Posts by Doctor Syntax

Get whimsical and win a Western Digital Black 6TB hard drive

It's not working. I'll stick a handful of shit on it and hand it back.

Select ringtone music:

Also sprach Zarathustra

The Blue Danube

The cattle prod has hair-raising effects.

The PFY's latest acne cream has striking side effects.

Oobee doo I wanna get O2

Steve Bong checks some of his 5,000 daily texts. Although he's given up shaving his hipster beard isn't coming on as well as he hoped.

I own copyright on this selfie and any lawyer that thinks different can take it up with me personally.

'Unexpected item in baggage area' assigned to rubbish area

"There's no mention of global warming"

There is now.

I can't help thinking that the entire retail industry is engaged in some private competition to discover who can treat their customers the worst. Either that or they want to drive everybody to online shopping so that they can do away with all this expensive real estate. If it's the latter they're clearly following the example of the banks.

As far as I'm concerned Tesco & Ikea both earn the never-again-set-foot prize years ago with the latter in a slight lead with a particularly ingenious twist.

They're bad enough by insisting you run a long maze even if you know exactly what you want and are simply trying to get to the stock area to get it. But the very last time I went there I was without the assistance of SWMBO. The car park is a 2 storey affair & naturally I ended up on the upper story. The loading bay has room for about 3 cars.

With a full trolley & nobody to guard it I'm expected to leave it for some toe-rag to load into his own car whilst I go and get my car & then join a queue of about 20 others waiting to load up? No, I'll put the trolley in the lift, take it to the car, load up & bring the trolley back down like any public spirited bloke.

I found the lift had a notice saying "No trolleys". I took the trolley up to the top floor and left it there.

"competitors such as Morrisons, which even ran an ad campaign promising it would provide more humans on tills"

I can remember Tesco advertising the same thing.

Win8 inventory glut? Yep, it's all Microsoft's fault, says HP

Re: Windows 10 is a success

Much the same except I used Zorin. It offers to set up dual boot which is set up with Linux as the default. This retains all their original files with the Windows partition appearing as another drive which Linux can then access. I found that it was quite quick to partition if you accepted the split it suggested but if you set the Linux partition larger it had to do a defrag which took hours on an old box.

"Everyone knew Windows 10 was coming. We may not have known the exact release date"

The release date was trailed well enough in advance. The only uncertainty, I suppose, was that they may have delayed. But the point is well made.

Re: Glutten Free?

Is that gluten or glutton?

Collective noun search for security vulns moves into beta testing

Another

How about a flop? After all, the number of vulnerabilities seems to increase in proportion to processor speed.

Whilst we're on the subject can I offer another collective noun. A one-time colleague of mine (himself an accountant) remarked "this business has a surplus of accountants". It seemed appropriate on several different levels.

Forget Big Data hype, says Gartner as it cans its hype cycle

In other words, they reckon they've made as much money out of it as was there to be made.

Microsoft will explain only 'significant' Windows 10 updates

Re: Trust nothing? Too late for that!

"you will find cases where an update borks something ... but that *is* (tin-foil hats notwithstanding) accidental"

It's also something that can happen to other OSs too. If you don't like living on the bleeding edge choosing a variant that has the most conservative update policy you can find.

Re: "Darling, it was a moment of madness"

"the generation who know no different"

I think they're starting to find out. And as a consequence we can hopefully look forward to the following generation being better educated.

Whitehall IT running costs creep up again to £4.6bn

According to Sir Humphrey

Introducing economies in govt. always costs more.

Could our fear of fracking be appeased with CO2 sequestration?

""Where does the CO2 come from? It would have to be captured and transported to the site."

This seems to be a solved problem: "we already pump CO2 into wells in the North Sea as a way of disposing of it"

Bruce Schneier: 'We're in early years of a cyber arms race'

"What sort of power would that put in my hands?"

Not a lot if the net infrastructure has been taken down.

YouTube bloggers told to slap 'advert' stickers on their vid posts

Sainsbury's Quadruple Belgian Chocolate All Butter Cookies"

But not very useful as a crossword clue.

Activist pens pirate's map to 'liberating' academic journals

"Surely, restricting the publication and distribution of an academic work hurts the author more than anyone else, or am I missing something here?"

Sadly, you're missing two things. One is that it's more or less standard practice with peer-reviewed journals since they started online publishing to paywall papers. The other is that Jstor will vacuum up older papers, scan them and paywall them; I found stuff I wrote there but oddly enough they didn't ask my permission to do that. That reminds me, I really should get in touch and complain. It really pisses me off that possibly something I wrote might have been in the haul that drove Aaron Schwartz to suicide.

