Posts by Doctor Syntax

Dear sysadmin: This is how you stay relevant

Sysadmin or developer, the advice is the same. Talk to people. Sysadmin to developer & vice versa but also talk to users, the people actually sat in front of screens, not just their managers. Get to know how the business uses IT in reality and get to know each others' concerns. That way you might be able to anticipate what the business needs, not just react to it.

Google GPS grab felt like a feature, was actually a bug

I wonder if Ubuntu Touch is ready for practical use.

"Why is this bit worded in the same style as a lawyer answering a claim?"

I suppose they were both statements that Google made to the Register but el Reg couldn't, of course, verify them for themselves. Alternative wording might have been "Google told us..." but it's a reasonable way to say that.

Accidental gathering of data? Sounds familiar. Ah, yes, I remember. Streetview, email and passwords.

There was a time when iPhones Google didn't know where whole towns cities in Australia were.

Google's become an obsessive stalker and you can't get a restraining order

Re: Opinion: Your choice

'OR I could go to my government representative and say "citizens need better inalienable privacy protection that's fit for the 21st century".'

And much good that will do!

"it was the Gallery app"

Possibly the coordinates were recorded in metadata in the image file and it was the gallery app that reconciled them with the premises.

Re: Had I known

"That is all."

No it is not all.

Are you still signed up? If so, now you know what Google has become, why?

Re: The thing is...

"I don't get ads. I don't get emails from Google or anyone that I don't want them from."

Neither do I but I have to work at it. An ad blocker is one factor. Another is maintaining my own domain and a multitude of email aliases on there, including short term ones for those who confuse needing and wanting an address for me.

"Even Amazon never emails me about potential purchases."

I'm not sure why you wrote "even". Amazon are far too smart. They realise that it would lose business. Even so I'm thoroughly pissed off with their repeated attempts to inveigle me into Amazon Prime.

Re: It will continue for a while longer

"Google employs very intelligent people and they are measured against the ultimate benchmark : ad revenue."

I'm not convinced on this. They ought to be able to get on top of all the bad practices which have driven people to use ad blockers yet haven't seen fit to do that.

Non-doms pay 10 times more in income tax than average taxpayer group

Re: On a related note

"When someone earning X times more than me is paying Y times as much tax and X is many times greater than Y then I'm going to complain because I'm having to make up the shortfall and subdidise their lifestyle."

You're looking at it wrong. If that person were earning X times as much as you somewhere else they wouldn't be paying Y times as much tax here. They'd be paying none at all. And who do you think has to make up that shortfall? You and me of course.

"The real question is how much tax would they have paid and how many austerity cuts could have been avoided?"

?

What do you mean "how much tax would they have paid?"? In what circumstances? If you mean in circumstances that wouldn't have attracted them here in the first place the answer is simple: none. I'll leave you to work out the effect of that on austerity.

I wonder how many of the critics here, at least those living convenient to cross-channel services, have made trips to France to buy booze and/or fags. It's the same thing. If it becomes possible to make international choices then tax rates become a competitive market.

If a country decides to go the high tax route to gather as much tax as possible from those who aren't mobile there's absolutely no justification sitting and howling* about injustice if tax-payers, individual or corporate go to Hong Kong, Ireland or anywhere else. The decision should have considered these factors.

By adopting more generous rules to high net worth individuals the government has, over the years, gained more tax than it would have done if those individuals hadn't chosen to be here. There are only two questions here:

Does the presence of those individuals with their spending power distort the local economy to the detriment of the rest of us, e.g. in the housing market?

Will these changes lose more from those who move away than it gains by increasing taxes on those who stay?

*Except, of course, the justification of political theatre; shift the blame from the politicians who made the decision in the first place.

Yelp wins fight to remain morally bankrupt

Re: My two cents worth

'You're talking as if "reputation" and "reliability" were still actual bankable commodities.'

You might find them appearing on company balance sheets as goodwill. If they weren't bankable why do you think people would pay for page rank?

Great British Block-Off: GCHQ floats plan to share its DNS filters

The intent might be genuine. The technical plan might be good. But even if both are true the scheme depends on trust and that is long gone.

Bad news: MySQL can dish out root access to cunning miscreants

Re: As always...

"It's the Unix outdated permission systems with scripts run as root and software that must drop privileges itself because of lack of a more granular permission system on processes and files."

No, it's developers* wanting to run their database engines with root permission when they shouldn't need to. There should be a $DatabaseEngine user and group. They can own the scripts, data and everything else to do with the engine. You're obviously unaware that such setups are not only practical but that they've been in use for decades.

