Posts by Doctor Syntax

Comcast to impose 1.2TB-a-month broadband download limits across more of America from next year

Re: Competition from Verizon

That's competition. You're free to move to the other area.

Intel chief pens congratulatory letter to President-elect Biden urging work on immigration and domestic manufacturing

The trouble with complex is that when it gets beyond certain limits nobody can understand it well enough which raises the spectre of undesirable side effects.

Dear Mr Trump/Biden (delete where applicable)

Amazon's ad-hoc Ring, Echo mesh network can mooch off your neighbors' Wi-Fi if needed – and it's opt-out

What could possibly go wrong?

And do Amazon care?

European recommendations following Schrems II Privacy Shield ruling cast doubt on cloud encryption practices

Re: What about Office Suites?

So more or less as expected. Thanks.

Re: Naughty step here we come

RIPA I knew about (HMG will tweak the wording for a new Act with a new name, SOP) but GDPR?

Considering the previous thread it can't be as obvious as I thought.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Sinclair Upton.

Re: What about Office Suites?

It would also have to be the case that there continued job doesn't depend on it, nor anything such as appraisals. Add management are going to have to be completely onside with ensuring that that's the case. Good lock with that.

Re: What about Office Suites?

What happened to that agreement to have a German company act as a custodian with MS not allowed to touch the data? Did that fall by the wayside? I haven't heard anything about it for a good while.

Re: What about Office Suites?

"MS have done the work on Model Clauses to cover all this which looks to a non-lawyer"

And those clauses are not worth the paper they're not written on. Because MS is subject to the US government they cannot abide by them if the US govt. says otherwise. That's the Schrems II ruling that is the whole point of the article.

It looks like a case of stating the bleedin' obvious. Necessary, I suppose, if manglements have been ignoring the bleedin' obvious.

Snap decision: 74-year-old Florida man wrests puppy from jaws of alligator

Re: "before taking a second to retrieve his own hand"

Don't take artificial hands too lightly. I had a murder case where one of the weapons was an artificial hand.

Both lived to tell the tale? What about the third?

Marketers for an Open Web ask UK competition watchdog to block launch of Google's anti-tracking Privacy Sandbox

Re: "people's changing expectations around how data is collected"

"No one is using the Web and expecting to be hunted and tracked like a wild animal."

Not quite no one. But would any of us in the not quite part believe anything different of Google?

Crooks social-engineer GoDaddy staff into handing over control of crypto-biz domain names

Re: Sophisticated...

All you need to remember is that "sophisticated" in this sense is relative. It tells you at least as much about the less sophisticated party in the incident as it does about the more sophisticated one.

Linus Torvalds worried Linux kernel might get messy around Christmas

SWMBO is a grandma so we fully support that remark hearabouts. Just remember to include Granddad. Roll on the vaccine, whichever it turns out to be.

I thought Christmas had been more or less cancelled this year.

It's always DNS, especially when a sysadmin makes a hash of their semicolons

Re: Typos in text files...

split would have been your friend. Just find out which of the 1000* line split files failed to load.

*Or whatever the chosen compromise split size would be.

Re: Guide to religion

ex?

Re: Anyone who ever dabbles in vi

Pine?

Pine Is Not Elm

I'd been using a Unix box which had the Rand editor but no vi before I found myself in my first real IT job. At the end of the first day I rushed off to Dillons. I've still got the book in my bookshelves but it hasn't been opened in the last couple of decades or more.

Re: Anyone who ever dabbles in vi

The first time I encountered vim I found it was lying to me which I thought the exact opposite of user friendly. It had been set up to hide Microsoft line ending ^Ms. I'd just fired it up specifically to edit those out of a file. I've never trusted it since.

Re: Anyone who ever dabbles in vi

Esc escapes editing mode. What could be easier to remember?

Re: Programming interminable comments

"When I started working mostly in C, after Fortran, forgetting the terminating semicolon was a common error."

And putting C in the continuation column when running a statement onto more than one line?

vi. Accept no substitutes (other than those starting :s of course).

nvi is its free incarnation. You can just download it to replace your bloatware, no need to envy it.

Re: Anyone who ever dabbles in vi

Some of us have been using vi since terminals only had screens, not windows and before nano or even pico existed. Why do you think we should be unable to close a terminal window?

US Air Force deploys robot security dogs to guard base

Three years minimum seems very light in the US scale of imprisonment. Was there anything on the laptop other than his email contacts list?

The GIMP turns 25 and promises to carry on being the FOSS not-Photoshop

Re: 25 years and still a pain to use

"Then, if for you silly money for software means any sum above zero, that's another matter."

Money becomes silly if it's more than the S/W's worth. If all I need to do is rotate images of SWMBO's patchwork back and forth to get the orientation right and them crop them for here weekly class handout then 150 of any currency units above pence is going to be silly.

Re: I found the learning curve

Definitely +1 for Pinta. Kolorpaint can also be handy.

