Posts by Doctor Syntax

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?

"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?

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

This can be simplified to avoid having to keep up with the obfuscation: if it's Boeing I'm not going.

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

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.

Re: "It's the system"

If you remember Windows pre-95 the icon for the button at the left of the title bar had on oblong on it (I suspect it was an image of a space bar because I think some incantation involving space could substitute for it). It was said that a good tester could look at that oblong and see a minus sign.

Re: "It's the system"

"the wrong buttons were pressed"

These days it becomes difficult to distinguish the button from anything else on the page. Or the button is further down the page, below the several inches of white space that extends to the bottom of the screen. Or work out which bit of text is a link and which isn't because the User Experience Designer has gone to considerable lengths to ensure they're the same colour.

All because of style over function, style is a matter of fashion and fashion dictates flat design.

Designing an interface takes knowledge, intelligence and thought. Anything cobbled together with crayons is an experience even if the adjective in front of it should be "bad" so a User Experience is substituted for a User Interface.

Place the blame where it belongs.

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

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: Too Many Stories!

The website can't even display images without javascript enabled. That should be a clear warning in itself. Kids today. Mutter, mutter.

Re: Too Many Stories!

I can't help feeling that although the spark mightn't have been that bright neither was a tour that didn't start off with a warning not to touch any controls they weren't instructed to touch.

Re: a perfectly understandable error

If you try to keep explaining it to real people you'll drive them quackers.

The one with K&R in the pocket.

Re: a perfectly understandable error

Experienced computer professionals always click through the first time. After all, if it's real it will come back and if it doesn't - well, what could possibly go wrong?

Amused? You should have been relieved that they realised there were two.

Re: Always check everything

And instead of a clear printed label it would simply be moulded into the case, effectively invisible so it wouldn't be obvious there was even a control there.

Re: a perfectly understandable error

"hang around a bit in the morning to witness just exactly how she managed to mangle her desktop icons like that every single day."

More likely something that happened gradually throughout the day.

UK Court of Appeal rebukes Home Office for exceeding its powers with bunkum 'national security' GSM gateway ban

The Home Office doesn't seem to have had a lot of luck over the last several decades.

In 2016 Australia's online census failed. Preparations for the 2021 edition have been rated 'partly effective'

Census at 5 year intervals? I suppose that's a recent thing. It reminds me I should maybe have another try at following ggfather's brothers who emigrated in the 1840s. I'm sure I found one of them and his wife in the 1880s but they were claiming to be Sydneysiders.

Re: Business as usual then

Governments are particularly prone to that outlook. I think it's because they make laws which are supposed to be obeyed so there's a presumption that they will be. The evidence given by the existence of a large law enforcement system is overlooked. There's also an assumption that laws will be obeyed in the way they intended - it's the sort of thinking that sees nothing could possibly go wrong with back-doored encryption.

NCSC's London HQ was chosen because GCHQ spies panicked at the prospect of grubby Shoreditch offices

Re: mandarin-friendly Victoria

"I must re-read the Yes Minister books again."

One or other of them should be a set book for GCSE English. Every year. They're now sufficiently old to be considered classics (which they always were, of course) and far more relevant than the classics Dickens and Jane Austen were in my day.

BTW Lossiemouth was a warning to Bernard that it might be his diet.

The first two episodes of YPM were on BBC4 the other evening. It doesn't seem to be part of a plan to rebroadcast the lot.

He also said "lessons will be learned", for what it's worth.

Pure reflex action.

UK reveals new 'National Cyber Force', announces Space Command and mysterious AI agency

Did anyone follow the link to BoJo's statement? He managed to avoid the phrase "world beating", perhaps wisely given the subject matter, but it was the same hubris and even more Boris guff than normal.

Police warn of bad Apples that fell off the back of a truck after highway robbery

Re: And then they were gone.

Not via Felixstowe.

If it's an Apple product it will be iScrumping.

Re: Calvados?

SWMBO had much the same reaction. "Apple" and "apple" are pronounced the same.

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

2020 strikes again.

Billionaire's Pagani Pa-gone-i after teen son takes hypercar out for a drive, trashes it

A pressure gauge is a measuring device as is a temperature gauge. Gauge is also a verb, more likely used at mean estimate rather than measure, at least in these parts. English is a language in which words can have multiple meanings and even be multiple parts of speech.

