Posts by Doctor Syntax

Back to the future: Honda's new electric car can go an incredible 80 miles!

Re: One of the factors I'd be interested in

"Electric vehicles - when parked at home - can conversely help to smooth the demand upon the grid, by using their batteries as local storage."

You could charge the battery off-peak which eases Neil's worry about generating capacity although the overall amount of power generated still increases as he says.

But you seem to be implying that you could use the battery to store power for the home. You'd be a bit annoyed to get into your car and find it grind to a halt a few yards down the street because you'd just been using its battery to cook your breakfast.

Re: Hydrogen fuel cells

"Hydrogen as a fuel is very poor when you consider the energy it takes to make it."

The energy required to make it, i.e. separate it from the oxygen in water, is the energy that's stored in it as a fuel to be recombined with oxygen so this aspect doesn't really matter. What matters is the overall efficiency with which you can go through the entire cycle.

But the issues raised in the articles are valid. It's difficult and potentially dangerous stuff to store and distribute and the overall environmental friendliness of it depends on that of the energy source.

Re: Hydrogen fuel cells

"Plus, this new Honda has TWICE the range of either of their Formula 1 cars built with McLaren!"

Not quite true. They got one car home in Melbourne only 2 laps down.

Boss swore by 'For Dummies' book about an OS his org didn't run

Re: preventative

@A/C

Good start but lacks cattle-prod, roll of carpet, quicklime or defenestration.

Re: That boss again...

I inherited a code base that the boss had written. He appeared to have been a Coboller so his response to C, having discovered C macros, was to write several C macros which made things look more Cobol-like (at least that's what I think they were doing). As soon as I needed to change the code wrapped up in some of those on a case-by-case basis I rid myself of the whole lot by running the code through cpp.

Another classic was the day-of-week code which occupied a page and a half which I couldn't understand for the good reason that it was wrong; come the new year and it crapped itself. It needed urgent replacement which was about a line long: call library function to return current date as an integer mod 7.

But the worst part was the fact that the entire suite was a single program so that everyone in the user organisation got all the functionality including whatever their job didn't entitle them to see. Bits of code needed by one screen were wrapped up in the code for another. I started to disentangle it but left well before that was complete.

Callisto Group snoopers wreak havoc with leaked HackingTeam spyware

I think you answered your own question: "should be" and "is" are two different things. And no govt. is going to make that a crime any more than they'd have made microphones and miniature cameras criminal back in the day as the whole lot of them make use of such things.

Half-baked security: Hackers can hijack your smart Aga oven 'with a text message'

Re: Can you control the oven temperature?

"So we went to the pub."

Usually the best solution.

Consumers go off PCs as global shipments continue their decline

Re: Yet again...

"in my entire experience as a programmer, I have yet to see anyone developing on anything that wasn't either a PC running some flavour of Windows, or a Mac*."

Although I did end my working life slumming on Windows I've used a whole slew of Unices including SCO on my old laptop as development and operational platforms. I also had colleagues developing on VMS. And personally I started out on ICL 1900.

There's a lot more to life than Windows & Macs.

Re: Great? Super!!!

"as much use as an extra nostril."

There are too many who would appreciate the extra nostril.

Re: Consumers are making a choice...

"iPads are the best compute devices for our parents and grand parents"

Some of us in the grandparents age group were using compute devices a very long time ago. Judging from your juvenile approach, long before you were born. We've seen punched cards fall by the wayside. We've seen the rise and fall of DEC, the 8-bit processor, the 16-bit and the 32-bit. No, we do not all want your shiny toys. Go back to playing with your phone.

Yet again...

...no, people have not gone off PCs. They're just using the ones they have and don't need to replace them very often.

It's a mature market. O that Gartner and headline writers were mature enough to understand that.

Prisoners built two PCs from parts, hid them in ceiling, connected to the state's network and did cybershenanigans

Re: 2 PC's what?

"Lovely...here in the states, a "Billion" is actually 1,000 million...or 1 to the 9th. On the other side of El Pondo, its 1 to the 12th, which to Americans, is a trillion...but, a trillion in the UK is..1 to the 18th,"

Cough. 1 to the 9th, 1 to the 12th & 1 to the 18th are all 1.

"that'll teach me to be slow."

You were lagging.

Re: Prisoners

"I am not a number, I am a free man!"

Peter Sage, is that you?

Re: 2 PC's what?

"Glad to hear somebody else who was taught about using apostrophes when pluralising capitalisations."

We were also taught that a billion was a million million. There are things that we're better off for having left behind.

@phuzz

Upvote for that blast from the past.

Re: 2 PC's what?

"I'm not saying it's correct, it's just that that's what we were taught to do back then,"

O'T'O'H' we don't write P'C's.

Re: Odd that there were network ports available inside the secure area

"You can cobble together the other parts and sneak them in pockets"

Is that a PSU in your pocket or are you pleased to see me?

What next?

A rehabilitation programme that involves taking old guns to pieces for recycling?

No more IP addresses for countries that shut down internet access

Re: Laws would be introduced...

And while they're at it they could rule that pi is rounded down to 3.

As you stare at the dead British Airways website, remember the hundreds of tech staff it laid off

Re: I realise it's simplistic but....

"Where's a 'B' Ark when you need one."

It's on the tarmac but BA can't take bookings for it. The website's down.

"As one of those BA IT dudes that was deemed "surplus to requirements" the failure of their website doesn't surprise me at all."

