Posts by Doctor Syntax

GDP-arrrrrrgggghhh! A no-deal Brexit: So what are you going to do with all that lovely data?

Re: Goodbye-ee!

There are two good reasons to be in the EU. One is economic. The other, as you have so rightly reminded us, is that the EU is a far better safeguards of our rights than any UK govt. of recent years.

Maybe you should think that one through a bit more. J R-M has moved his company out of the UK into the EU. What does that tell you about his estimate of the effects of his political policy on UK as a place to do business? Is that a mitigation any UK employee of any UK business thinks would be in their individual interest?

Re: Unlikely now anyway

1. "The greatest ever majority in the referendum" was pretty well a dead heat. A simple majority may be fine in first past the post voting for an MP you'll be able to change in five years time. We don't make much use of referenda. Those countries that do usually require a very substantial majority to make a permanent change to the status quo. Failing to do so is at the core of the govt's problems since then. And let's not forget that word "advisory".

2. " the expressed wishes of 80% of the electorate" At the last general election the turnout was a little under 69% so your 80% is total and utter bollocks on this ground alone. Secondly no one party got even 50% or the votes who did turn out. More bollocks. And the only thing that the electorate are asked to vote on is their choice of candidate in their constituency, all of whom will have a wide variety of policies, individual and party, so there is no direct way of arguing from the vote to any particular policy. Which leads us to..

3. It's the successful candidates, voted in at the last general election who are now challenging a PM determined to ride rough-shod over Parliament in almost as arrogant a fashion as Charles I. That's representative democracy in action.

Re: But didn't parliament vote against a no-deal Brexit?

"everyone wants EU membership to become a historical issue rather than one that keeps rising from the dead.."

1. Not everyone.

2. If it does become a historical issue the consequences will ensure it keeps rising from the dead.

Re: But didn't parliament vote against a no-deal Brexit?

The limits of jurisdiction of Parliamentary legislation lay somewhere between the tides and the actions of HMG.

Re: But didn't parliament vote against a no-deal Brexit?

Labour will probably agree to an election once the immediate threat of 'no deal' is off the table. If they do this (as they suggest) once the no deal bill has had royal assent, but before the extension is asked for then it's possible Johnson could wait, hold the election in mid October, win a majority and repeal the new law to untie his hands.

I think Starmer realises this. Even Corbyn might realise it. It's a possibility but less of a probability.

Re: Unlikely now anyway

On the whole I agree with you except that at last Parliament seems to be asserting itself.

Re: Unlikely now anyway

"Lets face it, the Democracy, such as it was, is dead."

We have a Parliamentary democracy. With Parliament finally getting round to asserting itself democracy seems to be doing fairly well at the moment.

Wouldn't it be a shame if it got in the way of the languid JRM's Dublin based company doing business with UK clients.

"the commission might look askance at the UK's use of surveillance under the Investigatory Powers Act "

They might also look askance at the wiggle room HMG left itself in the DPA's implementation of GDPR.

HP Inc waves bye to EMEA president with 'immediate effect'

Possibly but HPE and HP Inc (or HP Ink to use the el Reg standard) are now two different businesses.

"A healthy grey market in HP supplies hasn't helped authorised sellers by putting pressure on authorised sellers."

There's always an alternative approach open to HP: competitive pricing.

Can you download it to me – in an envelope with a stamp?

A year or so ago I ordered a left hand door mirror for SWMBO's car.

Despite being in all day when DPD were supposed to deliver it there was no sign of it and shortly after it was due to be delivered a note appeared on the web site saying that there was nobody in and they'd left a card. There was no card in our letter box. I reckoned that the basic problem was that we have no house number but a spelled out number is in the house name and the site ordered from had no concept of an address without a number. I realised they'd attempted to deliver to a numbered house down the road.

After much effort I finally got a phone number for DPD that didn't immediately drop through to an automated system that told me the package had not been able to be delivered (the first time I keyed in the package number; all subsequent attempts to any DPD customer disservice number would recognise my number from CLI and not even bother asking). The parcel was then sent out with the corrected label. At the appropriate time courier with an anonymous white van turned up so I went to meet him to ensure he didn't escape. I was handed a package. Not, unfortunately a DPD-shipped package but another one I was expecting. I went back indoors and found the familiar note on the website - not in, left card. I'm sure it was the same white-van man contracting for both firms and, presumably recognising the packaging and not bothering with the label, attempted to deliver to the same wrong house.

Despite the fact that they'd never actually attempted to deliver to the right house DPD insisted I'd had the due number of attempted deliveries and took it to the collection point miles away. I drove over there, picked up the box and took it home. I opened the box and found a right hand mirror.

Re: Deliberately obnoxious

Our neighbour in Lisburn (N Ireland) was in the "Greenfinches" (rather like PCSOs today). A group of French tourists parked in the control zone where you're not supposed to leave a car unattended in the middle of town & went shopping. When they returned they insisted, I'm not sure how, that none of them knew any English. My take on it was that they should have discussed calling the bomb squad to deal with it, i.e. blow the bloody doors and boot lid off. I reckoned there would have been a miraculous recovery of linguistic skills.

Look, we know it feels like everything's going off the rails right now, but think positive: The proton has a new radius

Re: So it's not only Wagon Wheels...

These days I call them Wheelbarrow Wheels. The main difference is that with a wheelbarrow one is sufficient.

In Hemel Hempstead, cycling is as bad as taking a leak in the middle of the street

Re: I swear...

"We get banned from driving for dangerous driving or drinking or drugging while driving"

This is the core problem. Drivers can be held responsible and too many non-drivers take this as licence to be irresponsible. It's so much easier to not have to bother to take any responsibility for your own safety if the entire effort can be dumped on someone else.

"One thing that has surprised me is that they all to a one dismount before going in the supermarket."

Don't say things like that. Just don't. We all know what'll happen next.

Re: Banning Cyclists

IME the zebra crossing is optional.

Re: Species of cyclists

"My house is on a route that climbs several hundred metres and is a challenge for sports riders"

I live in a similar area but my experience is different. Too many of them are self-entitled twats. There also seems to be a cycle club that annually feels entitled to simply take over the lanes to hold some sort of event, even setting themselves up to act as policemen on point duty whilst singularly lacking the skills to do that.

Big bang theory: Was mystery explosion over New York caused by a meteor? Dunno. By a military jet? Maybe...

What about cyclists with head-cams? Or has that fad passed?

Newb admits he ran Satori botnet that turned thousands of hacked devices into a 100Gbps+ DDoS-for-hire cannon

Re: Will the right people be punished fairly?

"The worst that the ISP has to worry about (apart from a massive labour cost fixing it all) is that customers walk, otherwise this hacker would also face further consequential damages."

Those whose systems got knocked off-line might be interested in claiming for damages. A skiddie might not be worth suing. An ISP on the other hand...

SpaceX didn't move sat out of impending smash doom because it 'didn't see ESA's messages'

For someone setting themselves up in the comms business a bug in their pager S/W isn't a good advert.

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.

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.