Posts by Doctor Syntax

Aghast iOS users report long-deleted photos back from the dead after update

Is the "delete" just a "move to waste-bin" operation at desk manager level or a genuine rm?

Re: Over writing files is hard

Nevertheless the smart storage device should present a consistent view of the LBA to the host - what was in a given LBA address should still be in that LBS address until the host changes it. Likewise the host should maintain a consistent view of the file system - even if low-level access to LBA addresses might turn up data marked as deleted a file deleted at OS level should remain deleted.

Somebody mounted an ancient backup? Result of a whoopsie with a more recent backup? Old photos to be scanned for ML training?

Alternative view: it's not a bug, it's a feature.

Qualcomm warms bed for Linux on Arm PCs

Hasn't anyone done this already?

Boeing might be criminally prosecuted for 737 MAX crashes after all, says DoJ

Re: The problem

My idea would be that every time a head of government takes office a special prosecutor with investigative powers is immediately appointed. Any infractions found would be prosecuted when the term of office ends.

Re: The problem

I can see something like that going to the Supreme Court (is NZ's Supreme Court still the UK Supreme Court?) with an argument that someone "at a distance from day-to-day operational and safety decision-making because of their seniority” cannot possibly be in a position to prevent an unauthorised action in the course of a day-to-day operation if that was the cause of the accident.

Veeam adds support for VMware alternative Proxmox to its backup software

Re: Another step in the inevitable fall of Broadcom

"SMBs may be negligible, individually"

What's more, some of them will grow to be the bigger enterprises that Broadcom are aiming for but by then they'll be well tied in to something else. In due course Broadcom will be looking to buy in more customers with another takeover.

IMF boss warns of AI 'tsunami' coming for world's jobs

"tasks currently arrogated to elite experts, such as doctors, lawyers, software engineers, and college professors."

Expert systems, in fact. Remind me what happened to those last time round.

Google thinks AI can Google better than you can

How about a prompt along the lines of "List links to pages that show ... and leave out all the crap"

Brexit border system outage puts perishable goods transport in peril

Re: A power outage

"Just how stupid are the numpties that plan these things ?"

About as stupid as the numpties who thought the whole thing was a good idea in the irst place.

Destroying offshore wind farms is top priority for Trump if he returns to presidency

Re: Will Trump bring back the coal-powered car?

"If windmills are killing whales and/or negative effects on marine life, isn't that a bad thing?"

I've seen that little two letter word do some heavy lifting in the past but this is really over the top. Which little two letter word do I mean? The one right at the start of your sentence.

On the wider topic - even before climate change was considered it should have been obvious to even the meanest intelligence that fossil fuels are not in infinite supply and must therefore run out at some point. That raises two questions: the first is what do you or your descendents do for energy when they do run out? Shiver? The second is that they provide chemical feedstocks. Wouldn't it be wise to conserve them for those purposes rather then shoving them up power-station chimneys? There's been no excuse for that for the whole of my adult life.

When AI helps you code, who owns the finished product?

"We’ve run into this mess at ludicrous speed, blithely unaware that using these AI-powered coding tools turns the copyright protections every software firm takes for granted into a sort of Swiss cheese of loopholes, exceptions, and issues to eventually be tested in court cases."

Who's this "we"? It's been blindingly obvious to some of us.

Ellison's exemplar SAP-to-Oracle region rules out ditching Oracle

"Of course it will work this time."

Re: £130 million & counting -- just for one council

If only there were people with the skills to bridge that gap. People such as systems analysts.

The UK reveals it's spending millions on quantum navigation

Re: Only eight million?

These have the disadvantage of being indisputably contrary to criminal law. The alternative was only arguably* contrary to human rights law.

* It was argued so it must be arguable.

Re: Quantum Navigation System for planes

You can know which airport you're arriving at or the airport you luggage is arriving at but not both.

Biden admin shells out $120M to return chip startup to US ownership

Re: God help America .... Biden is emulating Rishi

Could you clarify who it is you're complaining here - all those of all political stripes who engaged in the race to the bottom or those trying to reverse it.

Japanese scientists propose drug to regrow teeth, promise trials won't bite

I'm still waiting for a follow-up to the work I read about years ago from KCL dental school - a treatment for cavities which would stimulate enough regrowth to repair the damage.

Texan construction workers put a rocket up Team SpaceX over 'unpaid bills'

Re: This opinion will not be liked.

if you do business with Musk you had better have your lawyers on standby require payment upfront.

Nix forked, but over politics instead of progress

"When I discovered Nix, I realized that, 30 years in, I'd been doing it wrong all this time."

After 40 years in or more I think I'll just stick with what we've dot - although I do hanker for the original idea that binaries were in /bin and user's home directories were in /usr and so on.

You OK, Apple? Seriously, your silicon lineup is … a mess

Re: Not for the Likes of Us

Not for the Dunning-Kruger end of the market.

One bank's brilliant upgrade was another bank's crash

Re: "Users would type into an X-terminal"

SLIP - serial line IP. That's something I haven't heard of for many a long year. Ah, the nostalgia.

