Posts by Doctor Syntax

Ubuntu 17.10: We're coming GNOME! Plenty that's Artful in Aardvark, with a few Wayland wails

Re: I wonder why it's *still* not the year of Linux on the desktop

"no-one can agree of the best distro/desktop combination!"

Because the best combination for you might not be the best for me. One of the good things wbout Unix-like systems is their modularity. You can either tailor an existing distro such as Debian or Fedora to what you want or roll out your own spec from Gentoo. Or you can start from a BSD base. What you don't have to do is put up with the one size fits all vendor approach.

For instance, one of the comments usually made here is that Linux is unsuitable for older users. Well, I've just been setting up a new laptop for SWMBO. Amongst other things I've been able to take advantage of the configurability of the typical Linux desktop to choose features such as the best system font to improve the readability for her, a necessity after macula problems a little while ago.

Re: Tension, apprehension, And dissension have begun.

"I'm currently liking Pop!_OS."

Your link is a 404

Re: Nice

"None of that RSI inducing command line nonsense."

Nice to see there are still people who can follow scripts. Even if they can't write them.

Plants in SPAAAAAAACE are good for you

Re: There's got to be a lot more of this if humans want to live on other planets.

When it comes to colonising other planets the engineering challenges are going to be a minor part in relation to the rest.

National Audit Office: We'll be in a world of pain with '90s border tech post-Brexit

Re: If you were born before yesterday ...

"you might remember that Meg Hillier was one of the many Home Office ministers"

So was John Reid who described it has "Not fit for purpose". Has anyone seen signs of improvement since then?

Re: How hard can it be?

"To my simple IT sales mind, that in itself is a relatively simple system and process to create"

That's the IT sales approach. Sell a simple system and then make the money out of the bits that weren't initially defined.

As things stand the bits that aren't defined include what happens to non-UK EU citizens already in the country.

Re: no deal over visa free travel

"I hate to say I agree with you about the extremists, except the only ones I hear demanding this are those who argue for remain."

Which "this" do you mean?

"It is concerning that some people seem to want the country to burn if they cant have their own way."

Our worry is that we will see the country burn because of those who have got their own way although it's not very clear just what that way is.

Re: Sure you have to do it faster but what's the problem with that?

"Running to the NAO"

The A in NAO stands for "Audit". You don't run to auditors, they come after you.

Re: Brexit?

"One which records movement in and out of the country while checking the validity of entry."

You're trying to hide the problem in that little word "validity" aren't you. How do you determine it?

There's another problem hidden under "entry". What about non-UK national EU citizens already here?

Re: Brexit?

"The rules will be whatever we as a sovereign country say they are."

Have you not been following any of this?

Go and read the papers or the accounts on the Been news website covering the last few months' worth of negotiations and then come back and tell us what those rules will be. Because none of the rest of us know. And by the time you've done that you might have started to wonder just ho "sovereign" a country we will be post-Brexit.

Or failing that, go and round up a few of the Unicorns that are going to bring the magic to make it all work. We're going to need them.

Re: Brexit?

"Brexit has had one positive outcome, because of the hard deadline we will know quite soon just how big a fuck up the new system is."

We don't know already?

Re: Brexit?

"We are leaving the European Union, what difference does that make to our borders?"

It makes a difference of who's allowed to come and who, of those present before the event, are allowed to stay. None of which is settled and doesn't seem likely to be, on present showing, until at least the beginning of March 2019.

Re: Brexit?

"The brexit in the title would appear to have next to nothing to do with the UK border problem."

OK, if you know what the post-Brexit requirement is going to be maybe you'd let Davis, Barnier & everyone else involved because as far as I can see none of them have a clue.

Re: Brexit?

"So, just more FUD that really has nothing to do with Brexit, then? It's just another plain old Government last-minute spending screwup."

No it's the plain old Govt screwup plus Brexit which itself introduces a last minute element because until the terms are known there can't be a specification. Remember that EU negotiations have traditionally involved stopped clocks in that they end up being completed in the early hours of the morning after the deadline. This one's going to be a doozy.

Re: "It's going to be a total failure."

"the big joker in this pack will be the fabled border-without-checkpoints that will be the Republic/NI EU/UK border."

As an added delight this is straddled by farms and even, I believe, buildings.

I remember being on holiday in Sligo in the Republic, going out for a drive and finding ourselves arriving, via back roads in Belleek in NI after a navigational error without any indication of when or where we crossed the border.

Later, at the height of the height of the troubles with massively fortified army posts, the border was still somewhat notional. However much "technology" gets thrown at it things won't change unless we get Trump in to build a wall.

