Posts by Doctor Syntax

Qualcomm agrees to pay $75M in all-cash deal to settle licensing suit

It comes from the shareholders. As do all the lawyers' fees. Lucky old lawyers.

HPE intros virtualization solution it says is totally not targeting grumpy VMware customers

"This isn't us being opportunistic,"

If so they were being remarkably short-sighted.

TSMC chip plant construction halted by discovery of archaeological ruins

"it's not usual for ruins to be discovered within Taiwan's many science parks"

The possibility should have been planned for. Perhaps it was.

Researchers find Meta's withdrawal of misinformation tool hard to swallow

Re: What's disinformation?

After seeing so much "disinformation" turn out to be true, or at least debatable

Anything can be debated. That's not so much a low bar as a bit of string on the ground.

CentOS 7 holdouts thrown a support lifeline by SUSE

Re: Why? There's a free solution.

The term you're looking for is "technical debt".

Still cheaper if you've got less than 5 servers and buys time to make the move o the land of .deb.

What's up with Mozilla buying ad firm Anonym? It's all about 'privacy-centric advertising'

" helps advertisers and ad networks measure how well online adverts are performing"

The results might come as a bit of a shock. At the very least the ad networks will want to keep the results from the mugs advertisers.

McDonald's not lovin' its AI drive-thru experiment with IBM

It's not easy to see why the review needed to be particularly thoughtful.

Re: Bacon-topped ice cream anybody?

SWMBO found a recipe for buns with bits of bacon in them. She offered them to her sister & husband & our daughter & family. They went down very well which is not surprising. They tasted very good and it was not at all obvious what it was that was in them.

Re: IBM the Taylor ice cream machines of modern technology.

Maybe they're a bit old-fashioned and remember "Nobody got fired for buying IBM".

In homage to Jurassic Park, researchers store DNA in amber-like polymer

More like WORO. Or perhaps the R could be discarded - more of a WOO drive.

That doesn't sound like a good medium for a backup. As we all know it's not a backup unless you've tested a restore, tested being the operative word. After a test you need to retain the ability to do a real restore.

As reading this involves destroying it that falls short of being a test. Even if you make multiple replicates you still don't know for certain whether the replicates you didn't "test" are good.

T-Mobile US drags New Jersey borough to court over school cell tower permit denial

If cell towers are considered unsafe for Wanaque then all the mobile operators should agree to remove all coverage from there. It's the only responsible thing to do.

NHS boss says Scottish health board wouldn't give cyberattackers what they wanted

The summary text is described as easy to read. Many of the recipients will have ageing eyes. Thin sans-serif text is not easy to read*, especially when on a grey background. It could have been made a great deal easier if they hadn't (presumably) frittered away money on a graphic designer and just used a higher contrast print.

* It isn't that easy to read here, either, even on a white background, especially when the composition text is a smaller font.

Ada and Zangemann: Fancy reading your kids a book about FOSS?

Re: a fun illustrated children's story

Shouldn't the dragon have been sitting on the deck of a golden yacht?

It would be nice to think such a radical idea will spread to website designers but they're a conservative bunch in their search for creativity so I don't hold out much hope.

"explains the concepts of FOSS to school kids… and managers, marketing people, and victims of Windows-induced Stockholm Syndrome."

That sounds about right. Many years ago when we were first introducing computers into the lab the director ordered a few copies of a Ladybird book on computers for the section heads.

Cops cuff 22-year-old Brit suspected of being Scattered Spider leader

Just sufficient range to reach somewhere for a transfer flight would be OK.

Bearing in mind that casinos were one of the targets his time in US jails is going to be interesting. It raises interesting questions as to why Naples was the destination. Was his flight involuntary? Or are we looking at a journey to his HQ?

A more interesting variation would have been to let him take off before telling him he wasn't headed to Naples.

Arm security defense shattered by speculative execution 95% of the time

Re: Is 4 bits enough?

In other words it's just a debugging aid and should not be treated as a security feature.

Shoddy infosec costs PwC spinoff and NMA $11.3M in settlement with Uncle Sam

"if they had performed the contractually mandated security testing"

The implication is that they failed to carry out a contract obligation. In that situation were they entitled to receive any payment under the contract?

The Hubble Space Telescope is back in business

Re: Regression

A manned mission to replace instruments as has been done in the past, possibly not. But how about the satellites currently being designed as a commercial service to latch onto others to de-orbit others? Repurposing one of those to boost Hubble's orbit might be one way of servicing it - in fact ISTR reading about that already being done to keep comms satellites flying. Add to that a capacity to take over the steering from the remaining gyro and its life could be extended considerably.

Feds sue Adobe and execs for stinging subscribers with 'hidden' cancellation fees

OTOH if it says it's an annual contract Id expect it to run for a year although in the UK there's be provision for very early termination with a "cooling off" period.

UK's Total Fitness exposed nearly 500K images of members, staff through unprotected database

As Fowler had already accessed them it seems to have been a really stupid thng to have claimed in the first place,

"We have made it a priority to ensure that images of members are not combined with other data that can identify the member"

Then what's the point of keeping the image at all?

Techie installed 'user attitude readjustment tool' after getting hammered in a Police station

Re: Unilever Basingstoke

You're lucky the building's still there. When I went back for a conference the old Victorian houses we were in had been demolished & replaced by a modern block. But now KCL has got rid of most of its science apartments and the block has been replaced by housing. Ditto my old halls of residence.

If "Pete" is a contractor why fight about the cost of a hammer and chisel? IR35 & all that.

Nearly 20% of running Microsoft SQL Servers have passed end of support

So what's on the LAN doesn't stay on the LAN. It phones home. Otherwise how do Lansweeper know?

