Posts by Doctor Syntax

Massive global cooling process discovered as Paris climate deal looms

Re: So-

The process science is intended to follow is to form a hypothesis, test its predictions against reality and, if it fails to match up, recognise that and then either discard it for a new one or modify it.

A model is a complex hypothesis, nothing more, nothing less.

With "climatic" models we have three problems. One is that the timescales that get discussed are really too short to be called climate but we don't have anything in our vocabulary to deal with the gap between weather and climate. The second is that over those short timescales meaningful measurement is difficult at best and arguably impossible. The third is that both sides are so dug into there positions that they would be reluctant to recognise any detectable* failure of prediction.

*Personally I'm not convinced we're seeing anything but noise.

It's the white heat of the tech revolution, again!

Re: Government’s role is to provide the opportunity for massive advances in technology [..]

"Anything else is mostly a justification that Government has too much money to play with, and should pare down the taxes to leave research institutes and corporations to care for technological advances."

Largely I agree, but where do those research institutes go to get funded if not to the government?

It's reasonable that the government should do those things which we can do better together than separately e.g. a public fire service rather than separate ones funded by insurance companies. But that's much less than big government enthusiasts think but more than small-staters want.

Re: I still can't work it out...

"All it's saying is that companies and other people don't operate optimally, so government should actively encourage more optimal operation."

That assumes they can work out what would be optimal so as to encourage it. There's always a snag somewhere, usually between theory and practice.

Re: Changing goal posts

"And on the civil front, Britain had the edge with the jet. You might think a quick trip to Malaga in a Ryanair bus is "a bit noisy and why can't they make it quieter", but pre-jet all planes (to put it simply) vibrated to add to the propwash battering the hull."

And those rear engined jets such as the BAC 1-11 seemed a good deal quieter, at least for passengers, then the engine on the wings variety.

The white heat of the technological revolution

Followed shortly by "What's one of the most technologically advanced jobs we've got on the stocks? TSR2? Cancel it."

Along with the pound in your pocket speech it made Wilson one of the masters of Yes Minister's principle of getting rid of the difficult bit in the title.

Herbie goes to a hackathon: Mueller promises cheatware fix

Re: Volkswagen is going to spend up big getting rid of its troublesome cheatware

"Weird, I've never really had problems with turbo diesels, and I have been driving them from the time VAG brought out the first turbo diesel."

Mine wasn't VAG.

The power band must have been all of 500rpm wide and on acceleration away from the lights the traffic behind vanished. Behind a black cloud.

Being a company car I handed it in when I retired & bought a 2nd hand petrol-driven Sierra with a suspiciously exact 60,000 on the clock. It was a major improvement.

Re: Volkswagen is going to spend up big getting rid of its troublesome cheatware

"All that is needed is for the Volkswagen Group cars to have their test running parameters set back to a mode which reflects normal driving."

T'other way round.

If they did what you suggest then they would fail the emissions test. The issue is that normal running does not reflect the test results which entitled them to be on the road. It's the normal running parameters which need to be changed to bring them into line with the tests and when that's done the vehicles are likely to be down on power, have higher CO2 emissions or both. Owners will then be complaining that they haven't got the performance they paid for & maybe that their vehicles have been reclassified into higher tax bands. Either that or remediation is going to include the fitting of additional hardware to inject urea.

As I have a VAG petrol driven car I'm hoping that this doesn't extend beyond diesels. OTOH, assuming it doesn't, I'm glad that after my experience with a crap (as in crap from brand new) company car years ago I've refused to even consider another diesel.

Tucci’s terrible dilemma: Unlock EMC value without destroying the Federation

If the likes of Elliott are so good at running businesses like EMC why don't they set up such businesses in the first place?

BBC joins war against Flash, launches beta HTML5 iPlayer

Re: I wonder what it means for get_iplayer?

I'm with you there, Keef. At present I often run get_iplayer on the laptop & then punt the file over the the Myth box to view on the big screen.

