Posts by Doctor Syntax

Fujitsu unveils new laptops 'optimized for remote work' – erm, isn't that what laptops have always been for?

Re: "optimized for remote work"

So was my old Nokia Communicator with its 9600 baud modem and that wasn't a laptop. It wasn't even a smartphone.

Contact-tracer spoofing is already happening – and it's dangerously simple to do

Re: OT - Did I miss something? 301 moved permanently??

Thanks. I hadn't noticed that. It probably explains various breakages. I'll have to go and reset permissions.

Re: Unhearing government

"The financial industry is better at providing contact details and extra information to verify that a communication is genuine."

Shall we settle for "just about as bad"?

I've certainly never experienced any branch of the financial industry providing any verification of their contacts. Emails purporting to be from them arrive at the appropriate unique address but that's not intentional verification on their part.

But - but -but isn't that experienced professional Dodo Harding, reporting to that expert on secure personal apps Matt Hancock, in charge of this?

Privacy activists prep legal challenge against UK plan to keep coronavirus contact-tracing data for two decades

Re: Optimists

"They think they'll actually have any data?"

If somebody who's tested positive names you as a contact then they'll have data on you. You didn't give it to them but they'll have it. A bit like Facebook and the rest rifling through subscribers' devices' contacts and grabbing data about 3rd parties.

It drives a coach and horses through data protection legislation. About the one hope is that the EU turns round and denies equivalence to GDPR unless it's changed. Just about every aspect of this has a red flag flying over it. It would help if someone in charge had a really solid reputation for safeguarding PII. What we have instead is Dido Harding.

UK.gov dangles £400k over makers of IoT Things: Go on, let's see how you'd make a security cert scheme

Re: Typical government project

Something must be done. This is something therefore it must be done. The politician's syllogism.

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

Re: Code... WHO CARES!

Shudder

Bite me? It's 'byte', and that acronym is Binary Interface Transfer Code Handler

Back in the days of Prime and PrimeOS a branch of the Home Office had one of these. The systems manager had added a facility that would respond to swearing typed in at the command line by responding in kind.

So you really didn't touch the settings at all, huh? Well, this print-out from my secret backup says otherwise

Re: Fear the

"has the BOFH been furloughed?"

Between social distancing and remote working it's difficult to get the victims bosses within range.

Re: Ah, customers.

I had a client whose flagship product was made on a system which included a system provided by a third party pulling in files across the LAN by FTP from another server provided by a 3rd party. The FTP server was replaced and it transpired the 3rd party client was more fussy about the exact format of the file listings from the FTP server than FTP server writers were. Fortunately the new server ran SuSE so I got the trivial job of rebuilding the daemon with a change of the fprintf argument.

Re: Load?

Over the bank holiday weekend there were reported concerns about overproduction while consumption was down and possible dire consequences for the grid. This would be a handy tool to have available for such occasions.

AR flop Magic Leap's 'pivot' spins CEO right off his throne

It puts selling anti-5G sticks for a mere £399 into perspective.

Surprise! That £339 world's first 'anti-5G' protection device is just a £5 USB drive with a nice sticker on it

Re: Jail time

The purchase price is essential to make it work. In the minds of the buyers of course.

Re: 5G Facts Summary So Far = Not Much

"specifically its wavelength or frequency"

There's no "or" ivolved. One changes, the other changes. It's almost like magic.

Re: Gutted

The effectiveness of such devices is a function of price so yours wouldn't have been effective. Your testimonials would have been along the lines of "It worked for half an hour".

Anyone willing to self-identify as gullible is clearly going to be an easy target for junk. The real harm with this sort of thing will come when someone realises this is a way to get someone to pay to install malware on their own machines - or their employers'.

Re: The product sheet is hilarious

Just "overdose" on its own is quite ambiguous. If someone were gullible enough to believe the rest of the sales pitch for this they might well believe it would protect them against overdose of some drug and try to benefit from that. I wonder what 3rd party liability insurance they have.

"Somebody employs this person"

Maybe they don't now.

Probably not. 3rd attempt is fairly standard. This one would have needed many more.

Laughing UK health secretary launches COVID-19 Test and Trace programme with glitchy website and no phone app

Re: Good and bad

"However as the most likely route of infection is from an infected surface"

Are you sure? I thought droplet and aerosol were now considered the main routes.

Re: Good and bad

Sort of. The problem is that a contact is assumed to be an infection.

Just a little while ago when various testing methods were being assessed and dismissed because they didn't meet quality criteria in terms of false negatives and/or positives. What quality criteria have been attached to this process? What impact assessment has been made on the consequences of people spending time in self-isolation for 14 days as a result of the false positives which will occur?

