Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK govt data people not 'technical,' says ex-Downing St data science head

Re: I'd go further

Not TfL but BR.

I used to commute into Marylebone (the unforgiveable performance of the Chiltern line would deserve a post of its own).

The whole station was painted. They did a really good job. They even picket out all the little details of the frieze of the news kiosk.

When that was finished they sandblasted the brickwork getting dust over the new paintwork.

Then they filled in the track of the north platform covering the lower part of the newly sandblasted wall.

Then they replaced the track by digging out a new one down the middle of the wide platform that, in the previous days had allowed vehicles to drive onto it if it was useful to transfer stuff onto a train, cutting off that as a future opeion.

Then they reorganised the forecourt, demolishing the old three-sided open kiosk that enabled one to buy a paper on the way to or from the platforms almost without breaking stride) and replacing it with one in an out of the way little cubby hole.

Re: Not technical?

Better one: (shouts) "There's somebody here ho's lost his memory. Does anyone know who he is?"

Re: If you pay peanuts

Usually a good design is not one that hits you over the head unless it's for a military application.

Re: a training program to help civil service technologists become "AI engineers"

"it seems the less that politicians, business types et al understand technology, the more likely they are to assume that it's going to be a pancea that'll solve all their problems"

You're describing the core market for silver bullets.

Re: I'd go further

I know it's unpopular to bring facts to a discussion but try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Technology_Select_Committee and click through the links for the members. Also check the CVs of the current leader of the opposition and the PM of the 1980s.

A check their CVs on Wikipedia shows that, despite the best efforts of constituency committees most of the members of the Select Committee do have a tech background.

Re: Yes Minister

Usually this saved Jim Hacker from making a bigger fool of himself.

Re: a training program to help civil service technologists become "AI engineers"

Maybe the reason they're said to need training is because they're told TPTB exactly that.

TSMC's US builds won't make America great at chips again, says ex-Intel boss Gelsinger

Re: Its not really healthy to be coming here as a foreigner just now

I was rather hoping Vance and his party would have been arrested on entry to Greenland, strip-searched, shackled, interrogated for hours and deported as undesirables seeking to overthrow the legal government of the country.

Tech support session saved files, but probably ended a marriage

Until you get to part 2.

Re: Double-edged reference

Ernie Wise telling about notes left in theatrical digs' gurst bookes: after one unsatisfactory stay "We will be certain to tell all or friends."

Re: > I did learn never to offer out-of-hours help to people I work with

Your listening probably helped a good deal.

"YOUR failure to plan is not MY emergency."

Compliment her on her otherwise unseen tattoo.

CoreWeave cools its jets, downsizing IPO as investor heat fades

The writing seems to be appearing on the wall. Will the bubble survive until the end of the next quarter?

VMware distributor Arrow says minimum software subs set to jump from 16 to 72 cores

The remarkable thing is that I always thought of CA in that way.

Malware in Lisp? Now you're just being cruel

Not as evil as APL.

Congress takes another swing at Uncle Sam's software licensing mess

DOGE will probably cut the staff needed to do this.

IBM US cuts may run deeper than feared ‒ and the jobs are heading to India

You may have trouble convincing us that the first two words of your comment are true.

Tariffs incoming.

Microsoft walking away from datacenter leases (probably) isn't a sign the AI bubble is bursting

Re: "gigawatts" capacity ?

Measuring processes by inputs rather than outputs is a sure sign you don't know what the output is. That applies whether the input is millions of your currency units, bums on seats or megawatts.

Today's jobs Microsoft thinks could use an AI assist: Researchers and analysts

Re: Pardon?

Snake-oil spread. A temping flavour but a little too greasy for some tastes.

Re: Visualisation or Sonification?

"Curse you 'Autocorrect'!"

As we all know, LLMs are autocorrect writ large.

Re: I can always click and see its chain-of-thought reasoning

If it comes from a machine it won't be obviously bad. It might be obvious to you and me but not to the types of people using it. To them, if it comes from a machine it must be obviously right.

ISS resupply and trash pickup craft postponed indefinitely after Cygnus container crunch

That's going to be an interesting insurance claim. At least it wasn't just the effect of somebody slinging it into the back of a van.

Now Windows Longhorn is long gone, witness reflects on Microsoft's OS belly-flop

Re: Deliver something worthwhile?

The thing, XP (SP3) is certainly the last Windows OS that considered that it was "your" PC it was running on.

AFAICR XP was the one that introduced the idea of phoning home. I decided that by that time Linux was good enough to replace SCO which dual-booted with Windows on my previous PC and become by sole OS.

"Longhorn is a tale of big ambitions, technical nightmares, and an extraordinary comeback,"

Nowadays the mantra seems to be "two out of three ain't bad."

CrushFTP CEO's feisty response to VulnCheck's CVE for critical make-me-admin bug

How not to do it.

