Posts by Doctor Syntax

Shakes on a plane: How dangerous is turbulence?

Re: Explainer?

"My guess is the author is aiming it at the level of his students at Preston Poly."

My knowledge of the graduates of that institution is limited to a sample of one but it would have been well beyond his comprehension.

Blighty's Virgin Queen threatened with foreign abduction

"@Martin - English may not be their first language"

A handle of patrick_bateman might be a clue about that.

Google-backed solar electricity facility sets itself on fire

"Ah but the real purpose of the facility is as a weapon for zapping satellites."

Or incoming asteroids? There should be scope for a Bruce Willis movie in there.

Cock fight? Not half. Microsoft beats down Apple in Q1

"all hail the successor to the great IKABAI-SITAL"

IKNAI-SO

Salesforce slaps UK Enterprise customers with 40% price hike

It could, of course, be to cover the cost of building EU-based arm's length data centres so as to be compliant when the Privacy Figleaf gets torn down. But I doubt it.

Half of EU members sidle up to EC: About the data-sharing rules. C'mon. Chill out

"the right balance between digital products and services and the fundamental rights of data subjects"

I assume the balance intended is 1-nil to the products and services.

Your next server will be a box full of connected stuff, not a server

'“There is no inflection point coming that will increase demand for non-x86 and Unix,” he said. Organisations migrating from those platforms, he said, will see Linux as their natural destination.'

One of the nice things about inflection points is that they arrive without the Gartners of this world noticing until it hits them in the face.

A lot of people running Linux at the moment do so because it's a cheap Unix-like OS onto which commercial vendors have migrated products such as RDBMSs. And a good proportion of those users are not over-fond of it becoming less Unix-like with the incorporation of systemd (yes, I know there are systemd fans who welcome a more WIndows-like approach). There's also a proportion of those users who realise that there are now alternatives to those commercial products which have less vicious licensing terms and which are available on other platforms.

Some combination of these factors could quite easily form an inflection point whereby there's a migration to BSDs. At which point there'll be a whole new slew of reports from the Gartners of this world assuring us that there's a migration to BSDs, that chroot jails are the new containers and explaining the reasons for it being a natural destination.

The underbelly of simulation science: replicating the results

A very long time ago I was at a lecture in a British Ecological Society meeting (that's ecology as a branch of biological science, not a political movement). Someone had spent a lot of time measuring the growth of heather in the lab in response to light, temperature, water, etc. Based on that they then used a model to predict growth of heather in field conditions based on monitoring all these factors. They reported that the model hadn't performed well, being out by a factor of 3. A comment from the floor was reassuring: in modelling terms a factor of 3 was a good result. I've approached modelling with scepticism ever since.

The Sons of Kahn and the Witch of Wookey

"And, notwithstanding Kylix they did they did plan a version for Linux."

And AFAICS this means running the IDE on Windows with a cross-compiler for Linux. They never grasped the nettle of making the IDE cross-platform; unless memory plays me false Kylix relied on running the Windows IDE in a hacked version of Wine which, like other binary-only stuff, didn't survive the transition to 2.6 kernels. What was worse the compiler that shipped with Kylix wasn't that good. That's not good in that it would barf on suitably complex but legit Pascal.

There was a compiler called cross-Kylix which could be used with Delphi and which did a better job. Here we are, a decade or so later, looking at the same approach. Meanwhile everyone who wanted to use the Delphi approach to cross-platform programming running the IDE on Linux or BSD has been getting along nicely with Lazarus. How much are they asking for RAD-Studio these days?

Re: Prophetic

"Today with such a silly name you can easily gather hundreds of millions of VC funding, especially if you babble about IoT or the like every three words."

Provided another one of the other three is DevOps. And the third is cloud.

Hacked in a public space? Thanks, HTTPS

"Some popular IT news websites even fail to use HTTPS in their comments if you can imagine that"

I wondered how far I'd have to read before someone pointed out this.

If you know what's good for you, your health data belongs in the cloud

Standards

I don't know how many sets of units are in use in blood sugar testing. In this scenario 60 was dangerously low. My wife's recent test by the health centre was 50 and they were pleased, but not over-pleased that she'd got down to this figure so I doubt the result is in the same units as in the scenario. The readings on her home monitor are of an order of magnitude different to the lab results so they must be in a third set of units. Unless there's a standardisation on units this sort of system could be very dangerous.

Goracle latest: Page testifies, jury goes home

People who live in glass houses...

Oracle must, of course, be using APIs from various places. If they were to win I wonder howmeny sue-balls will be flung at them citing their case as precedent.

The PC is dead. Gartner wishes you luck, vendors

"A lot of UK business has been donating old computing equipment for almost a decade to organisations like UNICEF and Save the Children. What has happened to that equipment?"

