Posts by Doctor Syntax

Meet Mr Gamification: He's got a NUDGE or two for you

Re: From the video:

"I've met loads of Humans that aren't people."

And vice versa.

Re: The event sounds awful...

"Accurate simulators have been helping people learn for a long time. Flying instruction has used these since the 1960s. I would put a medical simulator in the same category.

Gamification means something completely different."

Are you sure? If it works they'll want to claim it.

France to draft blacklist banning alleged piracy websites – what could POSSIBLY go wrong?

Re: Theft/Piracy

"Hard working people have had their wages stolen from them by torrenting etc. That is theft."

When someone gets a conviction in court for that I'll believe you.

It's just that when a case gets to court you need to get the law right. And I don't think you have because when it comes to "track down the burglars and prosecute them" I used to be involved in that for a living.

Any way, I hope you're being paid for all your hard work here. But you really should register and get yourself a proper handle. Can I suggest Humpty Dumpty? Then you'll be more convincing when you insist that words mean exactly what you want them to mean.

Re: Theft/Piracy

"You semantic word play is so amusing"

No it isn't semantic word play. It's the law. Go and read up about it. Not hard, is it?

"Theft of movies costs jobs"

Theft of movies would be someone taking the film and not giving it back. You were challenged to find an example of that happening via a download. We're still waiting.

You keep complaining of people being deprived of their rightful dues. It's a fair complaint to make. It's simply that you'd have an easier row to hoe if you made the effort to take notice of what you're being told. And your industry would find it easier to make money if they actually took the trouble to find out what the market wants in terms of accessibility and what it's willing to pay. At present they seem to have an outsize sense of entitlement based on an outsize sense of their own worth.

Disclaimer. I have no interest in watching your industry's product by download or any other means. I haven't read of any film I'd want to see for a long time.

Re: Theft/Piracy

"Oh, so you work for free do you? Out of the goodness of your heart?"

Hello there, astroturfer. You need to brush up your reading skills and maybey your knowledge of the law. The OP simply pointed out that the correct term is copyright INFRINGEMENT.

Theft is the taking away of something in a manner that permanently deprives the rightful owner of it. Theft is a criminal offence and if the theft is reported and the culprit detected could result in a criminal trial. Pursuing the criminal is at the state's expense and, of course, whether and how vigorously that happens would depend on available resources.

You download a copy of something? It's only a copy, the original is still in the possession of its owner. You've infringed the copyright but not committed theft. That, in most of the civilised world, is a civil offence. The copyright owner is entitled to pursue you for damages - at their own expense, initially.

There are remedies for the injured party in copyright infringement. The OP said nothing about working for free. Now you've been told about the differences between theft and infringement go back, read the OP and try to find anything that justifies your comment.

And then consider this. The French have set up an agency to take action on infringement - a civil matter at the state's expense. Who's working for free? The state is working for free on behalf of the copyright owners. If you don't think people should work for free you should complain about that.

Happy 2nd birthday, Windows 8 and Surface: Anatomy of a disaster

Re: Next up, Jony Ives?

" It looks like something a 3rd-rate Linux distro hacked together the night before a release."

You've got me puzzled. What does a 3rd-rate Linux distro hacked together the night before a release look like? Apart from Yosemite, of course.

Chipmaker FTDI bricking counterfeit kit

Re: Such a dick move.

"FFS.

- They aren't destroying any hardware.

- They are changing a setting in an EEPROM. You can change it back.

- They have a tool that allows one to change the settings on their chips which you can use to put it back."

If this comes to court I look forward to your giving expert testimony to try to persuade a jury of that.

Re: Very dumb idea

"Maybe they don't want that reputation to be spoiled by fakes?"

They don't need fakes to do that. They're doing it themselves.

They've engineered a situation in which any device which claims to contain their chip could be a fake which will be bricked. Getting bricked or not seems to be the only test available to the user to determine the good from the bad. That's not a test which will appeal to the user so the safest thing for anyone who's in a position to check what their device claims to contain will simply avoid it if it claims to be theirs.

It matters not that this is reversible if you download some tool from their site (remember that's the site of a manufacturer who has just bricked your gadget) and then find something else on which to run that tool (because unless you've been able to back out the new driver there's no point). All the average punter is going to see is a bricked device. And if it came to court that's more than likely that that's how the jurors would see it.

