Posts by Doctor Syntax

Worst-case Brexit could kill 92,000 science, tech jobs across UK – report

Re: But the good old days!

"Let's reconvene in two years time and see who was right "

He'll come along with the "no true Scotsman" line.

Re: Amsterdam

"And of course not being in the EU won't stop us buying from them if we want to" and can afford to.

Re: So one remainiac commissions a report from load of other remainiacs...

"I don't know how these problems are going to be resolved, but I do know that the richest 50% of the population screaming insults at the poorest 50% of the population is unlikely to contribute towards lessening tensions between class groups and starting to resolve the problems that we face."

Something else that isn't going to contribute is the poorest 50% discovering that what happens isn't what they'd been persuaded was going to happen.

I do, however, notice that the Farages & BoJos of this world are actually in the richest 50%.

Re: Loyal Commenter

"And right or wrong is subjective."

Fair point. Losing a few thousand jobs would be objective. Deciding whether that's the right or wrong outcome is subjective.

The whole point of Brexit is to deregulate the British economy by decoupling it from the nonsensical, Euro-centric and near-socialist view of regulation on the Continent a large part of what's currently its home market and its supply chain.

Reports like this will have little effect. By and large the people affected, if they didn't regard Remain as a foregone conclusion and didn't vote, would have worked it out for themselves and voted remain.

What I'd like to see is a report on employment on industries where substantial employers are foreign investors who set up factories in the UK as EU manufacturing bases. AFAICS these tend to be in places that voted leave. They should at least have a chance to know what they voted for before they discover it the hard way.

Heart of darkness: Inside the Osówka underground city

Re: Outsourcing

"otherwise you have one interesting to drive car"

Believe me, the two front end version was far more interesting.

Re: Outsourcing

"He cut two Fiat X19s apart and welded the front end onto the other back end."

That brought back a memory of the two front ends (of a BMC 1100, I think) welded together. Maybe that's up on Youtube somewhere.

PC lab in remote leper colony had wrong cables, no licences, and not much hope

Re: Sounds perfectly normal

"I was SHOCKED to find no cc, this must be the only UNIX without one."

The Onyx Z8000 box had its software distributed on two QICs. The main one had the compiler so that was OK. The other tape was called the games tape and somehow we weren't supplied with it. That was the one with vi on it.

Re: Ré causing, not curing chaos

"Except, of course, that you must not have ANY exposed circuit parts (switch, beeper, etc)."

Remember the old AC/DC transformerless radios? Probably running off a 2-pin plug. Serial heaters, quite possibly a live chassis... The good old days.

Re: Ré causing, not curing chaos

"The idea was to try and do away with the circuitry and expensive transformer required to step down from 240v to 5v by using ultra low current devices and a simple resister to drop the unwanted 235v."

I took apart a defunct PIR detector. The power supply? A bridge of 1Nsomething-or-other diodes, a fractional watt resistor, a capacitor and a zener.

BOFH: Buttock And Departmental Defence ... As A Service

Re: Well the smoking gang...

"2 side walls would class it as outdoors"

Two side walls on a bus shelter? Luxury!

Remember those holy tech wars we used to have? Heh, good times

"ZX Spectrum vs C64 or ST vs Amiga."

The Spectrum was the toy we bought for our son.

"Does anybody know if KDE still better than Gnome?"

AFAICS Gnome are winning the race to the bottom. Nevertheless each version of KDE gets uglier than the last and more replete with who-on-Earth-wants-that features.

Re: S**t!

"it is probably because I am old"

As one gets older time becomes more precious so saving it is a good idea.

Re: S**t!

"I have noticed that these days, ***ALL*** web browsers suck."

Maybe it's just that all the websites suck in different ways.

Next; tech; meltdown..? Mandatory; semicolons; in; JavaScript; mulled;

Re: Anyone seen a single line C program ?

"APL couldn't be worked on even WITH the unadulterated source."

APL and "unadulterated source" both in one sentence. Who'da thunk it?

Re: Bad programmers blame the syntax.

"And if you are so old you cant adopt your coding style"

Ah, poor little orphan coding style, looking for new parents.

Re: Tabs v spaces

"languages that need whitespace to decide the structure of a program should be similarly taken around the back of the shed."

I can see why someone thought it would be a good idea. I can also see why it isn't. An IDE that automates indentation or something like cb is a better solution.

EU court to rule whether Facebook should seek and destroy hate speech

Re: Logistics

"Dislike FB as much as I do this doesn't seem like something they can win."

Not getting into a fight you can't win is always good advice. Somebody should have given it to FB.

Data protection is best managed from the centre

Getting ahead of yourself here..

There's no point in even thinking about controlling the way stuff's stored and handled until you've cracked down on over-collecting and that's primarily a cultural problem. You need to deal with your data fetishists first.

