Posts by Doctor Syntax

systemd row ends with Debian getting forked

Re: Off to a bad start

If you don't understand shell scripting you have no business running a Unix type server.

Under the Iron Sea: YES, tech and science could SAVE the planet

Re: Iron is not enough

"a creature being fossilised is a rare event...Most of the world's carbon exists as CO2 in chalk cliffs, seashells, etc."

Those chalk cliffs (and limestone wolds etc): you do know what they're made out of don't you?

Eat FATTY FOODS to stay THIN. They might even help your heart

?

"the waist sizes shrink more with the low carb diet than the low fat diet – though not to a statistically significant extent."

So do they shrink or don't they?

Docker: Sorry, you're just going to have to learn about it. Today we begin

Re: FreeBSD for servers

I've had a brief look at the FreeBSD derivative PC-BSD. My initial reaction was that something needs to be done about the Byzantine software management. There are packages and PBIs (push button installers) and a stack of stuff that just sits in the ports tree and isn't visible to the local system's software management. Clearly that stuff needs to be compiled up into PBIs and made accessible via a single management tool that will list the whole of what's available irrespective of whether it's a package or a PBI.

As Debian on BSD kernels seems to have been one of the casualties of systemd maybe some of the folk who were working on that will turn their attention to either PC-BSD or an alternative derivative. After all, they should have the aptitude for it.

Euro Parliament VOTES to BREAK UP GOOGLE. Er, OK then

Re: How are they bundled?

" some people seem to think that this utterly trivial issue of search & advertising company promotes its own search & advertising is somehow important"

s/issue of search & advertising company promotes its own search & advertising/MEP/

Hacker dodges FOUR HUNDRED YEARS in cooler for SCANNING sites

"I do find it mind-boggling that the US justice system manages to find 44 different names for basically a single offence."

It doesn't say they did. There were 18 counts of one thing & 15 of another. That's 3/4 of them under just two headings.

Presumably you've no great experience of how courts work.

Turnbull should spare us all airline-magazine-grade cloud hype

Re: Why not "the" cloud?

"t's all just marketing guff for 'offsite server'"

Or someone else's computer rented out at a rate sufficient to make someone else's profit.

Our system handles £130bn and it's BUST. Want the job of fixing it? Apply to UK.gov

And another..

The Certes site has a second ad. for a public sector Technical/Solution Architect in the public sector in Newcastle or Leeds to "develop a deep understanding of the department's digital service user needs". Who do we know in Newcastle in the public sector?

What should America turn to for web advice? That's right: GOV.UK – says ex-Obama IT guru

"They are written in plain English and ask only the most pertinent questions. By contrast, the US system contains dozens of mind-boggling questions designed to cover every eventuality."

Plain English & simplicity are good goals. But as they probably can't cover every eventuality there needs to be a good escalation procedure to get a human into the loop quickly to deal with the corner cases. And that needs to be a knowledgeable and empowered human, not a script-driven hell-desk worker who can do no more than web-site does. And escalation needs to be built into the system by design not added on when everything starts to fall apart.

I think most customer service failures result from a lack of this; if at first you don't succeed try and fail again.

Bang! You're dead. Who gets your email, iTunes and Facebook?

Re: Solve this the same way companies do

"it brings a new dimension to a Ghost Writer producing content for a Blog."

Or do it yourself using GhostBSD.

Mine's the shroud.

Re: Attach account details to your Will in dead tree format

"so far lawyers and the law seems to still have some respect for Wills & the contents therof"

That's not surprising given that they make money from them.

OTOH they are likely to point out that there is good reason for the company to be told about the death; the deceased would have been one party to whatever contracts were in place so the other party would, I've thought, have reasonable expectations of being informed as part of the executors' duties.

But surely the executors should have access to the account in order to clear up the deceased's affairs. Whilst the T&Cs may make it clear that music "bought" on iTunes is only leased other files such as those originated by the deceased and correspondence received are part of the estate. They may possibly of value as IP in themselves but they may also contain information which the executors need to finalize the deceased's estate.

Nice subtitle.

Call the Commish! Ireland dragged into Microsoft dispute over alleged drug traffic data

"So doubtless my bank (Barclays Plc) has US-based shareholders and therefore Uncle Sam has an absolute right to look at my bank statements?

I think not."

Uncle Sam probably thinks differently.

