Posts by Doctor Syntax

Donald Trump jumps on anti-tech bandwagon, gets everything wrong

"You criticize KM on the basis of unspecified past articles without reference to anything we can use to check your own accusations accuracy."

And,of course, we can't check on consistency or accuracy sources of the A/C's previous posts.

Autonomous vehicle claims are just a load of hot air… and here's why

"Yet another heap of well-meaning nonsense has been slid off a shovel onto my shoes this week"

What was that about insisting on active verbs?

User fired IT support company for a 'typo' that was actually a real word

Re: Validation Vs verification

"I don't think my wife would thank me"

That's a pretty strong argument. In fact, what you'd get would be a pretty strong argument.

Re: Dangers of OCR and spellcheckers

"They have done. They call them serifs"

What really puzzles me about OCR failings is the ability to read variable-pitch fonts just fine (or at least as fine as OCR can manage) and then fail completely on what I'd expect to be the easier option, monospaced typescript.

Re: If I wrote spill chuckers...

With all due respect -> I you suffer from acute Dunning-Kruger syndrome

Re: "Mangers feature prominently in the Christmas story"

"I thought it would might help to clarify that the same isn't as true on this side of the pond."

For extra clarity, the pond will be the one with the Isle of Man in it.

Re: Validation Vs verification

"McLinux, which would be a cool name, but wrong."

Have you considered changing your name by deed poll?

Europe dumps 300,000 UK-owned .EU domains into the Brexit bin

Re: Where are the Brexit fans?

"It's clear the EU is in the wrong here"

On what basis? Because they're not doing what you want?

Farage, Gove, BoJO etc. may have told you you could vote leave and still hold onto any bits of EU membership you still fancied. Everyone else told you it wasn't so. Well, it wasn't so. It's becoming demonstrably clear that it wasn't so and yet you still believe Farage, Gove, BoJo etc. Why?

Re: No surprise

"The act of an organisation you'd want to be beholden to? Maybe not."

It's all about taking back control. But we don't retain any control over what we're no longer a member of. Didn't you realise that that's how it would work out? And we put British businesses out of scope of the .eu domain unless they establish an EU presence or just move over there.

Just because consequences weren't intended doesn't mean they don't happen.

Cambridge Analytica's daddy biz had 'routine access' to UK secrets

SCL has continued to support the group "without additional charge to the MoD"

Translation: The MoD became part of the product and nobody told them.

Shaking up the Nad Men: Microsoft splits up into 'cloud' and 'edge'

"Conway's Law, a 1960's adage that holds a company's software will be structured in much the same way as the company itself."

There must be a corollary about the stability of S/W from companies that keep restructuring themselves.

'experiences and devices'

The E word. Always bad news for user interfaces. But I suppose it's applied to MS ever since Win 8.

Brit cloud slinger iomart goes TITSUP, knackers Virgin Trains, Parentpay

Re: Erm...

"It's Easter holidays. The schools are shut for 2 weeks."

From Friday. At least, that's the situation with the grandkids' schools.

"Seriously don't envy the guys having to repair those fibre cables whilst having CEO of whichever shit company screaming down the phone to hurry up."

Step one of procedure. Take out all manglement phones if they're not already out.

Details of 600,000 foreign visitors to UK go up in smoke thanks to shonky border database

Re: Problems

"When you travel as a holiday maker the chances of you needing to renew your passport are pretty small."

But not zero. Accidents can happen. However if the system is being developed by Agile coping with it can be left to a later sprint and it's just tough luck if your passport gets stolen before then.

Re: Problems

"This is what got Boris Johnson to be denied entry to the US a couple of years ago as he tried to enter on a British passport which clearly stated that he was born in New York."

His real problem was probably talking to the immigration officer who promptly decided he couldn't possibly be a native English speaker.

Re: Problems

"That's a sweeping statement, do you have any proof?"

It has the Home Office. How much more proof do you need?

Re: Problems

"flaunt the laws and rules"

Is this similar to waving them?

Re: Problems

"Good luck tracking me."

Presumably your name and date of birth are unchanged?

