Posts by Doctor Syntax

Chef melts under heat, will 86 future deals with family-separating US immigration agencies

Re: All's well that ends well?

Removing the previous attribution was specifically forbidden by the licence terms. So no, it was not "allowably within the license".

You've got (Ginni's) mail! Judge orders IBM to cough up CEO, execs' internal memos in age-discrim legal battle

Time to start telling someone - specified members of IBM management or their lawyers - that he looks specifically to them to act and that he will hold them in contempt of court if there are further problems. A bit of personal responsibility can have an outstanding effect.

Devonitely not great: Torbay and South Devon NHS declares 'major IT incident'

Re: What ?

You may be right but I have the uncomfortable feeling that more centralised management will simply increase the scale of failures.

If you have enough of this type of gut microbe, you can get drunk for free after eating carbs

You are not a single individual. You are a complete biome.

Tesco parking app hauled offline after exposing 10s of millions of Automatic Number Plate Recognition images

Re: Bastards

Quite right. Tesco (and every other retailer) need customers more than I (and every other customer or potential customer) needs them. Not being good at understanding their customers is a problem for any retailer. Thinking they are good whilst not being is an even bigger problem.

Re: Bastards

"unless you're just bloody minded, which is a distinct possibility "

Life is too short to carry a grudge but we all have to do the best we can.

Note that one of my points was that part of Tesco's shtick was that they were really good at understanding their customers because of all their analytics. Well, that was something they couldn't analyse unless their outsourcer passed over the data, which I suspect they didn't. They weren't as good as they thought they were.

Re: Idiots

"Registration numbers are PII"

If it's just the number then maybe not. However as soon as you marry it up with the name of the registered keeper and the name the person, if different, who was driving it at a certain time and place certainly is.

Re: Bastards

You do realise, don't you, that Tesco's shrinking turnover is the cumulative result of lots of people like me not buying from them? If you think it's some mega-millionaire not shopping there any longer then you need to grow up.

Big companies spend fortunes on marketing and advertising to bring people in or get them to pay more when they're in. They fail to realise that not pissing off customers and potential customers would be far cheaper.

They also seem not to realise that parking is an aspect of customer service. Put like that it should be simply obvious that it is. Yet they're prepared to turn over their car parks to companies for whom the store is simply bait to lure prey or to take up premises in trading estates where their landlords do that.

"And that you think that documenting the fact here will get you some sympathy."

I'm not looking for sympathy. I have less need of Tesco than they have of customers. However it does appear that more folk here agree with me than you. I trust you're not looking for sympathy either.

Re: Bastards

There parking vultures sent me a snotty letter saying if I did it again I'd be fined. I decided the best way to avoid the risk of that was to never go into a Tesco car park again. The best way to avoid that was never to go into a Tesco again.

The really annoying thing was that when they looked after things themselves they sent someone out to control the exit gate when they were busy; that day they weren't, it appeared to be a day when half the population was spending a really hot summer day watching other people kick a ag of wind up and down a field.

Also annoying was the fact that I'd driven into town to pick up SWMBO, do some shopping in Tesco & go home for lunch. We decided to eat in town and were about to pass on the shopping but I decided that as we'd parked there it would only be fair to use the shop, otherwise we'd have been out, having bought nothing, in under the time limit.

It seems that Tesco don't actually want you to shop in their stores. It's amused me since to note how their market share has shrunk over the years and realise that my absence has contributed a good few £k to that by now. And the real irony is that as they'd outsourced the car park they probably had no idea about the letter and that that's why my card suddenly stopped being used; so much for their alleged expertise in number-crunching.

It's ace that UK.gov 'in 2030 will be joined up, trusted and responsive' – but what about now?

Re: 140 automations in operation ... which entails many thousands of bots

"whilst recruiting some people who have a clue and experience"

Experience shows that they haven't done that in the past. A change of tack now seems unlikely.

"Everything GDS talked about was design."

Well, colour me astonished - with lots of white space.

Switch about to get real: Openreach bod on the challenge of shuttering UK's copper phone lines

"if we can spot all those challenges early on, we can do something about them"

Discuss them at length at senior management level without reaching a decision with the possibility that those at the sharp end will sort it out in spite of all the roadblocks senior management put in their way.

