Posts by Doctor Syntax

Microsoft drops a little surprise thank-you gift for sitting through Build: The source for GW-BASIC

Re: every byte mattered ...

"I'd used unixes on 68000s for chip design work and they had been very stable"

I had a short gig developing some reporting stuff for a factory installation on a Motorola box. At the end I had to go to Italy to install it on site. The machine kept crashing & I'd find odd files in lost+found which were clearly dumps of bits of memory. There were odd murmurs from my client's client about not letting me go until it ran. Fortunately it eventually managed a clean run and I escaped. I later heard it was traced to faulty memory.

Re: Not bad for the year -- but they may not be telling us everything

"There were usable tools around since the late 70s for microprocessor development but they were insanely expensive -- an Intel MDS, for example, cost about 50,000 pounds"

You were shopping in the wrong place. The S-100 systems were around since the mid '70s and much cheaper than that.

Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC

Re: They say you can tell a man....

There, there. Lockout getting to you? There's a chance schools might reopen before the end of term.

Re: AMD's new marketing slogan: "Intel outside"

Cyrix had "Cyrix instead".

Re: AMD's new marketing slogan: "Intel outside"

I was working on one piece of kit and didn't notice the sticker had peeled off until I found it had stuck itself onto my screwdriver set. I just left it there for years.

Re: $$$

Often things do scale more or less linearly until you get to an inflection point. Rule of thumb: either buy the last thing before the inflection point or wait another year.

Re: $$$

Upvote for Morgans of blessed memory. Before they went into computers I used to get Exacta stuff from them.

Re: $$$

Wrap it carefully and tape the edges together.

Re: mythical Year Of Linux On the Desktop comes

As far as I'm concerned it happened when laptops no longer had floppies to boot the SCO installer and Windows first wanted to phone home.

Help your fellow IT pals spruce up their virtual meetings: Design a winning background, win Register-branded gear

Re: not safe for work.

With no lifts, no 9th floor windows with dodgy fasteners and everyone being out of range of cattle-prods BOFH is going to have to get more creative. I suppose drones will come into their own.

A set of QR codes leading to various interesting pages. Of course opinions might vary as to what's interesting.

Dude, where's my laser?

Re: Not unbelievable

"I'm sorry but James Bond (and his manly bits) nearly copped it in 1964 at the hand of Auric Goldfinger and his laser"

At the time a friend's physics lecturer described that laser as "Wouldn't even tickle Pussy Galore".

Home working is here to stay, says Lenovo boss, and will grow the total addressable PC market by up to 30%

Re: I have to say I'm with Lenovo on this

"It will vary somewhat between companies, those with the sociopathic bosses probably leaning more to office working initially until they see other companies saving lots of money by selling off or renting out office space. ... Office space prices will almost certainlly drop significantly in the short to medium term."

The best gains will be made by those who move fastest so the sociopaths will lose out.

Re: Market +30% = wages -30%

The PHBs may be seen as an economy to be made along with the expensive premises.

BoJo buckles: UK govt to cut Huawei 5G kit use 'to zero by 2023' after pressure from Tory MPs, Uncle Sam

Post-Brexit sovereignty. We're free from EU influence so we can do exactly what the US tells us to do.

Just wait until the US trade talks start.

HPE's Black Thursday: Staff face pay cuts or the ax, office closures to save $1bn+ after coronavirus slams IT titan

You can't shouldn't recognise revenue

FTFY.

Not everyone does what they should.

"whether they are the right type of manager to work at HP"

Or whether HP was the right type of place to work.

Back to the future.

Working at home has made businesses re-evaluate their expensive HQs but the answer isn't necessarily to have everyone working in their own home. In the longer term insurance, business rates and H&S issues might crop up.

The other week the CEO of Barclays was interviewed about this and suggested some employees from the big offices could work from branches instead (serves those banks right who've cut themselves off from this option). At last big businesses are realising that it doesn't make sense to set up big offices in big cities that require staff to drag themselves in from the surrounding towns where they live. Smaller hubs in and around those those towns could provide work-spaces for the employees who live there. A sort of WeWork 2.0 could be the provision of such hubs in larger buildings.

In my own locality in the 1950s most people commuted no more than a few hundred yards. There were mills every half mile or less and most people were employed in them. In some cases they would have a mill closer than the nearest bus-stop. Some of those mills still exist, some leased out to small businesses, at least one standing empty for some years. Even if their premises are unsuitable for conversion their sites could be re-built. It would mean employment could move back to where people live.

"The Register has heard all staff bar those in front-line sales will take a hit"

So you'll be able to buy something from them but delivery might be a problem.

Mind your language: Microsoft set to swing the axe on 27 languages in iOS Outlook

Re: Widely understood

My farming neighbour thinks it also applies to sheep.

Competition? We've heard of it. MoD snubs cloud rivals to hand Microsoft £17.7m Azure hosted services gig

Re: Data sovereignty, eh?

This is the post-Brexit concept of sovereignty. EU rules can't contradict the US when they tell us what to do.

