Posts by Doctor Syntax

Microsoft's Recall preview doesn't need a Copilot+ PC to run

"It's surprisingly good even on something this low spec."

For some dubious values of "good".

NASA, Boeing opt to fly leaky thruster as-is for first crewed Starliner CST-100 mission

Re: Its just a O-ring...

Let's hope the reviewers have read their Feynman.

Re: Here we go again.

Not the next iteration, this iteration. Just in case there isn't a next iteration.

Parliamentarians urge next UK govt to consider ban on smartphones for under-16s

Re: Here's a thought...

Politicians aren't usually in favour of teaching kids critical thinking.

Re: Re:

It stands to reason. All the adults you know used to be 13.

"National Service for the youth"

They seem to have taken the first episodes of Tes Minister (getting rid of rthe difficult bit in the title) and now Yes Prime Minister (national service) as a source of ideas. Did nobody tell them it was saire?

"massive pension hikes"

Anyone old enough to remember YM and YPM is probably in favour of this.

Will Windows drive a PC refresh? Everyone's talking about AI

I assume Morgan Stanley expect to make money from either lending to buyers in a PC refresh, dividends from vendors or both.

Yup, both. That'll be it.

Even closer: xpert systems?

There's plenty of digital roadkill.

We polled thousands of IT pros – and sustainability just ain't a priority right now

And deciding is just too much like hard thinking.

Perhaps the "Just Stop Oil" lot should be pointed at cryptocurrency and ML training.

AWS leads UK cloud market while Microsoft dominates growth and new customers

"Participants say that these enterprise agreements and the relationships they symbolize mean they are very unlikely to consider switching from [Microsoft's cloud] Azure, but they do not see them as directly inhibiting switching – just that the status quo would make switching an illogical business decision, given the benefits these agreements provide and the effort required to disentangle their infrastructure from the Microsoft ecosystem,"

That seems analogous to what any drug addict would say about their poison of choice.

Do any of their customers cite the risk of price-hikes by third parties and the cost of extrication in their annual reports? Surely they ought to.

By 2030, software developers will be using AI to cut their workload 'in half'

It's just as well the workload will be halved. The half that's saved will be needed sorting ou the mess.

But it doesn't which, if either, is right.

Re: Too imprecise

""Dave, I believe you are creating a subroutine that you used previously, saved in Project C.nx."

In the real world client C paid for that subroutine so they own the copyright.

Take two APIs and call me in the morning: How healthcare research can cure cyber crime

"Progress is built on failure as evolution is built on death."

Actually, evolution is built on the survivors. The dead are collateral damage.

Evolution works be throwing enough variants against the wall to see what sticks. To do that there needs to be a lot of variants. Will ARPA-H be able to afford enough?

Also it's worth remembering evolution is quite capable of producing sub-optimal solutions. What evolution produces depends on the survivable options that it took to get to wherever it is now. There are a lot of advantages to walking upright but anyone suffering a bad back should be able to tell the Intelligent Design believers they've got it wrong. Don't follow the evolution model too closely.

And why isn't it HARPA rather then ARPA-H?

Tape is so dead, 152.9 EB of LTO media shipped last year

Re: Long term storage to tape, takes more than just a bunch of tapes!

The passage of time makes it less likely to have survived in readable form but it also makes it less likely that they will still be relevant.

Re: Broader issues to consider

Over the span of millennia the solution to survival has been number of copies - and those may be in the form of being quoted by a later author rather than straight copies - and chance. In other words, we have the occasional copy of the occasional old text and know very well that more has been lost. That's why there's now great interest in recovering the contents of the carbonised scrolls from the House of Papyri in Herculaneum which might include texts unknown elsewhere. Ironically being buried in volcanic ash has preserved them against the usual decay of organic matter. This is still not a recommendation for carbonising your records in order to preserve them.

Re: In tape we trust

You can compress it by writing in hexadecimal. Id that's too expensive just use Octal as it doesn't use expensive letters.

Re: "take even longer when there's compression or decompression to be done."

yet in 2024 we still trust our data to rust on great lengths of plastic.

"Because it works" is a powerful technological argument although price is probably a factor as well.

Re: So The Next Time Your Service Provider Assures You That...........

Why not just destroy the media?

Venerable ICQ messaging service to end operations in June

Wall (Unix) will mystify some.

A thump with the pointy end of a screwdriver will fix this server! What could possibly go wrong?

Re: 2 years with a dry joint, running an engine testbed

Anhydrous, even.

Because he'd put a small pick through the connector?

Where do Terraform and OpenTofu go from here?

Re: Language evolves...

"let's incentivize give* people an incentive to do this task because motivating them without one is not working"

Not exactly hard.

* Not gift!!! See above.

Re: here's a quick summarization ...

Here's another one which realy pisses me off - and it's seeped back into UK English.

"Give" is a perfectly good verb.

From that we obtain the noun "gift" meaning that which has been given.

Straightforward - enough? "Give", verb, "gift" noun.

No. for some reason that which has been given is suddenly a verb meaning, it appears, the exact same as its root, "give". Why?

If you use "gift" as a verb you might think you're trying to do somethin fancier or more important than if you use "give". You aren't. You're just telling me there's something amiss with your vocabulary.

