Posts by Doctor Syntax

Bring the joy of train delays home with your very own departure board

"a full meter in width."

If it's straight it's a metre, if it's a meter it's round.

Re: Cool.

The last one is what every Nana said in the 70s for ever.

Now Dell salespeople must be onsite five days a week

"Dell, however, is not alone in its efforts to force employees to help justify pre-pandemic real-estate investment, tax breaks linked to employee attendance, and waste time commuting and polluting."

This points to the fact that the tax-breaks are no longer fit for purpose. Any government claiming to have a green agenda needs to revise them.

Starlink-branded hardware reportedly found amid wreckage of downed Russian drone

Re: Space Karen

I'd guess that given his staff will be largely US citizens operating from US territory a visit from the CIA might result in Musk's degree of control being less than complete.

Re: What usage ?

"Can Starlink equipment actually receive a signal when travelling at several hundreds of KM/h ?"

The relevant speed would be that of mobile unit in relation to the satellite. Given the speed of the satellite relative to Earth that's the normal mode of operation.

Data harvesting superapp admits it struggled to wield data – until it built an LLM

I'm impressed. Not in a good way.

Being able to predict whether a driver is suitable for a loan they haven't asked for seems like a data fetishist attempting - and failing to justify his behaviour. They haven't been asked for the loan so why do they have the data. And how do they know these "insights" are actually that rather than hallucinations let alone being worth having.

It sounds as if the best thing they could do to become profitable is stop collecting the data, get the bast price they can on redundant storage and fire all those wonks* who've been poring over it all.

* Similar nouns are available

Re: 40TB a day

"it's a budget that can reach over €5000 per week"

It might explain why they're been running at a loss.

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

Re: Those were the days

IME it's not so much the thinking as the stopping that matters. Once what's directly in front of you is removed the solution seems to emerge from the subconscious. Leaving work in the evenings was usually the occasion. On one occasion it took no longer than the walk across the car park but driving and, therefore, having to think about something else was more usual.

Re: been there..

"visualising the console GUI and even moving my fingers as if they were the curser"

This is where CLI gains. You just remember and dictate the words.

"I can remember my grandmothers landline number from childhood, the landline number I used for a BBS, my wife's mobile, all the landline numbers my mother ever had and the landlines I've ever had but that's about it. Oh, and my sisters mobile number before she emigrated."

I can't even remember my own old telephone numbers, personal or work and never could - once I move house or job I seem to discard them. There's one exception: my parents' old number. That's because it's now our own. As to my own mobile number, it's not so much muscle memory as a kind of rhythm memory; if I tell it to somebody they read it back to check with a different pattern, e.g. "Oh double seven one oh - ..." becomes "Oh seven - seven one - oh ... " it's gone and I'll not get it back for several minutes.

Same with car numbers. My first two I've still got. I've also still got the last one because I only changed car in April. As to the rest I can only remember the area letters of one of my N Irish ones and that because I was driving down a ramp in an English multi-story (the ramp included a hazardous footway) and as I passed someone walking up I heard an incredulous "EOI?"

"Words were exchanged shall we say."

It's a pity you managed to succeed so that the entire penalty couldn't be dumped on accounting as an effective learning experience. Words alone probably had no effect.

Public Wi-Fi operator investigating cyberattack at UK's busiest train stations

Insider job

I've seen it reported in another place that an employee has been arrested.

Starfish Space to tackle orbital junk for NASA with SSPICY Otter

"Otter will then dock with an operational Intelsat satellite and use its electric propulsion system to keep the satellite in an operational orbit for a few extra years."

Could it do the same for Hubble when it finally runs out of active reaction wheels?

That doomsday critical Linux bug: It's CUPS. May lead to remote hijacking of devices

Re: Is that all?

"I'm using Debian 12.7 right now (desktop Linux FTW)"

Unsurprisingly Devuan also has it installed. Check by stopping it. Can I still print to both networked printers? Yes. Remove it. No sweat.

