Posts by Doctor Syntax

So just what is the third Great Invention of all time?

Re: Writing?

Don't denigrate word of mouth as a means of passing on information.

'The concept of "data" as an entity in itself wasn't really understood before the printing press.'

No way. The concept of data goes at least as far back as the notion if recording things by impressing marks in clay tablets. And probably before that with cutting notches in pieces of wood. And before that as oral tradition. You can't really separate it from language itself.

Re: The first great invention

"As far as can be determined, language evolved. The brain processing implementation necessary for this certainly supports this"

You'd have to include the evolution of the vocal tract along with that. You could make similar arguments about adaptations for tool use which is another candidate for significant invention.

Despite the biological evolution involved I think there must have been an inventive element to both although you could then argue that there is a biological underpinning to invention itself. You can't really separate the biological from the mental development.

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

New for 2016: Windows Password now use Faecal Recognition

That's £2-68p in loose change, a fluffy Polo mint and my car key but no sign of my USB drive.

"Phantom Furniture Thief of Old London Town"

Upvote for Two Ronnies reference.

Whatever angle I look at it from the £100 Microsoft cashback offer hasn't persuaded me.

Despite all her efforts Emma couldn't quite get to look through the front grille to see if the rumours about a miniature Difference Engine were true.

English is such an odd language. F'r instance my head isn't really over my heels at all.

From this angle the winner of the obfuscated C competition made sense.

...and now flex your hips a little more and you can plug in the network cable with your toes.

Does the light really go off when you close the lid?

At least she realised that whatever she tried prices on eBay only went up.

Welcome to the topsy turvy world of social networking and data privacy.

Anna regrets trying draw a structure diagram of systemd.

Why do they call it a laptop when it won't stay on my lap?

I still can't make head nor tail of the new start menu.

Are you sure I'm watching it wrong?

"hinged around a large ear growing out of a tree behind the two VR viewers."

You didn't notice the two others?( Forearm of one of the viewers & tree in the distance on the RHS).

Self-driving vehicles might be autonomous but insurance pay-outs probably won't be

Re: Hmm, air travel or autonomous vehicles

"At this point most air travel is accomplished, for the most part, in autonomous vehicles."

What's the minimum separation between aircraft in flight?

"Thinking about it though Volvos position of accepting liability is just crazy. We have to assume that some self driving cars will have accidents and some of the time it will be the cars fault."

No, it will never be the car's fault. Lawyers are not only are they more effective than engineers at avoiding accidents, they can do so after the event.

Virgin Media filters are still eating our email – Ntlworlders

Re: Yeah, right...

@ Gordan

Banks don't email? Worse. They employ marketing companies to email on their behalf with the From: field set to look as if it's the bank's domain when a quick chase through the headers reveals that it's not. Often there are embedded links which aren't to the banks emails. They've been teaching their customers to fall for phishing scams for years. Retail banking is run by marketing wonks who wouldn't recognise security if it came up to them & bit them in the arse.

Re: ISP email?

"[e-mail]"

There's also the secret little pleasure of knowing all their spam will bounce.

Re: Yeah, right...

"I somehow seriously doubt the truthfulness of that statement"

Why? It's quite feasible that large scale companies such as banks would have large numbers with a given provider.

Re: ISP email?

" I've had the damn email address from the ISP for 15 years"

Does that mean you've never needed to change ISP (in which case you're lucky) or because the grief of changing email address is too great to contemplate changing ISP - however bad they are?

"We appreciate the frustration this causes our customers and thank them for their patience,”

Translation: "we seem to be getting away with doing nothing".

Why should they bother to do anything if their customers are gormless* enough not to get another email service?

*With a nod to the thread on Lester's article.

Google wins book scan battle. Again. Can post pages online. Again

Re: Another Viewpoint

"That is a copyright violation in and of itself."

The court has said otherwise. It's their opinion that counts.

"Lawyers have a habit of biting onto the minutiae of legal niceties and missing the bigger business picture."

Especially in the publishing world it seems. One organisation has been reported putting the bite on the reading of books to groups of children in libraries. Anybody would think that children who have been read to aren't likely to spend the rest of their lives as the publishers' market.

Re: US only?

This would be a ruling which applies in the US only. If you make much use of Google for out-of-print books you will find there's sometimes a difference between what you can see in the US vs what you can see in the UK. In the US the PDF might be downloadable but the UK only gets a snippet view. Presumably there's a difference in what's considered to be in the public domain between the countries but it's difficult for the user to understand what the criteria are. However proxies are one solution to that. Another is archive.org. One considerable annoyance is that books which have been available in PDF are sometimes withdrawn as someone reprints it.

Re: @skelband

"How does the author or their estate get paid when they don't know that a book sale had occurred?"

In exactly the same way that they get paid if someone walks into a bookshop, looks through the shelves and finds a book they're interested in. The only difference is that with Google the customers have a search mechanism which enables them to find books they might otherwise have missed.

Euro privacy warriors: You've got until January to fix safe harbor mess – or we unleash hell

Re: Sue 'em all, god will recognise his own

Were you watching Mastermind tonight by any chance?

Reality

It seems very unlikely that the US will update its legal system in that time-frame. It also seems unlikely that without such update any arrangement that transfers data to the states will be deemed legal. In reality the deadline applies to businesses to set up arrangements to host data in the EU which will withstand scrutiny. To some extent that depends on the outcome of the MS case but given the speed of the legal process it might be the more practical option to assume the worst. So what to do?

