Posts by Doctor Syntax

MacOS wakes to a bright Catalina sunrise – and broken Adobe apps

Re: Subscription servers

It should be a warning to anyone anywhere relying on subscription services.

HP to hike upfront price of printer hardware as ink biz growth runs dry

The tattiness may be part of their problem. If they sell a low quality printer at a loss it might never last long enough to eat enough HP cartridges to give an overall profit before it joins the empty cartridges in land-fill.

"Traditionally, printers were sold at a loss and the profit was generated by consumables over the lifetime of the device, in much the same way as the razor industry operates."

Just how old is this tradition? I doubt that printers were being sold at a loss when I first bought an HP printer. I suspect that somewhere along the line someone in what HP became decided that they could play this trick on customers provided they overcharged on cartridges. AFAICS there are a few of flaws with this.

The main one was that once third party makers realised they could make and sell cartridges profitably at much less than HP's price HP should have realised that that game was up. Cartridges had become a commodity and they should have readjusted then. Another is that if the disparity was great enough they could lose overall by customers replacing cheap printers before they'd bought enough cartridges to make back the upfront loss. Also, looking at the racks of different HP cartridge types in office supply shops I wonder if the cost of spreading cartridge sales across all that variety is cutting profits at that end of the chain.

Twitter: No, really, we're very sorry we sold your security info for a boatload of cash

Error?

All those LoC and everything else needed to put this together were intended to do something else and this was an accidental and totally unintentional side-effect? Or it was an unconscious doodle by some day-dreaming developer that by the magic of DevOps got released without anyone knowing it existed?

You might try not insulting our intelligence.

Re: Hmmm

Why give potential spammers (and that includes any business where you are the product) your main email address?

If you thought Windows Insiders was lacking a little in the leadership department, it is now

Re: Dona Sarkar's Twitter Tag Line

"Press Windows key, start typing the name of the thing I want to launch"

It sounds very much like what we call the command line. I thought Winnies weren't supposed to like that.

Virtual inanity: Solution to Irish border requires data and tech not yet available, MPs told

You expected Farage etc to think of anything but themselves?

Re: An outsider asks....

And also read roomey's post above and how reports of that violence affected him as a child.

Re: technology yet to be available

These terms have different meanings in politics. Theory is what you invoke to prove that the untested thing you're about to d will work. Hypotheticals are how you dismiss the explanations of how and why that untested thing won't work.

Re: Not going to work but

The ones who at one time provided a number of guaranteed Parliamentary seats for the Conservative and Unionist party, the last part of whose name BoJo might have conveniently forgotten.

Re: Let's not forget...

Agreed, but it's going to be a rather wide verge.

Re: Mission Impossible

"No-deal Brexit instantly guarantees a hard Irish/NI border."

Not instantly. It'd take time. And that's only in terms the extend to anyone could guarantee such a thing.

I suspect the solution is going to be Boris crashing us out with no deal in defiance of the Benn Act followed by a strong dose of reality. After that the defiance of the Benn Act can be invoked as the basis for saying that it never happened, rather like the first prorogation never happened. Alternatively as a punishment Boris should be kept in place to run the mess he created up until the end of the fixed term Parliament next May.

Re: Real inanity

"the Maybot (who voted remain) "

We don't know how she voted in the referendum. As a thoroughly house-trained Home Sec she'd have wanted to get out from under the ECJ but saying so in public would have ended her career after the expected Remain victory. I'm convinced that a minimal support for Remain was simply a career choice.

Re: It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic

Given the nebulous requirements the solution must be cloud-based.

Re: In event of Brexit emergency, break grass

The international order follows county borders. I'm not sure how old those are but I'd guess they follow older parish and/or townland borders and maybe property borders before that. As at the time it was all one country it didn't matter too much if a property straddled a county border. Given partition the border had to be drawn somewhere and, short of sending out a team of surveyors and lawyers to argue every inch, the county boundaries would have seemed the most practical. But as to whether partition was ill-judged or not, the alternative would have been the north fighting a war of secession. Whether that would have settled the Irish Question permanently is a matter for speculation but as we know politicians favour a short term solution whatever the long-term cost.

