Posts by Doctor Syntax

Microsoft Azure faceplants in Norway, taking government services with it

"I'll let you know if we have anything to share."

Not a working system, obviously. Anything else?

UK tax authority eyes £880M overhaul for Northern Ireland trade services

Re: Brexit

Could you explain what your solution should be? Are we to ditch the GFA & re-erect border posts? Or should Ireland have left with us so we could have a Britain/Ireland customs union to avoid customs posts? Do you genuinely believe that the rest of the world has to adapt itself to your Little England thinking? Or what?

Re: Creating opportunities where previously there were none.

Fleece? Brexiteers will probably insist that "we" voted for it, conveniently ignoring the fact that more than half the UK population didn't. Except they won't, they'll insist that this wasn't the Brexit they voted for although nobody quite knows what was.

KDE Plasma 6.3 released – and 6.3.1 is already here

"Plasma 6 is now at the stage where the team is restoring features and options lost in the major upgrade to the Qt 6-based release."

The one feature I'd like to see restored was lost at either the 3/4 ot 4/5 transition (I can't remember which).

It used to be possible to set a corner as the hot spot to unhide an auto-hidden panel. Now it's just the edge. It means that the panel bobs back up* as soon as the cursor overshoots the edge.

* Other directions are available if you site the panel on some edge other than the bottom.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Back before Carley and the rest it woudl have been impossible to believe how tawdry HP would become.

Do they really want any customers? Are they just intent trying to make the business a target for a takeover?

Two arrested after pensioner scammed out of six-figure crypto nest egg

The bigger question is who scammed the pensioner into investing a six-figure sum into cryptocurrency in the first place.

Lloyds Bank reviews tech and engineering personnel in reorg

Re: Customer Journey Manager

My customer journey with Lloyds was to get out.

Type-safe C-killer Delphi hits 30, but a replacement has risen

Re: Delphi - A fantastic product let down by decades of mismanagement

"trying to milk customers until they die"

There are certain companies that are bad news when they buy a platform you've come to depend on.

Re: What characters not common on non-USA keyboards?

I suppose those in Europe can get their own back by including a couple of Euros.

Re: Compared to Delphi, FPC and Lazarus are a joke

"Getting curly braces on an Italian keyboard, for example, require EMacs-style key combinations."

That's going to be a pain in C-like languages. It may be why Pascal allows (*....*) as a replacement for {...}. Looking at it again and taking some of your other replies into consideration perhaps what I read in your OP wasn't what you intended to say.

Re: Not

"That was probably the warning it gives you when it's about to set up a local configuration directory"

The message could usefully be rewritten. The way it's phrased it looks like an error message.

Re: A colleague of mine uses Delphi/Lazarus

"And converted exceptions to function boolean return codes."

I did that very briefly. You just have to grasp the idioms of any language to use it properly.

However kudos for your C programmer for returning error codes; s many applications these days give me the impression that many programmers just assume it'll all work fine and plough on regardless.

Re: A colleague of mine uses Delphi/Lazarus

"Object Pascal is clear enough that anyone understanding object-orientated concepts can pick it up pretty quickly."

And anyone not understanding OO concepts will pick thoe up pretty quickly at the same time. That was my experience although it did help that I'd used UCSD Pascal years earlier.

This was my last gig before retiring and up to then I'd been Informix database and tools. The client decided that Delphi was too old-hat or something and decided to rewrite the application for their flagship contract in C# or C++, can't remember which. The team kept growing and growing by the time I left. My view was that what we'd been doing in Delphi on other contracts was sufficiently flexible that it could have been extended with much less work. I doubt management really understood what they'd got.

I later heard they lost that contract although I believe some dubious shenanigans to do with re-letting the contract were involved. They now are no more.

Re: Compared to Delphi, FPC and Lazarus are a joke

"characters not common on non-US keyboards"

What characters? I use a non-US keyboard & haven't encountered such a problem.

