Posts by Doctor Syntax

Tat bazaar eBay confirms: THOUSANDS of workers will be AXED

Should have done it years ago

Specifically they should have got rid of the developers who kept making tweaks to what started out as a reasonable interface and introduced lots of minor annoyances.

SECRETS of the LOST SCROLLS unlocked by key to HEALTHY BOOBS

The way things are going with libraries hereabouts it might turn out to be easier to read books from the Herculaneum library than from the local one.

Will fondleslab's fickle finger of fate help Windows 10?

Re: I think I'm getting old :(

"A Microsoft account will be and currently is, optional."

"Currently is" seems to be the case. But "will be"? Do you have some cast-iron assurance on this?

Facebook worth more than Portugal? Hell, it's worth a LOT more than THAT

Congrats to Tim...

...for crafting a cunningly disguised version of the broken windows fallacy.

Pull up the Windows 10 duvet and pretend Win8 and Vista were BAD DREAMS

Re: Post Windows World

"Read and digest: http://philstephens.com.au/security-for-google-drive-businesses/"

I had a quick look. I came across this "Instead of documents being emailed around the company, they can be shared via email. This means that all that is sent is a link."

What's to stop emailing links being done if the storage is in-house? Alternatively, what's to stop complete docs being emailed if storage is on someone else's computer?

Whilst not wishing to cast aspersions on Google's security measures (other, of course, than the fact that they're open to hidden NSA demands in a way that an in-house system isn't, a major consideration if you're in the EU) the generic issue still exists. You're now dealing with three attack surfaces, the in-house one which may now be smaller; someone else's which, as another commentator has pointed out, you can't visit or audit its physical security; and the connections between the two.

It's not Luddism to point out the smoke and mirrors. Nevertheless, maybe I'll adopt "and Enoch shall break them" as a sig.

Re: Post Windows World

"Most businesses could move their entire organisation to the cloud storage and web apps, and get themselves some proper security. (with cloud storage, users don't email docs, all the security is handled serverside with 2 factor auth)."

s/cloud storage/someone else's computer/g

What's this "security" of which you write?

Re: Linux.

@Kaltern

You'd be much more convincing if you wrote as if you knew what you were writing about.

Re: Hellooooo UBUNTU...

'What *most people" want is ... a PC that ... smells like the one they're used to.'

Burning?

Re: "..stopped retailers and PC makers from selling .."

"A good marketing person makes you think YOU came up with the idea of NEEDING it"

Meanwhile, back in the real world, real marketing people make me realise that they're trying to make me think that I came up with the idea of needing whatever it is. And succeed in pissing me off to the extent that even if, by some remote chance, I actually need whatever it is I'll buy it from someone else.

Re: It's not difficult you know

"Ethel who works in HR"

HR?

Works?

Oxymoron detected.

Whisper keeping schtum over abuse of user data

Surely a typo?

'an internal review... had "found no wrongdoing".'

The usual wording is "found no evidence of wrongdoing" as Sir Humphrey explained.

Facebook is MORE IMPORTANT to humanity than PORTUGAL

Re: Self Importance?

I was with you as far as Port. But I'd need considerably more than one bottle to reconcile me to watching a bunch of kids kick a bag of wind up and down a field.

'If you see a stylus, they BLEW it' – Steve Jobs. REMEMBER, Apple?

Re: Who wants Handwriting Recognition anyway?

So you've never had a delivery which you were asked to "sign" for on some sort of electronic pad which converted your signature to a series of straight lines joined at odd angles?

Buggy? Angry? LET IT ALL OUT says Linus Torvalds

Re: Middle finger

"it doesn't mean that El Reg has to plaster the picture of him"

But it doesn't mean you have to see it. Just block all images from regmedia.co.uk until they get over this redesign nonsense. You'll lose one or two meaningful things from time to time but on the whole the signal to noise ratio will be greatly enhanced.

" look at the tie die"

Really! Professional shills ought at least to be literate. The correct spelling is "dye".

Dongle bingle makes two MEELLION cars open to exploit

Wouldn't connecting something like this invalidate the car's warranty and the construction & use approval (or equivalent in the jurisdiction concerned)?

'Our AI systems must do what we want them to do'

@Sebastian

"Do NOT re-elect him. We need to send a signal to western leaders that we're not willing to trade privacy for some illusion of security."

Elect someone else who'll do the exact same thing? That's the problem.

@Tromos

Just get the BOFH to deliver it. With the cattle prod.

The Year of Living Danishly, The Internet is Not the Answer and Classical Literature

Re: Fact checking - a pedant speaks

"I could truly care less"

So you do care?

'It's NOT FAIR!' yell RICH KIDS ... and that's a GOOD THING

Unexplained detail

"Two students .. are given $100.

The first is allowed to split the money any way they wish and offer, say, $40 to the second. The second student then decides whether to accept the offer. If it's rejected, then neither student gets anything, if it's accepted, they get to keep the $60 and $40"

So what happens to the $100 given to the 2nd student?

