Posts by Doctor Syntax

Honor launches new UK store, laptop, kettle, er... toothbrush?

Re: The girl in the picture knows more than she is letting on...

Would that be the exploding Colgate toothbrush? e.g. https://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/2011/11/03/colgate_issues_recall_over_exploding_toothbrushes.html

ITAM Forum opens: 'People just want to talk to other managers about how to defend against software audits'

Re: Avoid Oracle and SAP

"If you have neither SAP or Oracle then you have very little chance of software audits."

There are plenty of people who'd tell you to add Microsoft to that list. Ernie Ball was an early learner, e.g. https://www.cnet.com/news/rockin-on-without-microsoft/

Former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman calls on UK govt to legally protect data from contact-tracing apps

Re: Oh what a tangled web we weave!

"The only salvation for past wrongs is in doing right, and that should wholeheartedly be encouraged, not condemned."

Yes, but to gain credibility there needs to be an acknowledgement of those past wrongs. Firstly it reassures us that they do realise they were wrong and secondly it makes it a good bit harder to go back there.

Re: "A minister's letter is not legal protection"

The law can require that the fetishists don't collect the data. Then it doesn't need to protect it.

Meanwhile we've got a clear indication of how much competence is going to be devoted to preserving privacy. Serco emailed 300 trainee tracers with CC.

You know this Land of the Free thing, yeah? Well then, why allow the FBI to trawl through America's browsing history without a warrant?

Answer to 2nd question in article title: because they're free to do so.

Could it be? Really? The Year of Linux on the Desktop is almost here, and it's... Windows-shaped?

Re: It's just so backwards...

"If I could run the MS office suite entirely on Linux with 100% feature parity"

Step back and ask yourself a simple question: "Why should I want to use MS Office on Linux when there are Linux-native alternatives?".

You use office suites to do a job, you don't do a job so you can use a particular office suite.

A real loch mess: Navy larks sunk by a truculent torpedo

Re: Too many return() statements in the code?

Yes, Minister reference.

Re: Too many return() statements in the code?

I was expecting the extra bunker at Sandwich.

Too secret, Why draw attention by clearing the area?

Easyjet hacked: 9 million people's data accessed plus 2,200 folks' credit card details grabbed

Re: Never store CC details

"As a punter you won't know what they do with your card details after you have entered them and clicked submit."

Perhaps it's time sites were legally obliged to tell punters what they do.

Re: We took immediate steps to respond to and manage the incident

"In other words we did our best to avoid GDPR fines."

Their best might not be good enough if they became aware in January and only notified credit car holders in April.

Re: Other reports are saying they became aware of this in January

What gives? A big fine I should hope. Either that or 72 hours has a different meaning at Easyjet.

Re: Highly sophisticated

It's spin from the corporate types to avoid making themselves think they look incompetent.

FTFY

To the rest of us things look a bit different.

Huge if true... Trump explodes as he learns open source could erode China tech ban

You've never noticed to completely blindingly obvious joke comments from commentards that get downvoted because people didn't "get it" without an actual joke icon being placed there?

Sometimes it's not obvious whether the commentard was being serious. Some of them are.

Re: Please please please...

And little hands.

Crooks set up stall on UK govt's IT marketplace to peddle email fraud services targeting 'gullible' punters

Recent elections and the referendum saw considerable effort put into the job.

Maybe they put the wrong pitch on the site. The one they meant was to sell to political parties looking for gullible voters.

Doors closed by COVID-19, Brit retro tech museums need your help

Are you just assuming a vaccine is impossible or do you have evidence to this effect?

Dutch spies helped Britain's GCHQ break Argentine crypto during Falklands War

Re: Breaks it angle

The US doesn't have friends, only interests.

Mirror mirror on the wall, why will my mouse not work at all?

Re: Only way

"But inflection was too hard for us Brits."

No, just too inflexible.

Re: problems getting started

It'll be me who pays for the eventual replacement.

To be honest I thought it was just a personal view but quite a few seem to have agreed with me so maybe marketing need to think about it.

Re: problems getting started

Back up the back-light with a reflector and it doesn't need to consume so much of the battery.

Re: The Terrible IT Manager

"No great loss when he didn't come back into work one day."

Carpet and quicklime or the foundation pour at the building site down the road?

Re: Mice

"You could barely see the logo image and and couldn't read the login box text but the customer didn't mention that"

Customer might have been used to a CRT with an anti-reflection screen over it. Remember those?

Re: Even easier to get wrong with Sun optical mice

"network cable that was coiled up under the desk, vampire taps and all."

I didn't realiseyou could coil up cable that took vampire taps in anything less than full room height.

Re: Even easier to get wrong with Sun optical mice

"I think I've still got one of those mouse mats in the bottom of the drawer at work."

/\/\j17's Uni wants it back.

Re: problems getting started

"The logo is to show everyone else - not for the user"

I've had at least one laptop where the logo faced the user when the lid was closed. In fact I still find it mildly annoying that things changed. After all, it was me who paid for it, not someody across the room.

Tales from the crypt-oh: Nvidia accused of concealing $1bn in coin-mining GPU sales as gaming revenue

"Now, the shareholder class wants to collect damages from the company "

Shareholders are the company. So basically they're suing themselves in order to get back a fraction of what it'll cost them after the lawyers have taken their whack. Where on Earth do they think the money's going to come from except shareholders' funds? Or do they think the company is going to string a few cards together and whip up some Bitcoin to pay them?

They should have remembered that the guys who made money out of gold rushes were those who sold shovels.

