Posts by Doctor Syntax

In Windows 10 Update land, nobody can hear you scream

"how come it fails for so many peoples."

Shhh. Your turn may be coming.

Re: Last time

"when did ANYONE last use a CDROM?"

A few weeks ago. Debian or Devuan CD-ROM, boot up minimal installation disk, do a network install.

Re: Installing Windows 7 on Sky/Kaby Lake CPUs

"I've got Windows 10 installed on so many devices and it's rock solid. Granted there have been a few hiccups with dodgy releases via Windows update"

Make your mind up - which is it? Hiccups with dodgy update releases does not amount to rock solid.

Personally, I'd rather stick to a nearly 50 year old operating system. It's not out-dated and it works.

Re: Do you people work in I.T?

"Waaaaah I can;t find control panel"

You seem to have trouble finding your apostrophe key. You were just as bad in your last attempt. Go and find a grown-up to show you where it is. There's probably one working in IT.

Re: "It has been a hellish couple of weeks for the Windows giant"

"I should be able to make MS pay for every trip to the fix it shop"

Remember the user who successfully sued MS in the small claims court for pushing W10 onto her computer?

Virgin Media? More like Virgin Meltdown: Brit broadband ISP falls over amid power drama

"my internet service has gone down, plus landline & tv is intermittent."

Eggs...basket.

Penta-gone! Personal records of 30,000 US Dept of Defense workers swiped by miscreants

If it was a 3rd party travel company that was breached why would it just be Pentagon staff records that were copied? I suppose the vendor could have had a very restricted client list but if not there could be many more victims that they're keeping quiet about.

GCHQ asks tech firms to pretty please make IoT devices secure

"One might think these were stating the bleedin’ obvious"

No one might not. The bleedin' obvious is "If it costs us money and we can get away without doing it we won't do it". The way to fix IoT security is to make it impossible to get junk into the market place. Make it illegal to sell insecure devices and illegal to connect them to the internet with an obligation on ISPs to enforce the latter. If Joe Punter discovers that the £1 cheaper grey market device bricks his internet connection until he removes it he'll be a bit more careful where he spends his money in future.

NASA's Chandra probe suddenly becomes an EX-ray space telescope (for now, anyway)

"It's difficult to budget for replacements when the gubbermint keeps cutting said budget."

This is the trouble with buggerment budgeting. If you don't spend this year's budget next year's gets trimmed back to match. In this case it's probably "You're still using the old one so you don't need a new one.".

It's the real Heart Bleed: Medtronic locks out vulnerable pacemaker programmer kit

Re: Not the only issue...

"Nobody tried doing that yet"

??? Surely Old Used Programmer did just that.

Facebook mass hack last month was so totally overblown – only 30 million people affected

Translation

People's privacy and security is incredibly important and we're sorry this happened: Abusing users' privacy is our prerogative.

So victims are told looking after the consequences ID is a DIY job. I suppose it's arguable that they can't do a worse job than FB. Nevertheless I trust this puts the GDPR fines into the top tier.

Shortages, price rises, recession: Tech industry preps for hard Brexit

Re: Ha Ha

"I don't remember all the levels but Irish Citizens came out on top."

What about UK citizens with Irish parentage or grand parentage?

Re: Your cold one...

"You will only get your cold one if it is brewed in the UK and does not include imported ingredients."

And doesn't require carbon dioxide in its dispensation.

Re: And all we can do...

"Going in to the Referendum it was made very, VERY clear that it was a one-time vote with a binding result."

Does the word "advisory" ring any bells?

Re: And all we can do...

"Whether you support the outcome or not, it is critical that participants respect the democratic process."

Let's try a thought experiment. The Flat Earth Party has won a referendum to abolish gravity (or define pi as 3). Should the democratic process be respected?

Re: And all we can do...

The people who want Brexit need to go away and only comeback when they have a properly costed plan.

FTFY But a distinction without a difference.

Take my advice: The only safe ID is a fake ID

Re: As far as te BBC uis concerned...

"and the Beeb haven't offered you a job yet?"

It's probably the Milton Keynes bit that's stopping them. Neither London nor Salford.

Re: Irish names in Irish or English.

"Stale ones, obviously."

Yup. AFAICR babies get to smell stale very quickly.

Re: It's only a matter of time...

One day, a telemarketer phoned up and was most insistent in wanting to talk to "Tiddles"

"OK, just hold the line and I'll go and call her."