NOKIA - Not FINNished yet! BEHOLD the somewhat DULL MYSTERY DEVICE!

Re: Maps

"I wonder if it will come bundled with whatever the old Nokia Sat Nav is now called"

I didn't notice any mention of GPS in the spec. If the hardware isn't there mapping apps seem a bit superfluous.

DEATH fails to end mobile contract: Widow forced to take HUBBY's ASHES into shop

"This is why I don't do automatic bill payment. I pay my bills manually. Automatic billing systems just can't be trusted."

You may pay your bills manually but the billing system is still automatic. If the billing system hasn't been told you've cancelled it will just keep on billing.

HSBC Turkey WON'T reissue cards despite 2.7 MILLION account details going AWOL

Encryption

Why was this stuff laying around in plain text? Or did they steal the key as well?

Pharmacist caught spying on friends' med records fined £1,000

Wrong court?

'The offence is punishable by way of “fine only” - up to £5,000 in a magistrates' court or an unlimited fine in Crown court. The ICO continues to call for more effective deterrent sentences, including the threat of prison in the most serious cases, to deter the unlawful use of personal information.'

What's the point of calling for more effective sentences & then failing to make use of the existing sentencing regime by not taking this to the Crown Court?

Re: Conspiracy?

From the report it looks as if ye was doing this off his own bat. So no conspiracy. It takes two to conspire.

Could YOU identify these 10 cool vintage mobile phones?

Re: Maybe I'm old

"Wow, that is old!"

No it isn't. It's GSM. Before GSM was TACS. And as the guy who had the (TACS) Steel pointed out in another post, before that was System 4 which ran in parallel with TACS for a while being shut down in the early '90s IIRC. I assume before that there must have been 3 previous generations. So much for 2G, 3G etc.

Re: Your 9110 is a 9210

I don't know about the 9210 but the 9110 had a VT100 emulation mode - 80x24 in minuscule characters.

Back in the day I had the box I was minding email me reports from all the overnight runs so in the morning I'd normally check them through to make sure everything was running OK.

The IIUG (Informix user group) was organising a chapter in the UK. They called for interested parties to a meeting with a couple of US members to set up a local committee so I went along. After the meeting we somehow ended up sitting round a table in a pub's beer garden. I opened the phone dialled into the modem in the back of the server (you could get away with such things in those days), fired up elm & rather belatedly ran through the reports. One of the US guys was sitting next to me & could hardly believe it; shouted to the other "Look here. He's DBAing his box on his phone!". Nice to get one over on the Yanks.

Re: Vintage?

Was that the Light Steel or Heavy Steel? There were 2 models with different battery sizes depending on whether you wanted a single or double hernia.

Adobe appoints former Reg man as open-source chief mobile lead

"the subscription model only works if you can improve the software every year"

Surely it's the other way round. If you want to keep selling upgrades you have to have upgrades to sell. You can collect a yearly rent for the same old stuff on a subscription model.

Cold? Cuddle these HOT GERMAN RACKS, yours for only 12,000 euro – we swear there's an IT angle

"Cloud&Heat believes it can save on data center facility and cooling costs."

Given that their rent is effectively negative and paid up front they're saving more than that.

" Once the installation fee is paid... for a period of fifteen years."

And what if C&H goes permanently titsup in significantly less than 15 years? That's €12,000 down the drain for their landlords - and maybe the German equivalent of the bailiffs knocking at the front door to demand the racks.

Yorkshire man NICKS 1,000 Orange customer records. Court issues TINY FINE

Re: Blame the prosecutor: He could have been charged with fraud.

Agreed. Fraud, Computer Misuse Act, probably a few others. This didn't get passed far enough up the prosecution food chain. At the very least it should have got him a conviction that would result in him being blocked as a company director along with any other penalties.

Annus HORRIBILIS for TLS! ALL the bigguns now officially pwned in 2014

Re: Don't bash it. @A/C

You're right in that it comes down to the programmers in the first place. Round the programmers there's an environment with attitudes ranging from "It compiles, ship it" to "Only release when we're sure it's right". And those attitudes can be found in organisations writing closed or open source.

You're also right in saying there are few eyes and brains willing (and, I'd add, able) to review code.

OTOH you say "It's not strange that all discoveries come from professional researches who have an economic incentive in hunting them". Are those professional researchers going to have an easier job with source they can read or with black boxes?