Euro ISP club: Sure, weaken encryption. It'll only undermine security for everyone, morons

Re: Simpler

on thisese islands.

FTFY

Re: Not a moment too soon

People also do legitimate business over the internet. That requires that it should be possible to exchange information confidentially if that's required and essential to confirm a transaction reliably. By "reliably" I mean that it shouldn't be possible for some third person to intercept and amend the transaction, impersonate one of the parties, forge a transaction nor for one of the parties to repudiate their part in it. That requires an end-to-end secure system. Whilst that may upset some branches of government others, those concerned with trade and the economy, should be pressing for it.

While personally I'd not want to use anything provided by Facebook for such a purpose the need for a secure, end-to-end secure messaging system needs to be met somehow and the best way to achieve it would be through an open standard defined, in the internet way, by an RFC with multiple, including FOSS, implementations available. Email ought to provide that but doesn't, not without add-ons. Either e replacement standard is required for that or a new standard is needed to sit beside it to provide for such messaging.

Flak overflow: Barrage of criticism prompts very public Stack Overflow apology

Re: It's been mentioned

Given that they may well be seeking a form of address rather than a pronoun I might be inclined to suggest something nicely medieval such as "Worshipful sir" or, where gender neutrality matters, "Your worship".

A pedant writes

"Personally, I see no need or place for pronouns, at least on the sites I use, and (given current ridiculous social norms) feel I should be offended on behalf of people who see pronouns as divisive."

Cough. You used a pronoun three times in that sentence.

Boris Brexit bluff binds .eu domains to time-bending itinerary

"In any case, it seems that UK businesses are capable of just as much foresight as UK government."

Well, they can't have more foresight. They have to fit in with what actually happens and as HMG has spent several years not knowing that nobody else can know either. Making provision for 4 different outcomes is expensive with no guarantee as to whether something completely different will happen. As an example AFAIK the Irish farming industry still doesn't know if it will have to spend a few million on a new meat processing plant in the north.

Re: Out of curiosity ...

" two down votes ... No explanations why!"

I think it works like this. Somebody posts something. You post an irrefutable reply which contradicts it. OP can either mutter "oh shit, why did I post that?" and move on or get upset and resentful. OP's only recourse is to keep downvoting every post you make.

TL;DR Wear your downvotes with pride, you were right and somebody knows it.

Hey, I wrote this neat little program for you guys called the IMAC User Notification Tool

Re: When American Corporations Tried the Global Approach

Always good to see marketing fall on their faces.

Re: Phirst Aid ?

Maybe they were suggested in Irish and only translated once they'd been approved.

Re: Bradford University School Of Management...

What did they change it to? Bradford University School of Technology?

Re: Sky EPG

A friend with a type-setting business had trouble with hyphenation when setting a book on the royal Arsenal.

It's time for this one again: https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-08-19

That was some of the best flying I've seen to date, right up to the part where you got hacked

Easier solution - don't go onto the internet whilst flying.

Promise of £5bn for rural fibre prompts Openreach to reach for the trench-digging diamond cutter

"700 metres of cabling a day – more than 20 times"

And a similar ratio for hitting water, gas, drains and power. Maybe a bit higher for rival cable companies' stuff.

Here we go again: US govt tells Facebook to kill end-to-end encryption for the sake of the children

Re: Delete all your social media now

You think that's possible?

Re: So logically...

"every room in every building has concealed microphones"

No need. People will buy their microphones from Amazon or whoever and place them in plain sight.

Re: Easy to hack ...................

There's an error in your logic here. If the govt. get all that Amazon, Google, etc. know about you from them they the govt. knows at least as much and probably more than the Amazon, Google etc know individually.

Re: Oh the irony!

"Facebook. one of the biggest invaders of personal privacy, should be taking a stand to defend user privacy"

They're defending their business assets which are, of course, the results of their invasions.

Re: Idiot politicians

If so they hide it very well. Hashtags Rudd certainly did.

