Posts by Doctor Syntax

PC sales sinking almost as fast as Donald Trump's poll numbers

Besides, any kind of tablet is not conductive to do lots of typing on or CAD design, for that you still need a proper Win7/Win8.1 computer.

FTFY

Like it or not, here are ALL your October Microsoft patches

A bottomless pit

"Its a crazy town with one hell of a marketing budget, some would say a bottomless pit."

Which do you mean, town or budget?

Re: Dear Microsoft.

"Signed, a pissed off MS customer whom has a lawyer."

I'm pleasantly surprised at the number of commentards who (not whom) spotted that one but here's an upvote for a splendid rant.

Burger barn put cloud on IT menu, burned out its developers

"She's therefore been surprised at the amount of governance she has to do, lest marketers go wild with campaigns that target people from the wrong lists, breaching policy or good taste along the way."

Why the surprise? That's marketing SOP.

Boost Ofcom's powers and fix mobile market woes, Three and TalkTalk tell MPs

Harding appears before MPs and they don't open the bowling by asking why she's still representing TT?

FreeBSD 11.0 lands, with security fixes to FreeBSD 11.0

Re: Pre-release turns out to be pre-release quality?

"though as a knowing user (or glutton for punishment!)"

If I'd been a glutton for punishment I'd have gone the systemd route.

Re: Pre-release turns out to be pre-release quality?

"I use FreeBSD for my workstation, and keep it patched etc, and yet somehow managed to resist the temptation to pre-emptively download the latest version before it was announced as being available."

I've been using 11RC3 for a new GIS workstation. It works fine.

It was a choice between that and Debian Jessie in order to get drivers for a recentish motherboard. A BSD RC vs systemd? No contest.

Yesterday brought in a shower of updates which I assume bring the RC up-to-date with the final release.

Re: Why the torrent hate?

"ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/11.0/"

Take another look at that link.

Do you see a Disk1 image? That's a CD image. You can download and install from that.

Do you see an even smaller boot only image? You can download that but that means you pull down binary tarballs at install time. The tarballs are quite small, however.

The install gives you a command-line system. If you want GUIs you'll have to install xorg and, if the default window manager (TWM I think) isn't sufficient, you'll have to install the manager of your choice. Again this requires pulling down tarballs of the binaries.

Nuke plant has been hacked, says Atomic Energy Agency director

Re: Umm. PDP-11s? good!

"Some hospitals still run Windows 2000 because to recertify their gear with anything else would be next to impossible and besides many of the staff are in their 60's and trained for decades to use them as they are"

Great. Casual ageism - still PC if not mandatory. And remind me how many complete decades since W2K came out (there's a clue in the name).

The principle argument of "just works" is sound so why throw in some bollocks to spoli it?

Re: The safest form of energy is?

Or, to put it another way, for the whole of my adult life (and I'm in my 70s) there's been no excuse for wasting good fossil carbon feed-stocks by shoving them up power station chimneys.

Re: News at 10

"The stuff we did in the 6th form in expectation of doing a physics or chemistry degree would probably get you locked up nowadays."

Sugar and sodium chlorate was regarded as an entertainment.

Re: News at 10

'I spent 2 years working with radioactive materials (H3, P32, etc) as a student in a lab... So my brain is in violation of the relevant part of the UK criminal code "materials useful for terrorism"'

I doubt it. P32 has a short half-life anyway and normal biological turnover will have flushed the tritium out long ago.

'Wake me up when someone tries to steal any quantity of radioactive Cobalt'

There's probably more of that about in the environment than you might think. Way back when the Belfast Radiocarbon lab was being set up we had to cast about for some old steel sheets to use in shielding as modern (in the '60s) steel was considered to contain cobalt-60.

'Facebook and eBay need to be subject to greater scrutiny' - Margaret Hodge

"Margaret Hodge understands this perfectly well, as her own family business - Stemcor, a global steel erector - paid very little UK tax on its worldwide revenues of c $10 billion, for the simple reason that they made a loss."

Didn't you know you're supposed to do as she says, not as she does. And for good measure, stump up for her little book.

No, software-as-a-service won't automatically simplify operations and cut costs

Re: Green Grass

"The grass really IS greener on the other side."

Which side are you looking from? From the vendor's side the the greener the better amongst all those HR & marketing types with credit cards.

Yahoo! halts! email! forwarding! to! outside! email! addresses!

Re: good reason

"a warning system that tells you that you've probably lost control of your mailbox, using said mailbox..."

