Posts by Doctor Syntax

Atos handed £1.5bn to run IT for UK government-founded pension trust Nest

Re: stupid question

"Sorry, I said it was a stupid question."

Given in-house means DWP, yes it was a stupid question.

UK Space Agency will pay a new CEO £125,000 to run non-existent space programme

Re: C'mon, people! This isn't rocket science.

Perhaps this is the ideal post for her. Then somebody capable can be put into T&T.

First Australia, maybe Europe, now America mulls effort to potentially make Google, Facebook pay for news

Whilst I have no enthusiasm for FB and the like the potential for collateral damage is huge. The basic principle of the WWW is that if you post something there it can be linked to. If you don't want that to happen don't put it there. If you don't want it indexed protect it with robots.txt. If you don't like that go off, sponsor some hard engineering effort and invent something that works the way you want but don't forget to make it attractive enough to the public that they'll want to use it.

I can't help feeling that the traditional media giants have come along, decided this was something they could exploit and, discovering that it doesn't work exactly how they want, are now trying to change the way it works.

This developer created the fake programming language MOVA to catch out naughty recruiters, résumé padders

Re: I can't believe it's not real!

Binary Integrated Network Generated Objects

Memo to scientists. Looking for intelligent life? Have you tried checking for worlds with a lot of industrial pollution?

Re: "`Oumuamua, the first-known foreign interstellar object to visit the Solar System"

Seeing as we weren't able to investigate it closely we don't know either way but to state baldly that it is artificial seems to neglect Occam and doesn't encourage taking his project seriously.

A sufficiently advanced civilisation will work it out for itself.

Remember that day in 2020 when you were asked to get the business working from home – by tomorrow?

Re: It Was A Breeze

If you had any shares I assume you sold them quite early on.

Re: Hats off

But SCO - the old SCO, not the litigation machine - had a free or cheap development licence that was only supposed to be used for 6 months but never timed out. You needed a floppy, and CD drive to install it. If they'd just sold the ordinary licences at an affordable price Linux would have been one of those archaic 90's curiosities that you vaguely remember and kids disbelieve. And SCO would have dominated the office server market ever since.

Re: Hats off

"I kind of miss how insecure we used to be able to be"

Support modem plugged into the back of the Unix box. Dial in from a Nokia brick Communicator. Pick up email (this is one that will get the kids - Unix boxes have the facility for internal email so the overnight jobs email their output to a user who can then read it on a character terminal with elm or pine etc). rsh from one box to another - none of your telnet here!

A client with problems would ring me at my main client's office, then unplug his fax and plug a modem into the fax line and, again, dial in from the Communicator.

Privacy purists prickle at T-Mobile US plan to proffer people's personal web, app pursuits to ad promoters

Time for US T-Mobile users to change networks at the first opportunity. There are good reasons to buy your phone separate from the network contract and T-Mobile have just demonstrated one of them.

MPs slam UK's £22bn Test and Trace programme for failing to provide evidence that it slows COVID pandemic

Bingham was chair of the vaccine task force. I recall reading somewhere that right in the early days, i.e. not long after the SARS2 genome had been published, some of the UK scientists starting vaccine development roped her in to organise production so in effect the government was presented with a fait accompli. This may have been a story invented after the event; however it has a ring of truth in it in that somebody competent got the job which is not a normal outcome of the BoJo circus's way of appointing people to this sort of position.

Re: 'Best choice'

The rationale was probably along the lines of "She ran some other techie thing somewhere or other. She's the only one of us who did. She must be right for this one.".

Re: Queen of Carnage

So that's why trolleys end up in canals.

Re: NHS Test & Trace??

"cos that's attacking nurses"

And that's the government's job, financially speaking.

Re: Private Eye covered this in their "Number crunching" section

Ah, yes. Continuous improvement.

The powers that be decided on TQM - mantra "Get it right first time every time." (They, the top team, spectacularly failed at that one ballsing up a projected relocation.)

Then they decided we had to move up a gear to ISO9000 - mantra "Continuous improvement.".

Nobody explained why, if we were getting it right first time every time there was scope for any improvement, let alone continuous improvement.