The Ashley Madison files – are people really this stupid?

Re: Lets look at this

"your average user wont[sic] have a clue how to access the data"

No but, as you may have noticed, some journalists do.

OpenOffice project 'all but dead upstream' argues prominent user

Re: Trolling time

For someone starting a document or spreadsheet from scratch you may be right. But I upgraded my definitely non power user cousin's PCs to Linux a few weeks ago and they had non-compatibilities with Abiword opening Word documents. LibreOffice gave no problems.

Microsoft drops rush Internet Explorer fix for remote code exec hole

Re: Pro Tip

Traditional Unix used to have some partitioning of function by username. For instance a user logged in as the printer administrator could administer the printing sub-system to stop & start queues etc without having root access. This approach seems to have died out for one reason or another probably because a lot of Unix installations didn't have more than one admin. A lot of the old user IDs are still sitting there in Linux but without any apparent use. What, for example, does bin (userID 2) do on Debian?*

We now have sudo attempting to do much the same thing but all too often set up to simply use the user's own password rather than root's and to be as omnipotent as root in terms of privilege. OK, we have logging thrown in as a bit of security theatre but it's a weakening of the original concept for the sake of convenience.

*I ran a find on my Debian laptop looking for files owned by uid 2. The only hits were in /opt and were in an IBM package.

Snowball spud gun shows comets could have seeded Earth with life

"peptides, which – given a few billion years – could have evolved into higher forms of life"

Apart from the fact that peptides aren't a form of life (they're just peptides) in much less than a few billion years they'd have degraded. Heat, UV, oxygen, free radicals are all quite destructive given passage of time.

"Panspermia is the simplest theory"

No it isn't. It's simply a way of saying "Waaay too difficult to think about."

Why do driverless car makers have this insatiable need for speed?

"But surely the most important need to hurry up this technology is to stop the death and injury carnage on the roads?"

That's not difficult. You simply ban all road traffic. Apart from anything else you would, of course, put up other causes of death as ambulances wouldn't be available to take treatment to heart attack, etc. victims.

Driverless cars may or may not reduce it but reduce and stop are two different things. In the real world we trade cost versus utility.

"Anyone else care to wager if it will start within the next 10 years?"

No, because there's no telling the degree to which big money will overrule other considerations.

"a car to take you to work in the morning...It would then go to the next job, or sit in a parking space until required"

Because most people need to go to work at about the same time requires that there are about the same number of cars as at present to support car-born commuting. This then leaves an over-supply for "the next job" so most cars will need to go and sit in a parking space as at present. It doesn't vastly alter the car population. If you want to get rid of commuter miles by car you need to get rid of commuter miles as such.

Re: Descisions

'The autonomous car would probably "log" that pedestrian long before a human'

However the human might anticipate another human's actions better than an autonomous car.

Re: Mandatory

"in 2013 there 1713 people were killed on the roads, 785 of whom were sitting in a car, the rest being pedestrians, bikers, cyclists etc."

Yes, we need automated guidance for walking & cycling before we can eliminate road accidents.

Re: The end of any driving pleasure

"Get (or rent) a hybrid or take the train if you want to nail 600 miles in a single trip."

Let me guess. You live on a bus route near a train station. You don't make journeys that require multiple changes of bus or train train. When you make journeys in your locality you restrict yourself to walking distance of home or places near bus routes.

The evidence against this thesis is that the manufacturers of Satnavs and the web-based routing services such as the AA seem to have made no attempt to refine their routing data which they've been using for years. I still get the web-based services offering routes which seem to prefer the scenic to the practical and only a few days ago I encountered an HGV stuck in a local hamlet having missed a turn by a few yards and then not having followed what should have been the more practical escape route.

Pirate MEP: Microsoft's walled garden is no consumer pleasure park

Re: Earth to Microsoft

'consumers ... have no voice ... and won't feel comfortable with this, "Linux," thing that people keep talking about.'

A good few of them now seem to be comfortable with it when it comes pre-loaded as a Chromebook. If MS get more & more arsey about H/W to the point that they start making it difficult for PC makers then we might see systems coming onto the market pre-loaded with Mint, Ubuntu or whatever. What with smartphones, tablets, Macs & Chromebooks consumers are starting to realise that Windows is not the only game in town and that the alternatives do the job are not really harder to use.

Cue complaints that LibreOffice isn't 100% compatible with MS Office without admitting that MS Office frequently isn't compatible with itself.

Google reveals OnHub WiFi router, complete with GLOWING RING

Re: GPS and Assist

"I think you'll find that is actually Motorola Assist and not Google Assist. Motorola is a company owned by Lenovo."

