Posts by Doctor Syntax

JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant meets irresistible outcry

Re: Not knowing what words mean

My analogy would be an old and old-type fabric surveyors tape, stretched in places.

"Any data sent to the AI service is not used for training."

So they're saying data is sent to the AI service.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Re: Not Putting the Cart Before the Horse

Pulling rather than pushing is a better option, The impending disaster is more readily perceived in time from that perspective and if it isn't it improves the gene pool.

Re: Questionable resolution

But what fixes the tech's hernia after replacing heavy kit at the top of the rack?

Re: What percentage?

OTOH it it's still sort of working and there are a number of users still poinding away on it a reboot will require a longish warning period to get them logging off including the trip with a 4x2 cluebat to deal with one of them. Even then the server process might need a staged shut-down. Don't just hit the power switch and hope everything will be OK when it comes back. Even if it cleared the original fault you now have more problems than you started with.

Re: Sort-of Recommendation

But whatever you do, don't lose the token from the token ring. You'll end up crawling all over the floor looking for it.

Re: Remote people might be right

The reality is that nobody could understand it and there was someone saying "It's more than my job's worth to let him poser down.". To be fair to that attitude I remember a box with a lot of drives which, according to legend, had a reputation for not coming back up once they'd been powered down. This led to major fretting when a re-do of the mains supply was needed. I think the UPS saw it through that without actually being powered down. Then there was more major fretting when it had to be relocated. In the end it all came back up OK.

Re: I see what you did there!!!

"The only other famous Edmund I can think of is the one in the Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and I can't make that fit"

There's also Edmund Ironside but that doesn't fit either. So Hillary it it.

Windows 10 users report app gremlins after Microsoft update

If they can be isolated easily, that's OK. But if new work instructions have to be loaded or results extricated then it could get a little more tricky.

Re: A calculator...

"That line blurs a bit if the problem lies in one of the common runtime libraries but I still don't think we can blame the OS unless core functionality is impacted."

Common runtime libraries shipped as part of the OS - irrespective of what the OS is - are core functionality if applications depend on them. The entire purpose of an OS is to run applications. Where else would you put the blame?

"some other ancient bit of software that they refuse to give up under any circumstance."

That'll be the control software for some humongously expensive piece of hardware whose long defunct manufacturer confidently wrote to run on the then shiny new version of Windows. They could, of course, give it up but that would involve a large, unplanned write-off and and a large, unplanned project to replace it.

I suppose my SiL still on W7 will be OK, otherwise it'll finally be the upgrade to Linux.

A conspiracy would very likely get cocked-up anyway.

Amazon extends the life of its servers to six years, expects $900m benefit in 90 days

If it ain't broke...

Interpol's latest cybercrime intervention dismantles ransomware, banking malware servers

"more than 1,300 malicious servers"

Assuming the culprits don't run on prem these must have been hosted somewhere. I wonder what mileage there might be in prosecuting or victims suing the hosting companies as accessories. A bit of KYC in the hosting business might go a long way in dealing with this.

Return to Office mandates boost company profits? Nope

Re: No WFH - WTF

And smart money in property investment would be looking at just such opportunities while converting those city centre dinosaurs to housing. At some point things must rebalance with those who want to live and work in city centres and those who want to live and work outside city centres can all be satisfied.

Re: No WFH - WTF

Why are you making an issue of his relative (from my PoV) youth?

I believe there's a push in Docklands to repurpose for biosciences. Lab work is harder to do at home.

"While certainly middle managers were used as pawns for this, the real reason for return to office is commercial property"

The two issues aren't mutually exclusive.

Re: if you, as a "middle manager"

When I was freelance I regarded the shit-fall as something happening over there in the client's hierarchy. SEP.

Fujitsu finance chief says sorry for IT giant's role in Post Office Horizon scandal

Expert witness saying that in their view the previous evidence was unreliable. If there was no opposition I doubt the court would take very long to deal with it.

Never mind the apologies, show us the money.

"Why isn't the Post Office and Fujitsu boards, past and present, already doing time?"

That is a depressingly easy one to answer.