Then there's Microsoft's POV. How will they react? If the driver is distributed via their upgrade users are likely to consider them responsible. Surely they're going to have to come down on this like a ton of bricks, replace the driver with the old one, probably issue a tool to fix bricked devices, give FTDI a stern talking to and forbid this sort of thing as part of the T&Cs of getting drivers distributed by them.

Smartphone giant _____ puts citizens' private data beyond reach of oppressive regime _____

Why...

... does a phone maker even need to know who the end users are, let alone keep data on therm?

The 'fun-nification' of computer education – good idea?

Re: Fun?

"half of those pop stars can't even sing."

Is this a new meaning of the word "half" that I was previously unaware of?

Re: But maths IS fun!

"The reason maths is incorrectly believed to be not equal to fun is crap teaching and contagion from adults who believe it is not fun."

Non-mathematician's view of maths teaching:

A long explanation of the perfectly obvious situation the teacher is about to render into mathematics.

A sudden flurry of equations being rearranged with maybe a new notation being thrown in on the side. If this were taken a little more slowly it would be perfectly easy to follow it but it's done at such a speed as to appear to be sleight of hand.

The teacher then adopts one of two attitudes. Either the pupil is being wilfully stupid because it's obvious or else extra coaching is required which takes the form of explaining the obvious at even more mind-bending length followed by repeating the conjuring trick at double speed.

Those who can follow the shuffling may go on to become mathematicians, those who can't won't so maths becomes something practised by those who selected for their ability to understand other mathematicians who can apparently write with both hands at the same time. (I'm a biologist so I understand natural selection).

You can repeat this, with appropriate modifications, for any subject you care to name; we can't sense that there are difficulties, let alone what they are, for those whose aptitudes lie elsewhere. Yes, that includes you, and maybe me before I retired, training up users with the new shiny S/W. Lull them to sleep with a long power-point presentation and then lose them by typing all the text & clicking the buttons faster than they can follow because you know it so well by now that you can do it with your eyes closed.

Compulsion vs aptitude

"Others thought that compulsion would put people off. Others challenged this, saying that you could make that argument against teaching anything. Physics can be badly taught - that doesn't mean you should scrap Physics. It was more of an observation about our lack of faith in the education system."

I think success in learning a subject is a function of the ability of a teacher to teach well - which includes a personal enthusiasm - and the aptitude of the pupil. To some extent deficiencies in the one can be made up for by performance of the other. In particular a pupil with sufficient enthusiasm and aptitude may bypass an indifferent teacher if other resources are available. OTOH a pupil who doesn't have an aptitude for the subject is unlikely to make good progress with even the best of teachers. And compulsion is only likely to reinforce negative reactions.

In my case:

Games & PE compulsory. I have spent the remainder of a long life detesting pretty well all sport especially anything which involves groups of people chasing bags of wind around a field.

Latin compulsory. The chief characteristics of the senior Latin master, as far as I could tell, was that he wore a Homburg & was reputed to have been a jazz trumpeter in his youth. Neither seem to have been qualifications for a good Latin teacher but as I was virtually never in his class I don't know if he had additional abilities. Certainly the rest of his department were also-rans. Failed O-level Latin; my knowledge of the subject is mostly botanical.

Science not compulsory beyond Gen Sci but well taught, especially physics and biology. I ended up as a botanist before moving into IT in my forties. But to be fair I arrived in school with an interest in science from way back.

IMV a compulsory core curriculum should be extremely restricted - the clue is in the name - and should be well taught. There need to be extremely compelling arguments for getting any subject into it and simply being a political fad de jour is neither compelling nor an argument.

Outside the core there needs to be a chance for the child to get exposure to other subjects but with freedom to drop the worst and spend more time on the best.

I don't know if things have changed since my time but my experience was that teachers - who presumably had an aptitude in their subject - couldn't grasp where the difficulties lie for those who didn't have it and were thus unable to help. This isn't particularly related to teachers - how many of those here who have to support non-ITers, either in work or in family, really understand what gives those supportees their problems?

In order to teach coding in schools TPTB need

1. To devise a curriculum

2. Recruit potential teachers with an aptitude for coding (and a salary structure that would make teaching as opposed to industry worth their while).

3. Train those potential teachers to teach the subject and to be able to help their pupils a good deal better than many of my teachers helped me.

That isn't something a government can decide to introduce at a whim; it will take time.

Only once that is up and running and proven to be effective as a non-core subject should it be considered as a core subject. And then rejected.

Happiness economics is bollocks. Oh, UK.gov just adopted it? Er ...

Econimics as a fashion item?

Explains a lot!

And is Dave still on the happiness stuff? I thought that was last year or maybe the year before. Surely he's flitted onto something else by now.

Windows 10: Forget Cloudobile, put Security and Privacy First

Re: rant-like journalism

"The world has enough worker bee drones."

Worker bees & drones are two different things.

Xiaomi boss snaps back at Jony Ive's iPhone rival 'theft' swipe

Re: Real design changes

I was with you until you got to the audio player bit. Not on my list.

Back in the day I'd have added a cellular modem complete with VT100 emulation & workable keyboard. My old Nokia Communicator brick did that. And it had rounded corners!

Now I would add Bluetooth with remote SIM - the built-in hands-free phone in my car is much easier on the ear than any hand-portable I've ever used.

Rebellion sees Chromium reverse plans to dump EXT filesystem

Re: Why on earth is this news?

"The reason why an ext formatted USB drive breaks that is because the Linux/Android/*nix community hasn't really ever got round to doing a proper driver for ext (or whatever) for Windows."

Or maybe that MS hasn't got round to it either.

Here's your chance to buy an ancient, working APPLE ONE

"between 230 and 384 units (rounding to whole units, of course)."

Is that the corners being rounded?

Jony Ive: Flattered by rivals' designs? Nah, its 'theft'

Re: Those in glass houses, Sir Jony...

"BTW, I don't agree with all the examples given in the second link."

I think there are rather more exceptions than you allow.

Taking the first one, iPhone 3G, once you get past the shape about the only striking resemblance in detail is that they both have an icon of a phone handset on a green background on the bottom left. The shape? They're both rectangles with a similar size & shape with rounded edges. Why? I don't suppose Fanbois & Samdroids have different proportions or sizes of hands & face and people have been rounding off edges at least since the neolithic when they started applying retouch to the edges of flint blades.

Next, the iPad2: different aspect ratios, totally different screen layouts - where's the dock on the Sammy?, bits & pieces in the bezel.

And so on.

Re: Those in glass houses, Sir Jony...

"Your butchery of grammar rules"

It's not butchery, he's just being creative.

More theft!

"firms like Pebble et will say they’ve stolen a march on Apple"

White LED lies: It's great, but Nobel physics prize-winning great?

Re: Life cycle

"What's more, the better quality LED's aren't going to need recycling for the fat end of two decades anyway."

Not my experience on a very small sample. A work light with two GU10s in it had one fail in about a year. Nothing wrong with the LEDs but the associated electronics started switching on & off at about 1 Hz. And there's the problem, any LED run from a voltage source more than about 3v is going to need some sort of converter. Even if it were impossible to produce LEDs with a shorter life than the heat death of the universe you'll have no indication that the manufacturer sought to source the lowest possible quality converter components until it goes titsup.

Google hauls Java-on-Android spat into US Supreme Court

Re: Best case

"The best result, software patents are completely dismissed. Innovation wins, and lawyers lose - so we know that won't happen."

Could you please explain the relevance of software patents to s copyright case?

Re: Oracle are most definitely evil

"CentOS have been at it longer than Oracle and I'd rather use CentOS than either RHEL or OHEL."

Pay attention at the back! Centos are now part of Red Hat.

Siri ... why is this semi headed RIGHT AT ME? Phone apps distracting as ever – new study

They're driving with EEG kit on their heads, they also have to watch for an LED in peripheral vision and respond to that by pressing a micro-switch. Yup, that simulates normal driving conditions OK.

It's interesting that in Phase 1 there seems to be little difference (maybe none; there were no error indications) between talking to a passenger, talking on a hand-held & talking on a hands-free. If the differences are significant the hands-free was slightly less distracting than the passenger.

How much is Microsoft earning from its Android taxes again?

Re: Strange World

i wonder what the EU competition commissioner might make of this.

Linux systemd dev says open source is 'SICK', kernel community 'awful'

Re: Olivetti and Time Travel

"True he does it for free"

No, unless something has changed recently, he's paid by Red Hat.

