Posts by Doctor Syntax

Two wrongs don't make a right: They make a successful project sign-off

" there had been costs involved making the rejects."

But there were no costs with milling and storage, of course.

Re: four legged tripod

Who says all 5 were legs?

Re: Talking of getting it wrong

Thank goodness for Brexit. They wouldn't be able to do that now. Far too complicated.

Re: Zeros and Heroes

I was going to say that Zeros was a very dry Linux distro but it turns out there really is a ZerOS.

Re: Just for reference, it's not a tripod

So not only can the crayon dept. count, it can calculate averages.

And a mushroom growing beside it. They thought it was the corpse of some fun guy.

Ok, OK.

'too expensive'

And, of course, the skip loads of rejects weren't.

Re: Verbal heiroglyphics

"one of the places that helped to inspire Darwin's theory"

Also, I think, the inspiration for his work on the significance of earthworms.

Re: Talking of getting it wrong

So they still haven't got round to getting "parcel hasn't made the expected move" into the next sprint. However, to be fair to Amazon, they're not alone in the logistics world in collapsing into a heap when something goes akilter.

Software development is about more than assuming it all goes as intended, especially where the real world is concerned.

"adequate stationary supplies "

Needed because in a pandemic you have to stay put.

Failed insurrection aside, Biden is going to be president in two weeks. What does it mean for tech policy?

I'd guess W@ldo is referring to the fact that its visa system allows for tech jobs to be paid a bit more then the going rates in really low wage countries so as to ensure the tech behemoths in the US are able to get away with paying less than what would be the market rate otherwise. Whether the US tech population regards that as enthusiastically as W@ldo is questionable.

Re: US (Affordable Care Act)

We are very well aware of how it's run. It appears that you aren't because you've not noticed the significant bit which I'll emphasise for you: free at the point of delivery.

There may be a number of issues about how its run but that central point is crucial to its nature. Feel free to re-read that until you understand just how important it is.

There seem to be a few of you who denigrate age.

Have you considered that those of us in our 70s were once as young as you are now - whatever that might be? Have you gone a step further and considered the possibility that you will be in your 70s in due course?

If being that age is such a great disadvantage in itself what are you going to do about avoiding that situation yourselves? Change the laws of physics to reverse the flow of time? Top yourselves? Or just grow up and drop your blinkered perspectives?

Surprising everyone, spending watchdog says the UK's 2025 deadline for nationwide gigabit broadband is 'unreachable'

Please stick to approved nomenclature. I kept wonder who this DCMS was until I realised - Ministry of Fun.

Leave.EU takes back control – and shifts its domain name to be inside the European Union

"snappy-but-unwise domain name"

But very consistent in their forward thinking.

Pizza and beer night out the window, hours trying to sort issue, then a fresh pair of eyes says 'See, the problem is...'

One of my current problems involves reworking one of our out of print books as a PDF for our website. I scanned it to PDF and then ran ocrmypdf on it and copied and pasted from the PDF into a text file so I could correct OCR errors with vi before reading them into LibreOffice Writer. What I'd missed was that a lot of full stops had been OCRed as commas. I asked for volunteer proof readers and it was one of them spotted this. She sent me a complete list and I got through about 2/3 of it before running out of will to live. I've set it aside on the basis that I'm replacing the original blurred grey on grey photos with digital colour and need better weather for that.

It would have been a doddle to have fixed them in vi first time round but I really couldn't face going back to the text files and having to re-do all the WP line spacing juggling to replicate the original page breaks (font metrics never really match up to the original).

Re: Eye of an eagle

The trick to achieving this is to inspect the article at leisure when nobody else is about but pick your moment to reveal what you found.

Re: ~/.procmailrc

Where I started out the standard for submitting work to the card punch operators was to cross the letter O rather than the numeral 0. Maybe it encouraged students to be particularly careful when they moved into the wider world.

What happens when a Chrome extension with 2m+ users changes hands, raises red flags, doesn't document updates? Let's find out

A clearing house for "this product has gone bad!"

That's the optimists' version. How about a clearing house for "this product hasn't yet gone bad"?