OpenAI in throes of executive exodus as three walk at once

Either there's been a big bust-up or else they know something about the corporate side we don't. If it was just one you might think they were just leaving to spend more time with their money.

CrowdStrike's Blue Screen blunder: Could eBPF have saved the day?

"So, in this particular case, we had a configuration change, which is like there's no code, its just a config that the sensor consumes. And we went through a validation process and we validated all those. They actually worked. The problem is we had 21 of them and the sensor understood 20. And that's the simple explanation of what happened."

The problem wasn't that they had 21 and the sensor only understood 20.

The problem is that the sensor didn't handle being presented with 21 safely. And the more generic version of that is that anything that goes into a kernel has to be very, very good at dealing with the unexpected because there's no safety net. That applies whether it's a malware sensor, a driver, a binary blob, eBPF or anything else.

UK government's bank data sharing plan slammed as 'financial snoopers' charter'

Re: "an assault on the presumption of innocence"

I remember writing to my then MP in 2015 pointing out that his govt. was celebrating the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta by removing the presumption. In fact that in itself was a bit late.

SBF's right-hand woman praised for testimony – and jailed for two years

Re: Sneaking suspicion...

"Amongst the USD 11 billions who would have noticed a few millions inconspicuously squirrelled away?"

Spending a few millions inconspicuously would be a bit harder. I'm sure someone will have an eye on this when she's released.

Altman reportedly asks Biden to back a slew of multi-gigawatt-scale AI datacenters

Artificial Intelligence, Real Stupidity.

91% of polled Amazon staff unhappy with return-to-office, 3-in-4 want to jump ship

Uneaten dogfood

I suppose if AWS isn't good enough to support Amazon employees working remotely it isn't going to be good enough for anyone else either.

Bottom line for an employee is - or should be - pay minus expenses. If they can live cheaply out of commuting radius they can work for less pay without damaging - possibly even improving - their bottom line. Especially when you take into account nobody payes your commuting time.

The snag with that line of thinking is that they lose the employees best able to jump ship. I suppose if you think employees are fungible you wouldn't be concerned about that.

NHS drops another billion on tech in the hope of finally going digital

Re: The pros and cons of centralised digital patient records

That's OK, providing it's only temporary.

Re: At least it's not a FAX

It actually works on tablets? Wow, that's something but not worth getting a tablet for.

Re: Shoddy? Improvements? ...but not "digital".........

Wrong Dr Syntax.

Think Rowlandson. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/33/40/af/3340afdbeb4e0076ce2a6944392e129f.jpg

However, next time I'm at Brodsworth I'll take a look at my namesake. It's a while since we've been there so it's time for another visit.

Re: In house...

Are you by any chance in Newcastle? I did some prescription-related work with NHS folds from there.

Quite horrendous but am I in the least surprised? Not a bit.

Re: In house...

One of the problems with doing it in-house would be having the likes of the Daily Wail going on about the NHS employing all these staff who aren't doctors or nurses. Sometimes you just can't win.

Follow up on that:

She rung up and found the appointment (routine long-term monitoring) had been made for a clinic in a different hospital than normal, further away and, more to the point, one with a serious parking problem. She got them to change it to the normal location. A few days later two letters arrived, one confirming the revised appointment, the other rearranging it to the other hospital. On the phone again to get it arranged back to the usual location, same day, earlier time. So far no more emails or letters so fingers crossed.

(Could do with a fingers crossed icon)

Re: Shoddy? Improvements? ...but not "digital".........

How about "no standards"?

Or too many standards.

Re: 9 months late?

"the real problem which is that the NHS is too big and too complex to fix. The way to tackle a hugely complex problem is to break it up into smaller chunks, which can each be solved separately."

The NHS has been broken down into smaller chunks. That's become part of the problem. Did you not read the thread above about those chunks not talking to each other?

Re: Place your bets...

They have to, otherwise they'd have to blame themselves for choosing them.

