Posts by Doctor Syntax

Think tank calls for post-Brexit national ID cards: The kids have phones so what's the difference?

Re: Tax

"It's certainly the main reason that Blunkett wanted them."

Not his department. The reason he wanted them is that he was Home Sec, i.e. under the control of the Home Office who want them because they're control freaks.

Yes Minister never properly tackled the Home Office but essentially Home Office policy very much like Foreign Office policy was explained there: ministers come and go and they each want their own policy so it's much simpler to just have on policy, the department's. HO is very, very skilled at brainwashing new Home Secs very quickly.

Re: ...citing the Windrush scandal as justification.

Given that it was the result of policy (hostile environment) as much as cock-up that's a hard one to believe. And even the cock-up included ignoring the staff who used the records telling them they were still needed.

The Solar System's oldest minerals reveal the Sun's violent past

Re: but 1/10th mm isn't really that small to a microscopist

You can view some bacteria with a "toy" microscope.

With the toy microscope that started me off that's more likely to be a bunch of fringes and other optical artefacts round a bacterium. It sounds as if Intel are having similar problems but at smaller scales.

100microns is small? It all depends on what you're used to working with but 1/10th mm isn't really that small to a microscopist. By standard definitions it's within the range for sand grains.

The internet's very own Muslim ban continues: DNS overlord insists it can freeze dot-words

Re: DNS Terror

"Countries should just start their own DNS servers and fracture the root server system."

Not the solution. Let countries (by which I wake it you mean national governments) get involved and you'll end up handing it to the ITU. What needs to happen is for the registrars (who, I believe are supposed to be ICANN "stakeholders" but not, apparently, treated as such) to do it in a coordinated fashion. The root server has a number of mirrors around the world; all they have to do is agree to treat one of those - and has to be just one - as the new definitive server and ICANN is on a downward slide as fast as you can say "fait accompli".

"and nation.of. "

Point of information. That would just be a subdomain of of.islam

India mulls ban on probes into anonymized data use – with GDPR-style privacy laws

"exemptions granted to government in the bill."

Sounds familiar. Not so much like the GDPR, more like the UK's new DPA.

Microsoft devises new way of making you feel old: Windows NT is 25

Re: NT

"21 3.5" disks, and the installer insisted on *every single one*."

I don't remember what Xenix used but I don't think it was quite that many.

I had a SCO install which came on a CD but needed a sloppy to boot. It wouldn't install on Virtual box even if you could get a copy of the floppy onto it - it didn't like the emulation. I had a few clients with Informix on SCO (the staple of a lot of small businesses at one time) so having that on a laptop was quite useful. About the time laptops no longer had floppies Linux became mature enough to use without spending more time fiddling with it than doing actual work (KDE 5 is making me start thinking that things are going backwards).

Re: Obviously...

I can tell you when my hatred started. Late '90s some complete and utter eejit in their advertising pestering department decided on a gimmick. They would get a magazine pubilisher to put a gob of the sticky stuff used to attach floppies between two pages with the slogan "Don't get stuck with Microsoft".

I suppose said eejit in his idiocy thought it would simply peel off with no harm done. It didn't always do that on magazine covers and stood no chance of being got off the flimsy pages without tearing. The eejit also hadn't realised the slogan was ambiguous. As a reward for such an arrogant tampering with what I'd paid good money for (and to the other advertisers who'd paid good money to buy space on the same pages) I decided to take the meaning they didn't intend and avoid getting stuck with them as far as possible in the future.

Back in the early days I had their FORTRAN for CP/M which seemed a bit of a miracle although I suppose even a Z80 box had more memory and storage than I was allotted on the University mainframe a few years earlier. And Windows itself was quite welcome when it first arrived: I could run an X-server on it to connect to the HP-UX boxes I was responsible for or, later, just multiple terminal sessions.

But Microsoft, over the years, have brought the hate on themselves through the sheer arrogance of their behaviour.

Re: 25 years and still a PITA

"Everything after Windows 7 is a step backwards if you ask me."

I'd go back to W2K. Missed XP. W7 just filled up its VM space doing almost nothing but updates and I couldn't be bothered to give it more.

Re: 16MB?

"which is conveniently 3 bytes when using the usual 8-bits/byte"

And even more conveniently 4 bytes if you have 6-bit bytes. ICL 1900 anyone?

"NT 4, in 1996, is peak Windows as far as this grizzled hack is concerned, before NT was retooled for consumers with the launch of Windows XP in 2001."

You missed W2K?

I migrated my W2K VM from my old to new laptop this morning. It runs the one application I can't get running under Wine and couldn't find a decent replacement for under Linux. I'm trying to decide whether to migrate the W7 VM. Probably not.

UK 'fake news' inquiry calls for end to tech middleman excuses, election law overhaul

Chickens coming home to roost.

