* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32759 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Dialogs.... time for

Long go SWMBO was working in a QC lab. Her supervisor changed the pH results to be acceptable. It didn't change the pH of the product.

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Re: Users, no matter how long they might use an application, never mind their instructions

"Move back slowly until the last straight kerbstone"

No kerstones, just a dry stone wal...

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Re: automated diagnosis

It's one thing automating that in-house. When a supplier does that it starts verging on looking creepy and in general the more security concious of us object. Having the user run diagnostics is one way round it. The other is to dump the information and pop up a dialog for the user to email it, showing the user exactly what's in the email so they can check.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: users eh?

I've no objection to studding a baseball bat with nails but a cricket bat? No.

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Re: I was once responsible ....

MOTD only showed until the main application menu appeared. It's possible, of course, that some elements of the main application could have got burned in...

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Re: Just like me and trackpads

"Even managed to settle down MeDearOldMum's recalcitrant unit "

I thought you were your MeDearOldMum's recalcitrant unit.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Return code ignored

When I wor nobbut a lad I spent school holidays working in a worsted mill. In practice anyone in the workflow to produce a piece of cloth was inspecting the previous stage's work because if it wasn't right they couldn't do their own job properly. That was what enabled the mills to produce a high quality produce.

Applying that principle to the situation you describe I'd say it was the programmer's job to question the spec otherwise the product is likely to be industry standard crap.

In practice pretty well any programming work I did was under what I suppose is now an extinct title of "analyst programmer". On a rare occasion where someone had delivered an alleged specification I spent quite a while chasing him to clarify ambiguities.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Simples...

And if you're doing something more complex you might need to save the work in its interim form to resume later. With several different layers in use .xcf is what you need. Exporting to .png or whatever is just what you don't need.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

I wonder if the solution to this would be to check if the problem is fixed, redisplay the dialog if it isn't, check once more, if still not fixed display a dialog with a fixed time of, say 15 seconds, check again and if not close down the machine, which the fixed time dialog will have warned about.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: I was once responsible ....

Back in the days of character terminals we used MOTD to broadcast a message at logon reminding users to log off. This ended with This includes you $NameOfMostRecentOffenderWe'dHadToLogOut It was remarkably effective. Eventually we had to remove that bit because the last name had been there so long.

Photon fantastic: James Webb Space Telescope spies its first starlight

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Re: I'm not worried any more

Actually I now understand the reference to fractions of microns in a previous article . In effect they're polishing the mirror now. In spaaace.

Amazon stretches working life of its servers an extra year, for AWS and its own ops

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"longevity provides no incentive to replace them if they are still working"

In fact, if it ain't broke....

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Re: AD Revenue

The Continue without Prime link will be 1 pixel high and white on white in future.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: "servers have a useful life of five years"

I suppose H/W failure might be due to failed electrolytics rather than semiconductors. There must be a trade-off between depreciation and disruption due to failure of in-use servers.

What's driving the extended lifetimes at Amazon and Google (reported a couple of days ago) may be that shortage of components is demanding it. If thay can't get enough components and have to chopse between not expanding capacity and putting up with more in-use failures it's not hard to work out which way they'll go. They're making a virtue out of a necessity.

Facebook fined peanuts after Giphy staff quit and firm didn't tell UK competition regulators

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

The best answer would be fines to be stated only as fractions of global turnover. It's one thing to set the upper limit on that basis but quite another to have the regulator actually think in those terms rather than currency units. And make the lower limit a "material" fraction.

Have you tried restarting? Reinstalling? Upgrading? Moving house and changing your identity?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Occasionally, you get a straight answer

The link might be useful for more the paywalls. Sometimes there's a search result quoting some of the page but the link goes nowhere and it's not on archive.org. It might well retrieve content there as well.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Ask other users in our forums...

"Larger companies often have so many customers that there isn't enough room on the planet for the call centre that would be big enough to deal with them"

The solution to that is to get stuff right first time enough times that the calls per customer are few enough that you can find room for a call centre.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Ask other users in our forums...

It's a bit annoying that you have to explain to an ISP help desk what Usenet is, that it's not a web site but has its own protocol and that it is actually part of their bundle of services.

And, yes, there were one or two very old posts on the forum with a slight hint that it might be DNS - which it was.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"It's rather like owning a domain for email"

And I just got a reminder of why this is a good idea.

