Posts by Doctor Syntax

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Re: I have to say I'm with Lenovo on this

"It will vary somewhat between companies, those with the sociopathic bosses probably leaning more to office working initially until they see other companies saving lots of money by selling off or renting out office space. ... Office space prices will almost certainlly drop significantly in the short to medium term."

The best gains will be made by those who move fastest so the sociopaths will lose out.

Re: Market +30% = wages -30%

The PHBs may be seen as an economy to be made along with the expensive premises.

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.

Re: Not bad for the year -- but they may not be telling us everything

"There were usable tools around since the late 70s for microprocessor development but they were insanely expensive -- an Intel MDS, for example, cost about 50,000 pounds"

You were shopping in the wrong place. The S-100 systems were around since the mid '70s and much cheaper than that.

Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC

Re: They say you can tell a man....

There, there. Lockout getting to you? There's a chance schools might reopen before the end of term.

Re: AMD's new marketing slogan: "Intel outside"

Cyrix had "Cyrix instead".

Re: AMD's new marketing slogan: "Intel outside"

I was working on one piece of kit and didn't notice the sticker had peeled off until I found it had stuck itself onto my screwdriver set. I just left it there for years.

Re: $$$

Often things do scale more or less linearly until you get to an inflection point. Rule of thumb: either buy the last thing before the inflection point or wait another year.

Re: $$$

Upvote for Morgans of blessed memory. Before they went into computers I used to get Exacta stuff from them.

Re: $$$

Wrap it carefully and tape the edges together.

Re: mythical Year Of Linux On the Desktop comes

As far as I'm concerned it happened when laptops no longer had floppies to boot the SCO installer and Windows first wanted to phone home.

Help your fellow IT pals spruce up their virtual meetings: Design a winning background, win Register-branded gear

Re: not safe for work.

With no lifts, no 9th floor windows with dodgy fasteners and everyone being out of range of cattle-prods BOFH is going to have to get more creative. I suppose drones will come into their own.

A set of QR codes leading to various interesting pages. Of course opinions might vary as to what's interesting.

Dude, where's my laser?

Re: Not unbelievable

"I'm sorry but James Bond (and his manly bits) nearly copped it in 1964 at the hand of Auric Goldfinger and his laser"

At the time a friend's physics lecturer described that laser as "Wouldn't even tickle Pussy Galore".

BoJo buckles: UK govt to cut Huawei 5G kit use 'to zero by 2023' after pressure from Tory MPs, Uncle Sam

Post-Brexit sovereignty. We're free from EU influence so we can do exactly what the US tells us to do.

Just wait until the US trade talks start.

HPE's Black Thursday: Staff face pay cuts or the ax, office closures to save $1bn+ after coronavirus slams IT titan

You can't shouldn't recognise revenue

FTFY.

Not everyone does what they should.

"whether they are the right type of manager to work at HP"

Or whether HP was the right type of place to work.

Back to the future.

Working at home has made businesses re-evaluate their expensive HQs but the answer isn't necessarily to have everyone working in their own home. In the longer term insurance, business rates and H&S issues might crop up.

The other week the CEO of Barclays was interviewed about this and suggested some employees from the big offices could work from branches instead (serves those banks right who've cut themselves off from this option). At last big businesses are realising that it doesn't make sense to set up big offices in big cities that require staff to drag themselves in from the surrounding towns where they live. Smaller hubs in and around those those towns could provide work-spaces for the employees who live there. A sort of WeWork 2.0 could be the provision of such hubs in larger buildings.

In my own locality in the 1950s most people commuted no more than a few hundred yards. There were mills every half mile or less and most people were employed in them. In some cases they would have a mill closer than the nearest bus-stop. Some of those mills still exist, some leased out to small businesses, at least one standing empty for some years. Even if their premises are unsuitable for conversion their sites could be re-built. It would mean employment could move back to where people live.

"The Register has heard all staff bar those in front-line sales will take a hit"

So you'll be able to buy something from them but delivery might be a problem.

Mind your language: Microsoft set to swing the axe on 27 languages in iOS Outlook

Re: Widely understood

My farming neighbour thinks it also applies to sheep.

Competition? We've heard of it. MoD snubs cloud rivals to hand Microsoft £17.7m Azure hosted services gig

Re: Data sovereignty, eh?

This is the post-Brexit concept of sovereignty. EU rules can't contradict the US when they tell us what to do.

Re: Hook, Line and Sinker

"Ah well, at least there be no argument or disagreement about who is to blame and carry the can whenever anything at all goes tits up"

According to TFA it's hosted partly by HP (?HPE) and partly on Azure, i.e. by Microsoft. Lots of scope for finger pointing there.

Linux desktop org GNOME Foundation settles lawsuit with patent troll

Re: impressive, but how ?

It's a pity the US patent office isn't liable for everyone's costs when a patent they've granted fails at such a basic level. Not only would they tighten up immediately but there'd probably be a mad scramble looking for existing patents that should be revoked.

Re: And thank the Imaginary Sky Fairy...

My understanding of the way OIN works is that they have a pool of patents which are licensed on non-aggression terms. A troll is unlikely to be using any of these in its own operations so OIN wouldn't be able to nuke them. They might, however, have the expertise to review the patents to invalidate them.

Re: And thank the Imaginary Sky Fairy...

There'll be an NDA around this but the lawyers will have acquired detailed knowledge about the case and the patents. Next time the trolls go after a commercial entity they'd be the best lawyers to call on to defend. The bill would be along the lines of "£1 for hitting it, £999 for knowing where to hit" Multiplied up an appropriate number of times, of course.

Re: I'm not sure

At a guess maybe they were in a position to invalidate the patents if it went to court?

Das reboot: That's the only thing to do when the screenshot, er, freezes

Re: ID10T error

"showing a way around the problem would probably have been quicker than trying to explain"

Until next time. And the time after that. And the time after the time after that.

It's lack of understanding that produces these errors and the way to engender understanding is through explanation.

Campaign groups warn GCHQ can re-identify UK's phones from COVID-19 contact-tracing app data

One of the downsides of a tracing approach is the balance between the number of false positives and false negatives - set the threshold too low and people are being sent to self-isolate needlessly which will quickly bring it into disrepute but set it too high and people who weren't alerted go down with the virus which will also quickly bring it into disrepute.

I see that they're now trialling something more akin to a spot test which, if it's available on a large enough scale, be able to screen out the false positives. That could be a game changer for the whole scheme. But it still doesn't overcome the problem with being asked to trust our privacy to people who have repeatedly shown themselves to be untrustworthy.

Re: Thank you

Just because you can survive a serious illness by being treated for a few weeks in hospital doesn't mean you should treat it lightly.