Posts by Doctor Syntax

Are you sure your disc drive has stopped rotating, or are you just ignoring the messages?

Re: Find the "A" key

after a relatively short while before buying it B.B.C (not *the* BBC, note) decided their acquisition was surplus to requirements a competitor and shuttered the place.

Likely alternative version.

"Person in charge of software testing asks"

Remember really old versions of Windows when the button on the top left of the window had an icon with a horizontal bar on it? I heard it said that a good software tester could look at that and see a minus sign.

Re: You've already had a second vote

"would have expected the Lib Dems, Greens, SNP and PC to have done much better in 2017 election"

The LibDems were still being punished by their erst-while protest-voting supporters for actually taking responsibility and joining a coalition government rather than being ineffective.

"2 referendum votes"

Well swerved! Adding "vote" to carry the plural.

Re: I can believe it!

That has the added advantage that it gets them to RTFM albeit in small snatches.

Re: I can believe it!

"i often find that it does not start printing unless you walk up to it."

You haven't terrified it enough. Try downloading and printing brochures for a replacement printer.

Re: Single sided floppies

Saying from back then: "There are eight ways to insert a disk into a drive. Only one is interesting."

Re: Users NEVER read on screen messages

Now the under-pinnings seem to be fairly common I wonder if it would work better if the error messages were "displayed" as speech.

Re: Error messages

"Many error messages (even in Windows) tell you exactly what you need to do to solve the problem at hand. Instead of heeding the message to reboot, add paper to printer, enter a missing value where the glaring red line of text tells them to, they call our (only slightly less clueless) helpdesk."

To be fair the users probably have difficulty distinguishing between these error messages and the huge number that don't.

Re: Find the "A" key

"Prank 2 was filling his cube with balloons"

Hah. Student days. Unpopular student was known to be about to take a long weekend away. Preparations were made. When he got back he found his room filled with lightly scrunched up newspaper.

"My bourne keyboard not good enough for your error messages?"

I was thinking more along the lines of ksh.

Re: all they want to know is the answer.

"Vatican University?"

Probably science practical classes. Been there. Lesson learned as tutor - first set up the microscope properly, even if you only set it up properly 2 minutes ago.

Re: You've already had a second vote

87% voted for parties of whom some supported Brexit and some opposed it.

FTFY

Re: I'm not even sure that half the developers read the prompts they are adding

I've probably also left the odd button lying around that does nothing but print "WIBBLE" or "BLAH", because that is just something I do as one of my program development stages.

Years ago I wrote a code generator. It dug into the database's system catalogs for a table descriptor, generated a data structure to hold a row, added code to emulate a scroll cursor which the database engine didn't have at that time, added a menu including some stubs and default code for queries, updates etc. The generated code had a default but harmless name on the menu with the idea that the generated code would then be edited to give the menu, prompts etc sensible text and flesh out the stubs as required. I took it with me on various jobs.

I was working with it on one job when I got an offer elsewhere I wasn't going to refuse and left PDQ.

Forward 11 years, now freelance, I had a gig to oversee some acceptance testing prior to a machine migration (Y2K). It turned out that they were using the now mature product from that old job. And there was a menu with the unchanged default text. I didn't look too deep but they were probably still running the no longer needed emulated scroll cursors. (We had the source on site and I suppose I could have finished that little task from way back but it would probably have caused confusion.)

Re: Similar but different experience

"ALWAYS give your boss (undeserved) credit."

Alternatively just go over his head. It's a judgement call based on knowledge of the boss and boss's boss.

Re: I'm not even sure that half the developers read the prompts they are adding

Or:

[Cancel cancel][Cancel] ?

IBM HR made me lie to US govt, says axed VP in age-discrim legal row: I was ordered to cover up layoffs of older workers

Like I said when her own claim was mentioned in an earlier article: don't upset someone who knows where the bodies are buried.

Tens to be disappointed as Windows 10 Mobile death date set: Doomed phone OS won't see 2020

Re: not missed any more

"used to push them over blackberries"

Didn't that scratch them?

DNAaaahahaha: Twins' 23andMe, Ancestry, etc genetic tests vary wildly, surprising no one

"This article just shows a total lack of understanding by the author and by the originating source."

Did you read the originating source? Did you notice the bit where the downloaded 123andMe data had 99.6% agreement? Can you, from your alleged understanding, explain how closely the parents would have to be related to each other to produce a result like that from non-fraternal twins? I don't think even the Hapsburgs could have managed it.

"Most of various DNA companies allow you to download the genetic data they have."

