Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: Paris...

One of my late cousins-in-law blotted his copybook with the Beeb (well before they went Arqiva & got sent to Orkney or Shetland as what he thought was intended to be a punishment posting. He quite enjoyed it.

Re: Paris...

If the stuff was good how could the selection be poor?

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

It's not really the same when it's not carved on the edge of a stone.

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Only Linear B.

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Being English I'd write it out in words as "November the first". Americans, of course, write "the fourth of July" on which topic in N Ireland "the twelfth" doesn't even need a month.

Beware of assumptions.

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

It gets a bit harder when you're working with historical material and you mostly day, month, year but the occasional "14th century". ISO is probably best if you allow truncation so the 14th century can simply be "13". (This is only one of the many problems with historical dates - Julian/Gregorian, dating by reference to saints' days and regnal years are others. It pays to give close attention to otherpeople's transalation of Regnal years - off-by-one is a hazard.)

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

"I fail to see why any sane person would force a us keyboard on anyone"

Not even when the anyone is a USian in the US and has only ever used US keyboards previously.

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

I couldn't find Etruscan but Noto Sans has Linear A and B fonts if that helps.

Re: Paris...

Only time I was at CDG was a flight from a working trip to Naples (equally grotty if you spend all your time in a big factory) and the flight was grounded due to storms over the UK airport. Eventually diverted to Heathrow, car parked at Gatwick (or maybe t'other way about but client who'd booked flight was in Crawley). Come to think of it, the outbound flight was delayed because of a leaking fuel filler cap. Air travel!!!

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

"All servers shall have only one keyboard layout and it shall be US International"

Is this the physical keyboard or the keyboard layout setting? The real pain comes with an bootable USB drive when they differ, especially when the WiFi passphrase contains at least one of those characters that gets relocated.

Re: Now forgotten

"No muss and no fuss"

Not once you've sorted things out with the breakout box & determined what flow control and parity are being used.

IME there's no sort of computer interconnection where muss and fuss can't be introduced given enough determination and lateral thinking.

Re: Mmmmm let me think...

Perception is all. I momentarily misread Eton.

Oddly enough they do tend to use the services they're attacking. They maybe don't realise they are encrypted because it's apt to leak out anyway - they leak it themselves whenever it becomes worth it to do so. E.g. handing it all over to a journalist to help them write their account of dealing with Covid.

Re: "Strong" encryption?

"Strong encryption is any encryption where the cost in money/time/effort to crack exceeds the value of the information retrieved...."

... within the time-frame in which it will have that value.

Re: Ofcom....and partial solutions to personal privacy.....

The (partial) solution: use peer-to-peer messaging where the ONLY messaging software is resident on user end-points.....and the encryption protocols exist ONLY on the end-points. (So no dependencies on any third-party "service".)

1. Protocols are fine but you need software to implement them. I suppose this was what you meant to say.

2. How do you get that S/W onto the endpoints?

3. How do the peers get in touch with each other?

4. Have you actually looked at Signal?

Re: Proof of the UKs diminishing political structure ...

Boris would and will say anything that he thinks will further his own interests with whoever he's talking to. H may well believe it until he has to say the opposite to someone else in a hours - or minutes time and will be entirely unaware of having contradicted himself. One of the things which slipped out when some of his staff started describing their time working for him was that they kept trying to stop him talking to anyone, at least when they weren't there.

Re: Proof of the UKs diminishing political structure ...

"For example, at the time of Brexit, the claim that any problems created due to the border issue in Northern Ireland could be quickly and easily fixed by the application of modern technology."

Anyone with any intelligence would have realised that three mutually incompatible requirements created a problem beyond fixing other than by entirely removing one of them which was a political impossibility given that the third requirement was the one HMG had introduced.

Re: Proof of the UKs diminishing political structure ...

"why didn't you say anything before ?"

To which the only possible answer is "We've been saying i for years. Why didn't you listen?"

"and rumour has it Microsoft was actively involved in the Cloud Act (although I have as yet not seen any evidence of that"

You must have missed the reporting at the time it was passed. Microsoft pushed them into it by insisting on warrant in a case where the data* was held in an Irish data centre. Logic would suggest that it would have made an even deeper cleft stick for them as it would still mean ignoring the need for an Irish warrant. Did they protest about that? No, they welcomed it.

* Existing international agreements would have enabled this if the USian PTB had been prepared to seek one in ireland.

Add to it the current trend of these agencies not releasing direct e-mail addresses and phone numbers (" just write to info@....."), and it becomes very difficult to get anything done.

Incompetent management is incompetent management will always find a way to screw up.

Re: Unemployment in the US won't always be at near record lows

"the more difficult getting them back into the office would be"

This only matters if not getting them back into the office is a bad thing. Light of experience shows that it might not be.

Re: Fingers crossed

"Which is propped up by the housing market to a large extent."

A problem in its own right and the product of years of cheap money due to interest rates being based on a cost of living measure that didn't take into account soaring house prices.

It's a very fragile prop.

Re: Fingers crossed

"massive amounts of unused housing (250K homes)"

How many of those are weekend/holiday homes, unfit for occupation, waiting for the new owner/tenant to move in of bing renovated?

Re: Why not convert to apartments

Yes, it requires work and that requires money. But eventually they'll catch on and spend the money.

"But we benefit from being able to hire good people"

Probably the good people the return to office lot lost.

Re: For a contrarian take

One instance given was that supposed efficiencies were due to the fact that the WFH employees were working longer to get the work done. The true comparison should have been between the WFH extended hours vs the total employee WFO time of office hours plus commuting time.

Re: employees were happy (31%), motivated (30%) and excited (27%) to be in the office

When you know the conclusion you want why let facts get in the way?

I don't think I'd want a case of musk. It would probably be both vinegary, bitter and corked. Quite undrinkable.