Given that this is old equipment before it gets shipped one wonders how much longer it survives. In fact, how much survives the rigours of shipment. Having said that, any trip to the local skip site shows a selection of old PCs and monitors in the electronics cage. What happens to those? And how many of those PCs have been wiped?

Re: Consider the nonsense of buying a desktop for your home

"Let us do the mental experiment of thinking that mobile internet is cheap and that games, messaging, E-Mail, telephone, video and internet access are all available in a portable device in your pocket, wherever you are and whenever you need."

OK, my mental experiment runs like this: Everyone in even my rural neighbourhood uses mobile internet for video at the same time. Bandwidth saturates. How do you increase it? Smaller and smaller cells. Very quickly you get to the point where you need lots of backhaul to service those small cells - you've reinvented internet connection to the home and wi-fi.

"PCs are no longer the first or only devices users are choosing for internet access,"

Maybe I'm getting old & the memory isn't what it was but I'm sure I can remember businesses not only using PCs for purposes other than internet access but using them for business before internet access became common. I think they might still be doing that. The vendors' problem isn't that people are using other gadgets instead of PCs, it's that the PCs they have are still working and fit for purpose.

Maybe the market for market reports has also saturated as they keep finding the same thing.

White hats bake TeslaCrypt master key into universal decryptor

I'm surprised that the link in the article is direct to an executable rather than to the parent page. This link might be more informative: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/teslacrypt-shuts-down-and-releases-master-decryption-key/

Hmmm, where should I dump those unencrypted password files? I know - OneDrive

Re: BS!

"They might just be in a position to benefit from what they say."

Of course.

Re: This study says what?

"I'm thinking the companies who would allow this study to take place on their systems likely don't think security first; skewing the results."

A minimal amount of research - if you could go as far as calling a quick Google and looking at their website research - shows that they're security consultants who do such scanning on clients' cloud use to look for this sort of thing. So companies who call them in are actually being security conscious* and the skew might be in the opposite direction to what you thought.

*Or maybe not if they're using someone else's computer.

Re: BS!

'I call BS. There isn't one word in their report about how they got their "estimate".'

Let's see now.... Google Skyhigh Networks.... Hmm, there's their web-site, click on it, scroll down till we find out what they do for a living... Hey, they act as security consultants for corporates, checking both shadow IT and official IT. You know something? They might just be in a position to discover what they say.

The Windows 10 future: Imagine a boot stamping on an upgrade treadmill forever

Re: Does anybody remember?

"But what happens when they discover that non-Microsoft is not an option because their critical software is Windows-only"

What happens when they discover it's Windows $SPECIFIC_VERSION only? Where $SPECIFIC_VERSION is probably XP. Wine. VM. There are options.

Re: Scared Sh*tless with W10 updates

"AC because i'm an utter knob because in the past I thought it would be a good idea to install a W10 PC as a file server into a tiny office. They use a SQL express DB as the backend for an app."

Help is coming - maybe: SQL Server on Linux.

Re: If there's one thing...

"We already know that SME's are be able to purchase Windows Enterprise licences."

What about SMBs, those businesses that can't (other, maybe than Trotters' Independent Traders) aspire to call themselves enterprises? What about individual professionals? Businesses that don't have the spare cash to upgrade to Enterprise licenses?

Are you telling them that Windows is no longer a suitable OS for their purposes?

No, scrap the interrogative, you are telling them that.

Re: So...

"many companies are, more or less, happily wedded to Windows stacks."

Happily wedded to old Windows stacks.

FTFY

When "old" becomes "obsolete" and "wedded" becomes "enslaved" it's time to review the market.

Re: So...

"those still struggling to get rid of IE & ActiveX crap are in for a massive re-wire effort either way."

Which gives them the opportunity and reason to make a long-term decision.

Storage array firmware bug caused Salesforce data loss

Re: Predicting failure modes

"Most companies would prefer the asterisk disclaimer at the end of their Up-Time Promise."

If you run your own services it's your data and ultimately your business at risk and you can decide what it's worth paying to protect it. If you decide to put the services on someone else's computer then from that someone else's point of view it's not their data and only the penalties in the SLA are at risk.

Adpocalypse 'will wipe out display ad growth' by 2020

Re: Protection?

"I really don't understand why people here can't see that adblockers hurt the wrong people. There are typically at least four parties involved: content providers, ad brokers, advertisers and viewers."

Your second sentence is something I've pointed out here myself. But the only technology available to viewers is the ad-blocker and for reasons of security, if nothing else, the ad-blocker is not going to go away.

