Posts by Doctor Syntax

I couldn't give a Greek clock about your IoT fertility tracker

Re: El. Reg. You complete and utter B*ast*ards!

"Having been tickled by the concept of the Antikythera Mechanism"

You've come to el Reg to effectively admit you've never heard of it before now?

Re: Glamping?

The Gaidhlig[1] word for database is "stor data".

And almost on that topic - does anyone here read ogham? See today's (Saturday) Google doodle.

Office junior had one job: Tearing perforated bits off tractor-feed dot matrix printer paper

Apart from decollators there are also collators. Client had one. The decollator was apt to deposit the sheets in exactly the wrong order for binding up into books. Plus two-up stationary might need to have the left and right leaves inter-collated. The mechanical collator was there to sort all these things out but was always busy on another job when it was needed. I ended up doing one in S/W which rearranged the print images before they went to the printers. It grew an increasing number of options as they found more things for it to do.

Re: Dot matrix refuses to die

"Quite interesting that US airlines still love their dot matrix printers."

Providing you don't tear it up at the folds one of the good things about fan-fold paper is that it keeps the entire document together. Can you imagine the cost of holding a flight while someone searches for a misplaced sheet from the passenger list?

Re: Grief, possibly death.

"he was about to become the first person strangled to death by a printer."

Probably not. Not the first, that is.

Re: spirit duplcator sensory memories

"pretty much anything to do with chemistry practicals."

Nothing in a decent school laboratory should be able to pass H&S.

Having said that, although in all my years working in a lab we never had anything but the old-style lab coats with a few buttons we did ban one of the peroxidase tests for blood. It was carcinogenic (one obstinate bloke kept using it and was in due course treated for its specific cancer, papilloma of the bladder). I wasn't pleased to discover that my daughter's lab was still using it years later.

Re: Lost count...

"In short. recruitment agencies, in the main, are only just above insurance salesmen in the ethics stakes."

In the sort of circumstance you describe I don't think they get as far as ethics stakes. They need to tackle competence first. Including the one who sent me someone else's contract. Same name, different skill set.

Re: Lost count...

"I'm trying to get hold of Hermen in the Berlin office but he's not answering - do you know if he is in today?"

It's been known to work the other way round.

UK to relative in Vancouver: "Our daughter's going to Quebec. Can you meet her"

Relative in Vancouver to UK. "You meet her. You're closer."

Re: Lost count...

"Seeing as you never quite know how far apart places really are unless you have experience of travelling there"

Being able to read maps is a big help.

Re: out of paper!

"university days (a quarter of a century ago"

What it is to be young - only a quarter of a century out of University.

"when some puppet tried to send a postscript image file directly to it, where for certain files rather than printing out an image on a nice single sheet, it tried to print out a few random characters per page on every page in the tray until it ran out."

Getting the printer control characters wrong on FORTRAN could and did do this with fan-fold.

Re: Speaking of carbon paper...

"They still use hand signatures to go across all three copies vs using a tablet for a signature."

Ah. Signatures that look like signatures. That's getting rare these days.

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

"Can't you just print it 3 times?"

There are these things called requirements and if the requirement calls for it to be printed in a single pass so there's no possibility of one "copy" being different/altered (regulators can be fussy about these things) then 3-part NCR it is.

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

"I think we were all startled at the amount of tape that reader had managed to cram into itself:"

ICL card duplicators had interesting ways of cramming cards into output hoppers. User standing nonchalantly beside the duplicator that was swallowing his stack of cards but not looking at the hoppers. One of them was somehow managing to crease the cards as they went into it. The hopper was filling up with a sort of random corrugated cardboard. Fortunately it was only one hopper.

Re: out of paper!

"Doesn't matter how many times I say to fill it to the top, never gets done unless I do it."

An old saying: If it's everybody's job it's nobody's job.

Re: Speaking of carbon paper...

"Can't remember the last time I saw anyone else use carbon paper."

As recently as yesterday evening. Should have been a month ago but my local Civic Society couldn't take subscriptions because the carbon in their receipt book had worn out! They've now got a new sheet.

UK.gov told: Draw up code of practice for cops bulk-slurping car plates

"Alas not, GDPR allows a get out clause for govermints and lawn enforcement."

This raises the question of what is sufficient for policing. One option would be a private prosecution against a chief constable under section 191 of the forthcoming DPA. That's the section which provides for personal liability of "a director, manager, secretary ... or a person who was purporting to act in such a capacity" arguing that the practices of ANPR use exceed what's appropriate.

Re: No problem with ANPR, within limits

"Particularly as it is not related to Brexit"

The Data Protection Bill is related to Brexit if HMG want an adequacy rating for GDPR.

Whois? More like WHOWAS: Domain database on verge of collapse over EU privacy

It should be simple enough. Natural persons resident in the EU (or UK when the new DPA is in place) have an option from the registrar to hide personal details just like any other data subject. Where appropriate these details can be obtained from the registrar by going to court, obtaining a warrant and presenting it to the registrar. If the court disagrees about what's appropriate they don't get the warrant. It's pretty well how any other online business will have to operate. Why do they think they need to be different?

