Posts by Doctor Syntax

Business PC sales up as suits flee looming end of support for Windows 7

Re: Always the last minute with the suits

In this case you can't really blame them for holding out as long as possible.

Re: Home users might still be able to upgrade to Windows 10 for free

For some meaning of "upgrade".

AWS celebrates Labor Day weekend by roasting customer data in US-East-1 BBQ

Re: re: if you use EBS, that sort of failure is to be expected.

Given that Cloud is sold to manglements on the basis that it takes away all those complications of dealing with their in-house expert staff and hands it over to people who'll just do the work without arguing those rants seem fully justified.

It is somebody else's computer. When using your own computers you expect someone on your staff to look after them. If you've been persuaded to use somebody else's because it's cheaper you might reasonably expect that somebody else to do the looking after. Anything else smacks of keeping a dog and barking yourself.

It gives "Availability Zone" a whole new layer of meaning.

Mozilla says Firefox won't defang ad blockers – unlike a certain ad-giant browser

Re: Firefox developers see wide open goal

"More of a nuisance for add pedlers who are losing penies from us fanatics than for Google."

Google is the main ad-pedlar.

Re: ABP Evil?

It would take an unusually stupid advertiser, even by the standards of advertisers, to pay to have an advert forced on someone who's made clear they don't want adverts.

Pompey boffin bags €1.3m off EU for dark matter research – shame a no-deal Brexit looks more and more likely

Re: Toilet paper

Stretching toilet paper isn't a good idea.

The side of a bus would be about the right size for the cheque they'd need to write to make good on all their promises.

They can always print it. That's a strategy which has worked out so well for various countries in the past.

Wheelbarrows make handy wallets.

And there'll be bugger-all of that.

HPE lawyer claims key associates of Autonomy boss Mike Lynch 'refuse' to testify to High Court

Re: Fishing or Phishing

"a witness who is subpoenaed must show up in court"

IME they certainly don't have to attend every day in a long trial nor even stay on the days when they do attend if they're not going to be called that day. Otherwise I'd have wasted even more time hanging about the Crumbling Road House of Fun than I did.

Re: Is that allowed

"HPE could invite them to attend but presumably couldn't compel them."

HPE could sub poena them as their own witnesses but it seems unlikely that they would.

Today in tortured tech analogies: Mozilla lets Firefox loose in the hen house, and by hen house, we mean the tracking cookie jar, er...

Everyday browsing/email/RSS/Usenet is Seamonkey here.

Palemoon set slightly less tied down than the Seamonkey installation for a few sites.

Waterfox even less tied down for less friendly sites but with data cleared at close-down. Cookies? Don't care, they'll be gone. FIngerprinting? Don't care, I'll likely not be back.

ISTR taking a look at Chromium some time ago but didn't bother with it.

Call Windows 10 anything you like – Microsoft seems to

Re: Given

If you can say "We're using Libre Office, get used to it"

Like MS saying "We're using a ribbon, get used to it".

But but but...Isn't compatibility why we keep getting told you can't replace MS Office with LibreOffice?

Fancy that - Office not backward compatible. Whoever heard of such a thing?

Re: "Naturally, all user data is wiped with this option"

But if you put the OS on its own partition it can only expand to fill all available space on the partition, not the whole disk.

Everyone remembers their first time: ESA satellite dodges 'mega constellation'

Re: Sounds like another step towards realizing "Wall-E"

Claiming by a nation state and management on a collaborative international basis are two different things. The first doesn't preclude the latter and it's the latter that's needed.

Divert the power to the shields. 'I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain!'

Re: Trusty UPS's...

Hence test it before going live.

Re: Servicing schedules ... get the chop, once the bean counters find out about them.

If you don't have the current capacity test everything except the beancounters' servers.

Re: Another Place, Another Time

"The biodiesel had 'gone-off' and turned to jelly in the tanks."

I still remember a long, circuitous and cold journey from Marylebone to High Wycombe because the non-bio diesel had gelled in the tanks of the BR signalling power supply. Cold weather was quite sufficient.

Re: Trusty UPS's...

Nobody thought to test the installation before going live?

Re: Servicing schedules ... get the chop, once the bean counters find out about them.

Business resilience audit?

Make it business related, not "just" IT. Maybe "resilience" isn't scary enough. Business incident survival audit?

The top three attributes for getting injured on e-scooters? Having no helmet, being drunk or drugged, oddly enough

Re: Obvious solution to reduce 200 San Diego road deaths.

And from that report On average, three pedestrians are killed in collisions with cyclists in Britain each year and 10 per cent of collisions take place on pavements.

I just love your accent – please, have a new password

"I pointed out I knew it was safe, that I hadn't provided ANY information aside from the validity of my email address"

And you see no problem in confirming it to a potential attacker?

