* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32768 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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Amazon’s cloudy Macs cost $25.99 a day. 77 days of usage would buy you your own Mac

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DTBYO

Days to buy your own. A new and useful metric for renting anything, cloudy or not.

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Re: Always do the sums

I thought that as far as Macs were concerned supporting the box itself actually is the cost of the box - if anything goes wrong you're supposed to get another.

More seriously, if you're concerned about the security and monitoring of a box do those concerns really go away for one that's connected to your network but not within your physical reach? As to patching this is entirely out of your control and you have to rely on the third party and this particular option, AIUI, is specifically not on the current OS version.

President Trump's rushed-through H-1B techie visa crackdown halted by federal judge

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Re: This will end up in SCOTUS

"the outgoing Trump administration is bequeating the incoming Biden administration a huge heap of problems"

AFAICS it's been doing that for the last four years.

When it comes to taxing tech giants, America is out, France is in, Canada and Indonesia are going their own way

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Global consensus might simply amount to everyone except the US.

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Re: With Covid emptying States' coffers, and those companies seeing increasing revenues....

"who do you think will end up paying, Amazon customers or Amazon shareholders?"

In the first case who do you think the customers will blame, Amazon or government?

In the second, how many Amazon shareholders vote in French elections?

HPE to move HQ from Silicon Valley to Texas, says Lone Star State is 'attractive' for recruitment, retaining staff

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Isn't that the part of Texas with the particularly patent-friendly court?

Arecibo Observatory brings forward 'controlled demolition' plans by collapsing all by itself

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Just a thought - is it possible some administrative function has been paying insurance on it for the last 60 years?

Scotch eggs ascend to the 'substantial meal' pantheon as means to pop to pub for a pint during pernicious pandemic

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Re: Why do you need rules?

It's taken me a good while to see the parallel with life in N Ireland. On the one hand there was a terrorist campaign which could kill you but on the other you had to get on with life. So there were rules and the bulk of the population got along with them, the exceptions mostly being those who were part of the problem.

There were considerable differences. For a start the overall risk was lower and the risk distribution was different. A big difference was that it was impossible to be in denial; if your regular pub was a smoking ruin you could see it was a smoking ruin. You can't see a virus so there's scope for Covidiots to tell themselves and those around them that it doesn't exist.

I don't see how we get round the last problem except the Covidiots discovering things the hard way. For the rest of us, however, we do need rules because they are essentially a codification of what the risks of infection are and how to avoid them. The rules will evolve as the mechanisms of infection are better understood and as treatments improve and vaccination is introduced.

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Re: It's all bollocks

It depends very much on the force/Chief Constable. Some have been very unhappy about this from Lockdown 1.0. It stems from the fact that we have a government that doesn't do detail, doesn't think things through. Right from the start policy has been chasing events instead of trying to get in front of them. I see they're now getting round to the idea that contact tracing should lead to testing and that the app should be able to provide payments for those it tells to isolate just like the manual tracing. And - who knows - they might even get round to deciding whether or not vaccination certificates will be issued.

Cayman Islands investment fund left entire filestore viewable by world+dog in unsecured Azure blob

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Let's take pharmaceuticals - my daughter works in clinical trials.

You might think that the end product is a medicine. So it is, but before that hits the prescription pads e-prescriptions there's another product - a huge stack of documentation to be submitted for approval. That documentation isn't collated by sorting through bits of paper, it's put together on computers including laptops of people like my daughter.

Those laptops are going to contain personal information about the trial patients - subject to GDPR - and including medical history. I'm not familiar with the regulations regarding that but I assume that it is subject to regulation over and above GDPR. The results of the trial will affect the share price so it's going to be subject to financial regulation as well. Beside all that the fact that it's also company commercial in confidence information is almost a minor consideration. As the trials workers are apt to be based where the patients are and not necessarily in head office there's also a need for secure communications with HO.

Any pharmaceutical business that doesn't think it isn't also an IT business to handle all that with an appropriate degree of securely needs to think again.