As I commented on a similar story elsewhere, the in-house team have skin in the game.

"It was the Windows update, then."

So it was your fault? You asked for a window seat and look what happened.

"Maybe we should just turn shit off now and again just to prove we are worth the money."

I've always thought that that should be the response to beancounters wondering about the value of this "cost" centre. "Shall we turn it off for a day and see?".

And isn't it surprising that those who invented the term "cost centre" never see themselves for what they are: a cost centre?

Re: Correlation is not causation

"the long-experienced, now allegedly redundant locals."

FTFY

So the site was dead, not just TITSUP*

*Total Inability To Serve Up Pages

Re: The solution? Start with more outsourcing...

"stockholders are the problem. They want their money"

I don't know how this will work out for BA's stockholders but it didn't do too well for United; I see from the Beeb that they're down 3%.

Gordon Ramsay's in-laws admit plot to hack sweary celeb chef's biz

Re: His in-laws?

"Dominoes"

Good idea. If you get a good spin on it and the right glide angle you can probably throw a pizza quite a long way.

Re: His in-laws?

"To say nothing of any family get-together."

Who cooks the food for those? They'd have to have food, even if all they did was throw it at each other.

HMRC beer duty bungle leaves breweries struggling to pay online

Re: Wort a liberty!

It's left you frothing at the mouth?

It just goes to show that HMRC couldn't organise...

BT's spam blocker IDs accident claims as top nuisance call

"Refuse anything with a CLI (option on most smartphones)"

Even if it's important?

"I gave up on landlines just as the broadband era came in."

How's your broadband connected?

"People have my mobile and my mobile has all the people I want to hear from."

Using your approach I'd certainly miss calls I'd need. For instance my phone has our doctor's number on it but that doesn't help because their calls come as number withheld.

Re: Too late for me and BT.

"BT seem to still have the GPO monopoly mindset."

It's BT management that has the reality distortion field mindset.

The in-house BT magazine used to have two major components:

- The usual pompous management articles telling everyone how the latest reorganisation was going to make things so much better (artfully leaving out the recursive fact that this meant better than the last reorganisation of a few months ago which was going to make things so much better).

- Letters from staff explaining how and why things weren't working in reality as management thought they should.

The latter, contradicting the former, were obviously something the senior management could have learned from.

So they stopped publishing the letters.

MPs worried Brexit vote website wobble caused by foreign hackers

The story next door just goes to prove my point

<---

I don't think gov.uk has much to learn from foreign hackers about making websites go down.

Brexit factor lacking in Industrial Strategy, say MPs

Re: Easy solution

"we might just cut unemployment and create a UK manufacturing base"

Or at least replace the employment and manufacturing base that ups sticks and moves to the remaining EU because being in the EU was the reason it was here in the first place?

Industrial factor lacking in Brexit Strategy, say MPs

Fixed that for them.

The current proportion [of GDP spent on R&D] is 1.7 per cent, below the average of 2.4 per cent and "substantially below the leading backers of innovation — countries like South Korea, Israel, Japan, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, which contribute over 3 per cent of their GDP to this area."

If only we had the productivity to support a higher R&D spend.

Trump's govt hiring freeze means there's no US Privacy Shield chief: We tracked down the woman filling in for now

Re: how long will she keep her job?

I wonder how long any "non-family" member of Trump's administration will last

Families can fall out too. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/12/ramsay_hack_plot_guilty_plea/

"In the meantime the OES is being run by a career diplomat rather than a political appointee."

Maybe this will start a new trend.

What shall we call it?

Professionalism.

DevOps, Containers, and three days in May

Nightmare.

DevOps and May in the same headline!

Apple wets its pants over Swatch ad tagline

I do wish PR people would settle their differences by duel. The ancient martial art of Ecky Thump seems particularly appropriate for them.

Re: Daft thing is ...

"All of you who feel a compelling need to know exactly what time it is, several tens or perhaps a couple hundred times per day"

I don't. But I sometimes do need to know what time it is, particularly if I'm to meet SWMBO at a certain time.

Unlike some, however, I don't feel a compelling need to carry a phone (it used to be more compelling when I'd had heart trouble) and certainly no need, compelling or otherwise, to carry a smart phone.

Re: Daft thing is ...

@Jay 2

You need to be more selective about who you socialise with.

Law Commission pulls back on official secrets laws plans after Reg exposes flawed report

Re: Reflection of societal trajectory

"Also, hosts asking obsequiously"

You should have paid more attention. Obsequiously? Tongue in cheek more like!

Re: When are Prime Ministers democratically elected?

@Commswonk

On the whole I agree. However, dislike of one's face should should caution one against handling sharp objects in the vicinity of one's nose.

The various treaty changes should have required approval by referenda requiring substantive majorities of the sort which wasn't required by our recent advisory referendum. If that had been the case I think we'd have had an EC considerably different to the EU of today.

How's that for a remote login? NASA puts New Horizons probe to sleep 3.5 billion miles away

Re: the data speed

In the days of ASR33s & 35s that speed was almost unimaginably fast.

UK.gov cuts deal with Microsoft to avoid £15m post-Brexit price hike

Re: It is not public cloud but private cloud Office 365

According to your link the data centres are in the UK but it's still someone else's computer.

Radio hackers set off Dallas emergency sirens at midnight as a prank

"Or they were phoning the emergency services, to find out why the sirens operated by the emergency services were going off."

And in the event of a genuine emergency those 800 people would have been occupying communications bandwidth better used in dealing with the emergency.