El Reg, can we have an "It's a toss-up" icon? Please?

Re: I don't believe the conspiracy

"Google don't sell your data"

Ehhh?

Apple: Samsung ripped off our phone patent! USPTO: What patent?

Re: Taketh away

"Might as well not even have a patent system"

Surely not! Do you want the lawyers to starve? Think of their children.

Boffins identify world's (possibly) first flowering plant

Re: puzzled

Trees with blossom are just flowering plants that happen to have adapted a particular mode of growth. A given flowering plant family can have herbaceous and woody members. The rose family, for instance, has members ranging from the strawberry, distinctly herbaceous, through roses and blackberries, shrubby, to apples and pears, trees.

Anti-botnet initiatives USELESS in sea of patch-hating pirates

Re: Who's responsible

@Tony S

I hope you're invoicing them and being paid daily. Just to minimise the amount of your fees at risk.

Microsoft replaces Windows 10 patch update, isn't saying why

Re: I'm losing track here..

"But in our case, it's brain-dead manglement that is the cause."

No, it's just because we like it.

Re: I'm losing track here..

"Is it a wonder IT people drink?"

No, but even Unix admins do that.

Re: Those of us who haven't "upgraded"

"As with all malware that throws up irritating pup-ups, the solution is to uninstall it"

I wonder if some of the AV vendors will bring out a product to do this - or make it an option in existing products. This idea offered FoC to any of them who may be visiting.

"Bank of America have already announced that they are deploying Windows 10."

No problems. I don't expect I'll ever be one of their customers.

Linux 4.2 release 'possible' for next week, if Linus feels good

Re: Geez.

@asdf

And for that reason BSD is where I'll be heading. Linux userland is looking less Unix-like.

Re: Geez.

@ Medixstiff

The immediate takeaway point is this is a philosophy of ship when it's fit to ship vs ship on a given date (say July 29th?) whether it's fit or not.

Another point is that new kernels are released on a cycle of a few months, not a few years. It's not a case of some new shiny that has a big marketing machine cranked up to go on it.

You should also realise that this is just a kernel release. Only a few people waiting to pounce on this: people who like to keep a bleeding edge box to play with, kernel devs taking this as a new baseline and distro builders. Of the latter those building rolling latest-everything distros will incorporate it. Others will do so if it fits into their time-line for a next release.

For most users it's the major distro releases that matter. They do tend to release to a fixed schedule for the simple reason that they're building from components that, like the kernel, have a release when it's ready approach. And for those of us who've been round the block a few times the distros we prefer are those that have the most conservative release cycles which can run to years; we're not sitting chewing our fingernails in anticipation of a new distro release let alone a new kernel.

But the real issue is that the comparison between Linus and a corporate CEO is utterly false. His role is that of gatekeeper of what actually goes into the product free of any external concerns. That means that the Linux kernel is a product determined entirely by the organisation's QA authority. It's the absence of media, boards and shareholders that allow that to happen. The stakeholders here are just the developers and users; that is, the people who really matter.

So, taking your statement that you like this at face value, I have to agree with you.

Don't fight the cistern: Voda takes the plunge with plumbers’ parking app

So with this plumbed into the car's cistern - err system - the next thing we'll hear is that someone's pwned it.

Hey, folks. Meet the economics 'genius' behind Jeremy Corbyn

Re: John Lewis

Tim: JL and Co Op are owned by, respectively, the workers and the consumers.

SFJ:Hmm, I shop at JL occasionally but don't rember being told I own a stake in it...

Slow down, Superfast. Take time to read what Tim wrote and notice the word "respectively".

Re: Corbyn is barking, but ...

@Arnaut

I take it you're thinking of the Real Scotsman version of socialism.

What Nick was describing is just the British electoral cycle:

A Labour govt gets elected. It does a whole batch of populist stuff, some good, some not. Iin the mean time makes a pig's ear of the economy as a whole by neglecting, if not asset-stripping, the wealth generating part of the economy.

At some point the state of the economy can no longer be shrugged off as just bad luck. At the next election they get turfed out and a Tory govt gets elected (or, as we've recently seen, a Tory-led coalition). This needs at least two terms to clear up the mess, trying to get rid of the crap, start wealth generation and get the good stuff on an even keel. In fact, as an economy can't be turned round that fast, things get worse before they get better.

Eventually there are sufficient voters who can't remember enough of the last Labour govt, fall for the populist hype and elect Labour who then start the whole thing off again.

Re: It's OK

"I am still convinced it makes no economic sense for society to charge for one road but not to the one parallel to it."

No disagreement there.