Crowdfunded Asahi project aims for 'polished' Linux experience on Apple Silicon

"I've been waiting for an ARM laptop that can run Linux for a long time. "

I thought properly Linuxified Chromebooks were a thing. Maybe they're not powerful enough for Linus.

Two English councils sign up to Azure for six years in £35m reseller deal as ERP project faces delays, ballooning costs

Re: GDPR Compliant Alternatives

"there are two Microsoft data centres in the UK"

There's also the CLOUD Act.

Brit registrar 123-Reg begins 2021 in much the same way it ended 2020 – with DNS issues

Consistency. That's what ISO9000 prizes.

United States Congress stormed by violent followers of defeated president, Biden win confirmation halted

Re: I'm surprised

It seems that their idea of due process was using the court was simply to make allegations without producing evidence. Not surprisingly, that failed. The role of making an allegation is as a preliminary to producing evidence. It's evidence that settles cases.

Re: Careful. Slow down and THINK.

You may be right, Jake, but every so often things do fail to quieten and a little local difficulty becomes a decades long disaster. I've witnessed that for myself.

Re: Kaiser Chiefs redux?

or perhaps the "resign and get Pence to pardon him" trick

That could backfire if Pence was then to decide the best thing for himself was not to pardon him.

If you're a WhatsApp user, you'll have to share your personal data with Facebook's empire from next month – or stop using the chat app

Re: Does this apply here?

I'd imagine that if they tried something so barefaced in the EU it would be the full 4% of turnover. Repeated as long as they kept it up. It would be a challenge that couldn't be ignored.

New York Stock Exchange U-turns on decision to boot China's three biggest telcos

Re: A totally useless move

Hmmm. They really do seem to be working hard at losing their reputationnow. I wonder whatht ey'll decide to do tomorrow. And the day after.

Re: A totally useless move

Sounds like fear of losing reputation to me. As posted above by YAAC it would have the potential to reduce their business to US companies only.

Consultants bag £375m for their role in developing the UK's faltering COVID-19 Test and Trace system

Re: Don't forget the middlemen

Half? Who are the lucky consultants who get that much?

Re: Bah, scumbugs

It's even safe to pick yer nose if you thoroughly wash your finger before.

"If" is a bigger word than it looks at first sight.

UK competition watchdog calls for views on Nvidia's prospective $40bn acquisition of Brit chip designer Arm

Float it on the stock exchange (obviously not NYSE - too unreliable) with articles of association limiting the size of any single stockholding to prevent it going round the same loop again.

Open-source contributors say they'll pull out of Qt as LTS release goes commercial-only

Re: This is how it's meant to work.

"But as soon as someone implements it, it all goes to shite."

Yes, Red Hat went to shite in a big way. Billion dollar annual turnover since 2012, two billion since 2015, three billion since 2018. They went to shite so badly that IBM had to rescue them by buying them up for $34 billion. It's a business model that really fails big.

Re: Open source

It still hasn't got through that much, probably most, open source code is developed by companies. The usual incentive is that it makes sense for companies to be able to collaborate on something mutually beneficial.

Qt may be a bit of an exception here in that it's always been primarily developed by a single company and hence its Achilles' heel, but I don't suppose that fits your argument too well weither.

Re: One less reason to bother with QT.

I'd guess this might be just the trigger needed for a fork.

Brexit freezes 81,000 UK-registered .eu domains – and you've all got three months to get them back

Some of the recipients who get the email don't get round to changing the email, find their emails bounce, assume the vendor just went out of business and take their custom elsewhere. CHECK.

Re: Well how sad is that?

"I can't imagine why any British company that isn't halfway up the EUs arse would use it."

What about a British country doing much if not all its business with EU customers? Is that being half-way up the EU's arse? Is paying the British employees with money obtained by trading with the EU? Or should they be good British citizens, wind up the company and fire their workforce?

the UK, of it's own choosing, decided to leave

You are neglecting the millions of us able to say "Don't blame me, I voted Remain".

Re: Not just money

"It is quite clear that the Leave argument was based heavily on ideals and concepts too"

And very misleadingly too. The ECJ was presented as a bogeyman.