Move to the latest IE, or suck it: January’s cold comfort for Microsoft hangouts

Once upon a time MS had this great idea about proprietary lock-in. Encourage customers to use those non-proprietary bits & pieces to build mission-critical applications and they were committed to using MS platforms for life. Except that now MS want to EoL those proprietary bits it means either abandoning those locked-in customers or charging them for extended support whilst they incur further costs in rebuilding the applications. In practice a good many of those customers are going to just keep using the old platforms as long as they can; if they isolate them from the net then there's probably no great harm in that as long as the hardware lasts. But for those current customers who rebuild are they going to think more carefully about having control over their own destinies in the future? And will that mean reducing their dependence on MS?

Web ad tried to make my iPhone spaff a premium-rate text, says snapper

Re: Bah!

" El Reg manages to make enough money to pay their staff by convincing advertisers ... to buy adverts they know very few will ever see."

It's cleverer than that. Because we block the ads we don't get so pissed off with them that we actively avoid the product.

Re: Advertising: mankind's most useless invention

"Adblockers and NoScript set to "stun", Cap'n."

And don't forget Ghostery.

Is Windows 10 slurping too much data? No, says Microsoft. Nuh-uh. Nope

Re: You really want to "deliver a delightful and personalized Windows experience" to me?

@ dan1980

A very interesting post.

A significant factor may be that Apple's market is not the same as Windows'. In trying to grab a share of one they risk alienating the enterprise segment of the other (where Apple's consumer-based approach wouldn't have been acceptable). They seem not to have grasped this.

They also seem to not appreciate that their traditional lock-in approach may have back-fired. Where users had custom applications running on XP and dependent on specific aspects of the OS their choices in moving no vary from impossible if the development was by a company that not longer exists to expensive if it has to be extensively modified.

If all they gather is this tiny minuscule little bit of data..... WHY IS THERE A GINORMOUS LIST OF WHAT THEY GIVE THEMSELVES PERMISSION TO COLLECT IN THE PRIVACY POLICY?

And talking about "user experience" is always an indicator of a badly broken user interface.

Re: You really want to "deliver a delightful and personalized Windows experience" to me?

"it's a world-wide corporate thing."

That may or may not explain it. It doesn't excuse it.

Here are the God-mode holes that gave TrueCrypt audit the slip

Re: People still use Truecrypt and friends?

"I'm one of those hipster"

Shouldn't you be using a Mac?

NSA? Illegal spying? EU top lawyer is talking out of his Bot – US gov

Re: The usual

"Sorry, America, your proclamations now carry about as much weight as Israel or Syria's. Except they have the benefit at least of talking a different language when they put out internal and external propaganda."

Now there's a common misconception for you - that American and English are the same language. They're even less alike once you get propagandists deciding that words mean exactly what they want them to mean.

Thousands of 'directly hackable' hospital devices exposed online

Apart from anything else it would appear that if these devices are accessible on IPv4 addresses then the organisation has a stock of those addresses that it doesn't need. Given the shortage I'd have thought that their beancounters would have seen an opportunity here.

Dear do-gooders, you can't get rid of child labour just by banning it

Re: flawless logic

@ST

You seem to have comprehension difficulties. I suggest you go back & read TW's article again. Carefully this time. If you still don't grasp the gist of it - that he's suggesting replacing something that doesn't benefit children with something that does, read it again.

Re: Doctor Symoleton Left and Right and Politics

Matt, your ignorance of British politics - and mine - is showing.

Re: Left and Right and Politics

When we finally had an ex-grammar school pupil, Wilson, as PM one of his govt's policies was to pull up the ladder behind them. So after a third of a century we were back to having public school boys running the country again.

To some extent things depend on the nature of the labour. Unskilled work in a sweatshop is one thing. However, tending the goats on the family farm is a step up as the child acquires the knowledge required to run the farm in later life is a step up although if the farm remains at subsistence level it's not an adequate step. Working whilst learning a skilled job is a definite benefit. It's becoming fashionable again amongst our great political thinkers. It's called apprenticeship but not to be confused with the TV version.

Re: Laws

One law never changes. That of unintended consequences.

Re: Child?

"birth rates are a symptom, not a cause"

The two are not mutually exclusive. They can act together to reinforce the situation making improvement an intractable problem.

VW’s case of NOxious emissions: a tale of SMOKE and MIRRORS?

Re: Who wrote the code?

"Where are they?"

