Posts by Doctor Syntax

Black Wednesday: DXC hosting services wonky for almost 8 hours after core switches go rogue

Perhaps they should outsource it.

Apple's privacy schtick is just an act, say folks suing the iGiant: iTunes 'purchase histories sold' to data slurpers

Re: No

Caveat bozo. Deserves an upvote in itself.

Re: This could be interesting

"if a set of data wasn’t believed to be useful, there wouldn’t be a market to buy it"

FTFY

Remember what I keep telling you, the only thing the advertising industry sells is advertising and this sort of thing is one of their products. It doesn't actually have to be useful, they only have to get clients to believe it is, probably by telling them that all their competitors are already buying it.

In the living room, can Google Home hear you SCREAM? Well, that's what you'll need to do

“This is not we were promised with devops, continuous delivery"

However, it is what some of us expected you'd get.

Any means of increasing the complexity you can manage will eventually be overwhelmed by the complexity it increases.

That's a hell of Huawei to run a business, Chinese giant scolds FedEx after internal files routed via America

Re: Future precautions

How is a package shielded from GPS not shielded from cell towers?

Re: The Dark Game ....

Not blank pages. That would be a wasted opportunity.

Re: And that, ladies and gentlemen...

So use your dog's eyelash instead.

Re: And that, ladies and gentlemen...

No difference. Any hair has a root and that root has cells and those cells have DNA and all the DNA in all your hair root cells is alike (give or take the occasional somatic mutation).

Re: I will not attribute your post to malice, never.

"Besides, the route that looks weird might be faster and/or cheaper "

Cheaper but seldom faster.

Re: I will not attribute your post to malice, never.

Have you considered the possibility that this might be just such an operation. There's nothing to say they couldn't do that and make some publicity capital out of it.

Re: "Inadvertently misrouted." Wow, that's what I call a spectacular display of contempt.

It's possible this could be a Concordski type of operation on their part.

Re: "Inadvertently misrouted." Wow, that's what I call a spectacular display of contempt.

This seems to be typical of managerial thinking in general. I've never quite worked it out.

Do we put it down to them being so stupid they actually think it? Or do they know it's wrong but they're so stupid as to think it's credible? Or do they just not care? With a few other gradations in between.

Re: I will not attribute your post to malice, never.

"Yeah, watchacha gonna do about it!"

Send another package with some mysterious white powder in it and see who panics.

"This instance is not indicative of the exceptional service our 450,000 team members provide on a daily basis around the world as they work continuously to live up to each of our customer’s expectations."

Translation: The NSA isn't interested in most packages we carry.

Egg on North Face: Wikipedia furious after glamp-wear giant swaps article pics for sneaky ad shots – and even brags about it in a video

"The ad agency even bragged about it."

If you pull a stunt like that the only way to get away with it is to keep quiet. An ad agency is about the least likely body to achieve that. Good to see they receive sufficient opprobrium to spill over onto their client. I wonder if their other clients will notice. Who was it again? Leo Burnett Tailor Made.

I wonder if Leo Burnett Tailor Made will get themselves onto first page on Google with this report.

Truth, Justice, and the American Huawei: Chinese tech giant tries to convince US court ban is unconstitutional

"an unsubtle move"

The best way. Subtlety isn't going to get through.

IEEE tells contributors with links to Chinese corp: Don't let the door hit you on Huawei out

Re: Simple solution - fork

I wonder how long it will take for currently US tech businesses to come to the same conclusion and shift their HQs. Just use a US franchisee to conduct any sales there. ROTW is a big place compared to the US so cutting yourself off from it isn't going to be a good idea.

Re: Ho hum

"so there is no reasonable reason for international committees to head over to the Swiss"

I take it you mean no reasonable reason not to etc.

Upvoted on that assumption. Done the same thing myself...

'Evolution of the PC ecosystem'? Microsoft's 'modern' OS reminds us of the Windows RT days

Re: I'm OK with all this crap

"it will be ready and waiting for that installation media."

More likely it will do its best to stop you installing it.

Re: hmmm...

"I've read this 5 times now and i still dont know what the f%&k they're talking about."

