Posts by Doctor Syntax

At last, the fix no one asked for: Portable home directories merged into systemd

Re: My pet theory for this shites existance is that...

"Probably not in the way he wanted, though."

Not in the way the rest of us want, not sure if he cares, though.

Re: Where are you?

The worrying thing about IBM is that with the effect on IBM's bottom line and the management changes it's starting to look like a reverse takeover.

Re: Where are you?

"trying to solve issues for people with laptops"

These days I use laptops almost entirely and I still don't have a problem it solves. With a hybrid drive boot time isn't a problem and time to get online is dominated by negotiating access with wireless. If I want to sync something between machines I have a specific directory for it on both machines which is separately synced with NextCloud (on a Pi running Devuan), not an entire $HOME and certainly not on flash drive.

Re: Why?

"you can use NextCloud"

And run that on Devuan of course.

"My only worry is that Linux doesn't take all the hardware driver support along with it"

My worry is that systemd doesn't take all the software support along with it.

Re: Jeez

The name seemed very vaguely familiar. It reminded me that it was well over 50 years since I studied any zoology.

Re: Jeez

"and proponent"

Given the remainder of the comment the obvious question is "why?".

Re: Finally!

They're all optional. The option is not to touch any of it.

Re: Systemd is devastating

"Got Devuan??"

Yes.

WannaCry ransomware attack on NHS could have triggered NATO reaction, says German cybergeneral

Re: Exactly, attribution is THE problem.

"I assume you are aware that Hacking attacks can - and in fact are - also be executed from the soil of the US, UK, Germany, France, etc."

I think you missed the phrase "more forgiving".

Re: Disproportionate response?

"Not least of these is the difficulty of finding out who triggered the attack, as opposed to who actually carried it out."

There's also the little matter of who failed to keep their stash of undisclosed vulnerabilities secret.

Things I learned from Y2K (pt 87): How to swap a mainframe for Microsoft Access

Re: In IT, encrpytion algorithms can't be secret....

Or in this case hardly anything, it seems.

Ah, night shift in the 1970s. Ciggies, hipflasks, ADVENT... and fault-prone disk drives the size of washing machines

Re: DEC field service engineers

100 upvotes for mention of Kermit.

it was an extremely useful essential cross-platform file transfer protocol

FTFY

Not just file transfer but terminal emulation as well. When all you had was a serial interface Kermit was the equivalent of FTP, Telnet, rcp, ssh or whatever your favourite weapon might be these days.

Gin and gone-ic: Rometty out as IBM CEO, cloud supremo Arvind Krishna takes over, Red Hat boss is president

Re: Did the desire to hire Arvind Krishna cause IBM to buy Red Hat?

I think Krishna is an IBM lifer. It was he who was largely responsible for them buying Red Hat.

Re: It's hard to believe that...

Ah, but with the PC they also put themselves in charge of the next big thing in computing and that went very ... oh, they bungled that one too.

Investors got the message a long time ago: "share price declined about 26 per cent while the S&P 500 surged 160 per cent and the NASDAQ Composite Index rose 257 per cent".

It seems to have been the board that wasn't getting messages.

Is everything OK over there, Britain? Have you tried turning the UK off and on again? ISPs, financial orgs fall over in Freaky Friday of outages

Re: Just call a sanitation engineer

Given the nature of much of that material.

"We understand this was likely due to the end of the month demands such as payroll runs and the deadline for submitting tax returns."

There'll be another month end next month. And one the month after. Etc.

SF tech biz forks out $146m in fines, settlements after painkiller makers bribed it to design medical software that pushed opioids to patients

Targeted advertising.

No need to worry about tracking. Cut out the middle man and advertise direct to the prescriber.

Not call, dude: UK govt says guaranteed surcharge-free EU roaming will end after Brexit transition period. Brits left at the mercy of networks

"but my granny can't work out how to use whatsapp"

This grandad hasn't worked out why he'd possibly want to use it. Or any of Facebook's other offerings.

Re: Transition Period?

"Including proposals on the Irish border that they've since agreed with Johnson, having said they were literally impossible to May."

