Posts by Doctor Syntax

Just can't catch a break, can ya, Capita? Shares tumble 40% amid yet another profit warning

Re: Panic stations!

"Fewer."

Not necessarily. If you jump from the bigger ships those to which you jump will be the lesser.

In a damning prognosis of the public sector outsourcing giant's woes, new chief exec Jon Lewis said "significant change is required" at the outsourcing biz, describing it as "too complex" and "driven by a short-term focus" as well as lacking "operational discipline and financial flexibility".

And who's responsible for that?

Ahh! I see now. He's new. Dump all the blame on the last guy.

Is it possible that the race to the bottom might be put into reverse to try to catch out the opposition? Or is it just dead cat bounce?

Should ISPs pay to block pirate websites? Supreme Court to decide

"Riiight, so Joe Punter sees a nice knock of Cartier watch online,.... buys it, and it's delivered to him via a postal service."

And take it a step further: say the knock-off vendor advertises by letterbox litter. Does Cartier hold the Royal Mail responsible for checking through all the mail and pulling out the infringing letters?

FYI: That Hawaii missile alert was no UI blunder. Someone really thought the islands were toast

Lessons will be learned...

How come the person who sent the alert could get away with refusing to be interviewed?

NASA finds satellite, realises it has lost the software and kit that talk to it

Re: Fair to say a real "Citizen Scientist"

"If all the probes you controlled with this stuff are accounted for and in either known orbits or en route for the next star system (very slowly) why bother? "

Doesn't everyone, now and again, remember "I have a bit of code that more or less does that more or less"? Assuming they don't lose that code.

"NASA, no concept of archiving."

It's not as if source code control systems were a new thing.

"a case of luckly to be looking in the right place at the right time."

In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind. Pasteur.

Borked bog forces flight carrying 83 plumbers to bug out back to base

What's the collective noun for 83 plumbers? A blockage?

UK.gov mass data slurping ruled illegal – AGAIN

Re: An endless charade

"for they are not independent, whatever they might claim"

You're saying that, despite what the article says, the judgement didn't put the skids under DRIPA.

The HO knows full well that what it's trying to do can't possibly be legal unless they explicitly repeal what's left of Magna Carta. They know that it'll be stricken down whenever it gets to court. So they just keep dragging a new variation out of the filing cabinet and putting it before Parliament. In due course it'll be sent to the bin and yet another one's dragged out.

Why do you think one of BigBrother Watch's points of contention is that the body set up to authorise snooping isn't judicial? Why do think the govt. tried not to go to the Supreme Court over the process of triggering Article 50?

Tsk-tsk, fat cat Softcat: Milk-slurping reseller taken to court

From the report it sounds as if they also ignored the judgement. Would they have noticed the winding up order if el Reg hadn't alerted them? Shame on el Reg for spoiling the fun.

Ubuntu reverting to Xorg in Bionic Beaver

Re: It is the video hardware driver's fault

"Hardware does not have a license, hardware has patents."

1. Drivers are S/W, not H/W

2. These days H/W is apt to include microcode (just ask Intel if you're in doubt) and that's S/W.

Fella faked Cisco, Microsoft gear death – then sold replacement kit for millions, say Feds

Could we swap him for our own May? He seems to have some technical knowledge.

You can't ignore Spectre. Look, it's pressing its nose against your screen

"forcing people to use their brains might even prevent the next Carillion."

It depends on the quality of the brains as to whether it prevents the next Carillion.

"The likelihood has risen, that's all - the impact is the same as it always was."

Risk is a function of both.

Re: No shared CPUs

"You know, the actual reason we have cloud computing."

So what about all the other situations where it's being used?

Re: Arm A53

"Then you merely need to rewrite your software to be efficiently multi-threadable."

You might need to do that anyway if the existing architectures need to be re-done with less out of order processing.

"What it means is that enterprises are relying on the public cloud to handle the really large workloads."

Maybe they'll need to look at the relative financial merits of stopping doing that until the new generation of H/W is available vs doing it in-house.

Trump White House mulls nationalizing 5G... an idea going down like 'a balloon made out of a Ford Pinto'

It even falls back on the US government's long-held desire to export American ideals to the rest of the globe. "Eventually, this effort could help inoculate developing countries against Chinese neo-colonial behavior,"

In other words, everyone else gets a US govt backdoor instead.

Intel alerted Chinese cloud giants 'before US govt' about CPU bugs

Seems reasonable. If the NSA hadn't discovered it already it would have kept them from doing harm with it.

Sysadmin crashed computer recording data from active space probe

"rm -rf /"

You can wreak havoc with mv * issued from root level. Just saying. Of course it's never quite as obvious as that. It's usually something like stuff * where you'd intended a / instead of a space.

"the computer centre (Botanic)"

Botanic? In my day it was in the Mews.

"Unless you're unlucky enough to find someone with an APL keyboard."

Unless you find someone unlucky enough to have an APL keyboard. FTFY.

Re: Hmmm ...

