Posts by Doctor Syntax

Jail incompetent council folk who leak our data, thunders furious BBW

Re: There is an officer...

"Just because you have clearance to see a certain level of information does not mean you have a need to know."

But you need to know so that you know if you need to know. Sir Humphrey got there before you.

Boffins: The universe is DOOMED and there's nothing to be done

"sliding gently into old age."

Kids today, thinking anyone over 30 is old. Given the current age of the universe and the timeline proposed it's not really got past the mewling and puking stage.

Return of the Jedi? StarWars.co.uk bod to fight the Empire (Disney)

Re: "A notice to appeal...

"a B or C list celeb that wants some attention could get behind"

That'd need to be one that doesn't work for Disney & doesn't want to.

Introducing the Asus VivoMini UN42 – a pint-sized PC, literally

"What dos it do with the heat?"

It opens a Window.

Re: Footprint

"I find it hilarious that someone's trying to not blame an equipment vendor for offering a hardware configuration with insufficient space for the OS they supply, though."

Maybe this was intended to be the barebones version that the customers could use for the light-weight OS of their choice. Then marketing came along...

Cloud computing’s refuseniks: How long can they hold out?

Clouds are, well, wet hot air...

... and the rain on you.

Re: "Security will have kept up with the hackers"

"BTW - The easiest way to hack any company is through social engineering. JT, odds are if you got hacked it would be because someone on your payroll was stupid enough to click on a bad link."

And if your stuff is on somebody else's computer that's a whole extra payroll's worth of possibilities.

Has Microsoft saved the Apple Watch with Outlook improvement?

Re: The first iPhone and iPad didn't sell too much either...

"And still anyway the Apple Watch in a few months sold many times more than all Android Wear smartwatches combined in the last couple of years..."

Maybe that tells you about the sort of people who want to buy smart watches...

RSA chief uncans insurance giant's mega IT infrastructure review

MORE TH>N

Ah yes, I remember them. The only way to stop them junk mailing was to take my business elsewhere.

Windows 10 climbs to 3.55 per cent market share, Win 8.1 dips

"I do find it strange that a lot of people get massively upset when MS does the data slurping thing yet seem perfectly happy to hand everything over to Google or Facebook."

This is based on an unfounded generalisation. I have a Hotmail account for those occasions when I need to hand out an email address I don't care about. MS are welcome to trawl through all the spam they'll find there; not that it seems to do them any good as, apart from SEO stuff, the predominant false negatives claim to come from themselves. Apart from that, I'm not a twit, my face is on no book and I'm unlinked.

Although I tried the preview out of curiosity (it didn't provide a driver for my HP all in one printer) I'll stick with Linux until I migrate to BSD and an old version for the rare occasions I need Windows.

Perhaps middle-aged blokes SHOULDN'T try 34-hour-long road trips

"When rotaries (roundabouts) were new here, and I was a new driver, the rule was that the vehicles entering the rotary had the right of way."

It was the same in the UK. It changed about '67 or '68 and the difference was dramatic.

Re: Lane merging

"Except that as with anything else, TPTB have muddied the waters by adopting multiple approaches, and using them inconsistently."

I give you the M60 N-bound near Stockport.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Stockport/@53.4284728,-2.1214888,16z/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x487a3515ca33c427:0xf418f67b823efe48?hl=en

Yup, that's joining traffic coming into the fast lane from the right.

Re: The rise

"I don't need painted nails to eat, I need a spoon. And if there is no spoon, that's where the trouble starts."

No trouble. Eat with your fingers and after eating get your nails painted. Full employment guaranteed.

Re: Lane merging

"Meanwhile a similar section on the M6 disappears the outside lane."

And on the M62 Pennine sections both ways. And M5 SW of Bristol.

AFAICR all of those have the right hand lane treated as the extra lane to be merged in at the end but at the start the extra lane is the crawler lane demerged from the left hand lane. Another area for study.

All hail Ikabai-Sital! Destroyer of worlds and mender of toilets

Re: Bah!

"I called in a plumber on my household appliance insurance"

There's your problem.

