Posts by Doctor Syntax

Take your pick: 0/1/* ... but beware – your click could tank an entire edition of a century-old newspaper

Re: The most dreaded word in IT...

Not a single word but - "why did it do that?".

Re: Earth slide? Well, yes ...

"Or worse, files whose purpose you THINK you know ..."

That's why know was in italics.

Re: Not quite relevant, but might share anyhow

takes 8 seconds from a cold boot to login installing updates in Win10Pro

Re: destructive hdd check

"I never heard how he managed to do it."

It involved removing the write-protect tabs?

Re: destructive hdd check

Just so! And this program's critical failing was not doing that. Oddly enough, four people seem to have disagreed when I posted that further down.

Re: Talking of paper...

Client ran a few of them. Their business was printing, quite a bit of the work with those printers was with MICR toner. They were probably some of the cheaper devices in the plant.

One interesting fault on one occasion.- ink failed to adhere to the middle of the document. It turned out that the printer had been run a long time on one particular width of paper which had worn a groove of that width in a roller in the fuser unit, very shallow groove but sufficient for wider stock to sit clear above that part of the roller.

Re: "But I never experimented on a live system again"

The real problem was a program what would perform a destructive action without asking for confirmation.

Re: Earth slide? Well, yes ...

The first requirement for a DBA or any other type of sysadmin is a well-developed sense of paranoia. This stops you doing things like deleting files whose purpose you don't know.

Re: destructive hdd check

"Having something that can erase a disc on removable media labelled "PC-Check" should be grounds for a lawsuit. Just asking for confirmation is inadequate."

How do you test a disk write function without writing to it?

I suppose you could read a track, save the data, write zeros, check the result and then re-write the original data which would be very slow.

AFAICR the SCO Openserver install disk offered non-destructve and destructive write test.options. You were expected to know what you were doing and take care.

Re: destructive hdd check

"My boss was rather unpleasant about all this"

Not surprising!

Re: Talking of paper...

"throughputs y' can only dream of wi' a laserjet"

Don't need to dream. I've seen industrial grade continuous flow printers. Nice and quiet compared to the old mechanical jobs.

Cheapskate Brits appear to love their Poundland MVNOs as UK's big four snubbed in survey again

Re: 1Gb Data a month - Really ?

"Do people really "survive" with 1Gb of data a month ?"

What's data? PAYG SIM only, don't walk into lamp-posts whilst gazing at a little screen.

Re: "matching the ease of use of an Amazon or Apple store"

"I find it less than straight-forward to find things on Amazon"

Agreed. In fact it seems to have got worse in the last few weeks. There seems to be a compulsion to return as many hits as possible irrespective of relevance, especially sponsored results, and returning nothing where nothing would fit seems to be quite impossible. It's easier to search Amazon via Google apart from the hits for obsolete products.

And recently I had the offer of a pick-up location about 250 miles away, the email for the locker release code arrived about an hour after the website showed delivery and the SMS never arrived at all.

I get the distinct impression that they survive by sheer size - it would be feasible for someone to improve on the software for both search (there was at least one better search engine in the '80s!) and logistics but not be able to get into the market because scaling up to match would be impossible.

FYI: Get ready for face scans on leaving the US because 1.2% of visitors overstayed their visas

free up JetBlue staff for other duties rather than scanning passes at the gate from continuing to be paid by JetBlue

Bloke faces up to 20 years in the clink after gun held to dot-com owner's head in robbery

The technical term to describe this as a literary device in fiction is 'situational irony'. I don't see a problem in extending the term to a real situation.

From the report linked in TFA:

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN). ... Through PSN, a broad spectrum of stakeholders work together to identify the most pressing violent crime problems in the community and develop comprehensive solutions to address them.

Just how many forcible attempts at transferring domain names do they have to require "comprehensive solutions to address them"? Why not just prosecute the case on its own merits?

There's a certain irony in the fact this was to gain control of a domain to use to post photos of people doing stupid things whilst drunk. I doubt that the entire site managed to feature anyone as stupid as its owner.

Idiot admits destroying scores of college PCs using USB Killer gizmo, filming himself doing it

Re: Surprisingly honest

"The college calculates that he caused $51,109 in damages, and it cost it $7,362 to investigate and repair what it could."

How much of that was accountancy overhead to calculate the cost to 5 figures?

Re: Silly "victims"!

Snicket?

A'n't yer heerd o' ginnels?

On the one hand he displays the sort of thinking we expect from MBAs. On the other he has managed to do the MBA of a Darwin award by getting himself removed from the employment* market pro tem and maybe for good if even other MBAs realise he's not going to be a team player.

* OK, 'employment' might not be the best way of describing the situation where MBAs turn up at an office and et paid for it but there aren't too many alternative words.

Re: Silly "victims"!

[Shakes head] Call that a Yorkshire accent?

Wi've yar USB ports forged fro' solid copper bi t' local blacksmith, and connected to a network o' Tesla coils fed bi lightning rods an' electric eels.

That's a bit more like it.

Not one of the 12 steps: Rehab patients' details exposed in publicly visible database

But it's in The Cloud. It's done that way so somebody else can look after little details like that.

We've read the Mueller report. Here's what you need to know: ██ ██ ███ ███████ █████ ███ ██ █████ ████████ █████

Either "I do not recall" or "I have no independent recollection."