Eventually they might get the message all is not quite as they expected.

Re: A different name for every site?

"You end up having to keep complex records to remember who you are for sites which you only visit every month or so."

I wouldn't call KeepasX complex.

Re: Silly first name.

"I'm a sassanach too. It was a term used by the Highland clans about anybody"

And a failed attempt to pronounce "Saxon". Applied by both Scots and Welsh even if the ethnicity of the person being spoken about was Anglian.

Re: Silly first name.

"Then there is Euan, Ewan, and Eoghan"

And Giovanni.

Re: Silly first name.

"You just need to listen to how it is pronounced"

You mean the spelling changes as the evening wears on?

Powerful forces, bodily fluids – it's all in a day's work

Re: Just the Usual...

Remember that your laser fax/copier/printer is also a source of contamination. I had a client who provided a reprographics service at a client a couple of hundred miles or so from the main office. Why is lost in the mists of time but recovering after a crash required a floppy. I learned that it was a good idea to take a spare drive if I had to visit, the existing one was always gunged up with toner.

Re: Acid?

"Depending on what you're doing dictates the type of hood you need!"

OTOH the fume hood you have is the one that was already built into the lab when you start work.

Re: Acid?

"all the acid in the air (due to the specific testing they did in this particular lab area) had eaten a lot of the solder"

We had carbon dating samples which were acid washed. The steady deterioration in the efficiency of the drying oven was due to the HCl eating the fan blades.

300,000 BT pensioners await Court of Appeal pension scheme ruling

Re: Another option to tackle the pension deficit

"is for BT to pay less to shareholders and more into the scheme."

Which they are doing and are committed to do for several years. The "more" amounts to several billions. The trouble is they're chasing after the ongoing missed income from the investments they should have made but didn't during the enforced contributions holiday.

Re: What's good for the goose...

"You can bet of CPI was higher than RPI"

It would take a massive crash in house prices for that to happen. It's not a bet many would make.

Re: I blame the cursed one

"Here is a quick guide to where it all went wrong."

The article linked is about 10 years old (and also seems to have been written as an apologia for Brown). It doesn't include the effect of persistent low interest rates since then. Since the financial crisis nobody has dared put interest rates up so that pension schemes have been suffering from the persistently low annuity rates.

Re: I blame the cursed one

some company final salary pension schemes had so much money in them that they were stopped from taking pension contributions from employees

FTFY

They were stopped by HMRC who had a rather short term view of things, not a good idea when dealing with pensions. They made estimates of what they thought such pension schemes would need to meet future requirements and ruled anything else would be tax evasion. They were wrong. They assumed interest rates wouldn't fall.

Cue the cursed one again. He gave the BoE the task of managing interest rates aiming for a CPI of 2%. As a lot of stuff in the CPI was going over to manufacturing in China or wherever it stayed low so interest rates fell. That threw out all the calculations HMRC had made because the estimated needs depend on the projected returns from annuities which are tied to interest rates. The fact that housing costs were in RPI but not CPI meant that a blind eye was turned on the housing bubble.

And yet after the eejit was thrown out of office - years too late - he got some nice job in a US university lecturing on how to run an economy without mentioning that he ran one into the ground.

Yale Weds: Just some system maintenance, nothing to worry about. Yale Thurs: Nobody's smart alarm app works

Re: "I can’t enter my property I only have the App!"...

"Use a brick (or your phone)"

Not a lot of difference if the app's not working.

Microsoft has signed up to the Open Invention Network. We repeat. Microsoft has signed up to the OIN

Re: Here's food for thought

"if they could just sell a Windows compatible UI that sits on Linux that would be the best thing for everyone I believe"

You believe some strange things. MS have been progressively screwing up the Windows UI for the last several years. There are plenty who wouldn't consider it the best thing at all so scrap "everyone". .

Re: maybe Plan L from outerspace?

"https://fossbytes.com/xenix-history-microsoft-unix-operating-system/

Not sure how accurate it is"

It seems rather muddled. The thesis is that MS dropped Xenix because IBM went for MS-DOS on PCs so they didn't need it. Given that Xenix was a server OS and MS-DOS a client that's a non-sequitur. Xenix followed by SCO Openserver, often with an application package based on Informix was a mainstay of a lot of small businesses with either green-screens or PCs as terminals. Until MS started doing server versions of Windows the two were largely complementary.

Re: If it knows it lost mobile, it knows it can lose a heck of a lot more

"integration"

The word you may be looking for is "lock-in".