"You don't need to mop up the zeroes, only the ones"

You can only mop up individual bits if the packets get torn open.

Re: Hmmm ...

"You could just about moor a boat with Token Ring cable."

You could just about moor it to thick Ethernet.

Re: Hmmm ...

"When a user decided the network was the cause of all their problems instead of unplugging the computer from the T junction they would unplug both sides of the coax."

They would then be told that they'd leaked all the ethernet out of the cable and their desk would have to be taken away for decontamination.

"Or an SQL "Delete" command with autocommit on and an untested "where" clause that doesn't do what you thought it did..."

When developing SQL always start with a scripted BEGIN WORK and rely on manual input for the COMMIT. Or for the ROLLBACK as appropriate.

"It would seem likely that someone somewhere would be unable to find that symbol on their keyboard."

Isn't it the symbol on the Any key?

Yup, remember coding sheets. Remember the triangles on them. Also remember the convention (just QUB or any 1900 installation?) for distinguishing O from 0 was different to that everywhere else.

Thar she blows: Strava heat map shows folk on shipwreck packed with 1,500 tonnes of bombs

" Hardly like to blow up London."

It doesn't need to blow it up. It just starts a wave running up the estuary. As it gets further up the estuary the banks get closer together and the wave gets higher. I don't think closing the Thames barrier would be too much help there.

"Nice little summary"

That link includes one expert saying “Unless you’ve got intimate contact between two munitions subsurface, you’ll rarely cause the other to detonate, because water is a very good mitigator. If you’ve got a 1,000lb bomb two metres from another 1,000lb bomb, the other one won’t go bang. I know that for a fact – I did it last Tuesday.”

Somehow, I don't see a cargo ship sailing across the Atlantic in the middle of the war having the spare carrying capacity to have been loaded with a couple of metres separation between items of cargo.

I wonder how many of these bombs have remained watertight over the last 73 years.

Re: Surely.....

"irretrievably stupid."

For anyone stepping on a large piece of ordnance irretrievable would be no more than the truth.

PC not dead, Apple single-handedly propping up mobe market, says Gartner

Re: Usable business PCs

"Except in 2003, the 4:3 screens were 1200 lines high. Serious money to get more than 1080 lines now on a laptop or monitor"

Yes, this is the real complaint, shrinking pixel density.

"you need about 17" diagonal for 16:9"

That's what I use on this laptop. Why should I settle for less to please the aspect ratio fetishists?

Re: Usable business PCs

"Because you get no more pixels on your 16:9 screen that you had on an old 4:3 - they're just arranged differently."

So what you want is more pixels. Why not simply say that? If you look at the post I was replying to it was specifically about laptops. A laptop screen has a particular property - its dimensions can't exceed those of the laptop base - at least it would look odd if it did.

Laptop bases tend to be very much wider than long on account the need to accommodate the keyboard. A 16:9 ratio screen is a close fit to the typical laptop. A bigger 4:3 screen means making it narrower without increasing the height unless the entire laptop is made more massive and hence heavier. Can you imagine that happening? A laptop like that would just result in cries of "Too big, too heavy".

So if you want more pixels (and I'd join you in that) just increase the number on the biggest screen that will fit the laptop but don't shrink the screen because of some aspect ratio fetish.

Re: Usable business PCs

"The problem is getting the hardware needs past accountants"

Accountants should be the easiest to persuade about wide screens. More columns on spreadsheets.

Re: Usable business PCs

What is this persistent nonsense that a wide screen is a problem. If you only want to use 2/3rds of your screen to work on, just use 2/3rds. If the rest annoys you, stick a piece of paper over it. Personally I need a wide screen to work on.

Watching videos? The TV's better for that with less scratchy sound.

Still hoping for a journo rehashing a Gartner press release to dig out an old one by way of comparison and see how that turned out.

Still waiting.

UK infrastructure firms to face £17m fine if their cybersecurity sucks

The only outfits who are "critical infrastructure" enough to warrant the full fine will either be government or sole suppliers of services to governments and able to simply add the fine to misc expenses on the next tender

The omission of any link from the article doesn't make it straightforward to find the details but I've provided a link in another comment. You can look up the criteria for yourself: they're in Annex 1 of the PDF.

There's one oddity in the "guidance" (actually HMG's response to the consultation). There's a table of regulators (or "competent authorities" in the jargon - YMMV) which includes OFCOM for digital service providers. There's also a table of thresholds to determine what size of undertaking falls into scope. There's an entry in that for digital infrastructure but that only applies to domains, DNS & internet exchange points. So are all digital service providers included, however small, or are none of them included because they don't exceed the non-existent threshold?

"Any chance of a link to the guidance?"

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/677065/NIS_Consultation_Response_-_Government_Policy_Response.pdf

And for clarity "next May" in the article isn't May next year. It's May this year which I'd be inclined to refer to as "this May" (as opposed to dismay who's currently the PM).

