Posts by Doctor Syntax

The tech lawsuit of the year: HPE v Mike Lynch and Sushovan Hussain

"The tech lawsuit of the year"

So you don't think Schrems vs Facebook is going to come to trial this year?

Brit broadband giants slammed as folk whinge about crap connections, underwhelming speeds

Re: Gmail?

"From fighting with BT to giving Google your emails"

I checked my address book for a local community group. About a dozen or more gmail, a couple or so BT and three or fourTalkTalk. No Microsoft brands at all. One of the TT ones also has a mac.com address. In fact both the known Mac users have TT addresses.

"Anyone who is unhappy with their current provider should take back control and switch to a better deal – you could get better service and save hundreds of pounds a year."

One thing that's probably keeping them locked in is that they're using ISP email addresses and it's just too difficult to change addresses, especially as they probably have it as the user ID on a lot of services.

It would be useful if Which advised against this.

Intel gets court order telling former engineer to return confidential docs in Micron row

Oh, you mean this drive with all the CMA copies of emails sent by management instructing me to do dodgy stuff?

Geiger counters are so last summer. Lasers can detect radioactive material too, y'know

Re: Bananas

"We need to know what that is in bananas."

K40

Alpha particles are helium nuclei so I'd have thought they're going to be pretty good at mopping up any stray electrons.

Techies take turns at shut-down top trumps

Re: Not Just Server Rooms

"all new arrivals on their induction tour"

On reflection, better to find out about him at the start.

Re: minor in comparison

"the wrong serial cable on a UPS"

I remember an odd instance with a serial-connected UPS on a SCO box. At some low level it must have tapped into the network stack because doing something - I can't remember what - on the network started what appeared to be a UPS-iinitiated count-down to power-off. It took a couple of repeats to be sure it wasn't the UPS.

Re: The same problem every time

"they should be red and not any other color"

Remember that some people are red/green colour-blind. Maybe that explains the green EPO button. Perhaps a distinctive shape would be a better distinguishing feature - and better to identify if the room's filling with smoke.

NASA 'nauts do what flagship smartphone fans can only dream of: Change the batteries

If the mole can't be retrieved and relocated to try somewhere else it's a massive design oversight. Anyone with experience with soil sampling on Earth should be able to tell them that sometimes you have to move over and try again. There's no reason to suppose Mars would be different.

Chap joins elite support team, solves what no one else can. Is he invited back? Is he f**k

Re: no such thing as "unsolvable"

"there is no such thing as an unsolvable problem"

Turning three mutually intermeshed gears.

Re: I keep filtering this story through the BOFH's eyes

You need to be careful with hydrofluoric acid. It will dissolve things you'd rather keep intact. Such as where the bodies are buried.

"Now we know where the Fleet Street droids went."

Not necessarily. Every walk of life back then seemed to have its own home-grown lot.

Re: No good deed...

"Yes, says I, I do"....

...I'll have that sorted for you as soon as I start.

Clearly nobody told Simon the plot. The A-team had had a feud going with Payroll for years and he'd undone the trick they'd been playing on them.

Campaigners cry foul over NHS Digital plans to grant policy wonks and researchers access to patient-level data

Yesterday we were in the local outpatients' department for SWMBO to attend a clinic. Today we got an automated patient survey with questions such as "would you recommend it?". What sort of answers do they expect? Yes, I'll tell all my friends to go there irrespective of whether they have that particular condition.

Unfortunately SWMBO picked up the phone. Had it been me I'd have logged it as a spam call to a TPO-registered phone.

Matt Hancock strikes again. Is there no limit to his enthusiasm/knowledge ration? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-47652060

Brit Parliament online orifice overwhelmed by Brexit bashers

Re: Too Late.

"I expect there are a lot of people who can tell their grandchildren in future that they wanted the Euro currency in the UK."

I can and would tell them that now were they to ask. I think the long term result of this is that we'll be back in, tails between legs and the Euro as a requirement.

If avoiding the Euro was your objective I;d say battle won, war lost.

Re: Populism

"An MP is not a delegate who must vote with the majority opinion of their constituents"

TM has taken note of this. Her constituency was predominantly Remain.

"they are supposed to use reasoned judgement of the facts of the issue to arrive at a sensible solution."

Hmmm.

Re: Hang on

"If all EEC/EU-related votes had required even a 2/3 majority of those who voted (never mind 2/3 of the electorate) Europe would look very different today."

I'm with you on that. But having known that they were going to have to sell their product to a 2/3 majority those negotiating the Maastricht treaty would have had to come up with a different product. It's by no means certain that there wouldn't have been an approved treaty.

I mean, the SANE way to have started this 2 years ago, would be to simply (but loudly and publicly) kick off full prep for full independence/normal status (relabelled by one group as "no deal").

Yes, but the brayng hordes of Leave demanded Invoke Article 50 NOW; don't even ask Parliament, just do it.

This is the state the Leave campaign engendered. Leavers can scarcely complain now that things weren't done in a sensible order.

Re: Can you blame us?

"Is EVERYONE just taking their "facts" from partisan newspapers' headlines?"

Leavers seem to.

Re: Scotland/Wales want increased powers locally

I agree with you about the Euro being a bad idea. It's a pity that the likely cost of getting back into the EU to repair our economy will be to accept it.