Re: Inept Targets

It's the seductive lure of numbers. They are the rocks on which the unwary will dash themselves to pieces. Reducing something to numbers is irresistible. The easier the better and best of all if the numbers turn up on a display without you having to have the skill to operate some device to get them. Numbers become and end in themselves. They're much easier to deal with than the messy business which is the reality they represent. Management by numbers, therefore, becomes management by the numbers which are easiest to collect.

Re: The crucial number ...

"I would be interested to hear from other Register readers of their experiences of Test and Trace."

I can only cite my daughter's experience. Returning from Spain she had the option of taking a test (back at the airport). After ringing several times for the delayed result she decided to drive back to the test centre and was half way there when they rung back.

I haven't read of the PAC getting into this aspect of T&T but maybe they should: schoolchildren failing a lateral flow test can have a PCR test to overrule it. A test taken at school has no such option. The essence of a a quick test known to return a proportion of false positives is that it's treated as a presumptive test whose positives you should follow up with a definitive test. It's almost as if T&T and/or DoE don't know what they're doing.

I think it was the other way round. It was the scientists who knew her and tagged her for the job although I suppose her connections avoided her getting passed over.

"It's beyond comprehension that Dildo was the best choice to run the Test and Trace programme."

Best choice? It's beyond comprehension that she was even considered a possible choice at all.

You seem to be under the misapprehension that there's nothing personal in this. Of course there is. It's her personal record that leads to this, hence the recursive acronym: DIDO In Disaster Out.

Talk about a Blue Monday: OVH outlines recovery plan as French data centres smoulder

It's bad enough when you get "Please insert tape 11" and you've only got 10.

Surprise: Automated driving biz finds automated driving safer than letting you get behind the wheel

"the paper notes that the simulations did not include any other vehicle traffic, so any effect such traffic might have on the Waymo Driver's sensors is not modeled."

So not comparing like with like. Or is there an assumption that the other vehicle traffic might not have had an effect on the human driver and wouldn't have left the human driver with nowhere else to go?

Imagine Amazon, Uber and PayPal merging. Indonesia's rough equivalents are probably doing it

How rough are they?

Or an active one?

FYI: A smart-speaker box can monitor your heartbeat using high-pitch beeps and a pinch of algorithm – study

Major gain for the insurance industry.

Couple it to a digital assistant and it can cancel your life insurance as soon as it detects a problem.

OVH data centre destroyed by fire in Strasbourg – all services unavailable

Re: welcome to the new world...

The difference is that the DR centre is only activated when you need it, not all the time. One of the advantages of being prepared in that way is that you should have a regular rehearsal event as part of the contract. That enables you to test your backup-recovery cycle.

I worked for a client who simply had a hot standby at the opposite end of the factory. In the event of a fire big enough to destroy both ends of the factory losing IT was the least of their worries.

Cortana smokes Invoke: Redmond's chatty assistant bails from the only smart speaker it called home

I see you are were trying to create a digital assistant. Do Did you want some help with that?

Keeping up the PECR: ICO fines two marketing text pests £330k for sending 2.6 million messages

Re: Avon salespeople

"Probably all that Avon can do is to remind their agents of the law and the dangers of using unvetted leads - but they can't enforce it."

Trademarks need to be protected. By passing themselves off as Avon they were devaluing the trademark and Avon can take action for that. We often hear of trademark disputes where there isn't really any possibility of confusion when small business has a name that sounds like some megacorp that starts throwing its weight around. This really the sort of situation where it should be used.

Explained in the article - money made by passing leads onto an Avon "rep" who's really self-employed. What Avon could do would be to take them (directors personally and company) to court for defamation (it reflects badly on their reputation) and the trademark related offence of passing off.

Re: Proposal to strike off

I doubt extra legislation is needed. It would just require that they draw Companies House's attention to the situation.

Just when you thought it was safe to enjoy a beer: Beware the downloaded patch applied in haste

Both, in that order.

"they opened them again"

Self selecting for basic internet security training.

Facebook uses one billion Instagram photos to build massive object-recognition AI that partly trained itself

The Treachery of Images.

You're missing out a stage. Vision is only one aspect of this. A baby learns about the world by correlating inputs from all the senses. It will learn that a banana has an inside which is edible. It will also learn that it is much smaller than a golfing umbrella, something which is not necessarily obvious from an image. And it will be making these correlations before gaining language.

An object and a picture of the object are two different objects.

I haven't bought new pants for years, why do I have to keep buying new PCs?