I keep getting messages like that about Hotmail/Outlook all the time. And sometimes about Gmail as well.

Verizon! 'wants! a! discount!'

Did you get that right? Maybe it's not $1bn it want's knocking off, but just the bn, as in $4.8.

Social media flame wars to be illegal, says top Crown prosecutor

"The new guidance was released along with a public consultation on what should constitute a hate crime, particularly against the disabled, race and religion, and on sexual orientation and gender identity."

As ever, age is fair game for discrimination. Kids!!

Linus Torvalds says ARM just doesn't look like beating Intel

Re: Linux has facilitated the cituation he is lamenting about

"The reason is simple -- Microsoft under BG and SB was only ever interested in money and monopoly and customer lock-in. MS was absolutely never interested in engineering elegance."

Are things different now?

Re: Almost bought a QL

'Your recollection is both right and wrong....The 68020 was the first "full" 32-bit implementation but the nice thing was all your 32-bit code from the 68000 would be ready to run and take full advantage of it.'

Yes, the 68k family became very popular for Unix boxes by being 32-bit but it was probably 68020s and later that were used.

Re: The man is a giant...

"If he is right, and the IoT become more like general purpose machines, we're in for a lot of trouble."

In terms of openness for being pwned for DDoS attacks they already are and so we are too.

Stickers emerge as EU's weapon against dud IoT security

This could be a useful first step if it involves creating an on-going process to set standards and to provide testing. The next step is to use that to prevent non-compliant stuff getting onto the market.

Boffins eschew silicon to build tiniest-ever transistor, just 1nm long

Re: Abundance a problem

In 0.65nm sheets I don't think abundance is a problem.

Leap second scheduled for New Year's Eve 2016

Another already

Somebody get the big key out and wind the Earth up.

Re: WTF

"It shouldn't be something we're wasting so much time on any more, like you shouldn't be using any software that doesn't understand February 29th."

ISTR that there was a version of SunOS or Solaris that went TITSUP on a leap year.

Command line coffee machine: Hacker shuns app so he can stay at the keyboard for longer

Re: This is bad

"I can run the washing machine/dishwasher/dryer"

All in one? Have you got a patent on that?

Re: Why aren't they following the standards ?!

"Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol"

It's not a standard:

"Status of this Memo

This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does

not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this

memo is unlimited."

Re: Extrapolating...

"The command line in the video was "coffee make"."

Just as well it's not the other way round unless he had a Makefile with a target of coffee.

Heads roll as Qihoo 360 moves to end WoSign, StartCom certificate row

Re: Archived copy of Tyro's blog post about backdated SHA-1 certs

"We reached out in good faith"

All this reaching out! No good ever comes of it.

Yahoo! spymasters! patent! biometric! online! ad! tracking! IRL!

If these advertisers put so much effort into understanding the "audience" how come they still haven't understood how much they're hated and despised? Have ad blockers told them nothing?

BOFH: The Idiot-ware Project and the Meaningless Acronym

If you've worked in a company long enough to have been on two or three projects you find that when you go into a fresh project meeting you'll know a good few of the faces.

There'll be one or two you've worked with before

There'll be or two you've learned to avoid.

There may be one or two who are new to you actually know about the area of business involved. Your task in the first meeting is to identify them.

From then on you get together with those from the first group because you know you'll end up doing the work between you, consulting with those from the last group as required and avoid as many of the rest of the meetings as possible. You'll miss nothing of importance and the job gets done.

'Please label things so I can tell the difference between a mouse and a microphone'

Re: Labelling

"Which C suite decided was such a good idea, everyone must do it, and made it mandatory not only for the shop, but all the design and research offices too."

I'm with Mike on this one. An empty desk is a sign of an empty head.

Re: When we get to the stage where we have to label everything...

"These days, before you can use a new purchase, you have to puzzle your way through complex assembly and use advice written entirely in pictograms."

It saves a fortune in translators. They're equally incomprehensible in all languages.

Crooks and kids (not scary spies paid by govt overlords) are behind most breaches

Re: Yes, I believe that crooks and kids are behind most attacks

"Plus crooks and kids don't really have the power to subvert standards, infrastructure and even logistics systems to insert vulnerabilities into the system for their own selfish reasons"

All too often we're not talking about standards. We're talking about badly configured installs that should have been secured and weren't. The kids attacking TT were using one such known exploit that was older than they were.

