Posts by Doctor Syntax

'They took away our Cup-a-Soup!' Share your tales of bleak breakout areas with us

"downgraded the staffers' coffee machine to a cheaper, crapper one"

I really hope you meant "crappier" and not "crapper". Not that it makes much difference to my view of coffee.

Customer: We fancy changing a 25-year-old installation. C'mon, it's just one extra valve... Only wafer thin...

"Unless you have a complete, working, development suite, which can run on modern hardware (even in a virtualised environment), ... then it's just not going to be worth playing with it."

Unfortunately, even if you don't have that when there's a few million quids-worth of industrial plant paying lots of wages involved somebody has to play with it. It's what's called legacy. It might be ancient, creaky and undocumented but it's what brings in the money to pay for all the new shiny. Despise it at your peril.

Re: Line editor without echo...

"VIM is actually the chosen one"

Vim? Beware of cheap imitations. My first contact with it was enough to teach me never to trust it.

I fired it up to tidy up a file that came from an MS box including removing the ^Ms off of the line endings. I discovered it had been set up to "helpfully" hide them. If vim is prepared to hide those what else might the lying little bastard choose to hide? Any time I set up a Linux box one of the first steps it to replace vim with nvi.

Re: Line editor without echo...

vi is only a line editor in ex mode.

In normal mode if the terminal uses escape sequences delays like those described bugger up the timing so badly the escapes get misinterpreted. In particular you get the situation where an escape sequence with a tilde in it is strung out so the tilde is seen as a character in its own right and flips the case of whatever character the cursor's on. So, no, he wouldn't have been using vi. Maybe its alter ego ex or ed. ANd that assumes the server was running HP-UX; I've not idea what editor's on the non-Unix HP jobs.

Re: Valves!?

But tubes just run straight through. Valves control things.

Re: Valves!?

And me. And seriously disappointed to discover it wasn't.

Re: my line of defense against this:

It's a well established fact in my family that I fix Windows by installing Linux and not as a trendy sub-system either.

Surprise, surprise, yet another cryptocurrency creator collared, hit with $6 million fraud rap

Caveat emptor

You have to wonder about the motivation of those who buy into something like this. Greed, presumably.

And can we be sure Randall Crater isn't simply a lunar feature?

Brave claims its mobe browser batt use bests whatever you're using. Why? Hint: It begins with A then D then V...

Following the hint by using letters...

Let's just work though this scenario:

Advertiser A* pays advertising middleman W** to place adverts. W pays site owner S to let their add be shown on a page I view. I see the advert and am annoyed. being annoyed I am less likely to buy whatever it is that A wants me to buy. A has paid good money to make it less likely to achieve their goal. A, if only they knew would be unhappy. I'm unhappy. W and S are happy because they get paid.

Now let's modify it:

A pays W, W pays S, S tries to send the ad but I block it. I don't see the add and thus bear A no grudge. W is happy, S is happy, I'm happy. What about A. A, if rational, is also happy. They'd have paid W and S the same amount if I had seen the add but now the outcome for them is neutral, not negative. In a rational world (not an easy concept where advertising is concerned), A, W and S should all be content to accept my ad blocker because they all gain from it.

* Note that the advertiser is someone with goods or services to sell, not the advertising network. The money that fuels this entire scenario is the money that A hopes I will pay to purchase such goods or services.

** W. You should be able to decode this one.

Re: sigh

"the electricity cost is absolutely negligible compared to the annoyance of seeing the ads."

And here's the crux of the matter. The advertisers are being royally ripped off. They're paying to piss off potential customers.

I have to repeat this: the only thing the advertising industry sells is advertising. If you're in a business and somebody in the advertising industry is trying to sell you advertising all he's interested in is taking your money. It makes no difference to him whether you make net gains or losses of customers, just as long as you pay.

Re: sigh

"You aren't paying for ... the internet connection used to deliver it to you."

Yes I am. And given the amount of advertising shoved down the internet that connection ought to be cheaper without the bandwidth it consumes.

Three-quarters of crucial border IT systems at risk of failure? Bah, it's not like Brexit is *looks at watch* err... next month

Re: Ha

"you appear remarkably willing to ignore what business is actually telling the government about Brexit."

It's just project fear, as is everything else he doesn't want to believe.

"The two groups have been tracking the government's prep for border control in the event of no deal"

It doesn't sound as if they need to put much effort into it. Ring round the suspects once a day - or even once a week: "What have you done?" "Not a lot.".

Oh no, look out, Google, Facebook, and pals. You're doomed. Here comes another watchdog to, er, nip at your ankles

"And Facebook would today be a lot more irrelevant had it not purchased Instagram which is used by a lot of young people who prefer it over Facebook."

This is the point where you really have a monopoly: the incumbent can simply buy up the competition and close it or run it, whichever makes most money.

Nuisance call boss gets 8-year ban after trying to dodge firms' £700k fines

Re: Yep.

"It'll be his son, or his daughter, or the Mrs., or son-in-law, or Frat brother, or ... all the crooks do it, BECAUSE THEY CAN."

At which point the penalties become personal. Personal fines or time inside.