The Irish border "solution" involves effectively moving the difficult bits of it to the middle of the Irish Sea. At the end of the transition period we'll have an interal customs border in the UK!

He can do that because, unlike May, he doesn't have to rely on the DUP for his majority. How well that works out remains to be seen. But it'll be OK because he's reassured us his a Unionist; we have his word on that.

Re: Transition Period?

"Getting a second term is probably in that strategy."

Maybe. He could simply say he's delivered what he promised and it's up to the rest to make the best of it.

Brexit keeps reminding me of the Bilko episode "The Empty Store". You got what you wanted, what are you going to do with it?

Re: Transition Period?

"I would never bet against Boris breaking a promise."

He promised to be dead in a ditch if he didn't make the October 19 deadline. That's one promise gone already.

Re: Transition Period?

we will get need more time for government and businesses to plan for implementing it.

However Boris is adamant that 11 months is all there is. However, come December he could decide to say "I've done what I came here to do. I'm off.".

"One network cuts their rates to attract more customers. Others are forced to follow. "

Alternative view: one network raises their rates. Others leap on the opportunity of increased profits and follow.

They could call it a Brexit SIM.

Re: Bankers

"Whereas designing solutions that fit into common use-cases - replacing tungsten bulbs with increasingly energy efficient bulbs - is working."

There's even a further lesson in that - replacing tungsten by compact fluorescents wasn't the greatest idea - they were crap: they didn't last long, the claimed equivalences to incandescent wattages were against the most inefficient incandescents they could find and unless properly disposed of were apt to leak mercury into the environment. Your replacement not only has to fit the use-case, it has to do it at least as well as the original for all the parameters, not just those you're trying to improve on.

Re: that reason's name is "Organised Crime"

"cell tower triangulation"

Ah, the luxury of being able to triangulate. Daughter was puzzled about grandson's lost phone being shown as at home and several hundred yards away. Had to explain you need coverage from more than two base stations to resolve the correct location.

Re: Bankers

"For business - it's just another business cost."

I hate to find myself on the beancounters' side, even occasionally, but for a business profit is money in minus money out. The greater the costs, the greater the money out and the smaller the profit.

"As soon as a company does that they will lose all their customers and go bankrupt. I can't see many others thinking that's a good idea."

Alternative: once one makes a break the rest will follow. Race to the bottom as usual.

Re: Transition Period?

"After tomorrow, we can sign what we like with anyone."

We can only sign what we agree with others. Reaching agreement depends on things like what the other side wants and doesn't want and the relative strengths of the two sides' negotiating position. And the capabilities of the negotiators. And the speed at which you want to sign it.

If you think we can automatically get what we like from anyone you've been seriously mislead. And it sounds as if you have.

Re: The Hidden Benefits of BREXIT

"Laws of unindended consequences and all that."

Only unintended by the voters.

It’s not true no one wants .uk domains – just look at all these Bulgarians who signed up to nab expired addresses

"That could be a real pain for those of us that have .UK domains hosted overseas for whatever reason."

The comment made no mention about location of hosting, just the location of the owner.

There are already Chinese components in your pocket – so why fret about 5G gear?

Opening an EU subsidiary in the UK would have beenfeasible. Nissan, etc. did that for cars. Unless the subsequent trade negotiations result in Brexit meaning nothing more than being out of the rule-making process and nothing else that sort of thing isn't going to happen for the foreseeable future.

Re: “A country torn apart by nationalism, corruption and warring factions”

"Boris could be on the Iron Throne for some considerable time"

You don't think he'll do a Blair and step down just before consequences happen? In Blair's case it was an economic policy that powered a housing bubble that in turn powered huge indebtedness. In Boris's case it's going to be the economic reality of the British business's home market being just the UK and maybe a whole new Irish problem when the Irish Sea border becomes a reality.

Re: “UK is now a sea of calm"

I was never a fan of British Snail, especially back in the days when I used to commute on the Chiltern Line but right back when privatisation happened it was obvious that separating the infra-structure from the service provider was a bad mistake. Not having control of the rails it runs on has certainly been one of Northern Rail's problems. None of its underlying problems are going to go away in March and the new operator is going to inherit them although eventually the new rolling stock is going to get delivered.

