Posts by Doctor Syntax

Surprise! Plans for a Brexit version of the EU's Galileo have been delayed

Re: If only there were a cheap-to-deploy land based positioning system...

You park the base stations on top of them.

Re: Shame we aren’t in Galileo?

"the less educated part of the country."

You need to include the over-educated part not just the intersect between that set and the set of politicians.

Re: Good

"British citizens are excluded"

Unless they were born in NI or have a parent or grandparent who was born there or in the Irish Republic.

"politicos realise space is hard"

So's a lot of other stuff. I wonder how long it's going to take for them to realise that.

We regret to inform you there are severe delays on the token ring due to IT nerds blasting each other to bloody chunks

Re: obligatory link to Dilbert 'token ring'

No, we all knew. Nothing sad about knowing the classics.

"We had 10base2"

Yup. '95 sounds a bit late for a recently installed Token Ring. By then we were on our third Ethernet set-up although luckily enough the stiff hose-pipe variant was somebody else's problem. Maybe the installer wanted to unload some old stock.

Re: obligatory link to Dilbert

https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-05-02

Scottish biz raided, fined £500k for making 193 million automated calls

OK, here's this once again:

1. Allocate a number such as 1476 (nicely away from miskeying 1471.

2. Dial that after the nuisance call.

3. Until a threshold of reports has been reached your telco holds a record of your report.

4. Once the threshold has been reached your telco credits your account with a few, say £1 for each call or £2 if you're registered with TPS.

5. The telco charges whoever originated the call to them and adds a handling charge. If it's the actual caller it goes straight on their bill, if not it's up to the telco who forwarded to yours to keep records and charge their source, along with their handling charge.

6. If some telco along the line didn't keep track they're on the hook and won't be doing it again.

7. The telcos are given notice to prepare for all this.

8. The telcos realise there'll be upfront costs plus even if they don't kill the practice stone dead with credit control to protect themselves the costs will kill the rogue-calling industry and their upfront costs won't e recouped in handling charges.

9. The telcos suddenly discover previously unknown ways to stop the problem at source so there's no need to incur those costs.

Requires only will on the part of government to empower the regulator.

"The company's most recent accounts show it was a dormant company at the time of the offences, so it was trading improperly anyway"

In which case the directors will be on the hook anyway under the Companies Act.

"I thought if the purpose of a business was illegal, there was no shielding of liability?"

There isn't. But the first step will be to hold the company responsible. The next step has to go after the director(s).

Windows 7 goes dual screen to shriek at passersby: Please, just upgrade me or let me die

I was in a local library the other week to use their Ancestry subscription. Yup - still running W7.

It's only a game: Lara Croft won't save enterprise tech – but Jet Set Willy could

"the real lines drawn on the dry-wipe whiteboards over endless cups of indifferent coffee as last night's hangover dissolves under the strip lights of endless meetings"

You are jack Dee and I claim my £5.

Re: I wants one

But only if I could find a copy of the Z80 UCSD Pascal.

Sure, check through my background records… but why are you looking at my record collection?

Re: Strangest job interview technique

The appropriate response to that has to be "Mornington Crescent".

Re: Coding Tests

"My brother went for a job, in the late 90s I think. At a listed company. And was told his CV had to be hand written. Turned out they employed a graphologist to spout bollocks about what your handwriting said about your suitability for the job."

The interview is also your chance to evaluate the company.

US Homeland Security mistakenly seizes British ad agency's website in prostitution probe gone wrong

Re: Devils advocate.....

The fact they got the domain back tells me the devil doesn't have all the best tunes.

"their email addresses are likely to be crucial."

In that respect they made a fundamental mistake in not setting up a .uk domain so they could continue to use email. Get the business going again and argue back at leisure.

"I mean, you could."

Ultimately the internet runs an a mutual agreement to trust a particular root service and sync all the mirrors to it. That implies that a mutual agreement to distrust it and trust one of the mirrors would be possible. If that were to happen the US would have the options, after all the shouting, of accepting it or cutting itself off from the rest of the world.

