Posts by Doctor Syntax

Heads up from Internet of S*!# land: Best Buy's Insignia 'smart' home gear will become very dumb this Wednesday

Eventually lessons learned become conventional wisdom. For instance after a while people almost all stopped walking out into traffic without looking although smartphones mean we'll probably have to go round that loop again.

Re: Nooo

My old HP printer/scanner/copier just works. I did say it's old. Even the logo looks as if it's more robustly made than the one my daughter's previous employers provided for her home office.

Re: Somewhat curious...

A bit of fiddling with the LAN which resolves the insignia (or whatever) server to a local Raspberry Pi running the same open protocol and you're right. In fact you can be right even before the original vendor closes down their server.

Re: Somewhat curious...

"a dumber competitor"

Your lot bought it so maybe no more than equally dumb competitor.

I wonder how many times some pwople will go through this loop before they catch on.

Re: Somewhat curious...

"How much would the back end for this system really be costing Best Buy to keep running?"

More than zero. Or, in beancounter-speak, too much.

Re: This is inevitable

That's what they want you to think...

Socket to the energy bill: 5-bed home with stupid number of power outlets leaves us asking... why?

Now Lan Constructions Group. A lot of freelancers have their home as registered office but a registered office isn't necessarily the same as an office from which a multi-employee business is run. I wonder if they had change of use permission.

Brit spending watchdog questions where savings will come from in court digitisation reforms

The benefits of this, if any, should come form improvements in quality. Does it bring things to court faster ("justice delayed is justice denied")? Does it reduce the risk of a miscarriage of justice? Does it avoid the waste of time in bringing witnesses, counsel and defendants to court and then sending them back again because for one reason or another the court can't go ahead that day?

Tech and mobile companies want to monetise your data ... but are scared of GDPR

Re: Hmm

You forgot the targeted propaganda.

Re: Quite...

"You go in for a tin of beans and come out with a car jack."

They may well be - and probably are - perfectly OK but I can't help thinking "Would I feel comfortable working under a car held up by a jack I bought from a place whose primary value to me is to sell me tins of beans?".

Baffled by bogus charges on your Amazon account? It may be the work of a crook's phantom gadget

It seems like a reasonably obvious step in the process of adding a device would be to send an email to the customer's registered address asking for confirmation. But as the reasonably obvious seems to be something that persistently eludes Amazon it's not surprising if they don't.

Ransomware freezes govt IT in Canadian territory of Nunavut, drops citizens right Inuit

"new and sophisticated"

Would that be "new" as in "well, it's the first time it's hit us"?

Please tell us why you're not securing yourselves, UK.gov asks businesses

Re: Post-card

4. We want to be able to click on all those links in all those exciting emails we get.

5. Marketing want to send out lots of emails and all that fussing about BCC just gets in their way.

6. The salesman told us that this cloud thingy would look after all that for us.

Re: Start employing people who actually know what they're talking about

"Maybe get some people in to educate the Government on how technology actually really really works?"

You mean something like setting up an enquiry and asking industry to provide evidence? So why does it make you chuckle?

Re: Post-card

The average High Court Judge has (a) had to fight MoJ's courts system and (b) has probably seen a much more varied slice of life than you and especially criminal life.

Pro-Linux IP consortium Open Invention Network will 'pivot' to take on patent trolls

Re: Fundamental Question

My objection based on the following argument:

The research that lead to the idea of software patterns showed that although the code might differ people presented with the same problem would come up with fundamentally similar solutions leading to the conclusion that most software solutions to problems are fairly obvious to people "skilled in the art". A novel piece of software might be no more than the result of a problem's first being posed to such a skilled person who does no more than what would be expected in solving it.

It follows from that that it should be a requirement to demonstrate that the proposed patent isn't obvious rather than assume that it isn't. The only such clearly non-obvious solutions, therefore, are those to problems which are well known in the literature but hitherto unsolved. Before a patent is granted the prospective patentors should be able to show the existence of such literature (and not straw-man articles of their own) well known in the field.

This makes the bar considerably higher even if it cuts the income of the US Patent Office. In fact the best example I can think of is HTTP/HTML in that Vannevar Bush & Ted Nelson's ideas had been floating about for years without any successful implementation. But what made them take off in the way they did wasn't being patented, just the reverse. It was their release with open source, unencumbered, working code; the very antithesis of patenting.

I cannae do it, captain, I'm giving it all she's got, but she just cannae take another dose of bullsh!t

Or cooking with a palette knife.

"time flies"

But keep them away from the food.

And it must have been at least 35 years ago I was playing about with real microspectroscopy - albeit in the visible spectrum.