I'd have thought that that level of memory loss would indicate a degree of dementia that should lead to the removal of a US president on medical grounds.

Canadian woman fined for not holding escalator handrail finally reaches the top after 10 years

Re: Other escalator laws

"I genuinely didn't understand what that is about either."

Maybe it's time to explain.

Somewhere in the depths of time someone in London Underground decided that there was a safety risk if passenger's dogs rode the escalators and that if a passenger had a dog with them they should carry it. The safety notice that was concocted was sufficiently terse as to be ambiguous and has been a source of amusement ever since, at least to those familiar to LU stations.

Re: Other escalator laws

You mean we have to carry bears?

Re: Other escalator laws

It's an older joke than that.

Re: More handrails

"A certain imperial chemical industrial company I used to work for tried to impose similar must-use-the-handrail rules for employees"

A clear indication of too many people in manglement with not enough useful work to do.

Re: Seems discriminatory

"Until I learned it's actually a safety feature."

Always something new to learn and where better than at el Reg.

Re: Other escalator laws

"Sounds like there's a good business for short-term dog rentals at each end of the moving staircases"

Tricky. Central London, morning rush hour, either you have a lot of dogs at the bottom of the escalator to start with or you've got to replenish the supply by getting them back down again afterwards. Can one person carry several dogs down? Or can you have a slide to return them? If the latter how do you work it in the evening rush hour?

Good luck to her.

Surprising absolutely no one at all, Samsung's folding-screen phones knackered within days

It depends. They might bash into the point of your shoulder or your elbow. Or maybe a brief-case carried at gonad height. You have to look where you're going fairly carefully to achieve that.

Re: Why would a layer you aren't supposed to remove

"If it is supposed to remain, use a stronger adhesive so it can't be peeled off without herculean effort"

And put a real removable layer on top of it.

Re: Well

"But you are a REVIEWER of a device that incorporates new technology. You really dont think you should have read the instructions first? Thats part of the review process isnt it?"

If the film looks removable then there's a good argument for the reviewer trying to remove it on the basis that a proportion of the punters will try to. That's part of the review process.

I think the pronunciation's the same.

Re: At first glance, the $1,980 phone...

Jacket with poacher's pocket. Put the rucksack in the pocket.

Re: Fuschia

Even garden specialists who should know better get this one wrong. Plant and (AFAIK) OS ar Fuchsia.

Re: Pretty well Inevitable for an Alpha Version

"the red ones are faster."

Unless the green ones are BRG.

Who's using Mueller Report Day to bury bad news? If you guessed Facebook, you're right: Millions more passwords stored in plaintext

"Our investigation has determined that these stored passwords were not internally abused or improperly accessed."

That's unusual. The normal form is to find no evidence of anything wrong.

Ah! I've read it again. The passwords were not internally abused or improperly accessed. That doesn't rule out external abuse or improper access.

Yes, I may have advised 'some' investors to flog their Autonomy shares, analyst tells High Court

"his clients are pissed off because HPE did not take his advice"

They should have been more pissed off because he didn't finger Autonomy as a take-over target and advise them to buy. Is there a faint taste of sour grapes?

"He advised his clients to sell its stocks – a move that cost them in the short term when HP bought the company."

Why just in the short term? Surely there wasn't any mechanism to recoup later.

Facebook: Yeah, we hoovered up 1.5 million email address books without permission. But it was an accident!

Re: Here i fixed that for you

I think they'd also understand personal jail time although maybe not until it actually happened to them.

Rather than simply delete them how about an apology for each of those who got Zuckered up? Individually typed out by Zuck himself.

Re: It's time...

I'd have thought it would apply but as an alternative how about 1.5 million offences under the Computer Misuse Act or equivalent for other jurisdictions?

Supreme Court of UK gives Morrisons the go-ahead for mega data leak liability appeal

Re: liability whatever precautions are taken is a bad idea

The problem with not holding the company liable in civil law is that there's then no redress for those injured. Where these are numerous it's not going to be possible for them to obtain it from the perpetrator. The real difficulty in this case is that the employees affected are collateral damage from an attempt to injure their employer.

I wonder if there are actual damages to any employees.

There is, of course, another way to look at this.

If his object was to punish the company for a real or perceived slight then the Supremes do his job for him if they allow the employees' claims to succeed.

There's a conundrum!

Re: Liable?

why is it some people find it hard to make a choice with those two options.

"I won't get caught."

That must be the thinking.

Re: Should companies be on the hook for criminal employees' doings?

"Reasonable precautions would include"...either restricting access to an employee who's been disciplined or keeping an eye on him if he has to have access.

Microsoft debuts Bosque – a new programming language with no loops, inspired by TypeScript

Re: Ah, the loop

"create a theoretical structure of such beauty that loops no longer exist."

Except, of course, they haven't. They've just hidden them away in a higher level abstraction, just like symbolic assembler hid actual addresses in labels and 3rd generation languages provided an abstraction to hide the actual hardware.

No loops?

I shall say this only once...

Hey criminals, need a getaway vehicle? There's an app for that... Car share tool halts ops amid crime wave, arrests

Re: "Share Now said no other cities should be affected by this."

"I am surprised that they do not have GPS trackers in all their cars, which certainly just about every other car rental company has."

They probably do but you get a terrible signal once you drive into a shipping container.