Ensure that data is hosted within the EU in a data centre owned by an EU registered and owned company subject to EU law and staffed by EU personnel. It really shouldn't be that difficult to set up at least not for those with existing EU data centres. This is what I think the senior management of an EU subsidiary of a US company running a data centre over here could do:

Set up a local company managed by the existing senior EU staff and owned by them or some other EU business. This EU company would lease the DC from the US parent. It would set up one or more subsidiaries to run the various lines of business using the parent's IP as franchises. The franchises would operate with contracts under EU law with clauses specifically forbidding any data transfers illegal under EU law. Any US staff remaining in the EU would be employed by the parent as liaison dealing with the local companies at arm's length. Even with a worst case outcome from the MS case there would be no company or person falling under US jurisdiction with any access to the data.

Given that the data centre would be rented this would only require sufficient finance to cover the rent, royalties & salaries until the first franchise payments rolled in. The parent could even lend the money.

By being first in the field they could then offer to set up similar operations for other companies, especially those with no EU presence.

Re: EU data protection authorities are committed to take all necessary and appropriate actions

Data protection authorities have the clout to start prosecuting EU businesses making illegal transfers. Does the working group have the clout to make them do this?

Re: One small problem with all this....

One step at a time.

Germany says Ja to data-slurp law 2.0

Re: @Doctor Syntax

Sorry about that but have an upvote for being a gentleman of great intelligence.

"must get a judge's consent"

HMG please note.

Ad networks promise to do something about the awful adverts you're all blocking, like, real soon

Re: "Marketing managers are, to the last man (or woman) a bunch of wankers."

"Microsoft could save money if they stopped messing around with multiple more or less crippled versions of their OS."

It looks as if that's what they're trying to do but not successfully. Beancounters say to board "it'll be cheaper to force everyone onto the same version". Board says to marketing & tech "can we do that". M & T say "sure" - they're not going to risk saying anything else. Everybody wanders out of the meeting with tech muttering between themselves "HTF do we do that?".

"its about brand recognition"

That works two ways. If I recognise a brand because it tries to poke its fingers in my eyeballs and eardrums I will avoid it like the plague.

Re: "Marketing managers are, to the last man (or woman) a bunch of wankers."

@ Arnaut the less

I'm in agreement about the distinction. As far as W10 goes it might have been beancounters who realised that if they could save money supporting multiple versions if they could cram everyone onto one.

The profiling of print media could be applied equally well to web sites. In fact it could be applied better in real time by picking up on the subject of the page. If I search for vacuum cleaners and later visit a gardening site it would make a good deal more sense to show me gardening related ads at that time rather than vacuum cleaner ads. And if I'm looking at pages about greenhouses ads for fruit trees might not be the best choice of gardening ad.

Wheels come off parents' plan to dub sprog 'Mini Cooper'

Re: Kanye West's son is called North.

If he also names his son North will that be North by North West?

It's surprising how stuff can escape your attention. After carefully selecting a couple of attractive names for our daughter we never cottoned onto the significance of the initials until they caused a certain amount of confusion about her status when she was a post-grad. It's all resolved now as she's Dr DR ...

I've always thought that providing the parents were wealthy enough this was a good ploy. Child grows up, successfully sues parents, cash passes from one generation to the next without a tax liability.

Microsoft now awfully pushy with Windows 10 on Win 7, 8 PCs – Reg readers hit back

Re: Linux Mint

"In WINE, Winamp can't see my CD drive, so I can't rip CDs with it, which I do need as it's got a reliable ripper that I like."

No shortage of rippers for Linux.

"Insert obligatory comment about using Linux here"

What you need to notice is that most of the people doing so have been long time Windows enthusiasts. What does that tell you?

Re: Probably laziness on my part ..

" I upgraded my dual-boot Windows 8.1 / Linux Mint laptop to Windows 10 / Linux Mint. Everything worked fine for several weeks and I could boot into either OS as required via the grub menu. ...Windows 10 did several automatic updates and destroyed the dual-boot, making it Windows 10 only."

Probably the original update was at fault as it seems to have failed Windows SOP.

Re: Probably laziness on my part ..

" I find my Debian box is a little cranky about automounting DVDs and USBs."

Currently running Wheezy (& no plans to go further) and that doesn't seem to have problems. ISTR problems with earlier versions however. It might vary with desktop - I'm running KDE.

"it will multiply out"

Quite so. The posts that say we're not the target markets (maybe that should be marks?) have missed the point. We're the ones who are advising others. Friends and family who come looking for help with their W10s aren't going to get it, they're going to be directed to alternative OSes.

It's noticeable that many posts on this sort of thread are from people who say they've been MS supporters from way back and who are now changing their minds. MS really have misjudged badly to alienate so many supporters.

"And so was..... "

FORTRAN for CP/M

HMRC U-turns on VAT rules for cloud

"Hardware purchases are not subject to the refund, unless they are provided as part of a managed service."

So any public sector entity competent enough to roll its own gets penalised for not pouring some of its funding into a service provider's profits. In turn that means that there's no incentive for such entities to maintain their own competence. And we wonder why the public sector regularly gets taken to the cleaners by service providers.