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Does electricity have the same risk profile?

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Oops.

I wonder how many tax authorities have spotted it.

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IT Angle

any other small firm whose think their main business is not focused on IT

When a firm is dependent on IT it's an IT business whether it thinks it is or not. This sort of thing is the result of thinking it isn't.

On the 11th day of Christmas TalkTalk took from me... the email address of my company

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"no chance of updating the accounts of all the contacts and businesses that use them."

You don't have to write them individual emails, send out an email to multiple recipients but just remember to put them all in BCC. OK? But we all know what's going to happen, don't we.

One thing to consider - send out the email from the old address, otherwise it'll look like a scam to some recipients. In fact it shod look like a scam to all of them except fellow victims.

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"Most (small) non-tech business I know couldn't give the slightest shit about computers, phones, internet connections, domains, websites and all that malarky."

OTOH many small non-tech businesses very often do care about branding and a domain name is part of that.

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Re: I just can't believe for a business service they think just over 1 month is enough notice

Thinking and caring are two different things.

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Even my non-IT daughter, in her short-lived business venture, without any prompting from me, set up her own domain for a mail address even though the mail was redirected to Hotmail/Outlook/Live/$CurrentMSBrand.

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" or register a domain and roll your own."

There are service providers who will act as registrars and mail service providers. Having your own domain does not mean having to run your own server.

A business with a gmail, hotmail or whatever address rather than its own domain raises a flag with me (and it's surprising - or maybe not - how many offers of web site design, app design, SEO etc come from allaged businesses without a domain to call their own). A TalkTalk address would have raised an even bigger flag.

It's better to burn out than fade Huawei: UK rolls out schedule for rip-and-replace rules

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I believe you can buy good encryption gear from Swiss manufacturers.

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"The sanctions are not politically motivated. They are financially motivated."

A distinction without a difference.

PC makers warn of battle for air freight capacity, will have to fight for cargo space with... the COVID-19 vaccine

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"The world needs more problem solvers"

And what we get is more MBAs.

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Re: Excuses, excuses

"does Huawei operate an airline?"

You couldn't carry computers in a Huawei airline. They might be infected with back doors in transit and constitute a massive security risk the moment they were unloaded.

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Excuses, excuses

"The cost of air freight has been rising all year because, quite obviously, there have been very few planes in the sky."

If there are fewer planes flying to carry passengers then taking the seats out provides more planes to carry freight. Or have the passengers been subsidising the freight?

AWS reveals it broke itself by exceeding OS thread limits, sysadmins weren’t familiar with some workarounds

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Re: I think they are Nerfing...

Like the man said, too many points of failure.

For every disastrous rebrand, there is an IT person trying to steer away from the precipice

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Re: It's not just our business

The Snopes article itself has a couple of issues in left-pond English: 'dinette set' is meaningless - or at least its meaning has to be reverse engineered and 'an English speaker would describe a broken-down car by saying that it “doesn’t run” rather than it “doesn’t go,”'. The latter might be true of an American speaker but but hereabouts "doesn't go" would be the norm.

Tricky stuff, language.

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Re: UK Crayon Departments are just as bad

Accident or intent?

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Re: Oh yes...

"So I did it his way and he was surprised that it didn't work as he'd hoped."

IT's ultimate sanction - giving the user/customer exactly what they demanded.

Calls for 'right to repair' electronics laws grow louder across Europe

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Re: @Dwarf

" the best you can hope for is for them to Darwin themselves without taking anyone along with them."

And preferably before they reproduce.

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Re: @Dwarf

"Often you can only make judgement calls on that based on a company's reputation, and that only tends to change over a scale of years or decades rather than the lifetime of a product."

The reality can depart from reputation PDQ - but only downwards. Change of management or sale of the brand is all that's needed.

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Re: @Dwarf

"The wiring harnes decided to burn itself out at the main control panel."

No - just no!

