Posts by Doctor Syntax

OpenAI’s Altman says Pentagon set ‘scary precedent’ binning Anthropic

Trump has money in OpenAI?

LibreOffice Online dragged out of the attic, dusted off for another go

"Known as CODA, this runs locally on Windows, Linux or macOS, but like the cloud version, its UI is rendered using web technology"

Why? Just why? There is an existing local alternative that doesn't need this. It sounds neither fish nor file nor good red herring.

Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction

"handled tasks ranging from programming to support, and everything in between."

The good old days. Requiring specialists allows things to be made more complicated than is good for them and introduces gaps where everyone finds themselves waiting for someone else to do their bit.

KISS.

Engineer held hostage by client who asked for the wrong fix

Re: Locked Out

It must have expired while I was on-site. I've been here for quite some time.

Re: Outrageous

"Besides, a fire alarm would probably precipitate a fire suppression dump of some sort"

That was the essence of the threat implied in the two options.

Open source devs consider making hogs pay for every download

Re: Tragedy of the commons

From what I've read local lordship was evolving before the Normans arrived and even without it rights would need to be regulated. The tragedy of the commons is what happens when they're not.

Re: Reg readers need to think this one through

I'd add

3. The faster requests come in from any IP address or block of IP addresses the slower they get served. In the event of really fast requests when somebody starts pounding return is they think they're not being served quick enough the connection is dropped and reconnections refused for the next 10 minutes. This is made quite clear to users as is the suggestion that if they want to make frequent pulls they set up their own cache. Alternatively they can have a private cache set up on the server provided they pay for it, solving the problem of who pays for the infrastructure.

Re: Tragedy of the commons

Common land in England was never in some sort of public domain. The land itself had an owner, usually the manorial lord. Certain people (e.g. householders or manorial tenants) had certain rights (e.g. pasturage, pannage, turbary, collecting dead-wood). Grazing would be limited by some form of rationing (stinting, agistment).

There were also complications of visenage or inter-commoning where two communities would have common rights on the lnd between them. If lordship demanded boundaries there might be differences between the neighbours' definitions of those boundaries leading to disputes, violence and even death. The commoners taking part were, I think, often pawns and victims in disputes between their manorial lords.

Enclosure goes back a long way, e.g. the peak of the English population in late Edward II/early Edward III. If the population grew beyond what existing cultivation could support extra land would be granted (asserts). When the population collapsed, e.g. in the famine of the late 1310s or the Black Death a generation later, come of these assarts were abandoned. When it rose again more common was enclosed well before the Parliamentary enclosures. I'm currently trying to work out how one common came to have been largely enclosed, apparently by a neighbouring estate, mostly by at least half a century before its Act. I've also seen an instance where the post-Enclosure field layout as seen on the 1st ed OS 6" map differed from that in the Commissioners' map; I suspect it was following previous encroachments which had already enclosed a substantial part of it, again from a neighbouring estate although this time they didn't get to keep it.

Re: No such thing ..

"I think the economist Milton Friedman coined that one."

What one is that one? If you mean "tragedy of the commons", no he didn't.

Re: Easy solution

How does your billing infrastructure work?

SaaS-pocalypse chatter is doomster pr0n. It would be nice if enterprise IT were boring again

It is not just the cost of building software that prevents newcomers from taking chunks out of the enterprise software market; it is inertia lock in.

Denizens of DEF CON are 'fed up with government'

Re: Corporate circlejerk

That was bothering me as well. Massive consumption of resources, massive distortion of the economy, massive risk (to say the least) of a massive bubble with all the downsides that entails and the only question is whether it wins some competition.

Re: Benjamin Franklin and human rights

Nd did he subsequently oppose that? Answer yes or no.

"A currency that cannot be hoarded...there's a problem to solve."

What sort of problem to solve? The problem of nothing ever being done because there's no accumulation of capital to get good but difficult stuff started. Be careful you don't invent the medieval economy.

Re: Blaming the wrong people

guy in charge whom you elected is a horrible human being's horrible human being.

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

Re: Kathy Burke said it best...

Oops. "with whom".

Re: Kathy Burke said it best...

Before it was called "woke" it was called "politically correct" and the politically correct had the mantra of not being judgemental. Anyone with who they disagreed was judged as being judgemental. Cognitive dissonance was unknown to them.

Cops back Dutch telco Odido after second wave of ShinyHunters leaks

Re: Well it's a tough one

Odido's business deserves to suffer on account of holding passport and driving licence numbers in the first place. These are surely not necessary for providing a telecoms service. However as customers have provided this data they must be OK with it unless Odido made them a requirement in which case they would appear to be in breach of GDPR.

BOFH: Nobody would be stupid enough to go live with the mirror system, surely

I'd draw the line at that but a 36" screen would be quite useful as my eye-sight deteriorates (and why is the Register comment entry page in a smaller font than the comment display page?) if only some sort of fold-away screen could manage it.

The Boss turnover is suspiciously high anyway. Fortunately the management records will not show this.

So at least one board member is aware of the BOFH's special talents.

UK copper fired after faking keyboard taps using photo frame

Measurement is hard - especially when you want to do it right

Productivity is a measurement of output per head. In order to measure it you need a good metric of output. Devising that requires thought. Capturing the metric also requires thought.

Keystrokes are not a good metric of output. They're not a metric of output at all. They're a metric of input. Someone using them as a metric of output in place of doing the work of finding something that really does the job (in this case, something related to monitoring of calls as far as can be told from TFA) is the one who is actually "making it appear they were working when they were not." Perhaps they should be fired.

What's more it would appear from TFA that this pseudo-activity was a device for keeping the computer from going into sleep mode, thus blocking an activity which appears not to have required key inputs. She appears to have been given a device which was not intrinsically fit for purpose and been fired for fixing that.

