Posts by Doctor Syntax

Julian Assange jailed for 50 weeks over Ecuador embassy bail-jumping

Calculated? Miscalculated more like. All he's achieved is to put off immediate woes whilst making things worse in the longer term.

"Your continued residency [in Ecuador's London embassy] has cost £16m of taxpayers' money."

And that wouldn't be something the judge judge said off her own bat, it would have been said to her. It could have been in prosecuting counsel's statement to the court, in which case Assange's lawyer could have objected, or given as evidence by a witness in which case it could have been cross-examined. In the absence of a full court report it would appear that the £16m wasn't challenged by the defence. Not that that appears to have been a consideration of Menasco who, presumably, is posting from outside the jurisdiction or hasn't heard of contempt of court.

"I did what I thought at the time was best" without thinking more than a day or so ahead.

Microsoft promises to boil down its lengthy and confusing privacy controls… in 1,500-word announcement

"Required" is a weasel word when it's MS that get to define what they require. A more trustworthy term would be "the minimum required to perform the user's operation".

Definition by example is another problem as it can only be a partial list. Even if the definition is an apparently clear list of what's gathered you need to look at what's not excluded. For instance the last time I looked at the wordy MS privacy statement it included "transactions". At a casual glance it looks fair enough, if you buy something from Microsoft obviously they need to record the transaction. But it didn't say "your transactions with us", just "transactions" which covers any sort of transaction MS decide to snaffle; transactions with your bank, for instance, are equally covered.

Taking into account the last point we need to restrict that apparently trustworthy term a bit further: "the minimum required to perform the user's operation on a Microsoft provided service" and the place to define that isn't in relation to the OS, it's in relation to the services where it can be precisely defined for each service. Everything else should not be just "optional", it shouldn't be collected at all.

That's a long-winded way to work. What a pity it's the only sensible way.

Re: Microsoft said it would split data gathered into "required" and "optional."

It's obvious they have listened to users, realised they have an image problem and, in typical marketing fashion, tried to solve it by coming out with an anodyne statement to try to justify business as usual.

"Zuckerberg declares with a straight face"

From the pics I've seen that's the only face he's got with always the same expression on it.

Extortionist hacks IT provider used by the stars of tech and big biz, leaks customer info after ransom goes unpaid

"Pay me $5,000 to not sell the data. Trust me, I'm a criminal."

Not the most persuasive pitch.

Eggheads confirm it's not a bug – the universe really is expanding 9% faster than expected

Re: Evolution of the Hubble Constant

The other day I saw a report that said that an EV in Germany would have and 11% or more greater lifetime CO2 footprint due to their switching back to coal from nuclear.

For the whole of my adult lifetime we've been shoving unnecessary amounts of coal up power-station chimneys due to "Greens" objecting to nuclear power. Will they take responsibility for that? No chance.

Re: Evolution of the Hubble Constant

"CO2 - makes plants grow better, will contribute to desert areas growing again"

It's water that's needed to make desert areas grow again. CO2 was never a limiting factor.

Come friendly bit barns and fall on Slough: Equinix opens £90m data centre in London rust belt

Re: Back Hoe?

Fair enough but it wouldn't improve the DCs.

I haven't been near Slough for decades. Do they still have the stuffed dog at the station?

"Slough – the unofficial bit barn capital of the UK, hosting more data centres than any other place in the country"

Just think of what you could do with one well badly placed back-hoe.

Oh dear. Secret Huawei enterprise router snoop 'backdoor' was Telnet service, sighs Vodafone

If they'd said it should have had ssh instead of telnet they might have had a point.

America's anti-hacking laws are so loose, even Donald Trump Jr broke them. So, what do we do about it?

It's going to add some piquancy to prosecuting Assange for a similar offence if it ever gets that far.

Out-of-office email ping-pong fills server after server over festive break

Not quite sexing up the CV but when I made the transition from science to IT I came from using a system that had the Rand editor and not vi. I was given some minor stuff to look at on the first day and got by with some half-remembered ed commands - or maybe just catting into files. A quick trip to Dillons (RIP) at the end of the afternoon to get a vi book (still living a quiet life in my bookshelves and problem solved.

"Even today sending a space-hungry PDF, often containing a scanned image of a text announcement, will routinely appear when a simple text e-mail would have been enough."

It didn't involve a PDF but I did get an email from some marketing type which consisted of a brightly coloured image of the few words he wanted to send. As the sender worked for the Co-op I took great pleasure in pointing that it wouldn't have worked for a blind recipient depending on a screen reader and that it therefore conflicted with his employer's sense of social responsibility, inclusion or whatever.

Re: Absolutely...

But imagine the shame of owning up only to find you'd been out-FUBARed for the week.

Re: Absolutely...