The enquiry was set up in such a way that any criminal prosecutions are delayed until it's completed and the PO has succeeded in dragging it out indefinitely. Witnesses' appearances have been put off because documents were unavailable or because new documents were found at the last minute and time had to be allowed to examine them. Many of these last minute documents have turned out to have been duplicates of those already in evidence. It's a great pity that these tactics weren't treated as contempt of court early on.

AFAICS the only action needed is to get a full list of all the convictions where Horizon was invlovled, including those where there was a plea, take it to the court of appeal and say "We believe all these convictions were unsafe and should be overturned". Faffing about with special legislation seems to be more a case of political theatre than anything else. Trying to look for and exclude possible real frauds is pointless as the evidence is tainted.

Netgear hauls Huawei to court over Wi-Fi patent spat

With the various sanctions* placed on Huawei would it be legally permissible to pay royalties? And if it wouldn't and the patents are essential to 5G where does that leave 5G implementation legally? Interesting quandary.

*Even if present sanctions don't cover that it would still be possible for the US to add more.

Space exploitation vs space exploration: Humanity has much to learn from the Voyager probes

Re: " We do want our society to still be around in a thousand years' time, don't we?"

all of our GDP plots seem to have "who gives a shit" as value for all points beyond the 50-years marker or so

Realistically, projections that get anywhere near that point would be worthless anyway. Predictions tend to fail as soon as the next big unpredictable event comes along.

Google "bronze age collapse"

Disappointing - it's all about the Eastern Mediterranean are and a little about Central Europe. Nothing further west into Ireland, for instance.

LockBit shows no remorse for ransomware attack on children's hospital

If it's anything like the UK, although a non-profit can't, by definition, make a profit it can make a surplus.

'I’m sorry for everything...' Facebook's Zuck apologizes to families at Senate hearing

Re: Yep.

"For some time now parents have delegated responsibility for the upbringing of their kids to other people."

Deep into the distant past that has included grandparents and older siblings. It has also included the community in which they lived. It's natural human behaviour. One problem here is that not only has the community suddenly expanded, it has allowed its less desirable members to be unchecked.

Re: Yep.

"a minor is not legally allowed to enter into a contract"

All that means is that they're not legally entering into contracts. If the sign-on simply requires them to state they're of age to bypass parental consent then they can get access, it's just that there's no actual contract involved.

Ransomware payment rates drop to new low – now 'only 29% of victims' fork over cash

Re: Time to ban paying!

"Only the contractors need to know which one they picked, and even if you know, you have an excuse for why you might not have known to get around the fraud charges."

The contractors would naturally be equally liable.

How do you know which contractor pays ransoms? Easy, it's the one whose directors are in jail.

"Coveware's takeaway is that the world is making progress in dealing with ransomware that a payment ban would completely undo."

It helps to look at who's making the statement.

Oh, it's the CEO of a business that conducts negotiations for victims.

SparkyLinux harbors a flamboyant array of desktops

Re: desktop zoo

"It seems to me that the operating systems that are successful: that have non-negligible market share, are the ones that offer few or no, options for variation"

The larger the market share the easier it is to dictate to users that that's what you get, whether you like it or not.

It always ends up badly with abuse of a monopoly position.

'Exemplar' digital hospitals trust hit by multiple tech-related traumas

Re: A lot of moving parts

Start - at NHS level - by specifying a data exchange format. Potential bidders need to demonstrate, actually demonstrate, not just provide bits of paper making claims, that they meet that.

It certainly seems to be an exemplar. Just not the sort that was intended.

OpenAI's GPT-4 finally meets its match: Scots Gaelic smashes safety guardrails

Re: Back in the day

"If you don't get dissolved in conc nitric first"

The one that really dissolves you is chromic acid, used to sterilise microbiological apparatus (it's possible our microbiologist might have been a tad old-school). The main training given to new technicians was to drop a circle of filter paper into it and witness its instant disappearance.

Re: Back in the day

And some of us had to pick up the no longer quite human pieces of those who followed such advice.

Crunchbang++ versus Bunsen Labs: The pair turn it up to 12

Re: Sigh.......

And how many more are lost to figuring things out again every time Windows crayon-kiddies decide to reinvent the UI?

"native English speakers"

How did you smuggle that one past the watchdogs, Liam?

