* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32773 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

Page:

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Brilliant and exhaustive work of research

Wasn't the original IBM work based on character interfaces? That still lives on in the menus that typically say

File Edit View ... Help

with their drop-down sub-menus. IBM also contributed to CDE but the CDE style of doing things is something I first encountered from HP as VUE.

Oracle really does owe HPE $3b after Supreme Court snub

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Oracle aren't a nice bunch, but they aren't stupid, and they were right about Itanium being doomed."

HP's Itanium customers might also have come to that conclusion. Nevertheless is they had an investment in it they might reasonably have expected it to be supported for the life of the H/W.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Happy Days

HPE isn't the screwing-over-of-ink-users company.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Licensing could also be a lot more expensive to deter the use of it as well."

That doesn't seem a deterrent to Oracle customers in general.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: First Amendment

Their case seems to have been based on the petition clause. A very quick DDG brings up this “Congress shall make no law … abridging … the right of the people … to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

How a right to petition the govt applies to a commercial contract doesn't seem obvious to me. Neither does equating Oracle with "the people". It didn't seem obvious to the Supreme Court either. I doubt it seemed obvious to anyone except Oracle's lawyers.

Cars in driver-assist mode hit a third of cyclists, all oncoming cars in tests

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Cyclists are road users, too

I'm with you in terms of cyclists needing to take responsibility but in terms of testing it's not just what was called the golden path in another commentary that has to be tested, it's the ability to cope when things aren't has they should be. That should apply to all testing but especially where safety is concerned.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Pedestrians?

Thanks for mentioning that exception, half the walkers round here aren't aware of that. (The other half aren't aware of any of it.)

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: "three leading systems" WTF?

The manufacturer's call centre or the ambulance service?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Try Scooters in Madrid

Nobody had a passenger to open the door?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: So technology works as intended...

So autonomous cars should only be driven at high speeds to avoid accidents? Or have I missed something?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: So technology works as intended...

You know it's bleedin' obvious, I know it's bleedin' obvious and the Yank lurker knows it's bleedin' obvious. Now how do we persuade all those pouring money into it and governments offering their citizens as crash test dummies that it's bleedin' obvious. Somebody needs to say it.

Elon Musk 'violated' Twitter NDA over bot-check sample size

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"what method they use for working out whether an account is a bot or not."

Suspend the accounts and see who or what complains?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: What's the endgame?

As several commentards have already said a figure like that needs a confidence limit unless the sample size was so large as to render the limit negligible. If that were s sample of 100 of which 5 were rated as bots that's not negligible. if it were 100 bots counted in a sample of 20,000 it's looking better and maybe good enough for the purpose in hand.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Wait a second...

It's up to the shareholders to accept it. The board may recommend acceptance but the share's he's offering to buy belong to the shareholders, not the board. There may also be regulators taking an interest. It's not over 'til it''s over.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Actually it's skewed. With a larger population that wouldn't show but 5 minus 3 SDs is less than zero but 5 plus 3 SDs is feasible. The ancient rule of thumb remembered from my student days is that you should look for a quantity of at least 30 so I'd want a sample of about 600 to give 30 or so bots.

But then there's the question of how the 100 (or 600) are chosen. If they're weighted towards the early days bot accounts might be rarer than if they're weighted to more recent times. Ideally the age and geographic distribution should at least resemble that of accounts as a whole. If we don't know something about the sampling process the results don't mean too much but maybe that's too much of a complication for Wall Street.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: violate ?

The market is affected as much by who says it as by what was said. If he says something that gets interpreted as an attempt to weasel out of his bid or reduce the price it makes no difference whether it was true or not. Then let's consider your assumption that it was, in fact, true...

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Any sensible random sampling process is fine."

Without knowing how the 100 were selected it's impossible to say whether it was a sensible sampling process.

Lawyers say changes to UK data law will make life harder for international businesses

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: BREXIT was a massive and expensive lie.

The lie was saying it was a good idea. We will now have to follow rules into which we no longer have an input or suffer the consequences. You might call that taking back control but it doesn't look like it to me.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: And nothing much will change for 95% of companies

The problem I see with this is that if the prevailing legislation doesn't meet GDPR requirements and something like the proposed public body data sharing comes into play then it might be impossible to claim GDPR compliance.

Never mind, companies can just set up an EU subsidiary to do what would otherwise have been done in the UK, or even just move the whole business to the EU. In the meantime the UK remains the best place in the whole world for something or other. What was it? Ah, yes: taking back control.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: And nothing much will change for 95% of companies

If the EU decides that the new legislation is no longer sufficient to support adequacy then at best companies might have a lot of additional hoops to jump through to do business with EU residents.

A Schrems style situation might even become a Schrems plus. Whilst the consumer rights side of the EU pushes GDPR etc the trading side doesn't really want to avoid doing business with the US and keeps inventing new fig leaves for Schrems to tear down. They might be less inclined to do the same for a country they regard as uncooperative.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: And nothing much will change for 95% of companies

GDPR is written into the current UK Data Protection Act, give or take a little wriggle room for HMG to indulge in its data fetish. That means it applies in the UK anyway.

The scope is a little different to what you say, however. The restriction would be on forms of business that involve collecting personal data so business to business transactions might not be affected nor consumer cash transactions. OTOH GDPR applies to EU citizens as a whole, not just Irish citizens.

A specific point about Irish ancestry, however, is that it can grant citizenship to those not born in Ireland so that my grandchildren have dual British and Irish (and hence EU) nationality despite being born in England by virtue of the fact that their mother was born in Belfast (not even in the RoI).

