Posts by Doctor Syntax

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

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.

Re: It's OK

"The largest cost of a road is the initial construction, operation is relatively low and not much dependant on the use."

"Initial construction" is a one-off. Maintenance is an ongoing cost into the indefinite future added to which is the periodic cost of reconstruction to widen or strengthen it as demands change. The Fosse Way was initially constructed by the Romans who did not have motor vehicles. Apart from the route what you see of the Fosse Way today is nothing like the Roman's work - it's the result of cycles of reconstruction and intermediate maintenance which, even allowing for inflation, must amount to several times the initial cost.

Re: whereas ...

Another Angry Voice claims to be a "pay as you feel" site. How do I get him to pay me as I feel now I've read it?

Boss hands dunce's cap to chap who turned off disk monitor

Re: Reminds me of...

"zealous sysadmin to decide everything in /u should be made executable"

Zealous isn't the word I'd have chosen. Lazy, maybe, or stupid. Files are made executable because they're binaries or scripts, not because of where they are.

You've been Drudged! Malware-squirting ads appear on websites with 100+ million visitors

Re: All your eyes are belong to us

"To be fair, you need to use the '/sarcasm' tag next, Big John."

I think the Devil's Advocate icon could have been a clue.

Liability

If the industry wants the income it must be prepared to accept the liability. Given that the user's point of contact is with the site rather than the broker the liability should fall on the site. The site itself might then push the liability onto the broker. Otherwise you're saying that in order to read the content the user must may a ransom to some scumbag.

Digital doping might make you a Tour de Virtual cycling champion

"There is SO much wrong with the article."

Yup, accurate measurement can be difficult stuff. Well beyond the lycra-clad numpties of negligible traffic sense plaguing the roads hereabouts these days. (No I didn't miss the statement that the writer doesn't actually wear lycra into the office.)

"a first-world problem of the highest order"

Really? I find it difficult to recognise it as a problem at all.

IT jargon is absolutely REAMED with sexual double-entendres

And Least Significant Bytes.

Re: Déjà vu!

I take it you missed "El Reg is re-running one of his timeless classic columns."

Icon isn’t a focus for reverence

Not even at Apple?

BOFH: Why, I LOVE work courses. Please tell me more, o wise one!

Re: I have a feeling this will not end well

Both out of the office at the same time. Dangerous. They might get back to find themselves out of office. Return of Gina?

Tidy desk policy.

"A tidy desk is the sign not a tidy mind."

"No it's not. An empty desk is the sign of an empty head."

Re: Well..

"I'm booked in for one next month"

Don't be depressed. Simon's told you how to handle it.

Re: BANG!!

'My intitial suggestion of "fuck him, lets go down the pub" was not taken up.'

That's the trouble with leadership courses. Everyone wants to be a leader instead of following the one with the best ides.

The only good management course I can think of was one where somebody had discovered the size of the last contingent's bar bill & set out to better it. No beer icon because to do that needed the contents of the top shelf behind the bar.

However, there was one so bad it turned out for the best. My reaction led to me being offered early retirement the following week.

Re: Am I the only one...

@Dave 32

Is that you, Philip?

Hey, Apple, we’re watching Faulty Tellies. Gonna tell us why?

Re: hmm are the Ads a hint?

Ads? I see no ads. You're reading it wrong.

Apple tries to patent facial recognition

Re: Yet again Apple wants to patent innovation and avoid invention

"Maybe Apple should pay some inventors instead of paying lawyers and designers."

Why? Their existing MO seems to be working well for them.

Dell, Google dangle Chromebooks over IT bosses sick of Windows

@IJC

Have you made any post that wasn't Windows astroturfing?

Typewriters suck. Yet we're infinitely richer for those irritating machines

Re: and my first 'proper' job (1973)

"All calculations were done manually using one of these"

And about 10 years before that we were using similar Marchants in a statistics course. They tended to vibrate quite a bit. Running a division they vibrated so much they walked along the desk.

The first thing I did with my first grant cheque was to head along to a typewriter shop & buy the cheapest portable in there for £10. That avoided having to read my own handwriting. I think it's still in the attic somewhere - it shouldn't be because it acquired a dose of woodworm in its wooden case.

Cloudflare hiccup nudges Stack Overflow and others offline

Again?

The same thing happened the other week, eventually falling through to a Cloudflare error page.

CAUGHT: Lenovo crams unremovable crapware into Windows laptops – by hiding it in the BIOS

It's going to get worse

Look at what this numpty is advocating: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/its-time-for-pc-companies-to-copy-one-of-apples-best-features/ and the first company he lists as this being a good idea for is Lenovo!

ANIMALS being CUT UP to make Apple Watch straps

"even sharks"

Even sharks? Nobody in the Reg subhead writing department heard of shagreen? It's been used for centuries.

Repeatedly robocalling? That's a paddlin' – a record $3m paddlin'

Re: It's a wonderful world we live in...

"20 years ago a Marketing exec was telling me about her bold mailing campaign, and how a 2% return would be a good result."

Did you ask her if that was net or gross? Every customer pissed off & lost should be set against the number of customers gained. Marketroids don't think about this of course. They daren't.

IoT security is RUBBISH says IoT vendor collective

"The framework also includes the following minimum requirements:"

Add one: a vendor should undertake not to change the policies etc to the detriment of the Thing's user after purchase.

Hillary Clinton kept top-secret SIGINT emails on her home email server

Re: On the other hand...

"How many times has her email server been breached, compared to the government systems?"

In retrospect it appears to have been quite a wise security measure on her part.

Assange™ to SQUAT in Ecuadorian broom closet for ANOTHER FIVE YEARS (maybe)

Re: Statute of limitations

"Assange took asylum in London"

No, he's taken asylum in Ecuador.

FAIL: Windows 10 bulk patch produces INFINITE CRASH LOOP

Re: Try turning it off an...

"And why oh why can't the "Long Term Servicing Branch" be proposed to Joe Public ?"

Because Joe Public has to test the updates before they go into LTS. It sounds as if Joe Public is doing a great job.

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.

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?