Posts by Doctor Syntax

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

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.

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.

Re: Why would a layer you aren't supposed to remove

"If it is supposed to remain, use a stronger adhesive so it can't be peeled off without herculean effort"

And put a real removable layer on top of it.

Re: Well

"But you are a REVIEWER of a device that incorporates new technology. You really dont think you should have read the instructions first? Thats part of the review process isnt it?"

If the film looks removable then there's a good argument for the reviewer trying to remove it on the basis that a proportion of the punters will try to. That's part of the review process.

I think the pronunciation's the same.

Re: At first glance, the $1,980 phone...

Jacket with poacher's pocket. Put the rucksack in the pocket.

Re: Fuschia

Even garden specialists who should know better get this one wrong. Plant and (AFAIK) OS ar Fuchsia.

Re: Pretty well Inevitable for an Alpha Version

"the red ones are faster."

Unless the green ones are BRG.

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?

"He advised his clients to sell its stocks – a move that cost them in the short term when HP bought the company."

Why just in the short term? Surely there wasn't any mechanism to recoup later.

Facebook: Yeah, we hoovered up 1.5 million email address books without permission. But it was an accident!

Re: Here i fixed that for you

I think they'd also understand personal jail time although maybe not until it actually happened to them.

Rather than simply delete them how about an apology for each of those who got Zuckered up? Individually typed out by Zuck himself.

Re: It's time...

I'd have thought it would apply but as an alternative how about 1.5 million offences under the Computer Misuse Act or equivalent for other jurisdictions?

Supreme Court of UK gives Morrisons the go-ahead for mega data leak liability appeal

Re: liability whatever precautions are taken is a bad idea

The problem with not holding the company liable in civil law is that there's then no redress for those injured. Where these are numerous it's not going to be possible for them to obtain it from the perpetrator. The real difficulty in this case is that the employees affected are collateral damage from an attempt to injure their employer.

I wonder if there are actual damages to any employees.

There is, of course, another way to look at this.

If his object was to punish the company for a real or perceived slight then the Supremes do his job for him if they allow the employees' claims to succeed.

There's a conundrum!

Re: Liable?

why is it some people find it hard to make a choice with those two options.

"I won't get caught."

That must be the thinking.

Re: Should companies be on the hook for criminal employees' doings?

"Reasonable precautions would include"...either restricting access to an employee who's been disciplined or keeping an eye on him if he has to have access.

Microsoft debuts Bosque – a new programming language with no loops, inspired by TypeScript

Re: Ah, the loop

"create a theoretical structure of such beauty that loops no longer exist."

Except, of course, they haven't. They've just hidden them away in a higher level abstraction, just like symbolic assembler hid actual addresses in labels and 3rd generation languages provided an abstraction to hide the actual hardware.

No loops?

I shall say this only once...

Hey criminals, need a getaway vehicle? There's an app for that... Car share tool halts ops amid crime wave, arrests

Re: "Share Now said no other cities should be affected by this."

"I am surprised that they do not have GPS trackers in all their cars, which certainly just about every other car rental company has."

They probably do but you get a terrible signal once you drive into a shipping container.

Let 15 July forever be known as P-Day: When UK's smut fans started being asked for their age

Aaaarg. its!

Has el Reg checked it's email from the Ministry of Fun? According to the Beeb at least some notifications went out without the benefit of BCC. Also according to the report they were trying to work out whether this had to be reported to the ICO. Nevertheless they take security seriously. You couldn't make it up. Unfortunately someone made them up.

The curious case of Spamhaus, a port scanning scandal, and an apparent U-turn

"Is this a blacklist fault? No - it's an ISP fault "

A bit of both. The ISP and Spamhaus should be able to work together to resolve the issue.

If you're going to take an approach that's liable to produce false positives and also disadvantage people on your list you really should have an efficient means of resolving issues that works at the scale that matches your operations.

Re: Schubert... Rossini...?

Are you suggesting one's an Elf King and the other's a Barber of Seville?

Why Qualcomm won – and why Tim Cook had to eat humble Apple pie

"This is where my thoughts wandered as well."

Or even a step further - Intel gave them advance warning they wanted to quit.

Europe's home PC buyers reach for their collective smartphone, sigh: We don't need a new desktop. This is a computer, right?

Re: The old ones don't get obsolete

"Laptops are getting better in the realm of size, weight, and screen resolution though."

Not sure about that. In the drive for even greater thinness and lightness facilities are being cut. My preferred supplier, for instance, haven't had one with an optical drive option for some considerable time and the one I'm currently using has an increasingly dodge keyboard.

"there's an app for that as in whatever you as a normal user needs to do"

One of the things I need to do is have a WP application open and visible at the same time as one or more other documents, usually, PDFs are also open. There's often my own little application that takes copy and paste from the OCR'd PDFs and takes out all the spurious line breaks so I can copy and paste clean text into the WP.

Is there an app that allows this to happen on the minuscule screen of a mobile device? What's likely to happen is that users get trained to accept the limitations of a lesser device and get trained to accept what they need to do as being what they're constrained to do by those limitations.

Three planets and two stars adds up to one research team made very happy by Kepler's unique discovery

"Although it's rocky and lies in the habitable zone ... its surface reaches scorching temperatures of about 427˚C (~800 degrees Fahrenheit)."

Habitable?

Google readies Pixel for the masses, but are the masses ready for Pixel?

"The phone would crash when Instagram, Snapchat or any other third-party app attempted to use the camera."

You think that's a bug, not a feature?

Open-source enterprise software slinger Red Hat bravely reveals that IT bosses love open-source enterprise software

Re: do I trust those libraries maintained by a retired guy and his cat?

At least it's easier to find which libraries these are. Just look for only two committers, one being the maintainer and the other being a cat.

It's worth bearing in mind that if something hasn't had much change for a long time maybe it's not broke and doesn't need fixing while something that gets a good deal of change might be being broken on a regular basis and in permanent need of fixing.

Hey, remember that California privacy law? Big Tech is trying to ram a massive hole in it

Re: Next time on the ballot

Certainly go back to the ballot, with the original bill or whatever, and make clear that this time it's no more Mr Nice Guy.

Did someone forget to tell NTT about Brexit? Japanese telco eyes London for global HQ

Re: Trading only on WTO terms?

"It seems to me the UK did a lot of trading outside Europe before the UK joined the EU. All manner of agreements, not trading only on WTO terms."

Those agreements were replaced by agreements with and via the EU (as it now is). Leaving the EU doesn't magic them back into existence so leaving means that the only extant agreements will be those that Fox has negotiated. He still seems keen that we leave PDQ but so far he hasn't done much on his contribution to making that possible without economic damage.

Re: Ha

"In spite of brexit?"

For selecting a global HQ membership of the EU is a no-op. London will remain on the globe.

For a business requiring an EU presence a post-Brexit UK will no longer meet the spec.