The case of the disappearing insect. Boffin tells Reg: We don't know why... but we must act

Re: I'd like to see more

"Are they really good at spelling bees?"

And understanding their origins?

Re: Maybe if they collected less insects, there would be more around...

"Of course it requires also being fee from the tyranny of a homeowners association or a city which mandates a crisp green lawn."

Call it a flower bed. Put a small square of Astroturf in the middle if someone insists on there being a lawn in the garden.

Re: Maybe if they collected less insects, there would be more around...

The "norm" for a lawn is it to be uniform, green, rye grass only and nothing will stop your average suburbia dweller splashing a bottle of glyphosphate a week on it to keep it this way.

Glyphosate is a non-selective. Splashing a bottle of it a week will simply result in a wizened brown mat of ex-rye grass.

Re: Pedantry

"Insects are at the bottom of the ecosystem,"

Revolutionary ecology as well.

DXC slashes meal allowances for travelling troops: Please sir, may I have some more?

Re: No health based exception to per-diem, well sorry no deal.

"I have a special diet, not for health issues or adherence to any -isms, I just don't eat chopped up dead animals because it's gross."

That sounds very much like vegetarianism to me.

Re: No health based exception to per-diem, well sorry no deal.

"Although veganism is a choice, it is also the best diet for Type 2 diabetes."

Type 2 diabetes means you have to avoid leather shoes? Vegetarian and vegan are not the same.

You can't find tech staff – wah, wah, wah. Start with your ridiculous job spec

Re: Simples

"The stupid bastards want something for nothing."

s/some/every/

Your data will get hacked anyway so you might as well give up protecting it

Re: Never explained

"As an example, just consider Donald Trump. Money and a sense of entitlement."

Maybe he could be persuaded. And for reasons far too complicated to explain, it has to be done before the end of the year. This year.

Re: It's an 'underworld' festival

"In the 1960s the fireworks were still legal in N.I."

I don't think they were when I moved there in the mid '60s, or at least it wasn't enforced. They certainly became so after the start of the troubles.

Re: Pumpkin connection

"When I was a kid in Ireland (Dublin) we hollowed out turnips."

Nowadays everyone seems to insist that these should be called swedes and it's the cricket ball sized things that are turnips. But who'd make a turnip lantern out of those little runts.

"We also had mashed potato with something green in it"

Sounds like champ.

"You mean, like these ones?"

A programmed maximum height? If it's going to be overflying people it would need a programmed minimum height as well or that freezer's going to be needed PDQ.

Re: 01/01/80

Informix dates start with 1 = 01/01/1900. A date of 31/12/1899 is a warning that someone didn't understand the difference between null and zero.

Re: Dungeness

Isn't Dungeness just the sort of place where low-budget film units go to stage Sci-Fi cowboy shoot-outs & the like?

Legends of the scrawl: Ordnance Survey launches augmented reality tool for maps

Re: True, but...

Utilities companies also use other highly accurate precise GIS and mapping tools for accurately locating and identifying mains pipes.

The mapping may be precise. It doesn't necessarily correspond with the reality underground.

"another for utilities companies to visualise underground pipes from over ground"

Reconciling theory with reality could be a bit of a problem for this.

What’s the real point of being a dev? It's saving management from themselves

"I was never that sure what a 4GL language/system was"

I can only speak from experience with Informix 4GL. Essentially a structured procedural language (but why retain "LET" as a keyword for assignment statements) but also incorporated SQL, form handling and report handling. The form and report handling incorporated event handling ("ON" as a keyword).

Essentially it added higher-level abstractions (databases, menus and reports) to what previous languages had had just as 3rd generation languages did in comparison to assembler and as assembler did in comparison to machine code.

I never quite escaped the feeling that the original non-procedural Informix applications, Perform and Ace (a report writer) were more truly what was toted about as 4GLs at the time but, within its restrictions, it was more practical - serious work with Perform & Ace required linking C code into their interpreters.

The OO approach to incorporating SQL has been very different, as far as I've experienced it. There would be some object which had a string component into which one would build the SQL with string operations rather than directly writing it in the source as a statement in its own right. This seemed clumsy. It was no surprise that New Era, Informix's own attempt at introducing OO into 4GL which did just this was a failure. However, as time went on it became more practical to take Informix 4GL's approach of preparing a named statement from a string and then executing it as more practical than the original for many purposes and still less OTT than the OO approach.

What we seem to have ended up with, for the most part, is 3rd generation procedural languages with OO features added. They don't really represent a higher level of abstraction and this, I think, is a failure.