I've replaced the main oven element twice and the fan once. It always happens about this time of year and the original element went on Christmas morning - now I keep a spare to hand. But the wiring harness....maybe I should order one now, just in case.

If I pedal faster and feed it spinach, my robot barman might pull more pints

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Re: reached an age

I'd rather stay as far away from such a driver as possible.

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Re: Mate

they seemed more interested in obtaining my some details

You don't have to give them yours. But I agree completely about lack of upfront prices. It's a warning. Possibly just a warning of an incompetent sales organisation but if they're incompetent the rest may be as well.

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Re: I want to get something to help me walk

And don't have an OS map in a plastic envelope slung round your neck.

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"If it's good enough for Popeye"

But do you want forearms that look like you've got a dozen baguettes tucked up your shirt sleeves?

TikTok given another week to sort out how to sell itself

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If I were running TikTok I'd be sorely tempted to:

1. Take the money

2. Deliver a barebones software system on the grounds that China's export controls forbid export of anything more

3. Withhold the user data on privacy grounds

4. Start another one next week. How does TikyTaky sound as a new name?

After demonstrating a facial recognition system that works on cows, moo-chine learning pioneer seeks growth funding

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Usually in these reports its the other end of the animal that's more appropriate.

Salesforce reportedly poised to scoop Slack for billions

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Missed chance

"Scoop up Slack"? Surely it should have been "take in the Slack".

Spending Review: We spy a stray £60m – is that all you can spare to help 5G market recover from UK kicking out Huawei?

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"We'd have liked to have given you more but Covid...."

Expect more of this in years to come. Every bad effect of dubious govt. policy will be blamed on Covid.

How the US attacked Huawei: Former CEO of DocuSign and Ariba turned diplomat Keith Krach tells his tale

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Re: Why 5G ?

"The very, very vast majority of phone users will not downgrade from 4G to gprs."

They'll also complain when they can't get a signal of any sort. So where do you place the trade-off? Or, to make it personal, any time you find yourself without a signal do you consider it a good trade-off for somebody somewhere else to have 5G?

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Re: 2 months to go

I know there's a tendency for threads to drift OT but don't you think you're pushing it a bit too much?

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Re: Which People ?

"governments don't trust the cloudy office stuff"

HMG seems to. That should be a strong enough warning to the rest of us.

AWS admits to 'severely impaired' services in US-EAST-1, can't even post updates to Service Health Dashboard

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"elemetry from IoT devices"

Every cloud has a silver lining.

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Re: what a great day

When something goes wrong it's still your problem, you've just put the ability to solve it into somebody else's hands.

Amazon's ad-hoc Ring, Echo mesh network can mooch off your neighbors' Wi-Fi if needed – and it's opt-out

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Re: The real problem is the data caps

"It benefits ISPs which get to charge each user for a shared resource."

I may have misunderstood this but the implication of it seems to be that the internet is just there and wouldn't cost users any money without the wicked ISPs charging.

That shared resource cost money to create, costs money to be continually expanded to keep up with demand and costs money to pay people to look after it (and the users) and energy to run. Those costs are also shared and that's why you need to pay your ISP.

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What could possibly go wrong?

And do Amazon care?

Comcast to impose 1.2TB-a-month broadband download limits across more of America from next year

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Re: 1.2TB a Month??

"not for cloud sync of photos between every device"

Keep that one at home. Pi, USB disk, NextCloud or OwnCloud. Next/OwnCLoud client on each device.

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Re: Competition from Verizon

That's competition. You're free to move to the other area.

Intel chief pens congratulatory letter to President-elect Biden urging work on immigration and domestic manufacturing

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The trouble with complex is that when it gets beyond certain limits nobody can understand it well enough which raises the spectre of undesirable side effects.

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Dear Mr Trump/Biden (delete where applicable)

European recommendations following Schrems II Privacy Shield ruling cast doubt on cloud encryption practices

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Re: What about Office Suites?

So more or less as expected. Thanks.

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