Posts by Doctor Syntax

Amazon Mime: We train (badly) an AI love bot using divorce bombshell Bezos' alleged sexts to his new girlfriend

"but it is Friday"

Any special not-Black Friday offers?

Cyber-insurance shock: Zurich refuses to foot NotPetya ransomware clean-up bill – and claims it's 'an act of war'

Re: Oh yeah

IANAL, however in civil court you don't have to 'prove' something to the same standard as criminal courts .... All they would have to show is "on the balance of probabilities"

There's also scope for lots of legal argument about what constitutes an act of war in terms of what befalls an innocent bystander.

If I could turn back time, I'd tell you to keep that old Radarange at home

An under shielded microwave oven? What a heart-warming story.

Peak Apple: This time it's SERIOUS, Tim

Re: Recession ???

"INNOVATE with the next lines."

Why? If the product does what the user needs what are the results of innovations? Quite possibly a product that does it worse. Or a product that's actively anti-user by continually spying, something that seems to be most of what innovation means these days.

"But the [stock] market also attempts to price in long-term risks"

It seems to fail at pricing in something that's more of a certainty than a reality: that the product market will mature. It's all very well setting a stock price at $SILLY P/E in the early stages because it anticipates what future earnings are anticipated. As the market approaches maturity maintaining that is just foolishness as the future earnings will stabilise at a lower level.

There's nothing wrong with a product settling down to be a steady earner. There's a lot wrong with thinking that it won't and everything wrong with failing to accept that it has.

The D in SystemD stands for Dammmit... Security holes found in much-adored Linux toolkit

Re: I use FreeBSD, and for good reason.

"standardising startup scripts to make them easier to manage"

Easier to manage by whom? WIndows admins? SysV scripts are shell scripts. Anyone setting up a startup script on a Unix box will be familiar with the shell. Anyone who wants to treat it as if it was another OS really shouldn't be doing that.

Hubble 'scope camera breaks down amid US govt shutdown, forcing boffins to fix it for free

"he's the democratically elected president and the border wall was his signature promise in the election. It should be built on this premise"

So what happens if a president is democratically elected on a promise to abolish gravity and make pi equal to 3?

Re: Easily solved

"the current state of democratic derangement"

I've often wondered about the arrangement whereby the head of state is also the head of government and the leader of the majority in the legislature is neither. It seems guaranteed to produce this sort of instability. I understand about checks and balances but those need some element of goodwill to make it work. As that joint head role is a pretty good definition of a dictator it's largely goodwill on the part of that head that's needed to make it work.

It has all the makings of a constitutional crisis. I wonder if the US will just sit it out and then carry on once there's a change of president or whether they'll recognise a need to rebalance in some way. That one piece written constitution they're so proud of is going to make the latter more difficult.

By way of comparison we also have something of a constitutional crisis in the UK and it seems as if Bercow is handling it by helping the Commons rebalance itself against Government.

Wanted – have you seen this MAC address: f8:e0:79:af:57:eb? German cops appeal for logs in bomb probe

Re: GDPR says no

"So, a general appeal for data relating to a MAC address is in breach of GDPR of which the police should be aware."

One thing the police will be aware of is the extent of the exceptions granted to them under GDPR.

Who cracked El Chapo's encrypted chats and brought down the Mexican drug kingpin? Er, his IT manager

Re: Collateral damage

"it'll only make the job of law enforcement harder."

It'll make the cartels' job of recruiting techies harder, especially given that they'd need to recruit more of them.

Re: The FBI paid him back in return for his services

"Can't they bother to keep his identity private?"

If they've revealed who did it in terms of function I think the cartels can work out the rest. It's a bit like all those people who post here saying "Anon cause otherwise they'll know it was me". Well they knew at the time and even if they forgot since they've just been reminded.

The time to use a false identity is when you're working for the bad guys.

Ministry of Justice abandons key plank of £280m IT project

Re: Parts of CPP have been successful

"I think you'll find that lawyers and judges also only work sometimes"

That's probably due to the fact that scheduling courts is so difficult.

"I feel dirty for saying this but you mean like Exchange can? Or dirty in a different way Google Calendar?...cant see the calendar itself being that tricky."

I rather suspect it's this sort of thinking that lead them into the whole minefield in the first place. It's a really complex resource optimisation.

It probably doesn't actually have to allocate every trial, judge, barrister and witness in the country but it does have to cope with substantial subsets. What's worse nobody can tell you with any certainty how long a trial will last - that's in terms of days or weeks not hours.

You might think you've got the calendar for the Bristol area sorted and then an expert witness calls in to say they can't make the court when you've got them down because they've already got a summons for Carlisle that day. If you try to reschedule that case you find you've got it down for a date when the prosecution leader is due to start a three day case in Northampton. Then an accused changes his plea in mid-trial and you're left trying to see if anything can be brought forward.