"candidates were invited to join the team for dinner or drinks"

That sounds like a technical interview in disguise. The team would catch the bull-shitters.

Re: Never trust a CV

"just kicked against the case"

But as we all know the professionalism lies in knowing where to kick and how hard. Obviously the man for the job.

Re: When was the last time you sexed up a CV?

Don't worry about it. We're going through a neo-Victorian period of exaggerated righteousness with the usual population of umbrage seekers. In a few more years we'll be in a period when everybody's laughing at it.

Re: Exchange?

I've just been reading up about the period. I now realise that that saying was propaganda put out by tax collectors. The reality is you never get rid of the geld.

Say hi to pay-as-you-go on-prem IT: Dell, VMware tout private cloud-as-a-service, or rentable tech as everyone would call it

Re: HPE deja vu

It's just fashion. Stand still long enough and you'll see everything come back into fashion, possibly with a new name attached.

HPE deja vu

Just HPE? Surely this is back to mainframe days.

Huawei, Huawei. Huawei, Huawei. Feeling hot, hot, hot: US threatens to cut UK from intel sharing over Chinese tech giant

Re: Pot meet kettle

I doubt the US thinks like that. They'll expect to keep getting what they're getting now.

NSC hacked?

Whose telecoms gear do they use?

FYI: Someone left 24GB of personal info on 80m US households exposed to the public internet

What's your explanation for this and all the other reports of unsecured databases and backups we read about?

The data centres are run by IT people. Their brief is to keep the stuff running, install new kit and swap out whatever's failed.

If a client thinks that this is all their in-house IT do (or did may be too often more appropriate) or that it's all that's necessary to be done then maybe that's where the problem lies. Your comment suggests you might be one of those client people who thinks that. If so, ask yourself what stands between you and your business's becoming the subject of the next of these reports.

"It's not for a lack of tools, but a lack of understanding and implementation of the available tools."

Not really. It's so they can avoid - and even better, get rid of - those obstructive sods in IT who make such a fuss about who can get access and the hoops they have to jump through to do it. So much easier just to put it in the cloud. The people who run the cloud don't complicate things like IT do.

The difference between October and May? About 16GB, says Microsoft: Windows 10 1903 will need 32GB of space

Re: What the feculent pile of...

In Syntax Towers even cell-phones are expected to last a lot more than 2 years.

Count yourself lucky if it's something only she passes the time with. SWMBO started a patchwork class (allegedly to use up all the bits of fabric she'd stored up - we now have stacks more fabric) and weekly I get dragged into photographing the next project, tidying up with Gimp and then photocopying the class notes last minute on class mornings. And getting dragged into any fabric shops we happen to pass.

It's Monday evening - time to get the camera out again...

Re: What the feculent pile of...

Does she need to be online for the side job? If not then just keep off=line when running Windows. If it has to go on-line, can the S/W for the side-job run on Wine? If neither works and the side-job can't pay for something bigger, is the side-job paying its way?

Re: I was looking forward to Paint again

"I had been with Mac the last 15 years but had grown bored of the complete lack of innovation since October 2011."

You say that as if it's a bad thing.

Too much innovation is simply fixing things that weren't broken.

Daddy, are we there yet? How Mrs Gates got Bill to drive the kids to school

Re: Daddy, are we there yet?

That was RC1. The final released version reach 100% at least 5 minutes before arrival.

Re: Raising children is an example of "unpaid labour"?

"This was just how physical ability worked"

There's another physical ability involved. In a family with an unweaned child it was necessarily the mother who did most of the child care. Once the child was weaned the next one often arrived about 9 months later.

Re: Slave box on a toytown estate

'Personal Contract Purchase'

Verbal inflation - Hire Purchase in the old days. Lawyers putting more words in the contract obviously contributes to greater GDP.

Re: What?

"We all do unpaid labour as a or for our family"

It depends. She's in an income bracket where she can pay someone to do the washing, the cleaning, the cooking, the gardening....

"She said after about three weeks she noticed an increase in other fathers doing the school run. One of the other mothers explained that when they saw her hubbie doing the school run, it made it easier to get their own husbands to do the same."

Nothing to do with the husbands wanting a chance to hobnob with a billionaire?

Powershell, the Gandcrab infection and the long-forgotten server

"rebuild public trust"

Any confidence trickster starts by trying to get the mark to trust them.

Sky customers moan: Our broadband hubs are bricking it

Re: It's been years since . . . .

"I just bin their junk day one"

Don't bin it,just put it somewhere safe. They may demand it back if you change ISP.

Last year, we joked that Amazon was a cloud giant with a gift shop. Looking at these AWS figures, we were right

Re: Amazon is the new Microsoft

"should be forcibly broken up."