Aww, a cute mini-moon is orbiting Earth right now. But like all good things, it too will abandon us at some point

Re: I idly wonder about the challenge of landing this on earth ?

* Dumping 300 toms of platinum on the market would probably lower the price.

Re: Hold on a mo...

"This thing has been parked up for 3 years and nobody noticed"

Don't you believe it. The (non Register) vultures who run the local B & Q car park have been ticketing it. The fines are going to be horrendous.

Rotherwood Healthcare AWS bucket security fail left elderly patients' DNR choices freely readable online

“We at Rotherwood Group take the protection of personal data very seriously. Once we became aware of a security issue affecting some data held on our cloud-based system, we took immediate steps to rectify it."

Rectifying after someody else finds your mistake is not taking protection seriously. Taking protection seriously is not making such a mistake in the first place.

Firefox, you know you tapped Cloudflare for DNS-over-HTTPS? In January, it briefly knackered two root servers at the heart of the internet

"Cloudflare also acted quickly: within 21 minutes it had identified that a specific code release, designed to fix a bug that it had introduced four hours earlier, was responsible."

Release code. Watch everything go pear-shaped. Take 20 minutes to associate the two?

How many times do we have to tell you? A Tesla isn't a self-driving car, say investigators after Apple man's fatal crash

Re: eye-tracking

"Well, the most obvious way of "working" while the driver is wearing sunglasses would be:

<sound alert>"

Good idea. Let the driver drive whilst blinded by a low sun.

If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now: Brexit tea towel says it'll just be the gigabit broadband

Re: Drying

"I am happy to report that at my current workplace the hand dryer is actually perfect; warm, resonable volume and timed to perfection. Its the more tradtional style dryer with the push button and the rotating nozzle."

And only slightly less effective at distributing microbiota into the air. Use disposable paper towels instead.

'I give fusion power a higher chance of succeeding than quantum computing' says the R in the RSA crypto-algorithm

Re: Voting Machines

"That's not to do with PR, but Civil War politics"

The two are not mutually exclusive. AIUI one of the effects of FPTP is to exaggerate* the ratio of votes when determining the ratio of seats. That's likely to make a stalled outcome less likely.

* I remember reading a long time ago that the ratio of seats is proportional to the ratio of the squares of the votes.

Talk about making a rod for your own back: Pot dealer's seized €54m Bitcoins up in smoke after keys thrown out with fishing gear

Re: He must know where the keys are

"From what I understand, the $50M worth of bitcoins aren't all proceeds of crime. He doesn't owe all that money to the police/courts does he?"

Good question. AIUI the original investment was from the proceeds of crime. It would be a function of Irish law as to whether he'd have been able to keep the gains on the Bitcoin value.

"absolutely no possibility I was smart enough to distribute my coins but dumb enough to store my private keys in a single place, in my house"

There's nothing to stop him being smart in one aspect only. Remember he was also dumb enough to get caught.

Re: Daft or smart?

"Surely smarter than that?"

Not necessarily.

But are the Gardai and he really and absolutely sure the landlord didn't keep the paper?

In-depth: Deloitte and accounts expert both cleared what HPE described as 'contrived' Autonomy sales

"seasoned legal minds"

Do you have to take their opinions with a pinch of salt?

Thanks, Gareth. The more I read the dodgier HPE's case looks.

HP Ink: No way, Xerox. We're not accepting your takeover. Well, we'd never say never. Maybe even maybe? Hello, you still there? Please?

Returning capital

In other words "we'll buy back shares" which takes money. Where does that come from?

They can borrow it which means that the remaining shares are loaded with debt. That, of course, is also the Xerox takeover solution.

Alternatively they can divert money that might have been reinvested or used to pay dividends to shareholders. The latter isn't a good idea if you're a shareholder looking for dividend income.

One possibility, which they can't possibly say out loud because it goes against everything stock markets assume, is that they realise the hardware market is now saturated; there's nowhere to grow and it makes more sense to trim manufacturing capacity to mostly replacement needs. They also need to trim ink prices to stop subsidising H/W sales that aren't going to be made.

