Posts by Doctor Syntax

The Register's Top 20 Most-Commented Stories in 2016

Re: To sum it all up

"which will make you really, really hope he's wrong."

His prediction of a King George IX shows he's got a poor grasp of either C20th history or Roman numerals - or maybe both.

2016 just got a tiny bit longer. Gee, thanks, time lords

"9 - 8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 - wait for it - Happy New Year."

Their actual solution was to count 1 twice.

Then the London Ambulance Service's system crashed. Coincidence?

Re: I don't see what the fuss is about

"It just doesn't set the RTC to UTC because it doesn't really have to"

Which makes it a poor neighbour on a dual boot machine. I'm not sure how this stupidity works on a portable device taken across timezones.

Re: I don't see what the fuss is about

"historically UNIX has handled time in a sane and correct manner ...However windows has had pretty poor ways of doing things"

What you forgot was that the A/C obviously comes from the Windows world where everything from Redmond, BSODs & all, is perfect so the Unix way must be wrong.

It should be interesting to see how they handle the normal New Years Eve countdown on the box:

9 - 8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 - wait for it - Happy New Year.

Re: I don't see what the fuss is about

"The C tm struct...has defined the seconds field as containing a value in the range 0-61"

That would allow for 62 seconds. It's actually 0-60.

Tricky, these off-by-1 thingies.

Yorkshire council hit with prolonged web outage

Re: Forced to close?

"That will explain why all the local A&E departments are being closed down."

Separate organisation and separate issue. That's the Kirklees and Calderdale NHS trust.

There's a common underlying trend, however: lumping together areas that don't actually belong together.

Kirklees was a piece of miscegenation from the 1974 reorganisation of local govt. Someone decided to get rid of the old West Riding County Council and the various Urban District Councils etc below them who had a fair idea of what they were doing and replace them with a single layer which they constructed from Mirfield and Huddersfield, two separate communities which had had relatively little in common except being neighbours and which, collectively, have maybe even less in common with the valleys upstream from Huddersfield and which are also part of this administrative monster. Some idea of the quality of thinking which went into this is indicated by the name they gave it: there really is a place called Kirklees and it's in Calderdale. If Kirklees Metropolitan Council ever had any real value it's long gone. The whole unwieldy mess should be broken up.

The creation of the NHS trust was a piece of financial engineering inflicting on HRI (Huddersfield Royal Infirmary) something similar to what happened to Ferranti. The hospital in Halifax had a huge PFI debt and was financially unviable so it was merged with HRI which had a valuable site. It's not just A&E being bled away from HRI; SWBMO's eye clinic is now in Calderdale, maternity services are in Calderdale, hip replacements are in Calderdale...

Re: Forced to close?

"Kirklees, i am told, is one of the most deprived areas of England. The nine strong ( all Labour) cabinet are doing their very best."

The cabinet, whilst invariably crying t'poor tale as an excuse for shutting libraries and museums, had money to spaff on the likes of the Tour de France. I doubt that many council tax payers here and in the other councils that "invested" in such vanity projects realise that we paid the promoters rather than vice versa. We're then told how much money this brought into the area, none of which seems to have actually benefited the community as opposed to the few businesses that profited.

Since then the council has been unable to provide much of a digital service to its residents

FTFY

Folders return to Windows 10's Start Thing

Re: With the exception of the Master Race...

"you still have to pay the $100 MS tax when you buy a PC laptop even if you want to put "Free" Linux on it"

Not universally true but you'll generally find that the MS-free pox is dearer because the additional crapware that's normally installed with Windows offsets the tax. And you're going to blow away all of it anyway so who cares?

Re: Unbelievable

"@Doctor Syntax - Xfce"

Sort of OK but somehow I always find myself replacing it with KDE. Unless they've changed it Xfce seems to have its own opinion about where icons sit on the desktop and it doesn't always agree with mine.

"Excel rules all software for all time, QED."

Was that you using Excel as a todo list in the recent story about the migration that went well? (As in down the well).

Re: "It’s a mystery why Microsoft..."

"somebody at Microsoft decided that GUI design was now a religion"

They so it working so well for Apple.

Re: Unbelievable

"Can you imagine Windows 95 going at the speed of today's hardware?"

KDE

Flight simulator sets fire to airport

"My best mom was like. I did not believe."etc

English translation needed.

Amazon files patent for 'Death Star' flying warehouse

Re: Not covered in tat

"To be honest, I hope this gets shot down before it ever takes off."

Bernard Woolley would like a word with you.

The possibility of an accident doesn't bear thinking about. Whole urban areas covered in tat.

Re: if one of these...

"have we suddenly all become stupid overnight?"

No, it's just that you've suddenly noticed it.

Barcodes stamped on breast implants and medical equipment

'surgery on the wrong part of the body'

These boobs were meant for walking?

The Life and Times of Lester Haines

Lester Young - Pres - was one of jazz's greatest tenor players, not a trumpeter.

