Posts by Doctor Syntax

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

It probably needs a S/W update that doesn't exist. Less and less of this stuff is inaccessible to your local garage. John Deering is now standard practice.

Re: DO NOT WANT

"80%, frankly, just isn't good enough for something being enforced by law."

See my post above - 80% seems pretty good!

"I see someone is going around downvoting anyone with valid criticisms of regulations implemented before the tech is ready."

Last time I looked this was primarily an IT site. One of the things a good developer learns (or used to!) is to question "what if" at very frequent intervals. What if the disk is full? What if the user enters an unexpected response? What happens if the item on an order gets nicked after it's been picked? If there are no good answers to these questions the software delivered will be at best unable to cope with the real world and more likely extremely buggy.

It's troubling when posts asking such obvious get downvoted in an IT forum.

If you can't produce a positive response (I'm assuming a lot of this activity is shilling) go back to your clients and tell them there are some serious issues they need to deal with PDQ.

What's the speed limit?

My new car also has one of those sign readers. Half the time or more it shows its "don't know" indication. I've seen it register a sign correctly and then go to "don't know" a few seconds later. At one local cross-roads a national speed limit road crosses a 40 road. Approaching from the former there's a NSL sign opposite for the other half of the road. It sees than and registers it even when turning onto the 40. I've also seen it show 30 on a NSL dual carriageway & 60 in a 30 area.

But the biggest difficulty is working out iif and where speed limits change in the lanes. Past our house it's a turn off from a 30 road & still 30 with street lights etc. Then the street lights stop. No sign. What's the speed limit? Turn left at the next junction and eventually arrive at a junction with a 30 road. Street lights start a few hundred metres before but no sign. Carry on instead and arrive at a cross roads where there is a street light, part of a sequence to the right & straight ahead. Turn left and no more street lights. What's the speed limit? A mile or so later it joins a road which is undoubtedly NSL but there are no signs. Instead of left turn carry straight on. After a few hundred metres the street lights stop. No sign. What's the speed limit? Carry on and join the same NSL road. Convrsely, of course, you can turn off the NSL road & end up on 30 roads without encountering a sign. Where do the speed limits start and stop?

How will it deal with crossing the Irish border with MPH on one side & KPH on the other?

BYW does anyone know if stretches of the A75 still have signs with different speed limits for HGVs & other vehicles?

Windows 11 is closing the gap on Windows 10

Re: "use of Windows 11 continues to rise as Windows 10 falls"

"That Unavoidable Upgrade To Be Done As Late As Possible"

And many home users - my sister-in-law for one - continue with their old W7 kit.

Babel fish? We're getting there. Reg reviews the Timekettle X1 AI Interpreter Hub

Mange tout Rodney.

(It's customary to refer to varieties of plants with the plant name first and then the variety after, e.g. "Rose Heaven Scent". I'm waiting for some enterprising plant breeder to come up with a variety of Mange tou called Rodney".

Big Tech's eventual response to my LLM-crasher bug report was dire

"It reflects a deficiency in the model's ability to accurately and uniquely respond to the prompts provided."

Not a singular prompt but prompts in the plural. Maybe prompts in general? I think that tells you all you need to know about deploying it in any situation where an accurate answer might be required.

HP to discontinue online-only e-series LaserJet amid user gripes

Re: an active internet connection in order for the hardware to function properly

Protip 3. Buy a different make of printer.

Re: The answer is right in the article

The erro in the logic, of course is that disregard for customers means fewer customers and fewer customers means fewer purchases. Trying to squeeze more money from those fewer purchases leads to even fewer customers.

Never mind. It'll still be good for another few quarters.

Re: at this point...

Also exceptions for those who buy really old ones second hand (or snag one that some idiot mangler has written off as being "too old"). Those made in the days when H - Hewlett and P = Packard are indestructible by conventional weaponry.

And do they think this will be enough to restore their reputation?

Twitter grew an incredible '1.6%' since Musk's $44B takeover. Amazing. Wow

"Growth of X's userbase has reportedly flatlined"

I'm sure generative AI will help restore growth.

UK minister recalls two planning decisions which blocked datacenter investment

Re: Failure to consider uses of waste heat

"or can a lot of food with some heat pump concentration to get up to the required temps."

