Posts by Doctor Syntax

All good, leave it with you...? Chap is roped into tech support role for clueless customer

OK, so it was invoiced. But at what rate - field tech or project coordinator?

Re: "This will only take a second..."

"And you can't refuse to do support for said person because it's your Mum"

If it's a family PC it gets Linux if they want me to support it. If it isn't I don't.

Re: Have you ever ended up being roped into doing more tech support than you’d bargained for?

"Student computers are a pain, they usually crash just as the critical disertation is finished and needs printing and no backup exists."

Even more so when the student's one of your own kids.

Again a long time ago, daughter arrived home after finishing her PhD. Backup was no problem. In fact all she had was the disk with her data on it as she'd used a departmental PC. Trouble is it was one of those proprietary disks so I had to buy a drive to get her data transferred onto something more portable.

Can't do it the US way? Then we'll do it Huawei – and roll our own mobile operating system

I'm just imagining a dev looking puzzled having been told not to put data harvesting in.

Re: Just pick one of the open source phones

"The Open Source community would have a harder time writing apps for proprietary services such as banking, Uber, etc that many consumers would expect."

A Huawei or a combined Huawei/Sumsung OS would represent so much of the new phone market that the proprietary services would provide their own apps.

Facebook blames 'server config change' for 14-hour outage. Someone run that through the universal liar translator

Re: Can't see why merging the services would hinder a determined regulator...

Exactly. If it becomes hard to pick them apart it's their problem. If it becomes impossible to pick them apart (unlikely) triumph.

Re: As an advertiser ...

"Facebook and Google claim to tell you which half."

Adblockers are even better. They stop you spending the wrong half.

Re: Not sure the comparison is valid

"Yes, I do use it, and it's necessary for various community activities I'm involved in, mostly due to critical mass."

In such a situation the community activity would have to do without me.

Re: Not sure the comparison is valid

"going down is very much like your bank having its telephone service cut off."

I'm not sure about that. Banks seem to have no compunction at all about cutting off their most direct link with customers: branches.

Re: Not sure the comparison is valid

Stop the world, I want to get off.

Re: Not sure the comparison is valid

Clearly 14 hours wasn't a long enough outage for the lesson to sink in.

Re: Facebook was down?

If they don't want to say anything what could the PR do better than keeping schtum? Churning out some longer meaningless garbage just gives us more to point and laugh at.

Capita: B is for Brexit, C is for cutting costs. Stock exchange: Yay! You guys are awesome

Re: "Firmly on track"

To follow Interserve and Carillion? It looks like its profitable activities are selling bits of itself and persuading (how) people to fork out for a rights issue.

Never thought we'd ever utter these words, but... can anyone recommend a spin doctor for NASA?

It's just a big Crookes radiometer.

What do sexy selfies, search warrants, tax files have in common? They've all been found on resold USB sticks

Re: Photorec

Upvote for both. I've used them to recover files from ransomware. The encrypted files hadn't overwritten the original data which had just been deleted.

Holy sh*tsnacks! Danger zone! Edinburgh Uni's Archer 2 super 'puter will cost a cool £79m

The rest of the Spring Statement could do with scrutiny. He seems to have made a statement that MPs should compromise of Brexit that lead the Beeb at least to get so excited they more or less ignored anything else he said. It sounds as if he might have been trying to distract attention from whatever bad news he might have hidden in there.

UK digital competition review: Forget money, we should consider 'balance of harms' during tech mergers

Balance of harms? What's wrong with absence of harm?

Re: ACTive Attractive Applied Imagination as Fabless AI Driver. ..... Applied Imagination

"King Canute didn't Fare so well the Time he failed to stop the Tides of Progress."

Go and read some history to find what he really did.

"And for now, the tech giants need only promise to be good and honest."

Could we specify the dictionary they use to understand these words.

Tech sector risks GM-crops-like crackdown if it doesn't win back trust, warns privacy watchdog

Re: Crack down on lopsided EULAs

Is there actually a contract in some cases? AIUI a contract is an agreement to provide goods and/or services in return for a consideration. A consideration is usually payment. If the user pays nothing what then is the consideration? If it's the provision of the user's data then exactly what would be the breach of contract if the vendor uses that data? Certainly until precedent could be established it could prove very expensive to sue as it might be hard to establish exactly what implied contract might be in place.

