Posts by Doctor Syntax

Microsoft says it broke some Windows 10 patching – as it fixes flaws under attack

Re: Everyone

"Microsoft is a total JOKE."

No, jokes are funny.

Re: "this may break dual-boot system"

Having dealt with Lotus it's now a case of "Windows ain't done till Linux won't run.".

Research suggests more than half of VMware customers are looking to move

Re: Open source replacements not good enough ?

"They like the idea of guaranteed support levels and things like SLA's."

And exactly how have SLAs stopped Broadcom from shafting them?

They need to look on this as a learning experience. If they don't their competitors who do will be along to eat their lunch.

Re: Consider Yourself

"Because it was new or different or strange or just _harder_ than mindlessly clicking on GUI buttons."

More likely because they didn't know what was happening underneath and didn't want to expose how shallow their competence really was.

"However, 28.6 percent are worried about open source security, and 23.2 percent voiced concern about security and service level agreements (SLA)."

You've been shafted by a supplier you trusted and you worry about SLAs? What good have your previous SLAs done you?

So you paid a ransom demand … and now the decryptor doesn't work

These guys are just getting ransomware a bad name.

Re: Backups!

To add to my post above, if it isn't immutable, and preferably off-site, it isn't a backup, it's a comfort blanket.

Re: Backups!

"They also need to be tested regularly."

If they aren't tested regularly they aren't backups, just comfort blankets.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch could be gone in ten years – for chump change

Re: "Curbing their spread feels like a good idea"

I think the point was that microplastics can be reduced by substituting natural fibres including wool for synthetics but that the OP is one of what seems to be a community of animal haters which thinks that the herbivores which have long formed part of the pre-industrial and, indeed, pre-human fauna of the planet are somehow a threat to it. It's not so much whataboutism as rejecteverythingism.

Re: "Curbing their spread feels like a good idea"

"Removing pasture enables rewilding of 75% of agricultural land,"

Let me guess. You live in a city and if you ever stop to think where your food comes from your answer is "the shop".

Also pasture is a good deal more floristically diverse than crop. If you can take a trip to any sheep-grazed chalk grassland take a good flora* with you, measure out a square metre and see how many different species you can find in it. That was one of the introductory exercises at the start of my botany degree 60+ years ago. Acid grassland is rather less so but still pretty diverse.

Your "rewilding" from tillage usually relies on a level of grazing to keep the ranker grasses from shading out the more interesting plants. Mowing is possible but grazing requires less use of machinery which is less discriminating and possibly more damaging.

* Plant identification book

Re: I applaud their actions

Goog idea but do they have any means to stop the top layer being ground off as microplastic particles?

Re: Recurrence

Look up the term "subset". It will blow your mind.

Re: Recurrence

Agree absolutely. There's scope for another: Repurpose. It comes between Repair and Recycle. An example would be an old wardrobe fitted out with a few bits of wood to become a bookcase.

Re: Recurrence

Given the content to container ratio I sometimes wonder what happens to all those miniature jam-jars used by hotels et. - including National Trust tearooms. It seems a waste to recycle rather then reuse them although I suspect the cost of collecting them would exceed that of buying fresh ones. Nevertheless you'd expect the NT to take an interest in them.

Re: "Unless we deal with it at the source"

most military organisations put armed guards on their armouries and ammunition storage areas everything.

Re: I applaud their actions

Interesting but their proof of concept was making plastic sunglasses out of the waste. There's only so many green-washed sunglasses that you can well (and many might well end up back in the ocean). Despite talk of partners it's really light on detail.

Re: "Curbing their spread feels like a good idea"

I just knew someone would be along to make this comment.

You need to take into account:

1. The planet survived a few millennia of herds of large feral herbivores.

2. OP referred to wool which comes from sheep which are not the same as cattle people get het up about.

3. Pasture represents a larger amount of stored carbon than annual crops. Converting it into tillage would release that.

4. The methane produced from the vegetable component of the human diet.

The future everyone wanted – in-car ads tailored to your journey and passengers

That threshold was passed long ago. The advertising industry must know it. What they won't do is tell their clients' boards. (I rather think most marketing departments know it but keep schtum as their salaries and expenses depend on spending their advertising budgets).

The advertising industry, of course doesn't care. They don't sell whatever it is they advertise. What they sell is advertising and possibly as many meaningless sets of statistics as their marketing department collaborators can flog to their boards.

My first car was a Ford. I've had a couple since as company cars and another personal one. Somehow I doubt I'll have another.

Private equity commits MariaDB takeover transaction

I wonder what the next fork will be called.

Apple owes billions in back taxes over Ireland state aid rule break

And forgo all the European business? Why would they do that?

Re: Who gets the billions?

5) Lower Ireland's corporate taxt rate to attract more multinationals.

SpaceX aims high with Polaris Dawn mission

Re: Not free floating

And remember not to let go.