Bullish Vodafone barges back into UK consumer broadband market

Sort of

"BT has been elbowing its way back into the consumer mobile space it abandoned in 2002 with the sale of Cellnet, which later became O2."

IIRC Cellnet, originally only part owned by BT, & BT Mobile were merged to become O2 which was then hived off as a separate company for which Telefonica made a takeover bid and won.

It always seemed to me to be a daft move for a major telecoms business to get out of mobile. But understandable; within BT Mobile the rest of BT was known as "Big BT" and it wasn't a term of affection.

Don't assume public trusts you, MI5. 'Make a case' for surveillance – Former security chief

Policing by consent

What seems to have been forgotten by TPTB is that in a democracy policing must be by consent, at least of the majority. It should also be in accord with the law including the presumption of innocence.

To put it bluntly, if random stop and search mostly affects black inner city youths the more one differs from that demographic the less one is likely to object. As the majority are sufficiently different there is so little objection as to amount to consent.

However, surveillance by mass trawl with no effective oversight puts everyone's privacy at risk. In those circumstances it would be wrong to assume consent and no legal cover by way of PATRIOT or DRIP can substitute for that.

And if I hear "if you have nothing to hide..." being trotted out I take it as a sure sign that the presumption of innocence is being abandoned. Apart from anything else, it would be fair to ask anyone coming out with that one what their bank account, PIN login credentials etc are - after all, if they've nothing to fear why should they hide them?

Be Your Own Big Brother: Going to pot

All beside the point.

The gadget I really need is one to stop all the neighbourhood cats from crapping in the garden. Maybe some of that low level electric fencing they have to keep the rabbits out of Painswick Rococo Garden.

Got a STRAP-ON? Remember to TAKE IT OFF at WORK

"Most people who use a boring old wristwatch can’t remember when they last changed the battery, if ever."

I can. Yesterday.

If you're suing the UK govt, Brit spies will snoop on your briefs

Re: How can government lawyers accept this?

I wonder what the Bar Council has to say about them.

Ex-NSA lawyer warns Google, Apple: IMPENETRABLE RIM ruined BlackBerry

Maybe...

... he was put on as a comedy turn.

Eye laser surgery campaigner burned by Facebook takedown

'Rodoy said she thought the service offered a "trusted, safe storage medium"'

Did the fact that it was someone else's computer not register?

Still, she's getting some benefit of the Streisand effect.

Personally, I'd not think twice about laser eye surgery; I'd think an infinite number of times. No surgery, no contact lenses. You only get one pair of eyes & it's not worth risking damage when specs are so much safer.

Why Comrade Cameron went all Russell Brand on the UK’s mobile networks

Re: What

"Now Call Me Dave has had an issue SOMETHING MUST BE DONE."

And this is something therefore it must be done. A prime example of the politician's syllogism. Yes, Prime Minister.

RBS faces biggest ever fine for THAT huge IT meltdown – leak

Re: From an insider

"we know what caused this particular megadisaster, and it wasn't a senior manager; as mentioned in the article, it was an inexperienced member of IT staff screwing up a batch job."

And whose responsibility is it to ensure that inexperienced members of staff aren't in a position to make such a big screw-up and to ensure that there are robust fall-backs in place?

The buck stops - has to stop - with senior management. If they want big pay then they should earn it by ensuring that this stuff can't happen. And the best time to do that is before it happens, not after.

Re: Corporate fines == useless

"Corprorate penalties are useless, they're just passed on to customers and employees."

Fairly simple solution. The fine must be paid from the senior management bonus fund. And if a particular year's fund isn't big enough, just roll it on.

OK, only fairly simple because it needs a mechanism to stop the fund being inflated by the amount of the fine.

The same could be applied to all those "here's a few quid and we'll just keep keeping on" responses to complainants. Those few quid should come out of staff bonus funds. When they get depleted enough the staff learn to be more careful.

HP's pet lizard is feral peril says wildlife group

Re: Missed one

Missed another. Sheep

Windows 8 or nowt: Consumer Win 7 fans are out of luck

Re: When I get phone calls...

"It's just people don't like change."

Right. That's what MS forgot. Either that or the fact that people are less likely to buy something they don't like.

Can I have my Economics Nobel now, please?

Piketty-Poketty-Poo: Some people are just itching to up tax to capital ...

Re: Maybe he read it, but hard to believe he understood it

"entrepreneur can do with her time and capital"

If you want to use the feminine pronoun then surely the noun should be "entrepreneuse".