Re: Scotland/Wales want increased powers locally

I'd go a bit further than that. The cross-party group should start by revoking A50 so we can go back and do things properly. The first step of doing things properly would be to to conduct a proper impact assessment on the economy. On the basis of that make a recommendation to the country of what the pros and cons are of the alternatives and then seek approval of that, either in the form of a general election or by a binding referendum conducted on a basis of requiring a supermajority for a change to the status quo.

Re: Scotland/Wales want increased powers locally

"She really seems to have never understood anything about the EU, despite her years in the Home Office."

Despite? More like because of.

She'll have been through standard Home Sec brainwashing to regard Europe as a problem purely because of the ECJ and the ECHR although the latter isn't actually an EU institution. When she crashes us out of the EU she'll have achieved one of the goals the Home Office set her.

Re: So lots of votes doesn't necessarily mean you'll get what you want. A lesson for us all there.

"Should it reach 17.4 million respondents then I am sure there will be a very clear case for taking action,"

Now that it's above 2 million she'd be wise to reconsider that. If only she were wise.

You seem to be new here.

Re: Hang on

"Very true, but that wasn't applied to any of the votes to join or create the EU so it would be a little one-sided to only apply it now to the vote to leave."

I've always considered they should have been. But the economic situation we have is what it is. It makes it a pretty expensive gesture to try to change what should have happened in the past.

"Which is also true of every vote taken when the EU was created in the first place"

Agreed.

"If there had been a 60% or 70% threshold there wouldn't be an EU to leave."

Not necessarily. Having to achieve a supermajorty might have lead to different arrangements being proposed.

Re: Bots or scripts or sunnink.

The old advice applies. Check your spam folder. That's where I found mine on HotLive3(some integer probably above 50 but no guarantees.)Mail

You can't have been collecting them for very long.

Re: This is not the non-functional you need to worry about

"It's achieving the first"

Rather better than it it had all gone smoothly!

Re: Hang on

"and then call another referendum in 2 years because xx% disagreed with the result, and then another 2 after that ad infinitum?"

The way to deal with that is what should have been the original arrangement: a change of status quo needs a substantial majority, such as 2/3. To say nothing of the vote having been clearly stated to be binding.

"There there are those who voted and won, and have since realised it was all rubbish and they are fscked."

And add those who weren't old enough to vote at the time.

Re: @AC

"Of course the petition isnt binding in any way and can be ignored"

Whoops.

The referendum wasn't binding either.

Thanks, Ben.

Am I too old if I assume everyone knows that one?

Debate around Huawei espionage fears in UK about as clear as those darn Brexit negotiations

"it is completely devoid of any meaningful content"

Civil Service reply writing at its finest.

Overheard at a Brit mobe network: On the count of Three UK, smile and say, er... we lost how many customers?

"Especially as I was using the landline in the local O2 shop (as otherwise I'd be paying for the call) and customers could hear me."

Perhaps you should have told him that at the start.

Children of Wales to be prepped for the vibrant world of work with free Office 365 ProPlus

"Welsh Assembly lobs cash Redmond's way."

It's bad enough to see a public body doing promotional work for a commercial entity. To find that they're actually paying to do this is appalling.

Altered carbon: Boffins automate DNA storage with decent density – but lousy latency

As far as I can see reading it will destroy it so there'd be a need to replicate pre-read or create a new strand after reading. If I'm correct it poses a further issue. How do you verify what you wrote?

There was no indication when if this will be put to commercial use.

Apart from any other consideration let's think what DNA contains: a sugar (the "-ose" at the end or "ribose" is a clue), some nitrogen and some phosphorus. A selection of some of the most important elements in metabolism. A single bacterium could multiply itself through your sugar-cube size DC in a few hours so you end up mostly decoding bacterial DBA to convert it back into bits.

Russian sailors maroon themselves in Bristol Channel after drunken dinghy ride goes awry

Re: 4am?

"what was wrong with the much closer Minehead?"

Maybe they'd been banned there already?

New Zealand cops cuff alleged jackasses who shared mosque murder video, messages online

El Reg: Perhaps there's a need for a "green ink" tag.

Who is "us" or "them" is largely irrelevant and depends on which side you are.

"Us" is the general public.

That makes whoever attacks the public or some subset of it one of "them".

Muslim terrorist, white supremacist, UDA, PIRA? All "them".

"there should be no legal consequences of expressing an opinion"

Murdering people and broadcasting it isn't expressing an opinion. It's murdering people and broadcasting it. If you choose to rebroadcast it it's still not expressing an opinion, it's being an accessory after the fact. The victims' rights to life override the murderer's right to kill them - overwhelmingly as the latter doesn't exist - and hence your right to rebroadcast the occasion.

"14 years for thought crime."

Look on it as 14 years for accessory after the fact.

Brit Police Federation cops to ransomware attack on HQ systems

I think we can be sure that this is one case that will be followed up.

'It's full of beer!' Miracle fridge reveals itself to pals tuckered out from cleaning flooded cabin

Cider on tap at work? How civilised.

Azure thing at last: Windows Virtual Desktop takes to the cloudy stage

"You have one opportunity to come out and have that first impression."

You have lots of opportunities to have that bad impression when the cloud's evaporated for a while.

Re: "Windows 7 ... lure hold-outs into the cloudy world of Windows Virtual Desktop

"3 years of free support post 2020 might be enough to convince the bean counters though."

And 3 hours of downtime might convince them they were wrong.