Posts by Doctor Syntax

BoJo looks to jumpstart UK economy with £6k taxpayer-funded incentive for Brits to buy electric cars – report

Re: £6k or is it a £3k change?

On the principle that most governments never announce any money just once I'd guess it'll be an extra £3k.

Contemplation is cheap.

Re: Buy more cars - drive them less

Can we clarify this? Do you mean the number of vehicles that didn't exceed 100 miles on some particular day, say 1st March 2020 (before lockdown) or the number of vehicles that never exceed 100 miles a day in the course of a year?

It's a big difference. I don't have a daily commute Pre lockdown I might not take my car on the road on some days and most occasions when I did I wouldn't exceed, say 20 miles and living where I do a substantial part of each journey involves driving uphill and then wasting the potential energy thus gained in braking going downhill. Being able to reclaim that energy would be a good fit for an electric car.

About half my annual mileage takes place on holiday when I might drive a few hundred miles a day going to and from my destination, I wouldn't count on being able to access an overnight charger at my destination and I wouldn't want to have my days dominated on holiday partially controlled by having to hunt up somewhere to top up the battery and hanging about when I do.

There would be no point whatsoever in having a vehicle which can't fit both scenarios.

Why would someone want to hack Germany's PPE supply chain? We're glad you masked

Why go public? If they've spotted it about it just keep quiet and feed them some disinformation.

Smart fridges are cool, but after a few short years you could be stuck with a big frosty brick in the kitchen

Re: My fridge freezer

Much the same thing here. I date them from the house we were in when we bouht them, ot years. The current freezer was bought while we were in our previous house so some time between '91 & '01. The previous was 2 houses further back so probably early 80s. I can't even remember when we bought the fridge but the door seal is starting to go - trouble is, I replaced the light bulb in it a few years ago and I'd hate to dispose of the fridge with some life left in the new one...

Re: Smart freezer - code frozen!

"then your premium fridge is just as functional as a bargain basement version"

If you're lucky. If not it just gets bricked.

Re: Yep, this need legislation

I can, of course, offer you that guarantee and wind up the company next day.

Ooo, a mystery bit of script! Seems legit. Let's see what happens when we run it

Re: Not quite the same...

Similar vintage a friend got the Fortran control characters wrong so it threw a new page instead of a new line. To make matters worse when he was taking it home on the back of his motor-bike it unfolded itself behind him.

Franco-German cloud framework floated to protect European's data from foreign tech firms slurpage

Re: "Europe has no notable operating system developers"

Isn't he a US citizen now. However large open source projects aren't the product of single countries. Developers are world-wide.

Amongst Linux distros there's SuSE which seems to have done the rounds: originally German, bought by Novell (US) then AttachMate (US), then MicroFocus (UK) then Blitz GmbH (German again) a subsidiary of EQT partners (head office Sweden).

Document Foundation (LibreOffice) and NextCloud are also based in Germany.

Re: After the CLOUD Act it was inevitable

Having skimmed through the PDF I'm a little less hopeful. Amongst the usual suspects contributors are Google, Oracle, HPE and Cisco. Admittedly it's the German branches of these but it makes it look a little less than European.

Re: After the CLOUD Act it was inevitable

Cooperation with allies is a far better way.

They do believe in cooperation: "We tell you what we want, you cooperate.".

Re: No global social network

Wethey have got global social [sic] networks. It's getting rid of them that's going to take work.

Legal complaint lodged with UK data watchdog over claims coronavirus Test and Trace programme flouts GDPR

Re: Last month's solution?

Hmm. NHS website says contacts are advised to self-isolate.

gov.uk says "must" self-isolate.

The M word implies it's a legal requirement but is it?

Re: Last month's solution?

Let's try somewhere in the middle. Don't just tell the traced contacts to lock themselves away. Assume that some, possibly many, will be false positives.

Treat the tracing as simply a presumptive test, i.e., one that has to be backed up with a better test. Only require the contacts to self-isolate in the first instance until a test result is available and then continue or not based on that.

Look to get quick turn-round. Instead of the mega-hubs where the test processing starts next morning distribute the processing so that it can be carried out closer to the subjects.