The other day SWMBO got an email pretending to be from the local hospital trust saying she had a letter and should log into a site, link provided, to see it. In fact the email was from a 3rd party domain, also the domain of the link along with the domain of the op-out link and the noreply Reply to: address. Typical phishing email in fact.

Of course on chasing the trust it turns out that this is their new supplier (or maybe partner) and we should have known about as the posters are up all over the hospital where we can see* them. Of course in order to go to the hospital to see them and be assured it was OK to trust the link and we'd have to trust the link to follow it, get the appointment and go to the hospital. Or maybe we should occasionally go to the hospital just to check on the posters.

Obviously nobody involved, including the presumed IT specialist supplier, sees anything wrong with clicking a link in an unsolicited email that doesn't come from the source it pretends to. If they really don't they're a menace to their employers because they're prey to be phished. If they know enough not to do it themselves they still see nothing wrong in training the public to be phished.

This is the NHS "going digital".

The malware guys have it too easy.

* Taking into account that this is an appointment for an eye clinic.

move from "an analog to a digital NHS."

As a patient I definitely function on analog.

With Granite Rapids, Intel is back to trading blows with AMD

Well played, sir!

Ah, i get it now. It's the world map for some sort of computer game.

Is it just me or does anyone else find Lakes and Rapids, Core ix and yth generation totally opaque? Does all this help or hinder Intel's marketing?

Musk dreams of launching five Starships to Mars in two years

Re: Just reality

In fact SpaceX gets approval for actually working unlike some other space venture we could think of. OP not only hasn't taken the trouble to establish a posting history, they haven't really researched what's generally said about SpaceX.

Blog posts? You're new here, aren't you?

Scientists demonstrate X-rays as a way to zap asteroids out of Earth's path

"The researchers said future experiments could investigate other target materials and structures and test different X-ray pulses since the vapor plume generated by the X-ray pulses is dependent on the chemical composition of the asteroid."

If they were concerned about that why not use something a bit more dissimilar to quartz than fused silica?

Some US Kaspersky customers find their security software replaced by 'UltraAV'

Re: Wonder how much UltraAV paid them

Or will with their next update once Kaspersky feels they have plausible deniability."

Kaspersky is in a good position to say "The US govt. made us do it."

Feel free to ignore GenAI for now – a new kind of software developer is being born

Re: Ostrich Hightower

And drinking the Kool-Aid won't make it work.

That athlete analogy is worrying. Competitive athletes have relatively few years at the top. Then they're discarded. and have to find some other way of earning a living. Some may become trainers, some sports journalists but what happens to the rest? Is this what he thinks should happen to software developers? Does he work for IBM?

AT&T intends to quit VMware, Broadcom claims in legal broadside

Elsewhere in the filing, Broadcom claims "AT&T has admitted in writing to VMware that it can 'migrate away' from VMware software and doing so will have 'a very quick payback and strong IRR'."

How sporting of them to let their other customers know that

AI to power the corporate Windows 11 refresh? Nobody's buying that

"when do senior people listen to their own staff"

Never.

SMBs, however, tend to watch the pennies and they're still a big part of the economy.

"The last big wave of desktop replenishment was more than four years ago, long enough for those fleets to be clapped out and useless."

If a manufacturer is putting that line forward the obvious reply is that if that's how they see their build quality we'll go elsewhere next time.

Heart of glass: Human genome stored for 'eternity' in 5D memory crystal

Pointless. Not the sequencing project but the fancy "archival" storage. Long-term survival of data is best served by multiple copies, particularly copies from one form of media to the next so that the storage technology remains current.

Re: One Question

"still delivering science"

No doubt an understatement. It will be delivering for years or, more likely, decades.

Re: So they've probably got one device to read it?

("religious purposes" being "archaeologist" for "we don't f*cking know")

sreligous/ritual/

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

Re: Never for rudeness, but..

"current career in IT Security Manglement"

In that role do you insist on plain text in emails?