PowerShell comes to MacOS and Linux. Oh and Windows too

It sounds like a perfect fit on Linux - with systemd.

Re: Poor old MS

"And we know that Andromeda is coming which will merge Windows Mobile and Windows capabilities so they haven't given up yet."

Wasn't that Windows 8? And 8.1? And 10?

Worcestershire's airborne electronics warfare wonderland

Croome is one that I've always managed to miss. Must definitely make the effort to get there next time I'm in that area.

Ecuador tried to make Julian Assange a diplomat

Re: It's a weird world...

"I honestly think it will at this point be a million times more likely and a thousand times more embarrassing for him to come out, be arrested, sent to jail for skipping bail, six months without press, gets out of that and... literally nothing happens. Nobody cares enough to bother to chase him any more. A couple of press conferences and then fades into obscurity."

That would certainly have been the smart thing to have done and could have been the situation a year a so back. However he's now met his match in the White House.

Brace yourselves for the 'terabyte (sic) of death', warns US army IT boss

"The Military is connected to the Internet ?"

Remember all those early three letter top domains? .edu, .com and ..... .mil?

Cryptocurrencies to end in tears, says investor wizard Warren Buffett

"take a bunch of flowers they grow in the ground for free"

Would you care to elaborate on that. How is growing them in the ground free? Remember your explanation needs to cover the fact that if the flowers weren't being grown something else would be. It also needs to explain how the flowers are grown with zero effort in propagating, ground preparation, planting, weeding, pest control and harvesting. It also needs to explain how the flowers got to be looking pretty without any cost, given that it will have taken generations of careful hybridisation and selection to get them to that state.

Have you ever actually tried growing flowers or anything else?

Re: Easy to understand

"1. I have to work (mine) therefore the item should have some value more then the effort I have put in."

I can work at, say, making mud pies. If I do that I've put effort in. But that effort creates no value at all. What would create value would be that someone finds mud pies useful. All the rest of your items could be applied to finding the person to whom they are useful. If no such person is found then they indeed worthless and the entire mud pie economy collapses - rather like the mud pies themselves.

See also - The Emperor's New Clothes.

Cisco can now sniff out malware inside encrypted traffic

Re: Content Filters?

"'ve used Websense (Forcepoint) for several years, it has the ability to un-encrypt, analyse, and re-encrypt traffic to see if something is malicious....What am I missing here?"

That it doesn't do that. it looks at the characteristics of the traffic instead.

Intel top brass smacked with sueball for keeping schtum about chip flaws

Re: What Inflation

"The most likely causes for the shares to drop will be in shareholders having class action lawsuits against the company"

Given that the shareholders are the company what we have here is shareholders suing themselves - at least in part. What they're trying to do is take money from their fellow shareholders. It's always seemed to me an extremely dubious proposition. In this particular case things would have been a lot worse if the fault had been disclosed before mitigations were ready for release and there had been several weeks of exploitation in the wild. It's likely that not disclosing earlier has protected the share price.

Think tank: Never mind WannaCry, update NHS IT systems for RoboDoc

Re: Facepalm

"I think the NHS needs to get its shit together on its IT foundations before getting hot and wet over bleeding edge AI and robotics."

And by the time that happens there'll be AI that actually works.

UK watchdog dishes out fines totaling £600k to four spam-spewers

" I guess texts can be sent from outside the jurisdiction so are not per se illegal."

The principals on whose behalf the texts were sent are likely to be inside the jurisdiction. They need to be hit.

Re: Good

"But the fines should be higher."

They seem to be trending that way.

1 in 5 STEM bros whinge they can't catch a break in tech world they run

"my experience is that the best candidate gets the job, and I’ve never come across any instance of selection on criteria other than ability to successfully navigate the interview and CV process."

So you're basing "best" on the ability to navigate the interview and CV process rather then the ability to do the job when they get it.

Re: The smug, dismissive way this article is written kinda proves their point

"You have to address the number of the targeted group at the beginning of the pipeline before you start dictating the output."

The start of that pipeline is a long way back. Maybe in school, maybe in the peer group, maybe in the home and maybe in the individual.

Re: The smug, dismissive way this article is written kinda proves their point

"I'd much rather have a black heart surgeon operating upon me if she was the best applicant at interview"

I take your general point but I'd prefer it if she was the best in outcomes rather than interview.

Re: Had I not been a white male

"quite well suited for the job I had, but would have been a disaster had I been promoted to management...clueless bosses and other jerks promoted for some reason other than they'd be good at their new job."

One of the problems I've seen for the whole of my career has been the lack of progression other then into management. Nobody gets rewarded in the long term for being good at their job except by being promoted to a management role for which ability may well correlate negatively with that needed for their current job. We thus end up with work being done badly by those who have either shown themselves unfit to do it or too inexperienced to be assessed and badly managed by those who could have actually done the job well and been underpaid.

