Posts by Doctor Syntax

Microsoft drives users to the Edge: Internet Explorer to redirect to Chromium-based browser in November

Re: Let me get this straight

"It's like the problem is your bigotry rather than anything MS have done."

No, the problem is that if you install anything from MS on your computer they think they own it. And quite likely you as well.

UK mapping agency the Ordnance Survey is heading into gaming territory with £6m tender for dev team

Let's see what I can see on OSM for my local area. Can I find countours? No, no, oh, yes if I select cycle map. What about field boundaries? None here but plenty over there. They seem to be only inside the National Park boundary. Follow that up a bit & suddenly they appear outside the boundary. Head a bit further up and they stop inside the boundary.

One thing the OS has that OSM doesn't: consistency. Sorry, but that's the way it is. If I want good mapping of the UK I'll stick with OS.

NHS COVID-19 contact tracing app is leaving some unable to access government self-isolation grants

"very grudgingly agreed"

Hopefully the grudge was because they got a flea in their ear for not knowing the rules in the first place.

There's nothing like a well thought-out scheme and this is nothing like ....

Re: meh

The traditional phrase is "terminological inexactitude".

Nowadays "world beating" amounts to much the same thing.

IBM: Our AI correctly predicts onset of Alzheimer’s 71% of the time, better than standard clinical tests

There seems to be an assumption that speech is in regular sentences whether long or short. What would it make of continuous rambling with no such structure? Just diagnose politician"? And no, I'm not necessarily thinking of BoJo.

IBM has yet to solve the conundrum of IBM.

Palo Alto Networks threatens to sue security startup for comparison review, says it breaks software EULA

Re: Bad marketing, Palo Alto Networks!!

It also raises the question of how much stuff hostile to the more typical end user might be hidden in there.

Huawei's financials take a beating as President Trump's sanctions come home to roost

The writ is just waiting for January. It still depends on which January.

Re: All Important?

"The busines reason for using Andriod and Google's services is the business reason for shipping PC's with Microsoft Windows."

True, but the reason is that this is what customers have been trained to expect by the efforts of large, dominant corporations imposing their will on the H/W suppliers. The customers are so well trained thet you hear squeals of horror from some of them any time you suggest the alternatives.

If you suddenly can't print to your HP Printer from your Mac, you're not alone: Code security cert snafu blamed

I can't help visualising HP's management over the past many years as being like a group of children who've wandered into a control romm full of switches and buttons which they don't understand going "I wonder what happens if we press this".

Alternatively it may be a consequence of the fact that, as most of us know, the reliability of an HP product is proportional to its age so they're trying everything they can to make it difficult to drive the older stuff because that's the only way they'll force us to replace it.

In this case it's HP at fault.

RIAA DMCAs GitHub into nuking popular YouTube video download tool, says it's used to slurp music

Re: Streisand Effect

Streisand effect keeps giving! I'd never heard of this and would have taken the list of "music" that could be downloaded as a warning. However as it's in Python the normal installation method applies. Yup, does what it says on the tin. Thanks RIAA.

Re: Fail!

They were good on specifying physical recording characteristics, pre-emphasis/de-emphasis and the like. It seems to have been all downhill since then.

'This was bigger than GNOME and bigger than just this case.' GNOME Foundation exec director talks patent trolls and much, much more

A very quick fix would be to make the legal costs for an invalidated patent recoverable from the USPTO. With a good case the defendant would know their costs would be covered, the plaintiffs would be aware that the cases would be fully defended, there would be far fewer patents granted and the USPTO would have a great incentive to go through the back catalogues, checking each one even if it meant handing back fees. In the meantime the USPTO would probably keep popping up with amicus curiae briefs to stop the expense getting out of hand.

Re: Irrational fear of upgrades?

It's not the effort or even lack thereof. It's the niggling worry of what will be broken when it comes up again.

In my case it was the upgraded release refusing to recognise the camera when I plugged it in. It might have been fine with a thousand other camera models but I only had one and it didn't work. Subsequently I read something that suggested it was just a type in a config file. By that time I was long gone, put off, ultimately, not just by the minor typo that should never have been there (the file was working, don't fix it) but also by the process that allowed it to happen undetected.

For all I know Fedora may be have a far more rigorous release process now but I've no great reason to go there (do they even have a systemd-free version?) so I'm never going to find out.

