Posts by Doctor Syntax

Intel pitches a Thunderbolt 3-for-all

"We envision a future where high-performance single-cable docks, stunning photos and 4K video, lifelike VR, and faster-than-ever storage are commonplace,"

In other words bigger and better selfies and kitten videos. Oh to be living in such times.

UK ministers to push anti-encryption laws after election

If any Conservative candidate comes calling for your vote ask them if they've published all their banking, ecommerce, farcebook, twatter and other log-in credentials. When they ask why explain to them that this will be the net effect of removing encryption and you don't see why you should be asked to vote for someone who hasn't tested such a stupid policy on themselves.

Or simply explain that forcing HMG to abandon the centuries-long presumption of innocence is a major win for terrorists who wish to destroy British values. (Make that English values dependent on your assessment of the candidate's degree of rabidness.)

Britain's on the brink of a small-scale nuclear reactor revolution

Re: Renewables are not as green as its promotors claim

"The sun runs out of fuel."

Anybody still around when that happens has more problems to worry about than renewables failing.

"That's why there are proxies for further back in the record"

And what are the error bars on such proxies?

The trouble with all this argument is that the period for which we have good global measurements (give or take arguments about integrating them) is very short so we're really arguing about noise which includes such things as the effects of volcanic veils - and do we know yet what caused the cold & wet period in Western Europe starting in 1315? In any case anyone who thinks that constant climate and constant sea-levels are the norm is living in a fools paradise. They have changed and they will change whatever we do.

OTOH we should really be concerned about conserving scarce resources. It's wantonly using up those that our descendants will be cursing us for.

Re: Underground

"Wasn't Fukushima a "fail-safe" design?"

In the wake of Fukushima the Swiss have voted to phase out their nuclear energy. That should protect them against tsunamis.

"137 years of measurements"

This is what concerns me about climate change discussions. Set against the period of the post-glacial it's about 1% and yet all the arguments hang on this.

There are very good arguments against unnecessary consumption of fossil fuels: they have multiple alternative uses as raw materials and when they're gone they're gone. There have been no good arguments against shoving them up power-station chimneys for the last half-century or more. It's largely down to the self-styled green movement that we're continuing to do this.

Hitachi exits mainframe hardware but will collab with IBM on z Systems

"Back in 2016 there were rumours Hitachi was going to buy Big Blue's mainframe division"

Given time I'm sure Lenovo'll buy it.

Google wants to track your phone and credit card through meatspace

Re: Well...

"there was an email from the company named above thanking me for my purchase and attaching my proof of purchase and warranty details."

I think I'd want the proof of purchase in writing printed out by them from their till. And no email.

Re: So when it shows advertising doesn't work, no-one is influenced by them

It'll work. It'll work because the results will be biased. It will only show conversions from adverts and not the potential customers lost because of being pestered.

Re: Stuff google

"Rodney"

Still working as DelBoy's runner?

Re: They'd know which cashpoint I visited

"Google can only infer your visit from your Android collecting location data and the time you spend near an ATM."

I shall stick with my Nokia C5 a little longer.

Re: re. Has anyone ever bought anything on the strength of a web advert?

"And I very much doubt the marketing / ad business would be able to lie about those figures on such a massive, world scale to fool those that pay dearly to have their products / services adertised year, after year after year."

There's an excellent book, How to lie with statistics. It ought to be part of everyone's education. In a few years I'll buy the grandkids copies. (If I live so long boxed sets of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister fill follow.)

As I've pointed out in another post here they don't measure the sales lost because of advertising pissing off potential customers. By only quoting conversion rates to their customers the advertising industry is lying to them with statistics.

Re: get ready for “what's your e-mail address?” from counter staff

"It is depressingly enlightening."

Actually I've found comparatively few who do leak email addresses. This may be because I just give out a series of short-lived email addresses so leaked addresses just bounce.

The exceptions are Ebay and PayPal who pass on the address to vendors. Even this is rarely abused.

I very seldom leave feedback at Ebay now simply because if I do it's impossible to then add negative feedback in the event that they do spam. I have left negative feedback in such circumstances. It's against Ebay's T&Cs to spam so I hope they do follow up on such feedback.

PayPal is a different proposition. The email address is also the login ID. They send a customer's login ID to the merchants! That is downright stupid beyond belief. I've been spammed a couple of times by PayPal merchants. They've been left in no doubt as to what I feel about them and that they've forfeited any chance of further business. It's also been pointed out that the email address makes it quite clear that it was only for PayPal's use and that they have inconvenienced me by forcing me to change it.

