Posts by Doctor Syntax

Space Force is go, go, go! Because we have a child as President of the United States

The new Space Force will get its own Chief of Space Operations, who will report to the Secretary of the Air Force, and will probably get most of the Air Force’s space assets – from the Vandenberg base in California where satellites are launched to ground control bases like the one at Schriever base in Colorado. It will also get GPS satellites, the X37B spaceplane and, of course, its own force – up to 15,000 personnel apparently. The budget provides funds to train and equip them as well as cover “prompt and sustained space operations.”

This appears to be SOP in politics. Package up or re-announce a whole lot of existing stuff were stuff can just include plans. UK parties of all colours have honed this to a fine art with NHS budgets for a long time.

$13m+ Swiss Army Knife of blenders biz collapses to fury of 20,000 unfulfilled punters

Re: 25% Tariff

Perfect illustration. Mopping up the consequences of the Blair/Brown let the future pay for it approach when it finally hit the buffers is painfully obvious. It would take at least another decade of a flourishing economy to pay it down. What a pity we're not going to get that.

Non-unicorn $700 e-scooter shop Unicorn folds with no refunds – after blowing all its cash on online ads

Re: priorities..

Unless you have product development completed and paid for down to the last detail 20% is going to fall well short. Even then if you want to get income from it it's still well short.

Re: The only winner in this

Like I keep saying, the only thing the advertising industry sells is advertising.

Revealed: NHS England bosses meet with tech and pharmaceutical giants to discuss price list of millions of Brits' medical data

Re: Good News!

We need lots of data to work out if there are enough beds.

Capita lights One Revenues and Benefits bug bonfire: ALL reports older than 12 months to be ignored

WONTFIX?

Where have I heard that before?

There must be some systemd fans at work there.

Americans should have strong privacy-protecting encryption ...that the Feds and cops can break, say senators

There's a very simple step legislators can take.

They can advertise for expressions of interest from developers. They then allocate a generous amount of money to each competitor to develop a proof of concept system. Each system then gets checked by an expert panel to see if it meets the criterion that it provides good protection for the user with only law enforcement being able to get at the data. If, when the experts have stopped laughing, they deem something suitable to go forward the legislators and official who were pressing for it become the beta-testers using nothing else for at least a year.

Obviously the total amount allocated for proof of concept has to be limited with an agreement before-hand that if the money runs out before they have a system that passes scrutiny they'll accept that it really can't be done or continue to finance development out of their own pockets.

Of course the best way of running the competition would be that they put their money where their mouths are and just finance the whole thing themselves.

Re: Really?

"Does the government think I'm a criminal? I'll let you know."

No, they'll let you know. But they probably do, they just haven't got round to deciding which crime but they're sure you should be placed under surveillance.

Alleged Nigerian social engineer wins free flight to the US for business email fraud and love scams

Re: So it's a rare thumbs up for the wheels of justice

"since when has justice... been about making a profit?"

Since the middle ages at least. The amercements of a manorial court were amongst the recognises profits of a manor.

OTOH for society as a whole the costs of crime, and large-scale fraud especially, justify the costs of the policing and criminal justice systems.

"sentences of 78 and 31 months"

Months not years? In the US?

Things are getting awfully slack over there.

Re: Next on the demonization list...

We spoof email addresses every day, for sending email on behalf of various companies... I wouldn't call either of them a "sophisticated anonymization technique".

OTOH a spoofed email on behalf of a company makes it more difficult to distinguish between what you and the company would regard as a genuine email and the sort of fake these guys are sending out.

How would you explain to recipients how to distinguish between your "genuine" emails and the fraudsters' fakes? It's this spoofing that trains the public to be taken in by fraudsters.

What's worse financial institutions such as banks and building societies and their customers have the most to lose from this sort of fraud and yet, IME, they're amongst the keenest to do this.

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

Re: Engineers

Whoever it is they demand complete transparency about qualifications.

Re: So... is he an engineer?

"I got my engineering degree from Bradford University, and the Institution of Chemical Engineers awarded my chartership. I *am* an engineer."

Back when I was working in a lab there was a suggestion that legislation or regulation was afoot that in science in order to call oneself a *ologist one would need to be a Chartered *ologist by being a member of the relevant Institute. As a biologist my relevant institute was the Institute of Biology so, as a pre-emptive strike, I joined. It turned out that the majority of the membership seemed to be biology teachers, so much so that a feature of its journal was exam howlers.

One thing I never quite gathered was whether MIBiol as a qualification outlasted membership which lapsed when I changed career. Am I still entitled to call myself MIBiol?