Re: Director? Who me?

"Or Mrs Jones"

Then he and whoever fronts for him could both land inside. That's assuming he tells whoever it is that they're fronting for him. If he doesn't then he can end up inside for a bit longer.

Vodafone exec dons tartan tam-o'-shanter, clutches bottle of Irn-Bru, in snap shared with firm... just before Glasgow staff told of redundo dates

Re: Not the only telco..

"I like it and will use it often thank you."

Y're welcome. The Brexit preparedness thread is over there --->

Re: Not the only telco..

"Obviously hasn't worked at BT/Openreach then?"

Yup. I always object to outsiders criticising BT management. You have to have worked there to be properly vituperative about them.

Alternatively those in positions of management think they need to communicate this way with the kids who comprise their staff.

The biggest uptick in demand for software devs by bosses is for... *rubs eyes* blockchain engineers?!?

Re: WTF is a...

"Search Engineer? Is it someone spending their working day looking up stuff on Google?"

Maybe it someone who writes stuff that searches Google and then filters out all the false positives.

Re: "A 2017 Stack Overflow survey singled out Perl as the most hated coding language"

"Sadly, for some programmers I've encountered, the opportunity to sadistically use such features and demonstrate that they are in some way superior seems to be a matter of misguided personal pride."

Until they make the mistake of staying in one job long enough to find themselves maintaining their own code.

Companies, he said, appear to be keen to build blockchains but there isn't enough blockchain talent to meet demand.

Mystery solved. Manglement will never get disillusioned about anything until they've tried and failed* and they cen't even recruit the staff to try.

* To be followed by wise-sounding comments about how it's better to have tried and failed than never wasted the company's money tried.

I say, that sucks! Crooks are harnessing hoovers to clean out parking meters in Chelsea

Mobile car valets are going to get pulled in for questioning fairly often.

US Supremes urged by pretty much everyone in software dev to probe Oracle's 'disastrous' Java API copyright win

Re: This is not a problem

Day 5:- US wonders what happened to its tech industry.

Day 6:- Discovers it moved overseas.

Re: Feature list?

"t requires only that one of your employees to read a competitor product review in some scandalous web sites to throw your cleanroom implementation to illegal area"

A product review is not a listing of the software.

I note. BTW, you seem to be arguing on behalf or Oracle here ("Our position is that" a few posts above). Some of us have the greater good of the entire software culture at heart. Not Google's interest. Not Microsoft's. Not the US tech industry's although that has most to lose. Just the interests of those who enjoy or at least live by software development and enjoy the products of that development. The interests of a culture that, for some of us has extended beyond a working life time. We think Oracle has taken a line here that runs entirely counter to what we understand to be the norms of that culture and industry because if they succeed the result will be toxic, at least for software development in the US. Given the fact that Oracle is part of that industry it will suffer the long term consequences along with the rest.

Re: Wow. Some just don't get it.

"Or got it right, but the law is wrong or deficient?

History is full of courts radically revising what is acceptable, usually when an actor takes the existing gray area and drives a truck through it."

One of the aspects of law is that when it's laid down in legislation it's done by legislators who aren't omniscient (definitely not!!) and can't anticipate the ways it can be applied. We then have judges who can take the law, the particular circumstances of a corner case and say how it should be interpreted in those particular circumstances to provide the best fit. And the higher up the chain it goes it's likely that the circumstances, as here, need to take into account the public good. That way the interpretation of the law can be adapted to suit requirements the legislators didn't and maybe couldn't have anticipated.

It looks like here we have one of those circumstances where an actor has driven a truck through one of the grey areas. It's now up to the courts to come up with a decision as to what the best interpretation of fair use in regard to APIs. And with almost an entire industry lined up in the form of amicus curiae briefs saying more or less the same thing it's difficult to escape the conclusion that (a) the public good is involved and (b) the interpretation given in the previous court does not match what the public (in the form of those working in the area) expect it to be or previously understood it to be. That seems to me to be a circumstance where the court needs to look at that previous decision and provide a new ruling that reflects the industry view of what's workable.

Re: Feature list?

" In current internet based development practises, the cleanroom is bad position to take, since your programmers have access to the information coming from your competitors via internet."

The cleanroom implementations of BIOS were, AIUI, done by reimplementation of a a list of procedure calls without access to the actual source code of what was being implemented. Did Google's developers actually have access to any implementations other than macros defined in include files?

And get sued by Oracle because it's API is too close to Java's.

Re: @Graham Before people get in to a panic...

"So the court doesn't care that it's software industry, or that software industry has always worked this way; rather the law says you can't rip off someone else's product unless you meet these criteria."

Originally the law was built as a means of respecting customs. In fact one of the reasons behind introducing juries in the first place is that they can say what the custom is in a particular community. Nowadays it seems that that particular role has fallen to amicus curiae briefs.

Re: Microsoft's position has some issues

The names and labels of the software modules are NOT the copyrighted content that the oracle is complaining about. Instead, analysis should be done based on "feature list" of the platforms.

In that case Oracle clearly doesn't have a leg to stand on because the feature list of Java is the feature list of previous platforms. On that basis there must be a score of other businesses that could sue Oracle into the ground, not only over that feature list but also over the feature list of SQL.