There really has to be a better way than what happened in the past. I've spent two or three days, or at least several hours of each, hanging around a courthouse waiting for half an hour in the witness box. I've also been called from the other end of the country to the other to go to a court that wasn't, as far as I knew, going on that day.

"Magistrates now have an online calendar system for booking their court attendance dates"

Wow. What a complex task.

Now try a calendar for handling multiple big cases where there are are several barristers per case, many witnesses, including the specialist witnesses who will each have multiple cases on the go, and juries.

Zuck's 2019 tech talk tour should tackle the questions Facebook spent 2018 dodging

Re: Muppet

"comparing British politicians handling of Brexit to clowns was an insult to professional clowns"

It's amateurs outdoing professionals.

Re: Muppet

Please stop insulting muppets.

Real-time OS: Ordnance Survey gets snuggly with Intel's Mobileye

"Utilities are intended to be a primary customer. They should know where things are, but often don't. Mobileye will provide this data"

What they often don't know about is the stuff that's underground. Good luck with that if you rely on Mobileye.

Amazon exec tells UK peers: No, we don't want to be dominant. Also, we don't fancy being taxed on revenues

Re: HIgh streets

"So we'd have to put up income taxes and tax on dividends"

If you have a company selling in country A and sending its profits to country B no matter what level you set for dividend taxes in A they won't collect a penny tax because the dividends are paid in B. You can tax the company's employees in A or you can tax their customers. Once the money's moved to B A can't touch it.

Re: "Change the law so the international arm of a... title too long

"I don't quite know what you think VAT is, but it's certainly not what it actually is."

I think the term he was looking for might have been withholding tax. It certainly isn't VAT.

Re: Tax allowance for costs is a grace

"Shareholders have not asked for profitability only share price appreciation."

If there isn't a prospect of profitability to justify the increase in share price the shareholder has just bought a piece of the underling assets and would probably be lucky to get more than a fraction back were the assets to be sold off. Good luck with your retirement if your pension is based on investments like that.

Re: Tax allowance for costs is a grace

"I thought corporation tax was generally considered to be incident on shareholders and customers?"

The money to pay shareholders comes from customers - unless there's something dodgy going on or the firm's flogging off assets there's nowhere else to get it from.

The point she makes about what happens if a revenue tax on items with a thin profit margin is valid. Either the line gets dropped or the price has to be raised in order to break even let alone contribute to the shareholders' dividend. In order to determine whether it really is a thin profit margin one does have to check on the source of course and make sure it's not being bought from another arm of the business in a jurisdiction with a lower tax regime.

Re: Tax allowance for costs is a grace

"The people who pay VAT are the consumers at the end of the sales supply-chain who can't claim it back."

And just who, ultimately, do you think would pay a tax on revenue? If you put another 20% on sales it would simply result in prices being raised to pay it.

she would like there to be more public efforts to "demystify" the tracking of people's buying habits online.

What I find most mysterious is why they're so bad at it. Their search throws up a large percentage of false positives and is less responsive to attempts to set search terms that what I was used to over 30 years ago. Then there's the repeat offerings of things which were unlikely to have been repeat purchases.

Thought Macbooks were expensive? Dell UK unveils the 7 meeeellion pound laptop

£7,001,726.28 Priced down to the last penny. That really is Precision.

It makes even Amazon Market book prices look sensible (same book - £7.44, £7.45 and £84.95).

Cambridge Analytica sister firm pleads guilty, fined £21k for failing to obey UK information commish

Re: So it's actually pointless then?

As the article quotes "This case is a discrete part of a broader matter,"

I'd like to think the ICO will end up pursuing former directors when they deal with the broader issues although they aren't in as strong a position as they'd have been if the events had happened under GDPR.

Re: So reading between the lines

"it could be argued that the administrator has a responsibility to retain enough BOFH's to be able to do so to meet their legal obligations such as this one."

Assuming the administrators even have the technical competence to work out who to retain - and assuming the BOFHs haven't already done a runner.

Microsoft vows to destroy Office, er, offices: Campus to be demolished and rebuilt

"who will be supplying the vacuum cleaners"

Somebody who wants to Zuck it up?

Excuse me, sir. You can't store your things there. Those 7 gigabytes are reserved for Windows 10

Re: World's largest purveyor of bloatware

"Make the third party software companies provide their own DLLs instead of installing 50,000 files that no one will ever use unless they install a Printronix printer."

That's how you get DLL Hell. There is a reason for providing standard libraries. The real problem comes when the 3rd party vendors decide they can't trust what's on there and provide their own anyway.

