Posts by Doctor Syntax

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

Re: Schrödinger's firmware situation

The last 10% takes up 80%. And the last 10% of the last 10% takes up 80% of the whole.

Re: Microsoft minutes

"and nowadays on File Explorer copying too"

Nowadays? I'm sure it was like that when I was a regular Microsoft user and that was long ago.

Re: The spinning wheel lies.

I always assume spinners to be animated GIFs so the fact that it's still spinning indicates nothing more than the fact that nothing's stopped it and that something way down in the graphics sack is still working.

Re: I definitely need new glasses

Then there are the ones that reach 100% and then go back to 20%. With a bit of luck they move forward again.

Yes, I'm thinking of Windows updates. That's why I prefer to do Linux updates from the command line - you get an actual commentary of what it's downloading on a file by file basis, what the current download ed amount is and they speed before moving on to what it's unpacking or setting up. You might not know what all those library packages are fore but at least you know progress is being made.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

Re: Still slightly awful to use

I think you answered your own question as far as Photoshop is concerned.

As regards Affinity (both, in fact) it appears I'd have to buy a Mac of some variety or give my computer to Microsoft in order to run it, neither of which I will do. I don't, therefore, see any point in giving their authors money to support their efforts if they don't support my OS.

Re: GTK3 -- More Information Required

I wonder how much bigger n will be when Gtkn and GNOME deprecate everything.

Re: > a couple of Youtubers

"Even if Vim is better than Gedit, who cares if you need to spend 2-4 weeks mastering it"

I've used vi since 1986. I don't think Geidt existed back then, why should I want to master it now? I'm results oriented.

"Best known" assumes context. Anyone concerned with upholstery or interior decoration would have that in mind.

As it happens there is another use relating to textiles, at least in my part of the world, as a verb. A gimped edge is one that has been cut zig-zag to prevent fraying and gimping scissors or shears are implements used to create them.

Re: names

"loving to associate themselves with BSDM"

Could you please explain this curious leap in logic a little more fully.

Re: names

Ah, so you're now resorting to whataboutism.

And can someone remind me where the confrontation here started.

"the company I worked for, which took DEI very seriously"

There is a difference between taking DEI seriously and assiduously seeking offence to take.

If DEI is to mean anything real then the core must be consideration and it really doesn't take much consideration to realist that GIMP in upper case is an initialism, especially when it actually is shown on the menu as GNU Image Manipulation Program.

And you're suggesting that a program that is both a grossly offensive ableist insult and quite literally named after a BDSM portrayal, would be taught in primary schools?

"a program that is ... a grossly offensive ableist insult"

Can we clarify this? Are you now saying that the program itself is a grossly offensive ableist insult?

I though it was just the name against which you were contriving to take office.

"You might know them as boomers or GenX."

You keep saying "names matter". Why are you labelling people with these names?

BTW, if you think older people are incapable of flexibility in understanding I take that as a personal insult, being slightly older than those whom you choose to label "boomers".

Just the opposite. Grown-ups get on with things. It's children who have to have them explained.

Re: [citation needed]

Words are wonderful things, and if you lack the imagination to use different ones if someone points out something is offensive, that's very much a "you" problem.

Life is too short to be driven by dedicated offence seekers.

Re: [citation needed]

"also tossed around XIMP (X Image Manipulation Program) following the rule of when in doubt prefix an X for X11 based programs"

That would have had to be renamed for Wayland.

If you thing sequences of letters can only have single meanings I strongly advice you to avoid looking up "set" in a dictionary. Of course if you do have such a belief you may already have been confused as "letters".

The Debian distro and those such as Devuan that follow it closely do freeze major versions for the life of a release. There will be updates during the life of the release but not major version updates. It's why they are regarded as (a) stable and (b) likely to get a bit out of date. There's nothing to stop some other project providing its own repository which a user may then include alongside the official ones. Alternatively a project may just provide their own .deb files to download by hand, e.g. LibreOffice..