Helping self-driving cars pass their safety tests?

Gold bugs, concrete bog roll holders and frolic-friendly furniture: What IS it with designers?

Re: Have to admit...

"it reads as if they've varnished the oak with yachts..."

You've never heard of yacht varnish? It's a thing.

<tangent> I bought a tin of it years ago to use on the parquet floor but didn't get round to doing the job for a long time. Eventually I came to use it, levered off the spring clips holding the lid down & the lid blew off with quite a bang.</tangent>

Re: Have to admit...

"I predict the varnish on the wooden tub will start peeling within two years"

It probably won't matter. By then it'll be out of fashion, the bathroom will have been made over & someone will have hauled the bath out of a skip & be mixing plaster in it.

"a use for this doubtless ingenious piece of design"

It's a money transfer device. It transfers money to the maker from those who have more of it than sense.

Get ready for a grim future where bees have shorter tongues

Let be add a (c). The bees will bite through the base of long-tubed flowers to reach the nectar that way. It's known bee behaviour. In fact the team should have checked that this isn't happening as it could be the explanation. Not that this helps with the pollination.

Sorry to bring a bit of biology into all your AGW & creationist arguments but I did start out as a botanist <mumble> years ago.

Given that bees and flowers have co-evolved over a very long period I'd expect that either (a) the longer tubed flower species will evolve to match the bees or (b) a new sub-species of bee will emerge to take advantage of a food source for which there is now less competition. Nature doesn't usually much on the table for very long.

@ Spotthelemon

And by replacing "Lewis Page" by "Jews" in your comment we can prove that you're a fascist. What was your point?

Re: Climate change is real

"who will neither agree nor change their minds in a thousand years."

Now you're being silly. A thousand years is the right sort of timescale to evaluate climate change.

Project Zero bod says antivirus black market is growing

Re: At the risk of being hunted down and called a spammer

". It was very confusingly written"

Takes one to know one.

Controversial: The future is data integrity, not confidentiality

"Ilves spoke knowledgeably about a whole range of tech issues"

But not necessarily about biological ones. IIRC blood type AB is the universal recipient - he has both A & B antigens already so wouldn't react against a transfusion containing either. Unless, of course, he's really O and his records have already been changed in which case he's in trouble but has proved his point.

Google makes admen pay for fake YouTube views, claims research

Re: Contrarian view

Interesting. A downvote. It must be a malvertiser or just possibly someone out of the Ken Wheaton mould.

All the recent evidence is that the web advertising business model is doomed unless it gets cleaned up PDQ.

It seems to be of the view that it's in some kind of war with the makers of adblockers. Wrong. It's in a war with the adblockers' users. A moment's intelligent thought should bring realisation that those users are the people it's trying to influence on the behalf of its clients*. Fighting those who you are seeking to influence is never going to come out well for those on whose behalf you claim to be working. Instead of seeing itself as having a right to thrust itself into everyone's eyeballs and eardrums with that right being denied by the evil adblockers it needs to reconsider. It needs to think what it has to do to be allowed into the potential targets' presence. The most urgent is to reorganise so as to prevent malvertising. It also needs to address other complaints - intrusiveness and consumption of the bandwidth for which those targets have paid.

If the advertising networks themselves can't get over their sense of entitlement to see this the web sites selling the advertising space will have to help them. Perhaps this could start with some of the more tech oriented sites which must surely be best placed to see the problem. Any suggestions?

*There's an alternative view, which I'm not prepared to argue against: that all the industry is interested in is taking money from those clients and that it doesn't give a damn whether the net result is of any value to them.

Contrarian view

If I click on a page with ads on it I'd be quite happy for the ad to be shown to a robot viewer instead of myself. The page author gets paid, I get to see the page and the advertiser, who'd have paid anyway, doesn't risk losing my business by pissing me off. Cui bono? Everybody. Except malvertisers of course.

More email misery and pillory for Hillary as FBI starts quizzery

Re: Conspiracy

Somehow, reading this, I hear it being recited in the voice of Sir Humphrey.

The BBC's Space: A short history of 21st Century indoor relief

Not so much the middle-class as the chattering-class.