Name is a variable, not a constant. Date of birth is a constant but (a) although you were present at the time you have no recollection of it and are dependent on what someone else told you* and (b) what you inform someone as to your date of birth is also a variable. Those are the realities of those who don't want to be tracked.

* There are exceptions around adoption etc. where not even the person doing the telling has no direct knowledge of the DoB.

Re: Problems

"Physical stamps on paper passport pages are a very outdated mechanism now, I suspect they're only there as a backup to the electronic controls."

As far as I can make out from TFA that suspicion seems to be founded on undue optimism - and likely to remain so until the Home Office get a clue.

The best outsourcers fire themselves

"My rule of thumb, then, with outsourcing software development, is to ask the outsourcer what their plan to fire themselves is. How long will they need to be around, exactly? If they don’t have one, then they’re likely planning on sticking around for a long time."

More likely is that they've got the measure of your scope creep.

It's baaack – WannaCry nasty soars through Boeing's computers

"We are on a call with just about every VP in Boeing."

My first reaction was about the naivety of thinking that the VPs would be those with the skills to fix it. Then I realised that tying them up with conference calls keeps them off the backs of those who actually do have the skills. So it really is the right thing to do.

Yes, Emergency Service Network will be late and cost more - UK perm sec

"When asked again if she was concerned about the programme, Rudd deferred to Rutnam."

So she doesn't even know whether she's concerned.

Are you able to read this headline? Then you're not Julian Assange. His broadband is unplugged

Re: Rather predictable

"He should though be conforming to common decency regarding his hosts."

He didn't conform to common decency regarding his bail guarantors so although you're right in saying he should the only surprising thing is that it's taken him this long to really upset them.

Take the dashboard too literally and your brains might end up all over it

Re: Sigh... Why the gauge?

"care to guess why the fuel quantity indication in your old vehicle varied significantly as a function of road grade and your new one is rock steady?"

One reflects a physical reality, the other some abstraction. Care to guess which one would I prefer to see based on the fact that my car runs on physical real fuel, not on an abstraction?

Re: Chart based encryption

Bar charts with axis not starting at zero are great for biasing human insight a useful warning that something's being fiddled.

Boffins stalk house-hunting bees, find colony behaves kind of like a human brain

"Ok, I am being unfair, not like there are any bees left to do proper research around Sheffield nowdays."

You are. There's a fair amount of Peak District not that far away. Sheffield used to pride itself on being one of the greenest cities in the UK until the council decided to start felling so many trees.

10Mbps for world+dog, hoots UK.gov, and here is how we're doing it

Re: We put a man into space/landed on the moon? between 1961 and 1969.

"When are we truly going to have 'just' a Broadband service with one charge Ofcom, where I don't have to take BT's phone service to get Broadband?"

It would probably cost you about £60 per quarter more if you did.

"Cost for the USO per household: £1,400,000,000 / 24,480,000 households = £57.19 per household."

It'll end up looking nothing like that as I'm sure we all know too well. And then, if you want to distribute the cost over 10 years' worth of bills you need to add in interest.

Re: Bill increase of £20

"I blame the article - it would have been nice to have stated if this is:-" etc.

They'll tell you when they decide which it is. It'll probably start at the bottom of your list and work upwards.

Re: What's "fast"...

"I don't need gigabit speeds, so FTTP is an extravagance"

It sounds like you'll be paying for it all the same even if you don't get it. Did you imagine those who've been whining for it were going to pay for it themselves?

"That nice man Jeremy said he could do a better job."

Every party not in government says they can do a better job. LibDem voters were horrified when their party got into government and discovered they couldn't.

"I still can't work out why this is privatised."

Because over 3 decades ago it became all too obvious that successive governments hadn't been and still weren't prepared to make the required levels of ongoing investment in the old GPO network. The only way to get adequate investment into the network and to recover money from such previous as had been made was to privatise it.

Most FTSE 100 boards kept in the dark about cyber resilience plans

"Just 21 per cent of UK Blue Chip businesses regularly share security updates with the board at least twice a year"

Or to put it another way, 79% of boards don't demand regular security updates.

I'd like to think that this level of neglect would raise questions from the big institutional investors but clearly not.

There are 10 types of people in the world, but there is only one Melvyn

The best Stobb ever! "Bragg, now fully awake, and reaching levels of incredulity not achieved since he learned that oxygen is the waste product of the chlorophyll reaction" is a particular gem.

"The In our time on X-ray crystallography"

Bragg on Bragg and Bragg?

I wonder if they were related? Bragg and Bragg and Bragg, of course, I know Bragg and Bragg were related.

Fed up with Facebook data slurping? Firefox has a cunning plan

"So no mercy to those who MUST use Facebook to stay in touch with family or do their jobs (with no alternatives to speak of)?"

You didn't read it did you? It enables you to use FB if you've dug yourself into that hole and at the same time keep all other use of your browser out of their hands.

Re: How is it any better than running NoScript

"We all know no-script is cool, but as a user experience it's rubbish. You have to care enough to put up with it constantly breaking things."

Wrong way round. I regard a website that can't function without introducing lumps of code from sources over which its developers have no control as being already broken at best and potentially dangerous at worst. All NoScript does is reveal that this damage.

Don't shoot the messenger.

What the @#$%&!? Microsoft bans nudity, swearing in Skype, emails, Office 365 docs

Re: That's Yorkshire fucked then

"Especially residents of Scunthorpe and Penistone."

Scunthorpe's been moved to Yorkshire?

OTOH the residents of Overton, Middlestown and Netherton might have a problem with the ancient township which included them (exercise left to the reader).

Microsoft's Windows 7 Meltdown fixes from January, February made PCs MORE INSECURE

Re: From the desk of /dev/null

That's an interesting post there, JJ. Of all the comments at time of writing yours is the only one to mention Linux. The rest seem to be by Windows users complaining about Microsoft.

Manchester Arena attack: National Mutual Aid Telephony system failed

Re: Holy **** you can't make this stuff up.

Yes Minister...it's satire, not a "how to" manual.

Satire is humour applied to criticism of that being satirised. The foundations are reality, without a real subject to examine critically there can be no satire. YM was generally reckoned as being particularly well founded. A boxed set of YM and YPM together with a copy of "How to lie with statistics" should be the basis for any education in civics.

Parents blame brats' slipping school grades on crap internet speeds

I think the conclusion is whatever youSwitch would like it to be.

FTFY

Re: Whaaat...

"I can't see why primary school pupils require homework....My primary school was rural , four pupils in my class."

My primary school wasn't much bigger than yours. My grandchildrens' primary school, only a couple of miles away, is probably at least the same size as a whole year (four classes) was at my grammar school. Rural schools are bigger, and maybe a bit less rural than they were. And they do have homework.

Re: Wiki

@MrDamage & MrT

May I remind the Hon Gentlemen https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/13/adsl_signal_passed_through_wet_string/

"a survey of 1,000 respondents by price comparison site uSwitch."

I'm reminded of Bernard being congratulated on being a perfect balanced sample.

Adobe: New Unified Customer Profile will personalise ads as never before

Re: “Consumers prefer a personalized experience,”

"Let me tell you about some of my hobbies while we are at it:"

The appropriate adverts will be along shortly.

NASA stalls $8bn James Webb Space Telescope again – this time to 2020

Re: It will be killed for national security reasons!

"Being a collaboration with ESA and Canada it may be more difficult to shelve it, but with a Trump administration scared of every foreign country, who knows?"

The ESA and Canada might be asking for their money back if he shelves it. If that turns nasty they could always distrain him by a few Trump hotels and golf courses.

Java-aaaargh! Google faces $9bn copyright bill after Oracle scores 'fair use' court appeal win

Be carful what you wish for

IBM on the line for Oracle. They want a word about SQL. And AT&T on the other line want to talk about C.

Re: "What next, copyrighted DNA"

"I think I hold a copyright on my DNA, or maybe my parents."

Your parents may wish to sue. Did they grant you a licence?

Did the FBI engineer its iPhone encryption court showdown with Apple to force a precedent? Yes and no, say DoJ auditors

"It should be noted, however, that the FBI has not given up its efforts to be granted access to every phone. It appears to be simply bidding its time until the next San Bernardino tragedy."

This should make it a bit more difficult to pull this trick. And not just the FBI.

But as you say, full marks to someone near the top of the FBI for showing some integrity.