Ho hum: If you're so artificially intelligent, name this song while my videos go viral

Whiteleys Garden Centre?

If that's the one I know I wouldn't have expected them to be at the forefront of modern technology. Maybe there are others. Or maybe it's a long time since I've been there.

Today's tech giants won't be as naive as I was in DoJ dealings, says former Microsoft chief Bill Gates

I thought the rule was "don't buy anything before version 3 and don't even think of touching version 4".

Re: Still the same liar, then

I think he meant he didn't realise should have been making political contributions.

Congrats, Meg Whitman, another multi-billion-dollar write-off for the CV: Her web vid upstart Quibi implodes

Re: Stupid Idea

"just hope Mike Lynch wasn't involved in this startup as he has enough on his plate right now."

I'm sure his lawyers will be interested in this. Evidence as to her propensity to mismanage a business into the groung.

Re: Money For Nothing And Your Flicks For Free

"Or do you mean streaming Cat antics and crazy dancing as in TikTok and other drivel?"

That seems to be what the market wants.

Run Windows on a Chromebook: All the details. Not so fast, home user...

legacy means "boring and difficult to monetize".

Legacy usually means the stuff that runs the real business and makes the money.

ISS air leakage fixed in time for crew handover, thanks to floating teabag

Good to hear you stand a chance of getting a decent cuppa on the ISS. It would have been a long way to go if you couldn't. But is it Yorkshire Tea? Earl Grey? Lapsang Souchong?

UK test-and-trace coronavirus data may be handed to police to nab those who aren't self-isolating as required

Re: Tragedy of the commons

"I was in a supermarket earlier and was stuck six feet away from a dozy old unmasked couple picking up and putting down dozens of ready meals in front of the product I was after. Then an other old dozy unmasked mare shoved her trolley between us and did the same thing. I just left. Most supermarkets have a special hour for NHS workers and old folk when I am barred. I'd like an hour when NHS workers and old folk when are barred."

Rather than the casual ageism (& what do you have against NHS staff) perhaps your ire should go the supermarket for not requiring better behaviour.

Re: Tragedy of the commons

"This one time my sympathy is with the police."

From what I read the police are far from happy with it although that might vary depending on the CHief Constable force.

Re: BBC take the opposing position . . .

Actually the original article didn't do that at all: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54586897

I don't know when the official announcement was mad but by the time the Beeb had their article written (they'd have to spend time getting reactions) it went live about half-past 10 on Saturday evening, well in time to get buried under later stuff by Sunday morning.

Note also that the later article is about the App. The original article deals with sharing data from the test and trace system. The difference being that the App doesn't collect personal data so Dido hasn't got anything to share.

It's a difficult position for T&T given that there is widespread avoidance. However making it a police matter, at least in the first instance, is not the way to go about it, neither is sharing data.

Part of the problem is that T&T for Covid-19 is a centralised operation whilst in the past such operations have been done locally. A local operation could have its own staff going round to check in the first place and only calling on the police if they didn't have the powers to enforce. As it is, the best they can do is to try ringing the contact to see if there's no response in the case of a landline or trying to make some judgement from background sound if it's a mobile.

Another part is that all this depends on a system which determines whether the subject might be infected; I haven;t seen any figures for it but wouldn't be surprised it it were quite low. It's not to be wondered at if members of the public are reluctant to self-isolate on a possibility and even less so if some of them are getting the message several times. Nor is it to be wondered at if the police themselves are unhappy as the Beeb article suggests. A test, trace and test approach would be better.

I suspect there might not be a problem sharing data from border records. It was reported that Burnley had a substantial spike resulting from someone returning from holiday and, instead of self-isolating, going on a pub crawl.

GSM gateways: Parliament obviously cocked up, so let minister issue 'ignore the law' decree, UK.gov barrister urges court

Welcome to the new post-law world.

Linux 5.10 to make Year 2038 problem the Year 2486 problem

Re: A Place for Everything, and Everything in it's Place

That's why your /home partition is on LVM.

Atlassian pulls the plug on server licences, drags customers to the cloud

"If you've got to migrate anyway, why not migrate to something better?"

Never give the customer a reason to review the market.

If you're feeling down, know that we've just buried a heat sensor in an alien planet. If NASA can get through Mars soil, we can get through 2020

Seems that Mars is like the Earth. Both follow Sods Law of Ground Investigation. That's the one that ensures e.g. the only lump of wood in your peat core will be in the middle of the period you're interested in.