I think it means that they haven't learned anything from their attempts to graft an interface designed for small screens with touch onto an OS designed for big screens, mice and keyboards.

I think their reply would be along the lines of "Who cares about finding out what people want? We're Microsoft, this is what we want."

It's largely a list of the things I don't want in an OS and the good things in the list I already have. I wouldn't, of course, have them if I were running Windows.

One thing I think would be a good idea would be separation of applications and user data. Have a separate, versioning storage engine, either running in a separate container or possibly even on a different processor providing storage as a service, preferably with some sort of authentication to authenticate the application as well as the user ID.

Know the enemy and know yourself: Walmart's new chief techie spent 15 years in the Amazon

Noting his previous logistics background before joining Amazon (i.e. none) it explains a lot. Such as the customer being the only one to notice that a product had gone into a distribution point and never officially left let alone not having left on schedule. Or their system going into confusion if an order didn't get delivered to a locker, treating it as a return and sending a courier to pick up up the non-received item from the customer who hadn't received it without having any notion that sending out a replacement PDQ would be a good idea. Or including a locker over 200 miles away in the nearby location list.

Let's hope they appoint someone who'll take a look at the whole sorry mess.

Re: Factual error....

"Upset that they're not managed to offload it" would be closer.

War is over, if you want it: W3C, WHATWG agree to work towards single spec for HTML and DOM

Re: Why not save the planet at the same time?

A long time ago I worked for a branch of a business that printed out its own invoices & things. Then there was an instruction from on high that all this sort of thing must be printed by some behemoth printer in a corporate data centre with which we otherwise had nothing to do. The corporate data centre had its own ideas about what the data it was to receive looked like irrespective of whether it fitted out requirements.

Somewhat less long ago I worked for a business that received and transmitted data via EDI irrespective of whether what was needed was a good fit with EDI message formats. If there were good tools for parsing EDI messages I never found them.

A little later I worked on a couple of projects which used XML. XML came with all the tools to transform one schema into another or even into non-XML formats. We could have our own private schema and not duly worry about what the customers' schemata were, all we had to do was knock up new style-sheets to transform them into what we wanted. By comparison with what had gone before it was like having a big light switched on. So no, I won't support your comments about XML.

Re: Not a joke

"From memory, a typewriter was a sort of printer attached to a monkey."

The monkey might well have had the disposition of an angry gorilla.

"a single Living Standard."

Translation: Obsolete before the ink's dried.

DXC Technology seeks volunteers to take redundancy. No grads, apprentices, and 'quota carrying' sales folk

Re: How F***ing Much?

But what's the standard deal?

Re: What this really means

The saddest thing of all about this is that they don't expect clients to notice that there's something hopelessly wrong about it. They must assume that client managements are looking at this, nodding sagely and saying "Good Idea". Given that those managements have already decided that outsourcing critical* components of their operations was a Good Idea the assumptions may well be right.

*whether they realised it or not

Google relents slightly in ad-blocker crackdown – for paid-up enterprise Chrome users, everyone else not so much

Re: My eyes, my bandwidth, my choice

"My response will simply be to move to a browser that doesn’t try to control what I do"

Move to? Why? Why aren't you there already?

It's the Round Tuit effect that allows these abuses to continue.

Germany mulls giving end-to-end chat app encryption das boot: Law requiring decrypted plain-text is in the works

Re: Das Boot?

"Once out in the wide world, secure key transmission becomes impractical."

If you agree on some sort of hashing algorithm then you can let some third party generate your one-time pad.

If Alice and Bob want to communicate they each sign up to el Reg and let each other know the handle they use. When Alice wants a OTP to communicate with Bob she selects an article and posts a comment. They both apply the hash to the article to generate the OTP. As a variant, in order to reply Bob selects a comment to hash and posts a reply of which the selected comment is a grand-parent. Or to really hide the OTP in plain sight they just use an amanfrommars comment as it stands.

The generation and distribution of the OTP is looked after by el Reg (other discussion fora are available). The shared secret is simply the means of identifying it to each other. There has to be a meeting to share the secret but once that's done there is a ready supply of OTPs with no risk of interception.