In a couple of weeks time we're going to hear the first complaints. In about six weeks time we'll be hearing the complaints from those who've gone through two periods of self-isolation with no symptoms. In eight weeks or so the whole shambles will be thoroughly discredited unless Hancock does what should be blindingly obvious now: test all contacts, with an initial isolation needed only until the test result is available and continued isolation only for positive responses.

Made-up murder claims, threats to kill Twitter, rants about NSA spying – anything but mention 100,000 US virus deaths, right, Mr President?

Re: But no one cares what Trump has to say

The Beeb sometimes displays three versions: deaths with a +ve Covid test, deaths with Covid on the death cert regardless of tests and total number of deaths over and above the typical level. Not surprisingly they are ranked in magnitude in that order. The last, it should be added, takes into account any such effects as other diseases not being treated and less fatalities due to RTAs.

Re: You supported a system...

We now have a situation where the Leader of the Opposition looks far more like prime ministerial material than the PM. In fact the PM has just burned so much political capital he could already have put the next election out of reach.

Re: You supported a system...

" It's the only one that makes any sense in a federal system. ... We have a federal government"

But why isn't the federal government directly elected?

It's worth remembering that the standard response of any politician faced with the consequences of their own ineptitude is to find some foreign enemy to blame. "Chinese virus" fits right into this pattern.

What's unusual about this one is that he started this sort of behaviour in his initial campaign - Mexican walls & all that. Thank goodness no politician in the UK would resort to such tactics.

Re: But no one cares what Trump has to say

"only the most head-banging Brexiteers have been able to keep a straight face"

I agree with the sentiment but not the expression. Nobody's laughing about this.

Re: They didn't vote for him

"Why is it that only corona deaths matter, not all the deaths that our response to corona causes?"

This article demonstrates that for most age groups Coronavirus introduces the same risk as all other causes of death put together. All other diseases, traffic accidents, fire, murder, the lot. Take all those together, add in coronavirus and, if you're over 30 - 40 your chances of dying are doubled:

https://medium.com/wintoncentre/how-much-normal-risk-does-covid-represent-4539118e1196

"Sweden is in it for the long haul, and they are going to have one of the lowest death rates of any country when this is finally over,"

It looks as if this is not going to be the case:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-52757471/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52704836

Re: You supported a system...

"It's just his country's retarted voting system that allowed him to 'win'."

I think there's a second problem. The roles of head of state and head of government are combined. By the time the US became independent the separation was becoming established in the UK so it's difficult to see why the US took that step backwards. It's not as if you need a monarchy to have separate roles, plenty of countries have elected presidents as heads of state with a separate role of prime minister as head of government. Add in political appointments to the judiciary and you're left with a system with inadequate checks and balances and one in which that joint headship can be reached without the faintest taint of education as to such constitutional limits of power.

EU General Court tears up ban on Three slurping O2. Good thing the latter's not set to merge with Virgin Media, eh?

Re: Just as well

"They have not invested in new towers/Microcells yet (needed for 5G)."

Probably the right decision at the moment. Nothing built, nothing burnt.

Embrace and kill? AppGet dev claims Microsoft reeled him in with talk of help and a job – then released remarkably similar package manager

1. Is it sufficiently similar to count as a derivative work and if so have Microsoft complied with the Apache 2 terms?

2. I hope he'll submit a suitable invoice for consultancy. A really suitable invoice.

Broadcom sends its England-based staff back into office as UK lockdown eases – though Welsh workers get a free pass

I'd like to see someone who has been fined challenge it and call Cummings as an expert witness on the correct interpretation of the rules. And then another. And another....

Re: Why?

It would be interesting to see whether this is more or less efficient than everyone working from home but we'll never be told.

Great success! Finance app was able to inform user that their action was unsuccessful

Isn't the collective term for complete bankers a wunch?

Switzerland 'first' country to roll out contact-tracing app using Apple-Google APIs to track coronavirus spread

Do they have an estimate of the number of false positives, as a percentage of the presumed contacts and as a percentage of the total population condemned to self-isolation. That would be essential to judge the impact of this? I haven't seen an impact assessment of UK version, manual or automated. I suppose it's just one more of those things to be discovered the hard way to be blindingly obvious.

Highways England waves around £62m contract for National Traffic Information Service after brief chat with vendors

Re: Utterley Useless

Whenever there's a possibility of criticism you'll find it's entirely automatic and out of their direct control.

Re: Utterley Useless

"excessive use of the variable speed limit system when neither the traffic volume nor current conditions justify it"

Sometimes it justifies itself - switch on the signs and cause congestion.