Re: "Dropbox" ".. halfway through moving from the ageing SHA1 technology.."

"Remind me what is Dropbox's core business."

Never mind about their core business, remind me who's on their board.

"I don't think the 15 year old kid using free software is the problem in TalkTalk's case. I think TalkTalk deciding that they didn't want to pay for any serious investment in IT security infrastructure was."

The two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it was a combination of the two.

BT Yahoo! customers: Why! can't! we! grrr! delete! our! webmail! accounts!?

"Please spare a thought for Sky customers"

No. It was being bought out by Sky that caused me to jump ship from my previous ISP.

Re: unless they are old there's no excuse

"they wouldn't let just anyone mess around with their wires."

Shhh.

When we moved here the master socket was located in the hall as was common but with no power anywhere near. The telephone cable comes into the house below ground so I knew it came up the wall from the below floor cavity.

When we had some building work done before we moved had the spark put a socket in the porch cupboard next to the meter. Se we drilled a hole though the floor of the cupboard, disconnected the master, pulled the cable back, threaded it up through the hole and reinstalled the master in the porch cupboard. The original site of the master was connected as a slave. So now the master socket sits well located next to the power for the cordless phone, the router and the VDSL modem and any other kit I want to put in there.

Re: Pay for Email

"You can check out, but you can't leave."

You can but you obviously didn't. In order to check out from ISP and other service provider email services you need your own domain. That, and the email service, can then be shifted to providers other than your ISP as you find fit. It involves making sure that everyone who needs to email you is told to do so at an address on your domain. If you'd done that you'd have both checked out and left.

Re: A reminder to...

"Just buy a domain name and use a domain hosting service to support it, configuring its e-mail and http redirection services to point to whatever ISP provides your e-mail"

It's one way but for whatever time you're with them you're still stuck with whatever quality of hosting service your ISP de jour provides. Given that they almost certainly see their prime business as shuffling bits between yourself and their up-stream that aspect of their business isn't given much attention and may well have been outsourced - which is the entire point of TFA and this thread.

The better alternative IMV is to select a service that sees mail and web hosting as its primary business with the domain registration as a part of that.

Re: unless they are old there's no excuse

"My folks are old, I know better But they won't Listen."

I feel sorry for them having such off-spring. But maybe it is their fault - they should have brought you up better.

I am old and know better. It's my daughter who won't listen. Actually she does know she shouldn't be on TalkTalk mail but just doesn't do anything about it.

"monopoly."

Given that you've just listed three alternatives it seems to me that that word doesn't mean what you think it does.

Invasion of the virus-addled lightbulbs (and other banana stories)

I must go and make some toast. All this reading about it has made me hungry.

"And we aren't likely to have AI for a long time"

Don't be silly. It'll just be another 10 years, like it's always been.

Windows updates? Just trust us, says Microsoft executive

Re: That's exactly the problem

"Microsoft have proven throughout its history that it cannot be trusted, whether it be software quality or business ethics."

Not entirely true. Way back in time I quite liked their FORTRAN for CP/M

Re: El Reg sat down with....? Wow!

'play "find the start bar" for them'

Big clue. By default either the desktop itself or the distro packagers put it just where Windows puts it.

'or "what fucking workspace am I in now?"'

Ah - multiple workspace envy.

Re: El Reg sat down with....? Wow!

"Opening a Word document? LibreOffice, OpenOffice and a few others have had no problems with doing this"

Oddly enough it tended to be Word that had that problem when the lock-in train was running full-tilt.

Don't panic, but a 'computer error' cut the brakes on a San Francisco bus this week

"Just like this bus, in fact."

And only a few customers were involved.

And it was a state-sponsored hacker.

There's always more in the PR handbook.

Re: Emergency brake controlled by a computer!!!

"thyristor was bart. this was computer error."

From TFA:

The Examiner notes that faulty circuitry components – thyristors linking the brake and accelerator pedals to the motor – were also replaced on 100 BART... trains last year.

It seems clear enough that thyristors were at fault in both cases.

Thyristors are electronic and computers are electronic so obviously it's a computer error; any newspaper would say the same thing.

French programmers haul Apple into court over developer rules

Re: Apple is a walled garden, get over it

"It'll depend on French law whether they can get away with it."

French developers against a foreign, Anglophone corporation in a French court? I'd have thought the odds were stacked in their favour.

Re: Apple is a walled garden, get over it

"Apple is the oxymoron of openness"

English translation required.