"police must be able to see all conversations on messaging platforms in order to protect the public, specifically children, from predators."

That sounds reasonable.

Now come back and tell us how you propose to do so that (a) it really is restricted to police and not accessible to some ne'er-do-wells who work out how to crack it in the future, (b) it requires a warrant issued on a genuinely* made serious crime case to a magistrate and (c) by what painful bits of the body you're going to string up those making unauthorised use to spy on political opponents, neighbours, the guy sitting at the next desk or spouses.

* Unlike, say, the warrants obtained on "Nick's" victims.

Oracle demands $12K from network biz that doesn't use its software

Re: @AC Accidental product activation

One of IBM's gimmicks with Informix is to push it for embedded systems so there are ARM ports. A bit of scratching around shows there's also a PHP module. Hmmm. A Pi Nextcloud server running on Informix? If I ever have a spare week to play with that...

Re: If Merula was using some Oracle software

Thumbs up for the double negative.

Re: Does Oracle have a case?

Oracle will probably want him to point to the company / guy using the IP address at the time. ...Oracle could then sue and get a judge to subpoena the ISP's customer record for the offending customers.

"Sorry, we don't keep records of that."

The Beeb's latest article on the King's Cross CCTV ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49921175 ) includes amongst the reasons for not being able to audit that setup the fact it wasn't designed to be audited and the lovely phrase "the limitations of corporate memory". I think they meant "shredder".

Re: @AC Accidental product activation

I'm surprised any went to Oracle. But Informix deserved and deserves something better than either IBM or its previous management.

Re: This reminds me of that scam..

And charge for storage?

Surprise! Copying crummy code from Stack Overflow leads to vulnerable GitHub jobs

There's even a faux O'Reilly-styled book of sorts, "Copying and Pasting from Stack Overflow"

To be followed up by "Five copy and paste from Stack Overflow".

When the satellite network has literally gone glacial, it's vital you snow your enemy

"Lightning is a weird beastie."

Our phone line is buried. The neighbours all have overhead lines. Back in mechanical dial days one of them got the phone fried due, presumably, to an induced current. I say fried because the dial was whitened & thickened rather like a fried egg.

Re: Wind and rain...

We'd not long moved into that particular house in '87 so thought that maybe that particular whistling noise was an acoustic quirk of the building. Discovered otherwise in the morning.

Re: Building to building WiFi

"trench ... the executives car park"

Ho what a shame!

TalkTalk says WalkWalk if you've got a mouldy Tiscali email address, or pay £50 a year to keep it

Re: Another ex-Nildrammer here

As I recall when Pipex took over Nldram they reckoned Nildram's support system was so good they rolled it out over the entire business. It went downhill when Tiscali took over but with few problems it wasn't an issue. Then TalkTalk tool over Tiscali and the combination of the two was the end of the line as far as I was concerned. I realised the best way to keep flexible for the future was to separate mail from ISP and even better to use a personal domain to separate email address from MSP should it become necessary. That last step hasn't in fact been necessary although moving both from one provider to another was.

ISP provided email is a trap. Use it as a short term measure if absolutely required but no more.

Re: pipex

"One more strike and they're out,"

They took over Pipex years ago and you're still with them? I not only got out from under to Be but got out again when Be sold out to Sky.

Re: Alternatively..

I also had issues with Freeparking and went with a paid-for domain and MSP service from Mythic.

HP polishes the redundancy cannon, prepares to fire 16% of workforce

Re: Bon Voyage, HP Ink

I spent the second half of my working life in IT. As far as I could make out the result was enabling companies grow or at least run hard enough to stay in the same place.

"and so begins the demise of HP then"

Begins?

Cosmo Communicator: More phone than the Gemini, more pocket computer than phone

I had a Nokia Communicator. In fact I had two but the older brick was definitely the better one for what I wanted. Being retired I no longer have the business use case for either the Gemini or the Cosmo and can't justify either to myself at the price. Unless, as an earlier comment said, there are a lot of cheap Gemini coming onto the market.

Re: Software

If it loads Debian then it will be able to run LibreOffice. Does that meet your criterion?