Posts by Doctor Syntax

Apple will cut down 36,000 acres of forest in 'conservation scheme'

Re: For people who cannot they see the wood for the trees

"That all depends on the kind of forests you are cutting down"

Bramley on M27?

NatWest and RBS' mobile banking apps go TITSUP

Re: @Sarah Balfour

Perhaps the solution is a rather drastic one. Take the patient to the bank, introduce them to a customer service (sic) person, tell them you've an urgent appointment elsewhere but to give you a call once they've sorted out whatever it is. I think that PDQ they'd work out a procedure to enable them to accept you as the patient's representative.

"Banks should do bank stuff."

These days bank stuff is IT, plus a casino bolted on the side.

So why exactly does almost ALL tech live in Silicon Valley?

"why did you get so many IT manufacturing companies setting up in the Clyde area in the 1970's? Because there was a large pool of unemployed labour there of people who could be retrained."

Wasn't there another factor - the large pool of unemployed labour lead to govt. grants being poured in?

Re: A Zombie concept?

"I can hire developers anywhere in the world, but I have to find them. How do I know that somebody in ToadSuck Ak is any good? Unless they are the inventor of Python/Ruby/etc then I am comparing them to somebody in India charging $1/hour on Elancer."

If you're considering recruiting on the basis of whether someone was the original dev of a big project you're probably doing it wrong. Firstly as there are very few of them they're not likely to be available. Secondly, they may not be the current project leads; they may not even have been involved with the project very long. Thirdly, and most importantly, you're overlooking the fact that any open source developer's contributions are a portfolio that you, personally, can review. You can actually make a comparison between the ToadSuck developer and the $1/hour Indian if they've contributed to open source projects.

"By coming to work in the valley they have proven to me they are good because they were hired by %BIG NAME%," so your main recruitment technique is poaching? Then if %BIG NAME%s start using remote developers you'll start poaching those once you've realised that that's how things are going.

"or simply have proved that they can earn enough to pay rent here." Actually all they may have proved is that they've managed, by fair means or foul, enough stake money to rent a pad there and hope to get hired. Whether they can actually stay hired is unproven.

"all accountants are equally good-enough, or I can judge how good they are easily." So you go by your judgement for the skill of accountants but not developers if you depend on someone else having hired them first?

Re: Question:

US law forbids the SA fault to open up & swallow them and as we know US law overrides everything else.

A Zombie concept?

"Firms in the same trade end up setting up alongside each other simply because it's more convenient to do so. That's where all the skilled workers you're going to poach are, after all."

The corollary of that being that that's where all the firms who are going to poach all your skilled workers are so you have to get together with them to set up anti-poaching agreements.

Where physical work is concerned there may still be a rationale for clustering. If you have a non-ferrous metalwork plant you need to be in a place where there's a concentration of skilled staff to operate it and conversely if you're a skilled operator you need to be in a place where there are firms with plant needing operators. But where the plant is mostly laptops that the skilled staff can afford to own and a server which can be located anywhere & rented then "where" resolves to "any place with an internet connection".

The consequence is that a dispersed workforce has demonstrated the ability to collaborate produce major operating systems and other substantial S/W. Maybe for many types of creative work the clustering concept is already dead, it just hasn't lain down yet.

DWARF PLANET Ceres beams back SUNNY north pole FROWN

The last person to leave forgot to turn off the lights.

Are YOU The One? Become a guru of your chosen sysadmin path

@Dave Watts

It probably has some bearing on the frequency or Total Inability To Support Usual Performance. What needs to be done right now will only get done eventually after all the processes get completed.

'Hackers racked up $$$$s via the Android Play Store, and Google won't pay me back'

Re: Bank of America debet card

" Maybe it's a strange idea across the pond?"

Or maybe a debet (sic) card is something different.

Let’s pull Augmented Reality and climax with JISM

Basic fact of life...

All premises-provided presentation kit will trip you up and the more modern the tech the greater its ability to do so. Projectors will have been configured to work only the resident technician's own device, possibly a Sharp Zaurus or nothing at all.

But modern tech isn't needed for this. I recall the conference with a slide projector set to timed autoadvance so the presenters had to keep back-pedalling the remote to stay on the slide long enough to talk about it. Presenters can still score their own goals; I remember one lecturer turning up to give a lecture - in a theatre shared by his own department! - with a set of slides larger than 35mm but still too small for the ancient alternative projector.