Re: ISAs?

"Pay tax going in (ISA) or pay tax coming out (Pension)"

You've forgotten Gordy's little trick. Pay tax inside both. Pensions and PEPs had tax relief on dividends. That was taken away & ISAs didn't have it. It makes a substantial difference.

Re: Simple in theory, not so simple in practise.

"(b) Government does SFA to prevent overheating and it all collapses in a pile of shit (2007 - Northern Rock)"

This was the result of the brilliant idea of using interest rates to manage inflation and then using a measure on inflation that excluded cost of housing. As if housing was just an insignificant part of household expenses.

Re: If r>g then...?

"From my reading (I haven't finished CI21C, obviously) Piketty's most stimulating point is that capital/wealth concentrates until war destroys it. If we want to create a society without war we must find other ways to constantly redistribute capital/wealth or else bad things."

If this is what he says then he has a very poor grasp on history and logic.

Firstly there are a number of other ways in which wealth is destroyed - fire, flood, drought, disease, lack of maintenance, spendthrift heirs ... history has seen them all.

Secondly the implication here seems to be that there is something happening that requires such concentrations to be destroyed and that invokes wars to do it so that wars are an inevitable consequence of those concentrations. Even given the curious leap of logic which come up with that requirement the other means of destroying such concentrations doesn't require wars.

Finally, even if we accept the first sentence the second is a non sequitur. Aggressive behaviour in humans appears to be innate. Even with an equitable distribution of wealth we would find things to fight about.

Forget eyeballs and radar! Brits tackle GPS jammers with WWII technology

According to the Beeb..

.. if you unplug the ship's GPS the gyrocompass and the radar stop working. What, exactly, was unplugged? A shared power lead?

Me give you $14 squillion gadziddly-dillion

And here's another

To: randomemailname@randomemailprovider

From: [e-mail]

(paraphrased)

We are so expert in everything internet-related that we're the dogs bollocks in SEO. We don't send spam. Just send us money and tell us the site you want promoting because it would be a waste of our time using our vast skills to work it out.

Signed with a distinctly un-Anglo-Saxon name

The strange thing is that one of these landed in my internet /dev/null - AKA Hotmail/Live/Outlook/${this year's favoured brandname} addressed to someone else completely with absolutely nothing in the headers to tell how it got there apart from the fact that it originated from a Hotmail/etc user & possibly their internal routing has gone wrong.

Desktop Linux users beware: the boss thinks you need to be managed

Re: LTSP

"Sure you can do it, but why?"

I think the why is that the user can be/has been provided with a cheap thin client.

Verizon set to pay $64 MEEELLION for overbilling customers

Re: Not a problem...

Of course the fact that they don't understand maths* very well might be why they don't have a better job just over the horizon.

* Do people who write "math" in the singular wear a trouser and cut paper with a scissor?

Planning to fly? Pour out your shampoo, toss your scissors, rename terrorist Wi-fi!

Re: Seriously

"The TSA are not capable of taking ANYthing lightly, they are chosen for their lack of humour, empathy, sensibility and possibly humanity"

I think you may have missed a word there: judgement.

UK.gov pushes for SWIFT ACTION against nuisance calls, threatens £500k fines

Re: Taking text/Email/cold callers to court

It's worth actually reading what this report is about. ICO have had penalties overturned by a tribunal which is making it difficult for them to proceed on other cases because they're concerned that that could happen again (it's not stated but I expect they're worried about having their budget bled by having costs awarded against them). They're wanting to have the criteria for level of nuisance reduced so they don't get tribunals finding against them in future.

SHOW ME THE MONEY! Ballmer on Amazon: 'They're not a real biz, they make NO cash'

How much profit do the likes of Microsoft Ireland make? IIRC it was a long time before Microsoft started paying dividends yet their stock market value kept going up and up.

Activist investors force Riverbed into climbdown over cash 'n' costs

Assuming the management & engineering staff have a reasonable shareholding take the money & run could be a good strategy. Does anybody remember the Bilko Empty Store episode?

FTDI yanks chip-bricking driver from Windows Update, vows to fight on

@Donald Becker

"I expect that they would lose in court,"

Why? If the fakes have FTDI's logo etc on them then it's just the sort of thing trademark legislation is intended to deal with. I don't know about your jurisdiction but in the UK Trading Standards legislation could be used to protect customers.