Actually at the same time we were also doing something approaching microspectroscopy with IR. Take the standard Perkin Elmer job, add a couple of lenses (made from KCl IIRC) and a special specimen mount. The latter was made from a couple of industrial diamonds to squeeze the specimens, small fibre, flat. The diamonds were cut as truncated pyramids, rather like a Tudor gem cut and under pressure if they were misaligned there was a risk of bits of diamond spalling off (diamond might be hard to scratch but can fracture).

My mate had to ring up the presumably very small, specialist US supplier for some reason and the guy he had to speak to wasn't there - he only worked there part time. "I suppose he works for de Beers the rest of the time." Oh dear. Americans don't do Irish humour.

Where does the "micro" come into this? A plate of food isn't just a big specimen by microspectroscopy standards, it's enormous for normal IR-spectroscopy.

Comcast-owned Brit telco Sky to hire 1,000 new staffers, half of them engineers

"But a number of experts have pointed out there is a shortage in the number of skilled engineers – particularly if the government is to meet its ambitious target of full fibre for everyone by 2025."

Stop that! Introducing reality into a consideration of government targets! What will you get up to next?

IT contractor has £240k bill torn up after IR35 win against UK taxman

Re: Cheeky fuckers

"the case was won primarily on mutuality of obligation"

In fact it sounds as if there was a straightforward commercial risk element. His company took the risk that a project would restart and continued to work on it, a risk that didn't pay off as it turned out. Is that in CEST? I doubt it.

I think the OP's point was that this was a straightforward contractor-owned company doing some combination of standard salary and dividends, not some strange financial engineering scheme involving non-repayable loans or the like.

The latter deserve to die; unfortunately the brunt of their dying will be borne by the contractors and the agencies or whoever designed and sold them and made their money on commissions will probably escape and keep their profits unless their victims sue.

Odd that they intend to appeal. A tribunal doesn't set a precedent. An appeal might. Will they go through with it?

If you're going to exploit work's infrastructure to torrent, you better damn well know how to hide it

Re: The sly devil

And points also docked for forgetting to unwind it all at the month end.

IT protip: Never try to be too helpful lest someone puts your contact details next to unruly boxen

I wonder how much it cost the supermarket in compensation for her victims. And the hassle of getting the convictions quashed.

Re: Where were you 20 years ago?

Oddly enough '99 was a relatively thin time. I did get one contract doing some Y2K testing during the summer. I had a few days between getting the contract, which was supposed to be to cover paternity leave, and doing it. The contract was only 3 days - I suspect if I'd worked it out it might have been at a loss but it kept things ticking over. It seemed rather odd that someone couldn't fit 3 days to test their new box for Y2K compatibility around a mere 3 days paternity leave.

In retrospect it seems likely that that they wanted a fall-guy at minimum cost (Scottish client) if things went bad. OTOH I knew that both aspects of the platform - up-to-date Unix and Informix - was unlikely to have any problems. I also had time in that few days to Google an official-sounding test regime I could point back to if needed and tailor a schedule based on it. I also had years and years experience of writing reports that would stand up to close legal scrutiny by being explicit in what they did and didn't cover.

So basically, apart from the overheads, money for old rope. Their then new box will be unlikely to survive to Y2K38 if, indeed, it's still running now but that's SEP.

Re: Where were you 20 years ago?

At a guess whoever's brain-child the product was had moved on and nobody wanted to pick it up and risk having it outshine their own pet product.

Re: On Call

"might be confusing with Q"

No problem. Q is obviously quince.

Re: Overtime

How much longer did the TOIL idea last once that aspect had been rumbled?

One from my more distant past, my forensic science days. We definitely weren't police but the police were inevitably our biggest "customer". One way or another* the local station got to know my address, or at least that I lived in their area and my phone number was in the book. Late one Saturday evening I got a somewhat apologetic call. It wasn't anything to do with my work but would I come into the station because they wanted an independent witness.

They'd arrested a drunk. You may have heard the expression "feeling no pain" as a euphemism for being drunk. For this guy it wasn't a euphemism, more like the literal truth; he must have been well anaesthetised. He was head-butting the cell door and shouting. By the time I got there he'd damaged one cell door - two layers of wood interleaved with a steel sheet and had to be put in another cell. They thought he'd broken his nose in the process and he'd bled all over the first cell. He was continuing to hit the cell door. There was no way I could actually go into the cell to see inside but there was a continuous racket coming from it: bang, bang, bang, "I want my solicitor", bang, bang, bang, "I want my MP", bang, bang, bang, "I want my solicitor"... Never heard anything more about it.

* It may have been because the station sergeant was a former senior SOCO. We came across him once off-duty in the local supermarket following the store detective. He suspected she was on a bonus for each case brought to court and was slipping merchandise into unsuspecting victims' shopping bags. He eventually caught her.

