Posts by Doctor Syntax

ICE-tracking app developer sues Trump admin after Apple spikes the software

Re: BasicReality...

See my response to Throatwarbler Mangrove above.

I'm not sure I've seen a BasicReality post that wasn't odd. In fact "Yes Minister" devotees will recognise the phrase "getting rid of the difficult bit in the title". (Series 1, Episode 1)

X shuts down European Commission ad account after €120M fine announcement

Re: X? Why X???

The only reason it retains any degree of authority is because, as the OP said, govts.are stupid enough use still use it for announcements. Do not mistake their using it because they think it has authority. Sclerotic decision making is about the only explanation.

Automakers' AI dreams may run out of road over the next five years

"companies with software and data experience have a natural head start, especially when led by execs that prioritize AI over traditional concerns of automotive makers."

So whatever dubious benefits AI brings in crap cars.

Barts Health seeks High Court block after Clop pillages NHS trust data

Re: Negligence?

Is the data actually being processed by Oracle or some other clous provider and not by themselves? If multiple users were affected that seems likely. In that event Data Controller could sue Data Processor.

UK moves to strengthen undersea cable defenses as Russian snooping ramps up

AI! That'll win the day.

Untrained techie broke the rules, made a mistake, and found a better way to work

"it would suggest that the batch queues were improperly configured."

Or possibly that there was a lot of other stuff running at low priority that really was low priority and that what Leo ran whould always have been at higher priority than that.

Re: “knowledge shared is overtime lost”

Damned double negative! Please disregard it.

Re: “knowledge shared is overtime lost”

Things usually work out providing neither side doesn't break the "don't take the piss" rule.

Re: Leo

I think that applies to all of us of a certain age. If the mainframe wasn't ICL perhaps the manufacturer had a lion mascot. Jaguar would have been a bit of a zoological oopsie.

IBM drops $11B on Confluent to feed next-gen AI ambitions

Job prospects in Confluent take a turn for the worse

Alternative title for article

Home Office kept police facial recognition flaws to itself, UK data watchdog fumes

"Our priority is protecting the public."

One of the things the public should be protected from is misuse of policing. We have seen several well-publicised miscarriages of justice recently, especially if "policing" includes private powers of prosecution as wielded by the Post Office.

It raises the question of whether concealment of a flaw from the regulator constitutes misfeasance in public office.

Rebuilding VisiCorp's Visi On UI reveals how Apple defined the GUI era

Having watched the demo there's a certain nostalgia for the days when a mouse was chunky enough to be used as an offensive weapon LART.

Death to one-time text codes: Passkeys are the new hotness in MFA

Re: "I've lost my phone"

It's amazing how many people don't get this.

Problem analysis?

"Unless they are holding a knife to my throat, what good is the phone if they don't have the password/login to the account. I'm still good with sms."

What good is your password if you don't have your phone when you need it?

Re: What is so bad about SMS

What happens when you lose your phone? Or it's stolen? Or it has a flat battery when you need it? Or you left it at home?

UK tech minister vows more whole-government megadeals after £9B Microsoft pact

So much for digital sovereignty. That would have been the better way to use the spending power.

Irish Excel whiz sheets all over the competition in Vegas showdown

Re: Congratulations Diarmuid

Setting up a database (as opposed to a list) is understanding the structure of the data to go into it. Perhaps a simpler application would let the user start typing in what they though of as records, start storing them but also analysing them and reorganising them to recognise the structure and restructure the data store accordingly.

For instance if it were presented with a list of things sold, including or der details, it might work out quickly that that there were two entities, an order and an item and not much less quickly that the "item" wasn't a single structure but included a product and likewise the "order" included a customer. The restructuring hat involved mightn't be too onerous as it would quickly work that out with a one to many relationship between order and item, between product and item and between customer and order. It might take rather longer to discover customers could have multiple delivery addresses and that they might not correspond to billing address and even longer to discover that product priced could change and the restructuring of the data might freeze it for a while..

Tech leaders fill $1T AI bubble, insist it doesn't exist

"If you look at today's AI, as much progress as we've made over the last couple of years, we're still not at the point where we're fully exploiting the potential of AI,"

At what point to you concede there's little potential to exploit and certainly nothing to justify the expense poured into it.

Maybe you need to research Nelson a bit more.

"They are sane words if you want to please your own investors."

Only if you plan to get out in time and leave a patsy to take the blame. And you know what they say about not seeing the patsy?

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Re: Vendor gone wild

"Thanked by president? Given a bonus? Fired the best friend's company?"

The president had her job to protect. At that point it must have been looking very dicey indeed.

Re: Similar Story with FTP

Some people are professional and value their jobs.

"the vendor of the application had found a bug in their wares, and was patching database errors on the live system, during business hours, without telling their customer."

The system was flat-lining. You might even say it was Horizontal.

EU metes out first-ever Digital Services Act fine, dings X for blue check deception

"It’s an American company, European law is irrelevant."

OK, let's turn that round. A European company sells in the US. US law is irrelevant. No tariffs. Is that how you see it? If not could you produce a reasoned argument as to how the two cases would be different?

"Just because" or something that reduces to it would not be a reasoned argument.

Pension portal launch fail sends Capita running to Microsoft for help

Re: 132,100 complex remediation cases

I wouldn't be so optimistic.

Re: Cheapest Option Programmers Outsourced Until Trials [COPOUT]

I was subbie to a subbie on a couple of Capita contracts that went well. But they outsourced their development to an Indian company with staff in the UK. From that experience I'd guess that most of those who worked on it will no longer have been in the UK. Every few months I found myself explaining to a new developer that there was a reason for the code they'd not understood and had just removed that gave special handling for names such as O'Neil and that it needed to be reinstated, otherwise their XML was not well-formed.