I still have a legit Delphi on a W2K VM. Arguably the high point for both products.

Re: A colleague of mine uses Delphi/Lazarus

"Nobody knows Pascal apart from him."

This is certainly untrue. It may be that there are no people with Pascal skills whom you know. Or possibly there are no people you know that you know have Pascal skills that you're aware of.

However Pascal was designed as a teaching language so it should be easy to learn although IME it's at just the worst distance from C to make learning one from the other tricky.

Also once your mate retires he could have a nice little earner maintaining all his old stuff.

Hundreds of Dutch medical records bought for pocket change at flea market

Re: As the company no longer exists no action can be brought against them

Buried somewhere in GDPR is a provision for making people personally responsible so that should be an option in any jurisdiction where GDPR applies.

As the company no longer exists no action can be brought against them. That just leaves the directors. We can but hop.

In the meantime does this leave Robert with the costs of certified erasure now he's in possession of the drives?

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

Re: I can feel the downvotes coming! Be gentle.

I finally came to t he conclusion - maybe wrongly - that the point of Gnome is to start with a blank sheet and add in what you need. However I've been using KDE for so long I can't be bothered with all that. Each to his own.

Re: No Thanks

I think some of these things have been picked up from phones. As Liam said, what makes no sense in landscape makes sense in portrait. On a phone there isn't space to provide a conventional menu bar so wrapping it up into a long drop-down format makes the same functionality available and useable irrespective of the icon at the top. It would also make sense in the side bar of a complex GUI. OTOH in landscape I want to see a menu bar and under no circumstances do I want to see a ribbon.

I see no reason why the menu structure can't be defined as a non-visual object and interpreted by a TUI or GUI interface of the user's choosing - even a ribbon.

Re: No Thanks

"Win98 got way more complex because MS frantically kludged IE in there ...

KDE copies that kludged design."

I don't think KDE has IE hidden in there.

Personally I find KDE quite understandable. It's the odd Gnome-related application sneaking into a distro that gets confusing.

Trump teases 25% semiconductor tariffs that will go ‘substantially higher’

Re: And yet markets seem remarkably calm

"But even then, global uncertainty tends to favour the dollar and US capital markets"

Only because the US is usually stable. It's hard to see that holding for the next few years.

Re: And yet markets seem remarkably calm

"Assuming there is logic to all of this, and Trump wants to deliver his promises of making foreigners pay"

But import tariffs do not make foreigners pay. They make the importer pay and that gets passed on to the ultimate purchaser a home. I suppose he could try export tariffs to make the foreigners pay...

Once upon a time the UK had this great idea, which seems to have become an EU idea as well, that the best way to grow a semiconductor industry was tariffs on components but they missed out components on pre-built boards. As anyone looking at a populated PCB knew the components on any one board came from multiple countries. Until the miraculous day dawned when the entire semiconductor BoM could be sourced from the UK any PCB assembler would be paying tariffs to bring in some of the components from abroad. Result - not that much of a PCB assembly industry in the UK, therefore not much of a home market for a semiconductor industry therefore not much of a semiconductor industry; that day never dawned.

TL;DR It's been tried before. It predictably didn't work then. It'll predictably not work now.

HP Inc to build future products atop grave of flopped 'AI pin'

Re: Why would a printer need AI?

"No explanation of what it does, as yet,"

It will print some extra documents if you're not buying enough ink.

Re: Why would a printer need AI?

"Do people still print things?"

We no longer print handouts for my wife's patchwork class but that's only because the class members no have to print their own copies. That change was mad when the class went to Zoom for the duration of lockdown.

Why print? For one thing it would not be feasible to bring laptops to the class but mostly because they include the essential paper templates that are part of the patchwork process.

Acer signals 10% laptop price hike in US, blames Trump's extra China tariff

Re: Global economies spread (some of) the pain

Why take a loss in the US? Sell what you can sell there and make up for the loss by selling more in ROTW? If you start to play games such as trying to cross-subsidise the US market you'll end up selling less than your competitors who are smarter, ratchet up your prices more to compensate, sell less still and either catch on or disappear up your own fundament. The ROTW doesn't owe the US a living whatever Trump thinks.

Re: Not Unexpected

Well, he knows that he knows what he's doing. What else is there to know?

Re: Not Unexpected

"maybe got missed in some analysis"

What analysis? If you know what you're doing you don't need analysis.

Re: Tariffs are taxes with nationalist spin.

Expect the US to adopt measures of inflation that ignore tariffs, rahter like measures of inflation that ignore housing costs. That fuelled low interest rates that went into climbing house prices, unsustainable loans and the great crash of 2008..

City-slaying space rock 2024 YR4 still has 2.4% shot at smacking Earth

Time to take a DART at it.

Nearly 10 years after Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier says: Privacy’s still screwed

No, minion. Your advertising budget is cut forthwith.

Re: Privacy is dead...

What we really need is arguments experience that can break through to the average person...

They'll learn. One at a time, the hard way.

Re: Sadly

My guess would be that the little guy who's selling products to real customers is less likely to trip up over GDPR. The little guy who's a data aggregator like the one in the states who got pwned and now deserves to be sued to oblivion along with his progeny to the 10th generation - he deserves to be not just tripped up by grabbed by one of those leg-breaking man-traps.

Agreed. It would take a skeptic at board level who's prepared to ask questions like "I just bought one of our cars and now I'm seeing lots of adverts for it which are obviously irrelevant. Can you explain to me why you think this isn't a waste of the advertising budget which we give you?".

* Or any other expensive and hence rarely purchased product.

The thing that will stop it fairly quickly is for businesses to wake up to the fact that their marketing departments are paying out good money for a backward looking product of poor S/N ratio which would be better seen as toxic waste.

Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?

IOW bootstrapping all the installs of all these systems listed above uses a bootstrapping approach.

Bank of England Oracle Cloud bill balloons – but when you print money, who's counting?

Re: Just wondering ...

"trusted cloud transformation experts with a future-focused, value-led approach and deep sector experience."

That should be warning enough to ay reasonable person.

Re: Does Oracle work?

Lots of them, but to their own expectations which they didn't share with the client.

Re: As a British tax payer ...

Some of us are long retired.

There's a slight chance Asteroid 2024 YR4 could hit Moon in 2032

Re: Soup Dragons Beware

One would prefer better.

Open source maintainers are really feeling the squeeze

Re: Let me quote from the MIT license....

This is the amazing thing. We regularly get commentards banging on about corporates can't use FOSS applications because of lack of support and yet the distinguishing feature of Microsoft support seems to be a monthly supply of apparently lottery of patches which may fix things and may break others.

1. Do you think the maintainer role is trivial in comparison with contributors?

2. What millions?

The itch was scratched, life went on, other things to do.

Re: Obligation to maintain?

To emphasise the point: a corporate - and anyone else - can make mods and not submit them upstream but would then have to incorporate them into later versions. That might be no more than a recompile from source providing the relevant source file was unchanged upstream in later versions. I did that myself for years when Wine decided that 24 bit video could be treated as 32 bit (it couldn't & shouldn't and broke a lot of applications in consequence).

The Doom-in-a-PDF dev is back – this time with Linux

Re: Coolness aside

"Coolness? It's an abomination."

Why not both?

If you dread a Microsoft Teams invite, just wait until it turns out to be a Russian phish

You've just described meetings in general.

Why AI benchmarks suck

"Tests that haven't kept up with the rapidly changing state of the art."

Rapidly changing state of the art? Is that another way of saying "immature technology"?

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

Re: More than light fingered

"By the greatest stroke of luck imaginable"

Maybe luck wasn't involved.

Why do younger coders struggle to break through the FOSS graybeard barrier?

Re: Also ...

With the costs of universities today the need for dosh is not a negligible factor.