* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32768 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

Page:

RuneScape bloke was wrongly sacked after reading veep's salary details on office printer

Doctor Syntax Silver badge
FAIL

It's difficult to see how they could have made more determined efforts to fail.

Initial carelessness in either printing it out unaware (a possible explanation for not collecting it) or failing to collect a deliberate print out.

Taking umbrage that something left in plain sight had been remarked on.

Not expecting it to be discussed.

Taming more umbrage when it was.

Picking on one employee.

Not being able to conduct disciplinary proceedings to a standard that would keep them out of court (probably an impossibility anyway in the circumstances but they seem to have made outstanding efforts in this regard).

Not settling ensuring that they did end up in court going full Streisand.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"As soon as it was found it should have been put in the confidential waste bin."

When first seen there might have been a reasonable expectation that the owner was on his way to collect it.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: When it gets as far as a tribunal ruling

There must be a public interest (both types) in releasing details where the employee won but redacting the employee's name. Otherwise how would we know Oracle were being sued for discriminatory practices?

Oracle finally responds to wage discrimination claims… by suing US Department of Labor

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

So they're admitting they discriminate.

UK political parties fall over themselves to win tech contractor vote by pledging to review IR35

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

According to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50547793 Labour plan to end bogus self-employment" so maybe that's how they plan to abolish IR35. You will be directly employed irrespective of whether you or your employer want that to be the case.

Not that I believe any of it. This has been the worst election for unfulfillable promises that I can remember - and that includes N Irish elections as well as UK.

Internet Society's Vint 'father of the 'net' Cerf dodges dot-org sell-off during public Q&A

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

“Although .org has often been thought of as a ‘home of non-profits,’ the domain was not actually defined that way,” he wrote, citing IETF document RFC 1591 from 1994.

He should have been more careful what he quoted. That RFC also says "It is extremely unlikely that any other TLDs will be created."

Irish eyes aren't smiling after govt blows €1m on mega-printer too big for parliament's doors

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

The Komori website says "Kando: Beyond Expectations".

They're right.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: This reminds me......

We still have a huge - about 5' high, 6' wide - very solid and heavy oak book case we bought at auction soon after we were married. We were only in a second floor flat, not fourth but the stair case had two flights and two landings per floor so it was a tight fit and did I say it was heavy. It's amazing what a few young students can do when they put their minds to it although it still has a scrape of paint from the staircase wall.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Details

In the early days of commercial computers David Brown Tractors got one, probably an Elliot. It was too heavy for the lift but they arranged to haul it up the lift shaft. It broke free from its rope and fell. The bloke who'd tied it on fainted. It must have been a family trait, his daughter was in my class at school and at the mention of the word "blood" keeled over off her lab-stool.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"an integrated, high volume, high quality print publication system"

It will need storage for raw material and the output, distribution and print finishing if the machine doesn't handle that itself. I'd have thought a location off-site in some industrial unit would have been better.

RISC-V business: Tech foundation moving to Switzerland because of geopolitical concerns

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: So obvious, why doesn't everyone do it?

"The people working on it are still mostly in the USA"

The point that Rich 2 was making was the wider one about open source projects in general. People contribute to open source from all over the world. It would be very difficult for the likes of Trump to split out contributions from US citizens. It would, however, be somewhat easier to lean on any US-based infrastructure including foundations that support projects. Not that it would make too much difference - the projects themselves would be out from under as quickly as you can say "fork".

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: So obvious, why doesn't everyone do it?

"Most startup angel investors are US based"

If you really want a start-up to be showered with silly money Japan and Softbank seems to be the place to go.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Swiss Miss Incorporation

"I've had people tell me rumors they heard"

If the rumours were disadvantageous to RISC-V then the time to go is while they're still rumours. When they're no longer rumours it's too late.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Swiss Miss Incorporation

Corbyn would shove it back up if he got the chance. But 7.8% is lower than either 17% or 19% so the OP's argument still stands.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: So obvious, why doesn't everyone do it?

"Of course anyone involved can explain the niceties of Swiss incorporation and international jurisdiction to the SWAT team coming through their door."

Alternatively they can just leave a note for the SWAT team that they've upped sticks and gone. Oh, I forgot, US citizenship doesn't include the right to travel does it? It's like the middle ages in Europe - you have to get permission from the lord of the manor to move elsewhere.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Subtle but brilliant.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: So obvious, why doesn't everyone do it?

"I've said before that I don't understand why so many open source projects are incorporated in the US."

