* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32780 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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Remember the 1980s? Oversized shoulder pads, Metal Mickey and... sticky keyboards?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Custardy

She certainly wasn't to be trifled with.

Well, somebody had to.

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Re: Tobacco smoke

"there is one at the end of the road that stinks."

Our neighbour across the road has one. Maybe it depends on the wood but I find it quite pleasant.

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Re: Been there...

"Always enjoyed the fact that the US "#" (pounds, or octothorpe if you're a purist)) key translated to the UK "Sterling" key on some keyboard or other.

Would make more sense if it replaced the "$" key, but something else was there."

It's still the $ key. As the # is still needed it means the UK keyboard needs an extra key.

On the subject of # and £ keys has anyone sorted out how to get the £ working properly on Devuan on the RPi? It results in displaying a # and (apparently) a CR on bash. Ksh displays £ and then on the next line a complaint about ?B?#: not found and in vi it inserts \xc2\xa3.

Both its parents,f Raspbian and Devuan on Intel have no problems with this. And, yes, I've tried various combinations of locale and keyboard map without finding one that works. Fortunately it only affects CLI usage (including ssh sessions).

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: It was something we used to do in the 80s

One of my first jobs was preparing dissections - mostly rats for schools (they went into perspex boxes filled with formalin; the filling holes sealed with the littl plastic plugs from the ends of ballpoint pens). The formaldehyde tanned my hands. I'm sure that resulted in the dermatitis I suffered down the years.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: It was something we used to do in the 60s & 70s

My approach to dating pollen samples was to brew up a large sample with NaOH to dissolve the humic acid matrix and sieve it, just like the first stages of a normal preparation for microscopy. The resulting brown liquid was then run through a continuous flow centrifuge at 10,000 RPM to get the fine particulate content back. That was checked with a microscope to ensure it was mostly pollen. It didn't need any other treatment except to char it (uncharred samples would gum up the dating system with tar). What I suspect was happening was that someone else was doing much the opposite - precipitating the humic acid with HCl and dating that. He was supposed to be doing a PhD on pretreatment methods; it did tell us something about the relative ages of various components but not in time for what I needed.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: It was something we used to do in the 60s & 70s

"The fumes at melted away a lot of the contacts on the motherboard!"

We had a pretreatment for carbon-dating samples that involved a final wash with dilute HCl (I can't think why!) followed by drying in a large drying cabinet. The cabinet got progressively less effective. We eventually found the fan blades had been eaten away. The cabinet was just sitting in the open lab, no fume cupboard.

We had another, small drying cabinet in a different lab. This was used to dry off benzene which was the final wash for pollen samples for microscopy so the amounts were small. One day SWMBO decides to make some meringues using ANalar sucrose (because it was available) and used the little cabinet as an oven.

The things you could get away with before elfin safety.

We're late and we're unreliable but we won't invalidate your warranty: We're engineers!

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: I go bang!

"wonder how they managed to get the cicuit certified"

You may be making a false assumption here...

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: The system is designed around failure and blame

I expect the kids appropriated the bricks PDQ. The last time I removed a bath panel I found a spirit level imprisoned behind it. Sometime plumbers do leave something useful behind.

BOFH: Judge us not by the size of our database, but the size of our augmented reality

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Re: It worries me...

Congratulations.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"We have a substantial amount of resource already hosted in the cloud as it is,"

Would that be a cloud not run by the usual suspects but by a small company with only one customer? And having very small latency because of it being on previously written-off servers in the DC?

Plan to strip post-Brexit Brits of .EU domains now on hold: Registry waves white flag amid political madness

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Re: Selective...

I'm not sure we're looking at the same graph. The UK line shows an initial peak followed by what looks like a bit of a change of mind followed by a fairly steady state, maybe falling a little from 2014 up to and including Q1 2018 after which is shows sustained falls for each of the following quarters. The fall from 2014 mirrors what's happening in Germany and the Netherlands, both of which have had much higher registrations in the UK except for the early exuberance when the UK had more then the Netherlands.

One of Blighty's most-loved charities hands £46m to one of Blighty's least-loved outsourcers

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Re: Card Readers

"Yet another database telling ne'er-do-wells where you are in real time."

Citation needed.

Haunted by Europe's GDPR, ICANN sharpens wooden stake to finally slay the Whois vampire

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Re: Consumer loses

Yes, for users the issue is not so much on the protocol as on getting the information it contains right. Of course if the "established e-Tailer" is "Nominet was able to match the registrant's name and address against a 3rd party data source" then you can consider it fair warning. If the registrant is a business, tell us because it isn't PII. If it's an individual then comply with GDPR or equivalent legislation elsewhere. Sole traders need to be considered; off hand I'm not sure what GDPR has to say about those as data subjects.

