Posts by Doctor Syntax

Another banner year for ransomware gangs despite takedowns by the cops

Re: Kill it stone dead

Agreed. But need to ensure that the ban is followed. Fines at corporate level may well be an accepted cost of doing business. There needs to be personal criminal liability for directors. Directors because it's a role defined in company law, otherwise either it gets difficult to define the responsibility in a way that doesn't leave loopholes or the liability gets pushed down onto somebody who did not make the decision and lacked the authority to countermand it.

And, of course, it's easy to explain risk in non-technical terms to the board "You could all go to jail for up to five years and be disbarred from holding directorships."

Want Intel in your Surface? That’ll be $400 extra, says Microsoft

Re: Why would anyone want any Microsoft Surface?

"At this stage, no-one in their right mind should be buying into a new MS technology until- and if- it's shown itself to be a proven and established success that won't be ditched six months or a year down the line."

Which is close to a self-fulfilling prophecy of dooe.

Intel sinks $19B into the red, kills Falcon Shores GPUs, delays Clearwater Forest Xeons

Board listen, nod heads, mutter "She seems to know all the right words.."

Re: crypto ASIC ?

"There are still people doing crypto mining, right?"

That is just so last year.

European Space Agency picks Thales Alenia Space to build lunar lander

"overtaken by more modern technology before a flight is attempted"

This is the usual situation when development takes a long time. Of course if you wait for the new technology to arrive before starting development you run into the same situation.

Arrr! Can a sailor's marlinspike fix a busted backplane?

Re: Nuns!

"That caused some problems."

For whom?

Re: Nuns!

"a nun in full regalia"

I don't think "regalia" is the correct expression. Please don't make a habit of it.

Re: Cotton Tail

And now I have the Ellington piece of that name running through my head. Much appreciated.

Re: changed the look on XP to 'classic'

"Thunderbird 91.13.1 was the last that could do OS theme and that needed massive configuration editing."

Seamonkey still does.

BT fiber rollout passes 17 million homes, altnet challenge grows

Re: Its a bit rich..

Yup. AFAICS FTTC was being implemented in the areas where it was easiest - higher density of housing meaning few cabinets serving many houses. Then with the push to FTTP they're reworking exactly those same areas because every 100m of fibre laid passes many houses instead of one or two. It was obvious that they'd do this instead of continuing the FTTC roll-out. If FTTC hadn't got as far as a given village before it wasn't going to once the priority had been switched and neither was FTTP. So much for universal provision. Naturally the altnets would see the opportunity.

"before moving to fiber"

They'll move to the US?

So two thirds of people aren't choosing to pay extra for performance for which they don't see the need and receive a product lacking resilience in the face of power failure? Who could have seen that coming.

They might have got better uptake by running fibre out to those places where FTTC is inadequate but then it would have cost a lot more for each house passed.

Asteroid as wide as 886 cans of spam may hit Earth in 2032

Are you sending it up?

Googlers asked if they'd like to bury themselves next to Stadia, Chromecast, DropCam

insisting it was about keeping "the best" on board

Does this mean they'll refuse some of the volunteers? Otherwise it's the exact converse of what will happen.

Even Windows 10 cannot escape the new Outlook

Not entirely.

Re: I'm sorry, *what*?

Again?

"Most versions of Windows 10 are rapidly approaching the end of the road. Support is due to end on October 14. While Microsoft has shown no desire to keep affected versions supported past that date"

With those reluctant to upgrade hardware even more reluctant if tariffs hike prices MS is set to make a fortune on an extended update service. I wonder what the annual cost of that will be compared to the one-off OEM prices it would have got for new W11 licences.

Tesla's numbers disappoint again ... and the crowd goes wild ... again

Re: Optimist prime

People: "We like being scammed."

There's the problem.

Re: Sigh.

"remember when Musk claimed he was the greatest expert in manufacturing in the world?"

Oh, but I'm sure he still is - unless he defers to his boss who may not have manufactured anything more than a great deal of ill-feeling but is still the greatest expert in - what was it again?

"I expect that it's news to the mayor of the city and the state legislature"

It's always news when you hear something for the first time. They'd have to be told anyway and he's a busy man now so he can't afford to have to do everything twice/

Re: Car sales, an entirely unscientific survey

OP says his car does 1400 miles a year. Car life may not be entirely related to mileage but, as OP suggests, it might outlive him. So why should he care about depreciation? Consumables will be entirely related to mileage and maintenance partly so.

Now what mileage is the robo-taxi doing? Consumables will still be entirely related to mileage even if they are cheaper. Maintenance and depreciation will be almost entirely related to mileage. And then you're paying for the operator's profit which is exactly zero for the OP.

Re: Car sales, an entirely unscientific survey

"renting out the parking spot in our apartment has yielded more income than I've spent on rental and taxis"

Then you're in trouble when nobody want to rent that parking space, aren't you?

AI revoir, Lucie: France's answer to ChatGPT paused after faux pas overdrive

Re: Educating AI

Almost.

