Posts by Doctor Syntax

BOFH: Putting the commitment into committee

"Marketing still gave me a stiff talking to, and made me read the document, before I was allowed a copy of the file though."

Didn't you ask them to check your stock of paper in the store room? The store room with no door handle on the inside.

Heaps of Windows 10 internal builds, private source code leak online

Re: Perhaps someone can use it no make the windows 10 we want

It's the logical extension. The Home and Professional versions turn the user community into beta testers. It's only natural to let them bug-fix it as well.

"If this gets installed on your computer it will save all of your important data in an impenetrable format, making it almost impossible to get it out."

It also opens up your computer to being spied on, advertised to and updated & rebooted at inconvenient times.

Russian hackers selling login credentials of UK politicians, diplomats – report

Re: What Is The Policy For MP's E-Mail ?

"My previous MP had surname suffixed by initials @parliament.uk."

Mine had $FirstName.$[e-mail] so the format isn't fixed.

"Apart from confidentiality, I'd have hoped that parliament required MPs to use @parliament.uk both to reassure people they weren't mailing a spoof address"

With you so far.

"and so that all official communications could be recorded"

Nope. Let's say you have a woman suffering from an abusive husband not getting sufficient help from Social Services or the Police who contacts her MP. It's a privileged communication so should not become a matter of official record. That's why the intelligence services are not supposed to tap MPs' communications; a point which is widely misunderstood.

Let's hope it helps them understand what we keep telling them about encryption?

Florida Man to be fined $1.25 per robocall... all 96 million of them

Re: Where do the fines go?

"They should of course go to those who were called. Automatic credit on their phone bill. NO LAWYERS involved, please!"

My thoughts exactly. Dial some code. The telecoms company charges the caller number - the real one, not the spoof, as if the recipient was a premium number. The company also adds a commission. The call comes in via a different telecoms company? No problem, just bill them and let them charge the caller, adding their own commission. It would need some policing - it would be unacceptable to let recipients flag anyone who called them - but the first claims against a number could be held until there were sufficient to ensure that it was a problem caller. The only way out for the robocaller would be to fail to pay their bill. That's just a matter for the credit control department of the telecoms company to deal with.

Ex-NASA bod on Gwyneth Paltrow site's 'healing' stickers: 'Wow. What a load of BS'

"when they start to project those beliefs onto kids it becomes beyond harmful"

As in http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-40274493

Re: High level spirit

"I had a bottle of Indian Whisky recently and it was rather drinkable. Can't remember the name though."

Are the drinkability and failure to remember connected in any way?

Doormat junk: Takeaway menus, Farmfoods flyer, NHS data-sharing letter... wait, what?

Re: "exciting long-term project"

"The BBC understands that in the new deal there will be no opt-out for patients who do not wish to share their data."

There will be. It's called GPDR.

Alex Price-Forbes, chief disinformation officer for Coventry and Rugby Clinical Commissioning Group.

That seems to fit a little better.

PC rebooted every time user flushed the toilet

@smudge

I've had the lift problem - someone took the decision to install the server next door to the lift. And the igniter for a stabilised Xenon illuminator was as effective as the X-ray machine.

UK and Ecuador working on Assange escape mechanism

Re: The worst thing in the world for Assange...

"discredit Assange as a paranoid nutjob. But given who's running the place at the moment"

Takes one to know one.

Lordy! Trump admits there are no tapes of his chats with Comey

Re: Bah!

Vote Republican. "We Got Nothin".

But do they have plenty of it?

Re: It only gets worse

"You must have enjoyed yesterday's Queen's Speech, which St Theresa used to make it clear she was not going to go ahead with everything she'd promised in her election manifesto."

Remember that the Queen's Speech only covers 2 years of a 5 year Parliament (or so May hopes) so on that basis you wouldn't expect all the manifest to be in it. Whether the Parliament will last for 5 years and how long May will remain PM are matters that remain to be seen.

Remember also that without an overall majority what a government actually achieves is going to be a compromise between the parties which form the consequent government and there's always going to eb something that gets dropped; just ask the Lib-Dems.

And last but not least "Events, dear boy, events".

Why do I see that and read "I just played back the tapes and discovered Comey was right."?

UCL ransomware attack traced to malvertising campaign

Re: Footnote

unless those PCs are running ... some decent up-to-date anti-malware software adblocker

Two Brits nabbed amid probe into global plot to hack Microsoft network

Maybe their defence will be based on "they started it, so there.".