Also, I'm sure the advertisers themselves, if they go online without an ad-blocker, find the obnoxious ads - and by association their advertisers - as obnoxious as the rest of us find them. At some point they're going to realise that that's how they're seen by the rest of us. Then they'll start to wonder why they're paying good money to have the general public find them obnoxious and whether this is costing them more than just the price of the ads.

So there are a couple of reasons why the old business model is in its coffin being nailed down. If you're in the content industry you'd be better occupied in looking for a new business model rather than fighting ad-blockers. I don't think the present idea is going to be the one; it's simply a variation on micro-payments and the problem with micro-payments is likely to be the unit cost of processing each payment being too big a proportion of the whole.

If I were to encounter a subscription site worth subscribing to, or if I were running a subscription site, I'd expect the deal to be direct between subscriber and site. Why should a 3rd party horn in and get money for nothing?

Ad blocking by ordinary users might be costing the ad industry some money. But we may reasonably expect to find that some of those using ad blockers are also the advertising industry's clients - after all why should they find having ads pushed in their faces any less unpleasant than the rest of ut. And when they realise that the rest of us have the same dislike of them as they do of the rest of adverts they'll start to wonder why they're paying good money to be disliked. That's when the industry's problems really start.

Manchester cops to strap on 3K bodycams

Re: Storage

"It's amazing that the police demand almost infinited storage duration for anything on the PNC, including illegally maintained biometrics on those arrested but innocent, yet they can only argue to store their own directly obtained evidence for a month."

So, damned if they do, damned if they don't?

Re: That's not too bad

"If the footage is going to be kept secure with no possibility of unauthorised access as is claimed, and destroyed after a month if it is not required, I see nothing wrong with filming any of the situations you describe."

And then at some point the accused demands all the video of the distressed victim and promptly posts it on YouTube.

Re: That's not too bad

"How about when taking the intimate sample from the rape victim? Think she's going to want that on video?"

Police surgeon's job.

Girls outpace boys in US IT and engineering test

Re: There's a touch of the 'bleedin obvious' here

"Our daughter did OK, she's and engineer/pilot but then she didn't stand much of a chance going into the humantities."

Not even it she'd wanted to?

Sainsbury’s Bank insurance spam scam causes confusion

"Which is why you buy a cheap domain and give every company a unique email."

I do this. I gave PayPal their own address. I was surprised to receive a confirmation email from a vendor who I'd paid via PayPal and who hadn't asked for an address. Clearly PayPal are passing on my address to vendors. They seem to lack any concept that this is a bad idea if only to avoid being impersonated.

They should make it clear to vendors that they can have the billing address (to check for fraudulent purchases) but if the vendor wants an email address for the customer they must ask for it themselves.

"It's also not uncommon for companies to outsource e-mail marketing to third parties,who may turn out to be spammers"

It's also not uncommon for companies to outsource e-mail marketing to third parties, who are spammers

FTFY

Unsolicited, bulk, commercial email. The definition of spam.

It's all very well hacking ISIS, Barry, but what about your ISA?

Are HPE thinking of cybercrime as a new business opportunity? Or are they worried that the cyber-criminals will go legit and out compete them by offering better customer service?

Hewlett Packard Enterprise hiring temps to cover for redundancies - sources

"But contractors aren't people"

No, contractors are businesses (retired contractor speaks) and will have factored in this. They won't have had redundancy payments. In fact it will be contractors who pick up the slack.

Re: Sort-a

Most people who have been made redundant do not have access to such "justice for the rich".'

Trade Unions do.

If a "redundant" post is back-filled doesn't it change the "redundancy" to wrongful dismissal with the possibility of suing for better compensation?

Destroying ransomware business models is not your job, so just pay up

"To this end the FBI and others would be better saving their breath and offering advice about how victims can identify and then decrypt their ransomware infections, rather than delivering sermons from an ivory tower"

However although "breaking criminal business models is not, however, the job of the system administrator" it is the FBI's job so the best thing they could do is get on with it.

China's new rules may break the internet warns US government

"The world's governments have long acknowledged that what countries do within their own borders is largely their own business."

The US, of course, has long taken the view that what it wants to do within other countries' borders is also its own business.

Their upset about China's actions might have an element of sour grapes in that they didn't get round to doing that first.

Art heist 'pranksters' sent down for six months

It sounds as if what they really need are brain transplants.

UK needs comp sci grads, so why isn't it hiring them?

"The employers provide hands on experience in a real work environment, and steer the academic input"

Do you really think that employers would be ready to step up to that plate when they can just hire in cheap labour from abroad?

Re: Science?

" Engineering is a discipline, the state of most current software products shows exactly why no sw dev can be called an engineer"

Yes, we know that. Which means, if you think about it, that Mr Massey has made a very good point.