TFA has a link to https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/dna-ancestry-kits-twins-marketplace-1.4980976 Let's take a look:

"The team at Yale was able to download and analyze the raw data set that each company used to perform its calculations."

and

"According to the raw data from 23andMe, 99.6 per cent of those parts were the same, which is why Gerstein and his team were so confused by the results. They concluded the raw data used by the other four companies was also statistically identical."

I do, however, wonder about "identical" when qualified with the word "statistically". I'd have been inclined to say "indistinguishable" - and"were" rather than "was".

Re: Boffins or Bafoons?

"So, please don't bash the AC, he's as full of shit as I am"

Perhaps you're identical twins.

Re: No surprise

"Two tests for the same person vary by only a handful of SNPs. That is, there is noise, but it's not very loud. Different companies' tests report different SNP values, too. Again, very quiet noise."

Agreed. It must be the noise sensitivity of the "ethnicity" interpretation that accounts for the apparent difference between the sisters. In fact the major components are fairly close for any given pair of analyses. It's the smaller components which seem to be beneath the noise floor so to speak. Ancestry and MyHeritage seem to come out better on this basis.

The real problem is where the components get a geographical label attached. Humans have been wandering back and forth for some considerable time. Take any particular person from any particular place in Europe or round the Mediterranean (which seems to be what these figures are suggesting) and you'll have picked someone whose ancestors will of necessity have taken a long route - and a variety of long routes - to get to that place. Take a second person from some other place and their ancestral routes will also be long and varied and some of them will coincide with the first person's.

Add that up over the the European and Mediterranean area and then reflect how much sense it makes to try to work out what Greek or Italian or Balkan or any other of the labels means. It's no surprise that although Ancestry and MyHeritage can match the twins to each other within the noise limits they differ wildly from each other in what those mean when they try to sort out Italian from Balkan from Greek from Eastern Europe from Russia.

My ethnicity? 90% sceptic, 10% others.

Man drives 6,000 miles to prove Uncle Sam's cellphone coverage maps are wrong – and, boy, did he manage it

"So the drone data would not be very useful since most users are ground dwellers."

Can't drones land, or at least hover at about 5 or 6 feet? This isn't Gatwick we're talking about.

"Of course in reality many of those areas are not easily accessible, especially in a state with large urban areas, hills and mountains etc."

Even if it were only carried out one network at a time could the equipment be small enough to be carried by drone?

Oxford University reportedly turns off its Huawei money tap

Doesn't it all come down to Chinese manufacturers not playing ball by inserting 5-eyes backdoors?

I used to be a dull John Doe. Thanks to Huawei, I'm now James Bond!

Re: Conquest of Africa?

"But surely Keenyah (pronounced like that) is British ?"

I suppose JR-M, BoJo etc think that.

Lawyers' secure email network goes down, firm says it'll take 2 weeks to restore

As a lawyer representing himself has a fool for a client are they going to brief each other to sue?

Microsoft partner portal 'exposes 'every' support request filed worldwide' today

Re: Can't have exposed THAT many tickets...

"submit a ticket about being able to see other users tickets."

After that it's tickets all the way down.

Top GP: Medical app Your.MD's data security wasn't my remit

Re: "can be downloaded worldwide, and modified, without even a password"

"I get stick about this every day because it causes them inconvenience, mainly as they need to e-mail something to a group rather than e-mail a link."

Have you wondered if providing mutually acceptable users' problems might be part of you job?

"Wierd incoherent story with weird partial quotes that shed no light."

Don't forget this is a report of a cross-examination. A cross-examination isn't designed to shed light. It's designed to guide the witness into making admissions favourable to whatever side the cross-examiner's working for.

Happy Thursday! 770 MEEELLLION email addresses and passwords found in yuge data breach

I haven't even bothered checking if the email addresses I've used exclusively for PayPal are there. They will be because those numpties think it's a good idea to pass it on to every merchant even if it's also the logon ID. The only way to handle that would be to change the email after every purchase.

Why do so many businesses think that an email address is a good logon ID?

Re: Now is a good time to get a password manager app

"PW managers are the biggest risk out there."

You're probably thinking about online password managers. Big hint: there are ways of doing some computing tasks without using the internet. Managing passwords is one such task.

"Gotta scare the sheeple to buy our products."

What is this word "buy" of which you speak. Just download KeePassX or whatever variation fits your OS.

Do you feel 'lucky', well, do you, punk? Google faces down magic button patent claim

Re: connects a user to its top-raking search link

"that typo seems apposite"

Sceptic that I am I assumed "I feel lucky" to mean either a random link or the best paid advert which would have fitted "top-raking" exactly so never bother with it. I just decided to try it.