"This is why I only use iPhone."

If you want to do serious work on a tiny screen best avoid doing anything that might make you go blind.

Re: No it won't.

"if you have a physically small device that you can plug into an HDMI screen and USB /Bluetooth keyboard it will work really well."

True but if you want to take it all with you it's far easier packaged as a laptop.

Re: 32GB HP and Linux GUI

"So it’s fine when Linis reserves space but not ok when MS do it."

What's Linis?

Linux, like any other Unix-like OS and like any sensible OS, protects itself against rogue processes attempting to eat the entire disk space* or, indeed, being driven into a corner by manglement who wouldn't invest in sufficient disk. Unix is fundamentally a multi-user OS; it also provides for protections such as disk quotas if you think you need them.

I've no idea whether MS does that or not. This, however, is something different. It's making a provision for a future process to download huge** updates by reserving the space that might be used in the meantime simply to avoid that future process checking available space when it comes to need it. I'd label that as passing the cost of failure to the customer.

* I've seen that happen in the past.

** 7Gb? Really? Like any other Linux user I've never seen more than a fraction of that get downloaded for an update. Even a full install with loads of applications you might or might not need fits on a DVD.

Re: Easy way to regain the 7 GB

"Of course it does."

I think you just blew his mind.

Re: Easy way to regain the 7 GB

"Zero. Linux doesn't require a swap partition."

Or allocate a partition the same size a the RAM if you want to be able to hibernate.

"You can no longer set your user storage folders to any other drive."

It just gets worse and worse. I'm glad I don't live there.

Re: Swap files eating my disk

"As annoying as losing 10% of your 250MB disk to swap space was on Win3.1, there was at least justified reason for doing so!"

What does Windows do about hibernating? Linux copies the memory to the swap space and then switches off. It means you have to have enough swap space to do that although you can do without swap altogether but then you can't hibernate.

Re: keep the users away from the system disk / partition

"that's just asking for a situation where the user has used all 96 GB of their space and would like to use some of the 16 GB free space on the 32 GB OS partition, but can't."

The proper cure for this is a bigger disk. One of the reasons for having separate a separate user area is to avoid the situation where the user - or Microsoft - has trampled all the free space.

"Manually resizing partitions is a pain"

Ah, the joy of LVM.

Re: Not a dig at MS, but a question.

It doesn't quite work like that. The kernel almost always lives in a separate, and not usually very big, partition /boot I have a 200M partition on this Devuan box. Debian and Devuan only keep the current and last kernels by default - others differ. There's also a partition, /tmp, that gets purged at boot - 1G on mine.

It's also very, very advisable to set up the area that stores home directories, where all your work etc. lives, on a separate partition. This enables you to reformat the entire rest of the disk and reinstall for a major upgrade and leave the bits you care about untouched. On my main laptop this is 500Gb (of a 2Tb disk) and 60% full.

Swap space is also separate - as it's also used to store a copy of memory to hibernate it needs to be at least the same size as physical memory although I prefer something bigger.

This is all minimum partitioning I'd suggest. The rest is up to personal preference. You could leaver everything else in the root partition; some installers seem to leave everything, including home directories, in root (some installers, be default put everything in root which is a crap thing to do).

A better plan is to have separate /usr and /var partitions. The former is relatively static stuff - program and library code. The latter is more volatile including another temporary directory, spool area (files queued for printing, etc.) and, in the case of Debian and friends, files downloaded for updates etc and these can be purged if more room is needed. I have a 20Gb /usr, 59% used and a 10Gb /var, 58% used. Cached update and install files amount to a little over 4G.

I also have /usr/local and /opt for other S/W not installed from the distro. They're 8Gb 4% used and 20Gb 10% used.

The root partition also contains some program binaries and libraries - stuff that might be used when the other partitions are unmounted. Mine is 4G but only 16% full. As someone mentioned elsewhere a Unix-style system is restricted so that only root is allowed to right to a partition more than

I could easily get by with a smaller disk with fewer partitions but this scheme avoids nasty surprises if I take my eye ofd things. Another thing that avoids really nasty surprises is that Unix-style OSs only allow root to write to file systems more than, sy 90% or 95% full. In practice routing OS updates are small and quickly applied so they don't provide surprises anyway but having spent a good chunk of my working life looking after Unix servers that occasionally have had ballooning overnight jobs I do like the degree of control this gives me.

There's one other factor in play here: I manage the disk with LVM (Logical Volume Manager). It means that currently a large part of the disk is uncommitted and I can use this to increment any partition - or even add new ones - over the life of the machine.

By comparison my little lightweight netbook uses eighteen and a half Gb including over 6 Gb in my home directory.

