Posts by Doctor Syntax

A fine vintage: Wine has run Microsoft Solitaire on Linux for 25 years

"Unfortunately, ... the most popular supported programs on Wine are games."

This, I found, was the problem. They concentrated on performance for gaming at the expense of H/W portability. In particular they deliberately assumed display drivers reporting 24-bit pixels would handle 32-bit because they preferred word alignment. It led to a lot of bug reports where applications would crash on commodity H/W with Intel video.

As they regarded it as a feature the reports went unaddressed which didn't stop them sending out automated emails when new versions were released asking if it had been fixed yet. I kept recompiling new versions with a simple patch until (a) I got fed up, (b) the application I was interested in stopped using a 32-bit splash screen which was the only bit that caused the crash.

IBM fired me because I'm not a millennial, says axed cloud sales star in age discrim court row

Re: Real benefit—or entrapment?

"If the older generation present a handicap to companies like IBM, it might be that they do indeed recognise the mountain of bullshit, and are torn between the need to bring in the cash, no matter how dishonestly, and the old-fashioned idea that you should, in fact, actually help your customers."

I was with you up to this point. However, the guy was a salesman and thus a front-line pusher of said bullshit. That wouldn't be a handicap to IBM.

"I mean, I hate to sound like an SJW type, but this is a pretty blatant and disgusting example of age discrimination"

Age discrimination is not just the only discrimination that's PC, or SJW-approved or whatever this month's vocabulary has it, it's actually mandatory amongst these folks.

Re: millennial

If this comes to court it should at least require the provision of a legal definition of millennial - and possibly of boomer.

Re: Take the money

"Since he's engaged lawyers he's already spending whatever resources he has"

They could be no-win, no-fee lawyers who scent a big win.

"Personally I would have made taken the package and let my partners know of some newly found availability. After 25 successful years in sales he must have made some contacts."

True but a good damages payment in addition wouldn't come amiss, it might even allow him to buy his way into such partners' business.

"he was on a team of four rather than eight"

Just looking ahead.

What a flap: SIM swiped from slain stork's GPS tracker used to rack up $2,700 phone bill

On the avian theme I'm surprised el Reg hasn't picked up on https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-44668607

Not API: Third parties scrape your Gmail for marketing insights

Re: Selectivity, again...

"So that would be an algorithm, artificial intelligence, a machine - not a person."

And what does Sample Application then do with the data? Sell it on? Use it as a basis for spear-phishing? Although the article says there's no evidence this has happened what we should be more interested in is the absence of evidence that it hasn't. Yes, I know finding evidence to prove a negative can be difficult or impossible but if companies want to be trusted simply saying they don't know something bad hasn't happened isn't really going to cut it.

"Every time I go onto facebook"

I think you'll find that's where your problem is.

"There is no evidence that any of the devs have misused data."

Is there any evidence they haven't?

Vodafone drank Facebook's network Kool-Aid … and LIVED!

Does this mean that Facebook could actually have a life as a genuine tech business when/if the slurping business model finally gets extinguished ( https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/03/four_federal_agencies_facebook/ )?

British info watchdog slaps Midlands firm with £4,500 fine. Next time, register

Operating CCTV without warning notices? It sounds like an ignoble thing to do.

'Coding' cockup blamed for NHS cough-up of confidential info against patients' wishes

"privacy of patient data is a key priority for TPP, and we continually make improvements to our system to ensure that patients have optimum control over information"

Has anyone in this situation - other, maybe than Zuck - said that privacy isn't important?

Maybe if data leaks were treated like H&S, where corporate and individual criminal responsibility is assigned and poor performance can result in losing your house and going to jail, then we'd see companies take it seriously.

From the Data Protection Act 2018:

"198

Liability of directors etc

(1) Subsection (2) applies where—

(a) an offence under this Act has been committed by a body corporate, and

(b) it is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of

or to be attributable to neglect on the part of—

(i) a director, manager, secretary or similar officer of the body

corporate, or

(ii) a person who was purporting to act in such a capacity.

(2) The director, manager, secretary, officer or person, as well as the body

corporate, is guilty of the offence and liable to be proceeded against and

punished accordingly."

Re: The Online Opt-Out Does Not Work Either

"I still do not see how they (UK authorities etc) can keep on failing at this simple stuff."

I don't know about the authorities but in TPP's case I can see quite easily how they do that. A few weeks ago I reported here seeing a recruitment poster "Write code/solve problems/save lives No experience needed". It was recruiting for TPP.