Re: I just tell em to fuck off and mind their own business.

"the problem with directing your anger at the people setting the policy is that it's extremely hard (and, in fact, impossible)"

Giving a valid address at your country's data regulator is possible and may well be very effective at directing your anger there. Of course if you live in a country that doesn't have such a concept - well, the rest of us feel sorry for you.

Re: We're already being asked for email addresses at the till

And the e-mail they get is probably the main only one, of this idiot customer.

The whole thinking behind this is predicated on the assumption that people have only one email address.

Re: It's a bit of an irony, actually

"Google, on the other hand, will one day have the means to prompt the sales clerk to ask if I like whatever it was that I bought yesterday, or if I'm still using whatever it is I bought last month."

At which point the sale would be lost.

Re: We're already being asked for email addresses at the till

"There's one retailer for garden machinery in my area that needs name, address, DOB and phone number for cash sales."

If this is in the UK it would appear to contravene the DPA.

Assuming for a moment that this scheme does exactly what Google claim it still won't measure the actual effect of advertising. In order to do that they'd also need to measure the negative effects - who bought what instead of a product that had been advertised at them because the advertising pissed them off.

Nobody in advertising or marketing will risk doing that. As long as they don't know they can plausibly deny that such an effect exists. The advertising industry can keep on selling to marketing and marketing can keep drawing their pay. Knowledge would seriously disrupt this cozy arrangement.

Remember folks, the only thing the advertising industry sells is adverts.

Re: Categories

"The occasional stuff is probably where the richest pickings for sellers/ad-slingers are, so they might want to concentrate on that."

Why would they do that? Don't they want me to buy their stuff?

"I remember when my manager bought a brand new Volvo. Six months later he told us that the dealer had got in touch to try and sell him a brand new Volvo."

Six whole months pester-free? I'd scarcely got my new car home before the dealer started spam texts. It only stopped when I managed to find the MD's email and told him bluntly that the spams had ensured that I never buy from his company again.

Re: get ready for “what's your e-mail address?” from counter staff

"Remember, corporate policy isn't the fault of the kid running the POS."

No, that's why directing them to the ICO would be a good move in the UK. Corporate policy might be in for a well-deserved nasty shock if they start spamming that.

Re: get ready for “what's your e-mail address?” from counter staff

"give a different email address to every organisation I deal with"

Ditto but only for those who I'll need to deal with on a long-term basis. I also set up a new address every few weeks for one-offs and then tear them down.

Re: We're already being asked for email addresses at the till

"Yes, I am the exception"

Don't be too sure. You're certainly not alone.

Re: We're already being asked for email addresses at the till

[e-mail]

IT firms guilty of blasting customers with soul-numbing canned music

Re: We are experiencing unexpected call volumes at the moment

"Aaaaarggh! I so hate that particular lie."

If they were so unexpected how come they had a message recorded for that exact situation?

Re: Suggestions for tech firms' hold music

Blossom Dearie - Brr brr brr busy line.

Re: All of our advisors are down't pit at' moment

Surely Yorkshire themed music should include some of our brass bands. Preferably playing Pratty Flowers.

Re: Vivaldi

How odd, in that case, that he taught in a girls' orphanage.

Re: "Hold" doesn't have to mean Purgatory

"I do my best to make HOLD a pleasant or neutral experience."

Hold is not an experience anyone wants. They want someone to answer the phone. If there aren't enough people to answer the phone quickly the hold queue will grow until it equilibrates; as it grows longer more people will abandon their calls and eventually the rate of drop out plus the rate of answer equals the number of new calls. And every dropped call means a customer or potential customer that your precious company has pissed off.

Your company might want short messages on your hold track, your callers don't, they just want their calls answered.

Re: What we need is a SILENCE option

" along with a queue announcement indicating how many people ahead of you"

A decent call centre will NEVER, do that. It is pointless.

It isn't pointless. The point is that the message should be repeated and you can hear how fast it's going down. Your 1000 calls answered a minute will have a total going down by about 50 as fast as they can announce itt and you'll know you'll get to the front of the queue pretty soon.

Re: Ahhh lovely...

"This is the idea that should be killed with fire, shot, killed with fire again, shot again, stamped on, dipped in quicklime, buried in a lonely forest glade wrapped in an old carpet, and then nuked from orbit."

Sorry, you failed your BOFH. You forgot the electrocution and the fall from the 20th storey window into a skip in the car park.

Re: er - call holding in *2017*

"What kind of business is going to call customers back at their own expense"

One worth being a customer of.