Re: Das Boot?

"Hmmm, maybe I should write a dystopian SciFi book."

You might not be able to write fast enough to keep up with reality.

Re: Das Boot?

"There is PGP and decent one time pads are REALLY easy and unbreakable, the issue with them is purely key distribution."

It certainly is for one-time pads. One reason for suggesting encryption be built into SMTP rather than being on top is that there is already a framework in place - the mail servers.

Re: Mystified; how will they force it?

"It's possible to load whatever you want on some Android phones, but most of the targets won't know how or otherwise won't do it."

The targets will know. It's just the innocent users who won't.

It really is time that SMTP was updated to include encryption as the default.

Uh-oh .io: Question mark hangs over trendy tech startup domains as UN condemns British empire hangover

Re: .US was the first ccTLD

Either that or they consider that basically the whole internet belongs to them and the country TLDs are just the bits they're renting out so they don't need to use one themselves.

Re: Those who do not learn history...

"Unravelling it might prove even messier."

Unscrambling eggs comes to mind.

If servers go down but no one hears them, did they really fail? Think about it over lunch

I'd have thought that a few returns of kit as being unsuitable would hammer home the message fairly quickly.

Re: I understand setting English language as a software standard, but hardware?

"not knowing how to get letters with diacritics on a US keyboard,"

I'd assumed it was a country where not only was lunch important but the script didn't need diacritics.

Re: Lunch isn't always a bad thing

What about Karma #2.1? Choosing the moment to hit the salesman with "By the way, did you know I used to work there?".

Let's make laptops from radium. How's that for planned obsolescence?

Re: Details please

If it's genuinely biodegradable, carbon dioxide and water. If it's composted then partially that and partially that gel complex we normally call humic acid as an intermediate stage.

Re: Biodegradable ?

They represent a small amount of carbon removed from the atmosphere in permanent form. Think of it as doing your bit to save the planet.

Re: Plastics and CO2

CO2 tends to get removed from the atmosphere in 40-50 years which is used to justify burning forests as "renewable energy"

Wood burning is essentially a closed cycle - the wood that's burned has been a standing crop that has been building up for a few decades. The C in the CO2 it releases into the air is the C that it removed from the air when it was growing so there's an equilibrium.

Burning fossil fuels releases as CO2 carbon that was fixed many millions of years ago and that amount of C will hang around until it finds its way to another long term sink.

They may degrade but only into smaller particles that find their way into the oceans.

Re: Why is it...

"if plastics do not decompose, its really hard to find original 1980s toys?"

We have a container full of two generations' worth of Lego waiting for the third generation to come along. Sadly, I doubt we'll actually see them playing with it.

Re: Milk Snatcher

"Sounds like a quite a few people went to schools where the staff had no idea how to store the daily milk delivery."

Milk delivered from the farm was unpasteurised and fresh. Milk delivered to the school had a cooked taste; whether that was simply age or over-zealous pasteurisation I'm not sure but living in the country one knew the difference.

Re: C-90s

Weren't C-90s the trendy newfangled ones?

"You might have a bit more luck with a big compost heap that gets left out in the rain"

The previous generation didn't compost in a compost heap. I'll see what happens to the current generation.

Re: "the fantasy bliss of climate-change denial"

"the cold-blooded dinosaurs that roamed beyond what is now the Artic and Antarctic Circles"

You do realise, don't you, that the bits which are now beyond the Arctic and Antarctic circles weren't always where they are now? There's this thing called plate tectonics...

OTOH climate and relative sea levels have never been constants. Those who insist that they are regardless of burning fossil fuels and those who insist they would be if we stopped are both deluded. However there has been no excuse for decades for the amount of valuable fossil carbons that have been stuffed up power station chimneys for the last many decades and the greens of past generations are largely to blame for that.

Re: I scream

"All glass contains some radioactive bits of rock - it's a pain making some optical detectors, you have to chemically purify the glass to get the background down"

K40 for one. When the Belfast carbon dating lab looked into the problem they calibrated and reused supposedly disposable containers for the scintillation counter samples.