Re: Lost in translation?

"Cat I've farted"

"File not found"

Re: I wish everyone would get it

Are you thinking of the travesty generator? Or did that just rearrange words into plausible sentences? I think I've heard of that idea somewhere recently.

Re: "cow's eggs as a nutritious food source"

Holinshed was always given to sensationalism. Henry's real concern was about methane produced by cows. As a renaissance man he was ahead of the curve on such matters.

DeepSeek stirs intrigue and doubt across the tech world

"China's AI disruptor rattles industry watchers with unproven claims"

In other words, standard marketing practice.

WFH with privacy? 85% of Brit bosses snoop on staff

Re: so management are not measuring output

They wouldn't recognise productivity if it bit them in the ankle due to a lack of personal experience of it.

Re: My best workplaces...

"Logica had an unusual management requirement: project and business managers and/or their deputies were always in the pub on Friday evenings to buy beer and listen to suggestions and gripes."

Would that be for staff working on customer sites? A consultancy I worked for had that on a monthly basis, not so much for listening to anything, just getting everyone together.

Re: Idle hands - but whose?

Or their "Productivity scores' if they were using teams during the period that was available.

I doubt manglers like that would work out that productivity had an inverse relationship with use of Teams.

Idle hands - but whose?

If managers have time to spend watching their staff it suggests that the company could afford to get rid of a few and tell the rest to get on with their work.

Canvassing apps used by UK political parties riddled with privacy, security issues

Re: Is your Electoral roll data safe?

A few elections ago our local Greens produced a big wodge of newsprint, unlike the other parties who simply printed small fliers. Their delivery of this wodge fell somewhat short. Instead of finding its way into my letter box it was dropped on the path as a piece of litter. But then the Greens have been wilfully ignorant of real green matters for uears.

Re: Is your Electoral roll data safe?

"I asked if I could post his reply on the local community page, and was informed I could not."

You post his refusal to allow you to publish the original. That then has your readers wondering what it is that he's hiding.

Microsoft talks up 'significant capital investments' in AI as sector reacts to DeepSeek

Re: Can't stop now!

Followed by an anvil.

Guess who left a database wide open, exposing chat logs, API keys, and more? Yup, DeepSeek

Re: Amateur hour at Clickhouse

It's inconvenient. Disabling it makes life so much easier.

Re: Missed opportunity

Wouldn't Tigger be a better fit?

Re: All Live Operational Virtual Environment Systems are Go.

And we're stuck with him.

Startup plugs AI datacenters into biogas-powered energy

Re: Erm

A bit of lateral thinking would enable the two to be combined. Use wind when it's available and biogas (also wind?) when it isn't with some storage capacity for the biogas to balance things out.

And now something fun for a change: Building blocks of life in Bennu asteroid samples

"all five nucleobases that form DNA and RNA"

Good to see that being reported. I read a report in another place that ignored uracil which is arguably more important than thiamine. It's RNA which is at the business end of protein synthesis with DNA coming late to the party.

"one of the mysteries of the Bennu samples lies in the chirality of the amino acids they contain. Terrestrial life relies almost entirely on left-handed amino acids, but those found in Bennu exhibit no such bias"

I'd have thought it was entirely to be expected.

Tiny Linux kernel tweak could cut datacenter power use by 30%, boffins say

Re: Kernel

Indeed it is. But even if the result of the fix is that virtually no time is spent on handling the network stack prior to that nearly a third of the time was along with all the other stuff the kernel has to do. I doubt that the time not now spent on handling it will be spent in an idle state using no power, there'll always be more stuff to do on a server.

The server would have had to have been spending an awful lot of time in kernel to get that sort of advantage.

White House asks millions of govt workers if they would be so kind as to fork right off

Fire first and ask questions afterwards.

Garmin pulls a CrowdStrike, turns smartwatches into fancy bracelets

"The gnashing of teeth from obsessive stat counters could be heard from around the world."

They could start counting their gnashes.

Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise

Index new stuff so the situation isn't perpetuated. Any time anyone has to hunt through the old stuff for something, index that something once found. Gradually the bits that matter get indexed.

Re: Interesting

"History would suggest sheep skin vellum and oak gall ink is a long term archival technology."

Oak gall tends to fade a bit. Carbon black ink is better.

'Bro delete the chat': Feel the panic shortly before cops bust major online fraud ring

Re: Who were the real brains?

Over the years we've seen bigger fish in the cyber-offensive line being crap at their own OpSec.

ASML makes hay while Sun shines, but Trump could rain on its parade

If the US starts breaching WTO agreements at scale at what point does the rest of the world start sanctioning them and disregarding any sanctions they've been placing. It could take Trump's successor a fair while to dig out of pariah status.

Trump tells Musk to 'go get' Starliner astronauts

"It has yet to respond."

This is an improvement. They didn't respond with a poop emoji.

Good timing.

He makes it look like it was Biden responsible rather than a large USian corporation but if he'd left it any longer more people would realise it was what was just coming up on a (delayed) schedule.

Or Trump.