IBM Consulting bought into Microsoft's Copilot – now it'll help customers do the same

"Generative AI is not only generating significant revenue for tech companies, but it's also yielding tangible benefits."

It doesn't say exactly for whom it yields benefits. Perhaps we're meant to assume customers although we old cynics will wonder about that. Nevertheless it's revenues for tech companies that are put first here with any customer benefits being an afterthought. Perhaps potential customers should reflect on that.

You want us to think of the children? Couldn't agree more

"Money talks and that it not going to change, ever.... Again these are not IT problems, they are people problems."

Not people problems as much as regulatory problems. Money probably talks more loudly in the US. In the EU US money is more of a fairly distant wail.

"There are a lot of unhappy kids around"

The term used to be "teenage angst" and that goes back about as far as when I was a teenager - which is not long after the term "teenage" was invented.

"They are a high value target in all this, and weakening their own transactional security is as bad an idea as it sounds."

Unfortunately it doesn't sound bad to its proponents. How do we overcome this?

Hey, Reddit. Quick question. All those clicks on my ads. Were they actually real?

Bots?

OpenAI insists it's not launching a search engine nor GPT-5 on Monday

"Keyword search works well for document retrieval and has become quite effective"

Please tell me where. Everything I've seen gets progressively less effective. Is sheer quantity of hits with some of the keywords or some words which look a bit like keywords a measure of effectiveness? What happened to the effectiveness of "AND", "NOT" etc that worked in document retrieval systems of the '80s but not on the moder web?

Cybercriminals hit jackpot as 500k+ Ohio Lottery lovers lose out on their personal data

So 500k emails telling the lucky winners they need to pay $10 to claim their prize. Even if only 1% fall for it it's a nice little earner.

BOFH: The greatest victory is that which requires no battle

Re: not trolling

I suppose the New Zealand usage would be the significant one here.

Re: Who knows a future AI Boss could be in play?

"What kind of humans do you think would actually fill those roles?"

There's now a Canadian airline that's got a fair idea. It will probably take a few other cases before the dust settle.

Re: Who knows a future AI Boss could be in play?

"Computer makes sure there is no way for you to complain about it"

There's always the option of a letter to ebay's registered address asserting your rights under GDPR. If that doesn't get a satisfactory response there are legal options. However much they may think otherwise companies running websites actually exist in the real world with real legal obligations, not the fantasy world they believe they're in.

Re: AI picks the average from the geniuses

"My friend complained and was told HR had paid a lot of money for this system, and it was proven to identify people with all round skills who could adapt to do any job"

Obviously the HR people themselves had failed by their own criteria. They couldn't adapt to the job of recruiting mathematicians.

Re: Synthia

"Sadly this episode isn't so much satire as contemporary reportage."

There's a difference?

US semiconductor building boom means staff shortages and talent slipping away

Well, fancy that.

People are important. Who knew?

Microsoft's Brad Smith summoned by Homeland Security committee over 'cascade' of infosec failures

Re: But we want a change to the Ribbon. And demand that Clippy be freed!

Irony, Jake. Irony.

a "cascade of avoidable errors" were to blame for the attack's success

I'd rate leaving emails on somebody else's server as one of those.

Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad

I remember some "artist" flattening brass instruments with a steam roller to make an "artwork" many years ago. The V&A, to what should have been their shame, displayed the product. For all I know it might still be there.

I told Halle Berry where to go during a programming gig in LA

Re: Alternative uses for hotels

"If I wanted a good time I wouldn't be here."

Senior staff used it and wouldn't want to have to mingle with employees - or let employees find out who was accompanying them.

You sorted out an Oracle problem in a fortnight, even if it did take 20 hour days? Birmingham council and Edinburgh University want to speak to you right now.

Did IBM make a $6.4B blunder by buying HashiCorp?

"a fork of the software will be made"

Like the OpenToFu mentioned in TFA?

Exactly like the OpenToFu mentioned in TFA.

Father of SQL says yes to NoSQL

Re: Unasked question

Maybe it's not even an answerable question.

Stack Overflow simply bans folks who don't want their advice used to train AI

Re: If they won't let you change your answers to a protest message

"Then the mods won't notice"

And neither will someone who needs the help you originally gave to similar people, trusts it because of the reputations and is now mislead by it.

Re: re: To be honest, SO was never good.

Brilliant!

Dell customer order database of '49M records' stolen, now up for sale on dark web

Re: "we do not believe there is significant risk"

It certainly isn't for me, at least not as a join.

And it begins. OpenAI mulls NSFW AI model output

Re: There is a theory, lighthearted...

A complaint from a Betamax owner?

UK's National Cyber Security Centre entry code cracks up critics

The smart thinking would have been to leave the pads uncleaned but change the code to something that didn't used only two of fewer of the four.

Italy's climate super computer, Cassandra, to combine HPC with AI

Unbelievable!

Cassandra? Really?

ML suggests all that relaxing whale song might just be human-esque gossiping

Someone featured on last year's Royal Institution Christmas lectures was taking a more direct approach to interpreting what they meant. He was recording them and filming them to associate the sounds with the activities they were doing at the same time.