Posts by Doctor Syntax

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

You were DIYing it wrong.

Internet industry freaks out over proposed unlimited price hikes on .org domain names

The value in a .com address is the result of the effort that the registrant has put into whatever goods or services lie behind it. The registrar has put in very little in terms of the costs of running the registry. If the registry raises the rate on the basis that the name is now more valuable perhaps the owner should invoice them for the work done in making it so.

Re: Domain names are all pointless

And where do you look it up if you don't know it?

Facebook: Not saying we've done anything wrong but... we're just putting $3bn profit aside for an FTC privacy fine

Re: $3B booked off for possible fines against profits?

Where do you think the $3bn is going to come from? It might not be a tax deductible cost but it's still a cost so it's going to reduce profits.

Now Ponder Mistakes: NPM's heavy-handed management prompts JS code registry challenger

"My initial attempt was a project called everythingstays.com which is no longer under development or maintained."

Oh dear!

Gather round, friends. Listen close. It's time to list the five biggest lies about 5G

"So the paranoia is that all works fine until the day that the special signal is sent, and some zombie buried feature wakes up and drops your comms network into the bin."

You mean manufacturers should avoid incorporating anything running W10?

Re: New and shiny but practically pointless

"But greater speed and capacity I'm sure will encourage people to develop new things that can make use of it."

You mean bloat?

IT sales star wins $660k lawsuit against Oracle in Qatar – but can't collect because the Oracle he sued suddenly vanished

It could backfire. Use this case as evidence to demand a freeze of all assets as soon as the next suit is served. The outcome would probably be a requirement to deposit a substantial amount in escrow but it might produce an instant settlement.

Windows 10 May 2019 Update thwarted by obscure tech known as 'external storage'

Re: Missing the real question

"Why does every major update break something that has been stable for years?"

Maybe the real question is why has something appeared to have been stable for years? It may well be that the apparent stability is based on special handling for specific cases. The moment a change goes near such a case and somebody forgets to tweak the special handling it breaks.

Re: Working fine for me

"How the hell do you even get to that?"

It's simple. He has N thousand users. They all get updates and whatever the update does to their machines isn't a problem. It's whatever the great Microsoft did so it must be right. Complaints not allowed. He probably doesn't know it but all his users brought in their own devices and use those for actual work.

Baffling tale of Apple shops' 'non-facial' 'facial recognition', a stolen ID, and a $1bn lawsuit after a wrongful arrest

Re: But what about the Police?

Reading between the lines, it looks as if they're going to say it from the witness box if it actually goes to court.

This isn't any pencil, it's an Apple pencil.

Oh, sorry. Wrong advert.

Re: So that's why the pencils are so expensive

"Apple didn't arrest him, the cops did so he should be filing suit against them as well."

It was the cops who realised it wasn't him and also gave the tip-off about facial recognition S/W. It looks as if they might be witnesses for the plaintiff.

"What may have happened was that the suspect found and kept Bah's state ID that he earlier lost"

No. Bah was the suspect at one time. What may have happened is that the culprit found and kept Bah's ID.

The one whodunnit is the culprit (or perp if you want to use US jargon).

The suspect is the one who's suspected* of being the culprit but remains innocent until proved guilty.

Unless and until someone else is suspected, and there doesn't appear to have been, then there is at present no suspect.

*Big clue here as to meaning.

Take your pick: 0/1/* ... but beware – your click could tank an entire edition of a century-old newspaper

Re: IT humans, raise your hands ...

Friday afternoons are not required for this.

"cached all the data entries in ram until told to write it out"

Who writes stuff like that?

Re: photoplating

"Our local papers are rife with typographical errors."

And why keep photographers on the staff when you can just snag a picture from Google for whatever street was mentioned in the story?

Re: The most dreaded word in IT...

Not a single word but - "why did it do that?".

Re: Earth slide? Well, yes ...

"Or worse, files whose purpose you THINK you know ..."

That's why know was in italics.

Re: Not quite relevant, but might share anyhow

takes 8 seconds from a cold boot to login installing updates in Win10Pro

Re: destructive hdd check

"I never heard how he managed to do it."

It involved removing the write-protect tabs?

Re: destructive hdd check

Just so! And this program's critical failing was not doing that. Oddly enough, four people seem to have disagreed when I posted that further down.

Re: Talking of paper...

Client ran a few of them. Their business was printing, quite a bit of the work with those printers was with MICR toner. They were probably some of the cheaper devices in the plant.

One interesting fault on one occasion.- ink failed to adhere to the middle of the document. It turned out that the printer had been run a long time on one particular width of paper which had worn a groove of that width in a roller in the fuser unit, very shallow groove but sufficient for wider stock to sit clear above that part of the roller.

Re: "But I never experimented on a live system again"

The real problem was a program what would perform a destructive action without asking for confirmation.

Re: Earth slide? Well, yes ...

The first requirement for a DBA or any other type of sysadmin is a well-developed sense of paranoia. This stops you doing things like deleting files whose purpose you don't know.

Re: destructive hdd check

"Having something that can erase a disc on removable media labelled "PC-Check" should be grounds for a lawsuit. Just asking for confirmation is inadequate."

How do you test a disk write function without writing to it?

I suppose you could read a track, save the data, write zeros, check the result and then re-write the original data which would be very slow.

AFAICR the SCO Openserver install disk offered non-destructve and destructive write test.options. You were expected to know what you were doing and take care.

Re: destructive hdd check

"My boss was rather unpleasant about all this"

Not surprising!

Re: Talking of paper...