Your pal in IT quits. Her last words: 'Converged infrastructure...' What does it all mean? We think we can explain

Re: The new mainframe?

"Yep, but without all of the high priests preening and primping it into glorious life."

Given the "I think I get it now" thread are you sure of that?

Apache OpenOffice, the Schrodinger's app: No one knows if it's dead or alive, no one really wants to look inside

"Sorry, but after forced upgrade of RHEL5 to 6 (process also also known as wipe clean and start from scratch) few years ago just to be able to run LibreOffice built against some latest and greatest library I don't believe that."

After trying one of the Red Hat derivatives some time ago and having had similar problems compiling something I Googled around and came across a forum post where someone was asking about a similar problem. They were in effect told they shouldn't be compiling, their own stuff, they should just use the distro's version. I felt that someone was missing the point and I didn't think it was me. I left the land of Red Hat and haven't returned.

OTOH I suspect that often configs are apt to specify recent if not bleeding edge versions of packages as the minimum simply because that's what the dev has on their own machine rather than specifying the oldest version that provides the functionality, or at least the oldest version anyone's likely to have. That suspicion is confirmed when one then finds a binary download of the same version which runs quite happily in the environment which failed to compile it.

PINs and needled: Experian site blabbed codes to unlock credit accounts for fraudsters

Re: Can someone tell me why?

What I'll add to your list is "bank account" but - again - you don't really need them unless you want them to give you free money - overdraft or loans.

And providing you're intending to work cash in hand. Does any permanent job still pay wages in cash?

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave me tea... pigs-in-blankets-flavoured tea

Re: Christmas is essentially Page 71 of the Brand New Monty Python Bok

"not plastered across a quarter of the year."

Only a quarter? SWMBO volunteers in a charity shop. They were supplied with Christmas cards and instructions to display them in late August.

Re: The King of Vegetables

"Worship the Holy Potato!"

Wow! If it wasn't dark I'd be inspired to go out and dig up a few.

Re: The King of Vegetables

"Now come on, peas are the king of vegetables."

Only if you eat them with honey. Otherwise they roll off your knife.

Re: Sprouts

"the small whitish things that baldrick ate are turnips."

So your turnip lanterns are rather small miserable things then?

Re: Sprouts

"Neeps with haggis of course aren't what the English call turnips, but are actually Swedish Turneeps, or swedes, which are lovely"

OK, total confusion now. When I worra lad turnips were the large yellow-fleshed veg used, inter alia to make turnip lanterns for bonfire night (Halloween? <spit>) and swedes were the little white jobs. Now it seems to be t'other way about. So I'm not sure what you're alleging the English call turnips.

Personally I prefer the big yellow-fleshed version and even better mashed with carrots.

But let's also hear it for kohl rabbi.

UK.gov withdraws life support from flagship digital identity system

Re: Couldn't roll out ...

"... a gov version of OAUTH"

OAF, however - no problem.

Re: It sucked lemons!

"I started with the Royal Mail, but misremembered the year I moved in to my current house"

There could also be a problem with Royal Mail not knowing the correct house. I discovered that PAF had the address wrong all the time my parents lived here. Off-hand I couldn't say whether I corrected it before or after we moved in.

Chinese Super Micro 'spy chip' story gets even more strange as everyone doubles down

Re: A Matter of Trust

They consider that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

FTFY

Payment-card-skimming Magecart strikes again: Zero out of five for infecting e-retail sites

"The security of our systems and customers is a top priority for Shopper Approved"

So how do you square that with what happened?

Also, let's remember that the punters who got their cards skimmed aren't their customers, just their customers' customers.

Punkt: A minimalist Android for the paranoid

"While i am sure there are niche markets for such a phone"

Clearly it's aimed at such niche markets. All those comments are really saying "I'm not in that niche". OK, they're not. So what?

Re: It looks very nice

"It would be nice if they provided the source code so that it could be verified, but they won't"

They're obliged to provide source code for all the GPL stuff but not for anything they've added.

Re: Calls and Email

"And before you say to tell your correspondents to just sent plain text, try doing that to someone over your head."

One of the joys of being retired is that there's nobody in that position. I have, in the past had the pleasure of pointing it out to some numpty from the Co-op that his email which consisted entirely of an image of text that it failed some of his employer's core values because it would be useless to a blind person who required a screen reader. I've also stood up in a shareholders' meeting to complain about bad email practice.