Did EU ruling invalidate the UK's bonkers Snoopers' Charter?

Re: Still debating the same points, again

"amend the act to included the safe guards that any data retained can only be accessed on the production of a Judge's court order."

Not enough. Amend the act so that the data can only be retained on the production of a Judge's order. The objectionable part of this is that it disregards the presumption of innocence.

"Except that membership of the EU requires membership of the ECHR/ECJ. If you aren't in the Eu and merely happen to be geographically in Europe then you can drop them."

The Good Friday agreement also requires membership.

Re: Still debating the same points, again

"I really don't understand why the Government just does not go back and amend the act to included the safe guards that any data retained can only be accessed on the production of a Judge's court order."

The problem lies not with the access but with retaining the data in the first place. In principle the assumption is that you're guilty and it's just a procedural matter. In practical terms you're relying on the likes of TalkTalk to keep it safe. In financial terms you're also dumping the costs of it on your ISP who will then dump it on you.

"European judgments resulting from appeals cases can't be considered to have an effect in the UK until a British judge has observed them."

But wasn't this referred to the ECJ by the High Court? That means that this one has already landed back with a British judge.

Also, it's not entirely a matter for UK courts. The ruling must surely affect what's acceptable under the GDPR. If a post Brexit govt wants UK businesses to be able to handle personal data of EU customers - and there would be a serious economic impact if they couldn't - then UK businesses must be capable of meeting GDPR.

Christmas Eve ERP migration derailed by silly spreadsheet sort

Yes, setting up a spreadsheet seems so much easier than setting up a one table database and so much more techy than a simple text note....right up to the time something like this happens.

"I am actually at a loss to say which one is worse."

You don't remember the times when people used to queue to get the latest version of Windows? Actually 95 was a major step forward, at least in terms of versions built on top of DOS. They put together a lot of stuff that had been around in terms of UI over the previous few years and hit a sweet spot with it. There's a good argument that the overall trend form that time has been down. They also incorporated a lot of stuff from HP's New Wave which, if you ran it over W3.x, made a big improvement in usability. And this from someone who is considerably less than Microsoft's greatest fan.

"All thanks to the grinches at AST."

I'd have thought a library that rewrites BIOS might take a share of the blame.

Virgin America mid-flight panic after moron sets phone Wi-Fi hotspot to 'Samsung Galaxy Note 7'

Re: Achem, funny not funny

"I think it's an ingrained trait of animals to follow the herd."

I think it's ingrained training of air-crew to follow procedures. Something to do with safety.

Re: My phone's hotspot is named "Free Pr0n Server"

"Mine is GCHQ_DetectorVN1"

That 1 is a dead giveaway. Try a larger random number.

Re: The only thing at credible risk of being blown up was a sense of proportion

"A Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is not the equivalent of a hand grenade with the pin pulled out."

Nevertheless they are banned from flights. So if it actually had been a SGN7 the plane would have been flying with a banned object on board. That is a serious state of affairs and I'd expect there would have been repercussions for the airline for doing this. That Smooth Newt considers it safe would not be a relevant factor.

Twas the week before Xmas ... not a creature was stirring – except Microsoft admitting its Windows 10 upgrade pop-up went 'too far'

Re: The weirdness that is Microsoft

"Why do they think that having every damn Office control in the "ribbon" so that the user is stuck in a forest of menu items they'll never use is better than some kind of customisable menu ( with a simple way to bring everything back if you need it)."

I suspect the answer to that is lock-in.

In the ?good old days MS could bring out a new version of Office which would default to writing files the older versions couldn't read so everyone had to buy upgrades because they needed to open those documents and spreadsheets.

Then those terrible people at the Document Foundation pulled a nasty on them. They got their formats made an ISO standard and the big purchasers - i.e. govts. - like specifying support of standards. So they then had to get a standard of their own, a story of its own but not for here.

Having to support their own standard they couldn't play their old games any longer to force upgrades. What was worse, they were having to compete with free and, given that their interface followed fairly standard lines the free competition wasn't that difficult to migrate to for users.

So they changed the UI. All the old users hated being forced to migrate but from MS's perspective this was for the greater good. In the fullness of time there was a new cohort of users who'd been taught the new interface in "CS" lessons in school (Microsoft loves to support education) and if they then joined organisations that had migrated to Open/LibreOffice they found the old-style interface just as difficult as the older users found the ribbon and that introduced pressure to migrate back to MS.

LibreOffice, however, is now fighting back with a move to support for multiple interfaces so that either style can be accommodated. https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2016/12/21/the-document-foundation-announces-the-muffin-a-new-tasty-user-interface-concept-for-libreoffice/

Re: The weirdness that is Microsoft

" it's impossible to argue away the fact that Microsoft don't ever seem anymore to build software that intuitively suits the ordinary user and makes life easier, or even makes any kind of logical sense."