Re: Hook, Line and Sinker

"Ah well, at least there be no argument or disagreement about who is to blame and carry the can whenever anything at all goes tits up"

According to TFA it's hosted partly by HP (?HPE) and partly on Azure, i.e. by Microsoft. Lots of scope for finger pointing there.

Linux desktop org GNOME Foundation settles lawsuit with patent troll

Re: impressive, but how ?

It's a pity the US patent office isn't liable for everyone's costs when a patent they've granted fails at such a basic level. Not only would they tighten up immediately but there'd probably be a mad scramble looking for existing patents that should be revoked.

Re: And thank the Imaginary Sky Fairy...

My understanding of the way OIN works is that they have a pool of patents which are licensed on non-aggression terms. A troll is unlikely to be using any of these in its own operations so OIN wouldn't be able to nuke them. They might, however, have the expertise to review the patents to invalidate them.

Re: And thank the Imaginary Sky Fairy...

There'll be an NDA around this but the lawyers will have acquired detailed knowledge about the case and the patents. Next time the trolls go after a commercial entity they'd be the best lawyers to call on to defend. The bill would be along the lines of "£1 for hitting it, £999 for knowing where to hit" Multiplied up an appropriate number of times, of course.

Re: I'm not sure

At a guess maybe they were in a position to invalidate the patents if it went to court?

Das reboot: That's the only thing to do when the screenshot, er, freezes

Re: ID10T error

"showing a way around the problem would probably have been quicker than trying to explain"

Until next time. And the time after that. And the time after the time after that.

It's lack of understanding that produces these errors and the way to engender understanding is through explanation.

Campaign groups warn GCHQ can re-identify UK's phones from COVID-19 contact-tracing app data

One of the downsides of a tracing approach is the balance between the number of false positives and false negatives - set the threshold too low and people are being sent to self-isolate needlessly which will quickly bring it into disrepute but set it too high and people who weren't alerted go down with the virus which will also quickly bring it into disrepute.

I see that they're now trialling something more akin to a spot test which, if it's available on a large enough scale, be able to screen out the false positives. That could be a game changer for the whole scheme. But it still doesn't overcome the problem with being asked to trust our privacy to people who have repeatedly shown themselves to be untrustworthy.

Re: Thank you

Just because you can survive a serious illness by being treated for a few weeks in hospital doesn't mean you should treat it lightly.

Re: Thank you

The apps (this and those based on the Apple/Google API) record the length of contact and the response is based on that so the contact length could be set for, say 2 minutes. That's been said a number of times.

What's not been said is how it deals with multiple short contacts. There's no particular duration at which you suddenly become infected if you're in contact a second longer; it's a matter of increasing probability. On that basis multiple short contacts should eventually raise the probability over whatever threshold is set for the long contact. But does the tracing add up all your 2 second contacts so that 60 of those are equivalent to a 2 minute contact?

UK's Ministry of Defence: We'll harvest and anonymise private COVID-19 apps' tracing data by handing it to 'behavioural science' arm

Re: Quelle Surprise!

"Then obviously you don’t have to be concerned about sharing email addresses."

It depends on circumstances.

A direct mail to a single person with CC to a small team or even a single individual known to the intended recipient wouldn't be a problem. Sending a BCC might be considered sneaky if the main recipient got to know about it.

An email CCed to members of a group coordinated mostly be email (e.g. my local history group to the rest of the group) is also fine - it's the only way a new member of my history group can find out the others' addresses.

A bulk email CCed to a lot of strangers is not fine. If the A/C only does bulk emails of that nature that once a year or so then there's nothing wrong with only using BCC so infrequently. But someone in an office job who needs to send out such emails (a) should know to use BCC, having been trained to to that, and (b) shouldn't be given an emailer that makes it too easy to get it wrong or too hard to get it right.

Re: Quelle Surprise!

"It's also emerged today that contacts, assuming they're identified, will likely not be tested but merely asked to quarantine regardless."

They were saying that at the start, then there was a sort of vague mention of testing but the testing regime isn't going to be enough to keep up with it. If they have 18,000 tracers they each only need to trace 10 contacts plus false positives a day to eat up most of BoJo's 200,000 tests a day and leave an inadequate 20,000 for everything else.

"wrote the National Cyber Security Centre’s technical gros fromage Ian Levy"

That's the blog that's completely unreadable unless you allow a stack of javascript.

So if I want to read what they have to say about security I have to disable my browser's security. It might simply be laziness or ineptitude but it's not reassuring. Under those circumstances I wouldn't trust their site so I wouldn't trust the content so I won't bother to read it.

There seems to be absolutely nothing about this whole track and trace stuff that doesn't have a red flag waving over it.

"data from the third party COVID-19 apps"

What third parties? Do their users know HMG is syphoning off their data? Even if it really is anonymised before it goes to NHSX are non-anonymised copes kept? And what about third party non-COVID-19 apps? This announcement seems to be taking the lid off a huge can of worms.

Tech's Volkswagen moment? Trend Micro accused of cheating Microsoft driver QA by detecting test suite

""The researcher did not inform us whereas standard and effective reporting for the industry would have required that he contact us first."

I thought that was for bugs. This appears to be a feature.

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.

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.

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.

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?