Use it to grow food by heating greenhouses.

Re: Failure to consider uses of waste heat

One of the earliest waste heat systems in the UK involved piping hot water from Battersea power station to flats on the other side of the Thames. This has sort of scheme falls a bit flat when you close the power station.

Re: Slow electrons

Or put the end points near the data centre. Why try to squeeze the whole country into London?

Microsoft ad subsidiary Xandr accused of violating GDPR

Re: Yet another advert related story.

I want to know who's paying for all these "views" and "clicks".

In general, advertisers. In particular the budgets of the advertisers' sales and marketing departments. authorised by the depertments' executives.

Are they not aware that just short of 100% are fraudulent!

Where "they" are the executives, I don't think you'd be easily able to prove they know. Whan a man's salary depends on it etc.

Elexon's Insight into UK electricity felled by expired certificate

If they haven't discovered it went down they don't deserve to survive.

64% of people not happy about idea of AI-generated customer service

There is, of course, scope for differentiation by providing better service. It only takes one business to do that in any market and they will gain customers simply as a result of losing fewer to churn than their competitors. It may take money. However, as it would have the same result as advertising is intended to, and probably with better results, the money can be taken from the advertising budget.

Evolve Bank & Trust confirms LockBit stole 7.6 million people's data

The appropriate response would be to permanently revoke the licences it needs to operate, ditto for all directors and senior office holders for their right to work in the finance industry and make clear this will be mandatory for any other bank that has the same experience. And just to avoid avoidance - failure to report such breaches within 4 hours will be a criminal offence for all directors and senior office holders.

That should spread the word that this stuff has to be taken seriously, day by day, day after day.

Users rage as Microsoft announces retirement of Office 365 connectors within Teams

Re: A shower of shite

II think their term is "mugs".

Re: Where's the Plan B for companies

Having their own Plan A (as opposed to Microsoft's) would be a start.

Re: "Office 365 connectors within Teams will be cut"

Best to treat them as fast prototypes/demonstrators. Set up sonething quick and very dirty with only about 60% of functionality needed. "This is very rough and ready but is it the sort of thing you were looking for? We could put something together properly in about $ESTIMATE".

Especially if you don't take account of their past form.

Raspberry Pi OS airs out some fresh options for the summer

Re: Sunshine

Joke alert? It's no joke.

Microsoft China staff can't log on with an Android, so Redmond buys them iThings

Re: "golden cryptographic key"

Limited use. When its cert expires they'll forget to renew it.

Eldorado ransomware-as-a-service gang targets Linux, Windows systems

Re: How does this malware gain a foothold on ones Linux computer?

It's a bit vague. Presumably it relies on a leaked UserID/password combination. Maybe the malware author has limited Unix/Linux knowledge.

Brit council gives Oracle another £10M for professional services amid ERP fallout

All the supplier is interested in nudging them about would be more and bigger payments.

"Why in heaven's name is there not a standard solution that any and every council in England and Wales can't just adopt?"

Because it's more profitable to pick them off one at a time.

Getting together to commission a development of a common system would probably be outside their remit and possibly, in consequence, illegal. I wonder if getting together to develop a common, properly tested specification would be OK Probably not feasible as councils of different political persuations would spend their time falling out with each other.

I always prefer glass half empty. The reasoning is that if it's half empty it has been full and I've already drunk half of it and once I've drunk the other half it might get refilled. OTOH half full might be as good as it's going to get.

Depending on your point of view - money pit or cash cow.

Breaking the rules is in Big Tech's blood – now it's time to break the habit

Re: killing music...

There's a view that music has been moribund if not dead for years and it's not piracy or streaming wot dunnit.

Microsoft forgets about SwiftKey's support site

Who needs certificates when you can have <breathless voice> AI?

Latest Ghostscript vulnerability haunts experts as the next big breach enabler

Fixed in 10.0.0~dfsg-11+deb12u4

A quick check shows Debian ghostscript is now up to 10.0.0 so unless there's been a regression this is well behind us.

Algorithmic wage discrimination: Not just for gig workers

Re: Home health sickness

I trust you're being ironic as we seem to be affording not doing it which must be a great deal more expensive overall.