It's also possible for a project to provide a tarball of either source to compile or binary to install. Pinta is an example of a source tarball and the expected behaviour of make install after a local compile is to install into /usr/local. Seamonkey an example of the latter which I uncompress into /opt although a user could equally well install into a home directory. LibreOffice .debs also install into /opt. AFAICS Flatpak & the rest are non-KISS reinventions of the /opt approach.

Gimp 3 has, in fact, made it into Devuan next but it's going to need a lot of work before it becomes Devuan current.

It has, in fact arrived, as 3.0.0 RC3 and then updated to 3.0.0. So far all it does is crash.

Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment

But the server market they occupied is still there, it's powered by the technology descended from what powered the PCs. I don't think it's as simple as the PCs devoured them from below. It was largely, I think, Unix mid-range servers that delivered the knockout before Windows servers came along.

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Re: How?

One of Gordon Brown's wheezes for taxing the future was to remove the tax-free status of pension funds' dividend income. It was one of the factors resulting in the end of final salary pension schemes.

(Others were reduced interest rates affecting annuity rates and the fact that if HMRC decided that a fund had more than they deemed sufficient the employer must take a contributions break. That meant that the surplus turned into a black hole when the interest rates fell resulting in the likes of the BT pension fund having had a shortfall for years)

Re: How?

My only encounter with the front end of the service, many decades ago was that those who were employed in it were not really suitable to be employed there. An encounter with some of the back office processing a long time after that did nothing to dispel that.

On second thoughts there was a second encounter with the front end leading to the same conclusion. When my father died I got a letter saying that his pension book (this was in the days when one signed for one's pension) would be sent to Belfast (from Yorkshire) to be forensically examined. Apart from this being no way to address anyone in a bereaved family the lab was where I worked, my boss was also in charge of the document examination department so I was familiar with the document examiners, had never seen piles of pension books around the place and didn't think there were enough of them to offer a UK-wide service.

On third thoughts where was another encounter with the same effect. My employment pensions had clear-cut terms such that if I were to die SWMBO would automatically get paid at half rate. There was nothing in DWP literature to say what would happen to state pension. An enquiry to their pensions "service" resulted in a reply that they were unable to say.

Any attempt to improve the targetting of benefits needs to start by looking at the DWP.

Re: How?

"There's no reason for an airport to need power backup for all its systems"

The evidence of Heathrow suggests there is a need for almost all of them to have backup power. OK, so long as nobody opens the door the food in the fridge will keep for a little while but that's about it.

Re: How?

Except under IR35 it waould all be treated as personal income anyway as well as having to provide HMRC with a free VAT collection service.

Re: Questions will doubtless be asked

If they had geographically diverse backups why would they all be shut down?

From some of the accounts/excuses being given it appears that this must also have been the switching centre for the power distribution network of what's now claimed to be multiple supplies.

Re: Questions will doubtless be asked

The CEO or whatever of Heathrow has been telling the Beeb he's proud of the way the event was handled. That sounds like a plan to fail successfully carried out.

Re: six runways around London for national resilience

OTOH if Gatwick and/or Stanstead had more runways then they'd be more able to do connecting flights. Your argument is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Re: Really...?

Shit!!! "more!.

Re: Really...?

The remaining capacity would be much less than zero. As the old saying goes, half a loaf is better than no bread.

Re: [Optical fibres] It's not as if one has to inject photons at 400keV just ...

"Outside of the high frequency trading brigade"

Whom I would regard with the same sort of disfavour as crypto-miners and LLM trainers.

Re: Questions will doubtless be asked

"You don't want to try to build the network capacity to shift a significant amount of London's data processing demands to, say, Dinorwig."

To Dinorwig, certainly not - that's not the purpose of that installation. There would be better options. London exceptionalism is an entirely different can of worms.

Re: Really...?