And TPP don't believe in providing first line of support for users; that's delegated to your GP's receptionist who is, of course, fully trained as first line IT support as well as being a receptionist.

I read this report on the Beeb a few hours ago. Unlike el Reg they didn't say who was responsible at the top of the report but I'd guessed who it was before I got that far.

Sysadmin shut down server, it went ‘Clunk!’ but the app kept running

Re: shutdown silliness

"Don't use the shutdown command."

I suppose it doesn't make as much difference as it used to do but when shutdown was first introduced it was a script. It enabled us to build in various extras such as inhibit new database connections during the grace period. Good luck doing that with halt.

Re: type 'reboot' in the local console instead of the remote one

"In my eyes, a 30 day uptime is a prime contributor to root cause"

If you think a 30 day uptime is a prime contributor to root cause I've got news for you. The prime contributor is some other problem, maybe a memory leak, that's slowly poisoning your system. Your reboot is just treating the symptom.

Re: Random USB

"Didn't think of that. Good point."

However, an LCD panel built into the back and front of each server that displays the name.

Re: Random USB

"a roll of carpet with your name on it"

Or, given the present context, somebody's name on it.

Re: BBC2's transmission mixer...

"I think it was only Wimbledon so not many people watching"

As the Beeb often contrived to have Wimbledon on both channels (even in the days when it had the test match coverage) you might only have lost half of it.

Re: type 'reboot' in the local console instead of the remote one

"How do you know when you're a real sysadmin? When, rather than a spurious pride that the machines have been up for a very long time"

If you're an old enough sysadmin you can remember when patches arrived at very infrequent intervals. Personally I can remember a machine which we really didn't ever want to reboot as we weren't convinced its disks would restart. That had an uptime of years.

Re: type 'reboot' in the local console instead of the remote one

"When your uptime is longer than you've had a girlfriend"

Stay off the Viagra.

Dear Samsung mobe owners: It may leak your private pics to randoms

"are they going to turn themselves into the ICO"

Clarification: by "they" I mean Samsung. They're turning themselves into data processors on behalf of all their customers.

And in the new world of GDPR are they going to turn themselves into the ICO (other regulators are available)?

DNS ad-hocracy in peril as ICANN advisors mull root server shakeup

ICANN challenging somebody else's governance? Maybe there's a market for panes of glass out there.

RIP Peter Firmin: Clangers creator dies aged 89

A few years ago the Barnsley municipal art gallery had a show of props from SmallFilms. Apart from cocktail sticks & so on you can add cycle wheel spokes to the ingredients.

I'm too old to have watched it at the proper age, so to speak, but that's why you have children...

Re: Oops

"a mistaken downvote from me"

You can just go back and change it to an upvote.

When Google's robots give your business the death sentence – who you gonna call?

We have to keep saying, cloud's not really anything special, it's just somebody else's computer you can't control. But if it gets sold to CxO* types as a panacea there's little chance of getting this through to them except by experience.

* In absence of evidence to the contrary assume O stands for Orifice and you won't go too far wrong.

Re: But...?

" you walk away and present the boss with a cost/benefit comparison of cloud vs self hosting, don't you?"

And probably get ignored by the beancounters. Although in this particular case if it had been a beancounter's decision getting the CFO out of bed to deal with it on his credit card would have been well justified.

Re: More info?

"But I don't get it how you can bet your house on a free service that is clearly not meant for such use."

Given that there was a demand for a credit card it doesn't seem likely that a free service was used. In fact, IIRC, the quote in the article about AWS handling billing issues better came from the complainant and not a commenter, again pointing to the fact that it was a paid-for service.

Micro Focus offloads Linux-wrangler SUSE for a cool $2.5bn

"Not bad price for free software"

And written by amateurs as so many shills commentards seem to have been told to say think.

Namecheap users rage at domain transfer pain, but their supplier Enom blames... er, GDPR?

"it isn't clear how the General Data Protection Regulation is at fault for this specific issue"

Whilst GDPR has dealt with a few weasel holes from previous data protection legislation it's missed adding a penalty for blaming every miss-step on data protection. If they ever have a v2.0...

Foot lose: Idiot perv's shoe-mounted upskirt vid camera explodes

Re: The real question is: did he want to get arrested?

"Why else would he confess his attempted crime to the police? He could just as well have gone to an E.R. and make something up about his injuries."

