* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32773 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: As an ex

Then tell him not to moan - didn't ask for extras.

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Re: Seems ok

If it was a friend you'd have installed LibreOffice. You know how it goes: "friends don't let friends..."

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Re: Seems ok

"promptly and conveniently"

And competently. The friend down the pub who would do it for free might just have decided the only way to deal with it would be to reinstall, reformatting the disk.

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Re: Seems ok

How close a friend? A best mate or someone he just knew slightly? We're not told. If you start doing that sort of thing for a friend you'll be surprised how many friends you've suddenly acquired, and how many relatives, not necessarily bereaved, they have. Fifty quid sounds like mates rates.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

The secretary had it right. The cost was a lot less than the alternative. What's more, when he agreed the price he did so because the result was worth at least what he was being asked.

Fish mentality: If The Rock told you to eat flies, would you buy my NFT?

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At a guess the fish was previously very unhappy because it didn't have any of the cover it would have had in its natural environment. It now has somewhere to hide and defend and this is being interpreted as looking grumpy.

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Re: Jean-Luc Mélenchon

"His stated political goal is to stop someone like him becoming a millionaire like he did."

Pulling the ladder up behind him.

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For some value of lucky. Unless he gets to sell it to someone even luckier.

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I doubt there's much difference between actors and actresses influencing the gullible to go vegan or to eat insects. It's the same principle. If the money's right it might even be the same actors and actresses.

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Re: Lab-on-a-fish

Why not? Phish as a Serivce is already a thing.

Microsoft dogs Strontium domains to stop attacks on Ukraine

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Re: Cool, but why are Microsoft doing this?

And why not the authorities in whatever country the servers are located?

Vital UK customs system outage contributes to travel chaos at its borders

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Re: Bit late to blame brexit

"Its not like this gov hasnt given plenty of opportunities for an opposition party of any size to bash them hard."

I think they've had a series of lucky breaks in the way of things getting steadily worse. Covid came along at just the right time to confound the effects of Brexit. Partygate almost had them sunk and then Dick threw BoJo a lifeline as from one clinger on in post* to another, by effectively delaying the Grey report. In his SOP BoJo rewarded that by throwing her under a bus. And then the Ukraine conflict came along.

* A post she shouldn't even have been in since managing the killing of Charles de Menezesz.

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Re: @Spaceman9

"And who is in charge of the single market?"

Its members, of course.

Which we were one of but no longer are. However for many UK businesses its members are an essential market.

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Re: a clique of aristocrats

fabulously wealthy friends and non-dom family

FTFY

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Re: @Spaceman9

"If Scotland wanted independence they should have let England vote too."

That's one thing we agree on.

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Re: @Spaceman9

"You do realise project fear turned into a disappointing damp squib for the EU and fanatical remainers?"

ISTR you saying the EU was about to collapse so get out while we can. EU still there, UK starting to look as if bits might drop off, such as NI.

Microsoft hikes prices for non-profit customers, ends on-prem software grants

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This is the right time to update our pricing. Although there are still questions and uncertainty, we see clear signs of economic recovery around the world. Moreover, over the past few years our competitors have increased prices, in some cases aggressively. We simply have a better story and proven track record of reinvestment in the product and consistently delivering new value to our customers.

Because we can.

European Right to Repair resolution headed for vote

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Re: My wishlist

Why? He's not going to get that wish-list there. He might in the EU.

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Re: (Yet) another regulation the UK will need to abide by

Of course it is. It's another idea beneficial to the populace that the EU is in favour of but the con-artists who now constitute HMG are against. As far as I can make out their main motivation seems to be that they found the EU's pro-individual, attitudes, especially the idea of a supra-national court protecting human rights, irksome. What does that tell you about their intentions?

If you couldn't work that out, note that they intend to repeal the Human Rights Act. Yes, they're going to replace it with a "Bill of Rights". That probably means they get the rights, we get the bill.

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Re: (Yet) another regulation the UK will need to abide by

And those who did vote were almost equally split between leave and remain. Although the Brexiteers seem to insist that "we" voted for it - including those of who voted against. We said it was a stupid idea then and even if we're in the same boat now we're certainly not prepared to go along with the idea that we're willing passengers.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: (Yet) another regulation the UK will need to abide by

It's a smaller market than the EU. For a UK manufacturer it's a much smaller home market than they had pre-Brexit.

Being the Beeb they couldn't possibly quote names but I think a series of reports referred to the same business. Pre-Brexit he three directors were gung-ho for it. After it happened it turned out that they could no longer sell their product, cheese, to individual consumers in the EU as they used to do. At least they could but the paper-work involved in food products made it impractical when applied to individual orders for consumers. The remainder of the EU had been a significant part of their home market, if not the bulk of it. In the last report I read they were having to spend money they'd intended for a new factory at home on a distribution centre in the EU so they could ship in bulk. Along with a plaintive cry from one of them that this wasn't what they thought they'd voted for.

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Re: (Yet) another regulation the UK will need to abide by

"I think you will find that in the U.K. there is a law that gives consumers a right of repair or replacement and in some instances their money back for up to 6 years."

Just before the car's warranty period expired the little plastic button on the handbrake leaver broke up. Clearly internal stresses - the fragments didn't quite fit back together. Oddly enough the dealer carrying out the last in-warranty service shortly after overlooked this despite being told.