Re: Not a dig at MS, but a question.

"The solution I found is to manually purge old kernels after applying new ones."

Debian defaults to just keeping current and last. Cleaning up Ubuntu is an annoyance.

Re: All well and good...

"What the hell is a jiga byte??"

One that dances from location to location increasing the wear on your SSD.

Re: All well and good...

"just in case you wanted to roll back."

Presumably if you did it would just roll itself forward again and then some more on the next update.

Re: More than adequate

"Maybe I should mention that I upgraded it from MS Windows 10 to Linux Mint."

That answers a question I asked above. I don't think I'd run Informix DS on it, though. Maybe SE.

Re: 32GB HP and Linux GUI

"ou could do a lot of things to get a distribution to exist happily in a gigabyte or two, but most users will want a reasonably modern window manager that they already like."

Let's put this in context. I have a little MSI netbook which I upgraded to 2G, all it will take running an elderly Linux Mint. It's not running XFCE or LXDE. It's running full fat KDE 4. I'm sure KDE 4 can be skinned to look fashionably fuggly but I stick to an old-fashioned classic look, not too dissimilar to W2K. Processor is N2600.

With KInfoCenter and LibreWrite open (on a blank document) it has 40% physical memory and 100% swap free although disk cache will eat into that as it's used. It's also running an instance of a real RDBMS engine, Informix, because one of the things I bought it for was research in libraries etc. where I could quickly know up a table or two & a form to record stuff.

The disk, of course, is much bigger than that in this thread - 320Gb - but then (a) I never got round to completely throwing off W7 and (b) it's still largely empty.

"Those 32GB eMMC devices are atrocious."

32Gb used to be enormous but software is liable to bloat to fill all space available. I've never looked at any of these things but the obvious question is can you install another OS? It's surprising how capable the old netbooks are when running Linux.

Despite vows to spend more with smaller firms, UK.gov sure does seem to love legacy lock-in

Re: SMEs don't have as big ...

"Or the non-exec positions an MP will need to supplement the pittance they are paid"

It's not the MPs you have to worry about. Most likely not even ministers. For instance take a gander at https://www.printweek.com/print-week/news/1120973/3m-considering-legal-action-400m-passport-contract

Senator Wyden goes ballistic after US telcos caught selling people's location data yet again

Re: Oh the Irony!

"where I come from, lying to Parliament (or in a select committee is an imprisonable offence."

It could explain Zuck's failure to appear before a Select Committee.

Reg Standards Bureau introduces the Devon fatberg as coastal town menaced by oily blob

Re: But seriously though...

"what they hell do we do with half a bottle of well-out-of-date rapeseed oil?"

Keep it. There'll be a shortage post-Brexit. You'll probably end up boiling it with alkali (wood ash will do) to make soap.

Linus Torvalds opts for the scream test: Linux kernel syscall tweaked to shut data-leak hole – anyone upset, yell now

Re: The Scream Test

Yes, use it sparingly. If there's too much screaming going on already another one isn't going to get noticed.

NHS England claims it will be all-digital within the decade

Older physicians seem to have a harder time "multi-tasking" and do sometimes seem distracted, diverting their attention away from actual patient.

And there was I, thinking it was younglings who get distracted with their digital toys, diverting their attention from whatever it is that needs to be done.

On the whole there's a lot to be said for making sure stuff is recorded, whether in writing or otherwise.

My mother had a penicillin allergy but in her 80s she forgot. It didn't matter too much as her GP knew about it. But then the GP retired and it wasn't in her notes. Possibly a coincidence but she had a fatal stroke not long after being prescribed penicillin.

Entering stuff and checking on past history inevitably takes attention but it's essential if the GP isn't to have to carry everything in their head. Perhaps the answer is to make sure systems fit into the doctors' work as effectively and unobtrusively as possible.

Attention all British .eu owners: Buy dotcom domains and prepare to sue, says UK govt

Re: A new low

"European politicos have been practising being cnuts for far far longer."

Objected to on the basis that Cnut was an intelligent man. For one thing he made sure that his demonstration of what happens when you challenge reality took place in safe condition.

Re: How long until the new referendum will be called?

"The black and white stay/go option was the only viable one."

Go in what way?

You just argued there were multiple leave options and not everyone who voted leave wanted the same thing. In fact, I doubt many had even considered the consequences; it was a non-binding vote and many took it as a general protest vote. Now there are realistically only a couple of leave options: the one negotiated with the EU by such Leave politicians who were prepared to take on the job, let's note, or the jump off the cliff option. The consequences of either are a good deal more obvious than they were back then including, of course, the consequence that this time it's for real.

Given that there are really only a couple of leave options available to vote for then a second preference vote works fairly well.