Maybe he hadn't the wit to invent a good story (having his foot explode might have rattled what wits he had), reckoned ER would call the police anyway and found the cop shop was closer so he might as well settle for a short hobble and a longer ride.

CIMON says: Say hello to your new AI pal-bot, space station 'nauts

I know IBM's getting a bit short-staffed these days but it does look as if it was designed by some youngsters visiting from a local school. A primary school.

Re: AI all over again

"Welcome in space son of Clippy!"

The Beeb's article made it sound more like an animated Clippy than Alexa. Maybe they're breeding. We're doomed, I tell ye, dooooomed.

Google weeps as its home state of California passes its own GDPR

Re: many chop up their corporate distribution for legal reasons

"This law gets California into that club."

It's a thought but is it strong enough to match GDPR?

"trying to reverse this will always, always look incredibly slimy."

What's more the ballot proposition is already written and ready to go. They can threaten to reintroduce it if there's any weaselling.

Re: Legitimate business interests

"User privacy needs to be thoughtfully balanced against legitimate business needs."

Turn it round: legitimate business needs need to be thoughtfully balanced against user privacy.

Adidas US breach may have exposed millions of customers' personal info

Re: News?

"At this rate it will be news when we go an entire month without a breach being reported."

When there are so few left intact that it's not worth the effort of going after them.

"Why did they store email addresses/passwords in one place and useful info like credit cards in (presumably) another database?"

Because they're keeping the most sensitive stuff separate. Normalisation is one thing, security is another.

Europe's scheme to build exascale capability on homegrown hardware is ludicrous fantasy

Re: Europeans are dreaming

"As far as dick waving, it is not how big it is, it is how you use it."

For dick-waving purposes it's usually how much you spend. Measuring inputs always gives much more impressive numbers than outputs.

Drug cops stopped techie's upgrade to question him for hours. About everything

Re: Collective of IT managers?

My then boss, having a rant about one of the accountants (he was also an accountant) included the phrase "this place has a surplus of accountants". That's been my collective noun for them ever since. Nobody ever seems to have a deficit of them.

Re: Arresting times past

I was subcontracting to a subcontractor to a large consultancy, well-known but not so well-regarded. I was included in a meeting to be held at their office. When we got there the receptionist demanded to know if our phones had cameras (this being back when it wouldn't be assumed they had); all camera phones had to be left in reception. What she didn't ask was if we had any cameras so my client's manager didn't tell her about the camera in his pocket.

Re: Arresting times past

"Not just the Old Bailey - it applies to any Crown or Magistrates' Court"

I'm not sure if it applies to the entire building but certainly to the trials within them. It doesn't apply to making drawings, however (after all, the artist can come into court, observe and sketch from memory), which is why you see sketches of witnesses or accused in the media.

Re: Many moons ago, maybe 1983 ...

"Seems the security detail wasn't all that versed in the power output of a 5mW HeNe laser, in their tiny little brains we were conspiring to roast the brass."

I remember someone's description of the laser in Goldfinger: "Wouldn't even tickle Pussy Galore".

Re: Arresting times past

Nobody told me I couldn't take photos - I was carrying out an inspection as part of my work.

"I'm sorry, but without proper photographs to document my inspection the complex will have to be closed until a fuller inspection can be carried out. It'll take about 3 weeks on a building of this size and I won't be able to schedule that long an inspection until next October at the earliest. Be more than my job's worth to let you continue otherwise."

Re: re: cops taking a moment to think

"stopping the police from marking their own homework when prosecutions were moved to the CPS"

The CPS don't seem to be that good at marking anybody's homework, including their own.

Git365. Git for Teams. Quatermass and the Git Pit. GitHub simply won't do now Microsoft has it

Re: Doesn't matter what they call it ...

"Has anyone managed to figure out how to stop cats from posting for you when your back is turned?"

Non-destructively?

How about HubCap for the inevitable "unlimited" free version with caps on file size, numbers and branches?

The cybercriminal's cash cow and the marketer's machine: Inside the mad sad bad web ad world

There seems to be an unaddressed assumption in this, namely that ads directed at the advertiser's intended audience provide positive value and that ads directed at some other audience don't. And yet we all seem to regard ads as annoying nuisances. Perhaps these "fraudulent" ads might be better for the advertiser in that their negative value is less damaging when directed to pester the "wrong" audience.