Not as easy as it sounds. You could split off the stuff-selling and bit-barn business from each other and still have two businesses which remain a threat to the rest of their respective industries. You'd need to split those two businesses up so that at least they represented competition to each other.

Re: HO HUM

And why not? That's basically what the reputation of any trading company should be based on. It makes no difference whether they were better of worse in the more distant past and you can't base it on what they'll be like in the future because your only sound predictor of that is what they've done recently.

Re: Two day delivery?

"you have to stand in awe of the machine they are.. Both the systems behind the scenes managing all that"

Yes, the systems are awful - see my comment above.

Re: Two day delivery?

"but Amazon have started claiming the lockers are "full" for smaller items"

It seems to be more complex than that. They won't deliver some sorts of products - for unclear and probably inconsistent reasons - to lockers. There may be a small print notice to this effect on the product listing but again I'm not sure it's consistent. But instead of telling you this explicitly when you try to assign it to a locker you get the "full" garbage.

Amazon seems to have become a distinctly curate's egg business.

Their store S/W is full of the above type of junk.

- Search was bad and has got worse. Results are padded with stuff that doesn't get anywhere near to matching search terms.

- I've seen tracking that showed a non-delivered product go into a warehouse and no further, there seems to have been no warning that something was wrong when it didn't get picked for despatch.

- I've had stuff shown as out for delivery to locker and then, for whatever reason, failed to be delivered. At that point they then fail to realise they need to despatch another PDQ or even realise that something;s wrong. When queried they'll tell you what they're doing to try to find the original. I've even had them report that it was found in a warehouse in another country. And they take the non-delivery as a return authorisation because that's the only way they can order a replacement so a courier then turns up to collect the undelivered item.

- The repeated attempts to flog Prime are beyond annoying.

Frankly I don't even care whether they use Oracle or their own database engine. I just wish the management of their logistics S/W was handed to somebody prepared to say "I don't care if it's running the biggest sales operation on the planet it's still not good enough.". Or maybe their logistics management would take that attitude and demand better.

OTOH I've found their Basics stuff to be OK. E.g. once well-respected British electrical goods company sold to asset-stripper who treat it simply as a brand; electric hot water jug has short-lived spring in the lid latch which fails in months. Like the asset stripper Amazon presumably get their equivalent made by some Chinese factory nobody in the West has heard of but theirs just works and keeps on just working.

It's springtime for Springtown as Seagate rains nearly £50m on Northern Ireland plant

the hifi company whose name escapes me for the moment. Strathearn. Suspected as having a leakage problem, losing CMOS parts that were used in IEDs.

It sounds like better value for money than the NI government poured into DeLorean or the hifi company whose name escapes me for the moment.

Jocasta? Jocasta! Don't ram that trolley into the man: New tech promises an end to this scenario

Re: self-braking trolley

"Invent one that can fish itself out of canals and rivers, or just take itself back to the store after being left half a mile away and I might be impressed."

Tackle the problem, not the symptoms. Self-braking trolley with GPS & geofencing; won't let itself be pushed off the premises.

Re: But... But... But...

"And this equipment will probably quadruple the cost of them, so is never going to happen."

It could be sold to the supermarkets by geofencing so they can't be pushed out of the car park.

Owner of Smuggler's Inn B&B ordered to put up a sign warning guests not to cross into Canada

Re: a victim of circumstance?

"I love how our border is marked by a line of stones"

The archaeologists view is that two stones make a wall.

And in current affairs... Apple recalls three-prong AC adapters after some shocking behavior

The plain old mains plug is a fairly tough lump for the very good reason that safety matters.

I've no experience of Apple products but my latest laptop has a ghastly wall wart with a vulnerable looking plastic earth pin and an even more vulnerable looking rectangular plastic box on the back of it. I dread to think what an accidental kick would do to it. The combination of a localised mains lead with a rectangular or clover leave connector and a trailing power brick seems inherently much safer - an accidental kick of the power brick will simply move it across the floor.

Re: And it has happened even before 2016...

"That slur on ISO 9000 has been repeated so often it isn't even funny any more."

It was never intended to be funny, just a comment on the quality scam industry.

The business I worked for long ago went from TQM (mantra: Get It Right First Time Every Time) to ISO 9000 (Continuous Improvement). When asked nobody in manglement was prepared to explain how, it we'd been getting it right first time every time there was scope for continuous improvement.

BOFH: It's not just an awesome app, it'll look great on my Insta. . a. a. AAAARRRRRGGH

Re: You'd have thought...

The clue is in the word "ambient". It sets the air temperature to the ambient conditions outside. IOW it just blows air into the building.

I had to review a project plan where the client had bought MS Basic to mock up the interface. The project was to be written in C or C++ or whatever.