Posts by Doctor Syntax

BT bets big on AI with ServiceNow to cut legacy baggage

Re: HR without the himan?

Human Remains of course.

Oak Ridge boffins twist exotic metal into eco-friendly, solid-state cooler

Re: I remember that

The freezing microtome stage used water to remove the heat from the warm side. Any refrigerating system is simply a means of transferring heat from one place to another so the heat has to be removed somehow, even if it's just be air cooling. It's not at all clear from the article how this Oak Ridge method does that. From TFA it seems to be just a heat sponge that's going to have to be wrung out somewhere and with no moving parts it sounds as if it that would be the same place it got it from in which case the cooling would only be temporary heat removal.

Solid stae cooling? Peltier effect. Used it more than 50 years ago in a freezing microtome*.

* A microtome is laboratory equipment to cut thin sections of a specimen for microscopy. The specimen might need support to stop it collapsing. For small fragments of wood ice is a suitable support.

Japan's digital minister declares victory against floppy disks

Has he removed just as a requirement or gone all out and removed it as an option? If not it might hang on a good while longer.

Many years ago we ran a service which required data with floppy as one of the options - I can't remember exactly but it might have been the only option. It kept everyone on the team who needed them well supplied with floppies. Somehow, back then we weren't unduly worried about the personal information on them although, in practice, as it was a matter of public appointment s it wasn't really confidential anyway

That's nature's way of telling you it's time to find a better company.

Re: The next....

"Files in these formats can be simply copied to what ever is the data storage medium du jour."

That seems like an awful faff. Vellum doesn't need to be copied and has proven itself to be a very long lasting medium. OTOH the mylar drafting film we used to draw pollen diagrams on is probably equally long lasting and maybe more durable still. Cut into A4 and whatever's needed could be printed on it. The only worrying thing would the how long the ink would stick.

Seriously, long term digital storage is an unproven matter. Not only does the medium have to survive and remain current,* so does the file format. It's possible to visualise someone copying hundreds of files every 10 years or so for 300 years and then it being discovered that the format has been out of use for so long that there's no software to make sense of it. "Yes, we still have the PDF documentation available but it's a PDF document..."

* Domesday book from 1086 is still extant** - the Beeb's Domesday videodisc project of 1986 not so much.

** It still has a format problem in that C11th script isn't that easy to read.

RIP: WordPerfect co-founder Bruce Bastian dies at 76

Did I miss the article or did el Reg miss the death of Lynn Conway, also last month? Without Lynn Conway & Carver Mead literally writing the text book on VLSI the computing revolution might have been set back quite a bit.

That's an interesting thought. If the word processor and spreadsheet vendors had said Windows wasn't fast enough, they'd stick to DOS would Windows have caught on, Microsoft released the APIs or would they still have won the day with Windows & Office? The latter might not have been a foregone conclusion.

How tech went from free love to pay-per-day

Re: Speaking the copium

"On the other hand, mostly in the creative markets, FOSS software has historically lagged WAY, WAY behind their commercial counterparts."

And in some markets the commercial offering is largely or entirely someone running a FOSS product as a service. And in still others, GIS for instance, you'll find that if you can't afford the very expensive commercial product the FOSS one is a very good alternative.

Re: Confused Old Person Here.......

On prem equipment could also be leased. However the attraction of using really somebody else's computer (as opposed to that leased computer that's on prem) is the ability to dispose of all those expensive IT folks. Which is fine until they come up against a situation where it would be really useful to have one of those expensive IT folk to advise or help out. And it's fine until the somebody else's computer has a problem and somebody else doesn't really put restoring their system ahead of restoring all the other suers' systems. And it's fine until there's a cashflow problem and payment of the rent for somebody else's computer becomes really important because not paying might not just mean loss of ability to do business right now, it might mean permanent loss of the business's records if somebody else doesn't retain data whose rent isn't being paid.

