Posts by Doctor Syntax

Yes, I've been swotting up on court evidence in advance, says Autonomy founder Mike Lynch

"Only in a murder trial do you have a last-minute proof that the prosecution keeps hidden until just the right time - twenty seconds before the commercial break."

And that's only fictional murder trials.

And why not? Any time I went into the witness box I had my case file and would at least have read enough to remind myself what it was all about.

Bulb smart meters in England wake up from comas miraculously speaking fluent Welsh

"Bulb already limits smart meter installations to areas where it has enough engineers "

Welsh speaking engineers?

In the US? Using Medicaid? There's a good chance DXC is about to boot your data into the AWS cloud

Re: The countdown to disaster has started

"That decision is going to cost a lot more than DXC is ready to budget for, I am sure."

It should, but probably won't.

Amazon's bugging of homes has German boffins worried that Alexa may be an outlaw

Re: Didn't El Reg follow a project to nobble Alexa ?

Nothing so sophisticated needed. A hammer will do just as well.

Re: Convenience v Surveillance

"my credit card"

If your credit card does this you can avoid it. What about someone else's credit card when you happen to be talking to them? How do you, or more to the point, Julz, deal with that?

Re: "the country takes the issue very seriously"

"hence why the data is being uploaded"

And yet it's possible for the mobile phone in my car to have its voice commands processed locally. How old is this advanced tech? Well, I remember a mobile phone with voice control being launched in 1986 (Topaz in the old BT Mobile catalogue).

Re: "the country takes the issue very seriously"

"Actually, there is one solution"

There's another which was John Brown's solution above. Give an audible warning when it starts live. And let's not stint, a nice flashing red light as well. It should be possible to do this locally but even if it isn't, all input when it's not live is sampled for wake-up detection and then goes straight to /dev/null.

Re: users can delete recordings themselves by accessing recordings through an app or browser.

Yup. I decides it was a joke but only by a majority verdict. Next week it might not be.

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, where to go? Navigation satellite signals flip from degraded to full TITSUP* over span of four days

Nigel?

Re: "The clocks on the Galileo satellites are British-designed already"

Who? You?

Re: Huzzah!

And go round in ever-smaller circles.

Alternatively just how do you manage to set up a geostationary satellite that hovers directly over Birmingham?

"A suspicious mind would notice lots of very odd happenings in the world of tech at the moment."

SNAFU

"notified within a matter of seconds"

But which seconds? That seems to be the problem.

Looking forward to the On Call.

Virgin Media blocks Imgur, literally tens of people rage at UK ISP

I wonder if that constituted a libel against legitimate users.

Good luck deleting someone's private info from a trained neural network – it's likely to bork the whole thing

"In order to leave out specific data, models will often have to be retrained with the newer, smaller dataset."

That strikes me as an indication of just how fragile the whole system is."

"That’s a pain as it costs money and time."

Oh, what a shame.

Industry reps told the UK taxman everything wrong with extending IR35. What happened next will astound you

It's very likely that a few people will take the advice and go to employment tribunals. When that happens there'll cease to be grey area (or worse) contracts.

I don't have to save my work, it's in The Cloud. But Microsoft really must fix this files issue

100k on the new shiny fixed (as opposed to exchangeable disk packs) disk. They were 24 bit words so worth 300 to 400k bytes.

The issue is not that saving a file didn't work. The issue is that not saving a file didn't work.

"Training says things save to cloud automatically."

If training said that how come only one user got it wrong?

Re: User "English"

"Germans sometimes have weird sentence construction."

They probably say the same about the English.

There's an implication (but not an outright explicit statement) that training had been given. If that's so and the other trainees didn't have this problem then one should exonerate the trainers.

In any case she'd been told that this is the way it's supposed to be used, that it's not an error for Microsoft to fix. If she couldn't accept being corrected by someone whose job it is to know then I think there's a reason to escalate the issue, IT manager to her line manager. Frankly, she needed to be kept away from sharp objects. Am I the only one who can see the dangers if she had access to email? At least she left and became SEP.

Re: The user is right

"Oh yes, this device/programme is easy to use, You won't need training, it's dead straight forward"

Didn't you treat that as an opportunity for a little harmless amusement?

Re: The user is right

"you don't save it on your machine anymore, everything is saved in the cloud"

But what did you do to save it on your machine? And why should you do something different just to save in in the cloud? After all, "the cloud" is just somebody else's machine. There's no implication that you do something different. Even if you misunderstood the first time you should be prepared to accept correction from someone whose job is to know.

Re: hang on a moment...

"So I think this is a case of a user being deliberately and obnoxiously pig-headed."

Deliberateness is optional.

Re: I could train 1st line to be fluent in 'user'

"someone who's written English is so bad"

Those possessive pronouns are so tricky.

"a health hazard (to the bean counter)"

No such thing exists.

"cutting the cable in half DOESN'T double the number of problems"

You have a faulty USB cable. You look for something to cut it with. Now you have two problems.

And three when you've cut it and then realise it was a working power-only cable.

"Well they cost five quid each you know..."

And what's the value of the data on it?

"Do you think they've never had to talk a user through getting them connected to a machine?"

And failed, which sounds all too likely given the rest of the story.

Re: You were surprised?

"After all, she'd no doubt had the mandatory brainectomy."

Obligtory Dilbert https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-07-11

Re: You were surprised?

