Posts by Doctor Syntax

Behold the perils of trying to turn the family and friends support line into a sideline

Re: I've had my share.

Parallel cable to a modem?

If that's right it's one thing I managed to duck.

Re: Neighbours, 75 YO

"just to make sure it ran"

And left it on "while we order the Windows disk".

Re: Dinner charge

I knew someone who did TV repairs. He had a rented TV himself. The rental company couldn't understand why he had so many faulty valves.

Re: Obligatory XKCD

The converse of that, back in the days of CP/M etc. Called in at a computer dealer and found them in some consternation. Printer spewing out realms of an unwanted document despite them having switched off the computer to try to stop it. They hadn't grasped the idea of a buffer in the printer.

Re: Twas ever thus

"says the person who never dropped a deck of punched cards"

You never used sequence numbers and a card sorter?

Re: F&F discount

"Its one of the few reasons that I use Windows still - so I can remember where everything is when I need to do it to F+F machines."

Just convert them to Linux (Zorin for that market). Otherwise they're on their own.

Re: Cable entanglement

"Any two or more independent cables placed in close proximity will spontaneously entangle"

They'll also produce offspring.

Re: Twas ever thus

"I'm convinced that the idea of connecting cables was an invention of Satan himself for unending torture of humanity."

It's a quantum thing. Cables generate spontaneously and are always entangled. They are in a state of superposition in that they could be anything until you open the box and find that whatever's inside has at least one wrong termination.

Multitasking is a myth: It means doing lots of things equally badly

"You have to keep multiple career histories and CVs updated – something that LinkedIn ... cannot handle at all."

To be fair to LinkedIn (it's the last Friday in the month so I'll allow myself a treat) they're not alone in that. Agents could never handle it either. Carefully tailor the CV company brochure to a particular gig and the pimp would submit it for a different one without checking and, I suspect, without submitting it for the intended one either.

Re: The English language includes support for lists

Bring back lamb and mint sauce flavour.

Re: Explaining jobs

"some of you will remember those halcyon days when High Street banks didn't take risks"

It's getting difficult to remember the halcyon days when Hight Streets had banks.

"hustlers"/ "work-a-holics".

My spark brother in law calls it ducking'n'diving.

We're all doooooomed: Gloomy Brit workforce really isn't coping well with impending Brexit

Re: If the current government ... keeps its promises

"They're making promises now? I thought they'd given up on that sort of thing."

Not making them. Just keeping them. The trouble with any politician is that they really believe they can do anything so they make promises that any rational analysis will show they can't possibly keep. And they're the last to realise they can't.

"people management"

What do they mean by that in that context? Reading it the first time I took it to mean bad management of the leaver. However manager quality is in the second list so do they really mean they're leaving because they want to manage people?

BOFH: We must... have... beer! Only... cure... for... electromagnetic fields

Re: Glastonbury

Not saying they don't but unless they've persuaded some business to provide it for free it comes out of the rates Council Tax.

Re: solution

"they did start getting strange headaches whenever the blinkenlights were on"

So they were sensitive to electromagnetic radiation after all.

"almost certainly needs more bandwidth than a Bluetooth headset."

And a lot more power.

DoorDash doesn't just pick up your food orders, it delivers your data to hackers, too

Re: Hey a company that's actually doing things (mostly) right

Well, they were putting their trust and, presumably without informed consent, their customers' trust in a third party. That immediately increases the attack surface.

Is this going to turn out to have been another of those cases where a backup was sitting, world readable, on a cloud provider's disks? From the account given it's data up to April 5 last year accessed on May 4 this year. That sounds awfully like a stale backup.

Re: CVV stored?

They say CVVs were not taken. That implies to me that they weren't stored.

As sales crash, Gartner wonders who can rescue the smartphone market ... Aha, it is I! 5G Man!

Re: suffering because of Brexit

Maybe people will be thinking of not spending on non-essentials now to have more money when the prices of essentials go up.

"the first deployment is being used to provide high speed fixed internet access for businesses in an area where there isn't fibre"

The constraining factors for that are going to be getting a signal, spectrum saturation and the extension of fibre coverage. Presumably 5G itself will slow down fibre deployment and everyone gets caught out when the saturation hits the the fibre's needed Right Now.

"Infinite growth is an unsustainable business model."

Sales tend to follow a sigmoidal graph. And that's a graph of total sales. Eventually everyone who wants a gizmo has one. Sales per quarter or whatever are the first differential of that curve with a bit added on for replacements. But every time marketing people think they're looking at an exponential curve. Every time.

Re: Perhaps

I'm sure that neither of you nor myself is typical of the great mobile-buying public so Gartnet might actually be right. Depressing, isn't it?

The Wun Show: Douglas Crockford has been sniffing JavaScript's bad parts again

Re: Harumph...

"Youth of today"

Given how long she's been entertaining us with her columns I'm quite sure Verity will be quite pleased with that.

Dunkin do-nots: Deep-fried cake maker did not warn its sugar addicts that crooks raided web accounts, says NY AG

"brute-forced their way into these customer accounts by simply guessing people's passwords."