Re: Get the strength of the Union around you !

Ostensibly IR35 was somehow supposed to eliminate this situation. There's no way it could ever have done so, being simply a means of increasing taxation of real independent contractors who the IR didn't really recognise as being businesses. This was an easy sell to the new New Labour government as independent contracts were by nature resistant to the lure of the usual trade unions. Ironically, it prompted us to form our own trade association which was never likely to become part of the Labour movement. At the same time it did nothing to serve the lot of those who were expelled from regular employment into pseudo-independent gig workers.

What's sorely needed now is a more clear cut differentiation between independent contractors and casual employees whereby the former are treated as businesses and the latter have full employee rights.

Re: Home health sickness

And yet, being able to support patients in their own homes in this way is critical for hospitals to be able to discharge them and make way for new patients. It really needs to be brought under the wing of the NHS with appropriate budget, of course.

Re: Independent contractors set their own pay rate

The reality is more along the lines of negotiate.

However, there is possibly an opening here for a rival "algorithmic" service which will negotiate on behalf of the gig workers. It would depend on most if not all of them in an area subscribing to it, put in counter offers to the job offering service, starting with one too high to be accepted and then reducing to a point at which it's accepted and then offering it to whoever has set their minimum price at or closest below that level.

Paessler pulls subscription licensing switcheroo on PRTG Network Monitor

Re: "3,000 of the 10,000 largest VMware customers"

"Short term gain is foolish"

Short term gain means bonuses for senior manglement and a great addition to their CV. The CV will then enable them to move on to another victiim employer to pull the same trick there. Their replacements will have to deal with the consequences and probably discover it's too late to reverse it by switching back to the original terms.

Innocent techie jailed for taking hours to fix storage

Re: I Had Forgotten

"get a McDonalds"

Inhuman punishment.

Re: I Had Forgotten

"a full breakfast if the police canteen ran to it"

I can't image a police canteen that would be unable to deal with that.

Re: I call BS; could never happen in UK (or ...)

"gaoled" if you would be so kind.

I think the only time I've seen "gaol" used extensively in the UK has been on witness summons to the "Court of Oyer and Termner and General Gaol Delivery".

Re: H&S Rules! @Paul

"Insurance companies nowadays look for as many reasons not to pay out as they can."

This has always been the case.

Labour wins race to lead UK, but few would envy the load in its tech in-tray

I wouldn't envy the load in its economic in-tray either. We have two self-inflicted wounds - the long legacy of Brownomics that stopped productivity growth dead and Brexit. Trussonomics can be discounted as a short-lived blip. Covid and Ukraine are a problem shared with other governments but those two are our own.

Europol says mobile roaming tech is making its job too hard

"In addition, an optimal solution should not impede secure communications disproportionately"

Whne working out what might be disproportionate it should be presumed that most communications will be innocent as this is, indeed, the case.

"the only alternative ... is to issue a European Investigation Order but responses for these can take up to 120 days"

So the appropriate solution is to straighten out existing procedures.

Japan's digital minister declares victory against floppy disks

Re: Icon

"We have a Victorian bellows-style camera as an icon for speed cameras"

Which "we" is that? I've never seen that in the UK.

There are still a few professional photographers using bellows cameras for large formats (the sort of people who consider Hasselblads to be a miniature format). A non-collapsible full plate camera would be a bit of a pain to carry about.

Re: The next....

"Oak gall inks would probably last a bit longer"

They can fade quite badly. Indian ink (carbon black) lasts far better.. I know of a C18th document with both on it and the blue-blakc (oak gall) has faded to a light brown while the black ink is fine. The paper is also discolouring to a light brown but as the two have not yet converged the faded ink can still be read.

Db2 is a story worth telling, even if IBM won't

Probably everyone in IBM who knew about it was over 40 so they're no longer there.

Linux Mint 22 beta sprinkles Cinnamon desktop on Ubuntu

That's shuffler's latest incarnation. No, it doesn't. For now I'm using PDF Juggler.

Amazon puts down its Astro robotic business watchdog

Owners of the soon to be bricked bot are encouraged to take advantage of Amazon's recycling program not rely on IoT things in future.

Not that many will take the hint, I suppose.