Posts by Doctor Syntax

British govt agents step in as Harrods becomes third mega retailer under cyberattack

Re: security , no it's in the way

It's a question of "what happens if we do get hacked"

Make that "when" and ask it of manglement. "If" gives wriggle room.

Re: M&S Store shopping - no stock at the best of times

Those of us with long memories remember a Burton's and/or John Colliers on every High Street, not far from the M&S. The "wherever they make the suits" was Leeds.

Re: M&S Store shopping - no stock at the best of times

"better for the environment"

Looking at the fields behind me - this is the time of year for lambs. If the local farmer wasn't raising sheep and beef cattle (the regulations for milk production made dairying infeasible for a farm that size years ago) what would he do with it? Historically the area produced oats almost exclusively, so much so that fields supporting other crops were given names such as Ryeclose of Wheatcroft. I don't see cereals being a thing. In any case ploughing up grassland is going to release stored carbon over a few years. Without rearranging, or more likely removing, all the walls, ploughing would likely lead to soil erosion. It's a south-facing slope so maybe a vineyard....

It's also worth realising that grazed chalk grassland is one of the UK's most significant environments in terms of both botanical and invertebrate diversity. Ploughing so much of it up to plant crops was an environmental disaster.

Re: M&S Store shopping - no stock at the best of times

"I'd recommend John Lewis for a suit."

The nearest John Lewis store must be even further away from me than the nearest M&S that sells clothing. It's just as well I don't need a suit.

Re: We can't continue to regard these simply as "IT Problems"

Thus for cyber security it is going to need some very high profile business failures and eye watering recovery costs for business leaders (and “investors”) to take matters seriously.

Preferably followed by directors being prosecuted for not discharging their fiduciary duty.

Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme

ODF also defines a graphics file format although I've never seen anything that implements it. (No, it isn't the drawing format used by LO Draw.) As far as I can make out from the XML schema it's for multiple layers and accepts both PNG and SVG.

Re: That UK Gov Manadate thing

"Maybe Reform UK could take up the challenge in their threats to implement a DOGE like approach to the recent wins in the UK local council referendums."

Soon your local council can make Birmingham look good.

Re: Succes

"Yes I've heard that in theory Office can read the things, but in practice all that happens is complaints about unreadable documents."

Obviously they need a more capable office suite. They should try LO.

"if you wanted to open a file created by it, you had to be running a copy of the suite yourself."

It was a little more than that: if you wanted to open a file created by the latest version of it in its default format you had to be running buy the current version of the suite yourself irrespective of how many older versions you may have bought.

Trump wants to fire quarter of NASA budget into black hole – and not in a good way

Re: Whither MSR

Is Musk planning an a round trip? And can he be on the first flight , round trip or not?

Re: What was .... *ponder* ...

"Look up Charles Walker and his electrophoresis experiments on Shuttle."

A quick search produces nothing more informative than I'd see on a glossy marketing brochure. What was the actual outcome?

Re: Is Trump just not capable of grasping the concept of knowledge?

But have you seen who akes over in that situation?

Re: What was .... *ponder* ...

"Amazon Lunar deliveries."

Left on top of Mars' recycling bin.

Re: Make Aerospace Grotty Again

MALA - Make America Little Already

UK's smaller broadband operators face tough road ahead, consolidation possible

"a patchwork of network overbuild,"

SWMBO would be very disappointed with any of her class who produced work with som many holes in it. FTTP roll out should either have been held back until there was better coverage of FTTC at reasonable quality or FTTP be required to deal with the existing not-spots first.

We're maybe two or three hundred metres from the cabinet. Although there's a fibre access point available at the corner of the garden we're not interested in anything more. A friend says she's connected to the same cabinet, a connection that must be about a mile of copper. As she's also about a mile closer to the exchange it's odd that she's on a cabinet so far away but there it is.

Just about every telephone post between the cabinet and the exchange has one of those fibre connection boxes on it but, of course there are none where she lives. Meanwhile there seems to be some contractor activity looking at the ducts which pass our house which I suspect to some altnet looking at duplicating what's already here.

"BT, VM should be split up in to regions and offered to smaller players give the a bigger footprint and offer better opportunities and alternatives."

The universal service mandate is not exactly being followed already. You've just come up with an idea to make it even worse.

Meta blames Trump tariffs for ballooning AI infra bills

I think they've worked that one out for themselves already.

Much as I hate to give useful hints to the AI world (apart from the obvious one to pack it in now) it's obvious what they should do. Look for DC sites outside the US. And make it clear to Trump that this is what tariffs do.

Zuck ghosts metaverse as Meta chases AI goldrush

Re: Roadkill

"The Metaverse is roadkill under the AI bandwagon."

AI, of course, is destined to be roadkill under the next bandwagon that comes along. Possibly quantum something but who knows?

I'm amazed that manglements seem to to have realise that the really life-changing technologies often arrive without great hoo-hah and often with comparatively investment needed so they still chase after the bandwagons, blithely scattering huge wodges of cash as they go.

Re: FFS

Let's be accurate here. They're demotivational quotes.

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

Re: Doughy

He's a strapping lad.

Siri? Will tariffs hurt Apple? Tim Cook says brace for a $900M whack, for starters

"And it’s very difficult to predict beyond June.”

That sounds a bit optimistic.

Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

Re: Been there, done that...

"laptops used by idiots"

What did you type this on? A server?