"If you want to create redundancy you would need a second substation connected to the same grid."

How about two or three smaller substations, each with its own connection to the grid, each supplying part of the load and emergency generators to cover the outage of one of them? Or separate substations for each terminal?

The fact is unavoidable: this was a single point of failure, just the sort of thing that should have been eliminated in the planning for previous expansions.

Re: How?

Phone calls are even cheaper. It always stuck me that a bomb threat to one particular motorway service station would cause both road ans rail chaos.

Re: Questions will doubtless be asked

"somewhere in England that isn't as power constrained as inside or around the M25"

Make that somewhere in the UK unless you're worried about a devolved government cutting off London. In these wild times I suppose you have to envisage such situations.

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: Memories having a secretary

Back when a group of us took our first computer course we were given a plan of the computer centre and amused to find one square room was labelled

Secret

aries

The Secret aries probably did run the place.

Also Marchant calculators on division. That was long before your flashy electronic computer things were available for the typical science statistics course.

Re: Typing Pools...

We were in a similar situation in the biology dept of a forensic lab. One of the aspects of our statements of evidence was that there was separate stationery for single sheet statement and further statements for first, continuation and final pages of multi-page reports. Easy enough to cope with now when the whole thing could be printed on blank paper but back in the day with a single tray printer and simple text editors it was better to leave it to the typists who, apart from anything else, had a better sense of which to take.

Euro businesses flummoxed by Scope 3 emissions

Re: About that RtO mandate....

"I was not convinced they had entirely thought their green policy through."

I doubt anyone has.

AdTech CEO whose products detected fraud jailed for financial fraud

Fraud and adtech in the same sentence. Whe expected that?

Accenture: DOGE's federal procurement review is hurting our sales

There'll be plenty of contracts later to pick up the pieces and try to patch them back together to make a working whole.

Re: The GSA's guidance would determinate contracts

Reinstate them after a court rules then to have been illegally terminated?

Microsoft ducks politico questions on Copilot bundling and lack of consent

"He explained that Microsoft hadn't increased the prices of either the Personal or Family plans since 2013 despite adding various new features in the 12 years since."

But did the customers want those new data mining features?

Tesla Cybertruck recall #8: Exterior trim peels itself off, again

Re: Recall won't fix the big problem

And it seems we've found a bell end who thinks the it would make him look cool and resents the implication.

No big changes to UK broadband regs, despite no real competition for BT

"Ofcom claims the country is on course to have "full-fiber" internet connectivity (i.e. fiber-to-the-premises or FTTP) available to 96 percent of homes and businesses by 2027, if all the planned network deployments are realized."

And the 4% will be those that get crap FTTC and even worse analogue to the exchange. No thought of getting everyone up to a basic standard before adding the shiny.

NASA's inbox goes orbital after email mishap spams entire space industry

"The US space agency has not yet responded."

Probably still trying to clear its inbox.

Feds charge three over Molotov attacks on Tesla sites in multiple states

"an individual armed with a suppressed AR-15 firearm who threw eight Molotov cocktails at a Tesla dealership."

I suppose the AR-15 wasn't a problem in itself.

Dept of Defense engineer took home top-secret docs, booked a fishing trip to Mexico – then the FBI showed up

Re: This just in

Perhaps the Pentagon has a stock of disinformation available.

Re: Shame

Bob, is that you?

Cloudflare builds an AI to lead AI scraper bots into a horrible maze of junk content

I think I'd be inclined to start by just throwing the crawler randomly selected words from the files in /usr/share/dict, then pick out clusters of those words and throw them into the steam, also at random. That way the LLM gets lots of meaningless associations of words to chomp on so that instead of hallucinating stuff that looks real it would be hallucinating random lists of words. For added maliciousness sprinkle in about 50% randomly selected words from PR spiels.

Re: AI generated content is poison for AI

If they follow the search engine in obeying robots.txt than it shouldn't be an issue.