Posts by Doctor Syntax

Email! HUH! Yeah. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing...

Re: 20 Years Ago

Reading obviously. Spammers and spanners are two different things.

Re: 20 Years Ago

I can answer that one: a combination of both.

We had the new Y2K system set up to cut over for Jan 1. It was a new pair of boxes because the hot standby for the old main box couldn't run the Y2K version of the database.

Because the year end accounts still had to be finalised the client's accountants insisted the old system had to be kept going for a couple of weeks whilst they finalised did that. So for a couple of weeks the non-Y2K system was crapping all over new orders and the vendors dialling in on a daily basis to fix the problems.

I don't know why they didn't let us move operations over to the new box and let the accountants play with the old one. If they'd given me some notice that they wanted to do that I could have arranged to bring over data on work completed in January, if that's what was needed and set the clock back to 31 Dec every day or some similar fudge.

Ex-Capita accountant who claimed £10k bung to leave was blackmail has appeal thrown out

£10k to quit? That's not blackmail, it's an insult. Or maybe Capita just being cheap.

Can't you hear me knocking? But I installed a smart knocker

Re: Now what do you do

"those Yale rim locks that became vulnerable once plastic credit cards appeared"

They became vulnerable as soon as they were fitted with reach of a glass panel.

Re: About this single point of failure business

Or an initial failure and all the "other disasters" are simply the domino effect of lots of other bits being unable to cope with either the original failure or one of the subsequent ones.

Re: About this single point of failure business

"our house has to work from a *systems* perspective"

Needs a second upvote for the reminder of what "system" really means - and it's not complicated electronics.

Re: And what about key fobs....

Or the access was about as secure as the lockers.

Re: Well that was a waste...

"Seriously, what if your house was on fire and your wife was inside and couldn't get to a window?"

Internal mechanical over-ride. Panic bar, panic button whatever you want to call it. Fail to locked is secure. Mechanical override is safety. Both are basic requirements.

Re: Then there's compatability..

To slightly amend Stoneshop's question: Why the hell would a doorbell need to have a hub so as to be compatible with a heating controller?

I'd long looked forward to being able to spending summers in retirement watching cricket on the box. Then that bar steward Bliar allowed it to be pay only.

Re: Because the reception is better

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Or is that absinthe?

Re: "Brick" "Window/s"

Similar to my car's automatic headlights. Yes they do always switch on when it's actually night or nearly so. But they'll also come on during bright sunshine. Or going under a bridge. OTOH on a dark day driving along a long lane with an overhanging tree canopy they remained resolutely off. And then there's the allegedly self-dipping electronic mirror.

Re: Smart?

"Anybody have any idea why IOT gear is referred to a SMART?"

Yes Minister series 1 programme 1. "Getting rid of the difficult bit in the title".

Whatever it is it gets recorded. Anything with ads obviously. Even on the Beeb things are almost inevitably watched from recordings for time-shifting.

Re: The joys of automation...

Note to self: never buy a Citroen.

Re: Then there's compatability..

"I've now arranged to get a better boiler fitted by our regular gas-safe plumber for £1500 less than BG's quote."

And he'll undoubtedly do a better deal on servicing than the extended warranty the makers will try to foist on you no matter how many times you return their letter-box litter as unwanted junk.

Re: There is of course a new approach here

"I identify as the grumpy old luddite at the back."

It's pretty crowded here at the back but Mr Hilbert says there's always room for another.

"Every time I see one of those hotel ads starring Anna Kendrick (Hilton I think, might be wrong though) and she enthuses about being able to open her room with her phone I want to throw something at the TV."

There's this thing called Fast Forward.

Cold shoulder.

Re: The joys of automation...

"There are many things technology can do, but as is often the case, it is not whether it can be done, but why."

Just because you can do it doesn't mean it's a good idea.

5G SIM-swap attacks could be even worse for industrial IoT than now

It's so convenient to hand over difficult stuff to somebody else. And they have so much incentive to do such a better job than you have when it comes to security.

White Screen of Death: Admins up in arms after experimental Google emission borks Chrome

Re: So what are you going to do about it? Replace Chrome with Edge?????

OTOH the functionality was already in the code waiting to be activated. Is it also in Edge?

Re: How much did you pay for this software again?

Nothing, but then I'm not using it. And when I hear of things like this I remember why.

Oracle and Google will fight in court over Java AGAIN and this time it's going to the Supremes

Given that we seem to be in an Age of Idiocracy I don't hold out much hope for this to go well.

The silence of the racks is deafening, production gear has gone dark – so which wire do we cut?

"without having been supplied with the tools required to do the job"

The sole tool may well have been enough cash to buy a slice of the business.

Re: Spanner in the works

Great respect for the guys who live jointed the faulty 3-phase in our road a few months ago; that would rate at a huge amount more than 10A. About 12Ω showing in the neutral. It buts onto the section that was replaced with similar problems a few years ago. I think the entire cable is being replaced in 12 metres stages.

Judge shoots down Trump admin's efforts to allow folks to post shoddy 3D printer gun blueprints online

Re: Well...

The questionable bit is where it characterises "posting blueprints online" as equivalent to "export"

That was the case with publishing PGP online, solved by publishing the source as a book which couldn't be blocked, taking the book to Europe and scanning it.

Use the courts, Jeff: Amazon to contest Microsoft scooping $10bn JEDI contract

Is there a sort of reverse musical chairs. Everyone else contests whoever has just been handed the contract so last one to contest it wins? Everyone tries to avoid winning the initial contract award.

Try as they might, ransomware crooks can't hide their tells when playing hands

"I'm sure this is where some other commentard is gonna tell me of just such a file system!"

