Posts by Doctor Syntax

After 84 years, Japan's Olympus shutters its camera biz, flogs it to private equity – smartphones are just too good

Re: Nah

"Honestly, you're not describing Olympus."

Unfortunately he was describing Leica. Several nice R lenses, no digital camera to take them

Beware the fresh Windows XP install: Failure awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth

I had to rewire various bits & pieces round the phone master socket for neighbours who run their business from home - they'd got a new puppy.

Re: There's a rat in mi kitchen...

"I once spent a fruitless evening chasing a mouse around the spare bedroom"

A trick picked up from dealing with escaped lab mice at school. Drop a duster on them. It might take several tries before you succead.

Maybe she found believing it easier than not believing it and that might have been part of her problem.

Re: Almost mouse free

When I was very young we had both a cat and a dog. One of them brought a young, live rabbit into the house. While everyone was chasing round trying to catch it the other arrived with another.

We're no longer helping UK Post Office persecute postal workers with our shonky system, says Fujitsu

"The problems with Horizon 1 and 2 were not apparent to the Board,"

They seem to have been apparent to anybody else who followed the saga, or at least not the actual problems but that there appeared to have been problems.

Laws on police facial recognition aren't tough enough, UK data watchdog barrister tells Court of Appeal

I'd have thought that T-shirt would only be effective against the sorts of systems it was tested against. A more effective way of fooling facial recognition systems would be a picture of someone else's face.

Re: There's several issues with sitting judges today

"Would you want you wife or servants"

I sometimes wonder whether that was a barrister who realised he was on the wrong side of history deliberately sinking his case whilst plausibly appearing to argue it.

Re: There's several issues with sitting judges today

"The legal language of the law does not capture how technology works either"

If you try to capture how technology works in legal terms your laws become outdated very quickly.

If you applied such a concept to cars you might have to have separate legislation for causing death by dangerous driving for petrol, LPG and diesel ICEs, whether turbocharged or not, straight EVs, hybrid EVs and plug-in hybrids with Parliament being asked to find additional time to legislate on hydrogen powered vehicles.

Sensibly, that's not how it works. Legislation simply says what's legal and what isn't irrespective of the means by which an act is carried out. One of the functions of judges is to apply that in a changing world. Legislation changes only as new stuff makes new things possible or, as with the various DPAs, experience dictates that changes are necessary.

Re: There's several issues with sitting judges today

Most of these people claim to have an "iPhone Galaxy Lumia", or that their laptop is an "iPod Latitude Pro".

Can you prove those claims?

After huffing and puffing for years, US senators unveil law to blow the encryption house down with police backdoors

There's a very simple test as to how much these people would want it if they understood what it meant.

Would they be prepared to have all their online account IDs and passwords published for all to see, all their bank statements for, say the last 10 years, all their emails, all their other messaging device data, all their medical records? Ditto for family members.

It should be a required test for legislators proposing this sort of legislation to publish this up-front.

Put up or shut up.

Former UK Labour deputy leader wants to know how the NHS's contact-tracing app will ensure user privacy

Given that nobody's yet prepared to say to what extent, if any, antibodies provide immunity that wpld be a non-starter. OTOH now that vaccines are entering phase 3 trials some such information should come out of them.

Re: Do as Estonia did

"That is what the Estonian identity card does. Two-way transparency."

Well, they would say that, wouldn't they.

"how the app will handle data it isn't authorised to collect"

Don't collect it so there's no worry about handling it.

"The former deputy Labour leader has also called for the implementation of a contact-tracing tsar, which would be responsible for the governance of any eventual app, and would field complaints from the public."

Obviously a job for Dido Harding with all her experience in this respect.

Maze ransomware gang threatens to publish sensitive stolen data after US aerospace biz sensibly refuses to pay

Re: An sensible response, indeed

If this keeps up they'll upset somebody who might do just that.

Here's a headline we never thought we'd write 20 years ago: Microsoft readies antivirus for Linux, Android

Beware of Geeks bearing gifts.

Ex-barrister reckons he has a privacy-preserving solution to Britain's smut ban plans

Re: This could actually make $$$

I remember doing up a house years ago. We lifted the carpets in what had been the son's bedroom....

Re: This could actually make $$$

It seems that you think a sense of danger puts kids off. It's what lines them up as Darwin award candidates.

"There's one seemingly obvious flaw"

Only one? For a start there's the other half of the system, the player or whatever it is that has to handle the material. That has to look at the the field and then do what it's configured to do - which it might not - and it has to be configured appropriately to the audience and who does that?