"I get over 100 emails a week offering me SEO services"

I'm not sure whether it's an improvement in Hotmail/Live/Outlook filtering but I now get very few.

Alternatively it might be a consequence of the fact that I've got into the habit of writing back if I've nothing better to do and saying that oddly enough they seem to have omitted their own domain name from their pitch so I can't check whether they're any good at getting their own site on first page in Google if I search for first page in Google. This is usually accompanied by a critique of their written English; I'd expect them to take especial care of this when presenting themselves. I usually finish up by pointing out that the address they've spammed is my spam bin and if it's typical of the list they bought they've been overcharged. The trick is to sucker them into reading through what's initially a helpful-looking the whole reply before telling them just how crap they are.

Of course they're all lead generators. I only ever had one who passed the lead on to someone who claimed to have a UK branch (situated above a language school operating out of a shop front in Longsight): probably a cousin. I wrote back pointing out the crapness of the reference sites he gave. With any luck the ?cousin got shafted for incompetence.

Re: An open registry of who owns domains is important

"The EU has passed a law that (either intentionally or unintentionally) undermines the Internet, and that when enforced in the fashion they like would actually terminate any contract that violates it. In essence, if you owned your own domain the EU is saying that the contract you signed is no longer valid – meaning it is quite possible that you no longer own your domain."

Could you cite the clause or clauses which say that?

Brit retailer Currys PC World says sorry for Know How scam

"One punter was ordered to pay an extra £40 or she'd be sold a blank laptop, Which? said."

Fine. Let's see, advertised price includes the OS so that'll be £40 less than advertised. Yes, I do have Trading Standards on speed dial.

Brexit in spaaaace! At T-1 year and counting: UK politicos ponder impact

" Such a pity we have the wrong people in the wrong room with the wrong drivers and the wrong mindset."

And he seems to be one of them. Never heard of him before. There might be a reason for that.

FYI: There's a cop tool called GrayKey that force unlocks iPhones. Let's hope it doesn't fall into the wrong hands!

Re: Woah! Some much tin foil, so many hats.....

"Whilst I appreciate privacy is important, security is also, and if this can help stop bad things happening, great."

You're reading it wrong. Security is indeed important and this makes bad things happen from a security point of view.

Take that, com-raid: US Treasury slaps financial sanctions on Russians for cyber-shenanigans, 2016 election meddling

Wot? Not even expelling a few diplomats?

Fermi famously asked: 'Where is everybody?' Probably dead, says renewed Drake equation

"Just look at how we monkey around with extinction level warfare, are xenophobic, live in the world controlled by the sociopathic likes of Putin, Trump and their buddies, and a race that is bent on subverting all scientific benefits towards destructive means"

Hove you considered the possibility that relative to the rest that might make us the good guys?

Re: Too little info

"If humans disappeared today, how long would it take for another technologically advanced species to arise?"

Good question. Technology is boot-strapped starting with easily accessible stuff and we've used the easily accessible stuff. Of course our rubbish dumps now contain a good stock of material for anyone who finds them but the remaining fossil energy sources are going to be harder to exploit.

Re: We're gonna need a bigger board

Upvoted for socks teleported out of washing. But what do they want with all those socks?

Re: Irrelevant

"Yes there are still many high power broadcasts but fewer and fewer as time passes."

And not as high power as it says on the tin. Nominally a VHF radio transmitter might be transmitting a total of a MW across its channels. In fact, that's ERP; as they don't want to waste energy radiating into space the only directions from which the tower looks like a MW job are those just above the aerial's horizon.

Re: Who said they are using EM in the first place?

"There will be a point where we simply cannot jam the required information into a spectrum band any more."

And the closer you get to that the more it looks like noise.

Re: Not useful

"We know there can't be no intelligent life."

The lower bound, however, is extremely low in astronomical terms. It's one planet. Here.

Airbus CIO: We dumped Microsoft Office not over cost but because Google G Suite looks sweet

“We want to force the organisation to make the change and drive a true transformation, and not just do a tool upgrade.”

Forget about the choice of tool. This is the sort of verbiage to worry about.

“let people go to the information that they need for their jobs… almost the opposite from an environment that is based on email where you receive whatever it is that others decide you can receive.”

Nice. Plausible deniability. No email with your name on the distribution list telling you not to do something you just did or vice versa.

Re: Well, let's just hope...

"When the internet's off, there's no work done anyway"

Only if you do your work on someone else's computer. If you don't it's quite likely that more work gets done. Unless you count browsing el Reg and watching cat videos as work.

Google to 'forget me' man: Have you forgotten what you said earlier?

Re: What DOES the EU Want Google to Be?

Then, the EU says "Google, you MUST police the Internet for us, only YOU have that power!".

This seems to be something of a misrepresentation. The EU mandates a right to be forgotten as a general right. It's not specifically about Google. In this particular case a plaintiff has raised the right against Google. It could equally be against any other search engine.

"The delisting would be a specific url / news article when the search term was NT2's name."