Red, white, and blew it? Trump tariffs may cost America the AI race

Who knows? It might even burst the AI bubble.

Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

Re: "When necessary, we're prepared to go to court"

And going to court is no guarantee of winning.

Re: "fight in court?"

Maybe none of that exists. After all if it did surely Smith's post would explain how they deal with is - and with the CLOUD Act.* So if he doesn't mention it it must all have gone away. We can trust him with things like that, can't we?

* He welcomed that when it was passed. Not because it enabled them to look after user interests but because it gave them clarity about not doing so.

Re: typewriters and carbon paper

The carbon paper is a problem for that.

Re: Convincing users

seamless login across all devices & services,

"Just what we wanted" - Scattered Spider.

And if you want multiple people to work simultaneously on a spreadsheet, you're doing it wrong; you should be using a proper database application.

Re: Microsoft panicking?

It means OP is living in 1938.

I suppose MoD has an advantage over most users. They can park tanks outside MS data canters.

Re: I'll believe it when I see it.

"It would have been relatively trivial in a Euro-scale of things to setup a project to deliver a non-proprietary client-server OS based on FOSS"

It already exists. It's time to use it.

It hasn't been legally safe to use such services for personal data since GDPR, even worse since the CLOUD Act but maintaining trade with the US meant that it suited the arm of the EU that handled that sort of thing to pretend it was and keep inventing privacy fig-leaves even as each one was torn off in court actions. Now that pretence is no longer needed.

As these things come under closer scrutiny in the EU HMG is going to have to be careful not to lose equivalence or the UK's interests could also be impacted.

Microsoft tries to kill the 'pausing datacenter builds must be bad news for AI' trope

It's just some words he said. They don't have to mean anything. At that level words are just for saying. Except, maybe for the last sentence:

"And then, of course, we'll look to share gains"

Translation: "if we make anything useful we'll charge extra for it."

It all depends on what you mean by "bad" news.

Linux in Excel? Sure, why not ruin both

VBA

If you can emulate ARM 1 in 808 lines of BBC Basic, why not?

Brewhaha: Turns out machines can't replace people, Starbucks finds

"It shows that they really don't understand their business at all."

Even to a non-coffee drinker such as myself this is the obvious conclusion.

It's one that is all too common:

- What's the nature of your business?

- We sell ProductX

In many cases that's wrong. The business provides a service which sells ProductX. The services is provided by people, not AI or some automated machine. Even if AI or some automated machine provides ProductX the service is provided by people.

'I guess NASA doesn't need or care about my work anymore'

OTOH it might simply be an intern who thought things needed tidying up.

Supermicro warns of massive revenue miss as buyers pause purchasing plans

Is anyone surprised that corporations are going to stop buying stuff with huge and unpredictable tariffs.

Perhaps US corporations should look at building data centres in Canada.

Ghost in the shell script: Boffins reckon they can catch bugs before programs run

Re: Two easy bash script tests

"If the script is over 50 lines long it should have been written in a proper high level language."

There used to be a mantra which ran something like:

Never do in C what you could do in ark

Never do in akw what you could do in sed

Never do in sed what you could do in tr

Never do in tr what you could do in shell

"Autres temps, autres mœurs"

Re: Shell

Was it you who had cron run a shell script to use tcl to use vi to write the night's backup script?

Yes, I've seen than or something as close to that as I can remember. No I didn't sort that one out - couldn't find a long enough barge pole to touch it.

Re: Bash compiler ?

You mean it should have been "back of a fag baguette"?

Double-guessing the user's intention is so reliable. Maybe I really do mean m -rfy /

OpenAI pulls plug on ChatGPT smarmbot that praised user for ditching psychiatric meds

"Things began to go downhill rapidly"

"continued" might have been a better verb.

30 percent of some Microsoft code now written by AI - especially the new stuff

Re: Feeble Point

"If you need a long flow of slides behind you to say what you are meant to be telling the audience, you aren't telling the audience properly."

That's bad. OTOH you might have a long flow of slides which you explain to the audience - actual photographic slides, not text. I used to have a carousel of slides illustrating all sorts of things - altered documents, comparison microscopy, footprints etc. I could pick that up, collect a projector and give different talks depending on the audience, anything from schools to detective training.

PowerPoint and Impress certainly make it too easy to put the text of the talk on the screen; what's on the screen should really be something to talk about.

Re: Feeble Point

For some manglers PowerPoint is all there is.

It's also useful if you have to give a lot of talks. Carrying a USB stick beats lugging a Carousel and slides around.

That approach works

libreoffice24.8 -writer

libreoffice24.8 -calc

etc.

Given the spin that's put out about AI half the people would believe that and the other half would be saying "It can't be worse".

Re: Only 30%?

It depends on what's meant by that. Individual LibreOffice applications are calls to a common executable with a flag to tell it whis functionality the user wanted. He might simply be catching up with that but it would likely be a complete rewrite. Something for Office users to look forward to.

TAKE IT DOWN Act? Yes, take the act down before it's too late for online speech

I'd read it as saying that platforms have at most a year to implement it but nothing to say it can't be done in less than that. So if Trump is so keen Truth Social should be up and running with it PDQ. And maybe X so as to oblige his wishes. So they should be open for takedown requests Real Soon Now.

Homeland Security boss says CISA has gone off the rails, vows to set it right

Maybe it's not really Noem, maybe it's someone who used that stolen pass of hers. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c74zv04xkkgo

Security/ R-i-i-ight.