"When I was in college, we were told that 4G languages were the future. Drag and drop programs."

Wasn't that 5GL?

"Deep in the mists of time, some 25 to 30 years ago, there was a belief that software production would change radically."

I'm glad you went on to explain which particular belief you were thinking of. There've been so many software that writes itself fads. If one actually works it'll take everyone with real experience by surprise.

Canadian govt snoops emit their own malware detection tool, eh

"the 5 eyes dancing together"

+1 for mixed metaphor of the day.

Re: "automatically recognizes the various file formats.. and triggers the analysis of each file.”

"Cautious thumbs up, provided a)It's available in source code"

From the subhead: "Canada's Communications Security Establishment has open-sourced its own malware detection tool."

HPE quits cloud servers, two weeks after telling El Reg it wouldn't do that

Re: Exciting new strategy

The HP way goes further than that.

4) Get rid of all the R&D staff because their salaries are holding back profits.

Re: Vaxen

I remember when out HP-UX servers were seen as a temporary solution because the business's standard platform was VAX/VMS. I wonder how that turned out.

IBM broke its cloud by letting three domain names expire

Re: Pay peanuts, get monkeys!

"If you do this, it's easy to hedge against forgetfulness for at least 9 years"

And therein lies the problem. It just increases the probability of forgetfulness in the future. If you persist in getting rid of everyone who knows how things get done there's damn-all chance that when the need to renew comes around there's anyone left who knows it needs to be renewed. And if the company has in the meantime screwed up its payments system if, by any chance, someone does know about renewals, the payment might not go through in time anyway.

Google faces $10k-a-day fines if it defies court order to hand over folks' private overseas email

Re: Cheap marketing

"the idea that data is safe with Google"

And also hides the idea that data might need to be safe from Google.

Re: The Law

"Google are trapped by a corrupt court system in the US."

The word you are looking for here isn't "corrupt", it's "arrogant".

Re: Mail held overseas probably belongs to a non-US citizen

"this particular goose is probably paying most of its taxes at special Republic of Ireland no-local-profits rates"

Its US employees are probably paying taxes at standard US rates, however, and spending their after-tax income moslty buying goods and services in the US.

And the company will be buying goods and services in the US for its own use. Why do you think Ireland can afford to set its corporation tax so low?

Re: Maybe the company should relocate

If a US company eg. Enron / Bernie Madoff / Lehman Bros was allowed to work only with cloud data held remotely then they could tell any US agency with a US warrant or a freedom of information to get lost. go through the established procedures to obtain a warrant in the jurisdiction in which the data is held.

FTFY

Why is is that this sort of thing keeps coming up in any thread in this general area?

Survey: Tech workers are terrified they will be sacked for being too old

"You can't have just the same skill-set at 50-60, that a 20-year old does. He'll not move faster, and think faster, but he'll also learn new concepts much faster."

New concepts? All too often old ones with a new terminology. And when they're not retreads they're often things along the lines of "I could have done with that 5 years ago" and grabbed with both hands because you understand why.

"they will have your replacement call you, though, to get it for free"

Whoa there. Do not proceed beyond the comma.

Re: Bah!

"They seem to think that something changed in the way computers work sometime around 1986."

1986? When they were 14 (rolling date).

Re: Wrinklies

"Transistors envisaged in 1930s"

The semi-conductor diode: C19th

Re: any grad born after '66

They want cheap "yes men".

Don't forget the "yes" part. They don't want people who've been round the block a few times and really aren't going to be impressed by any manglement bullshit.

Microsoft exec says ARM-powered Windows laptops have multi-day battery life

Re: Microsoft FAIL

"If the whole world was in agreement, why did RT get any traction at all?"

Shiny.

Re: Please explain

"Microsoft is giving up on smartphones, but loves the idea of ARM-powered laptops running Windows 10."

It also loved the idea of smartphones and of ARM-powered Surfaces.

The problem with BigCos (Microsoft is far from alone in this) is that if something doesn't take off quickly enough (and "enough" seems to shrink these days) or its champion leaves the business then the product gets dumped along with all the customers and secondary vendors that had bought into it. Ironically this should make potential customers more wary so that it becomes harder to get something to take off. In reality Barnum applies.

Let's dig into how open source could KO the Silicon Valley chat silos

Re: >open ecosystems cost money to run and in turn charge their customers.

"Closed providers build proprietary protocols over an open port....

These days, phones bypass the corporate firewalls so we could use any protocol we fancy."

And so we do things the convenient way. Once again convenience tramples security. More and more stuff gets done in the browser - more and more ways to deliver malware.