I'm guessing you went via a call centre. That probably farms out jobs to a local business which also operates a call centre. They in turn have a list of self-employed erks who range from only turn out to replace tap washers because that's all they know to only turn out for complete CH installations because anything else isn't worth getting out of the van for. I'm surprised you got two to turn up at all.

Re: Definition: Expert

"A consultant is one who knows less and less about more and more until he knows absolutely nothing about everything"

This is an excellent starting point for a consultant.

His clients' employees almost certainly know the answers already but it's infra dig - and perhaps bad strategy - for a CxO to ask someone paid such a small fraction of a CxO's salary.

The consultant, starting by knowing nothing, asks the experts, the employees. By adding his fee to the experts' advice his recommendations become pearls of knowledge. Information is valued according to what it costs.

Re: Bah!

"Reaching your nuts from under the sink is well known to involve a great deal of contortion"

Don't try this at home.

Re: Bah!

"You couldn't figure out how a toilet worked just by looking at it?"

Figuring out how something works just by looking at it is one thing. Figuring out why it doesn't is something else entirely.

"Icon represents a different problem."

3 pipe?

Re: Plumbing's easy.

"Top drawer bodgery!"

No. Cupboard under the sink bodgery. Much better.

"an odd BIOS bug which prevented Windows running properly"

By bug do you mean it allowed it run to some extent?

Mine's the one a penguin just took.

"he isn't an 'expert' so shouldn't get or expect expert pay".

Clearly he isn't an 'expert', he's an expert. So maybe he should get expert pay.

Re: Plumbing's easy.

"Fresh water is input.

Pipes move it about appropriately."

Not when they're plastic pipes & the mice have chewed through one of them. They then move it inappropriately all over the floor.

"This meant I was forced toa penny more than once – probably nearer £0.37 in total – in the downstairs sink, which I discovered is uncomfortably high for a diminutive man of five-foot-six."

A. What's a toa?

B. Don't you have a step ladder? Stand on the first step & pee between the rungs. Careful aim might be required.

On a general point the entire plumbing industry seems dedicated to producing large numbers of parts none of which are what you need, probably don't fit together and when they do they leak.

A close shave: How to destroy your hard drives without burning down the data centre

Re: Remove platters

"degauss etc"

Shouldn't degaussing be sufficient? Or maybe that was too boring.

Huge hack attack: UK data cops to probe Carphone Warehouse breach

I'd have thought that they would be on the hook for any losses between the breach and the notification and beyond allowing for a margin for customers to pick up the communication and act on it. It may, of course, be covered by insurance but their insurance cover should be more expensive in the future.

At some point insurers are going to start demanding more information about the risks they're covering so the IT equivalent of an 18 year-old Ferrari driver is going to find cover much more expensive if not impossible.

Carphone Warehouse coughs to MONSTER data breach – 2.4 MEELLION Brits at risk

Re: Here's the most astonishing part

AFAICT this is TalkTalk helpdesk's response to their customers who signed up via Carphone Warehouse. So it's not difficult to envisage the situation that TT encrypt (?hash) customer passwords at their end but CW don't leading to a situation where only some TT customers, those from CW, have unencrypted passwords floating about and the rest don't.

Not being a customer of either I'm not sure about processes here but does this imply that the same password is being passed between the companies?

The usual waffle about announcing a breach and then saying your security is important to us. Has it just become important now it's too late? Possibly. It'd be a bit tough to claim that it had been important prior to the breach.

Apple, Google should give FBI every last drop of user information, says ex-HP CEO and wannabe US prez Carly Fiorina

Re: Mussolini...

"narcissistic Thatcher-worship"

Surely that should be narcissistic self-worship.

It looks as if she's trying to do to the rest of the US IT industry what she did to HP.

Windows 10 is FORCING ITSELF onto domain happy Windows 7 PCs

I have very little that needs Windows and that will run on W2K. Time to blow the W7 VM away.

It's incredibly easy to bump someone off online, and here's how to do it – infosec bod

Re: Happens often enough here in France

"Then ensued a nightmare farce of him trying to convince the authorities that he was alive and well; but too late, all the computer systems had been updated with his untimely demise and he couldn't be brought back to life again nor reclaim his pension."

Presumably such a false statement, especially one resulting in serious financial disadvantage, would be libellous. Try suing the responsible authorities for libel & see just how quickly it would be corrected.