A lot aren't physically in any particular place unless you count a Github server and maybe it's time to rethink that in favour of one hosted by a business outside the US. Some are in Germany including NextCloud , KDE and the Document Foundaton. AIUI German law has advantages for registering such organisations. Dyne.org who support Devuan is in the Netherlands and the devuan.org domain is registered in Italy.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"There are not many prominent examples of technology companies fleeing the US for fear of political restrictions," - Yet.

It's 2019 so, of course, there's alleged ad fraud to the tune of $1bn in tech pushed to doctors

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"This allowed Outcome to both overcharge advertisers for campaigns"

OK, I get this, they're in the advertising industry.

But why should overcharging advertising be cheating the advertising company's investors? They should have received the dividends. Something doesn't quite link up here.

Xerox: Prepare to say cyan-ara, HP Inc. We're no paper tiger. We're really very serious about that hostile takeover

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Smaller company attempting a hostile takeover?

If I were an HP stock holder I'd be thinking that most of the money I'd get would be borrowed. If I also got stock I'd be holding a chunk of that debt. In other words I'd effectively have borrowed the money to pay myself and have to pay interest on it. No way would I want stock.

OTOH if I were a Xerox stock holder I'd be thinking if it were an all cash deal I'd be borrowing heavily to buy a chunk of HP shares - but if I wanted to do that I'd just go out and buy them myself. But Xerox has money from the Fujifilm deal; instead of borrowing more money to no good purpose why don't they just hand me my share of the cash in hand?

Amazon straightens up its IoT house, complete with virtual Alexa, ahead of Las Vegas shindig

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"computers ...are built into the environment, so you don't have to think of them."

That's when you really have to think of them.

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: A quirky investigation into why AI does not always work

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Nature

"But just think we still take over a year to become slightly self-aware"

My recollection is that babies start out self-aware but aware of nothing else. They certainly know when they want something and able to let you know but the second part is probably pre-programmed That year's spent becoming aware of the environment they're in, correlating the inputs from the different senses. They learn to understand what they see has other properties by touching it, trying to eat it etc. That understanding of the external world is crucial.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: It's not AI...

"stop this Marketeer nonsense please."

Nobody ever succeeds in stopping marketeer nonsense. You just have to wait for them to dash off somewhere else.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"AI has no real understanding of what it is doing"

This is the key. We need to understand what "understanding" is.

As regards the example of whether an AI could recognise a sheep when it's not standing on grass, we all understand that a seep isn't just some generalisation of a collection of images, it's an object with a whole collection of other characteristics including its behaviour. Understanding is quite a complex phenomenon. Again in relation to sheep, the grandkids could at an early age quite easily connect Shaun with the real sheep they see in the fields around here and yet recognise the human characteristics added by animators as being artificial and find the humour. Good luck to getting an AI system to do that.

Not to Nokia, but someone's seeking a third Huawei: Openreach hunts supplier number 3 for UK's FTTP network

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Will the inspection of Huawei code be extended to Cisco products? If not why not?

Bose customers beg for firmware ceasefire after headphones fall victim to another crap update

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: "The company kept very quiet"

"Get your PR department in order, Bose."

PR is no substitute for customer service. The best the PR department can do is to tell QA not to let this stuff out of the door.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Criminal Damage

They'd also have the possible defence that what the update was intended to do would be a reasonable excuse. I say possible because an intended trivial change might not be enough.

We are absolutely, definitively, completely and utterly out of IPv4 addresses, warns RIPE

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love IPv6

Superb.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: What should have happened with IPv6

"This could be fixed easily by national regulators…"

The internet distrusts national regulators.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Lies, damned lies, and statistics that don't lie.

IIRC DECNet relied on - or assumed - that the MAC addresses were the subset allocated to DEC. Trying to get HP-UX boxes talking to a VAX with a VAX-oriented management we had to buy a DECNet package for HP-UX. When it was installed it promptly changed the MAC (which was programmable) to look like DEC. That confused all the clients until their caches caught up.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

But won't this get in the way of the Corbyn internet for all promise. Is he going to solve our problems for us? Don't tell me politicians don't understand tech!

Stop us if you've heard this one: Facebook and Twitter profiles silently slurped by shady code

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: "MobiBurn only facilitates the process"

"a judge would call that complicity."

If only that could be arranged.

