Posts by Doctor Syntax

BOFH: The USB stick always comes back – until it doesn't

The boss handed over his keys, even temporarily? Is this the basis for the next instalment?

As Amazon takes over the Bond franchise, we submit our scripts for the next flick

Re: Another franchise to be milked to death

Don't forget the Dick van Dyke cockney accent.

DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers

Re: Brainless thief

Opportunism doesn't take brains.

Re: No honour anywhere

It's amazing how manglements seem to think that changing the name will leave the old bad reputation behind.

Re: DIMMs

As the old adage goes, there are 8 ways to insert a floppy disk into a drive. Only onw is interesting.

Ewe'd never believe it.

Data is very valuable, just don't ask us to measure it, leaders say

Re: Self Checkout

"It is certainly deemed of considerable value"

To whom?

To the "Club" member, presumably as they get better prices.

But what actual value does the shop get? Absence of data allows them to screw the accidental visitor which is ironic. On the whole it seems a mechanism for keeping potential customers out, rather like those web sites that will only work with a selected browser. It probably gives the manglement a warm sense of exclusivity whilst doing nothing for the shareholders.

IOW three quarters of businesses making big investments in data not only don't know if they have a positive ROI, they don't have a way to find out. Would they make any other investment on that basis? Blinded by the big shiny!

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

Could it be that one factor is to reduce Boeing's chances of getting another chance?

Re: ISS Test

The more interesting question is who will fire whom?

Plus the money for the deorbit mission gets paid a couple of years early.

I'll double it.

Los Alamos boffins slap blinkers on satellites so we know who to blame in a crash

Blink in slow Morse then they can be read with a long exposure.

National Science Foundation staff axed by Trump fear for US scientific future

Re: What a mess

Whatever the answer to that question I think the US is going to have to take a long look at its constitution when the dust settles. It looks as if offsetting the presidential and legislative elections might be the only effective safeguard. What chance panic-striken Republicans impeaching Trump within a year?

Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code, says its rise is inevitable

Re: Pushing, pushing..

Not really a trick question. To some extend USCD P-System did it was interpreted by the P-Code interpreter whatever that might have been written in - probably assembler.

When it gets down to the level of handing out chunks of memory I guess it's not intrinsically safe, it's just made safe by doing it carefully.

Re: Rewrite it in Rust

"Just a skill issue?"

More of a scale issue, I'd think. If you started to write your new version now by the time you'd finished Linux would have moved on.

Re: Pushing, pushing..

Is it possible to write an OS completely in memory safe mode or must a memory safe language need an unsafe mode to get to the parts memory safe can't reach?

Insiders say IBM's broader return-to-office plan hits older, more expensive staff hard

There should be a few nice little earners for ex-experienced IBMers as expert witnesses for the shafted clients.

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

Re: I wish...

And if you find yourself doing something where you think "huh, it would be shitty to be on the receiving end of that" then you can decide to not do it.

It's called the Golden Rule.

Re: "It went down like a lead ballon"

Not inflated with xenon, then?

Re: You couldn't make it up

"I'm also still not buying a new HP product - ever."

I don't need to, nor do I need to ring them. My HP printer is one of the old school - uses 3rd party toner without complaint and just runs.

Re: Irate customers

I suppose now things can be ordered online things are different but the physical stores are so bad that I consider them an elaborate experiment in customer abuse. (HP and Microsoft are latecomers by comparison). Getting in and out of the car park at the Leeds store was bad enough. The inadequate number of loading bays was just more of the same. There was also a notice that trolleys were not to be taken up to the top car park floor. Without that notice I would have taken my trolley up and returned it so I did the only reasonable thing in response: I took the trolley up there and left it.

I will not buy from Ikea again.

Re: Irate customers

"Hence why Luton is known as the biggest hole in the UK."

Unhappily relocated workers were said to call Lllantrant the hole with a Mint in it.

Re: Irate customers

Some time ago I started to assemble two Ikea desks for my grandchildren. Both of them had the same component severely mangled. It appeared that one set of holes had been drilled and then the component turned round before drilling the second lot so that it could be fitted with either set of holes correctly placed but not both. You got away lightly with one missing hole.

That was definitely much later than the nineties.

Laptop makers stalled on repairability improvements

Re: Dell

As somebody said above, it's the rage for thinner and thinner gadgets wot dunnit.

Re: Dell

"but who types?"

The literate.

Microsoft Azure faceplants in Norway, taking government services with it

"I'll let you know if we have anything to share."

Not a working system, obviously. Anything else?

UK tax authority eyes £880M overhaul for Northern Ireland trade services

Re: Brexit

Could you explain what your solution should be? Are we to ditch the GFA & re-erect border posts? Or should Ireland have left with us so we could have a Britain/Ireland customs union to avoid customs posts? Do you genuinely believe that the rest of the world has to adapt itself to your Little England thinking? Or what?

Re: Creating opportunities where previously there were none.

Fleece? Brexiteers will probably insist that "we" voted for it, conveniently ignoring the fact that more than half the UK population didn't. Except they won't, they'll insist that this wasn't the Brexit they voted for although nobody quite knows what was.

KDE Plasma 6.3 released – and 6.3.1 is already here

"Plasma 6 is now at the stage where the team is restoring features and options lost in the major upgrade to the Qt 6-based release."

The one feature I'd like to see restored was lost at either the 3/4 ot 4/5 transition (I can't remember which).

It used to be possible to set a corner as the hot spot to unhide an auto-hidden panel. Now it's just the edge. It means that the panel bobs back up* as soon as the cursor overshoots the edge.