Another aspect is that as far as consumers are concerned EULAs may already be void right-pond as consumer protection is stronger here.

Hapless engineers leave UK cable landing station gate open, couple of journos waltz right in

Re: "A terrorist or foreign agent would have been free to plant explosives ..."

"if anyone abused the situation, it would be local yobs"

Well, you couldn't expect the Mail to tell its readers their teenage kids could go in there, shoot up drugs, nick anything not welded down and set the place on fire.

Carphone Warehouse fined £29m for mis-selling mobile insurance to punters who didn't need it

Re: Persistent buggers

"they take more money in premiums than they pay out in claims"

And commissions. Don't forget the commissions. Dixons don't.

Re: is this a surprise ?

"But surely this has been going on since the first high street shop started selling mobiles."

Much longer than that.

"accepted that in the past the company's practices fell short"

Sir Humphrey's excuse number 5.

Re: PC world

Maybe you just don't have the right disbelieving face. I don't usually buy anything there but when I did the whole attempt was made in a tone of voice which carried no conviction and petered out part way through. I can't remember if he actually started off with "I don't suppose..." but it was the impression given. Or maybe he was used to dealing with customers who knew their own minds; he was, after all, in a shop in Yorkshire.

Bank of England takes a break from opining on banks' IT outages to 'fess up to forking needless cash on legacy kit, manual processes

Re: If only they knew the half of it...

More or less standard operating practice at so many places.

Quite.

"MPs called on the BoE to ensure the way it is working, systems and culture are brought up to date, which it said should include a revamp of its IT systems."

What a pity they didn't pause to think things through.

"In addition, it pointed to problems incorporating the Prudential Regulation Authority's systems when it absorbed the body in 2014; this led to duplicated applications and the need to integrate large datasets."

And nobody noticed this migration happening. The BoE really needs to make efforts to get their data migrations into the media. They should ask TSB for advice.

They're BAAACK: Windows 10 nagware team loads trebuchet with annoying reminders to GTFO Windows 7

Re: Microsoft (if a person) would be locked up in any other walk of life...

"For abusive dominating behaviour"

No, they'd become a CEO.

users will have an option to "do not notify me again".

To be implemented by running the update so no further notification is needed. MS have form on this.

2 weeks till Brexit and Defra, at the very least, looks set to be caught with its IT pants down

Re: Ha

"promised he would stay regardless of the result."

At a guess he'd never anticipated the result and didn't expect to deliver on that. Not surprising - he was a politician. Having lost the vote he realised not only that it was a stupid promise to have made and that if was to be implemented it would need someone who believed it was a good idea and had planned for it to do so. He could have seen that if he'd stayed on he'd have been in May's position - struggling to put something together while the ERG and camp followers complained about everything he did to try to put their nonsense into practice.

You can scarcely blame him for the fact that the group of those who believed it fell apart. Maybe they were of the same opinion - they didn't expect to win and didn't believe it was a sensible scheme. Maybe their only position was to heckle from the back benches and they couldn't keep doing that if they were in government. Were they emboldened in their campaigning by the belief that he would actually stay on and do the heavy lifting for them and take the blame for failing? I don't know. You'd need to ask them.

But you can't logically complain that he didn't stay on while elsewhere claiming he should have handed over the reigns.

Re: Ha

"The jellyfish should have handed government over to a member of the party who wanted brexit."

I'm sure you're aware of it but a PM is usually the leader of the largest party in the HoC. A departing PM can't just nominate his successor in either role. So when Cameron decided to quit the only option was for the Conservative party to go through its normal procedure to choose a successor who, by convention, HMQ would invite to form a government.

The members of the party who were most strident about wanting Brexit contrived to either quit the contest or stab one another in the back. The result was someone who many of us suspect of having been a crypto-leaver who wanted to protect her position in the event of the expected referendum result.

The leading Bresiteers have only themselves to blame for one of them not being at least a candidate for PM.

Re: Scrap the parties

"Then parliament enact the policies."

Including the mutually contradictory ones?