I remember it being used on an "experimental" basis round the western section of the M25. I didn't use that section on a daily basis but it did seem odd that the days I drove round there were always the experiment days and never the control days. It was also noticeable that between the cameras the traffic flowed a little more freely and then bunched up at the next camera.

Re: Utterley Useless

"Signs saying lane closed, when there is no lane closed, thus causing congestions."

They may be new signs but it's the same old same old from the days of those signs in the central reservation although the speeds on those weren't enforceable. There's be 10 miles or so of signs saying "50" or "60" and the "End". I remember one occasion taking my daughter back to University (she's now well into her 40s) stuck in a queue for about half an hour on the M1 past Chesterfield with a 2 lane closure showing. Eventually I joined the renegades ignoring the sign and driving down the outer lanes. There was no sign of any closure. After that I ignored them totally; Mk 1 eyeball gave adequate warning of any real trouble.

the winning supplier should remove "under-used traffic data sources, including automatic number-plate recognition"

I'm sure they'd get lower bids if they could leave the ANPR cameras in place and sell on the data to 3rd parties.

On the subject of roads is it time for a new Reg unit? 260 miles would be a Going and the return journey of the same length a Cumming so we can measure the Cummings and Goings.

Not going Huawei just yet: UK ministers reportedly rethinking pledge to kick Chinese firm out of telco networks by 2023

While absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, one would reasonably expect such strong demands to have been substantiated by now.

Doesn't "because I say so" count?

Re: Invariably for many thick humans, a forlorn hope on the way to a deserved future dire state

That's what I thought but he isn't.

Photostopped: Adobe Cloud evaporates in mass outage. Hope none of you are on a deadline, eh?

"us professionals, still do own our own software."

Those would be the professionals who were professional before it went cloud-only. What do younger professionals do? Buy 2nd hand copies? Or is it professional in the graphics industry to use cracked copies?

5G mast set aflame in leafy Liverpool district, half an hour's walk from Penny Lane

It'll be a self-limiting situation. When all the cellular infra-structure in an area gets destroyed there'll be no means for further conspiracy theories to spread to the gullible.

Man responsible for least popular iteration of Windows UI uses iPad Pro as a desktop*

Re: Rather than switch

You seem to be proving my point. As I wrote in another comment, you use applications to do a job, not do a job so you can use some particular application. And Windows folk seem to put up with an awful lot so they can use a particular set of applications to do particular jobs irrespective of whether those jobs could be done more easily by other means.

Re: So it doesn't even do what its creator needs ??

It never ceases to amaze me what Windows users will put up with rather than switch.

IBM's sacking spree reaches Australia – and as staff wait to exit, they're offered AU$4k to find new workers

offered the chance to pen a "written defence" of their role

The best destination of such a document would be the clients they're supporting. Add in contact details of course.

Home working is here to stay, says Lenovo boss, and will grow the total addressable PC market by up to 30%

Re: Market +30% = wages -30%

As regards middle managers, yes. But there are indications that those above them are starting to look at this and that's where the decisions will be made. Top brass aren't all Marissas.

Re: Market +30% = wages -30%

If the board and C suite start reviewing their need for premises and how things can work without them looking at the PHB level will be part of the "how things work". I suppose, however, that it will beyond the likes of HPE and IBM to make sensible decisions about exactly wo is and isn't important in making things work.

Microsoft drops a little surprise thank-you gift for sitting through Build: The source for GW-BASIC

Re: The only programing language I know

"Unless the teacher was really good, people using Basic only learned Basic, not programming."

You can also learn Basic programming in a course on any language. It was decided that research staff and students in our dept. would do a one week FORTRAN course. (Somehow SWMBO escaped that although she fell into scope.) Some time later I had to help one of my colleagues sort out a program. All variables had the format of one letter and one digit. The GOTOs leapt all around the place. It was a classic example of Basic spaghetti but written in FORTRAN.

Re: Only 45 years late?

"though I notice that the released source archive has TOPS-10 style 6.3 filename conventions"

That would be because of the inheritance from CP/M, both the MS-Basic for CP/M and the fact that it ran of MS-DOS which borrowed, shall we say, from CP/M and CP/M looked very much like DEC stuff.

Re: every byte mattered ...

"I'd used unixes on 68000s for chip design work and they had been very stable"

I had a short gig developing some reporting stuff for a factory installation on a Motorola box. At the end I had to go to Italy to install it on site. The machine kept crashing & I'd find odd files in lost+found which were clearly dumps of bits of memory. There were odd murmurs from my client's client about not letting me go until it ran. Fortunately it eventually managed a clean run and I escaped. I later heard it was traced to faulty memory.