Flat Earther and wannabe astronaut killed in homemade rocket

"And photos from great height showing curvature?"

If you want to tst things out for yourself you don't rely on optical instruments when the Mk 1 eyeball suffices.

"welcome back to port"

That's not port, it's beer.

Re: Stupid is as Stupid does

"To be what most would consider a "proper" rocket, you'd want fuel and an engine to burn that fuel, and control and direct the propellant."

What do you call things like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_%28spacecraft%29

"there's _NO_ way I'd accept a 6,000 year old earth"

I wish Alan Harper, one of his successors, had issued an ex cathedra statement about that.

"It was founded by a guy called Ken Ham"

I don't know about Ken Ham but South Ken has quite a good museum dealing with creation amongst other things.

You don't need to get more than a few feet off the ground to determine whether or not the Earth is curved. Just go to the sea-side where there's shipping and watch the way they way they appear and disappear hull-down. Then work out how that happens.

World Wide Web's Sir Tim swells his let's-remake-the-internet startup with Bruce Schneier, fellow tech experts

Re: Well, Well, Well...

"Were I in his shoes, I would be rather disappointed in what humanity has done with it."

He is in his shoes and he's made no secret of being disappointed.

Huawei claims its Google Play replacement is in 'top 3' app stores after Trump turns off tap to the Chocolate Factory

"claimed it has as many as 3,000 engineers working on it."

3,000 engineers producing this stuff and that's only for a specific phone brand. Somehow I find that somewhat depressing.

The Wristwatch of the Long Now: When your MTBF is two centuries

Re: Electrics (especially batteries) are a problem, one of many

"the main fuse gave out. I tried replacing it, but I must have choose wrong because POP something else blew"

You should have replaced the dried out cap. that caused the fuse to blow in the first place.

Re: Instilling new timeframes of thought in a world beset by faster/shorter.

In 10,000 years it's going to accumulate a lot of leap-seconds.

Re: Beware survival bias

"Is there really such a thing?"

If there isn't somebody's missing a trick. A very lucrative trick. They'd be able to reissue cookery books with QR codes to scan to control the mixer.

Re: Beware survival bias

"it was built out of the best materials available and with the most precise mechanical engineering at the time of construction."

It was also built for a simple task. Add a perpetual calendar and day of week function and either (a) you have to be able to set d-o-w independently of the calendar or (b) you have to build in the correct leap year algorithm or (c) it goes out of kilter on 2100-03-01.

BAE Systems tosses its contractors a blanket... ban on off-payroll working under upcoming IR35 tax reforms

"On the one hand, they can spend lots of man-hours assessing each contractor individually"

Or they could hire those contractors the same way as they hire, say electrical contractors to do a wiring job.

Re: It's worse even than this...

"But my company (and indeed my family home) is outside the UK and I was told I would be inside ir35."

That's an interesting one. I'd been wondering about what would happen if the contractors worked via, billed from and were paid by Irish registered businesses. It would, of course, depend on the terms negotiated with the EU but I'd think there would be serious problems if HMRC were to try interfering with commercial contracts with an overseas company.

I suspect all these companies have been engaging freelancers via their HR departments. HR only understand employment contracts. Would they let HR hire a builder to put up the shell of a new DC? Or an electrician to wire it up? Or an HVAC technician to install the cooling? So why let HR hire the people to set up the computers inside it?

"People are still getting mixed up between being an employee under PAYE and a permanent employee. You can be the first without being the second."

Until somebody decides to nuke one of the employers by going to an ET.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to save data from a computer that should have died aeons ago

Re: That's going about it the hard way ...

In 2010 finding suitable hardware might have been a problem.

Re: Serial overflow...

Something about this story reminds me of the saying about the bandwidth of a van-load of tapes on the motorway...

Re: One Per Desk

Did anyone other than ICL and BT (which is where I saw them) ever use them for actual work?

Re: Those were the days

And don't forget you'll need to renew an encryption certificate or too as well.

Then the company running the subscription serve goes AWOL and that's the end of that.