Posts by Doctor Syntax

"And 1g is a backronym for cellular mobile telephones."

Your 1g is, in fact, the first GSM mobile telephone system. It wasn't the first cellular system; that was TACS. And TACS wasn't the first mobile system. Back in the mid-80s the bit of BT that eventually became part of O2 still had a product called System 4 running alongside the newly introduced TACS.

Re: Blue sky thinking?

"And this is supposed to be government by a party known for its financial responsibility."

It got taken over.

Re: Remember...

"I expect the EU will be added to the list come January."

For a substantial part of the current HMG it's been on their list for some time except, of course, when they're looking for somewhere to go on holiday.

Re: National Cyber Security Should Investigate Government Systems

"handing over contracts and Intellectual Property to Huawei."

Would that be the Huawei that has a large number of telecoms patents of its own? Or the Huawei that was about to establish an R&D base in Cambridge? Or was it the Huawei which, alone of the telecoms equipment providers, made arrangements to have its software open for examination to UK security*?

At the very least we should demand any alternative equipment providers be as open as Huawei has been compelled to be. Who knows - if that were the situation we could actually make informed decisions on the basis of technical merit.

* Who seem to have found poor coding standards but nothing malicious.

That would be a political decision. It's not a basis to make a technical one.

Re: Reminds me

It's certainly normal weather up here in the North.

Re: Reminds me

Good idea but you need a supply of freshly made and inexpensive ones to replace those that fail.

Re: Make no mistake

OTOH after the first, or at least the first few, outages the ass should be what the manager who made the cloud decision is out on.

A defect which is active is more than "latent". Another weasel word on which they should be called out.

Re: Do you remember?

"which seems to mean exactly the same thing."

That depended on what the thin client was connected to. If it was some external service then, yes, it was the same thing. If it was to your own service, then no.

Re: Why is this differnet from Companies House

You're assuming that domain owners are corporate bodies that make such filings elsewhere. Many of us here have our own domains for our own purposes such as email addresses and are entitled to privacy in this as in any other respect. Individual privacy is regarded as a basic right in Europe. Your use of SCC suggests your expectations are US-centric where you're denied such rights.

Re: Whois lookups used to be useful

This is exactly why I suggested above that corporate registrants should be disclosed in whois. The baby has been thrown out with the bathwater.

It might be mandatory but if the domain owner chooses not to do so it's a bit difficult to work out who they are.

If BigCo has their website flogging their rather dubious products they may well register some "review" site which habitually praises them and do so anonymously because they can.

I vaguely remember receiving spam fa few times from somebody flogging print services. They put their limited co name on the email but not their registered number. I think there were also some errors on their website - possibly about address - so I grassed them up to Companies' House who didn't fine them but "helped them" to fix their errors. The spam stopped.

Re: Clarity

Actually, it's only illegal as regards actual people resident in the EU. It isn't as regards corporate registrants but nevertheless they're hidden because of it.

Re: Good analysis

"In any case, programming will go on."

If Oracle win any vendor that wants to see its libraries used will have to make very specific declarations as to the ability of developers to include the API's declarations in their code. It will be interesting to see how Oracle themselves deal with that. On the whole it'll probably be safer not to develop in Java and probably a good idea to develop outside the jurisdiction of the US.

Re: Nine Laypeople

There seems to be a widespread view, which I find very odd, that judges live in isolation from the rest of the world and know only about the law.

A moment's thought should lead to the realisation that all manner of cases are brought before them. As a defunct Sunday paper used to claim, all human life is there.

Re: Nine Seniles

I take it you've not spent much time in courts listening to legal arguments.

Re: Half way home

"we'll find out the reality that we don't"

Bu, but, but...we've taken back control.

Re: Not for much longer

Cummings doesn't need to explain anything to BoJo. He just tells him.

Re: Not for much longer

"The UK will be at theoretical liberty to go its own way, but the practical consequence...."

And you think the current HMG gives a damn about consequences?

Like the next US govt, the next UK govt. is going to have a massive foreign relations and trade repair job on its hands.

Re: Nothing rhymed

" the illegality of these mass surveillance systems was known long before"

In legal terms it's not "known" until a court rules on it.

Re: RDBMS vs Excel

the last one said “This page intentionally left blank.”

Surely that should be the zeroth one.

It's the "and dirty" bit that catches people out.

Re: Is my memory failing..

"CSV is so useful that I'm more than a little surprised that a decently flexible and configurable CSV module has never surfaced in either the C or Java standard libraries."

TStringlist, the Swiss Army Knife text handling class in Object Pascal (Delphi and Lazarus) has options for treating data as CSV.

Re: Or

"The real way to decarbonise the transport sector" is to need less of it. Until recent events we've seen London workers commuting in from sillier and sillier distances. Now London's complaining about all the money lost from lack of footfall but they've been part of the problem, not part of the solution.