Posts by Doctor Syntax

Tech firms, come to Blighty! Everything is brill! Brexit schmexit, Galileo schmalileo

Re: Its the Will of the People!!

"where people rather want become journalist than engineer I don't think paying more will help alleviate a skills shortage."

If being an engineer doesn't pay well, partly because of off-shore competition, then paying more would help.

Going slightly OT could the numbers of media studies/arts students reflect the numbers of places available and could that in turn reflect the relative cost of providing such places? There's an argument that the media studies students are subsidising the provision of STEM courses.

Re: Its the Will of the People!!

"Pay more and people WILL flock."

Only if they're allowed to.

Re: Services

"But then how do you propose to keep the roads, army and NHS?"

I'm assuming he forgot the joke icon.

Astroboffins 'sprinkle iron filings' over remnant supernova

Re: Not too shabby indeed

"Just in time to fly to the supermarket to pick up pancakes and hoisin sauce."

But won't the crispy duck have got cold by the time he gets back?

Microsoft tries cutting the Ribbon in Office UI upgrade

Re: it is not the customer's job to adapt

"Muscle memory is not currently part of UI designers list of concerns as far as my experience goes."

AFAICS the only concerns are keeping up with fashion set by other designers or possibly being lucky enough to be amongst those who set the fashion.

Re: it is not the customer's job to adapt

"People stayed with the older Office versions for many years (because of their superior usability)"

Or simply because they didn't see why they should pay MS money to upgrade something with which they were content. That would be a valid reason even if the interface hadn't changed at all.

"For professionals who actually want to work with the products, it was quite frustrating and painful."

Don't you realise those are bad, bad people? They haven't got with the programme. They were supposed to buy upgrades for all their old products. Not doing so means they've deprived MS of their rightful extra income. Next thing, you'll be telling us some of them even use LibreOffice as well.

Re: Why do I smell...

"... a change merely because of the change?"

Not merely because of the change.

It's because they backed themselves into a corner years ago by getting their file formats made into an ISO standard (add your own comments on the whys & hows of that). That prevented them from forcing upgrades every time a new format was introduced and users of old versions found themselves unable to open files from newer versions. It also meant that compatibility stopped being a moving target for other S/W, particularly open source. So how to lock users into MS products and upgrades?

Enter the ribbon. New users get forced to learn the ribbon interface (all those educational deals) so wouldn't be able to use either old versions of Office or the competition. But now LibreOffice have started introducing a ribbon interface into their products so ribbon-habituated MS users can feel at home.

Is it surprising that we get another interface change?

Microsoft loves Linux so much its R Open install script rm'd /bin/sh

Re: Today's story...

"Developer wrote bad code, was immediately fixed when found."

This sounds reasonable until you take into account that it was a user who found it and not an in-house tester.

Re: Typical installer written in a large company

"You need your Tier 1 developers on it or even better a sysadmin with a developer background (if you can find one), not the Tier F ones."

In fact, forget the Tier 1 developer. It's strictly sysadmin territory. Get it wrong and it'll be sysadmins pointing and laughing.

Relax. It's OK, folks, the US government isn't going to try to take back control of the internet

a non-trivial number of blowhards ... who keep saying this must be done, without having any idea of how to do it or even what "it" is.

"Any plan to pull it back would be met with international fury."

I've often said that IT's ultimate revenge is to give the users exactly what they asked for. Perhaps it's time to do that to Cruz and watch the wider, non-US, internet community just sideline IANA and all its works by simply redesignating one of the root mirrors as definitive.

No fandango for you: EU boots UK off Galileo satellite project

Re: In perspective, Galileo isn't important

"Allowing another partner to join a project at a later date, then change the terms to exclude an an existing partner is NOT ACCEPTABLE."

I'm not sure who this other partner joining at a later date and changing the terms is but it's quite clear who's responsible for excluding the UK. It's the UK. We (by a small percentage of those who voted) decided to leave.

Re: EU Are Being Vindictive

"We paid our share for the development etc., - if we don't get that back then we should be allowed to decode the PRS signal."

You may thing we should but that's just your personal view. The reality is that unless the contracts were written that way that can't happen.

Re: If not doing something because it was "inconvenient" [...] @Voland's right hand

"https://twitter.com/JohnnyPixels/status/779231997080309760"

Nice one but a bit optimistic about the UK hand. I think it's just the Fool.