"Of course all the downvoters have no clue about a proper permission systems."

No. We're the ones who actually do have a clue. And practical experience.

*Oracle have been around long enough to know better.

Re: I've got a cunning plan my lord

According to TFA it can be done via injected SQL so root access might not be needed.

End all the 'up to' broadband speed bull. Release proper data – LGA

Re: Why not publish what exists?

"oven better aggregate it and publish it."

Do you mean cook the figures?

Re: Still not enough to filter out incompetent ISPs...

Now we're getting to the stuff that matters. Bandwidth to the ISP is one thing. What the ISP does with that is another. Traffic-shaping, for instance. When my old ISP fell into the clutches of TT they traffic-shaped Usenet out of existence for part of the day. And the first rate customer service had been wiped out by a previous owner - I still don't know whether it was run by a chatbot or humans that had failed the Turing test.

These are things which are under the control of ISPs and going to be experienced uniformly by all of the ISP's customers.

Re: "local data for local people"

"Given that the LGA represent the bureaucrats that decided my festering rubbish only needed to be collected every two weeks"

Until you got to the music festival I thought you must be a neighbour.

"As has been mentioned previously, the BT Openreach estimator that's available to wholesale suppliers is pretty accurate."

The speed I'm able to get in the middle of the afternoon here might be a good deal more than what I'd get in the evening if a lot of people down the road start streaming stuff when they get home from work and my bits have to share the infrastructure with whole lot of others. It might also be better or worse than my neighbours; all our connections come from the same point on the buried cable. Mine comes underground, theirs are overhead from a cable running up a pole, some of them distributed direct from that pole and others from a second pole linked to the first. Clearly there are various options for water penetration, different wiring choices (Al vs Cu) etc.

Can the LGA suggest a test method by which this can be determined other by having the user run a speed test from within the premises?

Microsoft thinks time crystals may be viable after all

Re: Its not complicated

There's a difference. The quartz crystal in your watch doesn't spontaneously settle into oscillation. It requires forcing with some additional electronics which consumes energy.

I got as far as "Wilczek considered a group of atoms in their ground state moving in perpetual circular motion, which is considered an impossible idea because ground states do not have enough energy to spontaneously move."

If I skip everything else I didn't understand it seems to mean that Microsoft are proposing to go round in small circles.

UK oversight body tipped to examine phone snooping tech in prisons

"By the time of publication a spokesperson for Number 10 had not confirmed when IOCCO would be formally asked to audit IMSI catcher usage by the Prime Minister."

Given who the current PM is the answer should be obvious: "Never".

HP doorsteps Apple shoppers at the altar of dreams

Re: The problem with the HP kit no matter how good it is, is...

"Now, if HP wanted to license HP-UX, and resume the port to x86, and then hire some quality software developers to upgrade the CDE interface and the available tools ... but that will never happen."

In part because HP-UX is owned by HPE and laptops etc are made by HP Inc. But what a thought.

Re: The problem is the HP label...

"cheap components that won't last 2 years"

The trouble with getting this sort of reputation is that even if you turn things round it takes years to get back to where you were. I'm currently on my 2nd HP laptop in the best part of 15 years with no troubles. I also have an all-in-one laser printer which is pretty substantial, has lasted with domestic use for many years and is still going strong. But having seen the HP printer my daughter's firm supplied her with (and looked at what's on the shelf in Staples) when I decided to get a colour laser there's no way I'd have bought it from HP.

I'd really like to see them regain their reputation but in order to do that they really need to face up to how they lost it in the first place. A puff-piece based on what seems to be a shininess comparison isn't convincing evidence that they've done this.

Re: Hey, we still innovate!

I'm no Apple fanboy - never owned any of their products but:

"The original MAC All in one Computer :vs Commodore PET"

Really! 68k :vs 6502?

You might have said Apple ][ :vs PET but even there Apple was innovative - an open architecture for plug-in boards followed up with the Woz floppy drive. Admittedly they dropped all that later but back then they were innovating. It's just that not many of us are old enough to remember.

HP Ink buys Samsung's printer business for a BILLION dollars

Re: Can't remember the last time I printed something

"Printing is stupid and primitive"

You are making the common mistake of thinking that everyone else has the same life as yourself.

I've just been printing the handouts for my wife's sewing class. I don't think taking a laptop & showing round would be as useful. That's just one of the very many use cases that you don't happen to have.

Re: Less Innovation, more renovation!

"Interesting to see HP moving more to hardware with this and its selloff of its software division."

You missed the split. There are now two HPs. HPE sold the software division. HP inc, which is the hardware and printer ink business, is the one which made this purchase.