Re: "It is perfectly possible for the West [..] to decide on a coherent policy"

"he is a somewhat authoritarian president, but far from a rabid dictator."

Should we settle on "kleptocrat"?

Re: those concerns might also edge towards paranoia

Actually that's a good use of the Oxford comma. By preceding the "and" which introduces the last item of the list it distinguishes it from the "and" ("politicians and their advisors") which forms part of that last item.

Re: Standards?

From the article: Things like software updates and security patches can be mandated as auditable, with source code disclosure and local recompilation made part of the cost of doing business. "No binary blobs" shall be, if not the whole of the law, certainly one of its commandments.

Re: "It is perfectly possible for the West [..] to decide on a coherent policy"

And on a smaller scale our lot are also about divisiveness. Yes a coherent policy could be put together but not in current circumstances.

So you locked your backups away for years, huh? Allow me to introduce my colleagues, Brute, Force and Ignorance

Re: Alas

There's so much left unsaid here.

Will Asimov fix my doorbell? There should be a law about this

Re: Infographics

"the most sophisticated domestic appliance was a saddle quern"

The loom?

Attempts to define international infosec rules of the road bogged down by endless talkshops, warn diplomats

It sounds as if it will take in incident that simultaneously ties up significant chunks of infrastructure in the US, Russia & China. Where's Blofeld when you need him? And where's the white cat icon?

Need 32-bit Linux to run past 2038? When version 5.6 of the kernel pops, you're in for a treat

Re: Again...

"Those CASIO wristwatches built in the 70's with permanent calendars are likely candidates, for example."

Permanent calendars are most likely to fail in 2120 when if they have a simple divisible by four rule for determining leap years. You should have kept your receipt.

Can we replace time_t with t_time?

At beer o'clock obviously.

Thunderbird is go: Mozilla's email client lands in a new nest

There's one area of UI that really needs work.

Hands up all those with users (of any client) storing their read mail in Trash/Deleted.

Hands up those with users - or themselves - storing read mail in the Inbox thumbs up icon is the nearest for myself).

Inbox should be for incoming, unread mail only. Trash is for stuff that's going to be deleted (end of day, over a certain age, over a certain byte limit - whatever). If you want to keep something about while you mull over it a Pending tray would be appropriate. For everything else we need a filing system that's a good deal better than the existing archive/filter system.

For instance instead of just using threading for display of linked emails in the same folder, make a folder for them.

- Automatically link sent and received emails that belong together instead of leaving sent in their own folder where they don't even get threaded with received emails for display.

- Automatically put mails to/from particular individuals, domains or addresses grouped in the address book into appropriate folders.

- Do that when the user moves onto a new mail in the Inbox if they didn't delete or pend the old one and do it with sent emails.

The papered office has known about manual filing for decades if not centuries; the paperless office (sic) should be able to automate it. Done well it might even be able to organise me.

The next step might be to extend that filing system for emails into a fully-fledged document management system covering emails and other documents.* If not done within the email client provide hooks for an external manager.

Yes, it might come as a shock so, as with any UI change, make it optional, at least for a long time, and don't default to it in the first releases.

* Remember that at least some of the documents relating to a topic will arrive as attachments, others won't but they need to be managed together.

Re: Thanks for the clarification, Smooth Newt

"Any email client that doesn't block remote images by default is not your friend."

Unless you're the sort of control-freak designer who thinks they should be able to control to the last detail what the recipient should see. I've even had the text of the email sent as an image - wrote back and pointed out that that wasn't friendly to those with poor eye-sight and depended on a screen reader and that, in turn, was contrary to their policies.

Re: I've stopped using it

"I'll take Thunderbird's 15-year old design over Outlook's current one any day of the week"

I'll take Seamonkey's even older design over TBird's.

Re: "Around 0.5% of emails opened in the 'bird today, apparently"

"I also like using Mutt."

I used to use Elm.

If only 3 in 100,000 cyber-crimes are prosecuted, why not train cops to bring these crooks to justice once and for all, suggests think-tank veep

"When a breach becomes public the response all too often is to blame the victim company."

Thinking like this makes you wonder why the banks bother to lock the doors at night.