With a warehouse of unsold AR goggles, Magic Leap has a brainwave… let’s rebadge ‘em and sell to business!

Re: Good article

And a good title for the blog. Requiem.

Good thinking. Magic Leap 1 is a much snappier name than Magic Leap One.

Ad network ransomware crook to flog £5k Rolex after court confiscates £270k in ill-gotten gains

Re: Absurd sentence

For a start, if the original judge describes the convict as a menace to society/children/etc require the case to go back before a judge before the release can be confirmed with the judge going through the original summing up and judgement as well as the case being put forward for release.

How many bean-counters did it take to calculate the forfeiture down to 8 significant figures, especially seeing as the watch is only estimated at one?

Internet jerk with million-plus fans starts 14-year stretch for bizarre dot-com armed robbery

Re: May have been something more serious

Prolonged contact with social media can loosen people's grip on reality as can mind-warping substances which could well have played a part in the decision making (for want of a better term).

And you'd be surprised at how inept criminals can be in real life. A colleague of mine ended his description of one incident with "...and these were professional bank robbers. It's hard to get good help these days.".

Re: I feel sorry for the defence lawyer...

"Defence lawyer serves a few purposes, regardless of the defendant's guilt/culpability:"

0) Advise defendant about pleading guilty.

Admittedly plea bargaining taints this but if a guilty verdict is inevitable the best mitigation might be to plead and be as apologetic as possible. Back in the day in Belfast one of the QCs, if such advice wasn't taken would simply sit there ensuring the defendant got a fair hearing by making sure the prosecution didn't step out of line* but asking few if any questions. His car reg number, BTW, was FIB 1.

* He once intervened to stop the prosecution, who'd called me, from cross-examining me trying to get me to say more than I was prepared to about a hair comparison.

I never rated hair comparison as generally useful and couldn't understand why the FBI were so keen on it - they were internationally renowned for their enthusiasm. I was pleased to see years afterwards that they eventually fell flat on their collective face over it. The FBI were wrong and I was right. Yay!!!

Oh noes! Half the NHS runs on Windows 7! Thankfully, here's Citrix with a virty vaccine

Like the article says, contact Brad's team I'm sure they'll be able to help you.

Actually, I wonder what they'd do if everyone in that particular boat contacted them.

"If you think you have an application that has a compatibility with Windows 10, you can call Brad's team, we'll look at it. If it's a Windows issue, we're gonna go fix Windows to unblock you. If it's an issue with your app, we'll help you fix your app so you can get unblocked."

Which of those alternative covers being connected to an expensive piece of kit which can't simply be written off and which is only certified for use with 7 or maybe even XP?

Behuld – zee-a internet ouff tuilet tissuoe at Meecrusufft Sveden. Bork bork bork!

Re: Demarcation, Comrades!

Dabsy shouldn't have announced himself as being on holiday although maybe he wouldn't have counted a trip to see a Microsoft office as a seasonal jolly.

And on the subject of demarcation your handle seems quite apt.

Re: Smart meter saved a few £

It's surprising how quick they can turn up when there's a problem like that. A few months ago there was a problem with the neutral. Once I'd reported it they were quite panicky about making sure everyone in the houses affected shut things off to avoid damage. It's probably the possibility of being on the hook for damage that motivates them.

"the UK government admitted this year that only half of households would have smart meters by next year"

I don't count that as an admission, I (dis)count it as another optimistic electioneering statement.

Re: Know your people

Take the laptop with you and you actually regain cubicle working. Winning all round.

Brewing in spaaaaace: SpaceX sends a malting kit to the International Space Station

In zero gravity how do you get a head on your beer?

Tesla has a smashing weekend: Model 3 on Autopilot whacks cop cars, Elon's Cybertruck demolishes part of LA

Re: Is it actually becoming a thing

"False positives can be worse than false negatives"

Both are bad. If stationary obstacles have to be ignored to avoid false positives the system is not fit for deployment on public roads.

Re: I Can't Stop Myself

"a list of options with no statistical basis"

ROFLMAO

Where are the statistics to show the orders of magnitude reductions in deaths you seemed to be claiming a few posts ago?

Re: I Can't Stop Myself

"The reason that people have died as a result of the safety features built in to Teslas is due to human error, the Uber was due to human error."

So let's deride the human driver's ability. Let's deride the human driver by calling him or her a meatsack. But when the situation gets beyond the much-vaunted AI dump the problem in the human's lap, probably after a long period of having nothing to do has sapped the human's attention and almost certainly when it's too late to do anything and then blame the human.