So many businesses these days are really IT companies at the core but aren't prepared to admit it to themselves. The accounts, the stock records, the order processing are all there. Renting the core of the business might please the CFO but it's a very risky thing to do - looks good until the risks materialise.

"But they're not identical, and many people don't want to relearn or take the time to switch."

And yet Microsoft repeatedly switch UI, most egregiously when they introduced the ribbon interface. If you have a locked in user population you can do this, losing a few users at a time.

Salesforce investors reject plan to add extra $20M to Benioff's total pay

Re: Do tell.

Just wondering - what's happened to the Tesla share price since then.

It may be non-binding but wouldn't the shareholders be able to dismiss the board if they were sufficiently annoyed with them?

I think it wouldn't be a bad idea if occasionally shareholders did fire an entire board, just to keep them on their toes although it would be a good idea to have nominations for a replacement already in hand.

MIT's bionic leg upgrade leaves amputees walking like the wind

Re: Seems a lot more practical and vastly less invasive than Musk's Neuralink offering

I wouldn't have thought so. They're the two halves of a feedback mechanism.

'Almost every Apple device' vulnerable to CocoaPods supply chain attack

Re: EVA negligent?

Claim them, lock them, throw away the key. The individual projects could still be forked to release them. It would be a more widely visible process than quietly using curl to take them over and the forks would therefore very likely get scrutinised before they were used in place of the originals. Perhaps this is what ought to have been done when the original migration took place.

Brace for new complications in big tech takedowns after Supreme Court upended regulatory rules

Re: "experts"

"But the experts don't always get it right either."

True. But they've got the best chance, especially when compared to those who think they've no use for them. Unfortunately all too often they're the ones left saying "told you so". Maybe that's the ultimate measure of expertise.

Re: It's actually good.

"One of the problems is that no political system operates how it's supposed to."

That's why I think it's a good idea to have a part of the system working at a level of being above (or outside might be a better word) politics taking a longer term view than the political cycle. We have whittled down the role of monarch to be just that in the UK whilst still, as head of state, embodying the nation as a whole - it really is a terrible fate to be born to and I have no envy at all of anyone who is. It's obviously undemocratic and arguably very effective.

The judiciary is another such element; AFAIK the legal profession is able to ensure experienced and respected judges get to the top. It's been very noticeable that one of the ambitions of the DK wing of the Conservative party has been to restrict their influence as a result of the Supreme Court's rulings about BoJo; that in itself provides proof in the value of the system.

I'd like to think the HoL would be another but it repeatedly gets stuffed with superannuated politicians and supporters. At least I can't see it being made an elected body as long as the HoC realises that as such it would be a rival institution although a party with a large majority might have a sudden rush of blood to the head. What I would like to see would be ex officio appointments such as the presidents (or whatever the title might be) of the institutes which represent the various professions,e.g. the various medical Royal Colleges. I doubt that would happen by law as a body those who demonstrably knew what they were talking about would be even more feared by MPs. OTOH if we have a run of sufficiently bright PMs to make such appointments it might simply become part of accepted tradition. Wishful thinking...

Re: "experts"

Ah, that use of quotation marks which allows for denigration without justification.

Re: It's actually good.

Looking at it from the outside that;s how it seems to me except that it's not only the appointment of the judges that's politicised. Officials around that, such as the Attorneys General are elected and therefore inevitably political offices. And that runs right up to the very top in that the head of state is also a political office. The US has nothing to keep politics out of anything. Maybe it was put together by people sufficiently high minded to make impartial decisions (or believing themselves to be). If so they didn't allow for their successors not to be so.

Re: It's actually good.

"Regulation will be completely decided by elected representatives."

At best elected representatives in the US are no more likely than those in the UK to have the necessary expertise. At worst they'll be subject to the Dunning-Kruger effects experienced by political parties and the lobbying influences. And in any event, no legislature can determine in advance the circumstances all the cases to which its laws will be applied.