UK housing association Places for People hands £21m to Salesforce to look after CRM and job scheduling

Re: Housing Association announce £25m IT contracts

If they're spending too much on IT they couldn't make a profit anyway but the essence of a non-profit is that it makes a surplus instead.

The project, imaginatively titled "Synergy"

Eventually you get to treat this sort of thing as a warning sign.

You can't have it both ways: Anti-coronavirus masks may thwart our creepy face-recog cameras, London cops admit

"just as the measles vaccine hasn't yet eradicated that disease."

Measles' survival has been greatly assisted by nutjobs. Perhaps is and when we get a Covid-19 vaccine a current vaccination will be required for international travel, being employed, etc. and measles just included with it. It still won't eliminate either but it would reduce it further.

Re: Why bother?

Carrying a chair leg to repair is also acceptable for target designation.

Openreach boss denies BT selling stake in UK's national broadband plumber

Did they learn anything from letting go of O2? We'll just have to wait & see.

If you don't LARP, you'll cry: Armed fun police swoop to disarm knight-errant spotted patrolling Welsh parkland

Re: IT Angle?

And in case anyone though you couldn't make it up here's another Pascal Close surrounded by a few more interesting names: http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?X=488645&Y=290360&A=Y&Z=110

Re: Plague Doctors?

Meanwhil SWMBO is busy making some masks. Yes, theatre of dubious value but it might become socially necessary theatre over the next few weeks..

You overstepped and infringed British sovereignty, Court of Appeal tells US in software companies' copyright battle

"If you sell anything in the EU, EU rules apply. If you sell stuff in the US, US rules apply."

So when an international deal takes place and the seller is physically in the US and the buyer physically in the EU where does the transaction actually take place? That's why such contracts specify the law and both parties agree to it.

"likely either null and void or at least not enforceable"

There's nothing in the article to say that the court made such a ruling. Also such matters can differ quite a bit between consumer and business deals and this appears to be B2B.

Often EULAs say which country's law shall apply, especially when the software is sold internationally. I wonder what this one said. If it said US law shall apply then it's odd that SAS should have gone to a UK court at all.

Re: Popcorn !

I was hoping the article would go on to say the UK court had found the US judges in contempt.

Vint Cerf suggests GDPR could hurt coronavirus vaccine development

The difficulty with framing legislation is that it's not possible to anticipate all situations, especially when the situations include technology or changes in society that couldn't even be visualised at the time. That's why the UK and US legal systems rely on judges interpreting the law as it applies to the case before them. From time to time legislation can catch up to take advantage of what was learned applying the previous law and adapting to changes in the environment in which it has to work. Without that element legislation would be too inflexible.

ALGOL 60 at 60: The greatest computer language you've never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree

"When your edit, compile, edit, compile cycle starts to get above about 10 minutes, you start to pay an awful lot of attention to your source code…"

10 minutes? Luxury. Punched card jobs run in batches. 2 hours turn-round, max 3 runs a day with the compiler losing track after the first error and rejecting every subsequent line. Then you really paid attention to your source code.

NHS contact tracing app isn't really anonymous, is riddled with bugs, and is open to abuse. Good thing we're not in the middle of a pandemic, eh?

Re: Do it right from the start

This is a circumstance when you work with what you've got - smartphones in the hands of the public - rather than something that doesn't exist. That said you should then make best use of it which this doesn't.

"they could always add security afterwards"

Conventional wisdom is that it's very difficult to add in security afterwards. Design it to be secure from the start.

Now there's nothing stopping the PATRIOT Act allowing the FBI to slurp web-browsing histories without a warrant

Re: Land of the free

With who paying for it?

If the VPN is run by a 3rd party company what does the P stand for?

$500bn fewer greenbacks to be forked out on IT in 2020 due to... well, you know what

"It is worth reflecting perhaps on how little anyone knows right now. "

Societies react to pandemics in quite surprising ways. Estimate of the Black Death (late 1340s) are usually 30 - 50% of the population killed. This left a vast surplus of land and a shortage of labour. So rents fell and wages rose, OK? No. They were more or less unchanged for a generation. The Statute of Labourers was passed to hold wages down but you'd expect it to have been ineffective against market forces. This was the time of desertion of medieval villages but not because the landlords couldn't attract tenants, it was the time when landlords threw tenants out to convert to pastoralism which needed fewer people to operate. It wasn't until the peasants' revolt, triggered by the poll taxes of the late 1370s/early 1380s that things started to change.

You'd also expect the population to bounce back - the C13th had seen a substantial increase in population before the famine of the late 1310s. In fact it failed to start to recover until about 1500. Because populations are difficult to estimate before the census started estimates of when it finally recovered to 1314 levels are variable but probably not before 1600.

So good luck, Gartner with your crystal balls.

Openreach tells El Reg it'll kill off copper sales in 118 UK locations next year

I suppose this means that even if you could have got good enough FTTP performance for your own needs, or even if you just wanted POTS you're going to have to pay extra to subsidise those who want more.

Driveway karaoke singer who wanted to lift lockdown spirits cops council noise complaint

Two questions:

Can he actually sing?

Has he paid for a licence from the PRS or whatever the approriate rent collecting organisation might be?

By at least 2 hours 59 minutes

More automation to suddenly look like a jolly good idea as businesses struggle through coronavirus crisis, say analysts

One of the lessons to take from the current situation is that when you need something relatively simple such as PPE urgently it's the non-automated, labour-intensive factories that can switch quickly to making it. By off-shoring that sort of work the western world has painted itself into a corner and Forrester's advice is that we collectively back ourselves into it even more firmly.