Posts by Doctor Syntax

Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins

Re: The 3 assistants with fantastic people skills who effing hate computers

It might improve things. OTOH it might take away some excuses.

Re: Holding on

Something along the lines of https://zorin.com/grid/

Re: Holding on

I don't think they do subtly.

Re: I predict.......

"where are they storing thier standard office-type documents?"

That's taken care of. The previous article said NextCloud was part of the mix.

Re: Really?

The forced upgrades harm the customers' bottom lines.

Re: I wish them luck

The biggest concern of all is the server. If they're sending data to the server who needs the clients or browser to phone home?

I think in their position I'd be starting with the NextCloud server and a local MSP, even before moving to LibreOffice.

"Microsoft also has cloud products that it says provide sovereign data for customer"

It says they do. Subject, of course, to any demands on Microsoft by US legislation such as the CLOUD Act. How does it claim to get round that?

Re: Really?

No good reason from the users' PoV.

Feline firewall woke developer to declaw DDoS disaster

Re: Vardøgr

Yes. It also seems to have a natter with the base station(s) when moving from one to another. With an older phone it would break through on the car radio. Presumably before receiving an SMS it's confirming that it's still on and listening.

Microsoft to use Windows 11 Start menu as a billboard with app ads for Insiders

Crabby and almost certainly older greybeard

5 - 10? I've got 17 shortcuts on the panel (task bar is the equivalent for Windows users). Some only get used rarely, some everyday, depending on what I'm doing. The Desktop itself is a place to store files and folders for easy access.

Probably a complete failure of the Windows 10 update system on your kit.

Re: Here we go again....

Shit always sticks. And stinks.

Some of us have chosen not to play it.

Re: Can see how this will go

As I've said before, marketroids are deluded narcissists convinced the world is waiting anxiously for their next fart, brain or otherwise.

Don't tell Microsoft to do that. Do it yourself to go to somewhere better. They're not going to change but you have the option.

Re: So let me get this straight.

If people won't stop using the OS then finding the next evil thing to inflict on them becomes a game.

Why making pretend people with AGI is a waste of energy

your theory has a proper school of thought, called "embodied cognition"

It's also called "biology".

"maths + languages first, humanities next, arts and crafts way down"

Languages not part of the humanities? And, although I'm not a mathematician it's quite clear to me that real mathematicians are creative. But even more than creative, children are curious. I very much doubt that schools are against curiosity although plenty of people outside school will be.

I'm convinced that real intelligence comes from the fact that we are physical entities interacting with the physical environment around us. We start out, newly born with millions of sensory receptors - rods and cones, taste buds, olfactory receptors, those cells in the cochlea, touch, heat, pain receptors, proprioceptors all feeding into a growing brain and spend the first months correlating those inputs to start building a mental model of the world around us, the perceived world. We have a sense of self stemming from our connection to the world.

As we refine it we can use it to understand that external world, plan and carry out our interactions with it to do and get what we need and want. Most o our vertebrate brethren do the same. That's the core of our intelligence.

What we humans have evolved is the extra capacity to communicate symbolically with language so that we can add to our model by listening or reading to others telling us about things they have encountered and we haven't and also to add more from our imagination and to reason more elaborately about our mental model. But that mental model of the environment is the core of our intelligence. The symbolic layer is just an add-on.

What ML and attempts at AGI are targetting is just that add-on layer. Without the perceived world underpinning it they're not going to get there. You and I can read a description of a room, a landscape, a person or experience, fictional or otherwise and add it to our mental model because we have seen and experienced these things directly during our training of our brains in those early years and beyond. A notional disembodied AGI can't have that connection to give a sense of self or an understanding of anything that's communicated to it. No amount of description can give it the sense of what a drink is because it's never felt the weight of the vessel and contents, never tasted it, never sensed the tempperature and never swallowed it. It is and must remain deficient in kind, not just in degree from a real intelligence.

Tired techie 'fixed' a server, blamed Microsoft, and got away with it

Designed?