Re: I hate to say it, as I don't like the way they work...

They'd had to get an ISO standard on the file format to satisfy government procurement standards. That meant that that barrier to rival versions - OpenOffice etc. - disappeared because it was possible to catch up with the moving target and stay caught up. Imposing a new UI gave them the edge. It might have made it hell for old users but new users then couldn't deal with OO/LO's interface which was close enough to the old Office one.

Re: I hate to say it, as I don't like the way they work...

In resisting interface changes I think your wife has it right. The rationale for interfaces in computing is that the interface can stay stable whilst the implementation changes; it avoids the need for everything that uses the interface to change in step. The interface should only change if there's a specific need for it to do so. A change of chair-warmers in the crayon department does not amount to a specific need.

Re: "But I hardly use it."

Missing component. I need to get a round tuit.

Re: So many tales

Bad move. Either you get a hit taken out on you or you'll be inundated with requests to get tickets fixed.

Re: When you say "pants",

M&S sourcing them from overseas was when it all started to go wrong. "All" has a fairly wide definition there.

The Document Foundation updates LibreOffice Community to 7.1.1

As you seem never to have looked at what it's actually about: the LibreOffice download page always offers two versions.

Currently its 7.1.1 and 7.0.4. The first is the enthusiast's version, the second is the stable version and was the one that used to be labelled for business deployment or words to that effect. Once 7.1 is deemed stable enough, say at 7.1.4 it will be the older option and 7.2.0 or possibly 8.0.0 will become the enthusiast's version.

The stable versions continue to receive bug fixes. The previous stable version was 6.4 and that ended up at 6.4.7.2 (at least). An OS's repository might offer something older - for Mint 20.1 it's 6.4.6.

The only difference now is that LO are trying to push those willing to pay towards firms such as Collabora who actually do the development work and need to improve their income streams. In part it seems to be a consequence of the Document Foundation painting themselves into a corner by having a constitution whereby they couldn't actually pay for development so those of us who thought our donations were going to development discovered they weren't.

Oh SITA: Airline IT provider confirms passenger data leaked after major 'cyber-attack'

Re: Legacy tech

It makes you wonder just how much further things will have to go before the brakes get slammed on in the realisation that "security" is something more than just a word in PR statements.

Re: Important message from British Airways

It seems to me to be a good example of using somebody else's panic (you can almost hear the sigh of relief "wow, we dodged that one") to encourage their customers to do something sensible - use a unique password. And if their password isn't unique then the only way to make it so is to change it.

GPS jamming around Cyprus gives our air traffic controllers a headache, says Eurocontrol

Re: Anti-Jam

"The question was "What can the pilots do?". That's the civil aviation pilots as I read it. If it's their own military is endangering them why should that stop them going on strike?

Re: Anti-Jam

"Problem is the blocking doesn't originate in the affected country."

Read it again and not the words "responsible for".

PayPal says developer productivity jumped 30% during the COVID-19 plague

They can save a bit of money on this. Find out who made the biggest improvements. find out who their managers were. Fire the managers. Bake in the improvements and save on salaries.

Re: Meetings

Seems a reasonable assumption.

The sooner AI stops trying to mimic human intelligence, the better – as there isn't any

Re: "Experience matters"

"and then your experience follows you out the door."

Until the beancounter finds out what the experience really contributed and how much it costs at freelance rates.

Re: Learns?

I suppose a medical system does have some objective feedback - patient lives vs patient dies. It's the training that's too expensive.

Dutch government: Did we say 10 'high data protection risks' in Google Workspace block adoption? Make that 8

Re: Surprised?

From the client's point of view don't sign an agreement that allows it. It's the client's money. It gives them the power to decide who gets it from amongst those who want it.

"Have none of them ever heard of GDPR?"

Yes. This is what it's all about.

Simple solution is for the clients to take the attitude You want the gig? Here's the terms. If you can't meet them don't apply. Come back when you can.

If US suppliers can't or won't meet the terms it opens up an opportunity for European suppliers. If there are no alternative suppliers keep it in house until there are.

Day 5 of Openreach strikes: No use of tech company toilets. No water. Fresh dates outlined

Company wide transformation...Jettisonng thousands of staff...Closing real estate. Checks date. Yes, 21st century. Nothing changes.