Re: Well

"because it has been subverted and undermined by the resentful or incompetent"

AKA the "no true Scotsman" excuse. I expected it to be trotted out by Leavers after it had all happened. I didn't expect them to fall out amongst themselves and start using it so soon.

Re: Well

"Did you know that according to the EU (suggested by the French, could it have been anybody else) snails are classed as fish! Hows that for thinking out of the box!"

I'm sure scallops, shrimp, crabs and prawns are also classified as fish. Zoologically they're not. In culinary terms they're shellfish, of course. I believe that in some English restaurants snails are referred to as "wallfish" - and why not, we couldn't use some foreign word like "escargot" could we?

Re: If not doing something because it was "inconvenient" was the ciriteria for Brexit..

"As we have recently had confirmed the EU are a far more reliable political entity than the US."

And thanks to these nuppits we in the UK have proved we aren't which is going to serve Fox & co really, really well when they try to negotiate all these wonderful trade deals.

Re: Well

The only pity is the spineless and incompetent tossers we have "negotiating" on our side.

These incompetent tossers are some of those who advocated leaving in the first place. If you think they're incompetent why did you take their advice when you voted? If you think you or anyone else could do better remember beggars can't be choosers and we (or at least you) are the supplicants in this.

Re: Dictionary anyone?

"which part of the EXIT the voters didn't get?"

All of it.

Audit of DeepMind deal with NHS trust: It checks out, nothing to see here

From Google's perspective, 13891231 is anonymous right up to the point where they compare information in the record with other information they hold and whittle the number of possible individuals down to a small number*.

* One is a small number.

Computer Misuse Act charge against British judge thrown out

Re: Try again

"There is something odd happening with moderatioo"

Given the possibility of contempt of court on such a topic moderation is a reasonable course of action to take with this thread.

Re: Interesting precedent

"Anyone notice the interesting precedent being set here?"

No. The court didn't have precedent-setting status.

She phoned Guildford Crown Court, where the case was due to be heard, “to ensure that the trial judge was not someone who knew her or her daughter,” according to Mr Justice Davis’ written ruling. Judges are subject to strict rules that prohibit them from judging cases where they have a personal interest.

Now the whole thing makes sense. Having a case abandoned midway through a hearing because of something like that is not good.

Intel chip flaw: Math unit may spill crypto secrets from apps to malware

"OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD projects published their patches to mitigate this issue – thus forcing the situation onto the world stage. The BSD teams went ahead after Intel declined to work with them under embargo, and instead stuck to larger operating system vendors and makers."

I'd like to think that'll prompt Intel to be bit more cooperative in future but I doubt it will.

EU-US Privacy Shield not up to snuff, data tap should be turned off – MEPs

Re: Perhaps it's a silly question. . .

"You sign up on a US server, read the EULA (several dozen pages wherein the jurisdiction of US law and playing fast and loose with personal data are mentioned)."

EULAs have a habit of not being enforcible due to clashes with consumer law. Now they have GDPR to contend with as well. Conditions of service based on playing fast and loose with personal data will be hit hard with this.

Re: No shit Sherlock

"demand from all US companies to only store private data in EU-owned datacenters."

The CLOUD act makes it necessary to go a step further. There needs to be something like an EU-owned trustee such as the Microsoft/Deutsche Telekom arrangement or a franchise arrangement so the data, as opposed to the datacentre, is out of US control.

"Meh they'll just fall back to model clauses"

I think GDPR has probably killed a lot of those.

Re: Disagree

"You have to give your trade partners time to comply."

How much time do they need?

As the article says, it was set up, reviewed after a year and some matters were found to need attention and, months later, still outstanding. Then the CLOUD act has made matters worse. They're not going to comply, at least not under more duress than just continuing threats to shut it down without doing so.

AFAICS the only effective pressure will be to shut down and put the ball in the US's court if they want it restarted.

It was always a fig-leaf, not a shield. Giving them until Sep 1 is just another fudge. Just call it dead and gone until the US comes back with an already implemented package that's compliant with EU law.

Trademark holders must pay for UK web blocking orders – Supreme Court

Re: Trademark - or copyright ?

"Does this have any bearing on the shysters who try and go after people based on IP addresses caught torrenting ?"

Not as far as I can make out but if I read the judgement correctly the cases cited suggest that they'd have to pay the costs of finding those IP addresses and matching them to the particular premises to which those IP addresses were assigned at a given time.

Microsoft reveals which Windows bugs it might decide not to fix

"Does the vulnerability violate a promise made by a security boundary or a security feature that Microsoft has committed to defending?"

Promises?

Re: Duty of care

"Microsoft accepts no responsibility for... By using this software You agree to indemnify Microsoft against all claims..." etc. etc... In other words, you're entering in a contract.

If such a set of contract terms attempts to overrule statutory obligations it'll get chucked out of court.

Re: Pay more, get less

"Blue Screen as a Service"

Are you sure BS stands for Blue Screen?

Re: Pay more, get less

"Or there might be something wrong with their development methodology."

Or their testing.

Re: Would it be at all possible to ........

"it seems to be very very busy doing something clearly very very important while completely ignoring any of those things I'm trying to do."

What? Do you think you're more important than M/S? It'll get round to you when it's your turn and not before.

Dixons Carphone 'fesses to mega-breach: Probes 'attempt to compromise' 5.9m payment cards

Re: "We are extremely disappointed and sorry for any upset this may cause."

"why do they word things in such a way that almost distances them from taking any ownership"

Because anything they say could be taken down and used in court against them.

"This announcement seems strangely worded"

It's just the usual "poor, injured, innocent us, hacked after all the care we take to look after your data" line.

"Treating all communications with suspicion for the next few months ever is probably a good idea, especially in situations where any form of login details are required."

FTFH

New York State is trying to ban 'deepfakes' and Hollywood isn't happy

Re: Ain't going to work

"For good or for bad, there is no constitutional protection for one's honor in USA constitution....The first court will terminate it with extreme prejudice on first amendment grounds."

Perhaps, rather than dealing with this as an act they should make it a constitutional amendment instead. It's time the US constitution was brought into line with those of civilised* countries.

* AFAICS some of the constitutional amendments are based on a romantic notion of the US as a pioneering country, pluckily advancing beyond the known limits of civilisation. If they want to be treated by the rest of us as civilised they need to start acting that way and the first step would be to get rid of that notion.

Internet luminaries urge EU to kill off automated copyright filter proposal

One solution to the problem of automated take-down requests for non-existent URLs would be to charge the IP lawyers a handling fee, say $10, per erroneous request. Even a lawyer would baulk at having to pay a million handling fees per day. We might actually see a few IP lawyers being bankrupted.

UK! watchdog! slaps! Yahoo! with! £250k! fine! for! 2014! data! breach!

Re: They'll never levy a maximum penalty

"If Yahoo isn't a maximum breach given the number of people involved"

It's not just the number of people, it's the length of time they sat on the breach before reporting. That's the sort of thing that lifts fines into the higher tier under GDPR.

Given the multiple failures here, including the long delay, this really was a case for a maximum fine if only to signal intentions about dealing with similarly egregious failings under GDPR.

Devuan ships second stable cut of its systemd-free Linux

Re: systemd-free?

"the vi vs emacs holy war was getting old"

You could always try nvi vs vim

"I upgraded an RC1 install"

I forgot to mention one small bug.

Entered "view some_file".

???? What's that?

apt-get install nvi

Same thing

It turned out that /etc/alternatives/view was linked to mcview.

Re: systemd-free?

"I still don't get why people are so disgruntled by Devuan."

They're True Believers who see any disparagement of the great and good systemd as heresy and Devuan supporters as heretics.

Re: Is it Upgrade Season or...

"I can never keep the two straight."

If you can't remember, try one, then the other, then the first one again.

Re: systemd-free?

"My concern is that if the people that care about running without systemd all migrate to Devuan, and if Devuan developers put little effort into pushing their changes upstream into Debian, then there will be that much less reason for Debian Developers to maintain the choice."

My concern would be more along the lines of what happens with Devuan changes pushed upstream. It's not likely that if a package is maintained by systemd fans they will accept any changes based on keeping it independent of whether systemd is running. My long term concern is that so much stuff becomes so systemd dependent that Devuan becomes unsustainable.

Which? calls for compensation for users hit by Windows 10 woes

"Won't Microsoft argue that it's free"

No. They wouldn't be able to complain about piracy.

Re: software giant still needs to work a little harder

"MS has worked extremely hard to beat the sheep into their fenced garden."

Gardener with neighbouring sheep farmer here: sheep have to be kept out of gardens.