* Other directions are available if you site the panel on some edge other than the bottom.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Back before Carley and the rest it woudl have been impossible to believe how tawdry HP would become.

Do they really want any customers? Are they just intent trying to make the business a target for a takeover?

Two arrested after pensioner scammed out of six-figure crypto nest egg

The bigger question is who scammed the pensioner into investing a six-figure sum into cryptocurrency in the first place.

Lloyds Bank reviews tech and engineering personnel in reorg

Re: Customer Journey Manager

My customer journey with Lloyds was to get out.

Type-safe C-killer Delphi hits 30, but a replacement has risen

Re: Delphi - A fantastic product let down by decades of mismanagement

"trying to milk customers until they die"

There are certain companies that are bad news when they buy a platform you've come to depend on.

Re: What characters not common on non-USA keyboards?

I suppose those in Europe can get their own back by including a couple of Euros.

Re: Compared to Delphi, FPC and Lazarus are a joke

"Getting curly braces on an Italian keyboard, for example, require EMacs-style key combinations."

That's going to be a pain in C-like languages. It may be why Pascal allows (*....*) as a replacement for {...}. Looking at it again and taking some of your other replies into consideration perhaps what I read in your OP wasn't what you intended to say.

Re: Not

"That was probably the warning it gives you when it's about to set up a local configuration directory"

The message could usefully be rewritten. The way it's phrased it looks like an error message.

Re: A colleague of mine uses Delphi/Lazarus

"And converted exceptions to function boolean return codes."

I did that very briefly. You just have to grasp the idioms of any language to use it properly.

However kudos for your C programmer for returning error codes; s many applications these days give me the impression that many programmers just assume it'll all work fine and plough on regardless.

Re: A colleague of mine uses Delphi/Lazarus

"Object Pascal is clear enough that anyone understanding object-orientated concepts can pick it up pretty quickly."

And anyone not understanding OO concepts will pick thoe up pretty quickly at the same time. That was my experience although it did help that I'd used UCSD Pascal years earlier.

This was my last gig before retiring and up to then I'd been Informix database and tools. The client decided that Delphi was too old-hat or something and decided to rewrite the application for their flagship contract in C# or C++, can't remember which. The team kept growing and growing by the time I left. My view was that what we'd been doing in Delphi on other contracts was sufficiently flexible that it could have been extended with much less work. I doubt management really understood what they'd got.

I later heard they lost that contract although I believe some dubious shenanigans to do with re-letting the contract were involved. They now are no more.

Re: Compared to Delphi, FPC and Lazarus are a joke

"characters not common on non-US keyboards"

What characters? I use a non-US keyboard & haven't encountered such a problem.

Hundreds of Dutch medical records bought for pocket change at flea market

Re: As the company no longer exists no action can be brought against them

Buried somewhere in GDPR is a provision for making people personally responsible so that should be an option in any jurisdiction where GDPR applies.

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

Re: I can feel the downvotes coming! Be gentle.

I finally came to t he conclusion - maybe wrongly - that the point of Gnome is to start with a blank sheet and add in what you need. However I've been using KDE for so long I can't be bothered with all that. Each to his own.

Re: No Thanks

I think some of these things have been picked up from phones. As Liam said, what makes no sense in landscape makes sense in portrait. On a phone there isn't space to provide a conventional menu bar so wrapping it up into a long drop-down format makes the same functionality available and useable irrespective of the icon at the top. It would also make sense in the side bar of a complex GUI. OTOH in landscape I want to see a menu bar and under no circumstances do I want to see a ribbon.

I see no reason why the menu structure can't be defined as a non-visual object and interpreted by a TUI or GUI interface of the user's choosing - even a ribbon.

Re: No Thanks

"Win98 got way more complex because MS frantically kludged IE in there ...

KDE copies that kludged design."

I don't think KDE has IE hidden in there.

Personally I find KDE quite understandable. It's the odd Gnome-related application sneaking into a distro that gets confusing.

Trump teases 25% semiconductor tariffs that will go ‘substantially higher’

Re: And yet markets seem remarkably calm

"But even then, global uncertainty tends to favour the dollar and US capital markets"

Only because the US is usually stable. It's hard to see that holding for the next few years.

Re: And yet markets seem remarkably calm

"Assuming there is logic to all of this, and Trump wants to deliver his promises of making foreigners pay"

But import tariffs do not make foreigners pay. They make the importer pay and that gets passed on to the ultimate purchaser a home. I suppose he could try export tariffs to make the foreigners pay...

HP Inc to build future products atop grave of flopped 'AI pin'

Re: Why would a printer need AI?

"No explanation of what it does, as yet,"

It will print some extra documents if you're not buying enough ink.

Re: Why would a printer need AI?

"Do people still print things?"

We no longer print handouts for my wife's patchwork class but that's only because the class members no have to print their own copies. That change was mad when the class went to Zoom for the duration of lockdown.

Why print? For one thing it would not be feasible to bring laptops to the class but mostly because they include the essential paper templates that are part of the patchwork process.

Acer signals 10% laptop price hike in US, blames Trump's extra China tariff

Re: Global economies spread (some of) the pain

Why take a loss in the US? Sell what you can sell there and make up for the loss by selling more in ROTW? If you start to play games such as trying to cross-subsidise the US market you'll end up selling less than your competitors who are smarter, ratchet up your prices more to compensate, sell less still and either catch on or disappear up your own fundament. The ROTW doesn't owe the US a living whatever Trump thinks.

Re: Not Unexpected

Well, he knows that he knows what he's doing. What else is there to know?