HPEeeeeek! Our sales have been decimated by worldwide slowdown, trade wars, say execs

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Bingo

"I am confident in our ability to drive sustainable, profitable growth as we continue to shift our portfolio to higher-value, software-defined solutions and execute our pivot to offering everything as a service by 2022, Our strategy to deliver an edge-to-cloud platform-as-a -service is unmatched in the industry."

It woz The Reg wot won it! Big Blue iron relics make it back to Blighty

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

I'm rather envious of the A0 scanner mentioned in today's blog. My neighbour has an early C19th map I'd like to get scanned.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge
Pint

Re: Finally

Join in the ---->

After five losses, Apple finally wins a round in $600m VirnetX FaceTime patent mega-battle

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Depending on the market cap of VirnetX would it be cheaper for Apple to buy them?

Bad news: 'Unblockable' web trackers emerge. Good news: Firefox with uBlock Origin can stop it. Chrome, not so much

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Who to block?

Yes, they're called advertisers.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Ad Spend

"Product not shifting"

The nothing to lose case.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Ad Spend

It'll take a year for the consequences to become apparent. Still, with bonuses only running on a monthly or quarterly basis nobody in sales is going to care.

Copy that? We'll never join you on the Xerox side if you don't answer simple questions – HP

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Maybe Xerox are trying to provoke HP into making a counter-bid against them. Given that they're the smaller of the two it would make more sense and presumably result in less debt. But I'd have thought that if combining the two was really a good idea a straight merger make most sense. No additional debt, just a question of which CEO gets fired the big pay-off as there'll then only be one.

UK taxman updates its employment-checking calculator for IR35: Still crap, say contractors

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"HMRC will stand by the results, provided the information input is accurate and it is used in accordance with our guidance.”

A strong bid for Weasel Words of 2019.

I wonder if they've tested it by running it against details of all the tribunals they've lost.

The Register talks to Azure Data Veep about Synapse and SQL Server

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"The cloud," Kumar told The Register, "is really helpful."

I'll bet it is. Cloud first, local indistinguishable from never. The subscriptions payments just keep rolling in.

Take a Big Blue cheque and go: IBM settles 281 UK age discrim cases

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

No word as to how much it's cost them?

Close the windows, it's coming through the walls: Copper Cthulu invades Dabbsy's living room

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Wired audio memoirs

Must get the Button Monster fixed up.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: DIY gone mad!

I'd describe it as "adequate". I wish our house was like that.

That code that could never run? Well, guess what. Now Windows thinks it's Batman

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Back in CP/M days we had MicroSoft FORTRAN. It included source of some libraries. I found a not very encouraging comment from one developer to another to the effect of "I can't get this to work. Can you?".

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: INP Error - System Halted

SunAccount had a function that started printing out messages to users in advance of their maintenance payment becoming due. As we were screen-scraping over telnet (yes it was a long time ago) from another system to look up accounts this wasn't welcome. We eventually worked out how to look up the ISAM files directly.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Not an actual error condition ....

About 2 weeks from go live I was appraised of a requirement that "everybody knew" about pricing, parts and whatnot. It required some hasty grafting in of tricky exploded parts list code which worked but I really never wanted to touch again. After I'd moved on and my replacement was body-shopped in he received dire threats from the product manager as to what would happen to him if he ever touched it. It eventually proved robust enough to be migrated a couple of times to new environments so it probably was OK...

...unlike the uncommented and incomprehensible code I inherited from my new boss at the next job which took a page and a half to work out what day of week it was and failed as soon as it hit New Year (a long way earlier than 2000). Replaced it by taking a date as day integer from a library function and doing MOD 7.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Assume the worst

"You will be familiar with how the same word is used with the same meaning in physics and isn't true there either."

Actually the meaning of atom in physics was the smallest piece you could divide an element of some substance into and with it still being the same thing. You might divide the atom but you then get atoms of something else so the original concept still holds true.

Totally Sardonic Bank: Well, it must be, to have a TITSUP* the same week as THAT report

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

It was certainly the behaviour of a member of staff at the TSB branch who provided the trigger for my leaving Lloyds TSB but in attempting to close the account it was replicated by one of the staff at the main Lloyds branch. As far as I was concerned they were indistinguishable.

In the recent report much was made of the fact that TSB wanted to be a "challenger" bank. If they really wanted to challenge the other banks they could do so by opening more branches. Instead they're challenging their customers further by closing about a fifth of the network. So even less of a chance of getting their next fubar sorted out in branch. Maybe they thought they'd take advantage of the TITSUP to bury that bit of news.

Page: