Posts by Doctor Syntax

User spent 20 minutes trying to move mouse cursor, without success

Re: Keyboard ecosystems

"Now they're a consumable item."

What flavours do they come in? A choice of coffee or Tango?

Re: Keyboard ecosystems

"And every year the winner was... keyboards."

In my student days it was hand towels but I don't think we tried the keyboards of the Marchant calculators.

"Alcohol any one?"

Don't mind if I do, even if it is a tad early.

ICANN pays to push Whois case to European Court of Justice

"The answer is simple: the organization has more money than sense."

A few GDPR-max fines will correct that ratio. Meanwhile I suppose their lawyers are assisting them on a slightly smaller scale.

Re: This one could run and run

"Are they trying to outdo the SCO / Linux case for extended legal farting about?"

Given that they're trying to accelerate its progress to the top court, maybe not. Unless they want to take it on to the UN or something when they've failed comprehensively in Europe.

Keep your hands on the f*cking wheel! New Tesla update like being taught to drive by your dad

Re: Pedant Alert

"There are many "A" roads that are 3 lanes in each direction with a central reservation and barrier."

And a few with just 3 lanes, one each way and a suicide lane in the middle.

Re: Crash Test Dummies.

"The computer would eliminate accidents through inattention. inc drink/drugs."

They'd eliminate a sub-set of those accidents - those that arise from things they're programmed to deal with such as keeping lane. The drunk, drugged or over-tired driver will find accident opportunities other than those they've been spared.

Re: Crash Test Dummies.

"Sad fact of life really..."

All true but with cars it's more like life and death.

Re: Crash Test Dummies.

"Still, once we get over this hump it's going to be super safe"

There's an assumption built into that statement.

Re: Auto-crash-pilot

"Just have two seconds between you and the car in front."

When I learned to drive (an probably for a long time before that) the rule was a car length per 10 miles an hour. That turned out to be a reasonable approximation for 1 second. Given that brakes and tyres were less efficient than nowadays it seems that the advice then was a good deal more optimistic.

Re: Auto-crash-pilot

"The radar is used to detect other moving objects, not stationary ones."

What about an object crossing the road perpendicular to the line of travel? It's moving but not with a component in the direction the radar's looking.

Re: Sigh ...

It's actually called "culling the herd" and maybe should be added to the Darwin Awards as added incentive.

It's likely to cull innocent bystanders, AKA collateral damage.

Creepy software knows what you are about to do... to that poor salad

"Predicting entire video frames will be at some point in the future possible"

How did they predict this?

Apple will throw forensics cops off the iPhone Lightning port every hour

Re: 5-dollar wrench

Doesn't work if: suspect is dead cf San Bernadino, have phone but suspect has escaped, want to unlock phone without suspect knowing etc.

Re: Aiding and Abetting

"I wonder what would happen to Apple's policy if their executives were hauled before the courts for aiding and abetting criminal and terrorist activities."

That would require going to court to prove that such activities did actually depend on the phones being lockable. The risk would be failure to prove that to a court's satisfaction, blowing up all the PTB's arguments in their face. That's a risk they're unlikely to take.

Re: Easy good passwords, here I go again...

"What we've got here is failure to communicate"

Or was it "a failure"? or did I expand "we've" to "we have"? So many things to remember...

Apple isn't backing down from a move to lock down the iPhone’s data port to increase security for users, even though it means thwarting some of the password-cracking tools used by forensics experts.

"Even though" doesn't seem quite the way to express it.

Bank of England to set new standards for when IT goes bad

Re: Banks too big to fail ...

"before a bank merger is allowed to go ahead"

Or demerger as TSB has shown us.

Re: So basically

"This is the org that let 80% of the UKs banks blow up."

By following a definition of inflation laid down by the then PM, former Chancellor. A definition that said increasing house prices didn't count as inflation when setting interest rates because low interst rate buy votes as well as keeping the cost of govt. borrowing down. That definitely wasn't a housing bubble you were betting the bank on. Definitely not, right up to the time it burst.

The only way is ethics: UK.gov emphasises moral compass amid deluge of data plans

Re: Blind keeping the public in the dark

"Why isn't the question the other way round, e.g. any reason why your project should not be spoken about openly?"

Because it doesn't work the other way round. If you speak about it openly and then discover you shouldn't have it's too late and you might find yourself having to dob yourself into the ICO for having led to half a million people's PII turning up on haveibeenpwned.