Apple whispers farewell to macOS Server

Re: Drat

"If there is something along the lines of some integrated free- or cheap-ware that would do the job on an old computer and is reliable and easy for non techies to set up (so I can also recommend it to friends)"

Take a look at Nextcloud. Also, although I haven't looked closely at them, I understand some NAS boxes also do this but not as a s S/W only package.

Re: I can see why they are saying goodbye

"No that doesn't make much sense; it's a UK company, but as we have an office in the US it's basically not legally possible to host our stuff in the EU."

Seriously, you need to examine this carefully.

I'm assuming you're thinking in terms of 3 geographical entities here: US, UK ex EU and EU.

Let's dispose of the UK ex EU vs EU bit first. GDPR will apply to the UK before Brexit. It goes live on the 18th of May this year. The current Data Protection Bill going through Parliament is going to have to become a new Act before then in order to give effect to it. I can't see it being ditched in less than a year as the UK is going to need implementation of GDPR in the future in order to trade with the EU. So in practical terms, post Brexit you're looking at UK+EU as being covered by a single regulatory regime.

Disposing of that issue let's look at what GDPR deals with. It deals with PII of any EU resident irrespective of where the data is kept and irrespective of where the company holding or processing the data is headquartered. If a company is handling PII of any resident of UK+EU (see previous paragraph) it's going to have to comply with GDPR unless it contrives to avoid enforcement by not having any legal toe-hold in UK+EU - which is probably going to be difficult on a practical level if it's doing business that leads to it holding such data. And in your case, as you say you're a UK business, impossible.

So if the "legally impossible" bit is aimed at avoiding compliance with GDPR not hosting in UK+EU isn't going to work. You're going to have to comply. Now all that's left for you to decide is how that's best achieved. UK or any EU country will have a GDPR-compliant legal framework in place by May 18th or is going to be chased by the EU heavy mob. The US isn't. Where do you think you have the best chance of getting compliant hosting if you don't host it yourself? And where do you think you have the best choice of hosting it yourself, assuming that's your preference, bearing in mind the US's recently renewed legal framework for barging in to collect data and applying a gagging order?

Re: I don't see why they think it has to go...

"where's the added value for the administrator in comparison to BSD or Linux on good hardware?"

If it was being sold to SMBs on the basis of not needing an administrator it's not so much the value as the cost that matters. Of course it's perfectly possible for a business to put together a product which would be as simple and as reliable and sell it but they'd be up against the problem of not having an Apple logo.

Re: I can see why they are saying goodbye

"it's a UK company, but as we have an office in the US it's basically not legally possible to host our stuff in the EU."

Never take legal advice from the vendor's sales vampire.

It knows where the gravel pits and power lines are. So, Ordnance Survey, where should UK's driverless cars go?

Re: "a valuable contribution to us achieving our bold ambitions."

"Actually completing a government IT project"

Mapping's never completed. It's a process, not a project.

BINGO!!!!

"OS will be providing expertise, advice and evidence-based insights with a view to helping uplift the test beds capability for the UK."

Form the OS? Is nowhere safe from bollocks spouters these days?

Well done, UK.gov. You hit superfast broadband target (by handing almost the entire project to BT)

Re: Where?

"Well, I 'm on Virgin and get 100Mb/s."

Hereabouts Virgin have not only stopped dropping litter through the letter box, they told one of their (presumably ADSL) customers that they change to another supplier. There's no chance they'd want to try laying anything in these particular geological conditions.

All your base are belong to us: Strava exercise app maps military sites, reveals where spies jog

Re: Collect all the data, ignore users privacy...

" you can't blame the service."

Yes you can. You can blame them for not making the privacy setting default to something sensible. This amounts to an offence under GDPR.

I wonder how many fines its going to take until US manufacturers learn to do things right.

User stepped on mouse, complained pedal wasn’t making PC go faster

Re: A little challenge to all those who are scoffing

"Go and find your mother's sewing machine."

In my case that would have to be SWMBO's machine. More than my life's worth.

Re: Can I just leave this thought with you?

"I recently introduced a few groups of long-term Windows users to the concepts of Control-X, Control-C and Control-V."

The thing is, that's just one set of controls. Users from other applications, particularly terminal based ones, will have had entirely different sets hardwired to their fingers. Where are the capabilities for loading these as alternatives so as to assist these users?

It's a matter of what you're used to. Having a Linux box here I have to flip between using that command character set on GUIs and a completely different set if I flip up a terminal session and use vi. Users who spent their working lives on some other terminal based application will have a different set of "instinctive" responses. It's not that any of these are wrong, it's just that they're different, and very likely older, than what Windows uses.

Re: Bad enough for techies

"Apparently, UI design is not a required course for the millennial code jockeys."

And UI redesign is.

Fancy coughing up for a £2,000 'nanodegree' in flying car design?

Re: Oh, Udacity

"Back in the day I did just 2 weeks wonderful COBOL"

2 weeks? That was a long course. 1 Week FORTRAN but missed day 1 due to a diary clash with field work.