Hack a garage and the car inside with a child's toy and a few chips

Re: Well...

"Yes, I know that sort of legal talk is not favoured round these parts"

I don't know what gives you that idea. Plenty of us have said the same sort of thing just about every time a cock-up of this nature is brought to light, and goodness knows there's been no shortage of those recently.

BOFH: Knitting bobble hats on the steps of the guillotine

"plan to produce well-rounded middle managers"

Burgers, pizzas, bacon butties, lots of sugary drinks...

Mine's the one with the box of Danish pastries in the pocket.

Microsoft vacates moral high ground for the data slurpers' cesspit

"@J J Carter

Don't do that. The whoosh sound deafened me.

LibreOffice 5.0 debuts, complete with fewer German code comments

Re: Nein! Nein! Nein!

"You're safe for now - no sign of a ribbon..."

That could actually be a problem. Although us oldies don't like the ribbon there's a new generation of MS users who haven't seen pre-ribbon versions. They could find the strange ribbon-less LibreOffice interface an obstacle to adoption. Maybe the LibreOffice team needs to look at the possibility of switchable interfaces.

IT security staff have a job for life – possibly a grim, frustrating life

Re: Only with software

" malle-herbert"

No we're talking about software in general. Some things are more important than Windows.

Windows 10 Start menu replacements shifting like hot cakes

"Learning how to do things keeps the brain alive"

Doing things keeps the brain alive. Having superfluous learning dumped on it is just a barrier.

The heart of good interface design is consistency. Consistency between applications means that what you learn from one application is instantly applicable to another. But consistency should also include consistency with the past.

"Right-click unpin, the technically literate solution to which you elude, just leaves a huge blank area where the tiles used to be."

There's a technically literate solution to that as well. Drag the border of the blank area back to the actual menu. Unless they removed that from the release version.

"the rest of the world get on with learning and using the new layout."

s/learning and/wasting your time learning to/

Learning how to do things is an investment of peoples' time. Requiring them to throw away that investment and make another is akin to stealing.

Re: Hardly surprising

"consider Cortana. FFS, why?"

Surely you know the answer: "me too".

"Within 5 minutes of installing W10 in a VM, I had downloaded Start10.

Live Tiles - WTF. Start10 gets rid of those, and that makes it worth every penny."

It takes about as long to get rid of the live tiles manually. The native start menu itself is a different matter but then my preference is the configurability of the KDE classic menu.

Re: Windows 8 isn't a good comparison

"I'm having a sweepstake at work to guess the number of downvotes this will get..."

How many did you draw? We'll try to arrange it.

Screw your cutesy plastic art tat, the US govt has found a use for 3D printing: DRUGS!

1,000mg of levetiracetam? Might as well round it up to 1gm.

Mac fans! Don't run any old guff from the web: Malware spotted exploiting OS X root bug

But the underlying issue seems to be someone writing a process running with root privileges and using an environment variable that can be set by an unprivileged user. What were they thinking of?

Hacklands introducing geeks to something called 'outdoors'

" all 210 works of Chopin ..t. More mainstream is music from DJ Oisin Lunny"

It depends on your idea of mainstream. The works of Chopin have been around for getting on for 200 years. The works of Oisin Lunny or any other DJ?

Yahoo! website! ads! spaff! CryptoWall! ransomware! AGAIN!

Re: Can't fix it? Then stop it.

Failing that, compensate the victims. If that were the norm I think Yahoo & the like would find it trivial to implement safeguards.

OFFICIAL SCIENCE: Men are freezing women out of the workplace

OTOH

SWMBO frequently (see below) complains of being too warm when I think the weather's OK.

That's about 2 days a year.

Re: Set to a range

"a room (or zone) controller" commonly called a thermostat.

We made a new Do Not Track thing – not like you'll use it or anything, huffs emo teen EFF

A better option

Instead of composing a text file (or maybe in addition to it) to be placed in some obscure place in a server's resources the EFF needs to come up with a means of displaying tracking status to the user.

What they should do is devise and copyright a DNT logo. Rights to display the logo would be granted freely to any website respecting DNT. Users would then assume that, by default, a website not displaying the logo would be tracking them and make their choices accordingly.