Posts by Doctor Syntax

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

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

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

Re: Breaks it angle

The US doesn't have friends, only interests.

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

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?

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

Re: Please please please...

And little hands.

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.

NHS contact-tracing app is best in the world, says VMware CEO... whose company helped build it

Re: Decentralised

"95% false positives is one person passing it onto 1 person in 20 they came in contact with"

Maybe. The alternative view is that if the infection rate was 5% this is no better than random.

The report also included an interview with one person who'd received an alert. He wasn't offered a test, he was told to self-isolate and developed no symptoms. If this instruction was sent out to 79,000 people it means that 75,000 were taken out of circulation for a couple of weeks for no reason at all.

In Isreal the govt. might be able to enforce that. Here it would lead the app very quickly being deinstalled or the responses disregarded. This is why I keep saying that in order to work it needs to be backed up by quick tests for all alerts.

Easier still; start to put your T-shirt on - and stop.

Re: Wear the mask

I think what was confusing the A/C is that the graphs of total positive results is remaining flat. What the A/C fails to take into account is the increasing number of tests and that there's going to be a correlation with number of tests as well as with the number of actual infections. Tricky things, sampling effects.

Re: Wear the mask

"Fact is, they are are extremely useful and successful at both reducing the the potential for person to transmit it, and for somebody to actually breath it in."

Two different things with two different requirements. Preventing breathing it in requires an expensive mask with a proper filter system to trap aerosols and HMG quite rightly doesn't want people stacking these up alongside their mountain of toilet rolls, paste, flour etc. when the front-line needs all they've got.

Preventing transmission of a disease people have needs something to catch larger droplets. It's a lower spec providing you don't take it off to cough but if you're coughing best to stay at home and do a proper job of avoiding transmitting the disease.

Re: Decentralised

"They are really good at it."

It depends what you mean by good.

The report on the Beeb web site says they've picked up 4,000 who then tested positive, about 25% of the known cases. But they sent out 79,000 alerts so that looks like 95% false positives. What would the hit rate have been if they'd sent out 79,000 alerts to random people?

We maintained or increased IT spending, say seven-in-ten pros, execs polled mid-crisis. PS: We love Microsoft most

This roughly balances with the number of businesses saying they've cut staff. So about 2/3 have put money into IT and about 1/3 are making cuts.

My first reaction was to wonder who'll be proved right but I suspect the third who are cutting staff will probably claim they were proved right. They'll say they never put money into IT because they never get anything useful out of it.

Post-pandemic hard-sell under way: Resellers leaned on to convert free trial users into fully paid-up customers

"So those who chase these post-panic deals will commit further to the distributor's ecosystem."

So it's lock-in all the way down?

IBM to GTS staff: Not volunteering to leave with a redundo cheque? We'll give you a helping hand

Are you inside IR35? If you're a contractor global bank is not your employer, at least not unless you own global bank. Your employer should be your own company.

Re: my proudest moment

"My proudest moment has been finding a position that makes me happy to do what I do every day."

Just like the OP.

Russia admits, yup, the Americans are right: One of our rocket's tanks just disintegrated in Earth's orbit

Re: Elon Musk isn't helping, is he

"when starship flys"

Providing it can get through the litter layer unscathed.

Microsoft doc formats are the bane of office suites on Linux, SoftMaker's Office 2021 beta may have a solution

"These experiments show that getting perfect reproduction of Office document formats on Linux is still not easy."

"It is worth noting too that there is an interaction with the printer driver in word processor documents, so you will not necessarily get exactly the same appearance on different computers even with Word."

Quite. And who really needs another proprietary document format?

Fancy some post-weekend reading? How's this for a potboiler: The source code for UK, Australia's coronavirus contact-tracing apps

Re: Sage & onion

"Finally, it might be worth checking the last paragraph of the article quoted in the parent thread to this."

Very interesting. The author seems to think this sort of thing should be left to insurance companies who have proper data scientists and academics should keep out. I wonder who trained those prper data scientists.

Re: Am I missing one huge thing.

" This also allows for the possibility of it telling you that you had received a false alarm and can go back to life as normal."

False positives are likely to be feature. Being told - maybe - that it was a false alarm might come as a relief at first. After a few false alarms, maybe discovered false by being told or more likely by the non-appearance of symptoms, leading to days of unnecessary isolation, will likely lead to the app being removed or at least disregarded.

What's needed is the ability to follow up all these alerts with a test with a quick turn-round.

Re: And the BCS position?

I got through most of the paper before going into skim-mode. In fact it doesn't quite seem to say what you think it says. That's just a summary of a large number of statements about how the system should work without pointing out that the govts. offering fails at a number of them. I wonder if it was written, at least in draft, before HMG confirmed what they were going to do. Alternatively it may have been craftily written so that at some future time they can point out that they were actually critical but without saying anything that will enable HMG to beat up on them right now.

I do like their phrase in support of mass-testing: “you cannot ‘big data’ your way out of a ‘no data’ situation”.

Penny smart and dollar stupid: IT jobs slashed in US, UK, Europe to cut costs – just when we need staff the most

I agree risking a GDPR fine isn't going to enter into their calculations now and it probably didn't before. There's always budget to pay the fine even if there isn't budget to comply in the first place.

But being in a situation where their operations have become more complex doesn't make sense to cut down. The probably explanation is that manglements don't realise the added complexity and vulnerabilities they've taken on. They're not prepared for the budget to pay to support it - there may come a day when things go so badly wrong there won't be a budget bigi enough to fix it