Privacy, net neutrality, security, encryption ... Europe tells Obama, US Congress to back off

Re: And suddenly ..

If you're so knowledgeable about this the following comment surprises me: "Thinking that Microsoft will win this is in my opinion wishful thinking. It would establish a precedent that a single company can change the law,"

This and the Enron bit have been trotted out before and it's wrong. Nobody is challenging the DoJ's right to subpoena evidence if they follow due process. The precedent that the DoJ is trying to set here is that if a company looks after the records of someone else then those records become part of the company's records. Enron's company records would have been Enron's company records wherever they were held and a decision in Microsoft's favour wouldn't change that.

There is a mechanism in place for a request to go through due process of law in Ireland. They chose not to use that and invent the theory that other people's email is part of Microsoft's coompany records. Why they did so is a good question. Was it a fishing expedition which couldn't be made to stand up in Ireland because there was no good prima facie case?

If such a precedent were set think of the possible consequences. SomeCo is acting as a safe deposit for documents establishing somebody's right to property; say the deeds of your house. SomeCo goes into receivership or whatever the equivalent is in the US. The receiver can treat the deeds as SomeCo's company records and make whatever use of them that will raise money. When it's put like that does it seem such a good precedent to set?

Re: how many of the MEPs were from the UK

You can check for yourself by reading the linked PDF. And the answer isn't just damn few, it's none! Not unless we have an MEP with a very non-UK sounding name.

Re: And suddenly ..

"Now let's see what finally happens in the DoJ vs Microsoft case because that will pretty much set the scene for the rest of this year."

This year? That's optimistic in terms of court proceedings. And whatever happens the consequences will probably rumble on for a good few years.

Bloodthirsty data parasites hungrily eye up healthcare sector

Re: care.data

"should have a published plan of what they will do *when* it is stolen"

I like it (apart from the fact that "stolen" isn't the legally correct term). It should extend to loss from anyone they've sold it on to and anyone they in turn sold it on to ad inf. - which would place an obligation on purchasers to report back. It would at least concentrate the minds.

"Claim from our insurance" wouldn't be a satisfactory complete answer although it might be a good thing to include. Insurers need to start thinking what they might be on the hook for and start dictating precautions.

And the plans should apply when someone downstream combines anonymised data with a data set capable of de-anonymising it.

care.data

SUCH a good idea!

Happy birthday to you, the ruling was true, no charge for this headline, 'coz the copyright's screwed

Re: Copyright theft

"they should be ordered to pay all that back."

With interest. Compound interest.

"so should the tune not be out of copyright anyway??"

Sometimes reading is so difficult. From TFA "expired in 1949".

Revealed: Why Amazon, Netflix, Tinder, Airbnb and co plunged offline

Re: @ Voland's right hand If only there was a way

"the sparky didn't like working on live kit"

Clearly you need a BOFH. Choice of working on live kit or the cattle prod.

Ex-BT boffin Cochrane blasts telco's 'wholly inadequate' broadband vision

What would be the cost of laying FTTP for the whole country? Not just densely populated cities but the whole country - isolated farms included. And the true cost, not the sort of estimates that are used to get the contract so that the difference to the true cost, along with the profits, can be added in as extras.

You call THAT safe? Top EU legal bod says data sent to US is anything but

The EU needs to give a deadline by which the existing SH will be dead unless there is a major change in US legislation - one which will be binding on the NSA with a treaty binding the US govt.

No more NSLs.

No more rubber stamping courts.

No more DoJ fishing expeditions.

The whole lot repealed from US law.

The deadline should be just sufficient for companies to bring their data home with a modicum of panic if they get their backsides into action PDQ; sufficient panic to give them serious worries about ever getting into that situation again.

Then let's see how fast US officialdom can reform to try to meet the deadline from their side. It would help if there were increased political pressures in the US. Isn't there an election coming up soon?

If you absolutely must do a ‘private cloud’ thing, here's how

Re: Business Critical Data out there in the cloud

" if it happened to Shoreditch no one would notice anyway apart from the slight increase in hot air rising from the area."

Don't you mean decrease?

Citrix wants a buyer, fast

If these activist investors are so good at managing other people's companies how come they haven't set up their own businesses to actually do stuff?