In fact it offered a level of protection above the UK courts. BoJo and friends have already shown their displeasure at the UK Supreme Court making them follow the law and seem inclined to want to tame it. A government wanting to put itself above the law is not a good move and the ECJ was our protection against that.

In non-monetary terms the loss of protection by the ECJ is, to my mind, the biggest disadvantage of having left the EU.

Most people living in Northern Ireland are entitled to put “Ireland” down as their country of citizenship.

No, all people born there, have parents born there or grandparents born there are able to claim Irish citizenship.

I lived in N Ireland for about 19 years but, being born in England, can't.

My grandchildren, also born in England, can because their mother w born there and even if their mother wasn't they'd still be able to do so based on their grandmother's status. They also have right to UK citizenship.

All that pre-dates the UK joining the EEC let alone leaving the EU.

But this is nothing to do with the .eu registration which is, if I understand the article correctly, to do with businesses rather then individuals.

Re: This is to punish the UK

"It will be several years before the fall out of Brexit will be apparent and disentangled from Covid fallout."

At least until BoJo and friends fall from power. For them, having something that's clearly external to blame is invaluable. SWMBO reported a lack of fresh veg in the Co-op yesterday. Who's to blame? Covid or maybe the weather, yes; difficulties in getting imports through the ports, never!

Re: This is to punish the UK

"They still have full access to the EU market, tariff-free."

And look! They're free of all that EU red tape that made it so difficult to ship products there previously.

Re: This is to punish the UK

You still haven't grasped the notion that you only won by a slim majority and that about 1 in 2 of your fellow-countrymen weren't bothered enough either way to vote approved of being in the EU. On that basis the EU had and still has many friends in the UK. It's just that you're not one of them. You're not alone but you don't speak for everyone.

Facebook appeals ruling that it stole tech. So, Italian judge issues new judgment: Pay 10 times the original fine

Another couple of rounds of appeals should do that.

Ah, right on time: Hacker-slammed SolarWinds sued by angry shareholders

Who, exactly, are they suing? If it's the execs then fine. If they're suing the company then they're suing themselves and the net result is that they lose the money the lawyers of both sides charge them and gain nothing because they, collectively, are the company.

Be careful where you log into GitHub: Dev visits Iran, opens laptop, gets startup's entire account shut down

Re: Artificial problem generators

Any given freedom depends on having others respect it. It's only a pre-existing bargain that we restrict one set of rights in favour of another. My freedom to extend my fist stops short of your face & vice versa.

Lay down your souls to the gods of rock 'n' roll: Conspiracy theorists' 5G 'vaccine' chip schematic is actually for a guitar pedal

Re: Ha ha ha.... but it's not funny

TL;DR

But let's pick up one point from the mish-mash.

If we take 90% to achieve herd immunity and only 60% or the original population are immunised what happens? The virus keeps spreading among the rest until herd immunity is achieved.

At one extreme that means that 30% of the original population get infected with no deaths but in practice the actual symptoms will range between zero and life-changing. If you're in the non-vax population you have to hope you're lucky enough to be in the remaining 10% or whatever proportion of the infected with negligible symptoms.

At the other extreme nobody else gets immunity and the infection stops when 60% of the original population is now 90% of the new - in other words 2/3 of the original population has been killed. To be a surviving non-vaxer in this scenario you have to belong to the lucky 6.7% of the original population who survive.

You can run these extremes with whatever other percentages you think apply.

In truth the actual scenario will be somewhere between the two extremes but if you're a non-vaxer and want to survive and do so without life-changing consequences you have to face the classic question: "Do ya feel lucky, punk?".

And otherwise reasonable people who understand how vaccines work, but believe that Covid is a false-flag exercise by "the government."

Gullible covers it.

Re: Ha ha ha.... but it's not funny

AFAIK this was part of the clinical trial of Oxford/AstraZeneca trials and it was found that it did give sterilising immunity although I'm not sure about the percentage. I don't think Pfizer gathered tht data and I'm not sure about the others.

Anti-vax theories are nature's way of removing the gullible from the gene pool.

Come, chant with us over a sacrificial goat and predict 2021's biggest tech stories to a high degree of accuracy

Re: Seconded!

Dammit!