... Aaaand that's a fifth Brit Army Watchkeeper drone to crash in Wales

Perhaps we need our own global positioning system so we don't have to rely on foreigners.

Where's the stirrer icon?

Scrapping Brit cap on nurses, doctors means more room for IT folk

Re: More job displacement, yay

"Why can't we recruit and retain the necessary medical staff?"

Because we don't train enough and were capped from bringing in enough from outside to cover the difference.

Re: Fishy logic

"Different types of workers obviously aren't equivalent or interchangeable."

Manglement everywhere doesn't believe you.

"among my friends who work in advertising there has been a serious exodus"

So it's not all bad.

No fandango for you: EU boots UK off Galileo satellite project

Re: Well

"I identified it seems to be the way the negotiations are being conducted. And as I point out it is unproductive."

If you recognised the reality that negotiations would be unproductive why did you support Leave?

"The UK doesnt want a border. So its the EU's problem if they do."

The UK's position is that it doesn't want to be in the EU. That means that there will be a border between the UK and the EU because that's what borders are: demarcations between one political entity and another. The RoI is part of the EU. So inevitably there will be a border between the RoI and the UK. NI is in the UK so that means that the border is between the RoI and NI. But the UK has commitments arising out of the Good Friday Agreement. Resolving the nature of the border that must necessarily exist between the UK and EU arising from Brexit and those commitments is inescapably a problem for the UK; it may be a problem for others but it isn't one that the UK can duck.

Re: Well

"That would make the RoI/NI border an EU issue then, not a UK one."

And negotiations between the EU and the UK make it a UK one.

Re: Well

"We are a small country."

It's widespread failure to realise this that's the crux of the whole issue.

Re: Well

"That is a very 'zero sum' view of negotiating. It is also a very unproductive way of looking at negotiation which is pretty harmful. Unfortunately it does seem the negotiations may be being carried out that way."

In other words, it's the reality. We've always said that. You didn't believe it. You can see it happening. You still don't believe it. Why?

"freedom to do as we please regarding borders (think Ireland)"

Indeed, think Ireland. Think also of a separate but associated matter: the Good Friday Agreement. And if you wish to wind back to pre-Common Market/EU days you then need to reconstruct the previous arrangement which allowed free movement of citizens between Ireland and the UK.

Re: Well

"And yes, I know that building a hard border in Northern Ireland would piss off the Irish (ex?-)terrorists"

For some, vanishingly small, value of "know".

Re: In perspective, Galileo isn't important

"Allowing another partner to join a project at a later date, then change the terms to exclude an an existing partner is NOT ACCEPTABLE."

I'm not sure who this other partner joining at a later date and changing the terms is but it's quite clear who's responsible for excluding the UK. It's the UK. We (by a small percentage of those who voted) decided to leave.

Re: EU Are Being Vindictive

"We paid our share for the development etc., - if we don't get that back then we should be allowed to decode the PRS signal."

You may thing we should but that's just your personal view. The reality is that unless the contracts were written that way that can't happen.

Re: If not doing something because it was "inconvenient" [...] @Voland's right hand

"https://twitter.com/JohnnyPixels/status/779231997080309760"

Nice one but a bit optimistic about the UK hand. I think it's just the Fool.

Re: Well

"because it has been subverted and undermined by the resentful or incompetent"

AKA the "no true Scotsman" excuse. I expected it to be trotted out by Leavers after it had all happened. I didn't expect them to fall out amongst themselves and start using it so soon.

Re: Well

"Did you know that according to the EU (suggested by the French, could it have been anybody else) snails are classed as fish! Hows that for thinking out of the box!"

I'm sure scallops, shrimp, crabs and prawns are also classified as fish. Zoologically they're not. In culinary terms they're shellfish, of course. I believe that in some English restaurants snails are referred to as "wallfish" - and why not, we couldn't use some foreign word like "escargot" could we?

Re: If not doing something because it was "inconvenient" was the ciriteria for Brexit..

"As we have recently had confirmed the EU are a far more reliable political entity than the US."

And thanks to these nuppits we in the UK have proved we aren't which is going to serve Fox & co really, really well when they try to negotiate all these wonderful trade deals.

Tech firms, come to Blighty! Everything is brill! Brexit schmexit, Galileo schmalileo

Re: Its the Will of the People!!