Then there's the notion that this is an international standard so how do you get different countries to agree on how a particular file should be rated? Or do different countries get to rate material to their own needs and how do you then enforce the distribution of files according to country (although big media marketing would love to have misdistribution enforced by criminal sanctions)?

Machine-learning models trained on pre-COVID data are now completely out of whack, says Gartner

Re: Puy du Fou is open

No idea who they are and CBA to look them up?

A/Cs are always right about everything. And always wrong.

Why do I read this as Gartner saying "The dog ate my homework."?

Facebook accused of trying to bypass GDPR, slurp domain owners' personal Whois info via an obscure process

"Facebook has been ... filing tens of thousands of requests for data on domains .... When those requests have been rebuffed, Facebook has then sued the companies that people used to register the names"

Could this be pushing them into vexatious litigant territory?

AFAICR, given that we're now several decades and iterations into DPAs the legislators have got wise to that and have set the net wide for global turnover.

Big Tech on the hook for billions in back taxes after US Supreme Court rejects Altera stock options case hearing

Re: YOU are paying those taxes

Bob, is that you?

"Let's keep it simple: turnover tax. Say 5%?"

A bit tough if your sales margins are, say 6% and even tougher if they're 4%.

"A decade ago global corporate profitability was $7.2 trillion"

Yes but countries are dealing with individual businesses. For a country with the UK's size of economy (as of a few months ago) one or two wouldn't be enough and it's still within the scope of Ireland, Luxembourg etc. to under-cut the UK although the fear has been expressed by other coutnries that the UK could try such a tactic post-Brexit. There's also a concern, of course, that the post-Brexit UK economy could be small enough to make it worthwhile.

"the only winners are corporations and their shareholders"

The winners also include the countries small enough to take advantage of the open market in taxation of multinational corporations.

"Personally I like the Irish model"

The Irish model is dependant on having a relatively small population and local economy. By bringing in multi-nationals a low tax rate on their turnover is large in relation to what the country would otherwise earn and the local businesses also benefit from a low corporation tax rate. Whilst you may personally like the Irish model it's not a model that's universally applicable.

US starts sniffing around UK spaceports – though none capable of vertical launches actually exist right now

I'm not sure about the wisdom of Newquay but for polar orbit launches NW Scotland has the advantage that you can drop old boosters etc.(including an entire failed rocket) a long way down range without risk of hitting anything expensive.

Faxing hell: The cops say they would very much like us to stop calling them all the time

We used to fax out work orders from a fax server to businesses who did installations for us. We came in one morning to a failed queue and a complaint regarding a number slightly different to the one in the failed faxes. It turned out that the destination had several fax lines and for some inscrutable reason forwarded overnight faxes from one line to another. That night, fat finger.....

Re: Wrong Number

"it took ages for the bank to grasp the issue."

WHy am I not surprised. These are the people who ring customers to talk about their finances and never feel it necessary to be able to prove who they are. Or have 3rd parties spam customers on their behalf.

A memo from the distant future... June 2022: The boss decides working from home isn't the new normal after all

Re: It would be so easy to pick apart so many of these points....

Completely with you until you got to the USPO as a good example. Of course if it led to them refusing more rubbish patents....

When working in the office do you get your commuting costs paid?

Re: Serendipitous

less offices = less need for shops, cafés, lunch places, pubs = worse for "the economy"

People will still eat, they'll just buy stuff in different places. It might re-open shuttered shops on housing estates or provide a market for sandwich vans.

Re: It could work out if love comes from two sides

The small subset of professions are very largely those commuting excessive distances to work in large city centre offices. Reduce their commuting and there's a big pay-off for the environment.

Let's also distinguish between working from home as opposed to working at home. For instance owner/operator taxi drivers obviously don't work at home but they may well work from home.

In this context I've previously mentioned my daughter; working in clinical trials she worked from home, sometimes at home but also spending a lot of time visiting the hospitals where the trials were being conducted. The office was only visited every few weeks. It was a hundred or more miles away but the hospitals were relatively local.

Re: More Middle Manager insecurity

Middle managers are there to act as a brake so that things can't run out of control.

FTFY

Re: More Middle Manager insecurity

In addition to realising they don't need big head offices businesses might also realise they don't need all those middle managers. Need to slim down the business for the New Normal? Keep the ones who do the work, get rid of the unproductive middle.

Re: New Normal?

"team building"

Ah, yes, those and other "motivational" events. I found them thoroughly demotivating, culminating in an episode that lead to enforced early retirement escape into freelance. I also found myself remembering those jobs a decade or more earlier where I ended up in circumstances that needed an armed escort and wondered what sort of screaming fit those team building wonk conducting the course would have had if they'd had to do that without going on a team building event with their new colleagues.

