Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: Really?

"Does the government think I'm a criminal? I'll let you know."

No, they'll let you know. But they probably do, they just haven't got round to deciding which crime but they're sure you should be placed under surveillance.

Re: Next on the demonization list...

We spoof email addresses every day, for sending email on behalf of various companies... I wouldn't call either of them a "sophisticated anonymization technique".

OTOH a spoofed email on behalf of a company makes it more difficult to distinguish between what you and the company would regard as a genuine email and the sort of fake these guys are sending out.

How would you explain to recipients how to distinguish between your "genuine" emails and the fraudsters' fakes? It's this spoofing that trains the public to be taken in by fraudsters.

What's worse financial institutions such as banks and building societies and their customers have the most to lose from this sort of fraud and yet, IME, they're amongst the keenest to do this.

Re: So... is he an engineer?

"I got my engineering degree from Bradford University, and the Institution of Chemical Engineers awarded my chartership. I *am* an engineer."

Back when I was working in a lab there was a suggestion that legislation or regulation was afoot that in science in order to call oneself a *ologist one would need to be a Chartered *ologist by being a member of the relevant Institute. As a biologist my relevant institute was the Institute of Biology so, as a pre-emptive strike, I joined. It turned out that the majority of the membership seemed to be biology teachers, so much so that a feature of its journal was exam howlers.

One thing I never quite gathered was whether MIBiol as a qualification outlasted membership which lapsed when I changed career. Am I still entitled to call myself MIBiol?

Re: I feel sorry for the defence lawyer...

"Defence lawyer serves a few purposes, regardless of the defendant's guilt/culpability:"

0) Advise defendant about pleading guilty.

Admittedly plea bargaining taints this but if a guilty verdict is inevitable the best mitigation might be to plead and be as apologetic as possible. Back in the day in Belfast one of the QCs, if such advice wasn't taken would simply sit there ensuring the defendant got a fair hearing by making sure the prosecution didn't step out of line* but asking few if any questions. His car reg number, BTW, was FIB 1.

* He once intervened to stop the prosecution, who'd called me, from cross-examining me trying to get me to say more than I was prepared to about a hair comparison.

I never rated hair comparison as generally useful and couldn't understand why the FBI were so keen on it - they were internationally renowned for their enthusiasm. I was pleased to see years afterwards that they eventually fell flat on their collective face over it. The FBI were wrong and I was right. Yay!!!

Re: Smart meter saved a few £

It's surprising how quick they can turn up when there's a problem like that. A few months ago there was a problem with the neutral. Once I'd reported it they were quite panicky about making sure everyone in the houses affected shut things off to avoid damage. It's probably the possibility of being on the hook for damage that motivates them.

Re: Know your people

Take the laptop with you and you actually regain cubicle working. Winning all round.

Re: I Can't Stop Myself

"a list of options with no statistical basis"

ROFLMAO

Where are the statistics to show the orders of magnitude reductions in deaths you seemed to be claiming a few posts ago?

Re: I Can't Stop Myself

"The reason that people have died as a result of the safety features built in to Teslas is due to human error, the Uber was due to human error."

So let's deride the human driver's ability. Let's deride the human driver by calling him or her a meatsack. But when the situation gets beyond the much-vaunted AI dump the problem in the human's lap, probably after a long period of having nothing to do has sapped the human's attention and almost certainly when it's too late to do anything and then blame the human.

Did I miss anything?

Re: I Can't Stop Myself

"limited understanding of the problem space"

Or should that be "understanding of the limited solution space"?

Re: Irreplaceable software?

"the visual appeal of Windows"

The what?

The visual appeal of Windows was ended by Windows for Teletubbies (or Fisher Price if you prefer).

Re: Just say "no" to Windows??

You mean the Chinese-made American computers? If they do take them out and dump them on world markets it's going to make for some interesting effects on prices.

Re: What a surprise

Yes. I can think of one person.

Re: Typical Chinese

Well played, sir.

Re: DIY

And watch it follow the same fate as soon as $Vendor can't be arsed to support $Version any more.

Re: Junior Customer Engineer

"it was just a beautifully architect 3 mm allen key"

I remember the HP engineers turning up to remove a transit bar from a tape drive. It had been fixed with the then supposedly rare-as-hen's-teeth Torx headed bolt. Except I had a set of Torx bits in my really quite cheap screwdriver set and the tape drive was already in use.

Re: About the same time that ...

And Little Venice is in London.

Re: About the same time that ...

It can also be a stream. But hereabouts a stream can also be a sike or syke, giving rise to the surname.

I guess it is too late to stop calling ourselves "admin" or "administrators", a pity as it makes it sound like we're doing minimum wage work

The trouble is that if your title is system manager they want to know where are all the people you manage. The manglement mind is unable to grasp that there are major responsibilities that don't involve budget or head-count.

Re: Once upon a time in Brighton...

It's so long ago that that I had to think about it. When I started to write it up that was my recollection but it seemed so unlikely that back then we'd have bothered with mixed case passwords...

Re: From Experience (and In Hindsight)...

"could've had some investment if there was catastrophic failure tbh."

It never happens like that. Inverse sod's law.

Re: Once upon a time in Brighton...

Over telnet (them were t'days) it was reasonably common for the various characters in vt100 escape sequences to get separated and in vi the tilde would flip case. And in those days it was normal to edit passwd directly. So root became Root.

No problem, just log in as Root. Except also back then Unix had a built-in assumption that you might well be working on a teletype which only had upper case so if the first character entered on login was upper case it would obligingly switch to doing everything in upper case. Root, root and ROOT were all one and the same so the user name wasn't a problem. But when you're in upper case only you can't enter the lower case characters of a password and get them hashed to the correct value.

Fortunately there was an already logged in root session on the console.