A spam on one of my domain mailboxes. Hmmm. Who did I give that one to? Obviously set up in December but I can't find any emails sent to it. Then I had a vague recollection of being asked for an email address in the course of a phone call but neither SWMBO nor I can remember which of us was asked let alone who by. Pity as now I don't know who to hold a grudge against but if whoever it was actually does need to contact us they'll get their email bounced with advice that flogging an email address you need to a spammer isn't good for business.

If they really need to get in touch they'll need to find some other way of doing it. Very apologetically.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Toyota have decided that using the heated seats in their cars requires a yearly subscription."

That possessive pronoun tells you a lot about Toyota.

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Re: A is for a certain online bank

OTOH if I were signing up for a trial I'd want to give them a disposable email address in case they turn out to be spammers.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

And then demanded £40 for the privelege, despite admitting the equipment they supplied was the issue.

You didn't try the phrase "Not of merchantable quality"?

When I was on Be their router stayed in its box, I had an existing ADSL router which I kept using. On moving to FTTC I switched to the PlusNet provided fibre modem and router. However they subsequently tied down the router which stopped me updating my DHCP settings, something I reckoned was none of their business so I've replaced both with my own fibre modem/router.

On the whole I prefer to buy my own H/W provided it's not the ISP's branded home hub type of box. It removes it from the ISPs control and makes it easier to switch ISP should that become necessary. It's rather like owning a domain for email; I might use an MSP to serve the domain but I can switch registrar and/or MSP if things start to go downhill.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Occasionally, you get a straight answer

"their customer support was commendably honest"

Whilst it's good to find people like that in business I can't help thinking "If only they'd gone into politics instead."

Polly wants a snapper? Parrot swipes GoPro for sweet views of New Zealand's Fiordland

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Sometimes you just get fed up with tourists and their bloody cameras everywhere.

Privacy Shield: EU citizens might get right to challenge US access to their data

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If the data subject has dealings with some business or organisation which collects PII then that entity should be solely and directly responsible to the data subject for their own misdeeds or those of any third party for whom they are an agent or to whom they outsource. The data subject should not have to deal with any third party or any foreign jurisdiction to obtain redress. In the event of that entity ceasing to exist the responsibility should devolve personally to its former directors, officers or owners.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: True in every way in fact

To a large extent I think it's a matter of enforcement. GDPR lays down a lot of requirements but it doesn't provide any means of pro-actively enforcing them. It takes an individual complaint to go to court to say whether such and such an arrangement invalidates them. Trade negotiators, of course, have traditionally wanted to do a bit of hand-waving to ignore them and it's taken the likes of Max Schrems to get any movement - hopefully that's changing.

I think if compliance really starts to be taken seriously there'll have to be some sort of arm's length arrangement if the US corporations want to stay in the game. Rather than establish EU data centres and/or subsidiaries they come to a franchise arrangement. An EU owned. managed and staffed company operates a DC using IP and branding licensed from the US parent under a contract under EU law (a difficult concept for US governments to grok) specifically limiting data transfers to those required to perform transactions.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"it would give EU citizens more privacy rights in the US than Americans currently enjoy."

Does that mean twice as good? As in twice as good as nothing?

I doubt the ink will be dry on any agreement before Max Schrems' next lawsuit goes in.

Having taken back control we in the UK, of course, have nothing to worry about.

That's a signature move: How $320m in Ether was stolen from crypto biz Wormhole

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: So, ETH was lost to bad code, and now new ETH has magically been added

What's the percentage of Dunning-Krugerands stolen via buggy S/W vs similar losses of fiat currency?

European watchdog: All data collected about users via ad-consent popup system must be deleted

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Current ads on Amazon are

I think your experience demonstrates clearly that the advertising networks are just selling junk data. The Amazon ads you see on Facebook are the result of Amazon being sold eyeballs characterised as having particular characteristics. Amazon don't know that they actually belong to a customer whose purchasing history is available.

Your experience also demonstrates that, like all current search engines, Amazon's search engine is pretty crap and would rather throw an irrelevant result at you rather than nothing at all. I was using a better search engine - written in FORTRAN, I believe, back in the 1980s. I think the difference was that the old engine was written to a requirement to produce good results. Modern search engines are written to a requirement to produce results.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Contextual advertising...

"Google thinks I'm a retired person with arthritis, at risk from shingles and that I have a newborn baby... I am not retired, I don't have arthritis, shingles isn't a risk factor and I don't have a newborn baby!"

To rephrase that: Google has data to sell to advertisers to indicate that you're these things. Advertisers will buy it because they've no data that says differently. Google, therefore, will be able to keep taking their money.