Yes, I can but the part to repair it. The part to repair is isn't the plastic button. It's the entire handbrake assembly at £86 IIRC.

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Re: (Yet) another regulation the UK will need to abide by

If only its home market were bigger, say the whole of the EU, and was protected from foreign imports that didn't comply.

Alternatively, the UK could duplicate the legislation locally. It would then receive the same protection from non-compliant imports and sell compliant products to the rest of the EU encumbered only by all the other complications of the EU now being an export market instead of an extended home market. Of course to do that means effectively accepting legislation that we had no input into.

Remind me again how freedom from EU legislation was going to enable us to take back control and make us more competitive.

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Re: (Yet) another regulation the UK will need to abide by

Absolutely. Nobody can complain about the consequences of what "we" voted for. It's not as if "we" weren't told because we told "us" lots of times so it must have been an informed decision..

Google focuses Lens on combined image and text searching

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Oh goody. Yet another way to interpret search to find a lot of things I didn't ask for to bury the few that match - or hide the fact that there weren't any.

Colocation firm Cyxtera may put itself up for sale

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"hotting up of the datacenter market"

Does this mean that datacentre investors aren't content to just collect dividends? Do they want to sell on and on, loading the operation with more debt each time until the operation collapses under its own weight those who financed the last sale have effectively put money they'll never get back into the pockets of all the previous owners?

Atlassian Jira, Confluence outage persists two days on

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Re: The Cloud...

Maybe we should update that along the lines of "Other peoples' computers who have control over you."

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Re: The vocabulary of our age

Or "not more than 100%".

South Yorkshire to test fiber broadband through water pipes

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Re: I would just want to be sure...

It might mean all the crap gets flushed out.

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Re: common ducting

"It needs the utility regulators and local authorities to bang heads together"

Very, vary hard. The local authorities are amongst those whose heads need to be banged, otherwise they'll conduct one of their rare resurfacings just before the utilities dig it up.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Just as well they aren't going via Wombwell. (Yes, it's a place, yes it's in the Peoples' Republic of South Yorkshire).

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Re: Where's Elon when you need him?

"All that megaherz in the water though, homoeopaths will kick up a stink."

It'd only work if you dilute it enough. How many litres per hertz would that have to be?

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"between Barnsley and Penistone"

They're going to have problems with their press releases blocked by the geographically challenged.

First Light says it's hit nuclear fusion breakthrough with no fancy lasers, magnets

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Perhaps a useful metric would be the ratio between the number of years away and the half life of the wast product.

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100 grams of tritium contains about the same number of atoms as 8 kilos of plutonium.

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Re: Ludicrous speed

At first glance it seemed quite reasonable. I read it as 6.5 knots. Must clean my glasses.

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They could manufacture some Trimphones as a by-product.

This may seem weird but don't give us all the chip funding, say Intel and friends

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Or cover all the niches so other countries don't get a foothold.

How do China's cyber-spies snoop on governments, NGOs? Probably like this

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A good two step strategy would be:

1. Run a honeypot operation feeding false information.

2. Fail to conceal that you were taking step 1n without actually making clear what it covered. This applies even if you didn't actually take step 1.

IBM deliberately misclassified mainframe sales to enrich execs, lawsuit claims

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"It names as defendants not only IBM but current and former executives including Rometty, former CFO Martin J. Schroeter (now CEO of IBM spin-off Kyndryl), current CFO James J. Kavanaugh, and current CEO Arvind Krishna."

IBM as an entity, like any other business, is owned by its investors. Why do investors persist in suing themselves? It they win all they succeed in doing is routing money from themselves to themselves less the amounts paid to two lots of lawyers - net, they pay two lots of lawyers If they lose they don't shit money from themselves to themselves but they still pay two lots of lawyers. It's lose-lose. Is there some remote possibility that this behaviour is incited by lawyers?

OTOH, suing the executives and maybe the board makes sense if the effect was to enrich specific individuals by pursuing policies detrimental to the shareholders.

Feds slay dark-web souk Hydra: Servers and $25m in crypto-coins seized

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Re: Here's an idea

A completely un-prohibited market in tobacco allowed millions to die of lung cancer and other respiratory diseases - including those whose smoking was only passive. That also was a lose-lose proposition.

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Re: Here's an idea

"Stop trying to police what people do with their own bodies."

But also stop inducing others to do things to their bodies brains which will do them long term harm.

Microsoft brings Cloud PCs and local desktops together in Windows 365

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Re: "Windows 365 Offline" will make it possible to work with or without an internet connection

I'm pretty sure the Windows "privacy" policy wins that.

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Re: "Windows 365 Offline" will make it possible to work with or without an internet connection

Why not open a Windows Bank? You pay all your income into it and in return you're allowed to use Windows and you get some pocket money back providing you behave yourself and wash the car every week.

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Re: I don't get it

"Like, why is it 5 more."

Less accurate?

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Re: Scarey

Is that "need" or "want"? The two are often confused.

Block claims ex-employee downloaded customer data after leaving firm

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"in this instance these reports were accessed without permission after their employment ended."

It depends on what you mean by "without permission". Computer didn't say "No".

'Virtually no difference' between AI and humans in diagnosing prediabetes

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Re: The great cost reduction potential

"The model is paid once"

Given today's trends in software licensing that's probably once a day or maybe once a scan. And the rates will keep going up.

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Which simple task is given to the half-trained assistant? Preferably the screening task so no role for the AI.

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