I've commented here a couple of times that Zuk could come to regret it if he needs to lobby HMG and his lobbyists get treated with the same disdain as he treated Parliament. This could well be such an occasion. The CA affair has given MPs motivation enough. Zuk's behaviour will have compounded that.

Sysadmin trained his offshore replacements, sat back, watched ex-employer's world burn

Re: Four into one

"shifted from a proprietary software package to SAP"

SAP is open source? Who knew?

Re: Employee to consultant...

"the company came to their wits and asked if they would like to simply come back on-staff."

And he didn't come to his wits & say no? If this was the UK going back on contract to an ex-employer would be IR35 bait. Going back permie with the same client even more so.

Re: Karma can be tough

"I politely decline the offer."

Without even quoting a figure?

Re: "How to use a barometer to measure the height of a building."

"3) (with stopwatch) swing barometer from top on a rope - time periodicity"

Not so easy. With a tall building the mass of the rope might exceed that of the barometer.

Re: Timing is everything

"How to use a barometer to measure the height of a building."

Are you also allowed to use a stop watch?

Early experiment in mass email ends with mad dash across office to unplug mail gateway

To err is human..

.. and sometimes you don't need a computer. Well, not make the actual error.

End to end testing of a snail mail system.

The client sent us a life-sized test file of correspondence which would have been sent had the system been live. I'm not sure how they generated it, maybe from their own training exercises but it used real postal addresses. The arrangement was that it would be run right through the system, including the enveloping line, a sample of the results checked and the rest shredded.

That was the computer part and it worked perfectly. The human bit came when the trolley was wheeled over to the outbound post area instead of the shredder.

It was publicly explained as "someone pressed the wrong button".

Re: Net send

Just checking...

man write

man wall

Yup, still there after all these years.

Let me try: is it the "c" being some sort of a "sh" instead of a "c"?

No, it's pronouncing the "ces" as a distinct syllable.

Nah, it won't install: The return of the ad-blocker-blocker

Re: Nine out of ten idiots deliver free advertising.

"The logo-laden shirt of your favourite football club is tolerable."

Only if you really believe that, if you turn up at a match wearing it and they're in need of a a last minute substitute, they're going to pick you because you came prepared.

"My plastic carrier bag from Waitrose is a walking advert."

It wouldn't be much use having Waitrose advertise to me. I don't even know where there's a Waitrose near enough to where I live to avoid it.

"the person being interviewed ... what I do remember is Wogan mentioning"

That was the Wogan programme. He talked and his guests listened.

Re: Nobody looks at them, nobody clicks on them

"Otherwise, the ad spamming would have been long dead."

You forgot one thing. The advertising industry is very, very good at selling. They sell advertising. Nothing else; advertising. They sell it to advertisers who are going to be pre-disposed to buy it because it strokes their egos by having their companies' "messages" "out there". The PT Barnum effect works.

Re: haven't ad's died yet?

@ Martin Summers

One advert worked for you some years ago? It's not exactly a ringing endorsement of advertising.

Re: How about ...

"Of course, that would still leave one subject to the tracking, the slow page load times, and the threat of the ad network being used to deliver malware. "

It would stop some of that. The cookies and malware just go to /dev/null. Page load times? Maybe there would be possibilities of capping the volume or speeds of the advertising sites providing the main site keeps loading, otherwise just go to a different site instead.

I've advocated this for some time. The publisher gets paid so they're happy. The ad networks get pais so they're happy. The malware flingers don't get paid so everybody else is happy. The advertisers' crap doesn't alienate the viewers they're trying to pester so they should also be happy but probably wouldn't be if they knew it was going on. The trouble is that the advertising networks get paid, ultimately, by the advertiser's customers who should be unhappy.

Re: Advertising from mobile 'phones

"Sent from my iPad"

Are they boasting, confessing or complaining?

Re: I'm seriously thinking about charging Coca Cola rent.

"Because it isn't McDonald's fault that their customers are stupid fucks who litter because its easier than thinking."

Oh yes it is. Without McDonalds the stupid fucks would have to provide their own litter to drop.

Re: Not Ads, but chuggers

"then drink the infusion."

Southerner!

Re: Not Ads, but chuggers

"How about when they knock on your front door every six weeks or so at half-past seven in the evening when you're trying to eat your tea?"

They usually have some laminated ID badge they wave in your face. It puzzles them then I point out it means nothing because I could knock one up with a camera and colour printer and buy the laminating stuff off eBay so it means they could have done so as well.

What is is with ID badges? They mean nothing out of a particular context - the premises of the organisation that issued them.

Re: Subscription

I hate it when it is called the "Advertising Industry". It doesn't make anything.

Oh, but it does. And it sells it. It makes advertising. Totally useless for those who ultimately pay for it, of course.

Re: Unpaid walking advert for someone else's company

"How do you transport your wealth in a hurry if it needs five trucks to move it?"

Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing.

Re: They Live....

"And close up work, who needs magnifying glasses."

Time fixes that. As you get older your range of accommodation shrinks and some of that is at the close-up end.

Re: They Live....

"Do not buy"

Or at least wait until your eyes stop changing. Years ago my employer decided to fit us out with safety glasses, prescription if needed. Being short-sighted and astigmatic I got the prescription glasses. I always thought it was suspicious that on every re-test I needed a slightly different prescription - and possibly it was. But now my prescription hardly, if ever, changes but if I hunt up one of those old pairs of safety glasses that were worn for just walking around* are now ideal for close-up work.

* When I wanted to examine something closely I took them off. Now that doesn't work either, I can't focus as close-up as I used to.

Re: They Live....

"blocked by the polarised sunglasses attachment."

It sounds as if your polarisers were cut out of a misaligned sheet. Either that or, as Big John says, there's something wrong with your dashboard. The two should work together.

"I never have more than one odd sock hanging around."

It's the sequence from odd to progressively smaller even numbers that's the problem. Where do they go?

"handing over your own cash for the privilege of having "GAP" screaming across your chest in 90,000pt font "

Simple solution: don't buy it; buy something else without the logo.

Less simple solution: try to bill the company for advertising their product.

Microsoft celebrates a bumper financial year ... by making stuff pricier

Re: I predict more of this with the cloud

"once the first one blinks"

I was with you until this. But blinking implies they never intended to hike prices. You didn't really believe that, did you?

Re: "It's a trap" - Admiral Ackbar was/is right!

"But subscription pricing is the opposite of lock in."

Not really. Lock in is about making it difficult to move because of things like data format compatibility and the cost (and difficulty) of migrating (just ask TSB). Subscription vs one-off sales is about how you collect the proceeds.

MS painted themselves into a corner on the data formats issue by getting themselves ISO Standardised; regular changes to formats kept customers locked in to an upgrade path so they could be milked by having to buy the latest version of what they'd bought before. Now customers who've bought anything that opens the standard formats can just keep using it or even worse (from the MS PoV) they can use LibreOffice for free.

Cloud, however, is a great lock-in mechanism against migration. If you can get a customer locked in to your cloud stuff you have them by the balls ("their hearts and minds will follow") and they just have to keep paying month after month, year after year.

Ecuador's Prez talking to UK about Assange's six-year London Embassy stay – reports

Re: Comrade Assange?

"What I've been wondering about is why Trump hasn't embraced Assange and promised a pardon for crimes real or imagined."

Given Trump's ability to contradict anything he said previously would you trust such a pardon if you were Assange?

Re: So much hostility

"he skipped to the UK"

Which was a pretty daft course of action if he was worried about extradition to the US.

Tech Shutdown Blows: IT chaos cost Brit bank TSB almost £200m

Re: Are there any good banks out there?

"fintech businesses get to skip the tedious business of migrating existing business from a legacy platform."

Or the tedious business of supporting actual customers - those awkward people who want to save or borrow money, not the purchasing managers the sales people schmooze with.

Re: 2,500 staff in new roles

"I doubt there are more than 2,500 people in the uk with the financial tranasaction skillset required to dig tsb out of the hole."

But probably plenty with skillset to say "Your call is important to us. Please give me your number and someone will get back to you".

Politicians fume after Amazon's face-recog AI fingers dozens of them as suspected crooks

Maybe they should repeat this against a set of US tech entrepreneurs including Bezos, of course.

Re: Applause

"can they put the guns away first though?"

In this particular instance, no. That should concentrate their minds.

Prof claims Lyft did a hit-and-run on his ride-sharing tech patent

Re: Also Known as ....

"but its still comms..."

But with a mobile phone. And with GPS. Just like "with a computer".

It's said that the UK Patent Office would accept patents for perpetual motion machines provided they were accompanied by a working example. What a pity that isn't a universal proviso.

Brit spending watchdog brands GP Primary Support Care a 'complete mess'

"Unlike businesses, there is no concept of saving money in the bank to build up a war chest"

OTOH, if you're running a lab and are actually hands-on, unlike the management of Chris G's sister's lab, you use the end-of year surplus to buy routine consumables that aren't going to have a limited shelf-life; microscope slides and cover-slips were examples in may case. Some of the money you might otherwise have spent on those next year then becomes your contingency fund.

Re: and to think...

"seems we may well be on track to repeat the mistakes of the early-mid 20th century all over again."

Those who do not learn their history...

Intel Xeon workhorses boot evil maids out of the hotel: USB-based spying thwarted by fix

Re: There's a simple fix for USB hacking.

"rewire the internal USB connections on the server, Pin 1 - AC live, Pin 2 AC live, Pin 3 neutral, Pin 4 neutral."

You could do even better if you have 3 phase available....