Experimental design

"They quickly found that in poor, pretty much non-market societies"

Economists! Can't they learn to change one variable at a time?

‘Whatever happened to Vladimir Putin?’ and other crap New Year prophesies

Re: Y2K @ Jack of Shadows

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

Re: Y2k

"Many (mostly) mainframe (mostly) Cobol programs held the year portion of dates as a 2-digit field."

I don't remember the language - it was a bought-in package - but the boxes were Unix.

The client had 2 of them. The newer one could have run a Y2K version of the package but the older one, a warm standby, couldn't so they bought a couple of new boxes. My gig was getting them set up, tested, cut over in the slack days between Xmas & new year and babysitting for a few weeks.

As a side issue I discovered something about the backup. Apart from tapes they backed up the main box to the standby by running cp overnight using an NFS mount. The previous admin had inserted a cron job to knock the cp process on the head if it was still running just before start of business the next day. It was ALWAYS still running just before start of business the next day. I don't know how long it had been since they had had a complete backup.

Anyway, everything was installed and tested ready to go in time. The bean counters insisted that as their financial year ended on 31 Dec we couldn't cut over at such a critical time until all their year end procedures had been run which took a couple of weeks. And yes, the Y2K bug certainly existed; we had to have the package vendors dial in several times a week to fix the problems before we could move the job over in mid-January.

Re: Y2k

"known about and attended to the first time a final mortgage payment date was given as being 1900 when a 25 or even 30 year mortgage was arranged"

Probably apocryphal but...

A consultancy was approached by a US state land registry for a new system. The clients specified two character dates. With Y2K fast approaching the consultancy pointed out the difficulty. The client insisted. Further analysis showed that the registry held documents going back the the C18th. At which point the consultancy declined the job.

I suppose it's the last sentence that makes it sound apocryphal.

Prez Obama snubs UK PM's tough anti-encryption crusade at White House meet

Change of tune?

In another place there's a link to http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/16/obama-sides-with-cameron-in-encryption-fight/ where he seems to have made another statement. Maybe the NSA twisted his arm.

Re: The horse bolted the stable long ago!

"Cameron isn't after cyberterrorists, he's after votes."

True. But if he thinks the way to get it is by banning their favourite apps he's greatly misjudged the twittering classes.

Future imperfect: A UK broadband retrospective

Re: Hmmm the Alcatel 'Snotblob'.

"When I had my ADSL installed in 2001 it was still a two engineer job. You had to have a ADSL box installed in the house. Was rather nice to have a proper purpose built box installed just where you wanted it in the living room."

Same date, a zero engineer job as far as I was concerned if, by engineer, you mean someone from BT. With the help of a cousin the master was <cough> relocated from the hall to the meter cupboard in the porch (no convenient power near the old location) and a cable pulled back to the hall with a slave socket on the original box, another telephone cable & a Cat 4 (yes, 4) to the upstairs room that was to become the office. Add a single splitter to the master and plug the slaves into that. Let Nildram know the new number & plug in the ADSL box which, IIRC, we'd brought from the old house and add a wireless access point. Also add the phone base station there sitting on top of the cupboard where we can see the missed call indicator when we come in.

ADSL box in the living room? SWMBO wouldn't want it there & anyway the meter cupboard kept a rat's nest out of site & out of mind.

BMW: ADMEN have asked us for YOUR connected car DATA

Weasel words

"had so far resisted requests"

Should be "under no circumstances will accede to requests at any time in the past or future". Not that it will affect the probability of my ever buying a BMW.

Young CHAP CUFFED in Blighty over Xmas Sony and XBOX hacks

Is there more?

"unauthorised access to computer material"

What lies behind this? Are there suspicions of him being involved in the BIG Sony hack?

Fertiliser doom warning! Pesky humans set to wipe selves out AGAIN

Re: LERN TWO PHUQUEING SPEL!! LOL

Have you ever heard of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)?

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/civilization?searchDictCode=all

You'll get sick of that iPad. And guess who'll be waiting? Big daddy Linux...

Re: iOS and OS X

"non-commercial developers listening to complaints from users... go on, pull the other one! Not that commercial devs always do listen (far from it)"

Six of one and half a dozen of the other in my view. If either side were to produce what every user agreed was the ideal product they'd still go ahead & try to fix what wasn't broken. Commercial devs need to have the next version to sell, non-commercial just because they want to.

Re: THere's a missing "Sponsored: Canonical" at the bottom of this article...

"And as usual you'll see some Linux ...Android."

Just think again about what you wrote there.

Apple v Ericsson: Yet ANOTHER patent war bubbles over

Re: Strange how fruity patents are so valuable

'I have always wondered why friends with "sent from my iphone" sigs...'

I've always wondered whether they're bragging, complaining or apologising.

Stop viewing Facebook at work says Facebook at work on Facebook at Work

users (sorry, people)

The word you were looking for is "product".