Re: Even after he'd left...

In the circumstances it might constitute enough rope for a PHB to hang himself.

Delayed, over-budget smart meters will be helpful – when Blighty enters 'Star Trek phase'

"And there was the situation in the US some years ago when some electricity companies were giving out free low-power light-bulbs."

The same thing happened here but it was some sort of requirement of HMG but that was back in the days of compact fluorescents. Out of one box of 6 one arrived broken. Out of another box one went pop immediately it was switched on. LEDs overtook them before I used them all.

Re: You learn something new everyday

It holds the door shut.

Re: Rudderless

A perfect fit.

Re: OT

Unfortunately she seems to have been sound on Brexit, just as David Davies was on HO affairs. They were just in the wrong jobs.

Are you as handy with privacy certs as you are with a screwdriver? Ikea has the perfect vacancy

Re: Remember the electric screwdriver

The last things I assembled from IKEA - two identical corner desks for the grandkids - both had a component with half the holes drilled 180° out of alignment with the other half, presumably either a half turn missed in the programming or an extra one inserted. One duff desk might have been an accident, two suggests a whole batch were out. That's the thing about consistency based quality - you swap the occasional rogue error for a job-lot of junk.

Re: join us on a journey where the road is truly more important than the destination

From observation the newbies who might make the junior role will be impressed. Those who've been round the block enough times to wualify for the senior role will know the warning signs when they see them. However, it's very considerate of IKEA to put up the "Danger, Wanker Management" signs so obviously.

£1bn Brit court digitisation scheme would be great ... if Wi-Fi situation wasn't 'wholly inadequate'

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: "More than 250,000 people have used our online services in the past year, with more than 80 per cent satisfied with their experience."

I wonder if the spokesman has tried calculating how many were dissatisfied and considered whether that's a number they should be prepared to live with.

Cyber-security super-brain Rudy Giuliani forgets password, bricks iPhone, begs Apple Store staff for help

You have expensive luggage. Mine can only manage 123.

No, lost the bit of paper it was written on once, guessed 10 times. What we really want to know: were all those tries the same passcode?

Bet you can't guess what I'm wearing, or where I'm wearing it

"So it got me thinking it ought to be possible to upload harmless but misleading photos to social media and let the hackers and spammers get on with it."

I doubt they check much - just fire off emails. All of which reminds me I must change my very obviously eBay-specific email address and set the old one to bounce. After all, the real eBay aren't going to email me to click on some link to fill in a customer survey and offer to reward me with an Amazon voucher.

Re: same area you can keep your landline phone number

"The actual landline number is given to business & officialdom then shunted directly to voicemail without causing my phone to ring."

Just wait until you need hospital appointments. Or even better, have a hospital appointment that's cancelled on the day because of an emergency.

US Air Force inks deal with Raytheon on Windows 10 (and other) support for ARSE

So if they do a poor job at maintaining it will it be half-arsed? Followed by a senior NCO coming into the room shouting "You lot, get off your arses".

Microsoft sees sense, will give Office 365 admins veto rights on self-service Power tools

It sounds like the grown-ups found out what was happening. Probably put a few marketroids on the naughty step.

A stranger's TV went on spending spree with my Amazon account – and web giant did nothing about it for months

Re: The list of compelling reasons

It seems to be a compelling reason to use them if you're a fraudster.

UK ads watchdog slaps Amazon for UX dark arts after folk bought Prime subs they didn't want

Re: Hooray!!!

"Not only is hard to browse, ie you are not searching for a specific show, but interspersed with all the Amazon stuff are other "channels" not part of Prime which you have to pay even more for."

Same search engine as the shop, then.

Radio nerd who sipped NHS pager messages then streamed them via webcam may have committed a crime

Yes. Read the article. Note the bit about the Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006. If it's illegal you can be prosecuted.

Boffins blow hot and cold over li-ion battery that can cut leccy car recharging to '10 mins'

Re: Power required

Look at the number of cars in a motorway car service station car park. Assume that 90% of those are going to want charging if EVs are the norm and they're going to want a charge in no more than 30 minutes that's going to last them for 3 hours at motorway speeds.

Installing that infrastructure in a service station isn't going to be done overnight but it's not going to be done gradually either. It''s be a fair sized project to bring in the supply and dig up the tarmac to lay the cables.

But the SOP being recommended for EVs on long journeys is that the stops we'd now make in the middle of a long journey would become recharging stops. That implies that the vast majority of drivers pulling into a motorway service station will not just expect but need to find a charger where they park capable of fully charging the car in the space of 20 or 30 minutes. Given the prices motorway service stations charge for petrol when most of the time most drivers manage to avoid filling up there I dread to think what prices they'll put on power.