come from?

Today I shall explain how dual monitors work using the medium of interpretive dance

Re: Laptop + Monitor = two computers?

One evening, long ago, when men were men and the University computers were made by ICL and had model numbers starting with 19, I was sitting the at a card punch when one of the staff came through taking a conducted tour of the computer centre so I tagged along. We went down into the computer room. Slightly embarrassed member of staff discovered the box (at least 6 foot high) whose door he opened wasn't the CPU, just some of the memory and thought the engineers must have rearranged them.

Re: Laptop + Monitor = two computers?

Should have added "If there's nothing on the end of the cable, that's the problem."

I remember reading, a long time ago, that the function of a Unix kernel* was to provide an illusion of place and an illusion of process**. Some people seem unable to perceive these illusions. I don't think it helps that modern UI (and that includes web) designers seem to go out their way to conceal them. UX designers, of course, are amongst those who don't perceive the illusions at all.

* Other OS kernels are also available

** The reality, of course, is a scatter of segments on a disk and slices of time on a CPU

Re: Qualifications before being allowed to use a laptop

"I'm too busy"

"So am I"

Re: Laptop + Monitor = two computers?

Maybe where other monitors display "no signal" it should display "this is a monitor, not an iMac".

Maybe something like this should be the standard message on all monitors. "No signal" is a message tor techies who would just as easily understand the significance of the luser version: "If you can see this message you haven't switched your computer on. This screen is only your monitor. If you're not sure what your computer looks like follow the cable coming out of the back of the monitor and it should be on the other end. Not the cable that leads to the power socket, the other one."

FYI: Today's computer chips are so advanced, they are more 'mercurial' than precise – and here's the proof

Re: Floating Point Fault. had got different results

"Perhaps the physicist was not explicitly initialising variables before use."

FORTRAN -

SOMEWARIABLE = 0

Later on

SOMEVARIABLE = SOMEVARIABLE + X

Re: Once upon a time.....way back in another century......

7. Use in production.

It's only in 7, and even then only at large scale that rare, sporadic failures become recognisable. Even if you were lucky enough to catch one at the previous stages you wouldn't be able to reproduce it reliably enough to understand it.

How many remote controls do you really need? Answer: about a bowl-ful

Re: Bang & Olufsen fixed this years ago...

Revox did something similar.

Re: Another Harmony owner here.

A few buttons? What's wrong with a big hammer?

Now that Trump is useless to Zuckerberg, ex-president is exiled from Facebook for two years, possibly indefinitely

Re: Punishment?

"Is being banned from Facebook supposed to be some sort of punishment?"

For a narcissist? Yes.

BOFH: I'm so pleased to be on the call, Boss. No, of course this isn't a recording

"I can't possibly do it as I'm spending most of my week writing off all the equipment people now don't want because it's been replaced by the gear we bought them over lockdown"

Better shred all that paper work. Oh, the original POs & invoices have already been shredded by Mission Control.

Microsoft to unveil 'what's next for Windows' ... Rounded corners and what else?

And a warning of things to come for those stuck with WIndows.

Re: Corporate Piglatin?

"Can you put this in technical terms?"

No. The essence of technical terms is that they mean something.

Re: How about.....

Too many idle hands in the development department.

Re: soon we will share one of the most significant updates of Windows of the past decade…

So far, so good until "They'll take over a major Linux distro next (Ubuntu is my guess)". How?