Posts by Doctor Syntax 42402 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Two years ago he might have been a person on interest in the US, but under the new regime anything Obama did is wrong so Julian's going to be free to go."
I suspect it's the other way round. The previous administration would have had the wit to realise the biggest punishment they could inflict would have been to ignore him. I think the current administration lacks wit.
"One of my regrets is not keeping hold of samples of various bits and pieces over the years"
There's a series on YouTube about renovating an Alto. One of the episodes is a visit from the Ethernet inventors who arrive with a box of various interface bits & bobs none of which can weigh less than a couple of smartphones.
"The only people I've known well who are actual self made millionaires spend most of the time looking flat broke."
Memory of Last of the Summer Wine. The three scruffs wandering round a car show room. Salesman asks manager "Shall throw them out?". "Nay, lad. Round here they they can look like that and be millionaires."
"How the **** do you dig those up seemingly to order?"
That particular one - I'd clicked on someone else's obligatory Dilbert, either yesterday or this morning and, as one does, gone forward and forward and .... it's surprising how quickly time flies. That was one I went through so it immediately came to mind as soon as I read Dwarf's post, and a quick search for dilbert gullible brought up a list of possibles - it was about fourth or fifth.
A few Dilberts stick in the mind and then it's just matter of Googling for key bits of dialogue & dilbert. Sorry, no magic involved, just serendipity. Another nice one from that sequence can be found with dilbert "law school" "ant farm"
"Poor syntax and grammar are deliberate. They're used to weed out those who might stop and think "
People say that but I'm not convinced. I sent back a wind-up to one of the Indian "improve your website" spams (originating IP address from an Indian ISP. OK?). This eventually lead to a reply assuring me they had English and Australian offices. StreetView revealed the English branch to be at the same address as a language school (the irony!) in Longsight, Manchester and they listed a number of sites as examples of their work.
The writing varied from almost idiomatic to totally unique. The worst one appeared to have constructed sentences by making lists in random order of the words needed in the sentence, starting to arrange them and after the first two or three abandoning the job as too difficult, leaving the rest where they lay and moving on to do the same with the next sentence.
"That is excellent for folks who don't own their own domain and mail server."
It only costs a few quid a year to own your own domain and you don't need a mail server. Either get a mail service from your domain hoster (again not expensive - even I do it) or simply get it all sent to your free gmail or whatever mail service.
"Take the contact email from one scammer, configure your email client to use that as "your" outgoing ID, & then reply to a different scammer as if you were the first one."
I've tried a variant of that by replying along the lines of that sounds very interesting but I'm too busy to deal with it at present, could you contact my colleague ....... While typing this I've just realised I slipped up. It should have been "one of my colleagues" and given them a list.
SEO and similar scammers are requested to send the results of "our" self-assessment questionaire (supplementary questions can be added prompted by particularly egregious lapses in spelling, grammar or punctuation):
1. Is the candidate a company registered in accordance with the legislation of the country in which it's based?
2. Is the company name given in the proposal?
3. Does the company have its own domain and website at that domain?
4. Does the website appear on first page in Google when searching for "first place in Google"? (Very important - if it can't promote itself it can't have any credibility for claims to promote others.)
5. Does the company use its own domain for email correspondence?
6. Does the proposal list the website(s) for which they're making a proposal?
7. Does the company buy cheap and utterly useless spam lists?
8. Did the proposal arrive in my spam bin address at .......@hotmail.co.uk rather than one of my real email addresses at my own domain?
9. Does the company actually write its own proposal email or did it buy it along with the cheap and utterly useless spam list?
10. Was the email unbelievably lucky to make it through Hotmail's spam filters?
11. Is the proposal from an out and out liar who lacks any competence to do the work themselves but is just generating leads to sell on?
"Being an old white bloke.... As a result, I have to be careful when dealing with people who are not the same sex as me"
Just accuse any complainants of being ageist, sexist and/or racist depending on which of their personal attributes differs from your own. It's a game that can be played more than one way.
Any email has to come from somewhere and if you're running a scam making it seem to be from somewhere safely foreign is a good idea, even if you live next door to the would-be mark. After all you don't want the plod getting involved which they might do if your text is in perfect English.
And in any case one has to abide by tradition: financial scams are obligatorily Nigerian, SEO proposals just have to be Indian etc. It would be unfair to leave the Chinese out of it - that would be discriminatory at the very least.
"Yes, file deletion was not good, but, only affected limited number of users with a specific bespoke configuration."
If you are one of that limited number it's a big issue.
"I have had no problems at all"
Have you considered the possibility that next time you may be one of the limited number of users affected? Have you worked out the possible financial impact is you are?
One of the requirements of an OS is to work properly for all users, not all except for a limited number.
I wonder what the GDPR situation with a breach before the go-live date but disclosure wwwellllll delayed until after. It's delayed disclosure that brings the biggest fines.
"We want to reassure our passengers that we took and continue to take measures to enhance our IT security,"
And why did el Reg publish this without challenging it.
I believe "thee" is correct as I was using it - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/thee - but I'm not an expert.
MW says, correctly of course, that it's the objective form. You were using it as the subject. When I grew up in Yorkshire second person singular was still in current use by older gernerations so, give or take the dialect pronunciation, it's second nature.
"Why would they, they have your money and they know you'll be installing Windows 11 as soon as it's out"
That would mean a pretty big rethink (although it might be the only way to get out from under W10's reputation). They made it clear that everything from now on will be W10 even if the rolling upgrades mean not a single line of the original code remains.
"ugly and limited widget sets for the GUIs"
Amen. I think it's because they're trying to ape the MacOS & Windows. There's an oversupply of W7-like decoration themes for KDE. With a bit of effort I have a nice, clean-looking set-up which looks very much like what W2K could have evolved into.