Not LibreOffice too? Beloved open-source suite latest to fall victim to the curse of Catalina

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: " it will become the mainstream on desktop"

"The problem is you'll just get the desktop and no useful software to run from there."

Really? What desktop Linux versions did you try? I'm not sure about some of the lightweight versions - of which there are a fair few in the list Jake pointed to - and there are some special purpose versions, such as pen-testing, etc. But all the mainstream versions come bundled with a set of applications that fulfil most everyday needs such as browser, email, graphics, multimedia and office.

Perhaps by "no useful software" you mean "no useful software you can buy". That may be because there's not much need.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Arrogant

"It is apparently the case its designer mostly had had in mind."

Presumably to try to make it as close to Windows as possible.

Fed up of playing Whac-A-Mole with network of SoftBank-owned patent holders, Intel hits court

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Re: When Elephants Fight....

Patent enforcement granting by the issuing authorities needs a serious overhaul

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Re: Simple....

"Patents shouldn't be transferable...."

Let's do a thought experiment.

You invent something.

You patent it.

You find you really don't have the money to build and sell it.

Do you

(a) Hock your house, children & right arm (assuming that allows you enough credit) to borrow money from the bank to set up a factory and marketing organisation, not of which you have experience of or

(b) Go to a VC who requires the above and 95% of the profits to set up the factory & marketing organisation or

(c) Sell the patent to someone who already has the business in place to develop it and cash out not?

Suddenly we see there's a good reason to be able to transfer patents.

Everything must go as school IT supplier Gaia Technologies' £5.7m debt burden revealed

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History repeats

Waaaaay back I worked for a short while for a schools supplier, this time biology and chemicals, who also went bust. They also had just made a capital intensive new-build addition. What's worse in their case it was mostly to produce microscopes just at the time the Japanese were coming into the market.

Messed Western: Vuln hunters say hotel giant's Autoclerk code exposed US soldiers' info, travel plans, passwords...

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

You'd think by now that hotel chains would have learned that (a) they really need to do a thorough annual audit of their own security and (b) do the same in spades for any business they're thinking of buying.

Obviously they haven't. It's going to take a few more big fines and lawsuits, big enough for the board and investors to notice. Even then it seems doubtful that they'll manage to learn from the misfortunes of others.

Luke, I am your father... which is why I must eject from JEDI decision, says US Defense Sec

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Re: Ethics?

He probably needn't have bothered. After all, he's probably over the half-life of a Trump appointment.

Power to the users? Admins be warned: Microsoft set to introduce 'self-service purchase' in Office 365

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Re: So what happens when the user leaves?

"Seems like a really badly thought out system."

No, I'm sure Microsoft have thought it out very carefully to maximise revenue.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: But

"A few things in win 10 will start complaining, as it downloads crap into the users folder and tries to run them."

Very likely the next update will ensure it doesn't complain about crap downloaded from MS.

Mandatory electronic prescriptions was the easy bit in NHS paperless plans

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: £300 million?

"Must be bloody expensive printer paper."

For what I hope are obvious reasons the base stock is a security print. That means not only specialist printing techniques but also rigorous control, secure disposition of waste etc. Pads are, or were (it's a long time since I've seen one), personalised to the prescriber which also introduced a good deal of maintenance of prescriber data etc. It all adds to costs.

Nevertheless my previous GP used to use the tractor-fed paper face-down in their office printer, not only wasting money but making a nonsense of the whole security issue.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

I wonder how a totally electronic system would work for consultations outside the GP's surgery or hospital. I assume there will be a well secured means of sending the prescription from a phone (you may detect a slight snark here) but what if the patient also needs the bar-code token? Does this mean the doctor has to carry a portable bar-code printer or will there be pads of pre-printed tokens to be carried?

Reaction Engines' precooler tech demo chills 1,000°C air in less than 1/20th of a second

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In other words the Mach 5 is a bit misleading. It's the speed that the air is moving in relation to the intake (or vice versa) but it's not air travelling at Mach 5 relative to the cooler.

Thanks.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"at Mach 5, they travel 86 meters in 1/20th of a second"

Quite. There's something not making sense here. Is the engine 86 metres long? Is there a convoluted path? Is the air slowed to much less than Mach 5? Or does this mean there's some way to go before it can be cooled quickly enough to work in an engine of practical size?

Big Red tells crypto-coin publication: One does not simply call one's website 'OracleTimes'

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There was a Wellworth's chain in Ireland, in fact, for all i know there still could be. The signage was eerily familiar but I think the name was genuinely that of the owning family.

Japanese hotel chain sorry that hackers may have watched guests through bedside robots

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"the robots have now been updated."