"anti-survivion?"

Darwinion.

Re: Ask any actuary

But just be careful of the format you save them in.

Linux Foundation, IBM, Cisco and others back ‘Inclusive Naming Initiative’ to change nasty tech terms

Re: These people failed before they even began...

Perhaps we could use the terminology Lord of the manor/serf. Or possibly raise the status of the second to villein.

Re: Here's my Word replacement list

And this, Jake is where you differ from those pushing this sort of agenda. They don't have to use technical terminology to hate it.

Re: So... looking at their alternative names...

"Doer"? Since when was that a word?

A long time, actually. In farming an animal might be referred to as a good or bad doer depending on whether or not it thrives.

Re: Sapir-Whorf

And then there's the one about the joint military exercises. The Army officers were fed up with being called "Pongoes" and complained. As a result the Navy circulated an order saying "Army officers should not be referred to as Pongoes" and the RAF circulated an order saying "Pongoes should be referred to as Army officers".

Also apocryphal. Allegedly.

Re: Sigh...

And I doubt there's any mention of Barbary pirates raiding the coasts of Europe for slaves.

Re: What about that special Friday?

"the one when everything is sold cheaply"

So they claim.

Re: So basically we're going to have to re-name everything.

Microsoft FORTRAN for CP/M had them as well.

Re: So basically we're going to have to re-name everything.

"I'm just ... speechless."

That's the best way, the less you say the less they can find offence in. They'll lokk pretty thoroughly though. Can I say "pretty"?

Re: Lefties

I'd have thought a lefty would define Right as wrong. Left would be unwrong or maybe right.

Re: Did this 10 years ago...

You have our sympathy.

What we see here is a minority of politically motivated people dictating to a multitude of technical people how to do their jobs. It sounds a lot like enslavement to me.

Re: I'm offended

Or a vocabulary Nazi.

Re: What are we going to do about the embedded devices?

In 10 years the currently approved terminology will have been deemed offensive and we'll have to start all over again.

Re: What are we going to do about the embedded devices?

"Obviously, over time, old kit dies and is replaced with new kit that should no longer contain outdated language."

The entire problem arises from the fact that words, at least in English, have long been able to have multiple meanings. This seems to be at the root of your idea of "outdated" - it seems that the offence seekers want words to have only one. What's even more peculiar is that they seem to only want a word to have its most offensive meaning even if it's one, for example "blacklist", which only they attribute to it.

If we are to update the language this is a Herculean task. Perhaps you could start be looking up the dictionary definition of "set", tell us which is the most offensive meaning which should be retained and then suggest alternatives for all the other meanings.

Re: Sigh...

"I think its a new problem"

Unfortunately it isn't. It's Puritanism updated. These things go in cycles. Bowdlerisation and high Victorian prudery followed in the late 18th & the 19th centuries. Periodically we get outbursts of of people looking for things to be offended by. Samuel Johnson's riposte is often the best way of dealing with them.

UK's Space Command to be 'capable of launching our first rocket in 2022'

Maybe NW Scotland. Good for launching into polar orbits as there's a lot of sea downrange for bits to fall into.

And let's hope they plug the thruster control cables into the right thrusters.

How Apple's M1 uses high-bandwidth memory to run like the clappers

How long can it be before this approach gets extended with a memory controller for off-SIP memory so that the high bandwidth on-SIP memory is just another layer of cache? One year? Two? In the lab now?

Ordnance Survey recruits AR developer to build 'geolocated quests' to help get Brit couch potatoes exercising outdoors

I'm just exploring some links provided here at the mo: http://vterrain.org/Locations/uk/

For historic maps they should have added https://maps.nls.uk/ although why the National Library of Scotland turns out to be the best place for historic maps of England remains to be explained.

I wonder how many points of interest this would feature. The likely result, should it actually become popular, would be a relatively small number of hotspots attracting the users and overflowing any car parking.

Hard to believe but Congress just approved an IoT security law and it doesn't totally suck

When the standards are written perhaps UL will certify products meeting them in the same way as they do for electrical standards. That would provide even more arm-twisting.

Test and Trace chief Dido Harding prompted to self-isolate by NHS COVID-19 app

"If every contact of someone self-isolating had to self-isolate, there would be no staff in hospitals or schools."

And that's why every contact should be told to test and then self-isolate or not based on that.