Re: Start Menu vs Super Key

Be careful - you'll have the usual suspects foaming at the mouth about using the command line.

Re: Hash

One too many people certainly did.

Microsoft posts another set of bumper results. Market's response? Meh

"it is also reasonable for investors to expect answers"

I believe there's a Yiddish proverb to the effect that no answer is also an answer.

Web devs fear Apple's iOS shakeup for Europe will be a nightmare for support

Once upon a time the web was conceived as being a universal platform. The demands of web developers for more features. Inevitably those features were delivered differently by different browsers so the platform is no longer universal. They got what they asked for and now they're complaining. In the meantime any user whose choice of browser (or security add-ons) doesn't match some site's choice just gets a rude message to "upgrade" or a broken site. I have no sympathy with them whatsoever.

The Land Before Linux: Let's talk about the Unix desktops

Re: Proprietary

... and understood it?

Re: Proprietary

You haven't read many of my posts, have you?

I'm not sure who you're replying to as I said FlatPak & Snap were solutions to a problem that didn't exist.

However let's consider your first two questions.

Firstly the whole idea of both those systems is that the basic package, Flatpak or Snap is to provide a set of prerequisite libraries for the applications packaged for those platforms. I'd expect any application that requires any additional libraries to have them included in the application package itself.

So we then have to ask can the base FlatPak and/or Snap packages be installed without manually downloading any pre-requisites. The packaging approach in both the RH and Debian based worlds has been for the system to automatically identify any addition packages in their repositories and include those, including pre-requisites of the pre-requisites. So let's see how I would do that on Devuan (which in practice means Debian for snything not systemd related) with the KDE desktop:

I can click to open my main KDE menu, select and click Synaptic, click Search, enter Flatpak and be presented with a list of Flatpak related options (that includes stuff for builders as well as installers, how many of your preferred non-twiddly options provide that), mark it for installation see a couple of required packages needed, click on Apply and have Flatpak and the prerequisites installed all without any use of terminals - should I so desire. I can do the same for Snap. No command line in sight.

One thing that might be slightly different from Windows, and, indeed, Ubuntu, is that on opening Synaptic I'm prompted for a root password. This is because Debian, like many Linux distros, follows Unix in being in principle a multi-user system and has appropriate security built in. Ubuntu differs in that it would request the user's own password as some measure of security. But even in Windows the system provides you with a warning dialog and asks you to click to approve, again as a sort of security measure. (I don't know what macOS does in this respect).

So in Debian/Devuan-land the answers to your first two questions is manifestly YES:

I doubt that things are essentially different in the RH/Suse world to what I've described above and I'm quite sure they're not different in the Ubuntu world. Again I would expect the answers there to be manifestly YES.

You can indeed go through the rigmarole of installing stuff from the command line. You may have read installation instructions on various how-to sites but for things which are in the big distro's voluminous repositories you don't have to.

The fact that you aren't aware of this makes it glaringly obvious that if you have any experience at all of the Linux world it must be a couple of decades out of date. It's always easy to spot those whose professed knowledge of such things is based on reading comments of others who are similarly out of touch.

You may well know what you're talking about for Windows and/or Mac. For Linux you don't.

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

Re: Not sure his plans to fix it are realistic

"Dorothy Parker's offering when challenged to use horticulture in a sentence"

You learn something here every day. That was today's. Thanks.

Re: Does old Cory know what he's talking about?

Microsoft of Google. What a choice.

Re: Eternal Growth

Rapidly growing companies may not turn a profit for years but are valued for their potential when they stop growing. I'd expect anyone with a handle of Big_Boomer to have reached a point in life where continuing profits are very desirable as they pay the pension. The problem shareholders are the activists who want to take a short-term, damaging profit and get out.

Re: It's everywhere

On the whole things get better if there's a profit in it for someone and stay better only if the profits continue to grow or if regulation keeps them better. The nature of things is that growth can't be indefinite so at some point profits will only continue to grow by cutting costs and letting standards slip. That's were regulation comes in to protect things. A saner world, which would need much less regulation, would be one where companies could be valued by their prospects for growth or their ability to earn steady profits and expected to move from one to the other.