Re: Wow. Some just don't get it.

"I really suggest people actually read the actual judgement.

It explains why the courts did what they did."

The reason the justice system has multiple layers of appeal is that sometimes courts get it wrong.

In this case you have almost the entire software industry, having had innumerable well-paid lawyers read the actual judgement, saying that, in respect of APIs, the courts got this one wrong.

Re: @Graham Before people get in to a panic...

Pretty well the entire software industry is saying that fair use requires a different interpretation to that which the court gave in order for software development to continue. But you're arguing that the court knew more about software development than the industry.

Is that a fair summary?

Up up and Huawei in my beautiful buffoon: Trump sparks panic by tying tech kit ban, charges to China trade negotiations

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6747591/Scientists-turn-carbon-dioxide-coal-world-first.html

Can't these people read press releases properly? That was supposed to be embargoed until April 1st.

Insane homeowners association tries to fine resident for dick-shaped outline car left in snow

Samuel Johnson's reply seems appropriate here.

LG's new gesture UI for mobes, while technically interesting, is still a little hand-wavy at the mo

" air gesture interfaces haven't taken off – they make you look silly"

I can't see that being any impediment to their use, they'd just become another set of group-identifying fads. The only real problem would be that they'd conflict with that other silly fad - talking at a mobile phone held flat in front of the user's face.

Tech industry titans suddenly love internet privacy rules. Wanna know why? We'll tell you

Re: Abroad?

"Threaten a tit-for-tat, especially if they sell something in demand in Europe, like say iPhones."

That'll be the Chinese made iPhones?

You're saying that a response to some US corporations finding it difficult to trade with Europe would be to forbid another another US corporation from doing the same. It doesn't sound to me like a rational response but I suppose you know your president better than I do.

Re: Abroad?

"How will they enforce it?"

Issue fines for non-compliance. No establishment in the EU? Court order to the company's banker's branch in the EU. Finding a bank with no establishment in the EU? More difficult. Finding a bank that won't throw you, a customer, under a bus if they need to? Impossible.

Re: Abroad?

"Plus what if they counter with a home law that runs directly counter to it, creating a sovereignty conflict?"

They have two choices. One is ignore that market - nobody's compelling them to do business in the EU if they want to cut themselves off from it. The other is to move HQ or at least set up a subsidiary or franchise operation to service the market. You decide to do business in some country, you follow that country's laws, whatever they are just like you've done with other laws way back.

Re: "Except, of course," it doesn't address the data gathering process

Not sure what you mean here.

Essentially GDPR is a requirement on what you do to offer services to a resident in the EU. There's nothing particularly unusual about legislation and regulation applying to doing business somewhere. It would be unusual if there weren't. So if a company, irrespective of where its corporate HQ is wants to do business with EU residents then GDPR is simply one of the things they have to take into account. If they don't like it they don't have to offer their services there, they can just forego a large market and see what their shareholders think about that.

IBM so very, very sorry after jobs page casually asks hopefuls: Are you white, black... or yellow?

Re: Race Obsessed

"Racism is part of American DNA."

Really? What gene governs it?

Re: Aren't we becoming too sensitive to everything???

"we even expect to see these options while picking ethnicity"

The fundamental problem is being required to pick ethnicity, not the choices.

"I'm indigenous to Yorkshire."

It's saddening to think there are those who aren't.

But age discrimination is fine mandatory

Re: Better the slur than the hypocrisy

"The trouble is that a lot of people don't care and they accept this kind of intrusions on their privacy and on their ideas. Private companies should not be allowed to collect such information."

Maybe it would be worth reapplying. If they're using the same questions you could grass them up under GDPR.

Re: optional

"So the options are insulting but the question is not?"

In due course I'm quite sure it will be so considered. What passes for normal in one generation is despised in the next, especially by those not old enough to remember.

Re: On a similar topic ...

"Sapiens/Neanderthalensis/Denisovan/Hobbit"

The jury's out on whether that's racist or speciesist.

Re: There's A Bit Of A Slope On It

"Clarkson said it with a little girn on his face."

Clarkson usually says everything with a little grin on his face. Exceptions include "Where's my steak?".

The case of the missing 300 Swiss francs: WIPO fires CIO following probe into allegations of fraud

Why, when I read this, did I think of Peter Hain?

Wanted: DVLA CTO. Must love cloud, open standards, agile – and retiring outdated kit

"They should be able to create component-based architectures, be used to using open standards and cloud native applications, and ensure IT services are resilient and systems comply with GDPR."

The rest of it's a matter of how you do things. Complying with GDPR is first and foremost a matter of what you do and a matter of policy for the organisation as a whole. That we repeatedly see this as something to be handed to IT (who will then be blamed when it goes wrong) is a matter for some concern.

In a galaxy far, far away, aliens may have eight-letter DNA – like the kind NASA-backed boffins just crafted

Re: The laws governing biological reactions are the same everywhere. Time will tell, but...

"The parallel with computing is obvious."

It also raises a problem. What do you do with all the S/W when you don't have any H/W?