China orders its telcos to rip and replace US chips with homegrown silicon by 2027

"Not honouring the licences."

The licences don't actually require you to contribute back. What the GPL does is require you to provide the source to anyone to whom you've provided a binary* and to allow sharing of that source under the same terms on which you receive that.

Who do we find avoiding that to the maximum extent they can manage? That distinctly non-Chinese business Red Hat/IBM.

* Permissive licences don't even require that.

Please explain how you pirate FOSS

Re: Expensive

"bridges that collapse on a daily basis"

They must rebuild them PDQ.

Perhaps the two sides could just swap their stuff and avoid all the land-fill.

How to coax ChatGPT into making better predictions: Get it to tell tales from the future

Let's see. If you ask it to make economic predictions it's not too bad* taking into account training information plus information about an event that happened since the training data.

Now extend that to the real world with training data available up to present. In that case the equivalent of the invasion of Ukraine is a future event that hasn't yet happened, may or may not happen and can only be taken into account if you can predict what's going to happen. So if you can predict what's going to happen in the future then the model can predict what's going to happen in the future. There must be a flaw in there somewhere.

* Ask n economists for a prediction you'll get at least n + 1 so "not too bad" is a low bar.

Apple's failure to duck UK antitrust probe could bring £785M windfall for devs

How come they limit the case to just Apple what about all the other "stores" ?

Let's say we have Apple store and ANOther store. We now have 3 groups of developers: 1 Apple only 2 Apple & ANOther, 3) ANOther only

So we now have, in the one trial 1 & 2 vs Apple and 2 & 3 vs ANOther. Group 2's lawyers are fighting two different adveraries at the same time. Jury are trying to keep rack of who's suing whom. 1 & 3 are sitting wondering what's going on when the adversary that's not theirs is being argued about. Add further combinatorial explosion if more stores are being sued at the same time.

No, can't imagine why it's just Apple being sued in this case.

Linux Foundation is leading fight against fauxpen source

Missing the point. Go back and read the paragraph again until you understand exactly what the programmers' response is. Did they intend to make anyone rich? Do they propose to do that now.

Re: It's complicated.

You could have problems moving either format between platforms if they don't have the same fonts available. PowerPoint isn't going to take much trouble over finding compatible fonts. If you want control over what the product looks like, save in PD|F.

OpenBSD 7.5 locks down with improved disk encryption support and syscall limitations

Re: By default it creates multiple relatively small partitions...

All cognoscenti start out as non-cognoscenti. Moving from the one to the other is better than remaining as a non-cognoscento and proud of it.

Re: I love OpenBSD

It's a platform. So is Linux. You add extra bits to the platform to perform tasks. It's just that Linux usually comes with more bits already installed on it. You can have a minimal Linux platform if you don't want it to do anything.

Which is why I said I look on it as Unix, even if it isn't UNIX.

It's a bit tricky in that BSD had to remove any bits of AT&T code but AIUI it did evolve from the original academic distribution Unix tape and Ken Thompson spent a sabbatical year there plus a lot of contributions such as vi went back into Unix. On the whole I'd regard it as Unix, even if it isn't UNIX.

IT biz trials gadget deliveries by drone to sidestep traffic and emissions

But can it open a wheelie bin lid to complete the delivery.

Adobe will fork over cash for clips to train text-to-video AI

Re: Genie already out of the bottle

Data-cows deserves an upvote all of its own.

In passing you imply what should have been clear to them - comparatively little copyright-free video exists, What they need is material from copyright owners together with permission for them to use it.

BOFH: The new Boss, Aiman, is suspiciously good – for now

Re: Totally OT question

Unless you come from the Spen valley part of the textile industry specialising in using recycled woollen fibres - not necessarily from old clothes, but also from waste generated within the textile and tailoring industries. It had the reputation of being hard-wearing but down-market.

Support contract required techie to lounge around in a $5,000/night hotel room

On the other hand...