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

None of this counts when it comes to Team Brexit's opportunities for willy-waving.

How CXL may change the datacenter as we know it

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

No doubt even now the malware developers are studying the fine details.

Financial giant Santander: 80% of our IT infrastructure in cloud

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"$20.8 billion (€20 billion ) modernization programme,,,Readers hoping for a tale of disaster"

Whether or not it's a tale of disaster depends on whether the modernisation process is worth the €20 billion. Nearly half the annual revenue is a pretty big budget even when spread over a few years.

Confirmation dialog Groundhog Day: I click OK and it keeps coming back

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Effect and "impacted"

It's well documented that one's own writing is the most difficult to proof-read because what is "read" is what's intended to be there rather than what is actually there. I'll rely on a spell check for words such as accommodate (yes, missed the double m again) and recommend (got it first time!) but the pairs have to be known.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Golden Path Specifications

Why the let off for single quotes?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Cancel

Maybe you should wait to cancel.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Effect and "impacted"

The point at issue is that there are words which have only a minor difference in spelling, stationary and stationery for example, which mean quite different things. The spillchucker won't help with those, you need to make a personal* effort to distinguish between a shop that's the opposite of mobile and one which sells envelopes.

* As opposed to personnel.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Ethnicity

"if your program freezes and you're about to lose hours of work (and potentially your job), chances are you'll read the error message like a holy tenet"

The second time it happens.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: [ae].*tive

With the aid of a GUI wrapper it's a crossword assistant for SWMBO.

September 16, 1992, was not a good day to be overly enthusiastic about your job

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: my early bird antics cost them over 40k

"Gordon Brown was worried that the same thing would happen before any entry to the Euro"

Had it been Gordon Brown instead of Lamont he'd just have sold off the gold reserves instead of foreign currency.

At the time the UK had had a long-running problem with interest rates. A rate that would avoid inflation in one part of the country would cause depression in another. Brown's solution was to partially wash his hands of the situation by handing it over to the BoE and then specifying that they aim at 2% inflation but carefully eliminating most people's biggest purchase, their house, from counting towards the measure of inflation. No inflation here, just a wildly overheating housing market.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: "Everyone had to leave" knee-jerk reaction

You'd still have no revenue. Much better to sell on the business to somebody else.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: my early bird antics cost them over 40k

ITYF it's usually the lowliest who gets the role of scapegoat. Right and wrong have nothing to do with it.

Ad-tech firms grab email addresses from forms before they're even submitted

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Autocomplete

I'm sure a little research would find a few other email addresses that you could inadvertently enter in error and have to change, such as John Lewis's CEO's.

BOFH: You'll have to really trust me on this team-building exercise

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Even free food has its limits as an enticement.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Not Team Building

I remember (very vaguely!) one away week where someone had discovered the previous week's bar bill and was determined to beat it.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Ahh, Team building/break the ice exercises....

A company having two teams working on the same thing without being aware of each other's existence? The company has more problems than needing team building exercises.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Back up plan

I bypassed that. It was obvious from the start that the presenter had OD'd on his pep pills. The usual "introduce the person sitting next to your" had become "introduce the two people sitting next to you".

"Will this help me with $CurrentWobblySystemIsThrowing"

"No"

<Leaves>

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Ahh, Team building/break the ice exercises....

"Is there a point to team building with people you are unlikely to ever meet again?"

Yes. It pays good money to the snake-oil salesmen who run the events and the hotels or whatever that host them. A point for the company you work for? Why would you expect that?

As a variant of that, vary occasionally I would have to visit crime scenes in extremely dodgy areas. I would have an armed escort, sometimes RUC, sometimes army, sometimes both. I've never worked with them before. Woah! I'm trusting my life to the protection these guys are providing, I've never met them before and I can do this without even a team building exercise? Im Possible!

Well, actually I expect them to look after my safety, they expect me to do my job efficiently so we can remove ourselves from the dodgy neighbourhood ASAP. We're all professionals at our respective tasks. What more do we need?

(OK, let's gloss over the fact that a combined operation once took me to the wrong address in Twinbrook.)

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Oh god

at the next meeting decides to berate me on the basis its currently logged at 53 seconds

Best reply: "Engineering, unlike accountancy, relies on precision and accuracy."

We can bend the laws of physics for your super-yacht, but we can't break them

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

Not in Yes Minister.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: latency vs. bandwidth

I think you've just achieved a breech presentation of Brooke's argument in TMMM.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: How to get the right answer from an engineer

"Not all sales bods have this practical attitude. There are courses where you learn how to talk complete bollocks."

My experience of most salesmen is that (a) they don't need the course and (b) would be too arrogant to accept that they needed a course for anything.

I agree that not all salesmen talk bollocks. The exceptions were selling Leitz microscopes and HP kit back in HP's glory days.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Not that surprising

A Grace Hopper nanosecond would probably be a good start for an explanation.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

If you get a subsidiary peak you know that some of the results under it are wrong but not which.

See Boeing.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: I love demands to do the impossible

Here's a classic to start you on your journey: https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-04-03

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: I love demands to do the impossible

And for elonmac, many happy hours of catching up.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

How do they award the Order of the Thistle?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

If they wanted to they could just go out and buy it.

Most organizations hit by ransomware would pay up if hit again

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Incredible

People object to victim blaming but in such circumstances - well, if you're going ot paint a target on your back, what do you expect?

Page: