Posts by Doctor Syntax

Ad-supported Microsoft Office bobs to the surface

Re: What's the point?

I suppose so much time wasted on FB makes it seem like it's 20011. And please tell me it's not a thing in 20011.

Re: Word lacks features like line spacing and borders

They still prefer you to use the subscription. They probably have to provide s free option for PR purposes so they have that box ticked but in such a way that if you seriously want to use it then the subscription is your only real (MS) alternative.

Long answer - never as long as they continue to exist.

Re: What's the point?

"People _HATE_ change"

I'd have thought extra adverts and missing functionality would count as change. As would new versions of Windows.

Windows 11 24H2 goes back to the drawing board over AutoCAD 2022 glitch

It's a trade-off. If someone wants to be at the leading (?bleeding) edge they can choose a rolling distro, if they want stability they can choose a stable distro.

Mega council officers had no idea what they were buying ahead of Oracle fiasco

By the time the contract lawyers are involved it's too late. The advice you need is to decide what the contract's for.

As per my comment below, the critical thing is the freelance approach. A continual source of engagements is the reputation gained by being good at the job, not at being recognised as presiding over a disaster.

"an employer that wan't to hear the truth"

I said freelancer. Spot the mistaken word in the above.

In any case a client who doesn't want to take advice is unlikely to ask for it.

I can't help feeling that the ideal solution would have been to have a real consultant on their side. Not somebody who's going to sell them a product, undertake installation, integration, training or anything like that. Just somebody who would, for the duration, provide the in-house expertise they were lacking, act as a devil's advocate. The sort of freelance person that HMRC has been working so hard to drive out of the UK economy

Satya Nadella says AI is yet to find a killer app that matches the combined impact of email and Excel

They've been pissing of their users for years and getting away with it. WHy should they expect things to change now?

Re: I got an idea

I'd have thought that a cleaned up W12 would be a money-maker. There's no chance, however; it'll be subscription only. Fail to make a payment and you'll lose the use of your PC have to install Linux.

Re: Sad

"No mention of using it to reduce the work for ordinary folk"

I thought that was the whole idea. Reduce the work for them, reduce the number employed, save money.

Under Trump 2.0, Europe's dependence on US clouds back under the spotlight

Re: Hackneyed

And for Munich, how's moving back to Microsoft working out for you?

Re: "It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds"

It was just common sense to have more control over the systems on which you relied. You don't start locking your front door for the first time just because w ell-known burglar has moved into the neighbourhood. If you've had any sense of security you'll always have locked up at night or when you left the house.

"Obviously we're not going to lift-and-shift on purely ideological grounds."

I'd have thought it would be a prudent decision rather than an idealogical one.

It's taken a long time for the penny to drop.

Do nothing.

Do nothing.

Do nothing.

DON'T PANIC MR. MAINWARING.

Signal will withdraw from Sweden if encryption-busting laws take effect

Re: If you've got nothing...

Except you almost certainly have stuff you're contractually obliged to hide. Just check out the T&Cs of any online services you use. You're obliged to keep those secure. If you rely on any such service to sync these between devices you can no longer do so securely.

Re: One of many ironies

How do you distribute the one-time pad to whoever is supposed to get the message? If that's intercepted you might as well not bother.

Re: Draconian laws and trust

"no matter how well-meaning it may be when it is created "

Even that depends on what's meant by "well-meaning". These laws* are nothing more than a means to enable law enforcement to avoid due process of law. I don't see that as well-meaning at all. Due process, remember, is there to protect the innocent. The claimed reasons are not well-meant at all; they're just excuses to provide short cuts.

* We have an epidemic of mobile phone thefts. Something must be done. Legislating to permit warrant-less searches of premises for stolen phones is something, therefore HMG believes it must be done. If that one passes then providing the police "suspect" your premises might contain a stolen mobile phone they can just roll up and demand entrance - and maybe break in if they feel like it. For stolen goods of any nature and value, terrorist arms and exploaives, illegal drugs or anything else a warrant has been needed as a basic protection of English rights since 1215 - an increase of mobile phone thefts and 810 years of precedent can be overturned.

MITRE Caldera security suite scores perfect 10 for insecurity

Re: Help me understand

Do Caldera users need to react to interact with the outside world in this way? AEaaS?

How's that open source licensing coming along? That well, huh?

"Do the people who try to monetise other people's work not read any history?"

Very, very seldom. If they do they disbelieve it because it doesn't agree with their greed.

"Companies that are considering making a product should think"

Exactly. As the OP said, they do these things because they're trendy and making legal commitments without thinking what they're doing..

A significant factor could be whether the non-comapny contributions involved an assignment of copyright. If the original contributors retained copyright then it would be legally tricky to change the licence although it might simply be a case of big corp vs small contributor.

Google binning SMS MFA at last and replacing it with QR codes

You were doing quite well berating the everything digital mindset - until you got to buying bitcoin.

LLM aka Large Legal Mess: Judge wants lawyer fined $15K for using AI slop in filing

Re: Marketing

It could be an even better earner if they cut out the middle men - the guy using the AI, the AI and the colleague who sends it to you - and just commissioned you to write it from scratch.

Re: Wow, $15,000...

If he's still representing the client it will be hidden in the fees somewhere.

Re: when courts are run by LLMs

It's always been the very basis of quack medicine.

Re: when courts are run by LLMs

In this brave new world that isn't a problem. We can just hallucinate it.

Trump administration threatens tariffs for any nation that dares to tax Big Tech

"The benefits of free storage, searchability, immense security, outweigh the small loss in privacy - to me at least."

I've never subscribed to the idea of storing email on somebody else's computer. It has to pass through it, true, and if it's being scanned not storing it online won't help. The solution is two step. First move to download what you've got. Secondly, get your own domain and get an independent company to host it for you. If you're not happy with the service you can move it to a different hosting company. It's a bother to get everyone you deal with to switch addresses. I don't know about gmail - I stopped using them years ago - but Houtmailive will forward your email; if gmail also do that then the remaining traffic can be forwarded through to your new provider.

Re: Least favoured partner

" if you live in the place known for 'x', then voting for something else is liable to be a waste of time (not always, but quite often)."

In both countries the status quo is maintained by the self-fulfilling prophecies of the number of people who can't be bothered voting because it would be wasted. If they did vote they might find it wasn't wasted at all.

Re: Irrelevant for the UK

"It's just recognising that we've screwed up our economy"

Time to start unscrewing it. If Trump et al wake us up to that they'll have done a worthwhile job. That's as far as we're concerned.

Re: Bootlickers everywhere

"Apartied Clyde has actually managed to anger GOTHS by calling himself goth..."

I hadn't heard that one. My granddaughter will be upset.

Re: Least favoured partner

I've got news for you. Businesses managed without M365. They manage somehow when it becomes M<365. They'll manage - and quite possibly better.

Re: Anti-fines not just anti-taxes

Unless it's Poe's law in operation. These days it's hard to tell.

100% this. Forget taxing them, just insist on sovereign data storage and processing under the control of local management, out of reach of the CLOUD Act and all the rest of it. If necessary quote Trump's reaction to the Home Office vs Apple. Nothing to pay, nothing to tax.

SpaceX has an explanation for the Falcon 9 bits that hit Poland

Re: Launch Cadence showing Signs of Stress

Move fast and break things.

squishing the local fauna can mean it is covered in juices that'll ruin your day (giant hogweed isn't just a Genesis track)

It isn't fauna either.

Might?

"While three incidents in just over seven months might seem a lot"

It's even more than Boeing. But nice of them to offer an explanation. Somehow an explanation would make things better if one had actually fallen on a house.

The software UK techies need to protect themselves now Apple's ADP won’t

Re: The least worst option?

The demand to Apple leaked. We don't know how many others received the same without leakage. If Google just discontinued a service we'd just think it was BAU.

If it's important enough to be encrypted why trust it to someone eles's computer?

Untrained techie botched a big hardware sale by breaking client's ERP

Salesman. Always ready to drop you in it.

And for the customer. You deserve another.

Re: Anit-Sales - or not?

That depends on what's meant by "you". If it's the company it's probably true. If it's just senior manglement it isn't. Manglement could find out themselves but it would involve believing what oiks on a lower pay grade say. By adding a fee the consultant adds value because he's so much more expensive than the workers so must be right.

Here's the ugliest global-warming chart you'll ever need to see

Re: Denialists - move 'm to the beach

"Can't find the stat in the cited paper"

Page 2, bottom of col1, top of col2. It's given as 18 ± 1 mm.

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

"See for an example the article Melting Glaciers Revealing Ancient Tree Stumps from a Warmer Period that describes that a complete forest was covered by a glacier. "

Thanks. The linked article is in Icelandic but Google Translate helps. It seems to be a follow-up to an earlier article which I'll try to find. I'd guess the glacier was a fairly immobile sheet of ice so that it preserved the trees in situ much as peat does. I'm not familiar with Icelandic palaeoecology but I find it interesting that 3000 years ago is about the time the Late Bronze age across a swathe of N Ireland came to a juddering halt.

As to your second point the 23 years seems to indicate that the figure was taken from the Nature article I linked a couple of times in this thread. There are a few of points to note about that: firstly that it refers only to mountain glaciers, not ice sheets, secondly that it was sufficient to raise sea levels by about 18mm and thirdly the rate of loss was accelerating. In that context think what "This means that the uncertainty of the estimated volume of glacial ice, not the volume itself but the uncertainty of the volume, is five times the calculated change in the last 23 years" really means.

The uncertainty is going to be a smallish fraction of the overall volume. In itself it's equivalent to 10cm rise of sea-level so that the potential rise is very much greater. Far from saying it's not as bad as it sounds, it's saying that the potential rise is very large indeed. It's also well to remember that a rise in sea-level will set off a lot of erosion on vulnerable coasts. Parts of, say, the East Anglian coast already have problems with coastal erosion; a 1 metre rise could be quite devastating.

Re: Denialists - move 'm to the beach

Just to clarify - that's melting of glaciers. It doesn't include the ice sheets in the Antarctic or Greenland.

Re: FWIW

"Back in 1971"

Back then some of us were wondering about the end of the current inter-glacial which,in geological terms migtht be reasonably imminent. What wasn't obvious at that time was the warming coming in the shorter term.

Re: Denialists - move 'm to the beach

"The problem is, they will all die of old age before the oceans rise more than a couple of cm."

How fast do you expect them to age? About a couple of cms-worth of ice has melted this century. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08545-z.pdf

Re: No more USAID

Central Europe has also lost 39% of its ice cover this century ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08545-z.pdf ).

BOFH: The USB stick always comes back – until it doesn't

Re: "putting even more addends onto the stack of stupidity."

I don't like the look pf that all metal handle!