Chrome version 42 will pour your Java coffee down the drain: Plugin blocked by default

Dalvik

Is it possible that Google might drop in their Dalvik VM to replace Java?

Re: Lock in

It sounds more like lock out in this case.

EU bods Oetti and Ansip: We must digitise EVERYTHING

Leopards don't change their spots

!The EU's warring digi-chiefs — Vice President Andrus Ansip and Commissioner Gunter H-dot Oettinger — finally seem to be singing from the same hymn-sheet."

They're both Eurocrats asking for more of something. Of course they're singing from the same hymn-sheet.

Health apps and wearables make you nervous, not fit, say boffins

Des Spence

Sounds like the sort I'd want as my GP.

Bloke hits armadillo AND mother-in-law with single 9mm round

Re: What exactly is so troublesome about mother-in-laws that they need shooting?

"You've never been married obviously."

Not to an armadillo.

This open-source personal crypto-key vault wants two things: To make the web safer ... and your donations

Re: More anonymity for criminals and terrorists

Back in the day I had a lucky escape from being a terrorist victim (I handled a booby-trapped weapon in the course of my job). So do I support all this surveillance? No. It implies a suspension of the presumption of innocence which is one of the basic elements of freedom under the law.

Welcome to the FUTURE: Maine cops pay Bitcoin ransom to end office hostage drama

Re: No Police Response

"Scary that the Cops get ripped off and not one wants to get serious about going after the perpetrators."

Perhaps you missed this on the penultimate paragraph: "The FBI is now offering millions in reward money to catch the crooks behind some ransomware."

Re: Wouldn't fly in my office @Crazy

"How is this the fault of any individual (apart from the person clicking the link)?"

Quite. You've answered your own question.

"At least make it a two stage process where they have to download it first, and then explicitly execute it."

The problem here is the file which looks like something else but which is, in fact, executable in disguise such as PDFs taking advantage of exploits in the reader.

Lib Dems wheel out Digital Rights Bill pledge as election sweetener

Re: [the Lib Dems have] never broken an election promise before.

"Political parties often break election promises; it is hardly fair to single out the Lib Dems as uniquely poor in this respect. But on the plus side, given the kicking they are getting over the student fees backtrack, they may be more wary of backtracking again."

To be fair to the Lib-Dems, they've always been a party for protest voters. They probably never expected having to have their policies confront the real world so they could promise anything.

Microsoft's top legal eagle: US cannot ignore foreign privacy laws

"> Do you really think it's a moral decision on Microsoft's part?

Nope. I think they're pushing privacy as a brand-differentiation,"

I don't think it's even that. They know it will be difficult to impossible for them, as a US company, to peddle cloud stuff into a good many markets. Note that: as a US company. The same applies to other US companies as well. If they lose they leave those markets open to non-US companies to move in and take over. It's not brand-differentiation, it's country differentiation. That's why they have so many amicus briefs from the rest of the US industry.

ALIENS ARE COMING: Chief NASA boffin in shock warning

"I'm a field geologist. I go out and break open rocks and look for fossils,"

Being a field geologist trained on Earth is likely to go with an expectation of finding evidence of life.

Defiant Labio lawyer spits on black hats after 'med data' theft

"Leaving a friend's car unlocked with the keys in the ignition in a dodgy neighbourhood"

I'm in favour of this. Of course when the key is turned the doors and windows are deadlocked, the 130dB internal alarm is triggered & then the interior is filled with a strychnine aerosol.

UK.gov: We want Britannia's mobe-enabled cars to rule the roads

Re: My opinion

"cars with built in GPS and cruise control, why haven't they hooked the two together?"

Given the number of times when GPS guides unthinking drivers onto unsuitable routes it's probably a good thing they aren't hooked together.

"we could require them to be programmed to overtake cyclists and equestrians correctly and to give way to pedestrians."

And how do we program the cyclists to do exhibit road sense? Equestrians, by contrast are much less of a problem.

"Thing is, an electronic handbrake enables hill-start tech; which could stop the old lady in front rolling back into your car."

If the old lady has been driving for the last 50 years she should have got the hang of hill starts by now.

"I've an Audi and it's enough of a PIA with the electronic handbrake,... plus a whole host of other wretched and unwanted features."

Why did you buy it if you don't like its features? When I bought my current car I made a deliberate choice to avoid an electronic handbrake.

HP Stream x360: Flippable and stylish Chromebook killer

"One of us is wondering if OpenBSD will boot on it."