Waymo: We've got a hot smoking gun in Uber 'tech theft' brouhaha

Re: How cute...

Did nobody ever tell them: "when you're in a hole, stop digging."?

Canadian sniper makes kill shot at distance of 3.5 KILOMETRES

"t's gonna be going very slowly at the end."

IIRC someone was killed in S Belfast by a stray from N Belfast which must be a comparable distance.

However I did for a while, have some sort of handgun round* on my desk with a nice fibre impression on it; it was said to have been stopped by an ordinary nylon jacket.

*Don't ask. I wasn't a ballistics expert. Someone just passed it to me do a fabric comparison.

Cheeky IT rival parks 'we're hiring' van outside 'vote Tory' firm Storm Technologies

Re: How would Storm know?

"the hung parliament doesn't look like it's going to get much done any time soon"

Given the alternatives I find this the best I could have hoped for it it weren't for having the DUP along for the ride - and anything they can get out of it.

Re: How would Storm know?

"Neither the Tories or labour (or any other party for that matter) have a monopoly on dickheads in their ranks"

Unfortunately none of them seem to have an absence of dickheads either.

Re: How would Storm know?

"We have a secret ballot"

Exactly. From this distance it looks rather like an attempt at humour. Either that or the bloke has never voted so didn't know how it works.

Lenovo re-launches data centre range with two new ThinkThing lines

Are these intended for the Internet of Thinks?

I'll just hang my coat up, it's too warm here.

Gov digitisation plans happening too slowly, say IfG policy wonks. Hear that, GDS?

"GDS has done more good for them than anything previously."

You forgot the joke icon.

Microsoft admits to disabling third-party antivirus code if Win 10 doesn't like it

Re: Nothing new under the sun

" I know the feedback will be ignored. "

Not necessarily. Next time round it'll be looking for renamed CCleaner.

IBM's contractor crackdown continues: Survivors refusing pay cut have hours reduced

Re: team leaders are offered a new tool

"I'm sure they and their subordinates already know where to find the tools."

Don't be too sure. They may be unable to find their arses with both hands and a map.

Re: $100+/hour Multi-Client Contracting + Continuity Income Guide

"2) Network big time - Attend Meetups. Speak at Meetups/Conferences. Participate in forums."

Let me add another to that. Work on jobs for one client that involve collaboration with other businesses future clients.

Re: The 'Hours Plan'

"Or the Process Management Process."

Or the Process Management Report Process Report.

Re: It is a compensation problem, not a capitalism problem

"If senior management is being compensated in a way that encourages short term thinking - quarterly results"

This is an area where governments could actually make a difference: ban reporting at less than annual intervals. Yup, I know the arguments. But consider the possibility that the benefits might outweigh the disadvantages.

Re: Abuse, plain and simple.

"my contract has always included language preventing me from working, directly or indirectly, for that customer for a couple years or so"

It sounds like you have a badly written an IR35 caught contract, at least in UK terms.

The contract should be between ClientCo or AgencyCo and YourCo not you. As someone said in a previous comment, start YourCo2 which never had such a contract.

Re: This is just another proof...

that unbridled Capitalism has MBAs have managed to create an environment in which the company's own management is also the company's worst enemy

"It's also another proof that our governments are either criminal or criminally stupid."

Governments appoint MBAs to run companies? Some businesses have been run well, some run badly since businesses existed. Good businesses have fallen prey to bad management. What's it to do with government?

"You might recall a recent story about Lloyds outsourcing to IBM.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/06/lloyds_confirms_ibm_cloudy_outsourcing/"

However, there's also https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/20/ibm_xeon_only_discount/

How does IBM keep winning outsourcing contracts if things are that bad?

FTFY

Re: Abuse, plain and simple.

"End result? Contractor still looking for a new contract"

End result, if they've any wit, contractor still supporting ex-IBM customer and divvying up IBM's slice between them. Sort of having your cake and eating it.

Re: “be forced to reduce their CLAIMED hours by 15 per cent.”

Might as well just say "Anybody who can get a job elsewhere, please do so."

Or this:

“In the last seven months I've pretty much worked constantly with five of my former clients, who have hired me directly to do the same work they can no longer find anybody at IBM to do.”