There's a simpler solution. ANSWER THE BLOODY PHONE.

Obligatory Dilbert: http://dilbert.com/strip/1998-10-13

Media players wide open to malware fired from booby-trapped subtitles

Re: didn't read it

Hmm. How free is free? Here's the link to VLC fix: http://get.videolan.org/vlc/2.2.5.1/win32/vlc-2.2.5.1-win32.exe

Oh look, it's a Windows problem at least in part.

Capita and Birmingham City Council 'dissolve' joint venture

@Cynic_999

Dammit. I meant to write "service" and somehow "job" got in there instead. You're right, of course, where there's specialist investment in equipment required the job can usefully be outsourced. But the sort of labour-intensive service provision jobs that are being outsourced in situations such as the article describes don't easily gain from capital investments in the same way.

Another example would be health care provision. Locally,district nurses and various other services have been shifted to some not for profit organisation. The management gets paid more but the nurses are reportedly breaking down from overwork.

Is it so difficult to work out? If providing some part of the job well requires X people being paid £Y to do it then handing it over to someone else who will be expecting to make a profit is going to either cost more to cover a profit or is going to be done less well by employing less than X people. If there are genuinely savings to be made in the operation why not make them yourself and cut your costs rather than let someone else make them and keep the savings?

NSA takes one-two punch to the face

Meanwhile on this side of the pond...

Comcast accused of siccing lawyers on net neutrality foe

How generous of Comcast to call the public's attention to this criticism of themselves.

Bankrupt school ITT pleads 'don't let Microsoft wipe our cloud data!'

"then it's obviously their cost?"

Except they don't want it to be.

Re: Price googing?

"That said, does seem very steep."

What can be paid out to the creditors as a whole will be a fixed amount and paid out as a percentage of the total debt. If MS put in a steep bill they raise their percentage of the total debt and thus their share of the payout.

Reading through the pleading two things emerge.

The administrators don't have a copy of the agreement and are complaining that MS won't let them see their copy. Apart from MS's admitting that there was an agreement it seems difficult for them to prove that there's an account at all!

The administrators are wanting to have their cake and eat it. They want the data to be handed over but they don't know how to use it if it were handed over so they don't want the data to be handed over until it's convenient for them.

Re: Don't forget the fees.

"If so, should cloud agreements not have a 'data escrow' clause?"

From the customer's PoV, yes. But it would be up to them to insist on it when the contract's set up. It's too late to start thinking about that when things go wrong. Despite everything that's said about lawyers this is why you need them - to see such problems in advance.

Re: Other media options are available.

"Because what you're suggesting is probably illegal and akin to a ransomware."

No. Basically it does what a landlord is entitled to do in the circumstances - distrain the debtor's property, in this case the data - but in a way that makes the administrators responsible for the storage avoiding accruing further debts. The payment being sought is what MS claim to be entitled to anyway, clearly different from a ransom for which there is no legal basis. If a court decides that the debt wasn't valid then the key can be handed over.

IoT standards? We've got 'em. And if you don't like those, we got more

"We are waiting to see what use cases [evolving current standards] are targeted at. Potentially I think the market will tell us and the market will guide us through that."

That sounds remarkably like a solution looking for a problem.

Three-quarters of IoT projects are failing, says Cisco

part of the problem was a lack of interest from the top of companies, with leaders failing to "buy in" to IoT

I don't call that a problem. It's buying into IoT that's the problem.

House GOP takes crack at ISP privacy bill

"It would also establish US trade watchdog the FTC as the governing body for internet privacy rules."

The US should give some thought to having a separate body concentrating solely on privacy rights, internet or otherwise. Given some teeth, say the ability to issue fines at levels comparable to the GDPR, we might even begin to believe the Privacy Shield actually meant something.

Scheming copyright scam lawyer John Steele disbarred in Illinois

Re: Needs to be disbarred in each state individually? WTF?

the problem of some states being more "lenient" in their exams.

Q1. Explain patent law.

Ans It's a licence to print money.

There is no Q2.

EU security think tank ENISA looks for IoT security, can't find any

Re: force the user to update the even the default unique credentials

"many (most?) clearly cannot be bothered with password changing, and mandating stuff will not change that."

It will if the mandate is that the device will not become operational until the user's own credentials are entered. And any variation on "password" will be spat back at the user after a second, 2 seconds at the next attempt etc.

Re: Rule 3, 4, 5

"(although this will instantly kill the IoT market...)"

The most essential rule of the lot.

Re: please...

Rule 2) All devices have different default credentials The device shall not become operational until the user has set up their own credentials.