How would the URL/news article be specified? If it's just existing material listed in the court case it wouldn't protect against someone rehashing the material and publishing a new article. The only way to deal with the latter case would be for Google to review any new material featuring the name or variants of it as they're encountered.

"it appears to be suggested that it only impacts on a search where the search term is the claimant's name. That’s not quite accurate... It results in the delisting wherever the search terms include the claimant's name.”

This raises all sorts of issues.

First of all there are numerous people sharing the same name. The effect would be to delist results for anyone who happened to share the name. What rights would such a person have if they wanted their name to feature in the result?

It also raises the question of what happens if the search includes words which go to make up the name. For instance, if the name was John Smith and I happen to search for a John Brown who was a smith does it mean that all the results I was looking for are to be delisted?

And what happens if I search for something completely unrelated but someone whose name coincides with the named person appears in the results? Would the result including that name be delisted even if it referred to the person involved? How would Google even be expected to know whether it was the same person or not?

Intel: Our next chips won't have data leak flaws we told you totally not to worry about

Re: So

"go down to your local retailer in 6 months or so and buy them"

...as part of a whole new computer.

Re: Actually...

I'm surprised there aren't more publicly known errors in it.

FTFY

Poop to save planet as boffins devise bullsh*t way of extracting gas

Re: Crap News?

"Is any part of this story actually new or novel?"

Using the CO2 which is also included in the biog as by addition of hydrogen (produced using some energy source), a catalyst and some more energy to get methane that can be burned to produce energy and CO2.

"Not quite - it's not a closed system, so it's not perpetual motion. The sun adds energy to the system, so it's not impossible."

The sun adds the initial energy. But on this scheme, having burnt the methane (including the methane produced as such by the digester) they have CO2. And as this is essentially a system for using CO2 and hydrogen (from ???) and more energy (from ???) the only limit to repeating this indefinitely is ??? As I said, the Underpant Gnomes version of perpetual motion, powered by ???

Transport for NSW scrambles to patch servers missing fixes released in 2007

Surely IBM has multiple layers of management.

And surely all those managers are their because of their technical competence - aren't they?

So surely those managers could lend a hand to do essential work.

After all, no business would be so foolish as to cut the staff who know how to do the work the company depends on and leave it overstaffed by those who don't. Would it?

It's Pi day: Care to stuff a brand new Raspberry one in your wallet?

Re: All Pi's need USB3!

"I'm using one Pi in a rather unorthodox location and have 17 USB devices connected externally (including the hubs). No-one should have to go through what I did to get that working."

Hove you considered that you might need more than one computer (that's more than one at the same time) to do all that properly?

Re: Pi vs Mac Mini

"You're comparing apples to oranges."

No, he's comparing Apples to Raspberries.

Trump’s immigration policies costing US tech jobs says LogMeIn CEO

"He now believes that won’t be possible, that the company will instead need to establish bigger offices offshore and that the net outcome will be fewer employees in the USA....He added his hope that the cost of running extra offshore offices is offset by lower labour costs, so that shareholders don’t see extra cost."

Translation: Great. We now have the perfect excuse for off-shoring as much as possible to the cheapest possible country and blame the govt. for any public backlash.

Openreach hiring thousands more engineers

Re: Engineers...?

"Be great of the Register could use the correct terminology."

And equally great of the PR numpties who write press releases.

MailChimp 'working' to stop hackers flinging malware-laced spam from accounts

“It is unclear how spammers managed to gain access to MailChimp's systems"

Really? I thought it was perfectly clear. I regard MailChimp and those like them as spammers.

Come May I'll be making it clear to anyone I do business and who shows signs of thinking otherwise with that they do not have my permission to send any of my personal information, namely by email address, to MailChimp or any of the rest of the spamming industry.

NHS Digital heads accused of being 'suppliers', not 'custodians' of UK patient data

Gordon said the body was only providing information “of an administrative kind” to those who were seeking to pursue criminal offences. He said the body saw the MoU with home office as “lawful and proportionate”.

I wonder if Mr Gordon will be taking legal advice before May because I'd have thought that this:

191

(1)Liability of directors etc

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.

puts him right in the firing line.

Patch LOSE-day: Microsoft secures servers of the world. By disconnecting them

Re: I just don't get it.

"Calm down and see what happens first. Perhaps even consider some testing too."

Unless someone takes up your second piece of advice everyone will sit calmly for a few days, then, because there've been no reports of problems, everyone applies the patches on Friday - just in time for a week-end's panic.

Ex-Equifax exec charged with insider trading after bagging 1 MEEELLION dollars in stock sale

"they were cleared of insider dealing by a panel of three directors from other firms."

Assuming they have their own days in court I can't see a judge and jury being impressed by that.

More power to UK, say 'leccy vehicle makers. Seriously, they need it

Re: A pragmatic view?

"Too many electric charging points are being installed in poor locations, shopping centres open 9 - 8 is useless. I want to plug in on arrival at my hotel......why are councils not providing road side charging? Lack of demand!"

So everyone should run round and provide charging points suitable for your convenience at their expense? Or do I misread you?