Re: peer review....

"Furthermore I'll wager LT has got many powerful corporate forces railing against him too."

AFAIK he works for Red Hat so he has at least one powerful corporate force backing him.

Re: Unpaid volunteers in a lot of cases

"sysvinit, upstart, and even openrc are alternatives to systemd."

The problem is that systemd is gradually being introduced as a requirement for other stuff. Sure in theory you could just fork the other stuff providing "other" is a small integer and "stuff" is a small codebase. As these get bigger this becomes less & less practical.

From my own PoV I came into being a Linux user via a whole lot of other Unix flavours from V7 onwards so, providing what I need to run is available on it it will cause me no great upset to move on to some BSD (and I've got an ISO image downloading right now to evaluate that option). But I can see why Linux users who have become emotionally invested in their preferred operating system will be upset.

Re: Unpaid volunteers in a lot of cases

"If systemd is so bad ... why hasn't somebody "better" come and written something to replace it?"

Systemd is being shoe-horned in to replace what was there already. And a lot of very experienced users of Linux & other Unices view what was already there as being better. They don't like being given new problems by something put in to fix other problems they don't have.

New EU data chief: 'We share common targets with the United States'

Suspend safe harbour now..

... and only restore it if they can prove themselves trustworthy.

Will we ever can the spam monster?

Re: Yes

"Once we stop using email."

Sort of. To refine your comment, once we stop using an email protocol which by default doesn't require verification of a mail's origin.

Re: Who the hell????

"You havent won a prize in a lottery you never entered.

There can't be a problem with a ticket for a journey you booked."

But a small proportion of the recipients will have entered the lottery or bought the ticket. If they can't spot the fake they'll reasonably respond and that small level of response makes it worthwhile for the spammer.

Re: There is only one way.

"A well-crafted phishing spam email doesn't prey on greed, and doesn't fall under what most computer users would understand as "common" sense. An email which appears to come from your bank and has a link which looks legit (but isn't if you look at the actual URL) can easily deceive those who did not grow up with the internet... which is still most of us."

Unfortunately banks send emails, or have other companies send them on their behalf, which look like well-crafted phishing spam. Only the "From:" uses the bank's domain. They're training their customers to respond to being phished.

What’s the KEYBOARD SHORTCUT for Delete?! Look in a contextual menu, fool!

Re: Getting harder to transition from mouse to keyboard...What's a Ribbon ??

"What's a Ribbon ?? "

The stringy thing on a typewriter that covers you fingers in black ink.

Re: Text editting

"his file suddenly becoming encrypted"

That sounds more like vim than Real Vi.

My first encounter with vim was trying to do something that I'd done many times with vi - clean up a file from the DOS world. And the thing was pre-configured with some set command to hide them. I quickly came to the conclusion that if it could do that it might hide other things I might need to see.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 Jul 11 2013 /etc/alternatives/vi -> /usr/bin/nvi

Ice probe peers at hidden BOTTOMS of oceans from SPAAACE

Re: Volcanos

"Well, 'Volcanic Activity' can be .. a tiny little sulfur fart from between some plates."

I'm not sure the Welsh would appreciate that.

Seriously, I don't think there are any old plate boundaries under Wales. From what I recall of my geology the Welsh slates are related to the closing of the Iapetus & that boundary runs under the Solway & across under Ireland. And the closure took place a long time ago* - Welsh sites gave the Cambrian, Silurian and Ordovician their names.

So the placement of those red blobs is a bit odd.

Allowing for the fact that there was a tremor on or near that line on Boxing Day, 1974.

Volcanos

According to the linked article the red spots mark volcanic activity. I didn't know there were two active volcanoes in Wales. OTOH if it means sites of long past volcanic activity there ought to be a good many more in the British Isles.

Google ordered to tear down search results from its global dotcom by French court

"If the information is defamatory the site where the information is written and the person who wrote it are surely the ones breaking the law, not a search engine that indexes what is publicly available on the internet?"

The linked report suggests that the plaintiffs went after Google on the right to be forgotten basis. If they only cited Google and not the original page publishers then the court can only rule against Google. Maybe the plaintiffs thought that RTBF was an easier case to prove than libel against the original sites - and maybe less likely to invoke the Streisand effect.

DVLA website GOES TITSUP on day paper car tax discs retire

Re: A defence of DVLA

"- You have a change to the service which in theory means the only difference for the average punter is they don't get to change the paper disc displayed in their window. "

In which case you weren't thinking of it from the punter's point of view. Previously the punter had to renew in advance to allow for postage and those "in advances" varied sufficiently to spread the load over a reasonable part of the month. Now the punter doesn't have to so his behaviour changes; if he doesn't have to very likely won't. Even under the old system you probably saw that the normal load actually varied and was higher in the last half of the month. You should have realised that that monthly peak is now going to come in a couple of days at the turn of the month.

Re: I don't understand

"So why has every man and his dog rushed to the website today? Is it vaguely curious types who haven't seen anything in the news about it until today, or people saving up to 20p in bank interest by not taxing their car until it's actually overdue by one day?"

1. Never do today what you can put off doing until tomorrow.

2. Never pay today what you can put of paying until tomorrow.

3. With big fleet owners those 20ps add up. Big companies will have bean counters who can do that addition especially where takes are concerned; if you haven't noticed that you haven't been paying attention recently.

Under the old system people will have allowed a little time to allow the disk to be delivered, now they don't so all those factors come into play. Even under the old system it seems unlikely that renewals would have been distributed anywhere evenly over the month which should have been something of a warning.

I'm sure there must have been someone on the project who worked all this out & probably pointed it out or asked how to scale up for such a peak. And I'm even more sure that the reward would have been to an accusation of being negative.

Third patch brings more admin Shellshock for the battered and Bashed

@pierce

The previous Debian patch also appears to have included this. I get the same response.

SHELLSHOCKED: Fortune 1000 outfits Bash out batches of patches

Re: nas and modems

Read Jim 59's first post above.

Re: Fortune 1000 overlords SHELLSHOCKED into Bash patch batch

"The trouble is, you really don't want to get notified every time one of packages that's installed on a typical Linux system is updated in one of the main repos. The signal-to-noise ratio would render such notifications useless."

Why not? There was a batch of Debian updates this morning. Open a terminal, apt-get upgrade, check what it was - latest version of Chromium, OK it, download and install, job done in a few seconds, close terminal. It's not like the monthly Win 7 updates which seem to take hours and need a few reboots along the way.

Agreed servers are another kettle of fish entirely but that's because you'd need to check the updates don't break anything and the occasional kernel upgrade would need a reboot but in general distros aimed at servers have quite conservative attitudes to upgrades.

@ Jim 59

If you think about it he's performing a useful service in telling the world about the competence of his company.

Be your own Big Brother: Keeping an eye on Mum and Dad

Notwithstanding Richard Jones's comment (we have similar issues with our daughter's FiL) this sort of article & its comments, however well-meaning, seldom manage to avoid a condescending air. Some of us have been using this stuff longer than some of you have been alive.

Rackspace to hit GLOBAL CLOUD REBOOT button to flush out Xen security nasty

Re: It is not (of course) that simple

"It is just not do-able with our current technology. Not in a cost effective way. Nothing customers really want to pay for anyway.."

But as Steve said, wasn't that the promise of cloud?

Microsoft on the Threshold of a new name for Windows next week

Re: Name not important

"Windows 8 didn't matter. Anyone with a brain knew that it never mattered (except to idiots in comment threads) because Windows 7 was huge and most really big enterprises only just finished migrating to it."

So... Windows 7.1?

Patch Bash NOW: 'Shellshock' bug blasts OS X, Linux systems wide open

Re: Linux = Making Windows look Great

Any nerd will know

a) the difference between a kernel & a shell

b) the correct spelling of Torvalds

However, if you wish to continue displaying your ignorance, don't let me stop you.

Apple's warrant canary riddle: Cock-up, conspiracy, or anti-Google point-scoring

Precautionary principle

If you're in a position to be worried by such things it would be best to regard it as being an ex-canary, OTOH if you;re in a position to be worried by such things, it's too late.

Who's that at the door, storage box flingers? It's the hard drive makers. No, they are not smiling

Some of those array vendors had their own drive making businesses & flogged them off. Not core or something like that. That might not turn out to have been such a good idea.

But ITYF that databases involve a lot more than just shovelling bits in & out.