GenAI hype meets harsh reality as enterprises wrestle with business case

Re: Salary vs task complexity

"AI is clearly trending to perform much longer tasks correctly."

I'm not sure "clearly" and "trending" go together that well.

"The reasons for this are various; poor data quality"

So first clean up your data. Then quit while you're ahead.

Down and out: Aegon's pension pothole and TfL's mystery 'maintenance'

Re: Aegon

Always listen to someone who's telling you what you need to be told, not what you want to be told.

We know 'Linux is a cancer' but could CentOS chaos spell opportunity for Microsoft?

Distrust goes way back beyond Balmer. It goes back to the 3 Es.

Thanks, Edward Snowden: You propelled China to quantum networking leadership

China would have assumed what was happening without Snowden. The only revelation was to the public.

Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many

Average is only 5, deviation either way is only 1, Difficult to see much of a discrepancy there.

Re: Somehow became corrupted?

Somehow there never seems to be a beancounter budget to which the costs of delays can be charged. Perhaps it might help if purchase requests are marked "THIS IS TIME CRITICAL".

CrowdStrike hopes legal threats will fade as time passes since it broke the world

"In the short term, people were upset," he said. However ... customers came around

But a great many people who were upset weren't their customers. at closest they were their customers' customers or even innocent bystanders. But it doesn't matter whether they come round or not.

Microsoft exec warns of business functions being sacrificed on the altar of AI

"getting there will require investment"

And don't invest more than you're prepared to write off.

I'd have thought that with all the training data on the internet the one thing it could be relied to do (and possibly the only thing) would be to draw a picture of a cat.

Re: No real sacrifice required

But you still have to work out which is hallucination and which is real. Just as you do with the real C-suite. Easiest to just replace them with nothing.

Scientists find a common food dye can make a live mouse's skin transparent

Doubtfully. TFA says it works by matching RI of aqueous solution to that of lipids in the skin. Cotton is carbohydrate, not lipid. It'll just dye it yellow.

Upgrading Linux with Rust looks like a new challenge. It's one of our oldest

"it's about the maintainers who come after you who have to try to parse the idiosyncrasies of how you write"

If maintainers have a problem it's likely to arise not from the language the code was in but in the lack of documentation. If something's idiosyncratic leave a note as to why.

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

And in yet another parallel universe the boss was intelligent and there was no need for such trickery.

Re: Reminds me of a claim by a sysadmin

"in about 5 working days"

In the circumstances I'd be inclined to point out very, very clearly that this was and should be treated as an emergency of their own making, they had better respond PDQ and 5 working days is not PDQ.

Re: Prison

Not a motorway and the way things are going, not even likely to be converted to dual carriageway in the near future.

It always surprises me that Shap peak on the M6 is at about the same altitude as the hill I drive over to go to the local supermarket. As I remember it the old A6 Shap summit was much tougher than that in winter.

Re: Over the years, I have come to regard you

A quite senior member of management was retiring and the invite to his leaving do was worded along the lines of "a meeting to debate the motion that name shell be referred to as 'a former member of staff;". Needless to say he was one of the good guys of whom there weren't many.

The way our lot rationalised things was that you needed responsibility to be promoted to PSO. Responsibility was defined in terms of direct reports which we didn't. The fact that the SSOs were giving evidence that could put people in prison didn't constitute responsibility. I did occasionally wonder about the possibility of tipping off a defence QC to suggest that as PSO was the career grade someone who hadn't been promoted to it wasn't good enough to give evidence. That would have caused ructions.

In terms of military equivalents I think PSO would have been equivalent to major.

Re: Servers in the hiding room.

Remember they were known to be off-site on an errand. There's no way they could be reported as still being in the server room. It would have been an arithmetic impossibility.

Re: Prison

"massive bathroom breaks"

Bathroom? Luxury. All we ever had was bog-standard bogs.

Re: Prison

Likewise Friday afternoon system updates.

Re: Prison

"No doubt your motorways are much like that... if I ever get to drive in England I'll avoid them as much as possible"

Make an exception for the M62 trans-Pennine section and the M6 north of Lancaster.

Google says replacing C/C++ in firmware with Rust is easy

"It's just a new programming language folks."

Programming languages, new and old have always been a subject for religious argument.

Re: Google wants you to do the same

I'm not sure the switchover from COBOL is complete yet let alone anything else.

Re: Let's look at the guy's title

That was my thought from TFA's title. Replacing things is (relatively) easy. Making sure they work, however...

Trump taps Musk to lead 'government efficiency' task force

Business efficiency? Easy. Don't pay bills.

Raspberry Pi 4 bugs throw wrench in the works for Fedora 41

"erratum E9 on page 1,340 of its datasheet"

A 1346 page datasheet is rather stretching the meaning of "sheet" even allowing for its including the title page.