Did I miss anything?

Re: I Can't Stop Myself

"limited understanding of the problem space"

Or should that be "understanding of the limited solution space"?

Co-op Bank online and mobile banking goes TITSUP*

Re: The UK really is a marvellous country

"BNP, the Credit Mutuel or the Sogenal"

I'm sure they have even fewer branches here than the usual suspects.

Worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable and royalty-free: Amazon's Alexa NHS contract released

Re: Wow

"The Lib Dems came off much worse from that team-up."

Not surprising as most of their voters seemed to treat it as a protest vote. It came as a big surprise to them that the leadership actually acted responsibly given that the alternative might have been a continuation of BankruptciesRUs Brown.

The other thing that came as a surprise to then was that in government, especially in a coalition, you can't get all your policies implemented because reality gets in the way,. The big casualty there being student loans because that was how Blair/Brown had funded the expansion of Universities.

"An NHS spokesperson said: "...this company ... which takes data privacy extremely seriously"

Did nobody tell the spokesperson that this form of words is only used after a data breach? Or maybe they know something we don't.

The Windows Phone keeps ringing but no one's home: Microsoft finally lets platform die

Re: Great

Do it right - the W2K UI.

Two can play that game: China orders ban on US computers and software

Why would they bother? If they're going to use Chinese application S/W they'll write it for whatever API they choose for their Chinese OS. I suspect that that might be very Linux-like. Very, very Linux-like.

Re: Irreplaceable software?

"the visual appeal of Windows"

The what?

The visual appeal of Windows was ended by Windows for Teletubbies (or Fisher Price if you prefer).

Re: Just say "no" to Windows??

You mean the Chinese-made American computers? If they do take them out and dump them on world markets it's going to make for some interesting effects on prices.

Re: What a surprise

Yes. I can think of one person.

Re: Typical Chinese

Well played, sir.

In tribute to Galaxy Note 7, BBC iPlayer support goes up in flames for some Samsung TVs

The Beeb broke iPlayer for radio some time ago so I'm not surprised. They're great believers in "If it ain't broke, fix it.".

Re: DIY

And watch it follow the same fate as soon as $Vendor can't be arsed to support $Version any more.

Amazon: Trump photon-torpedoed our $10bn JEDI dream because he hates CEO Jeff Bezos

After watching what's been happening in the world over the last many years - and that extends well beyond any the tenure of most heads of government - I feel that the standard of government would be much improved if, immediately after any head of government ended their tenure, a formal investigation were to be started as a matter of routine to determine whether any criminal offences were committed by their government whilst in power, maybe extend that to the election process by which they got there and, should any evidence be found prosecution would follow.

No political element as there is in impeachment and no possibility of interference which could be exerted whilst they're an incumbent. Just concentrate minds on whether they could, if need be, defend their actions in court against cross-examination.

Remember the Dutch kid who stuck his finger in a dam to save the village? Here's the IT equivalent

Re: In memory of

"the copy function targeted DD statements in the reverse of a disk to tape backup"

Ah, the sanity of Unix where everything's a file and treated equally, real files, disks, tapes... It makes for consistency.

Re: Junior Customer Engineer

"it was just a beautifully architect 3 mm allen key"

I remember the HP engineers turning up to remove a transit bar from a tape drive. It had been fixed with the then supposedly rare-as-hen's-teeth Torx headed bolt. Except I had a set of Torx bits in my really quite cheap screwdriver set and the tape drive was already in use.

Re: About the same time that ...

And Little Venice is in London.

Re: About the same time that ...

It can also be a stream. But hereabouts a stream can also be a sike or syke, giving rise to the surname.

I guess it is too late to stop calling ourselves "admin" or "administrators", a pity as it makes it sound like we're doing minimum wage work

The trouble is that if your title is system manager they want to know where are all the people you manage. The manglement mind is unable to grasp that there are major responsibilities that don't involve budget or head-count.

Re: Once upon a time in Brighton...

It's so long ago that that I had to think about it. When I started to write it up that was my recollection but it seemed so unlikely that back then we'd have bothered with mixed case passwords...

Re: From Experience (and In Hindsight)...

"could've had some investment if there was catastrophic failure tbh."

It never happens like that. Inverse sod's law.

Ericsson throws $1bn at US authorities to make bribery probe go away

Re: So basically

It may well be the case that bribery is a standard cost of doing business in those countries. Another way of looking at it might be that in those circumstances the US Govt. has decided to join in the game and get its own bung.