It's worth standing back and reflecting if an entire operating system - not just a kernel but all the additional layers up to and including applications - can be built by globally dispersed teams with just the leading lights getting together at annual conferences.

On a smaller scale I worked for a body shop that had staff scattered in ones and twos, maybe threes, in locations across London but arranged an after ours get-together once a month by putting a suitable sum behind the bar in a central London pub.

It's not sustainable concentrating employment into cities so large that the employees end up scattered across a few thousand square miles of countryside and it's certainly not sane to tell those employees that they should be walking or cycling to work.

It's time businesses and the government woke up to the fact that big businesses have so many employees that they end up living in idely dispersed areas and looking to other solutions than the big Head Office.

Look to a number of smaller offices dispersed closer to where people live and let them commute into their closest one. That could well end up with a "team" spread between multiple offices but with individual members working next to members of other "teams"; it might even turn out better for cohesiveness of the business as a while.

Government's role in this would be recognising that a considerable part of the country's environmental problems stem from a decades long planning policy that separates work places from living places. This mess has been planned - not deliberately but nevertheless planned. They need to look at how they plan to get out of it.

Health Sec Hancock says UK will use Apple-Google API for virus contact-tracing app after all (even though Apple were right rotters)

Re: Security theatre

"if testing is fast and provided to all contacts with appropriate delays"

The current plan seems to be that you don't get tested, you just get told to hide for a fortnight. At the point where isolation fatigue sets in, the alerts are ignored and there's a bit hooha on social media there'll be a U-turn that was, as ever, always the intention. But until then, just go and hide along with the rest of your household.

sending it to a leaky bucket somewhere in AWS

FTFY

Re: The two are using the same method.

As you say the whole thing is probabilistic. It means (and this applies to the manual tracing) there will be false positives and false negatives - choosing s threshold will tend to tip the balance between them. But it does mean that a "contact" is really no more than an indication to test, not an indication to self-isolate. And the rate of false positives/negative is something else Hancock isn't releasing - assuming he knows - assuming he's even asked - assuming anyone's able to work it out - assuming anyone who should care does.

Re: distance and signal strength

Presumably that's done by timing?"

Passive reflection.

The bluetooth system would reply on an active response. That active response takes processing. If the H/W isn't designed for that then it'll be handled in S/W. In S/W it might depend on either the scheduler giving it some time or on an interrupt and there not being a higher priority interrupt being handled when BT wants attention. At best if the trun-round time were consistent for a given make of phone phones would need to carry a database of the timings of other models of phone to work out how much to compensate.

Re: distance and signal strength

The point is that the transit time at close quarters is a few nanoseconds. It's going to take a lot longer than that for the phone at the other end to respond and return the signal. It's not like radar which relies on a passive echo. What you end up measuring is twice the transit time plus the time taken for the remote phone to decide to reply plus some time lost in the local phone and not forgetting the length of the signals themselves. In relation to the rest the first element will be negligible.

Measuring stuff is hard, particularly when you want to do it properly.

Re: NHSX devs apparently superior to Google devs

"wash those hands"

I'm not sure that works with ionising radiation.

Re: distance and signal strength

"At the mandated 2m distance the round-trip delay would be about 7ns."

Surely that's the one-way trip. At any events the radio transmission time is going to be swamped by the variability in the time taken by the electronics to respond. It'd probably end up being 2 +/- 100 metres

"Why don't Google and Apple co-operate and develop the app and roll it out as a critical public safety update across the globe?"

ISTR more or less the same question being asked and answered in a different thread. Google and Apple don't want the task and/or responsibility for who should be declared infected. It's up to the local health authority to have control of that.

Google isn't even trying to not be creepy: 'Continuous Match Mode' in Assistant will listen to everything until it's disabled

Re: GDPR

so by GDPR law I have to be proactively offered an opt-in or -out

FTFY

IR35 tax reforms for UK freelancers glide through committee stage: D-Day set for 6 April 2021

"The reforms to the IR35 rules make large and medium-sized businesses responsible for determining the employment status of contractors for tax purposes, rather than the contractors themselves doing this."

It should be a fairly simple test: In the great COVID-19 debacle 2020 did you furlough them with the rest of your employees, make them redundant or push them off the sledge because they weren't employees at all and you owed them nothing?

ServiceNow slammed for 'tone deaf' letter telling customers contracts can't be tweaked as COVID-19 batters businesses

"ServiceNow contracts are non-cancellable"

And customers were prepared to sign them?

I suppose they could be shown to make savings for several quarters - longer than management was prepared to look ahead.