Re: Ha

"One campaign stopped with winning the referendum"

It certainly did. It stopped because it had no idea what to do next. It's entire purpose was to campaign. The nearest they seem to have thought about implementing it would be that Cameron would stay on to do it despite having campaigned against it.

Re: Ha

"Wasnt that the Gina Miller fiasco?"

Let's consider this scenario. No case was put forward at the time and HMG just went its way without a commons vote. Somewhere in the last few months the case was put to the court and the court gave the verdict that was given originally: there was a legal requirement for Parliament to approve before invoking A50. We'd now be in the position that the entire Brexit process would have been conducted unconstitutionally and, by the terms of A50 itself, not valid.

How would that have been for a fiasco? For added flavour consider the scenario that this had been raised not in the last few months but after March 29 (April 1st seems a good date).

Leavers seem unable to grasp the simple fact that she did them a favour.

Re: Ha

"the one man able to prepare anything (Cameron) refused to and ran when he didnt get the result he wanted."

Now there we do agree. He should have had a plan B.

We might not agree as to what the plan B should have been. Mine was to note the advisory nature of the vote and do a proper feasibility study which IMV the vote entitled him to do and simply logic obligated him to do before it went any further. What's more he should have tasked the arch remainers with doing an impact assessment on various sectors of the economy as part of that.

Re: @codejunky

"Damn right take back control"

And probably give most of it to the US.

Evidence?

Swiss electronic voting system like... wait for it, wait for it... Swiss cheese: Hole found amid public source code audit

Re: Better than in the UK...

"And yet the instances of voting fraud are remarkably rare"

Not only rare but ?almost always involve postal, ie. remote, votes.

Re: Potentially unpopular opinion

"If you want to get a fast vote count"

Good, fast, cheap. Pick any two. Whichever of the other two is chosen I'd want "good" as one choice. Now we have to ask whether "fast" is worth spending silly sums on and still compromise "good"

Re: Potentially unpopular opinion

So for me its "ties to my official spot on the face of the Earth" versus workforce mobility.

The whole point of voting is to make decisions on behalf of a community. That's a community in the sense of a group of people sharing the same physical space. It makes sense to tie qualification to some spot you habitually inhabit.

OTOH there's an attraction in electronic voting if we could give Facebook users an electronic vote for their own MP. They could choose to vote for either the FB MP or their geographical constituency MP. The successful FB candidate could be called the Honourable Member for B Ark.

Re: Are they going to vote on whether to adopt electronic voting?

A wapentake!

Boffins discover new dust clouds in the Solar System, Mercury has a surprisingly filthy ring

"Earth’s even got its own debris zone."

Probably includes all the toys that keep getting thrown out of the pram.

Yelp-for-MAGAs app maker is warned there are holes in its code. Does it A. Just fix the problem, or B. Threaten to call the FBI, too?

Re: Thank you

Somebody should remind them that when everybody thinks you're an idiot it's not a good idea to open your mouth and confirm it.

Is there a charge equivalent to wasting police time but for the FBI?

Amazon may finally get its hands on .amazon after world's DNS overseer loses patience

ICANN getting impatient? Now they know how the EU feels about their demands for a moratorium on GDPR.

Re: These new TLDs were always a stupid idea

"money making scheme, completely unnecessary."

Not from ICANN's PoV

UK joins growing list of territories to ban Boeing 737 Max flights as firm says patch incoming

Re: will be able to enter UK airspace and land at their destination as planned

Landing's OK. It's taking off again that's risky.

Raiding party! UK's ICO drops in unannounced on couple of dodgy-dialling dirtbag outfits

"just wondering why the two companies in question were not named in the article?"

I'd guess the ICO didn't include that in their PR. After all we don't want to give them a chance to wriggle out under sub judice rules.

Re: Why stop there

"If you go along with them for long enough you get to talk to a solicitor who knows a lot about "traffic accident claims" but is surprisingly vague on their cut of any award by the court."

If by that time you've got the name of the solicitors concerned it's time to mention the words "Law Society". Or not bother mentioning them, just grass them up.

Re: Timing

"Seems about par for the ICO to swoop after a problem has gone away."

Alternatively the increased penalties may be having an effect and deterring them. Isn't that what you want?