"where people rather want become journalist than engineer I don't think paying more will help alleviate a skills shortage."

If being an engineer doesn't pay well, partly because of off-shore competition, then paying more would help.

Going slightly OT could the numbers of media studies/arts students reflect the numbers of places available and could that in turn reflect the relative cost of providing such places? There's an argument that the media studies students are subsidising the provision of STEM courses.

Re: Its the Will of the People!!

"Pay more and people WILL flock."

Only if they're allowed to.

Re: Services

"But then how do you propose to keep the roads, army and NHS?"

I'm assuming he forgot the joke icon.

Astroboffins 'sprinkle iron filings' over remnant supernova

Re: Not too shabby indeed

"Just in time to fly to the supermarket to pick up pancakes and hoisin sauce."

But won't the crispy duck have got cold by the time he gets back?

Microsoft tries cutting the Ribbon in Office UI upgrade

Re: it is not the customer's job to adapt

"Muscle memory is not currently part of UI designers list of concerns as far as my experience goes."

AFAICS the only concerns are keeping up with fashion set by other designers or possibly being lucky enough to be amongst those who set the fashion.

Re: it is not the customer's job to adapt

"People stayed with the older Office versions for many years (because of their superior usability)"

Or simply because they didn't see why they should pay MS money to upgrade something with which they were content. That would be a valid reason even if the interface hadn't changed at all.

"For professionals who actually want to work with the products, it was quite frustrating and painful."

Don't you realise those are bad, bad people? They haven't got with the programme. They were supposed to buy upgrades for all their old products. Not doing so means they've deprived MS of their rightful extra income. Next thing, you'll be telling us some of them even use LibreOffice as well.

Re: Why do I smell...

"... a change merely because of the change?"

Not merely because of the change.

It's because they backed themselves into a corner years ago by getting their file formats made into an ISO standard (add your own comments on the whys & hows of that). That prevented them from forcing upgrades every time a new format was introduced and users of old versions found themselves unable to open files from newer versions. It also meant that compatibility stopped being a moving target for other S/W, particularly open source. So how to lock users into MS products and upgrades?

Enter the ribbon. New users get forced to learn the ribbon interface (all those educational deals) so wouldn't be able to use either old versions of Office or the competition. But now LibreOffice have started introducing a ribbon interface into their products so ribbon-habituated MS users can feel at home.

Is it surprising that we get another interface change?

Microsoft loves Linux so much its R Open install script rm'd /bin/sh

Re: Today's story...

"Developer wrote bad code, was immediately fixed when found."

This sounds reasonable until you take into account that it was a user who found it and not an in-house tester.

Re: Typical installer written in a large company

"You need your Tier 1 developers on it or even better a sysadmin with a developer background (if you can find one), not the Tier F ones."

In fact, forget the Tier 1 developer. It's strictly sysadmin territory. Get it wrong and it'll be sysadmins pointing and laughing.

Relax. It's OK, folks, the US government isn't going to try to take back control of the internet

a non-trivial number of blowhards ... who keep saying this must be done, without having any idea of how to do it or even what "it" is.

"Any plan to pull it back would be met with international fury."

I've often said that IT's ultimate revenge is to give the users exactly what they asked for. Perhaps it's time to do that to Cruz and watch the wider, non-US, internet community just sideline IANA and all its works by simply redesignating one of the root mirrors as definitive.

Audit of DeepMind deal with NHS trust: It checks out, nothing to see here

From Google's perspective, 13891231 is anonymous right up to the point where they compare information in the record with other information they hold and whittle the number of possible individuals down to a small number*.

* One is a small number.

Computer Misuse Act charge against British judge thrown out

Re: Try again

"There is something odd happening with moderatioo"

Given the possibility of contempt of court on such a topic moderation is a reasonable course of action to take with this thread.

Re: Interesting precedent

"Anyone notice the interesting precedent being set here?"

No. The court didn't have precedent-setting status.

Intel chip flaw: Math unit may spill crypto secrets from apps to malware

"OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD projects published their patches to mitigate this issue – thus forcing the situation onto the world stage. The BSD teams went ahead after Intel declined to work with them under embargo, and instead stuck to larger operating system vendors and makers."

I'd like to think that'll prompt Intel to be bit more cooperative in future but I doubt it will.