I regularly have to prepare images of SWMBO's patchwork for her class handouts and Gimp gets used for rotating the images backwards and forwards to get optimal orientation - and yet somehow Gwenview seems easier for the final crop.

I end up using a combination of all four - in Gimp the simple and complex are often equally obscure to work out.

Adiós Arecibo Observatory: America's largest radio telescope faces explosive end after over 50 years of service

Bill Gates is otherwise occupied with vaccines. But how about Larry?

Re: Yeah I know it's obsolete

Old != obsolete

Re: 60 years old? -- Time to build a new one

Lulworth Cove is much more bowl-shaped but then you'd have Darwin candidates diving into it.

Manchester United working with infosec experts to 'minimize ongoing IT disruption' caused by 'cyber attack'

Re: Social engineering techniques

Provide a separate lan with its own separate internet connection for them then even if when someone gets control of one of their PCs they can only get at the rest of them so no damage done.

Because they're local and they seem to have something to do with this cyber attack stuff.

Why just stop at one of them?

No, not a fan, why do you ask?

When even a power-cycle fandango cannot save your Windows desktop

Re: We from the movies

What monitor? It's usually the reel to reel tape that explodes.

Re: some people have a block

So often the block is just "It'll be all too complicated for me so I won't even try.".

One does not simply shove elephants on a ballet shoe point and call it an acceptable measure of pressure

I'd have thought elephants per ballet shoe point would have been an excellent addition to the Register Standards.

Re: Liquid mercury is not very dangerous unless you spread it over a wide area

This light at Cragside appears to have no electricity supply.

https://i2.wp.com/heritagecalling.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/cragside-lamp.jpg?resize=358%2C361&ssl=1

In fact one of the contacts is the copper base it stands on (the body is cloisonné enamel on copper) and the other is a wire dipping into a small bowl of mercury. Lifting the lamp turns it off, setting back in its correct position turns it on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq2G4JIWbEw

Re: But what then

"the mercury sphygmomanometers were deemed ‘too dangerous for the students’"

A few years ago I was recalled to my GP. They'd taken my blood pressure on their electronic gubbins which was subsequently found to have been out of calibration so they had to redo it the old-fashioned way. There's a lot to be said for instruments where you can see exactly what it is you're measuring against (e.g. the traditional chemical balance) but the lure of a number (so it must be right) on a display is too strong for some people.

"Liquid mercury is not very dangerous unless you spread it over a wide area "

The second carbon-dating system in QUB used a chemistry based on acetylene. As it tends to explode at pressures of about one and a half atmospheres the entire gas processing line was run at below atmospheric with a mercury manometer at each step so that if the pressure got too great the manometer acted as a pressure release valve. IIRC the surface of the mercury in the pots was covered with oil.

IBM Power9 processors beset by Cardiac Osprey data-leaking flaw as Spectre still haunts speculative chips

Re: It's the world we live in

I used to buy stuff from the local shop for more pounds because buying stuff over the internet took too long. Unfortunately, by the power of the leveraged buy-out, my local Maplin is no more. And conversely I find myself wasting time going to a local shop* when it would be quicker to have gone to the net first because the local shop doesn't have whatever it is I'm looking for anyway.

*Although recently a local shop did point me to https://www.screwsline.co.uk/ when they didn't have what I needed.

Not sunshine, moonlight or good times – blame it on the buggy

Re: Infamy! Infamy!

I don't think any of Rowlandson's oeuvre ever made it onto film.

Re: Infamy! Infamy!

Your handle seems strangely appropriate.

Actually, my favourite line was "Sic transit Gloria". Did she have that name simply to make it possible?

Hence the assembly instruction:

DWIM - Do what I mean.

Bloated middle age beckons: Windows 1.0 turns 35 and is dealing with its mid-life crisis, just about

Re: You can see the Xerox Alto on YouTube...

Yes, even Jobs got taken in by the "Jobs copied it" thing.

The original Mac, only a single floppy for storage and not really enough memory was more a proof of concept. W95 looks to have owed rather a lot in functionality to MWM, HP VUE and their successor, CDE with a good deal of underpinnings from HP New Era.

Dell joins the 'fast object storage revolution'

Re: What a load of Crap

When someone offers massive increase in speed or whatever I always wonder what's being traded off for it.

EU says Boeing 737 Max won't fly over the Continent just yet: The US can make its own choices over pilot training

Re: Brexit?

"aircraft parts produced in the UK WILL NOT BE AIRWORTHY."

Thy might not be certified as airworthy, but they might still be physically airworthy. This entire saga hinges on the difference between certification and reality.

Re: Brexit?

"I gather Boris is not a details man."

Only when he can invent them.

"Even the smallest of changes to an aircraft triggers a huge chain of events in motion, with each event starting its own chain and so on."

The correct way of doing it is not to get it wrong in the first place. Then there are no costs for making a change and no costs, human and financial, from not doing so.

Re: Consumers need to know what aircraft will be used before they book.

How long have you been in this line of work?