I had a client who took security very seriously. At one stage they did use a business as described above to test staff although by means of phone calls. I fielded a few of those and replied pointing out that the first word of the company name was "Security" and that it meant what it said. AFAIK the staff came out of the test very well.

"a non-reflective disposition"

Salesman?

"The irony was that pretty much each time this happened we'd have had the mandatory IT security refresher not long before."

Was it irony or a test of the refresher training?

Re: I've been in small companies

"You need to review these things regularly and do a sanity check on them."

It's my view that a policy should include the statement of its rationale. It has the advantages of leading to a better understanding of its significance by those who have to follow it (senior management, is that you?) and aids periodic review.

I'm always puzzled by the fact that the makers of the hands-free in my car think there are a lot of customers with contacts with the surname Home pronounced Hume but that none of them have homes to go to.

Whistleblowing saboteur costs us $167m bellows Tesla’s accountant

Re: Are you f**king kidding me?

Unless you're missing zeros from the Tesla value or decimal points from the others there's an order of magnitude difference.

Re: Whose money?

If any(!) money were recovered by the company it would go into the company's bank account (less whatever the lawyers get) and thus become shareholders' property. The shareholders, however, might reasonably (a) prefer to keep existing funds away from lawyers and (b) want to know more about what Tripp has to say about the way the business is managed. But that's what AGMs are for.

No it's not Russell Brand's new cult, it's Microsoft's Office crew rolling out their Save Experience

Re: "I just want a way to turn all that crap off"

"have now settled on LibreOffice"

Where "Save remote" is just another option on the File menu and stays out of the unless and until you need to use it.

"If your organization does not use OneDrive, we recommend starting to plan an adoption campaign to take advantage of being able to charge customers more to use the cloud"

FTFY

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson moves to shut Parliament

Re: So, to sum up. . .

Well, he's been talking bollocks for long enough, it would be hard to denay he hasn't got any.

Re: So, to sum up. . .

"The purpose of Brexit is to restore sovereignty to the UK."

Purpose and result are two different things. As an isolated nation the UK will have far less clout in the world than it did as part of a larger block. (Note that phrase "part of" because that's the situation, not "subject to" which seems to be the Leaver view.) I really can't see how having less clout equates to "restored sovereignty" but, hey, we'll have taken back control.

Re: So, to sum up. . .

Not necessarily but it should require a substantial majority, say 2:1, to overturn the status quo. Trying to do it without that condition is exactly why we're in this mess.

Re: So, to sum up. . .

"I meant singles market"

AIUI BoJo is quite keen on the singles market.

Re: So, to sum up. . .

"Most of the world are not members of the EU."

Most of the world haven't been UK business's home market or a major part of UK industry's supply chain for four decades. They still won't be so there's no difference there.

The EU has been UK business's home market and a major part of UK industry's supply chain for four decades. Now it won't be. That's where the big difference lies and it's not a good difference.

Today's Resident Evil: Ransomware crooks think local, not global, prey on schools, towns, libraries, courts, cities...

"Modern DR is based on replication/mirroring and built-in resilience."

Where are those replicates and mirrors? If they're all on the same site as the primary system then consider that they don't exist. The fire that takes the primary will take them as well. You've not had a fire yet? Note that word "yet".

Re: @AC

And 2.1. It's a good way to learn that strangers can't always be trusted.

"even the testing requires time, money and infrastructure."

IME the testing was very valuable. You learn how best to structure your backups for quickest restoration.

Re: Danegeld

It made a nice rhyme but in fact it was the geld we never got rid of.

Despite billions in spending, your 'military grade' network will still be leaking data

IOW about one in 5 errors would be avoided by email defaulting to BCC rather than CC. It sounds like it could be a cheap win.

Clutching at its Perl 6, developer community ponders language name with less baggage

Re: "Want a simple, efficient and elegant programming language? C"

"in *nix world useless complexity is what people like"

Maybe, but here in the Unix world we like simplicity. Guess what we think of systemd.

Apple blinks on iPhone repairs, touts parts program for independent tech mechanics... sort of

Re: Soo....

The saddest thing is that they think we won't notice.

Vodafone hurls sueball at Ofcom over plans to relax BT leases

"But what's to stop the competitors forming a single joint-venture company"

Having to put their own money up front instead of having BT do it and then getting a regulated price to piggy-back on that. If the banks had had that option available to them would they have built SWIFT?

"it will never be cost effective for multiple carriers to all build their own physical links in low density areas."

It will, however, be very cost-effective for multiple carriers if they can get BT to pick up the bill for the areas they don't want to cherry-pick.

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Re: Dick

That change took place because the project was being forked and you couldn't expect them to end up with two projects with the same name.

Re: Dick

I love to see this sort of medieval place-describing surname surviving.

Gov flings £10m to help businesses get Brexit-ready with, um... information packs

At least they're helping some businesses. Those getting the contracts.