For several centuries one mechanism in England for fitting the theoretical to the real has been the judges' role in interpreting how laws should be applied to circumstances. That has been inherited by other legal systems including that of the US. Another mechanism in the UK has been the statutory instrument. Legislation makes provision for the relevant ministers - in effect their departments and whoever advises the departments - to make make detailed rules within that legislation which are then brought back to Parliament and so have at least the tacit approval of the elected representatives.

In the UK system, therefore, the judges are then interpreting not only the primary legislation but also the secondary legislation which is still under the oversight of Parliament. They are not free to ignore the latter. I take from this report that in the US the agencies have much the same role in making rules under enabling legislation but don't have any mechanism analogous to the statutory instrument to put the authority of Congress behind them. Is this the correct reading.

Nasty regreSSHion bug in OpenSSH puts roughly 700K Linux boxes at risk

Re: sshd restart required after upgrade

The usual upgrade scripts for Debian and its children include restarting daemons.

Re: 2024 finally Year of the Windows desktop

"I use Linux to talk to my real UNIX machines"

Back in the day many of us have even used Windows to do that.

Re: 2024 finally Year of the Windows desktop

"I never put you down as one of the butthurt fanbois"

And what part of "we grok the joke" would make you think otherwise? One of Bandacious's early upvotes was mine.

Re: 2024 finally Year of the Windows desktop

It's OK, we grok the joke - including how long a similar problem on Windows would take to be detected, buried within Microsoft, fixed, held back to the next Patch Tuesday, applied, rebooted and the resulting breakage fixed the following month - maybe. Did you miss that bit?

Mythic Beasts beat both of us to it. First I heard of it was an email from them telling me of an urgent update to a server.

So - to them (but not before they've finished all their patches) >>>

Debian & Devuan patches also landed this morning.

Microsoft tells yet more customers their emails have been stolen

"Microsoft are the most valuable company on the stock exchange and should have the resources to pay for the best software engineers and devs"

If they did that they might not be the most valuable company. Paying appropriate salaries to enough of those people takes money.

Along with the messengers who used to carry snail mail around the buildings, no doubt.

Isn't a government big enough to be able to run its own email server and important enough that it should do so for the sake of ensuring critical stuff doesn't leave the premises, not even to a trusted(sic) provider?

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

Re: You touch it, you own it

He never touched the second printer and if, by that thinking, he owned the arc welder they should have asked his permission to use it.

Re: Let's start a fight with the Welders

Barry next door will probably set the hedge on fire.

Re: Soldering vs. Welding (was: Blame-shifting gone mad)

"welding is joining two pieces of metal into one"

And, of course, the original technique is fire welding where no new material is added - the two pieces are heated in the hearth to such a temperature that they can be beaten into single piece by a smith wielding* a hammer.

* Back to the amateur etymology - is this the origin of "weld"?

Re: Pinspotters have computers in them too.

"Sorry, the kit's in the workshop" would have been a shorter - and final - explanation.

Nevertheless it's a useful tip for today's world.

Re: Having rebuilt a couple of them ...

The rodents would have been on the trading floor. And, of course, manglement would be home to any mustelids.

Re: Blame-shifting gone mad

English has another word to fit between them, as it were: "brazing".

What sort of engineer doesn't just add left-over tools to his toolkit? After all if something's too big to solder an arc welder should fix it. Best to always have one handy.

Boeing to reacquire spun-off supplier Spirit AeroSpace to shore up safety

"what began as a beancounting exercise gets undone in the interests of good engineering"

Yes, let's hope the beancounters get spirited away for good.

Like you, I'm orry to see what keeps happening o Shorts. I had a couple of colleagues who'd worked there, as did my BiL for a while.

Indonesian government didn't have backups of ransomwared data, because DR was only an option

"Most agencies did not use it because of budget constraints"

Now they're discovering what a real budget constraint is.