ZFS comes to Debian, thanks to licensing workaround

"what's the point in licensing your free software?"

Because if you don't license it it isn't free.

A license is a grant of permission. That's the meaning of the word. If you don't believe me look it up for yourself. An example would be a driving license - it's a permit to drive.

f you don't grant a license you're not allowing anybody else to use it. That's the legal position. There seems to be a common misconception to the contrary but it most certainly is a misconception.

Of course you can add restrictive clauses to your license. Your driving license, for instance, might restrict you to driving certain types of vehicles; nevertheless without it you're not legally permitted to drive at all. A software license might impose certain restrictions. The GPL's restrictions are different to BSD's & some might consider them more onerous but in both cases they are permissions to use and distribute the software subject to those restrictions.

I presume it's the restrictions that are the root of the misconception but, I repeat, it is a misconception because the licenses are essentially grants of permissions to do something which would otherwise be a breach of copyright.

"That's one of the most stupid things you can do - especially when you're not fully aware of the long-term implications."

Another is to not specify a licence in the first place, presumably on the basis that it's the freest of all. It's not, of course, it's the most restrictive because a licence is a grant of permission to use: no licence, no permission.

Re: That's Why...

Firstly, we need to differentiate between Linux the kernel and Linux distributions.

Linux the kernel has the ability to accommodate loadable modules some of which are included in the kernel source. ZFS isn't one of these. Neither are such items as user space file systems and binary drivers.

Linux distributions package the kernel, a bundle of tools including a whole raft of more or less Unix-like tools. As we've seen Ubuntu bundle a GPL'd kernel-derived module which interfaces with the non-GPL'd ZFS file system. Ubuntu, presumably on the basis of legal advice, take the position that this indirect link between the kernel and non-GPL code isn't such as to make the ZFS code a derivative on the kernel and hence isn't subject to the GPL.

Secondly we need to consider the legality of this in terms of licensing. As I've spelled out here a few times whenever some new legal situation arises the only way to be sure of the way the law will deal with it is the decision of the highest court that adjudicates (which might differ in different jurisdictions). The only way this is going to receive such a ruling is if someone with suitable standing, presumably a kernel contributor with contributions to the parts of the kernel most closely associated with the interfaces being used, takes the case to court. RMS might not like the situation but he isn't a court and unless he takes action himself and convinces a court that he has sufficient standing then there's not a lot he can do about it AFAICS. If the kernel contributors don't take legal action within a reasonable period of time we have to assume that either they accept the Ubuntu position, take the view that they don't believe that they have a strong enough case against Ubuntu or simply can't be bothered.

It's worth noting that although ZFS isn't GPL it is, AFAIK open source under the CDDL licence. This is in clear distinction to many binary-only drivers that many Linux distributions include. If the inclusion of ZFS were successfully challenged in court distributions might start to be concerned about including such drivers; under such circumstances the entire Linux project would be in serious trouble.

"The problem with non-GPL licensed software seems to me to be that it eliminates the requirement for reciprocity that the GPL licences embody."

It's only a problem if your wrote the software and demand reciprocity. If you write something and release it under BSD then presumably you don't care about reciprocity so no problem.

Spied upon by GCHQ? You'll need proof before a court will hear you...

I doubt Privacy International is too worried. A refusal by the IPT is likely to be a required step to taking this to the European court.

Sysadmin paid a month's salary for one day of nothing

OK, I've posted it here maybe a couple of times before but...

Client had two not-quite-same systems running a product which wasn't Y2K compatible in the version they were running. One of the systems could run the later version, the older one couldn't. The older one was the hot standby, allegedly kept ready to roll by an overnight NFS copy.* Their decision was to replace both boxes with new ones running the current S/W and cut over between Xmas & New Year. I had a contract for several weeks to install and oversee UATs all of which was successful, in other words the sort of work which generally made Y2K the non-event which the great uninformed insisted proved the work wasn't needed.

The bean-counters flat-refused to let us cut over before New Year as their accounting year was also the calendar year and they wouldn't take the "risk" of using the new system until they'd closed down the year which took them into the middle of January. The actual risk they took, of course, was that the old system wouldn't handle the new data properly. It didn't & we had the vendors dialling in two or three times a week to fix corrupted data until we were finally allowed to cut over.

Yup, Y2K did have the makings of a lot of stuff going wrong if the remedial work hadn't been done.

*One of the things I discovered was that the data had grown too big to be copied within the overnight window. The tapes from the main system would have been OK but if the main had gone titsup the hot standby wouldn't have worked.

Salesforce.com crash caused DATA LOSS

Re: Staffing realignment

"A rolling head gathers no moss..."

...but plenty of golden handshakes.