This, of course, assumes that there were some actual developers and it wasn't vibe coded from start to finish.

Is this the product of vibe-coding or was it written manually by staff whose boss considers they're slacking unless they're working more than 90 hours a week?

Re: "...the largest ever on-time transition of a public sector pension scheme in the UK."

If the scheduled go-live date has passed before it's released and fully working it isn't on-time.

Latest Windows 11 updates may break the OS's most basic bits

Re: win2k snappy ?

In my world a server runs headless or with a command line UI if it has a local console.

About 2000 Microsoft could have said to themselves "We've got it about right. It's stable, it has a nice, clear UI. We can just keep selling it to OEMs and rake in a steady income. Development costs can be trimmed right back, just keep it up-to-date with new hardware. Marketing can be trimmed back because it can sell on merit. Nice and easy to manage with a huge profit margin."

Why didn't they? Because nobody makes big money managing a nice simple business. They can get big pay packets by allegedly managing something huge and complex not matter how dire the product and how hated it is by their customers once they've got the lock-in they established back in W2K days.

Re: win2k snappy ?

W2K was getting everything right. I'm not sure whether XP did or not but it was the first that wanted to call home so even without the Windows for Teletubbies UI that was a line crossed marking the start of a downhill slope.

Re: WTF?

"I would think that MS would blink and create a version without the stuff."

Perhaps if the industry offered to buy them at a premium, even though they've already bought the stuff once. At a very, very big premium.

Re: WTF?

There used to be such things as user groups who could exert some leverage. I suppose user businesses decided it was taking up too much staff time to attend meetings, even before COVID. Then there was the issue of who would represent the business - quite unacceptable to send some low level techie who understood what it was about it it was qay too detailed for a managerial chap.

"The bad news is that there is no immediate fix, and the workaround involves fiddling with the Windows registry for virtualized environments or a PowerShell script to prevent Explorer launching before the required packages are provisioned."

But it's so much easier than Linux, isn't it?

How does a user get in to fiddle with the registry or create and run a script without the task bar or panel? I don't suppose Ctrl Alt F1 woks on Windows.

Hegseth needs to go to secure messaging school, report says

It's bad enough saying that people with this degree of entitlement should take any training by adding "with a knowledge assessment" is just a step too far.

Twins who hacked State Dept hired to work for gov again, now charged with deleting databases

Re: Yet another 'Highest priority'

If that's the highest priority what sort of pig's ear do they make of stuff they don't care about?

"They fired me because some of you determined I was unfit to deal with your data,"

"And just in case of doubt I proved it"

Palantir wants to set the juice loose with new AI power initiative

It's time the AL/LLM industry got called out on energy. Their demands are rapidly becoming unsupportable. If they cannot clearly demonstrate value for their demands they should be strictly rationed.

Aisuru botnet turns Q3 into a terabit-scale stress test for the entire internet

Re: Stupid question

Probably all of the above plus cover for break-ins and nation state bad actors.

John Henry still leading the race vs AI in customer service

Or a Yorkshireman.

Or the ones who have speculated wildly by putting money down and are now anxiously hoping it becomes true.

Re: Jibe ?

Fowler (2000 edition), under "gibe, jibe" says "The American word jibe in the phr. to jibe with 'to agree, be in accord*

is an unrelated word of unknown origin (in the 19c)." It also says that the sailing term is spelled with "y". Spelled with "i" it means to mock or jeer and that meaning, goes back to at least 1761 in "An Universal Etymological English Dictionary; ....etc" 18th Ed.

UK SAP users say they're baffled by Business Suite reboot licensing maze

Working as intended, then. If it was clear they wouldn't be able to come along later and demand back-dated fees.

Xero to start charging developers API usage fees, replacing revenue share deals

Re: Business 101

As I read this it wasn't free. How does one plan for a paid supplier suddenly tearing up existing agreements and launching a smash and grab raid?

Even Ballmer realised that 3rd part developers add immense value to the core product.

Micron ditches consumer memory brand Crucial to chase AI riches

Re: Fire sales soon?

The stripped-out memory modules will still have some value when the rest goes to landfill.

Windows 11 still barely pulling ahead of 10 despite end-of-support push

"but I am surprised that the the artificial hardware requirements to deliberately force new hardware purchase haven't seen litigation"

It's the other way around.

1. Microsoft want you to buy a new Windows licence so that you pay them money. Everything else hangs on that.

2. They could simply have announced that W10 users need to buy an upgrade licence because it's going EOL. This certainly would bring litigation from users who just bought a new W10 PC.

3. In order to maximise 1 and avoid the fallout from 2 they could compromise on the amount they can sell and set some time limit so a W10 licence more then N years old has to be upgraded. This brings even more and even less defensible litigation from users who bought a new W10 PC just over N years ago.

4. In order to maximise 1 and avoid the fallout from 2 and 3 they introduce a H/W requirement based on something introduced about N years ago. You'd need to spend a lot of money on discovery to find a Halloween-type email saying that that was the plan in order to make a suit stick. Just pay up for the licence and tough shit if it comes with a new, expensive PC attached.

Re: Are the Reg's forums broken (again)

I've noticed it well before AWS had the big issue they admitted to.

Re: Is Windows 11 a pox?

Instead of side-stepping systemd you could avoid it by using Devuan.

Not having used W11 I'm intrigued about these start menu complains. Have they really made it worse than W10's? If so, that must be true genius at work.