Come on, Amazon: If you're going to copy open-source code for a new product, at least credit the creator

Re: Not following the spirit of the licence?

Copyright exists automatically. You don't have to do anything.

That's something that's caught out the unwary by posting something on github or wherever without a licence. They think they're making it public domain by doing that. In fact they're making it unusable because there's no legal way to copy it.

A very quick search reveals that Ace Books used a loophole in US copyright law.

Re: Not following the spirit of the licence?

My own correction. There's the option of the licensor including a NOTICE which must be copied if it exists.

Re: Not following the spirit of the licence?

I wonder how many commentards have read the Apache licence. As far as I can make out from it, unlike the early BSD permissive licences, there's no requirement to to credit the author(s) but there is a term against applying their trademarks. That might be seen as an inhibiting crediting authors.

I might have misread it, of course, so I'm open to correction.

Will there be no end to govt attempts to break encryption? Hand over your data or the kiddies get it, threaten Five Eyes spies

Put your money where your mouth is.

Instead of complaining nobody will do it for you commission someone to provide software to do this. It must, of course, stand up to expert infosec inspection to ensure it actually does keep out miscreants, including ensuring that collected data can't get leaked or misused.

When you've cracked that you can go ahead and get it used.

Software billionaire accused of hiding $2bn in income from IRS – potentially the largest tax scam in US history

Re: Idiot

That's the trouble. All those who didn't know when to stop keep outbidding each other because they can.

Re: Idiot

Or decided that 1 billion was enough for anyone and retired long ago.

Hey Reg readers, Happy Spreadsheet day! Because there ain't no party like an Excel party

Re: The bane of auto formatting....

"auto formatting is useful. It is, as ever, the user's fault when it goes wrong."

I thought the entire purpose was to make it go right when the user went wrong. The cost of that is that it goes wrong when the user's right.

LibreOffice rains on OpenOffice's 20th anniversary parade, tells rival project to 'do the right thing' and die

Re: Possible solution to different licencing...

If that was the idea it's taken a long time for them to get round to it. It was a good while ago so I might have retained the wrong impression but AFAICR there was a lot of who-ha about Oracle not doing much with it, alienated devs and the like so the release under the Apache licence was made so that it could be forked which enabled the dissatisfied devs to do that. If that's a reasonable summary then I think it ill-behoves them to complain about the continuing existence of something that was set up for their benefit.

"Money – we know the TDF is trying to find ways to finance the project"

Quite. And even more ironically, it's the nature of their licence that makes it difficult to do that. No wonder they're looking at OO and shouting "sour grapes".

UK tech supply chain in dark over Brexit preparations months ahead of final heave-ho

On his own, he's welcome to leap. It's taking the rest of us with him I object to.

Re: It's just me who doesn't qualify.

Seriously I'm a bit too old to be affected but equally seriously it could be significant for the younger generation.

Re: you are still a Brit as far as the eu is concerned?

Not sure of the date but it must be after mid '70s as our children qualified.

Re: It's almost as if

As I remember it the plan for Leave was to let Cameron deal with it because he'd foolishly said he would. Having discovered that the result actually was Leave he did the sensible thing and bailed. That left Leave scouring the woods for unicorns. Come January we'll discover whether they found any.

Re: Awww, kids today...

"The passport control actually checked that I looked like my photograph."

But you got out eventually?

Re: Bye lads....

"if the Brexit talks to pear shaped"

Were they ever going to be any other shape? HMG deliberately put themselves in the position of supplicants and then want to dictate terms.

Re: Bye lads....

"until you have Irish citizenship you are still a Brit as far as the eu is concerned."

No problem for my children (born NI), my grandchildren (mother born in Ireland) and any great grandchildren (grandmother born in NI), my sister-in-law (as per my wife) and her husband (Irish mother) and at least some have their passports to prove it. It's just me who doesn't qualify.

I think one comment was that they were more likely to hear something sensible from the sand than from the government.

Re: Latest from the PM

"This is cargo culting at its worst."

But without cargo.

Lift us up where we belong: UK's Network Rail puts elevators online

Re: What could posssssibly go right?

"Actually, there's quite a good record of third-party applications picking up data provided by Network Rail"

It will necessarily need some sort of hole in the systems perimeter to get access to the API and there's a good - or bad - record of miscreants taking advantage of any possible weakness. Those holes had better be well defended.