Recommended updating tool: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Silverline-245033-Hardwood-Lump-Hammer/dp/B000LFXCU4/ref=sr_1_43?keywords=hammer&qid=1571764194&sr=8-43

UK tech freelancer numbers down for first time in 5 years since IR35 tax reforms hit public sector

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

The fact remains, however, that the package for the direct employee is different. It includes holidays, sick pay etc. as tax-free benefits in kind. In order to maintain "fairness" - which was much trumpeted by the likes of Red Dawn - surely those should be taxable. And while we're looking at such things why not assess the value of a permanent contract of employment. It would be a little more difficult to value because some "permanent" posts are more permanent than others but then HMRC have never been hesitant about valuing things if it brings in taxes. How would they value their own posts?

Don't look too closely at what is seeping out of the big Dutch pipe

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Re: A serious question

"IANAL, but the people who wrote the policy are."

Which is why they included the bit about the extent permitted by law.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Test bed

"developers had setup linux PCs or MSSQL servers for testing purposes, and within days the network would be crawling and the hard disks would be full of nasty stuff"

How come the IT department made it possible for these servers to be reached from the outside in the first place?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Up for sale

Ah, so you looked for it, did you?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Gazetta dello sport

The thing to do in such circumstances is to ask oneself what BOFH would do.

In this case, gradually limit the bandwidth available over period of a couple of months. When the complaint eventually arrived the usual BOFH/PFY good cop/bad cop/worse cop routine would explain that it must be because our internet connection is getting very congested these days and we really need a much bigger pipe and suggesting a contract with a new comms supplier they've just heard of.

We read the Brexit copyright notices so you don't have to… No more IP freely, ta very much

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Sui Generis?

That seems to replace brevity with complexity.

What I think it means is that if you take a number of items which aren't necessarily themselves subject to copyright and arrange them in some sort of order that arrangement is itself a work on which you can claim copyright.

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Re: TL; DR

Do we get to deport southerners from Yorkshire?

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Re: Bonfire

And no red tape of course.

ATTK of the Pwns: Trend Micro's antivirus tools 'will run malware – if its filename is cmd.exe'

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Re: It's nearly 2020 ...

Don't bother, Jake. Check Tilda Rice's short posting history. Even hardware has to be Microsoft. We've seen a stack of them here over the years.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

But can Trend trust known sizes and locations after the next Windows update?

Er, hi. Small Q. Where's our billion-ish dollars gone? We summarize Bitcoin exchange's subpoena requests

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"to recuperate its cash in Blighty"

After Brexit I might need to find somewhere for my cash to recuperate.

Euro data watchdog has 'serious concerns' as to whether EU deals with Microsoft obey GDPR

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The issue is do you mitigate the worst risks, which seems to be the solution they're looking at, or do you eliminate them?

OK, here come the no-Linux-here naysayers but all they can claim is one sort of risk vs another. The GDPR-related risks are ultimately legal and on-going whilst the FOSS-related risks are practical ones involving training and the like and relate to change-over.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

if the Timeline is disabled and telemetry set to the lowest level, there are "no high data protection risks resulting from the diagnostic data collection in Windows 10". My emphasis.

Hmmm. Does this mean "We know there are still some risks" or "There could still be risks but we haven't found them if there are"?

Assange fails to delay extradition hearing as date set for February

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Could we offer a straight swap for, say, someone claiming diplomatic immunity?

No one would be so scummy as to scam a charity, right? UK orgs find out the hard way

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"If they start being completely honest and open about what they pay staff, how much they raise and what they spend that money on then I will be happy to believe what they are doing is genuine."

You mean they should do something like publish accounts? With some oversight body like the Charity Commission?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Charities are a fraud

Sometimes figure need a little interpretation. A while ago it was reported that the Charities Commission was concerned with Samaritans because almost the whole income was eaten up by office expenses. What do Samaritans do? They seat counsellors in offices to answer phones. Offices and phones were classed as office expenses.

Traffic lights worldwide set to change after Swedish engineer saw red over getting a ticket

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: How many engineers does it take to change a light?

In this case 1 had to change the whole institute. I bet they're ruing the day they took him on.

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Re: Would someone explain

"when turning right."

Remember the US drives on the wrong side so the UK equivalent would be making a left turn at the junction.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

One junction in Huddersfield used to have a turn right filter operated by a detection loop in the road. The detection loop was forward from the stop line. Out-of-town drivers would stop at the stop line on red. The main lights changed to green and they'd just stay there waiting for the filter not knowing that they needed to roll forward a car length or so to trigger the filter.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Countdown

Taxi drivers are perpetually annoying.

FTFY

Google ads from the po-po can prevent vengeful gamer nerds going full script kiddie – research

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Not even FreeDOS?

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