Google aren't trying to sell you anything. They're not even interested in selling you anything. All they're interested in is selling advertising to advertisers and the more they can charge the happier they are. That data is worth as much to Google as an equivalent amount of accurate data because they can charge for it regardless. Whether it's worth as much to the numpties who buy it is a different matter.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

And, of course, because we've taken back control the EU court decisions don't count here.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Thank goodness we've taken back control and don't have to put up with this officiousness.

Grab some tissues: Meta's share price tanks after Facebook emits latest figures

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Re: Nice, but that now ?

"give me an alternative and ill gladly jump ship."

Email? Telephone? Even in these days, face-to-face meeting (you did say "in the area")?

How did you communicate with them before FB?

Jeff Bezos adds some more overheads to his $485m yacht by taking down historic bridge

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Meh

"The only people better off are yacht manufacturers"

This is true providing "manufacturers" includes the shipyard workers and the suppliers of maerials and components. Then ultimately you have to include the shops where the workers spent their money and the tax authorities.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Can't they remove the masts, simply?

"This shipyard has mega yachts before"

This is the root of the problem. Nice as it would be to simply tell Bezos "Nice boat, but you'll just have to sail it up and down the canal because it can't go any further" reality is that they probably want to keep the shipyard in business contributing to the city's economy. Longer term they should maybe look at relocating the shipyard as being preferable to keeping dismantling the bridge or losing the business.

Of course they could replace the bridge with something equally iconic but designed to open. If all else fails a sightseeing visit to the Tower of London might help.

Court of Appeal ruling offers hope for UK umbrella firm workers chasing holiday pay

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Re: Lies

Probably a few other incentives in play.

Reputedly the IR has tried this on for years and been rebuffed. Their PAYE system is a system designed by employees on a payroll for employees on a payroll. Payrolls are what they understand.

Also the Paymaster General of the time, AKA Red Dawn, was from the left of the party. She would be unlikely to look favourably on workers who weren't unionised.

50 lines of Bash to bring a Wordle fan out of their shell

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"And if we really fancy a text-based challenge, perhaps we'll fire up Vim."

Easier than getting out of a Windows update according to https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-update-needs-eight-hours

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They're built in? That means the NYT paid about $400 a word. Their regular journalists must be fuming.

America's EARN IT Act attacking Section 230 is back – and once again threatening the internet, critics say

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"claiming that online service providers are disinterested "

Disinterested or uninterested? If they're disinterested they could weigh up arguments and come to a decision without having any motivations of their own to affect that decision. If they're uninterested they wouldn't bother.

Oracle Linux appears somewhere unexpected: The Windows Store

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I don't expect to see Devuan in that list so I'll just keep running it on bare metal.

Breath of fresh air: v7.3 of LibreOffice boasts improved file importing and rendering

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7,2,5 is now showing as the more extensively tested version.

UK's new Brexit Freedom Bill promises already-slated GDPR reform, easier gene editing rules

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Yes Minister, episode 1. Getting rid of the difficult bit in the title.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: OK.

"you can probably still buy one equally good."

Probably. But maybe it wouldn't be.

How would you know? It would look the same and if there was no requirement to label hormone or antibiotic produced meat there'd be no way of telling.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Marmite

"e.g. in Ireland, where what we call bacon is known as rashers"

I never heard that when I lived in NI. Maybe it's a regional thing.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: OK.

"(also, significant CO2 reduction from less cow-farting, double win!)"

The cow-farting issue is CH4 which is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. The solution to this, of course, is instead of feeding plant material to cows it can be fed to vegetarians so they can produce the CH4 instead. Vegetarian produced CH4 is good for the planet - or something like that.

Comcast fixes broadband cables 'peppered' with holes after Oakland drive-by shooting

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Re: Murrica!

Convolution.

New York Times outlays seven-figure sum for 1,900 lines of JavaScript – yes, we mean Wordle

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Re: In before ...

It's all these kids who had a Spectrum as a birthday present once upon a time now have the mistaken idea that they invented it all. In due course they'll get the same treatment from those who had smartphones when they were children.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: In before ...

"yes pen because of their superior intellect"

SWMBO has an interesting twist on this. She'll hand me a part-done crossword and say "Can you get me any?"

As like as not when I supply an answer she'll say "I'd thought of that one but I haven't written it in."

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: In before ...

Well played, sir!

Attack on Titan: Four Japanese Manga publishers sue Cloudflare

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Don't be silly. It's the best justice money can buy.

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