Anthropic to Pentagon: Autonomous weapons could hurt US troops and civilians

Re: Seeking a seat at the table

"Do you really believe VC's would supply this kind or money and having no say in the company's direction?"

Of course they have a say. The say will likely be not to put that money at risk (and more than it already is!) with the legal consequences of unrestrained use by the likes of Hegseth, especially if that use is against US citizens. Just think of all the class actions.

Re: Seeking a seat at the table

Is that you, Pete?

Which article were you reading?

Re: American civilians and warfighters

"It always irks me that American military speak values 'murican own nation lives 1000x 'foreigner' lives."

This is the design principle behind all armies.

NUC, NUC! Who’s there? ASUS with a client device for Microsoft’s cloudy PCs

Re: Thin clients were unreliable enough when it was all on-prem

Freelance I had a couple of gigs a few years apart running UAT for application server upgrades. It might have been a coincidence but I'd worked on development of the application a decade or more previously. The application was character based and the client was running thin clients with a separate terminal server. By the time we got round to the second upgrade someone -possibly the terminal server company, had put together some sort of layer that took the terminal control codes to turn it into a GUI interface although the users were told not to use this.

The morning of go-live on the new server everything was working as expected and I was about to go home when I was called back. Performance had collapsed. It didn't take long to find out who'd switched to the GUI terminal setting in advance of the beefed up terminal server that was due next week.

Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now

Re: What are the memory manufacturers doing?

"vendors should be investing in extra capacity. But they're not."

See https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/27/micron_continues_fab_expansion_with/

The headline is about NAND but scroll down the article.

Re: Recycle / re-use?

Or vice versa.

Re: So let me get this right

The limited resource is money and from time to time the right way is subject to fashion. Tulips or AI, it's all the same.

Re: Not only Zorin or Mint

"But virtually all other Linux Distros will do the job just as well."

Zorin & Mint are supposed to be the most Windows victim friendly so that's what I quoted. Personally I think anything running KDE would be preferable as there are plenty of cosmetics to make it look like W10. The unfamiliarity would be sensible menus, the fact that updates appear to be broken because they install so quickly and the lack of advertising.

Re: So all those PCs I've hoarded

A whole load of newly minted Mint users?

Re: What are the memory manufacturers doing?

ISTR shortages and gluts of memory in the past. We'll see this cycle turn just like the last.

Re: We just need to hang on for a year or two

Never underestimate the ingenuity of someone seeing an abundance of potentially valuable material going cheap.

The OS's function is to run applications. The applications' functions are to allow the user to do stuff. As you, williamyf, know quite well as you've told us of your excellent work in using Linux to make computing available to those who would not be able to afford it, it the being able to do stuff that's important.

"To put it bluntly: the average person doesn't care about their OS, unless or until it changes to one they're unfamiliar with!"

OK, let's assume this average person has a W10 laptop that can't be upgraded.

Would the Zorin GUI on their old laptop be less familiar than that on a new W11 laptop?

And which would cost them money?

Re: Recycle / re-use?

They could consider a special edition - as a new purchase of course, for older H/W. OTOH if the extended support wheeze brings in enough money they wouldn't want to kill that and, of course, it establishes the practice of Windows as and annual subscription, preparing the way for Windows 12.

Is this AI bursting its own bubble?

Meanwhile Zorin or Mint will keep that old laptop running with an up-to-date OS for quite some time longer.

ServiceNow boasts its AI bot is resolving 90% of its own help desk tickets

“How does it know it got the right answer? Because the outcome is measurable inside the same platform, Did the ticket resolve? Did the workflow complete? Did the approval get the right sign-off?

The fact that a ticket is closed doesn't mean it got the right answer. They'll discover that when an attacker gets a password reset or access authorised.

Salesforce CEO 'SaaSquatch' Benioff says his company will monster the SaaSpocalypse

Re: Fluffy Bear, Fluffy Mule, Fluffy Einstein , and "I want your soul"

"as we are developing our own"

Things turn full circle.

"They can also measure this per customer to show how much work agents are performing."

And bill for it as customers will discover.

NASA safety watchdog says it's time to rethink Moon landing

Very, very lucky or very, very careful?

Microsoft to auto-launch Copilot in Edge whenever you click a link from Outlook

"Most of us don't have a choice. My employer mandates"

You don't have a choice but your employer made one, even unthinkingly.

This just confirms my choice not to use Windows nor even the Linux version of Edge. It is beyond my comprehension why Windows users, or at least those who know there are alternatives, continue to tolerate this abuse. Yes, I know - this thing for which you think it's essential or that thing. But do they really justify putting up with it all?

Rapid AI-driven development makes security unattainable, warns Veracode

Security Convenience is our first priority.

And checking thinks is so inconvenient.

Debian 14 will drop Gtk2 – unless Ardour rides to the rescue

Ongoing tinkering is just as likely to introduce bugs. And interop problems, this being a case in point.

Qt is an option for Lazarus. However I wonder if it's better to regard projects such as GTk2 as not dead but "complete". Does sofware have to be in continuous development once it's good enough?

Britain's creaking courts to use Copilot for transcriptions

Re: Why does this need AI?

"We've had speech to text programs for donkey years."

OTOH they produce some odd results. Maybe text to speech with AI adding a first correction pass prior to the human making a second pass. If AI adds to the human checker's work rather subtracting then it can be eliminated.

Worried Europeans can now cut Azure's phone cord completely

Re: Wrong vocabulary

Paranoia is the first requirement of any DBA, indeed, of any system admin role.

You really should consider more imaginative menus and if you put wine first perhaps you should start keeping a record of your alcohol consumption.