"throughputs y' can only dream of wi' a laserjet"

Don't need to dream. I've seen industrial grade continuous flow printers. Nice and quiet compared to the old mechanical jobs.

Cheapskate Brits appear to love their Poundland MVNOs as UK's big four snubbed in survey again

Re: 1Gb Data a month - Really ?

"Do people really "survive" with 1Gb of data a month ?"

What's data? PAYG SIM only, don't walk into lamp-posts whilst gazing at a little screen.

Re: "matching the ease of use of an Amazon or Apple store"

"I find it less than straight-forward to find things on Amazon"

Agreed. In fact it seems to have got worse in the last few weeks. There seems to be a compulsion to return as many hits as possible irrespective of relevance, especially sponsored results, and returning nothing where nothing would fit seems to be quite impossible. It's easier to search Amazon via Google apart from the hits for obsolete products.

And recently I had the offer of a pick-up location about 250 miles away, the email for the locker release code arrived about an hour after the website showed delivery and the SMS never arrived at all.

I get the distinct impression that they survive by sheer size - it would be feasible for someone to improve on the software for both search (there was at least one better search engine in the '80s!) and logistics but not be able to get into the market because scaling up to match would be impossible.

FYI: Get ready for face scans on leaving the US because 1.2% of visitors overstayed their visas

free up JetBlue staff for other duties rather than scanning passes at the gate from continuing to be paid by JetBlue

Bloke faces up to 20 years in the clink after gun held to dot-com owner's head in robbery

The technical term to describe this as a literary device in fiction is 'situational irony'. I don't see a problem in extending the term to a real situation.

From the report linked in TFA:

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN). ... Through PSN, a broad spectrum of stakeholders work together to identify the most pressing violent crime problems in the community and develop comprehensive solutions to address them.

Just how many forcible attempts at transferring domain names do they have to require "comprehensive solutions to address them"? Why not just prosecute the case on its own merits?

There's a certain irony in the fact this was to gain control of a domain to use to post photos of people doing stupid things whilst drunk. I doubt that the entire site managed to feature anyone as stupid as its owner.

Idiot admits destroying scores of college PCs using USB Killer gizmo, filming himself doing it

Re: Surprisingly honest

"The college calculates that he caused $51,109 in damages, and it cost it $7,362 to investigate and repair what it could."

How much of that was accountancy overhead to calculate the cost to 5 figures?

Re: Silly "victims"!

Snicket?

A'n't yer heerd o' ginnels?

On the one hand he displays the sort of thinking we expect from MBAs. On the other he has managed to do the MBA of a Darwin award by getting himself removed from the employment* market pro tem and maybe for good if even other MBAs realise he's not going to be a team player.

* OK, 'employment' might not be the best way of describing the situation where MBAs turn up at an office and et paid for it but there aren't too many alternative words.

Re: Silly "victims"!

[Shakes head] Call that a Yorkshire accent?

Wi've yar USB ports forged fro' solid copper bi t' local blacksmith, and connected to a network o' Tesla coils fed bi lightning rods an' electric eels.

That's a bit more like it.

Not one of the 12 steps: Rehab patients' details exposed in publicly visible database

But it's in The Cloud. It's done that way so somebody else can look after little details like that.

We've read the Mueller report. Here's what you need to know: ██ ██ ███ ███████ █████ ███ ██ █████ ████████ █████

Either "I do not recall" or "I have no independent recollection."

I'd have thought that that level of memory loss would indicate a degree of dementia that should lead to the removal of a US president on medical grounds.

Canadian woman fined for not holding escalator handrail finally reaches the top after 10 years

Re: Other escalator laws

"I genuinely didn't understand what that is about either."

Maybe it's time to explain.

Somewhere in the depths of time someone in London Underground decided that there was a safety risk if passenger's dogs rode the escalators and that if a passenger had a dog with them they should carry it. The safety notice that was concocted was sufficiently terse as to be ambiguous and has been a source of amusement ever since, at least to those familiar to LU stations.

Re: Other escalator laws

You mean we have to carry bears?

Re: Other escalator laws

It's an older joke than that.

Re: More handrails

"A certain imperial chemical industrial company I used to work for tried to impose similar must-use-the-handrail rules for employees"

A clear indication of too many people in manglement with not enough useful work to do.

Re: Seems discriminatory

"Until I learned it's actually a safety feature."

Always something new to learn and where better than at el Reg.

Re: Other escalator laws

"Sounds like there's a good business for short-term dog rentals at each end of the moving staircases"

Tricky. Central London, morning rush hour, either you have a lot of dogs at the bottom of the escalator to start with or you've got to replenish the supply by getting them back down again afterwards. Can one person carry several dogs down? Or can you have a slide to return them? If the latter how do you work it in the evening rush hour?

Good luck to her.

Surprising absolutely no one at all, Samsung's folding-screen phones knackered within days

It depends. They might bash into the point of your shoulder or your elbow. Or maybe a brief-case carried at gonad height. You have to look where you're going fairly carefully to achieve that.

Who's using Mueller Report Day to bury bad news? If you guessed Facebook, you're right: Millions more passwords stored in plaintext

"Our investigation has determined that these stored passwords were not internally abused or improperly accessed."

That's unusual. The normal form is to find no evidence of anything wrong.

Ah! I've read it again. The passwords were not internally abused or improperly accessed. That doesn't rule out external abuse or improper access.

Yes, I may have advised 'some' investors to flog their Autonomy shares, analyst tells High Court

"his clients are pissed off because HPE did not take his advice"

They should have been more pissed off because he didn't finger Autonomy as a take-over target and advise them to buy. Is there a faint taste of sour grapes?