Yes, I have worked at BT. Why do you ask?

Re: For 2025 read 2075

"I have no idea who's responsibility this is"

In practice, the customer I'd guess.

"Unlike the digital TV switchover, people aren't going to buy new phones/sockets and do it themselves."

There may be a built in assumption that people will be expected to buy new phones.

Re: Bye Bye Fax

The other weekend there was article in the Times magazine about Deep Mind in the NHS. The reporter was being shown round a participating hospital where there was fax (sneer), pager (sneer) and a PC system. The PCs would regularly crash which might explain why these sneered at old technologies were still in use.

The Deep Mind bit was picking up creatine levels from haematology and sending an alert to a nephrologist. To send the alert they were using a purpose written app for the nephrologists' phones. IOW they were reinventing the pager (sneer) for the phone but only for one of the many possible alerts that might need to be sent out.

I suppose that as this magic bullet gets extended to other conditions for which an alert might be needed we'll get Matt Hanckock's wet dream: a multitude of HNS apps for the doctors' phones. Eventually someone might realise the toll taken on the performance of the phone and come up with an all purpose alert app. They could call it Pager.

Chef roasted for tech contract with family-separating US immigration, forks up attempt to quash protest

I'm not convinced politics equates that colsely to morals and ethics. It should be the case but all too often isn't.

The guy made it available under some FOSS licence, the company seems to have abided by that licence.

In fact they seem not to have. The licence is the Apache licence: https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

See in secont 4.c: "You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works" (my emphasis). As far as I can understand from the article they have not done so.

German ministry hellbent on taking back control of 'digital sovereignty', cutting dependency on Microsoft

Re: The lack of OSS money has been noticed for a while

"as this article points out, is vulnerable to being bought out by more unscrupulous companies with large cash piles like MS/Goog."

Or even IBM. But from the business's point of view, as opposed to the users', that could be part of the business plan.

Re: About time.

" If you wanted to clone Office you can, but that’s a really big job."

Just as well somebody's done it. I use one of those clones every day.

"Germany and the EU would be better off using their influence (carrot and stick) to shape MS to their needs."

Much easier and cheaper to drop some Euros to the Document Foundation if they need something specific that's not already in there.

Re: About time.

It might be worth your reading up why, after WWII, it was decided that international cooperation in Europe was a good thing.

Re: "but they tend to retain support for legacy stuff"

Actually, until now Microsoft retained support for "legacy stuff" far more than open source.

The issue with Microsoft was the other way around. By periodically updating the format it meant your "legacy" version of Office couldn't open the .doc or whatever file someone sent from their more recent version so you had to buy the new as well.

The open approach is to set the file format as a standard and stick to it so our old version of the S/W will open and use a file written by the latest version or even from some other application using the same standard. Microsoft got its arm twisted to use an open standard so they got their own, reportedly of dubious clarity.

he business case has to should include the contingencies for the cloud being inaccessible, just like an 'in-house' plan business continuity by having multiple data centres, mirrored server instances etc etc

FTFY

If the driver is cost will those contingencies be included. Maybe, but very likely only after the need for them has been cogently demonstrated by an outage.

Re: Do you want to be held hostage by Microsoft?

In any case big distros ship with a fairly full set of applications so the patch info will be mostly "everything". At best it might tell them about Gnome vs KDE vs XFCE vs whatever else.

Re: Yep

They can come back but it would require some effort to rebuild the organisation. Effort that the C-suite would be unwilling and/or unable to exert.

"Are Microsoft taking the piss ?"

When weren't they?

Re: Do you want to be held hostage by Microsoft?

And ISTR a rather vague statement somewhere that implied the German data trustee arrangement was no longer operative. If that's so it was withdrawn with a lot less publicity than it was announced.

"I wish them luck but we all know the inevitable backhanders and brown envelopes will stop this in it's tracks."

It seems to have done so at city level but maybe not at national govt. level. Microsoft can't open regional offices all over Germany.

Re: Do you want to be held hostage by Microsoft?

"If you want sovereignty & security then don't use another country's software."

And certainly don't use another country's servers.

Open-source companies gather to gripe: Cloud giants sell our code as a service – and we get the square root of nothing

Re: In a normal universe

"They are not volunteers if they are paid by someone to write the code."