Non-compete clauses? IBM is repudiating its own contracts so it might have a hard time enforcing them.

Oxford profs tell Twitter, Facebook to take action against political bots

Re: Nope, the truth is not relative

"Did anyone claim a statement of fact? All he said is that they are true statements."

That's the point. They were statements but meaningless because they were incomplete. You have to be prepared to examine statements critically in order to understand what they actually mean - which might not be the same as what they appear to say.

Let's just call them Anti-social Media and have done with it. As they deteriorate to white noise maybe we should ask if their time has passed.

Re: Nope, the truth is not relative

"Water contains 66.6% hydrogen

Water contains 11.8% hydrogen"

Neither is a statement of fact. A statement of fact would include whether by weight or by number of atoms.

Stack Clash flaws blow local root holes in loads of top Linux programs

Re: Security 101: If they're sitting at the computer...

"But at least you can be reasonably assured that this particular hole will be patched when all the libraries go over their code with a fine toothed comb."

That's already been done.

Email from my email provider yesterday to say they were going to reboot last night because of that. Laptop has just been updated this morning. I'll reboot as soon as I've posted this.

Done and dusted.

'OK, everyone. Stop typing, this software is DONE,' said no one ever

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

NSA had NFI about opsec: 2016 audit found laughably bad security

And yet one of its jobs, as with GCHQ here, is to help secure national IT infrastructure. Is this a case of the cobbler's children or is it equally poor at its assigned task? And if NSA is that bad what of GCHQ?

I suppose they're both too busy spying on us.

Re: Can't wait till ISIS recruits infiltrate the NSA....

They haven't?

Microsoft's new Surface laptop defeats teardown – with glue

Re: Nonsense

"What are you going to replace?"

The battery.

Re: Does Microsoft offer an exchange program too?

"The only time a user has to repair a laptop is if it fails after the 3 year warranty period but before it so outdated as to be no longer useful"

Never mind repair - what about replacing a battery?

2 kool 4 komputing: Teens' interest in GCSE course totally bombs

Re: Lets be realistic

"When I was at school we all had to do woodwork and metalwork - subjects for working class kids that were supposed to start working with our hands to make stuff."

I have a certain degree of sympathy with this point of view. Yes we had that sort of class and school and I discovered that basically I wasn't much good at it.

And yet an attitude that if you want stuff you can make it is important. I acquired it not so much from school as from my dad. Right now I'm sitting in the house that he built; not had built but built himself (OK, over the years I mixed a fair bit of mortar, concrete and Thistle by hand). Because he'd grown up with that attitude and also had the aptitude to go with it. Roll forward to post-grad times and, after a week's introductory FORTRAN (the first day of it missed because SWMBO and self hadn't got back from a week's field work) I discovered that if I wanted a program I could and did write it myself; I'd finally discovered an aptitude to go with the attitude. I eventually built a second career out of that.

"Schools should focus on teaching pupils a good grounding in Maths, the 3 Primary Sciences & English."

Actually the computing could be woven into those.

Back in the blimey-is-it-nearly-60-years-ago days at school the physics lab had a couple of spectroscopes with diffraction gratings. Working out how to get the 2nd order image of the sodium doublet and at least the first order of the neon that was present in the sodium lamb was a grounding for serious experimental work in later life. Now imagine if such kit (assuming schools still have such things) were combined with a stepper motor, a sensor and an RPi to automatically acquire spectra. That's how computing skills could be acquired along with ordinary lessons.

"Someone thinks that page description markup has to do with CS"

Of course it does. Rory Cellan-Jones says it's "coding" so it must be right.

"I know that I can get a team of 4 brilliant developers from the Philippines for the cost of 1 contractor from the UK. I also know that I dont need to be in the same room, building or country as they are for them to work well."

You've missed an important point. You think they don't need to be in the same room etc. In fact there's a lot to be said for developers - we used to call them analyst/programmers - being able to talk to the people who were doing the work your S/W would be helping them with. That way you would find out what was actually needed. You could maybe fast-prototype something and get feedback.

Your 1 contractor in the UK, if carefully selected, working with the end user will be worth the money. The actual cost might work out closer than you thought and you'd likely get better value for money via a better product.

"or work for the government"

Oi. I did that in science for some years and I can tell you pay and prospects were crap. You did not get to "skim off the top" in science in the Civils Service.