Man behind deepfake Biden robocall indicted on felony charges, faces $6M fine

The FCC can only issue fines. You'd have to wait for the criminal trial to do that, always assuming they're charged as accessories.

"Why are only the first guy and the last firm getting hit with fines?"

The fine was issued by the FCC. Maybe the other parties supplying services aren't in the FCC's scope. OTOH maybe they could and should be charged as accessories in the criminal case.

Assuming he doesn't have $6m what's the procedure in the US? Jail for non-payment? Make him bankrupt & write off the rest? Attachment of earnings for the next 6,000 years?

Was there no one at Microsoft who looked at Recall and said: This really, really sucks

Step 2. Microsoft responds to public outcry. An update makes turning it off work with copious apologies all round.

Step 3. The next update has a small error that silently turns it back on again.

What it indicates is a culture driven by nonsensical ideas enforced upon the "underlings" by marketing / management

It could just as easily be the other way around. Screen snapshot-ting isn't new. Automating it is just the sort of thing some ADHD intern might come up with.

Re: Yes they did look at it

No. Make it quick. We need to be shut of it ASAP.

That culture sounds familiar. A bit like the Post Office. There's a lesson to learn there.

Micron told to pay $445M in memory patent infringement case

How on earth can a jury find, as a matter of fact, that a patent already declared invalid, has been infringed? I know this is Eastern Texas but why wouldn't the judge direct them on this?

Elon Musk says he doesn’t want 100% tariff on China-made electric vehicles

Re: "Things that inhibit freedom of exchange or distort the market are not good."

Or saying yuo have the funds to takea company private?

How dare a mere President do something without consulting Musk? The very idea!!

I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite – and no one wants to fix this model-breaking bug

Was this written by AI?

Re: Known issue

I don't think anyone has a great understanding yet of *why* they transfer so well

The prerequisite to that is likely to be understanding why they're adversarial and the prerequisite to that is likely to be understanding why a given prompt produces the output that it does. Good luck with that.

However I'll throw in a wild guess as to why they're transferable: the contents of training data are too similar so if one doesn't have the maerial to create a realistic pastiche neither to any of the others.

Re: Support and maintenance

I wish you the good fortune to be able to keep doing what you're doing without being taken over by a larger company.

Bad vibrations left techie shaken up during overnight database rebuild

Re: Those dot-matrix printers really could shake up a storm

"isibly shaking from side to side as the print head moved along"

When I was a student computers were rare and botany departments certainly didn't have one. We did have an electric Marchant calculator where the entire register moved. Everything was OK until it came to doing division when the vibration would make it move along the desk.

'Little weirdo' shoulder surfer teaches UK cabinet minister a lesson in cybersecurity

Re: Pride

If you think post July will be better than pre July you must be an optimist. Different, yes, better, no.

It's a close match.

Re: Situational awareness is rare

Take a screenshot of the current screen and display it full screen.

Re: Situational awareness is rare

OTOH setting the building on fire is an extreme way to deal with HR.

Re: Situational awareness is rare

Experience is a dear teacher and for those who still don't learn there's always the dodgy window fastener.

Bing and Copilot fall from the clouds around the world

Re: Put your phrase inside quotation marks?

It's fragile to say the least. I've seen a dramatic improvement just by putting one word into the plural, simply because there were sufficient hits on place names which were in the plural to push the shrapnel down the results - but it still came up with place names rather than the sort of general results i was looking for.

Google guru roasts useless phishing tests, calls for fire drill-style overhaul

"fire drills of the early days, which were more like fire evacuation drills – sprung upon a building's residents with no warning.

...

now fire drills are better planned, well-announced procedures"

Oddly enough it's the old style drills that more closely resemble actual fire alarms (and bomb alerts).

The comparisons is, actually, a false one. An evacuation drill is an exercise is responding to an alert raised by others. Phishing testing is more akin to testing response to encountering al fire outbreak or recognising a suspicious object and taking appropriate action including raising an alert.

Re: Not sure if it's possible

I know some email systems add a warning to any external mail as I've seen them when my messages has been quoted in a reply. Whether that would be enough to stop some recipients clicking on links is another matter.

Meanwhile the public don't receive any training not to be phished. Far from it organisations which should know a lot better persist in training them to respond by sending emails with invitations to click, including invitations to click to log in. I remain convinced that those responsible for sending such emails would click on a link in an inbound email with the subject "This is a fraudulent phishing email" and a link labelled "This link is dangerous to click".

By all means keep running phishing tests and restrict those who fail from using any technology more advanced than a mechanical typewriter and an abacus.

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

I've avoided it for years.

OTOH the land past my house is categorised as a built-up area although it's a moot point as to where it ceases to be so. It's on one of several possible routes that will take you between a road with a 30 limit and a road at national speed limit without passing any speed limit signs of either sort.

Re: Research finds pedestrians don't pay attention when crossing road

"It's actually really hard to ride a two wheeled bike slow enough"

One of the Greek lecturers in QUB could ride amazingly slowly - on the road. They had all (it was a small department so not many) probably come from Oxford so they were all cyclists but he was outstanding.

Re: Pedestrian here

" I can hear motorbikes on the road on the other side of the valley - over a mile away."

Ditto, and the level of sound seems to be inversely proportional to the power. Tracking the loud buzzing sounds it's surprising how long it takes them to cover any particular stretch or road.