Re: And tomorrow...

"As HP altready share printers with Canon, where's the competition especially for workgroup (and more) printers?"

Brother?

Brexit makes life harder for an Internet of Things startup

Re: Another "oh think of the children" BS story.

"Why was it non-binding? Why was there no supermajority?"

That's easy. He was expecting a Remain majority.

Given that goods made all over the world are imported into the EU under the CE mark it doesn't seem to be a critical factor. Unless the standards change what you're making now that meets them will continue to meet them unless you change the product. If the standards change then, irrespective of whether we're in the EU or not the product might have to change to meet them. This is Brexit-neutral as far as selling into the EU is concerned.

What wouldn't be Brexit-neutral would be a UK-only standard which is incompatible with CE in some way, then you'd have to make two different products to sell into different markets. Do you think that's a likely event? Or do you think it more likely that the CE standards will continue to be accepted in the UK, either under the CE mark or some UK-only mark with equivalent standards?

Not being in the customs union would appear to be the real problem.

Curiosity rover likes big buttes but it cannot lie around

Re: Shiny thing

Yes, it's the handle to open the trapdoor.

SOHOpeless Seagate NAS boxen become malware distributors

Maybe the security was designed by their HR department. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/09/seagate_faces_suit_for_getting_phished/

33 million CLEARTEXT creds for Russian IM site dumped by chap behind Last.FM mess

Re: Irrespective of the strength of passwords

"life would be a *lot* simpler if so many of the retail sites didn't decide we needed a password and login for *everything*."

My solution is to set up a temporary email address every few months for these wankers and then tear it down later. Their spam just gets bounced.

"if they use Gmail, you can generally assume they're actually not that hot on security"

Not necessarily. A Gmail address might simply mean that they don't consider that particular site is deserving of security. Stuff that matters can be given a unique email address and password.

Cisco's head of enterprise networking bails

"it has always been the same seven years"

Really? I'd have thought it'd have been a different seven years each time. Or did he have more than one job at a time?

Chinese rivals: ZTE to take on Huawei... in the UK

Smart cities?

These days I find even dumb cities bad enough. Smart ones?------>

Petulant Facebook claims it can't tell the difference between child abuse and war photography

Re: Why is this surprising?

" the best they can do is allow for escalation to someone who is authorised to deviate from the procedure."

Not entirely. The best they can do is allow for escalation and learn from their mistakes.

Re: The problem is libel

"They can see, just as well as anyone else, that this is an important historical image and that the nudity is unimportant compared to that. "

Evidence?

Is there paper in the printer? Yes and it's so neatly wrapped!

Re: No lazy stereotyping?

"Did I leave anything out?"

Yes. Every mistake PHB can make that you couldn't even think of and wouldn't have believed if you did.

Sony wins case over pre-installed Windows software

Re: Economic Behavior Of Consumers

"Is it really MS's fault that there are no suitable Linux alternatives for essential production software?"

What part of "distortion of the market" did you not understand?

Re: Simple

"Only Microsoft would lose because they pay out for an unused OS and no metrics."

It's the crapware vendors that lose out because they paid to have their advertising put on there.

Re: The free market

"The most returned PCW product in one year, some time ago, was the Eee PC"

Since then the growth of mobile devices has shown people that there are alternatives to Windows. So much so that the one thing people don't want on their phones is Windows.

Re: Why not just grow up?

"there is only a very small minority of consumers ... who don't expect a PC to just work out of the box."

Work for whom?. Some of us want the PC we just bought to work for us.

Greed?

AFAICS from the article he wasn't content with getting the cost of the Windows licence, he went for damages, maybe from greed, maybe just to make a point. Assuming there was the equivalent of the small claims court in his jurisdiction he should have gone for that. Now he's created a precedent which is probably the very opposite of what he intended.

Re: OS Refund

"I think you'll find that the range of models/suppliers this is available on is very limited and it is actually quite difficult to but a laptop now that is compatible with linux."

How many people go round butting laptops?

Buying laptops compatible with Linux doesn't seem to be a problem, however.

Re: "Which will prove what, exactly?"

"Does he for example go into car showrooms and try it on the sales staff there?"

I have gone into a car showroom and after waiting an unreasonable time for attention, left. And I was seriously looking to buy a new car - which I did from the showroom across the road.

Re: Three heads and bare machines

"There is a very cosy (and profitable) relationship between PC vendors and the OS manufacturers."

Only as long as the OS is seen as promoting the sale of the machine. If it becomes seen as a toxic brand then the vendors have a problem.