Look into tests that are supposed to give quick results on inexpensive equipment. Even if they also give false positives (but not false negatives) they can act as a second level test before sending samples for a more definitive test. But testing contacts is key, otherwise when the complaints start coming in in a few weeks time the whole thing will blow up in HMG's face.

If that leaves any spare capacity start looking at random testing. If there are asymptomatic cases giving rise to contacts relying on symptomatic cases only will take forever.

Re: GDPR?

Not only committed but actually written it - more or less - into the current DPA. It's the less that's the concern here. Govts tend to lend themselves wriggle room in legislation. At a guess they'll either defend themselves on those grounds or insist it's not covered because they're doing things manually. Even if they are that latter won't wash; manual data processing is data processing.

It could be 'five to ten years' before the world finally drags itself away from IPv4

In a couple of decades IPv6 hasn't succeeded in pushing its predecessor to the fringes if not displacing it entirely. Does that suggest it really was the right design for the job?

Re: Sign of mass adoption

70% of Google traffic seems like mass retention to me.

Re: IPv6 isn't a very good solution?

"We're told that we absolutely have to move to IPv6 because of the Internet of Things"

Possibly the strongest argument against it.

Re: It'll happen two years after

No it didn't.

Moore's Law is deader than corduroy bell bottoms. But with a bit of smart coding it's not the end of the road

Re: Quantum

Linux has been on my desktops and laptops for years. A glance out of the window shows that fusion power is ticking along nicely, as it has been all these billions of years. So what's holding up quantum computing?

"Yes, but how many hours of programmer time did it take to do the optimization, and how much money does a few hours of a programmer's time cost versus a few hours of a single CPU core?"

And how much is the user's time worth whilst they wait for a task to complete?

The programmer only has to optimise it once. Many users may use the program many times.

Hooray, space boffins have finally got InSight lander's heat probe back into Martian ground again

If they ever design v 2.0 of this they'll know to incorporate a big hammer. May be hi-vis jacket as well.

Brit MP demands answers from Fujitsu about Horizon IT system after Post Office staff jailed over accounting errors

Agreed but their families deserve compensation.

Re: Any chance

"he and his wife, also took and collected his child from the local hospital"

And this despite the fact that the entire flit to Durham was so that his nieces could look after the lad.

Re: Any chance

Witnesses are called by either the prosecution or defence. That includes expert witnesses. I can't imagine any situation where a witness just walks up and plonks themselves in the witness box unbidden.

Re: Any chance

"Would you be happy if you'd been falsely imprisoned?"

As a regular expert witness over many years a constant worry was that I might despite best efforts get caught up in a miscarriage of justice. It's a concern every expert witness should have, at least one appearing for the prosecution. I can't help wondering if the witnesses who appeared in these cases had that concern.

"While Fujitsu was not a party to the litigation..."

Whilst that's true they provided participants in the form of witnesses. One aspect to look at here is how well informed those witnesses were.

Were the problems known the the witnesses? If they weren't but were known in Fujitsu who was responsible for sending ill-informed witnesses?

If Daddy doesn't want me to touch the buttons, why did they make them so colourful?

What we really want to know is what's Dave's son's elReg handle?

Astroboffins peering back in time with Hubble find stars may have been flickering into life even earlier than thought

Not finding a trace of Population III objects in the 500 million to 1 billion year period after the "Big Bang" is surprising

It sounds like a good time to be an astrophysicist or cosmologist. "That's odd" is one of the best reactions to have in science.

Have I Been Pwned breach report email pwned entire firm's helldesk ticket system

Re: Also an age-old observation:

It's the gift that keeps on giving. The annoying thing is that I've correspondents in my local history group that sometimes send mail that appears blank if the reader's set to plain text.

IBM to power down Power-powered virtual private cloud, GPU-accelerated options

Re: As usual

"Why shit on your paying customers?"

Maybe they're running out of employees to shit on.

Is a global crisis the right time to invest in some kind of data platform? If the boss isn't making cuts to all things IT, why not?

"Where we see the next five to 10 years..."

The Great [insert technology of choice] Revolution is always coming in 5 to 10 years. Always has been, always will be.