Not such a file system but certainly such a system. Open/NextCloud keeps versioned files (it's the V in WebDAV) and there are a couple of server side apps that claim to detect such behaviour.

But that's a client-server system. Maybe what we need is a new architecture that fits that into one box. Your user-facing WP, spreadsheet or whatever doesn't directly read and write files but asks for such services from the server. Maybe two VMs would be enough to run client and server or, for the truly paranoid sensibly security minded, two separate processors. For added security the formats of the updated files could be checked before being saved.

High Court dismisses nameless Google Right To Be Forgotten sueball man... yes, again

It would be very simple for Google to settle this. Just tell the court they won't produce any results on searches for "Mr ABC".

Re: It seems that ABC is well aware of the Streisand effect

"in a corner of his own painting"

Well played, sir.

Labour: Free British broadband for country if we win general election

Re: Erm

It's been nuttiness all round since 2016 and anyone not playing the game has had the whip withdrawn. So much the case that a good many responsbile MPs have decided to get out of it altogether.

Re: Copper

The installed copper is worth much more than the copper. It's the installation that provided much of BT's value.

Re: The 1980s called but British Telecom still hadn't connected your phone yet

"I and many of my fellow English people are fine with Scottish independence because we are sick and tired of hearing about it."

The whole of the UK should have been given the vote but I suppose the result would have looked like being thrown out and that wouldn't have suited the wee man's ego.

Re: Free FULL FIBRE?

Whatever's promised the actual delivery - at best - would probably be free ADSL. IOW broadband.

Re: For a given value of "free"

"So you'd like to pay for your driving per-mile"

I'd like what I pay for in car tax on a flat fee basis and indirectly on a per-mile basis in fuel tax to be spent on roads. I have no doubt whatsoever that if any government introduced per-mile charges it would be additional to the other transport taxes.

Re: Only nationalise OpenReach

"Having an infrastructure provider as Network Rail in public hands where private operators compete on is a good thing. Whether you agree that Train Operating Companies should be private or public is another matter. I see very few people debate that Network Rail should be privatised too.

Why not replicate the set up for rail similar to that for broadband?"

Why not? Because having the rail infrastructure separate from the operators gives the former no incentive to do a good job and denies the latter the means to do so. It was an arrangement guaranteed to produce little improvement on BR days. That's why not.

Re: LOL's

"not like it was done."

Certainly not.

We had companies paying to run shortish term franchises over infrastructure somebody else owned and ran. And I never did find out who owned and ran the station whose employee was still trying to find my pre-booked ticket and still had to sell me a car park ticket whilst the train was pulling into the station. I arrived by car about 15 minutes later than if I'd taken the train and would have been a good deal earlier than that if I hadn't bothered with the train at all.

Re: Infrastrucutre

Hmm. I wonder how old the text books and/or their authors were. By the late '80s the difference between the black telephone rationing company and the privatised BT were becoming obvious. Either the books date from the '70s or were written by authors too young to have been GPO subscribers back then.

Re: The bigger picture

But obviously the faster the better.

That's similar to the view Cameron seems to have adopted when promising a referendum.

"The few quid i spent joining Labour to vote for Corbyn to keep them out of power seems to have been a great move."

Except that the Conservatives then decided to join in the batshit insanity competition.

It would facilitate that. The further apart that OpenReach is from whoever you deal with the less the ability of that whoever to be forewarned and to pass on the warning.

It's bad enough already. One afternoon some months ago phone and broadband kept going down. I tried ringing BT to ask if they knew there was any work going on in the area. No there wasn't. They could arrange a call-out but it would coast £80 if there was nothing wrong. Rather than do that I went down to the village where the cabinets are. Two manholes with the covers off, each occupied by a guy sorting out connections which they told me were no in great condition. Essential work, the only thing wrong was lack of communication (yes, the irony) back to customer disservice and hence to the customer. If things are to be broken up there needs to be a real effort on communicating this sort of thing all the way to the customer.

Re: Marx would be proud

"Also that asset will be matched to a hopefully profitable company"

Hope is about as close to profitable as a nationalised industry would get. And a faint hope at that.

ECHR is not an EU court, that's the ECJ. I don't think that any of our politicians like the idea of any external authority that keeps them on the straight and narrow - which is an excellent argument for the ECHR, the EU, the ECJ and anything else like that.

Re: "Labor is pro-remain, right?"

"ou do realise that the people have been waiting 3 years for their will to be respected?"

Which will was that? The will of the more or less half that wanted to leave or that of the more or less half who didn't?

The impasse of the last few years has been the consequence of the fact that you need a decisive majority for a change that fundamental, say something like 2:1. Apart from the gung-ho ERG types I suspect most of the rest of the MPs are looking over their shoulders at the electoral consequences of a disrupted economy.

Re: Political self-obsession and onanism

"privatisation was a political decision"

The political aspect came in when the privatised BT was not allowed to move into cable. That it, not until the supposedly more commercial businesses had shown their commercialism in the extent to which they were going to limit their efforts to cherry picked areas. The BT was brought in late and more or less simultaneously berated for not having the universal fibre network it had been forbidden to build.

Re: Political self-obsession and onanism

"There are some nationalised industries that do well and I can't imagine the private sector doing a better job."

The reason BT was privatised was because as a nationalised concern it couldn't get the finance to do even a poor job.

Re: Political self-obsession and onanism

"the plan is to provide FTTP for every home"

The headline word is "broadband". Even if anything else is babbled you'd probably find that ADSL counts as broad band and if you wait in the queue you can be connected up in a couple of years time and use it 3 days a week.

Re: Political self-obsession and onanism

"barely understand"

I think you're overestimating them.