Yup, but it was you who described them as volunteers in the first place. If you care to read the article it's not individuals complaining about this, it's companies. Their problem seems to be that they wanted to start S/W companies, decided that some sort of FOSS licence was cool and used that, not having worked out whether it was appropriate for their business model. There are a number of models that do seem to work. One is the Red Hat 1.0, give away the product and sell support (Red Hat 2.0 is being so successful that IBM pays good money to buy yo out). Another is the Intel model where you sell some H/W and provide FOSS drivers. A less publicly visible model is that you need some particular FOSS S/W and either do some debugging or add new features and contribute back to the project.

Class-action lawsuit claims DXC 'selectively timed' job cuts to inflate short-term profit target

"The Register has heard anecdotal evidence"

Whilst science doesn't usually care for anecdotal evidence in forensic circles it's called witness statements.

And good to hear of shareholders taking a class action against manglement and not against the corporation, i.e. themselves.

Exploding super-prang asteroid to pepper Earth, trigger deadly ice age – no, wait, it happened 466 million years ago

Re: Units?

Good point.

Re: I'm getting a bit tired of this silliness

I'm looking for S/W that can collate dates expressed in forms such as "Thursday after the Feast of St. Luke the Evangelist, 8 Edw. II." or "the Morrow of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, in the first year of King Edward s. of King Edward".

Re: Units?

I was wondering what a semi-truck is in Wales per linguine.

Congratulations! You finally have the 10Mbps you're legally entitled to. Too bad that's obsolete

"vastly subsidised by tax payers in the cities."

Check out the link in my comment above.

Imagine if Facebook could read your mind: Er, I have some bad news for you...

Re: Faraday's titfer

What was that about fools and money? Well done to someone for spotting an opportunity.

Re: Gym

Sorry, only one upvote available.

Re: EMF sensitivity could be real.

Switch mode PSU emitting ultrasound?

Re: Proposed card:

The stork attempted your delivery three times but there was nobody in. Left under your neighbour's gooseberry bush.

Re: Ze Linky

Italics use em tags (for emphasis), bold uses b tags. Contrary to opinion in certain quarters these are a much better way to gain consideration for your arguments than SHOUTING. (Strike-through uses s tags.)

"Has anyone actually measured the EM output that's radiated from any complained about Linky?"

Why worry about stuff like that if there's compensation to be had?

Re: Gyms

I'm not going to waste my precious energy like that. It might run out.

BOFH: What's the Gnasher? Why, it's our heavy-duty macerator sewage pump

Re: Great, I'm now that consultant

They probably daren't do that either.

And I was sure it was going to be the bodies buried under the concrete that were smelling.

Call-center scammer loses $9m appeal in stunning moment of poetic justice

Re: Actual effect?

"it's beyond their ability to provide a way for the recipients to know the origin"

It isn't* and if they were legally obliged to do that they would.

* Allowing for the fact they might only be able to label it as "International" which should be enough.

Re: I believe the word all y'all are looking for is ...

Even worse, the White Hart in Holmfirth went through being Brambles and has arrived at Harvey's. It seems to have been a popular pub name in the area. Could they all date back to Richard II?

Re: Congratulations! You've been pardoned! We're connecting you to an operator now...

I don't get many but I think it's because when I get one I ask the caller to hang on a moment and put the phone to one side for a while before hanging up. I consider it a public duty to keep them from calling anyone else for as long a s possible but I think it's got me blacklisted.

Re: Revenge and justice are very closely related. You'll learn that as you get older.

"It's fine for the state to administer justice. It's not fine for the state to administer revenge."

There's also a need for the state to administer deterrence but i'm not sure where that fits in between justice and revenge.

Always read carefully before you sign.

Belgian F-16 pilot rescued from power line after emergency ejection

Out of the fire into the frying-pan.

We asked for your Fitbit horror stories and, oh wow, did you deliver: Readers sync their teeth into 'junk' gizmos

I think it works like this:

You post something which is a matter of opinion somebody disagrees with and they can argue against it.

You post something which is self-evident and somebody who disagreed with it can say to themselves "Oh, that's right" and move on or, if they can't manage that they downvote it. As a further measure they seek out other posts be the same poster and downvote those as well.

Look on those downvotes as an acknowledgement.