Global bean-counting behemoth PWC tells vendors: Now would be a great time to audit your customers

From the vendors' point of view, it's a good time to be get customers licenses set to numbers of seats that might well never be filled after things start up again.

From the customers' point of view it would be a good time to look at license-free alternatives but I doubt they will.

GSMA suggests mobile carriers bake contact-tracing into their own apps – if governments ask for it

"This just looks like some government sponsored attempt"

It looks more like fear of missing out on the GSMA's part and maybe also the carriers'.

Devuan Beowulf 3.0 release continues to resist the Debian fork's Grendel – systemd

Re: KDE on MX Linux

Damn keyboard!

"I know Devuan does"

Must persuade SMBO I need to replace this laptop.

Re: KDE on MX Linux

Yup, one of those which seems to include Plasma 5.18. I'd need to spend a bit of time making sure I could reinstall into an LVM file system to preserve /home & other stuff. It's not immediately clear whether MX does that but I now Devuan does.

I stuck with Trinity for a while but started to run into issues with building applications in later releases of Lazarus and wondered if the two weren't getting on. I might give it another try. KDE has followed the usual UI progression from KDE3 > KDE4 > KDE5 of putting shiny before function. UI designers are like an infestation of mice: they get into everything and once they're there they're almost impossible to get rfd of.

Re: "It solves a problem that people have."

"Sysvinit executes scripts in lexigraphical order. This was dumb at the time, but really, really hard to change."

I wouldn't call it dumb at all. Things to be processed in a specific order on the one hand and a system which automatically addresses things in lexical order on the other are fairly obvious case of problem and solution. It doesn't matter whether they're scripts or anything else - PDF files to be assembled into a new file by pdfunite is something I've found myself using fairly often recently and used just that approach.

Dddly enough I'd just started burning an MX disk, had a look here and found this. You wait ages for a systemd-free Debian 10 and.... Unfortunately Debian, and hence Devuan, never seem to settle on an LTS version of KDE.

Actually I've been using the testing Beowulf on a Pi for my Nextcloud server for months so that's updated.

Re: My problem with systemd

Tell Pottering. He'll probably come up with GeneCashCamerad. Either that or WONT_FIX.

Re: "It solves a problem that people have."

"It seems to be a better implementation of the excellent Windows NT service interface!"

The epitome of damning with faint praise.

Re: "It solves a problem that people have."

"On HP-UX this got even worse with their practice of combining all of the above into a single script which then had to work out where in the statup/shutdown cycle it was."

That was particularly useful. The script could be edited so that we could inhibit the system from starting new applications, tell the users to log out with time to finish their current tasks and then let the grace period pass before actually forcing them out.

Anatomy of a business email scam: FBI dossier details how fraudster pocketed $500k+ by redirecting payments

Re: Not very good

"Criminals are criminals because, well, criminals are stupid."

The criminals you hear about in trials like this are stupid. They're a subset of the set of all criminals. But how big a subset?

BBC voice assistant promises to summon streams even if you're just a little bit Brahms and Liszt

Re: "The BBC is selling Beeb as a privacy-friendly option"

I'm not sure how it can be considered as compatible with being Windows only.

Contact-tracer spoofing is already happening – and it's dangerously simple to do

Re: Unhearing government

The site currently asks you if you'll fill in a survey. The first thing to notice about the survey is that it's run from a 3rd party domain. Wankers in marketing never learn.

Re: Four countries - same CLID?

But then do we even believe the CLID?

"Driving 260 miles to Durham while your wife has the virus is not safe"

Driving 260 miles when you yourself might be infected is even less safe. There have been reported cases where individuals started out feeling fine on shorter drives than that and were in a state of collapse by the end of it.

Spending watchdog doubts UK is capable of managing Brexit and coronavirus info campaigns at the same time

Not a very surprising conclusion given that they've proved themselves incapable of managing even one thing at a time.

Lenovo certifies all desktop and mobile workstations for Linux – and will even upstream driver updates

What are you doing that requires you to have driver problems 10 times in a week?

Re: Vendor support is one thing...

"I'm not sure why I would want to watch in 4K on a PC or laptop."

Not even the PC with a tuner card in it, sitting under the TV, running MythTV or Kodi?