Signalgate storm intensifies as journalist releases full secret Houthi airstrike chat

Re: Training

Training is for little people. Those in charge don't need to know things.

No app is more secure than its least secure user. Give a bunch of politicians a secure EEE channel and you can reasonably expect one of them to leak the contents. It enables them to believe such channels aren't inherently secure so it doesn't matter if they require them to be backdoored.

Re: Falklands conflict 1982

Including Goldberg who withheld any mention until after the operation, details until challenged and even then, according to the Beeb's report, a message that would have identified a CIA operative in the field.

Re: Hysterical - sorry, Historical

It's present occupant if he's allowed to play with matches.

Re: They're already

"I expect he got a reprimand in private for this cockup"

I doubt he even got that.

"I'd have thought it's pretty simple Mr Waltz; you're an incompetent fuckwit who typed the wrong phone number in, didn't validate the number, didn't validate the identity of the person you added"

It goes a step further. Apparently he's said he doesn't know Goldberg and yet must have had his number on his phone in order to issue a Signal invite to him.

Re: They're already

"1 - use of unauthorised and clearly not well shielded messaging"

As it was CIA installed onto the devices it was authorised and technically well shielded. In practice its shielding depended on the users. Trump is now saying that Walz has learned a lesson. Most people would have thought that someone appointed as National Security Adviser didn't need to learn such basic security lessons and might wonder about the quality of his advice. However I'm sure he's being paid a lot so, as such things work at that level, it's expensive advice and so must be valuable.

Re: They're already

It's a commendation that they realise its strength. However good any system might be it's no stronger than the human intelligence which controls it which in this case was .... shall we say pretty weak.

Of course the big question is how many more people were waltzed into the group that haven't been identified?

Re: They're already

"So I guess it wont be long until he's arrested"

It's possible he has other embarrassing threads stored away. Even if he hasn't there'll be a certain fear. That might well keep him out of jail.

Jeff Bezos can now taunt Elon Musk: I'm building a moon rover for NASA, when can Tesla do that?

Will it be able to avoid it?

Re: The lesser of two evils

Musk has already turned his nose up at the Moon and thinks we should ignore it and go to Mars instead. OTOH Amazon delivery might also miss the Moon and deliver to Mars's wheelie bin instead.

Aardvark beats groundhogs and supercomputers in weather forecasting

As climate shifts the training data will become increasingly out of date. Basic principles of atmospheric and oceanic physics won't.

Re: I use the Golden Gate Bridge.

In upland Britain the simple equivalent is "If you can see $LOCAL HILL it's going to rain. If you can't see it it's raining." Maybe those living in boring flat areas have alternatives.

British govt wants to mainline AI, but its arteries are clogged with legacy tech

Legacy systems are the ones that run the enterprise and calling them that is the snake-oil salesman's method of getting them replaced. Once the new shiny has replaced them it instantly becomes "legacy" for the next salesman (who might even be the same salesman).

Ask Birmingham Council how the replacement of its legacy systems is going.

Revenge of the nerds: Teachers, professors sue to undo Trump science funding cuts

Re: Ha

You mean the universities should become primary schools?

Universities are the place for advanced education and basic research, exactly what the Make America Grate idiots are trying to stop.

Re: POTUS

"it may not be long before the US will start alienating itself from almost everyone else"

This already sounds like a message from the past. Surely it's government policy to do just that.

Whoever thought the law would be such an obstacle to a good chainsaw?

VMware sues Siemens for allegedly using unlicensed software

Given a large enough corporation some unlicensed installations would not be beyond belief.

OTOH some licencing systems are so convoluted one might almost imagine they were designed to create non-compliances - is VMware one of those?

Re: They’ll have to pay for software they can’t use

"The other is, companies that use the software may not want to donate / be associated with the software that they use for free. So their options are not to pay them, or to go via a 3rd party (support agreements) and hope that they actually contribute to the development via commits or contributions."

A few examples:

There are a number of Linux distros for which you can buy support or buy as supported from their maintainers, from Red Hat ans Suse down to Zorin. No problem there.

LibreOffice you can buy commercial support from the project website.

PostgresSQL's main site lists companies from whom you can obtain commercial support. A simple search through their lists includes many who state that they are contributors to the project. Some individual contributors are named.

This does not deny that there are individual developers who are unpaid but this situation now seems to be receiving attention.

It's all far removed from paying for a subscription for support and wondering if that support is going to break you system on the second Tuesday of the month.

Re: Burning it down

And those small businesses, by the time they get to the size Broadcom wants to deal with, will have been using something else and are not going to want to migrate.

Where do Broadcom expect to get new customers?

OTF, which backs Tor, Let's Encrypt and more, sues to save its funding from Trump cuts

Re: Idiocracy was a documentary

Prove it. I'm sure it was done anonymously.

Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees

Re: mutt -- it sucks less.

Which just goes to show that it sucks less.