PlayStation-processor-powered plutonium probe prepares Pluto pics

"As New Horizons screams"

In space nobody can hear...

Google v Oracle: US Supreme Court turns to Obama in Java copyright war

Re: Turkeys voting for Christmas

"So by making it an ANSI standard that surely makes it free to use? much like anyone could implement an ANSI C compiler."

And is it your contention that standards can't contain licensable IP? If so what do you think all these Samsung/Apple/MS/Google/whoever pissing matches are about? (Apart from those about rounded corners, of course.)

Re: Turkeys voting for Christmas

"There's nothing with "copying" SQL, as it's been a standard since the 80's"

Nevertheless it was originated by IBM. It may be a standard but are any intellectual property rights FRAND? As IBM has owned Informix for a good while as well as DB2 they could give the opposition a bit of a problem if this ruling suddenly made SQL a copyright API. Umpteen years back royalties on Oracle? Larry might have to sell his boat.

Re: Turkeys voting for Christmas

"Which API is that? Oracle is a lot of things and has a lot of products (in-house and acquired), but I must have missed the API upon which they built their business."

SQL.

Preserve the concinnity of English, caterwauls American university

Re: funny

"Am I scratching blood from my nose."

Did you upset him so much he decided not to teach you about question marks?

Re: I'd settle...

"The commonest examples being lose and loose!"

Surely the commonest are its and it's. Have and of are also strong contenders.

Windows 7 MARKED for DEATH by Microsoft as of NOW

Re: A definitive date

"2020 will be the year of the Linux desktop."

By then I think I'll be on the FreeBSD desktop. Debian 7 will be the last Linux desktop for me.

What do UK and Iran have in common? Both want to outlaw encrypted apps

Look on the bright side

No DRM in streaming. No DRM on Blueray. All TV free to air....

Hawking and friends: Artificial Intelligence 'must do what we want it to do'

Re: motivation

"the example of an AI that is tasked with making paperclips efficiently.

Given this as a motivation the logical conclusion as he sees it is the elimination of human life ... as very early on it would be clear that preventing anything from interfering with paperclip production is one of the essential tasks."

Clearly someone with no acquaintance with industrial production systems. The realistic task would be more along the lines of "make 200,000 boxes of paperclips" and especially "don't make more than we can sell".

Re: "Our AI systems must do what we want them to do"

"AI will do what we told it to do, not what we want it to do."

Or not even that much. And anyway, as ever, it's 10 years ahead.

Peers warn against rushing 'enhanced' DATA SLURP powers through Parliament

Making hay

When you can't find a needle in a haystack what you need is a lot more hay. Obviously.

Had a data breach? Well, SPEAK UP, big biz – Obama

Works both ways? No?

"The plans would make it a crime to sell this data to overseas firms."

How about making it a crime to obtain data from overseas firms (by US Gov)?

20 years on: The satirist's satirist Peter Cook remembered

Re: "greatest British comedian of all time "

"Tommy Handley, Max Miller, Spike Milligan, Tommy Cooper, Les Dawson, Morecambe and Wise, Peter Cook"

And let's remember Lance Percival as another of the greats of that time.

Then there were some great singers who appeared on those shows, Millicent Martin, Cleo Laine, Marion Montgomery, Annie Ross...Duds reduced a few of those to laughter if they were brave enough to duet with him.

We just didn't realise how lucky we were.

Tax Systems: The good, the bad and the completely toot toot ding-dong loopy

Re: Tobin/Robin Hood Tax

"We have one in the UK.

It's called Stamp Duty, and costs 0.5% on share purchases."

And at a larger rate on property sales.

Given sufficient capital it would be feasible to handle house sales by an agent taking your existing house in part-exchange. Because the transaction tax would be taken twice there's no chance of this happening except, maybe, on corporate-funded relocations (something like that actually did happen to me).

What happens, therefore, is that agents and solicitors end up arranging long chains of transactions all set up to happen on the same day so each deal is only subject to a single transaction tax. If something goes wrong with one link in the chain the whole thing is delayed or collapses completely. If you need to move for work without the employer paying relocation you can end up renting in one place for months at a time which your family stuck hundreds of miles away (been there too).

It's an enormous deadweight effect which has a bad negative effect on mobility of labour.

MI5 boss: We NEED to break securo-tech, get 'assistance' from data-slurp firms

Re: Discrepancy

"Did they already know what they were going to find though?"

I suspect that that's what's happening in the Microsoft email case. Anybody who's seen anything of it in the media and had dodgy emails on Hotmail/Live/Outlook/What's it called this week would have long since deleted them. They already have the text & want someone of their own to be in a position to introduce it in court as evidence. Going through the proper channels would result in some Garda going to court & testifying that there was nothing of significance on the account; that wouldn't do at all.

Re: oh no

"Is the register going to start using BBC stock photos showing "hackers" wearing balacavas in darkened rooms with binary in their eyeballs?"

I don't know because I block all their images now. I suggest you do the same. It saves a lot of time and insults to the intelligence.