Summons to give evidence to a court martial on Tuesday, be there on Monday. All the way from Belfast to Inverness flying out on some small, cramped plane with a couple of SIB sergeants, the MP's equivalent of CID.

There was nothing for me to do in Inverness when I got there. Still the SIB took me out drinking at their expense (note to self - never drink with Army sergeants again). I woke up sitting up in bed next morning not even having managed to lay down before going to sleep - or passing out as it might be unkindly called.

Car collecting me to go to court, gave evidence, had lunch in the mess sitting next to the judge (that never happened in Crumbing Road), catch flight back on small plane calling at Skye, fretting about apparent tightly timed (it wasn't) change at Glasgow.

It turned out the only reason they wanted me there the day before wasn't to discuss the case or anything, they just wanted to be hospitable. The hospitality cost me a day at work out of my last week in the job which I sorely needed as I was scrambling to write up all my pending case reports. Worse still, the regiment was being posted so if the case had been delayed it would have been a free trip to Kenya instead and probably a witness fee.

"If I'd known what they were up to I'd have claimed a bit more in expenses."

Knowing what they were up to, you probably did, you just didn't know it.

Re: failed meeting

"in particular not understanding the conversion between litres and cubic metres"

At least he knew they measured the same sort of thing - pretty good for a salesman.

Re: So, a nice week-end then

"They were paying to have somebody on hand who could fix it if it became urgent."

If Frankdidn't really consider himself a ninja it's more like paying to have someone who they thought could fix it. But they were happy anyway - it's all in the mind.

"a deluxe suite in a top global hotel chain"

So his personal details will have been swept up in a security breach (I'm assuming they've all fallen, irrespective of whether it's been made public or not).

Microsoft gives Hyper-V ceilings a Herculean hike

That's an awful lot when you consider 640K is enough for anyone.

Where there's a will, there's Huawei to develop one's own chipmaking kit

"7nm homegrown processor produced by chipmaker SMIC, which Washington had not believed Chinese companies were capable of producing"

Maybe they weren't without the incentive of sanctions.

Microsoft breach allowed Russian spies to steal emails from US government

Does the saying "good enough for government work" apply here and ordinary businesses can expect better? Or does government get the most secure service available?

Boffins deem Google DeepMind's material discoveries rather shallow

Re: S&M - Sales and Marketing

And extra AI, of course.

We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners

That was my alternative when I was looking for a new colour printer. In the end I went with a Brother laser MFP for the scan-to-network function. Another good alternative to HP. OTOH my HP 2030 mono laser just keeps going but that's old-school HP.

Re: This feels like an own goal...

" even if HP win the actual case."

Even if? Especially if.

If they lose they'll have to stop doing it and start the long haul of rebuilding their reputation - if they can.

Fancy building a replacement for Post Office's disastrous Horizon system?

Re: I'm surprised

"I honestly expected that they'd just extend the whole process indefinitely until the inquiry is finished"

I think they're targeting "heat death of the Universe" as the finish of the inquiry. They may not have that many new documents to discover but padding things out with discovering previously discovered document has helped thm in the past.

Undoubtedly the advice given will be "Cloud". If that's taken up we can expect to see all POs in the country being out of operation at the same time fairly regularly.

Re: EPOS

One thing which I discovered looking through some of the more technical accounts was that the counters provide services for a number of customers. ASDA PoS will not simultaneously be handling sales for Tesco and Morrisons as well as their own.

A slightly more comparable situation can arise with a filling station operating a supermarket branded convenience store: a few days ago I bought petrol at a BP filling station with a Morrisons Local (or whatever they call it) convenience store attached which could handle BP customer cards but not Morrisons'.

The COTS PoS system is too limited when it's asked to stray outside supporting one business at atime. The alternative, of course, is that the PO reorganises the way it does business to avoid all that. Maybe miracles are possible.

MPs ask: Why is it so freakin' hard to get AI giants to pay copyright holders?

"Why is it so freakin' hard to get AI giants to pay copyright holders?"

That's an easy one to answer - they're slurping up not even all the money being thrown at them would be enough to pay up.