Or other flavours of BSD. What's more, will they not only boot but install?

If I didn't have an MSI netbook for portable use I might have been tempted.

Re: Cheap and cheerful?

"I like the way paying NSA/GCHQ to store your data is seen as something positive."

That was my first reaction given the name. But, as there's 17G spare plus an SD card slot, restricting oneself to local storage might not be too terrible, depending on the speed with which successive updates bloat Windows to fill the other 17G. An alternative OS could avoid that problem. But with no exchangeable battery I suppose it's intended to be disposable so it might be a race between battery decay and Windows bloat.

Midlife crisis, suck ingenuity? Microsoft turns 40; does the dad dance

Re: can we retire windows as a way to interact with applications and data...

"show me my files in relation to each other associated by relevance"

Given the same collection of files we might have different ideas as to relevance and those ideas themselves might well change with task.

"I would like a freeform filesystem that does not care about directories, but lets me organize my files in many different ways simultaneously"

I doubt you'd make this work without some concept of containers for file, which is what directories are. Given that Unix & Unix-like systems do much of what you suggest. A single file can appear in multiple directories simultaneously; a "file in a directory" is really a pointer to a single occurrence of the data in a collection of such pointers.

Although the directories themselves form a single hierarchy they can be symbolically linked into other directories but navigating them can be confusing as each directory has only a single parent. However file managers such as Dolphin in KDE keep track of how you got to a particular directory & use Back & Forward buttons to navigate the network of real & symbolic links.

"I would like to not have to open a separate application for every file I use"

Different sorts of data require different handling. Passively viewing data is reasonably straightforward. A WP document can contain image and tabular data, for instance. The demands of editing any type of data are much greater than those of viewing so a single all-purpose editor is likely to be either humongously too big to use, both in memory and interface* or too limited in scope which may be why the like of Works got rolled over by office suites. And then, to meet everyone's needs you'd need to add CAD, GIS and all sorts of other applications. One size does not fit all.

*Some interface functions such as opening and closing files are common but imagine an application which had all the controls of a whole office suite included in a single interface.

"tear-off menus/palettes"

Probably OK if you're only dealing with one thing at a time. If I have multiple PDFs or other documents open for consultation whilst writing something else I think I'd quickly get confused which torn-off menu belonged to which document.

A good deal of what you want can be supplied by the web. HTML can provide the flexible filing system & the browser can effectively hide the multiple applications. If you don't mind keeping all your data on someone else's computer maybe a Chromebook is what you need.

Fortran

The MS product that impressed me most was Fortran on CP/M. Previous to that Fortran was punched cards and a computer that filled a large air-conditioned room. Now it was something that ran on a small box into which extra hardware (ADC for instance) could be plugged. And thanks to INP and OUT statements added to the language that hardware could be accessed directly. Anything later was an anticlimax or a step in the wrong direction.

Re: what a lot of people..

"Sadly we have Windows to thank for the mainstream mentality of accepting rebooting, reinstalling and slow down over time to be perfectly normal expectations."

And don't forget malware.

Boffins: Large Hadron Collider NOW movin', we're getting down and crush groovin'

Re: Are we all doomed?

'the 200" Hale telescope....We build it over again'

Which was still a lot simpler than what happens if you make a mistake in manufacturing the Hubble mirror.

Are you sure there are servers in this cold, dark basement?

"the days of floppy disks"

Ah, floppies. Back in the days of SCO my Oldham-based client had an offshoot in London. If they lost the HD SCO had to be reinstalled from about half a million floppies - at least that's what it felt like. I quickly learned that if I had to go down to do that I also had to take a spare floppy drive. It was a reprographics office and after a while enough the toner got into the drive to ruin it. Then there was the day when the operator rung up to say the ceiling had just fallen in on his desk....

"the same place"

I'm not sure about this. It seems that the author was working for a service business or a leasing business. It was the 2nd time this had happened to that business. It doesn't say it happened at that site. It might have been but we're not told that.

To defend offshore finance bods looting developing countries of their tax cash

Re: Phil dude nice one tim....

"When you start drawing from your pension fund, at retirement time, you will pay taxes on your pension income, just as if you were receiving a job paycheck."

That depends on the tax levels. The pension investments are likely to be getting relief at the highest marginal rates of the worker's tax. The pension income is going to have the pensioner's tax allowances set against it, then the lowest tax band etc. It might never have any portion fall into the highest possible tax band: mine certainly doesn't :(

Streaming tears of laughter as Jay-Z (Tidal) waves goodbye to $56m

Nice...