Sadly Microsoft don't have a monopoly on that. It's these UX experts who get everywhere like a plague of mice. They decide they know what one thing you want to do and tailor the UI to that and only that. The fact that you want to ten other things hasn't occurred to them and the fact that you might want to do at least one of those others at the same time is utterly beyond them (they've been brought up on mobile devices that have tiny screens where you can only do one thing at a time). So they build something that needs full screen to work and their lobotomised UI now makes it a pain, if not right down impossible, to do some of the other things you wanted to do.

Re: M$ Long History

"The 'Start' menu is literally a Microsoft invention, right down to the (lamentable and inevitable) patents, so I don't see how UNIX had had it for quite some time."

The single start menu is. CDE had multiple menus. Consolidating them was a stem forward but not wildly inventive.

Re: M$ Long History

"The same capability had been available for UNIX systems for quite some time."

The standard Unix offering of the time was CDE which I used a lot under its HP guise, VUE. It featured a whole series of pop-up menus. Reducing that to one produced a much tidier interface. Gnome, for some reason, didn't quite take the hint with the default there, as I recall, being two. My preference has always been for Unix or Unix-like systems and my preferred UI is KDE but MS did, I think, move UI forward at the time.

Re: Apology or not, results are the same

I don't understand the downvotes you got. We might disagree about doomsaying W10 (I assume that means objecting to the slurping) but otherwise I think it's a fair summary of MS's intentions.

Re: M$ Long History

"The Windows 95 user interface was widely recognized as superior to anything else available."

I agree. It was certainly based on a lot of ideas and features that had been around for a long time. Those included CUA and HP's New Wave (the copyright declarations included HP). However, they put it all together in a slicker interface than I'd seen elsewhere. In recent years they then seem to have brought in UX designers who've concentrated on throwing away as much of that as they could.

Rollout of smart meters continues at a snail's pace

" I'm not sure how much benefit the utility is getting from the resulting load smoothing but it can't hurt."

It's the load smoothing by switching you off that you need to worry about.

Re: Replacement Power Supply

Your supplier seems to have been about as smart as your meter.

Apple sues Nokia's pet patent trolls

"The problem was with software and marketing."

And the management who let them get into the mess with S/W and marketing.

Somehow, I can't find any sympathy for either side.

Gov claws back £440m for rural broadband

Re: Radio 4 this morning

"Anyone tried backing up 1TB to a cloud store?"

Why not back it up to a 1 Tb external drive which you can then put in a safe place? At least you'll know where it is. Or if you must back up to someone else's computer, just borrow a laptop.

Google's latest legal opponents: Shooting victims' families – and a cheesed-off ex-manager

Re: Sign of Things to Come?

What you haven't worked out is that highways, postal services, etc. are infrastructure. So, in effect, are Google etc. At some point you have to stop and think what duty of care do operators of infrastructure have?

Should they police in detail who gets to use them and how; should, for instance, the water undertaking decide that only non-terrorists get anything coming out of their taps?

Or should their duty of care be limited to ensuring that the system runs smoothly and delivers what its users ask?

And if you think the former could you please present us with a detailed plan of how it should be done because I'm sure the rest of us would like to be enlightened. Your detailed plan should explain how it would avoid the situation where Facebook caught flack for taking down that iconic image of the napalm girl that was so influential in its day. Using algorithms to deal with the complexities of human culture might be a tad more difficult than you think.

Amateur radio fans drop the ham-mer on HRD's license key 'blacklist'

Introduction

Ms Streisand, meet Mr Ratner.

Microsoft scores nearly $1bn non-compete contract with US military

My first reaction was that some "This is Microsoft" guy in India had finally hit the big time.

Snapchat coding error nearly destroys all of time for the internet

"Mike is not up with the latest ideas in physics"

Yes, but Mike is being The Cool Person. He probably hasn't time to do both.

"An investigation by the perennially under-resourced pool discovered"

The investigation found the list of servers apparently compiled in from a library on Github, a library from which they have now been removed in the current version.

What sort of eejit compiles in stuff like that? Haven't they ever heard of configuration files?

Landmark EU ruling: Legality of UK's Investigatory Powers Act challenged

Re: Yup...

"And even then Waxy May will neither accept the verdict, nor allow debate."

Think not? If the SC supports the HC and she tries to go against it she'll probably be ousted by a vote of confidence or she'll be in a legal tangle that will take years to unravel.

Re: But I thought we "took back control"

"their copies of the ICRs will be on machines physically separate from the open internet (or so one would hope, anyway)"

I admire your optimism.

Re: Appropriate?

"it's one thing the security services having untrammeled access to this material, they are some of the most highly vetted people in the country. "

And there are still instances of their abusing it.

Sayonara North America: Insurance guy got your back when Office 365 doesn't?

Re: Just Remember the EULA (All 456789 pages of it)

"one of the Indian (Cough, cough) Consultancies"

Cowboy Consultancies are also available.