Chinese space company accidentally launches rocket in test gone wrong

Coming soon on "Who, me?".

American interest in electric vehicles short circuits for first time in four years

Re: Lies, damn lies and statistcs

If the Musk/Tesla explanation is correct why aren't the missing Tesla customers buying other makes?

Re: The sight of a Telsa accelerating with a half million watts of power is heartwarming

"If" usually has to do a lot of heavy lifting.

A friendly guide to local AI image gen with Stable Diffusion and Automatic1111

The chair could be stable (and there are a couple of spare castors - all they need it to be attached to the chair) but not the table. And whose is the leg to the left of the table leg? I assume you have a bloke in marketing who wears ladies' shoes.

"A compatible Nvidia or AMD graphics card with at least 4GB of vRAM. Any reasonably modern Nvidia or most 7000-series Radeon graphics cards (some higher-end 6000-series cards may work too) should work without issue. We tested with Nvidia's Tesla P4, RTX 3060 12G, RTX 6000 Ada Generation, as well as AMD's RX 7900 XT"

As a humble laptop and Pi user I'm beginning to see why H/W makers are so keen on AI.

Mars is slam-dunked by hundreds of basketball-sized meteorites every year

You are GPT4 and I claim my £5

Windows: Insecure by design

Re: New Code Issues

They're now replacing sudo with a "better" thing.

Sudo was an attempt to replace su with a "better" thing - unfortunately it fails one of Saltzer and Schroeder's design principles: "Separation of privilege: Where feasible, a protection mechanism that requires two keys to unlock it is more robust and flexible than one that allows access to the presenter of only a single key."

Re: Three cheers for Linux! I guess..

If you want an example of things to do:

SWMBO runs a patchwork class. Most weeks of the year I photograph the example she's made for next week's project.

The image usually needs a bit of adjusting - the "squares are never quite square - so Gimp rotates it to the best alignment. Sometimes it's even been used to pull it a bit squarer. And on a few occasions when only a quarter or a half has been completed Gimp miraculously (so the class thinks) works it up into a complete square.

Gwenview, the standard KDE image viewer crops it (Gimp could but somehow GV is easier).

The finished image is pasted into the handout's cover sheet in LibreOffice and exported as PDF. Sometimes additional images of the same pattern from online are added. The PDF name is set st start with 'A'.

SWMBO's handwritten notes are scanned onto NAS as PDFs, the default name starts with 'B'. Drag into the same directory as the cover sheet (which directory is shared via a Pi NextCloud server with SWMBO's laptop.)

Fire up a terminal in that directory and type pdfunite [AB]*.pdf projecname.pdf to assemble the handout as a single PDF. Yes, there are GUI alternatives but sometimes CLI is just slicker.

Pre-COVID I used to print multiple copies of the notes but now SWMBO emails them to the class to print for themselves (they need the templates on the last page(s) as hard copy).

Re: I hear you loud and clear

"Until then, as a freelance programming consultant, I unfortunately must have the same platform my customers use and, for some strange reason, none of them are on Linux."

Been there, done that, feel sorry for you. Delphi on NT/2K. I couldn't believe the hoops it had to jump through just to run an external process.

Re: how much punishment are you willing to take?

There's a huge gap between corporates and home users. It's filled by SMBs who like to - no, have to - sweat their assets. Does your local bar/restaurant change its PCs, including those running PoS, so often? Your local garage? Your doctor, dentist or optician? Corner shop? Any other local business you use?

Microsoft CEO of AI: Your online content is 'freeware' fodder for training models

Re: Copyrights as a structural obstacle

I'm not sure I'd want a trained musician replacing a trained nurse to look after me if I were ill and I'm not sure that the talents which enable the musician to be a musician would have enabled them to train to be a good nurse instead. And we've seen a couple of examples of people with musical degrees running tech companies.

On the basis that you seem to believe that humans are fungible I assume you're in management.