.. to be reminded about Blumlein.

Thanks, Dabbsy

Microsoft drops Do Not Track default from Internet Explorer

"If privacy were legislated, those free services might disappear. Most users like the services, indeed have come to depend on them, and don't think it costs them anything."

As per another comment, you're confusing tracking & advertising. However with respect to advertising there's a workaround. What's needed is a browser add-in that will accept the adds without displaying them & even generate click-throughs without displaying the results. The user would be able to set a cap of the amount of data actually accepted. Everybody wins. The users don't get pissed off by ads. The websites get paid. The advertisers gain by not LOSING business by pissing off potential customers.

"it can simply be ignored by the ad industry."

s/can/will/

Light the torches! NSA's BFF Senator Feinstein calls for e-book burning

"Feinstein, a big fan of America's surveillance apparatus"

IIRC she became a little less enthusiastic when it was turned against her committee.

The coming of DAB+: Stereo eluded the radio star

Re: If 6music was on FM

"You had me until RDS, the technology that makes me mash the stereo to get back to what I was listening too whilst swearing."

The TLA you're looking for isn't RDS, it's EON. Turn it off if you don't want it.

Re: Todays Music just blows

"Yeah, that's right Grandad. It's all just Thump Thump Thump these days. And those bloody teddy boys"

Let's see, Teds in the mid 1950s, aged late teens to early 20s. How old are they now?

Re: DAB killed the radio star

"a switch to mono"

It seems that DAB really missed its mark. It needed to match or exceed existing standards such as FM or CD in quality in order to find a place in stereo rigs. It didn't so AFAICS most DAB kit sold is the little portable mono radio spec. It's not surprising if broadcast channels switch to match the bulk of receivers in use.

Locally Integrated Menus back on Vivid Vervet’s menu

Re: systemd compatible with init scripts

"from a marketing perspective they are not telling the truth"

Marketing not telling the truth? Standard operating procedure!

So where's all these digital services GDS promised us?

Re: The Companies House site is now a worse experience

"CH.gov.uk → redirects to GDS front page → Find Company info → Start Now → old CH front page exactly as it was, with the useful search box right on the front page"

Which you then bookmark and continue to use. Isn't GDS wonderful? - it helped you to do that.

New dirt-cheap Chromebooks: Team Google keeps jackboot on throat of PC titans

Re: I think you mean

"Can I wipe it and put a PROPER linux on there?"

Not necessarily. Choices include a PROPER Unix: BSD.

Prostrate yourself before the GNU, commands Indian DEITY

Re: Would The Reg please stop

"If you want to run a successful commercial business, you need a professional partner who will have your back and ensure there are no potential legal threats. If you just want to run a toe-jam harvesting co-operative, then by all means use F/OSS."

This reminded me of the time when the client's invoicing run broke on the second successive Friday lunchtime (see icon) by blowing up the database engine. Although it was a proprietary application we had the source code to most of it so, after repairing the damage, I spent the rest of the afternoon going through the it & rung up the profession partner, i.e. vendor, to tell them how to write code that didn't cause to engine to keep taking bites of memory without releasing them. Free or not there's a benefit to having the source.

Re: The DIETY has spoken!

+1 for EA

Encryption is the REAL threat – Head Europlod

Re: freedom is nice to have, until it gets taken by a criminal who can not be found

"In many European countries the same ones opposing NSA style dragnet spying, also supported laws which forbid or restrict police to maintain databases with DNA and other information. If the police is allowed to keep DNA, fingerprint, voice recognition and facial recognition information of all registered citizens, crime fighting would be considerably easier, and perhaps the dragnet surveillance can be terminated."

You need to take a little care in stating your case. The objection to retaining DNA etc records is not to retention per se but in retaining records of people who have not been convicted. There is, in English law, a principle of presumption of innocence. That is one of the main protections against wrongful accusation.

With that correction made the reason why we oppose all these things is because they have one thing in common: abuse of due process of law. The notion of due process has been part of English law for 800 years this year; we like that. I think even David Cameron, were he to think about it, would baulk at celebrating the anniversary of Magna Carta by abolishing it.

Microsoft update mayhem delays German basketball game, costs team dear

Re: "PEBCAK"

+1 for "a management type doing a corporate feasibility study for the Peter Principle"