I also have this view of football fans.

"or even ask the user to give them step-by-step commentary on what she was doing to get to the problem."

The user's repeatedly making mistakes. Do you really expect to get a reliable commentary?

"This is not stupidity but unfamiliarity with new technology."

In the case of the user in the article, given that she was explicitly told, it's stupidity.

Microsoft tells resellers: 'We listened to you, and we have acted' (PS: Plz keep making us money)

Re: Seriously

You know what it means, I know what it means. The advertising people may even know what it means but they make their living selling bushes and there's the other saying about what happens when a man's living depends on his not understanding.

Re: Seriously

Dunno why you got the down votes unless they were from folk in the advertising industry. WoM is far more effective and far cheaper than adverts.

Re: Seriously

"Some marketing moron"

More likely the moron would be a beancounter totting up the "losses" on the licenses - price of everything and value of nothing etc. Much as I expect marketing to be staffed entirely by morons I suspect that this time it was marketing who realised the consequences.

Re: "a thorough review"

A thorough review usually takes longer than that. The rest of the business saying "WTF do you think you're doing?", however, can be pretty quick.

Cloudflare comes clean on crashing a chunk of the web: How small errors and one tiny bit of code led to a huge mess

A good rule of thumb is that authorisation to roll out a change includes authorisation to roll it back in an emergency. It shouldn't need someone else to be consulted.

A second is that if things go pear-shaped promptly on rolling out a change it should be rolled back PDQ. Even if the problem was actually something else you're no worse off than you were before and at least you now know it wasn't the change.

However this is the way to handle the PR side - not the self-serving, transparently untrue boilerplate response we usually get. It actually raises Cloudflare's reputation.

Re: It never gets any less true.

One of the things to remember when writing regular expressions is that just because it's possible to do some particular thing it isn't necessarily a good idea.

We have the best trade wars: US investigating French tech tax plan over fears it unfairly targets American biz

"Isn't Jeremy Hunts solution to leaving the EU ... the UK drops its corporation tax to the same level as Ireland to attract ... multi-nationals"

The prerequisite to this is that the national economy* is relatively small compared to the size of the revenue that the multinationals put through that facility, otherwise the fall in revenue from native businesses exceeds the gains. Up to now that's ot been met. Leaving the EU might achieve that, however but I'm not sure it's a good achievement to make.

* Normally the consequence of being a smallish country with a smallish population.

"As a revenue tax targeted on a narrowly defined set of companies, the Digital Services Tax is not one of those smart measures. It risks making investing in the UK less attractive"

Investing? I think he means "selling in". The tax gets charged irrespective of whether they invest or not. In fact the whole thing could be structured so that real investments are offset against income.

US border cops' secret racist Facebook group a total disgrace, says patrol chief. She should know, she was a member

Re: Patrol?

"and for Iceland were 73.6% of men and 60.9% of women"

Store or country?

Cough up, like, 1% of your valuation and keep up the good work, says FTC: In draft privacy deal, Facebook won't have to change a thing

Re: Probably about as good as the government can do.

"Third, you don't want X thousands of FB shareholders screaming to their congresscritters"

The people at whom they should scream are FB manglement for getting into this position. And FB manglement are pretty well insulated from this because one of them has a controlling vote.

"set aside $3bn in anticipation of an FTC smack-down, leaving the biz with $2.43bn in profit"

This could be clearer but I'm interpreting this to mean that of the $5bn they had to root down the side of the cushions for $2bn because they'd already put $3bn in the swear box. So the profits for the first quarter would have been $4.43bn. Pro rate that means that annual profits are of the order of $17 to $18bn. But that $3bn set aside had to have come from somewhere, presumably profits in some other quarter. Even if the cost of the fine was spread over multiple quarters it must still have come from overall profits and is well over a quarter of that pro-rate estimated annual profits.

If I were an ordinary shareholder I'd be a bit narked to find that the business's playing silly buggers had resulted in a fine of over a quarter of a year's profits. In fact, I might be inclined to vote against the board at the next AGM. Of course, this being Facebook that would have no effect whatsoever due to the strange share structure.

Train maker's coder goes loco, choo-choo-chooses to flee to China with top-secret code – allegedly

This was in 2014-15. By 2024-25 I wonder who, between the US & China will have the most trade secrets worth nicking.

Re: Device(s) cloned by immigration/customs at O'Hare?

It's one thing to state things in an indictment (or "Bluster" might be a better word) and another to produce evidence to that effect in court. It seems unlikely that they'll ever have to do the latter so they cold actually claim it included a solution to the travelling salesman problem if they wanted.

"Suggest you visit a logistics company. I think the (largely off-the-shelf) systems they use to track packages through their distribution and delivery network are more than capable of handling rail freight."

Evidence says they're all too often not capable of tracking stuff through their own networks. It's OK when everything goes as it should but the use cases for nicked stuff, failure to deliver or whatever are due in some much later sprint.

Re: Fat Controller

This entire discussion seems to ignore the fact there seems to have been the company was doing stuff which needed software engineers and included source code for a control system. Presumably whatever the intended market there was stuff considered worth taking.

Re: "Which hasn't struck me as particularly advanced either"

"same as stopping vs non-stop passenger trains of the same type."

Back in the days when I suffered British Snail they had an answer to that. Send out the sopping service first.