Anybody researching the Wordsworth family history knows the family originated in Penistone and also knows that a trawl for anything they might have overlooked by searching for those two names in combination reels in a mass of estate agent's ads. Developers are never shy on incorporating locally-linked famous names into their street names.

I wondered which would be Google's top-ranking, or -raking estate agent's add. And what happened? I got taken to the Nation Archives' page for the Wordsworth family papers in the Sheffield Archives.

$24m in fun bux stolen from crypto-mogul. Now he fires off huge fraud charge. Like, RICO, say?

Re: All the King's horses ...

"Security isn't easy."

Deciding not to - in effect - carry $24million in your phone is fairly easy.

Licence to chill: Shrinking data warehouse biz Teradata hires insider CEO

Back in the 80s there was something literally* awesome about such a name. Nowadays, when the first thing I do on buying or building a new laptop, PVR or whatever, is to install a 2 Tb or more drive which can be in a laptop drive form factor, it seems rather pedestrian.

* Yes, literally.

'It's like they took a rug and covered it up': Flight booking web app used by scores of airlines still vuln to attack – claim

Re: "Yet again you've let them get away with an anodyne statement"

"If you think the statement makes them look good"

We know it doesn't. But either (a) they think it does or (b) they know it doesn't but they don't care because they never get challenged to their faces so they and all the others will just do the same. They need to get taken to task.

"At Amadeus, we give security the highest priority and are constantly monitoring and updating all of our products and systems. We became alerted to an issue in one of our products and our technical teams took immediate action. We are working closely with our customers and we regret any disruption this situation may have caused,"

Yet again you've let them get away with an anodyne statement. Did you ask how bad it would have been if they didn't give security the highest priority?

The last sentence was puzzling until I realised their "customers" are the airlines, not those booking flights who obviously don't enter into the matter at all. Mustn't make life harder for airlines by making work (disruption) for them.

McKinsey’s blockchain warning irks crypto hipsters

"McKinsey is confused about the reasons blockchain isn't ramping that quickly. Their main reasons are related to ALL digital transformation projects, not just blockchain."

Would that have something to do with snake-oil?

If at first, second, third... fourth time you don't succeed, you're Apple: Another appeal lost in $440m net patent war

"his is only going to benefit lawyers and patent trolls"

Sole purpose of the change.

Germany has a problem with the entire point of Amazon's daft Dash buttons – and bans them

Re: er... so

"You can already easily return an order to Amazon at no cost if not happy."

So you waste time waiting for the substitute you didn't want to arrive and still have to go out and get the right thing and organise the return. The trouble some people will go to for the sake of convenience...

Re: A 'proper' use for the buttons

"How do you watch the 'Grand Tour' ?"

I don't. It was a straight choice.

"I remember using as a boy on my Grandparent outside loo."

You were lucky if that was your only exposure. Those of us older still remember it being the only choice other than squares of newspaper.

"I prefer to just section out the rear legs and loins"

Back in my University days my hall of residence kitchen had a firm rule that once a year they would serve rabbit stew which consisted mostly of ribs and vertebrae. It was over 50 years ago but the memory cannot be erased. Their termly offering of alleged macaroni cheese was another thing I'd prefer to forget but can't

Re: @doublelayer -- A simple idea

"he problem comes 3-5 years later when I've forgotten the password to the site"

For that there's KeePassX.

Re: @doublelayer -- A simple idea

"Why not stick to facts - mother's maiden name, mother or father's birthday, anniversary, number of siblings, etc. Those things don't change..."

... and can be researched.

FCC's answer to scandal of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile US selling people's location data: Burying its head in the ground

I take it the US has nothing equivalent to the Select Committee system of the HoC. If it had he'd be summoned to appear in front of them to explain why he was ignoring such letters.

While Windows 7 wobbled, AI continued its relentless march at Microsoft

Re: Azure not Linux

"adding support for Python as a scripting language for Office"

Yet another way to screw a victim with a malicious email attachment.

This must be some kind of mistake. IT managers axed, CEO and others' wallets lightened in patient hack aftermath

Re: Seems legit

"The western world would do well to use this approach for similar incidents."

It might have as much to do with who was affected as with local culture.

Goddamn the Pusher man: Nominet kicks out domain name hijack bid

Re: How about some grace time after expiry?

"And you get multiple, regular emails telling you that your domain is coming up for expiry, has expired and is in the grace period, is now in the redemption period, will be released, gone."

None of which helps if the email address is someone who has left the company, gone sick or for whatever other reason, isn't reading emails.