Re: Perennial problem

"and then blame the IT guys if it fails next year..."

The IT guys have a paper trail.

Microsoft answered Congress' questions on security. Now the White House needs to act

Re: Better AD defaults would be nice!

"Microsoft should buy Pingcastle"

WHy? They'd either break it, close it down after a few years or both. If you want to continue using it it's best if they don't buy it.

Re: Thoughts.

"Joe Biden grew up in the age of Bakelite"

He's about the same age as I am. I don't remember th '50s a s being particularly the age of Bakelite. It was the age when all these computers bere first being designed - and those by a generation older than he and I.

A pox on your casual ageism and another on your lack of historical knowledge.

Say it? You're not even supposed to know it.

Re: BREAK IT UP

"should be nationalized"

Are you saying Microsoft should be nationalised? Leaving aside any political disagreements: by whom? MS are everywhere. Should every country nationalise the local office? If it were a US government run entity why should any other country trust it (again, leaving aside the obvious comments)?

From RAGs to riches: A practical guide to making your local AI chatbot smarter

Re: Getting there

"Then an LLM+ could verify every statement it made"

That requires the LLM to understand the meaning of each statement.

If you make a statement you intend it to have meaning because you attribute meanings to the individual words because they are symbols referring to things in the real world or abstract concepts based on that reality. You attach further meaning to the way in which those words are combined to arrive at your intended meaning.

The only information the LLM has is the set of associations between strings of characters. Even calling the strings "tokens" is stretching things a bit too far. It would be nonsense to call them symbols in the way in which our minds treat them as symbols. They assembled on the basis of statistical associations with the prompt. The result appears to have meaning to us because we parse the result and construct an apparent meaning based on that analysis and the meanings which we attribute to the words.

But the statement will have no meaning to the LLM because the LLM does not deal in meanings. It cannot verify that which is not in its scope.

TAIFM will be based on TFM but with variations for the veracity which nobody will be able to vouch.

So we either have to explicitly tell it what document the answer's in or tag the documents so it can find them and then it tells me what I could find out by reading the document.

I'm not sure this helps look for stuff in a laptop without any fancy accelerators but with a big pile of downloaded historical source document.s Text search and a bit of reading and thinking are going to save the day, as ever.

European Commission may be about to put the squeeze on Apple for its App Store rules

Re: Fines on US companies? Pointless

"I doubt any court would rule that to be proportionate"

If it's what the rules say then I'd have thought a court would have no option but to back it. What's needed there is for the rules to be quite explicit about how fines up to the percentage are determined - say so much for first offence and incremental proportions for persisting with the offence.

We need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this network

Re: "This being 20 years ago now"

"For example, high quality (consumer-oriented) stuff has had all the screws and fasteners hidden for decades"

That'll be self-styled high quality. OTOH the discerning buyer will take a look and think "That's going to be a bugger to fix".

Re: "This being 20 years ago now"

Other sales/marketing and the gullible.

Re: "This being 20 years ago now"

"but that they give people an impression of what some business is like in some way"

This is, in fact, very generous of them as it often serves as a warning, to prospective recruits and customers alike, to look elsewhere for employer or supplier as appropriate. Such selflessness should be applauded, even if it isn't awarded.

Re: "I literally crawled over broken glass for this company."

"Shops where everything is behind the counter or in the back"

These are infinitely better than those where whatever you ask for isn't behind the counter or in the back. I remember one whose owner I privately refereed to as "we haven't got it" as that seemed to be his stock response to anything asked for.

Possibly even better are those who don't necessarily have it but know who does - like the one who pointed me to someone online who had got all the old stock from a closed down screw manufacturer and could supply things like what might have been the UK's last remaining few screws of that particular size in brass.

BOFH: An 'AI PC' for an Acutely Ignorant user

Re: Virtual coloured penclis?

"The problem with isopropyl is that it degrades the shiny surface of most of these dry-wipe boards"

What about trike (trichloroethylene)?

Re: AI Confused

Insist on only using serif fonts in future.

If the PC's smarter than the user then the user isn't going to hear a word against it.

Tesla shareholders agree to pay Musk staggering sum of $48B

Re: The occupants of the deck cabins will quietly assemble at the lifeboats.

If trading of shares not held by trackers lowers the price sufficiently to take it out of the index then that would no longer apply. If the number of shares held in such funds is enough to prevent that happening then there's something very wrong with the market because it would be unable to make corrections as necessary

Re: Inevitable

You have to wonder at the competence of those dealing in shares that have kept the price so high.

Re: Strange accounting

The company issuing shares and selling them dilutes the voting rights of the remaining shares. That's why a company raising money this way would tend to do it by a rights issue - unless an individual shareholder turns down the offer they retain the same share of voting rights. If the plan is to sell the shares to another party to buy into the company this should require existing shareholders approval.

Issuing new shares and giving them away dilutes the (other) shareholders' voting rights and their share of the value of the company. It should always have required the approval of the shareholders to do that. Given that the shareholders have effectively diminished their own interests it's strange decision - or did Musk effectively control something approaching the majority of the shares anyway?

Nigerian faces up to 102 years in the slammer for $1.5M phishing scam

Re: One way traffic

Surely that's because all US citizens are fine, upstanding people whose heads would never harbour a criminal thought. Or something like that.

UK Labour Party promises end to datacenter planning 'barriers'

Re: Also

"None of the parties is bothered with vision."

Perhaps that's just as well considering some of the visions we've been subjected to over the last few decades.

"A very good site (subject to power feeds) for a DC"

If you're going to develop something next to a motorway the sensible choice would be one that needs good road connections. That's not a DC.