Or found customers who'd reused IDs and passwords from breaches of other sites?

HMRC chief digital wonk Jacky Wright takes flight back to Microsoft's light

"she is very impressive in person but her tenure has been massively disappointing"

The main requirement for climbing to the top of the tree in management or politics is to be personally impressive and wield your elbows well. Being able to do the job would be a nice to have from the point of view of the organisation but a very minor consideration at most for the climber.

Cynical? Moi?

Wouldn't it have been better to have appointed somebody who didn't have to recuse themselves?

And undertake to stick around longer to ensure that their "achievements" would be achievements they'd be prepared to live with in the longer term?

Worst-case Scenarios? You've got it: Gremlin makes totally trashing your apps even easier

Chaos Monkey?

Are they using some to test the British political system? It would explain a lot.

Pro tip: Plug in your Tesla S when clocking off, lest you run out of juice mid hot pursuit

It's not the running down that's the trouble. The article points that out. It's the time to refuel.

Dropbox CEO: I will make your worklife a calmer experience

Re: 1000 emails?

"need to be aware of email going to large groups, if only to weed out the crap from the good stuff"

Do you see any of the root causes of the problem in there?

"files from a range of other services including Slack, Zoom and Trello into one Dropbox folder"

Perhaps if there were different folders for each service it might be easier. And why not local instead of on somebody else's computer.

The D in Systemd is for Directories: Poettering says his creation will phone /home in future

Wow. I'm left wondering how all those real Unix/Informix systems I used to manage ever staggered into life. Systems which ran large and small businesses for years. Systems from V7 through System III to System V.

Re: Good encapsulation, Dr S

"On the one hand it seems to be taking Devuan a long time to get their Buster based version out...

One can ask oneself: would this be why MX is taking off so well? "

Like Devuan, the MX stable is still Debian Stretch, i.e. Debian 9, not 10.

Re: re: Once desktop processing power became sufficient to crack the encryption

Via a setuid program that has permission to write there.

Re: he likes to pass off criticism as a hater brigade instead of fuctional concerns...

You sound like one of the hater brigade. Have an upvote.

Re: In other news...

Just to clarify - it's the first wide public release of Knoppix to abandon systemd.

Re: I must be an edge case

"I know you didn't write it"

He sees that as a problem. The rest of us...

Re: Devuan?

"OpenBSD, MacOS - there are lots of perfectly fine distros"

Those are not Linux. They're Unix variants. Linux used to be a Unix-like OS.

Re: Linux is dead

Jake, did you read that link I posted to the Debian mailing list. The gist was that it was getting difficult to maintain sysvinit because of all the systemd dependencies creeping into upstream userland stuff. That makes me worry about the maintainability of Slackware as well because surely they must be either keeping to old versions of userland or chasing the same issues.

"I've long wondered why this metric is a big deal for people."

It's a big metric if you're trying to push something that allegedly reduces it.

"And besides, your Great Aunt Martha has never installed an OS of any description"

How do you know, you've never met my great aunt Martha?

Re: Good encapsulation, Dr S

As more and more of userland gets pottered about with upstream in order to make it work with the vampire squid it might be more difficult to maintain such distros without forking more and more of them.

Re: Linux is dead

"not fully understood by anyone except him"

I think you're being too generous.

Good news: Microsoft is doubling your OneDrive storage for more than double your money

Is this anything to do with the emails I keep getting on my Hotmail junk address saying the OneDrive I never asked for or use will suffer terrible misfortunes unless I go to some link and fill in my personal details?

Re: For private individuals, 1 TB USB Drives

Or just store USB drives in each others houses.

Fairytale for 2019: GNOME to battle a patent troll in court

"grant Patents without much checking, and rely on subsequent litigation to clarify the veracity and validity of the claim."

This should be OK providing they are liable for all the costs of successful challenges.

Consumer campaign to keep receiving printed till receipts looks like a good move – on paper

And e-tickets

I booked tickets for a local event. The email tells me I do not need to print this email just make a note of the booking reference. It's an alphameric string of 17 characters. Yes, I'm going to remember that when I turn up at the door aren't I? And the door staff are really going to check that in a list of 100 or so 17 character numbers.

What are this lot on? Gotit! Green Koolaide. Because it's "more than 400 times better for the environment" if I don't print it. Eejits.

Re: The problem is there's no defined standard, so it's roll-your-own (again)

I do that as a matter of course. Emails are received by an email client, stored and deleted from the server. Old school.

Re: Amazing technology

"Worried about spam? Then sign up using an email address that you only use for receipts."

And watch it collect more and more spam. The real way to do this is to set up a number of addresses before you go shopping. Hand the next one out to each shop. Get the receipt. Kill the address. In practical terms I already have more addresses than I'd like to have just for the firms I regularly do business with.

US lobby group calls for open standards to fight Huawei 'threat'

The headline sounded like the Devil quoting scripture. And the article confirms it.