Re: Slight typo

"She better be good if she's doing 19% of the entire company's leadership work!"

Maybe effective leadership was meant. After all, it's Microsoft.

Re: Ignoring the gender element

"Some are arseholes, some are not."

The former seem to be most likely to get to positions of authority.

Re: Isn't it a small minority - Bear me out please - two things..

Their girl peer groups appear to be relentless in their view of science and tech as "uncool"

Sadly there seems to be a peer group which regards any educational achievement as uncool. I read recently that the lowest achieving group in the UK are white working class males.

Transport pundit Christian Wolmar on why the driverless car is on a 'road to nowhere'

Re: Public transport is already self-driving

"Good public transport would probably be more efficient and cheaper."

My last gig before I retired was about 40 - 45 minutes commuting by car door-to-door. I had to go in a few weeks later to sign some documents. This prompted me to work out what the the journey would be by public transport. As far as I can remember it went something like this.

5 minutes to walk to the bus stop. The bus only runs at hourly intervals, it used to be 4 an hour and more in rush hour.

40 minutes to town. It used to be 30 but the the bus now makes a diversion to try to cover two old routes instead of one and does neither satisfactorily.

20 minutes wait for the next bus which is also on an hourly schedule.

60 minutes journey. Along one of the country's many overcrowded and unpredictable stretches of motorway.

4 minutes to change to the next bus. Not long in terms of the unpredictable nature of the previous leg.

12 minutes journey by bus arriving about 10 minutes after the target arrival time.

2 minutes walk to the gig. Say 2 1/2 hours if all went well

Anyone who thinks public transport is more efficient is someone who lives on a route where a single journey takes them directly between home and work and back with a frequent service.

The comparison is basically saying, "It would be a stretch."

I've driven on motorways. I know what a convoy of 3 trucks looks like: short*

Football fields, however, are something I've successfully avoided for the whole of my adult life and as much as possible of my schooldays. Therefore the only thing such a stupid comparison tells me is something I don't want to know and isn't germane to the discussion in terms of something that I do know and is. It seems to be a reflex of journalists - or possibly something they've been taught as essential in journalist school.

Actually the more germane distance isn't the length of the line of trucks but the distance needed to pass it in terms of the distance to the junction at which I need to leave the motorway.

* In relation to the length of actual convoys!

Re: And of course the moral issue...

"the motorcyclist. He's at least seventy years old."

Is this an evidence-based generalisation?

Re: Missing the point

"our cognitive abilities are never as good as we think they are: we find it very, very difficult to concentrate on things for a sustained period but this is something that computers excel at."

OTOH our cognitive abilities are driven by massively parallel processing. In a non-routine situation (and accidents are not routine) they might be able to out-perform a computer which don't necessarily cope well with edge cases. The trade-off isn't necessarily as clear-cut as you might think.

"at the end of the day it's just about the money."

The money aspect is indeed easily dealt with. It's passed onto the manufacturer who in turn will distribute it back to the owners just as insurance does. But liability isn't just about money, it's about responsibility which, at present, can result in criminal prosecution. How does that aspect of liability get dealt with? If a manufacturer has a choice of spending money or cutting a corner how do you bring that responsibility home to the individual(s) who made that choice?

"I think, that the problem with driverless cars will always be liability.

If I as the driver will always have to be liable for the actions the car takes"

If it's driverless then you won't be the driver.

"One of the benefits of the 20mph limits is the increase in survivability. Your chances of surviving are lot higher than being hit by something traveling at 30mph."

Your chances of surviving are much worse than being missed by someone travelling at 30mph concentrating on the road rather than on staying within a 20mph speed limit. A driver's concentration is finite; don't misuse it.

Re: I bet

"Given that locks aren't automated"

A far more easily solvable problem than automating driving.

Re: It appears from the article that Mr. Wolmar is a railway enthusiast...

"Why in God's name would I want to spend £20,000+ on something I'm not going to use much?"

Is that the best you can manage? You'd spend it for exactly the same reason as you do with a non-autonomous car: it's there when you need it. If you're expecting to use an automated cab then you should also expect to spend a long time waiting for it because everyone else who thought the same way as you would be wanting to use the limited pool of cars at the same time. One in N times you'd be the lucky one to get prompt service and block out N others, otherwise, just stand there and wait.

Re: It appears from the article that Mr. Wolmar is a railway enthusiast...

"After dropping you at home the car works the taxi night shift"

And your next day starts with cleaning out the various organic remains last night's passengers left in it. Or do you wait up to do that as soon as it returns from its night shift?

"I don't think The Holborn Effect will stand in the way of that."

Why not? If the Holborn Effect is operational it might be waiting miles away when you want to pick you up from work.