Posts by Doctor Syntax

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

Re: Let's Check the Server Room Access Log

System stopped while they were there but continued when they weren't & started when they were there. Problem doesn't correlate well with their presence. Couldn't be them.

Are you ready to back up your AI chatbot's promises? You'd better be

Again we see how businesses say one thing, then act in a completely opposite way. They always talk about how customers are so important, but then at every single opportunity, they skimp on the customer service.

It's not really saying things. It's just the standard PR process of joining together strings of words. They're not intended to have meaning. Just like generative AI. PR people will be the easiest to replace if they haven't already been.

And I don’t think anything was “legally binding”

It's just that the legal court bound them to pay up.

AFAIK in English law it's got to be a good deal higher than a small claims hearing. The High Court at least, I think.

Re: and yet...

Is AMFM1 going A/C?

Re: I'm not a Luddite, but

Ned Ludd was a fictitious signatory of threatening messages. Alterantives were "Captain swing" and the less imaginative "A friend".

Re: I'm not a Luddite, but

Mug?

Can you realistically see that happening?

OTOH would a small claims court be precedent-setting in Canada?

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Re: Ah, Joy

"Fortunately for our sanity and the health of our company, she was gone (of her own volition) within a month."

On to another step up the ladder no doubt. I had one of these ambitious kids attached to my team once. Fairly recent graduate, no skills appropriate to the team. I think she'd come from somewhere where she'd been for a short time. About a month or so later she moved to yet another job having, as far as I could make out, having gained any useful experience while she was with us.

Re: The Landan response: f**k off and do one mate.

"unreasonable changes to my conditions of employment"

Big IR35 fail there.

"some folk are just STUPID."

They might start out a bit stupid but given a long enough run they get very good at it.

What happened to B♭?

Mine was "ficus", after the plant in my office.

I remember visiting some office where the plant was called Floella.

OTOH the ones who tell you they can manage anything can manage nothing.

If they tell you the first time you meet that they've got an MBA - sympathise with them. Sow a little confusion into their minds.

Re: It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude

"should no longer be treated as an employee but as an equal."

When they really need something you're not an equal, you're a superior.

Re: Being polite is great

With a 4 hour week minimum.

Re: "And to this day, the more he dislikes someone, the more polite he is towards them."

Mine is "Life is too short to bear a grudge so you just have to do the most you can."

Re: Fire in haste, regret at leisure

"you wouldn't happen to remember the password would you"

"Yes, don't you?"

Re: Being polite is great

Don't get mad, get even. And if possible, get ahead.

Varda capsule proves you don't need astronauts for gravity-defying science

You don't even need to leave the Earth's surface to do gravity-defying science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinostat

Judge slaps down law firm using ChatGPT to justify six-figure trial fee

"you treat it's output like a search engine result"

That's damning with faint praise.

As far as I can make out if you take any single word in the middle of the output the few words either side of it are words which are more likely to be found in those positions in the training material than any other words taken at random. The run of words is very likely to look like it was written by an intelligence because it has been so written many times. But as you get a word or two further away the next lot of adjacent words also emerge a very likely from the training material but not necessarily from the same contexts as your central word and even less likely will the words a little way either side of your central word have come from the same contexts. It might all appear to make sense as a well constructed sequence of English words but not as a coherent assemblage of facts or argument being expressed by those words.

Re: "relying on ChatGPT to do anything related to their jobs could be a bad idea"

Admitting is probably better than trying to keep quiest an being found out.

"You'd think lawyers – ostensibly a clever group of people"

Having mixed professionally with a good few barristers I'd say their cleverness followed a normal distribution with a fairly large variance. Some were sharp and picked up on what they were being told PDQ but there were one or two whose abilities didn't seem to get much further than putting the gown and wig on the right way round.

Fortunately the judges did seem to get picked from the upper end of the distribution.

BOFH: In the event of a conference, the ninja clause always applies

You have no sense of public responsibility. The more of their time you waste the less of it they spend pestering other people.

Either lots of butter or coat the bread in the bacon fat.

Top tip for cold beef sandwiches - use beef dripping instead of butter.

You don't need AI for that. Just a long list of responses all expressing enthusiasm and asking for more details, choose at random.

Even better, have two signatories, one of whom is enthusiastic, the other alarmingly sceptical and alternate them.

I'm sure there are better nouns than "colleague" to fit the situation.

Re: I needed this.

"Spent much of the morning (failing to) get sense out of a banking app"

I think I see your problem. You believed there was sense in there in the first place.

This. Bacon butties and BLTs are two different things, OP appears to have conflated them. And a bacon butty in its purity should not be contaminated with sauce of any colour.

You've got to work out exactly whose company party it really was and who was paying for it.

All sales psersons are cling-ons.

LockBit identity reveal a bigger letdown than Game of Thrones Season 8

"LockbitSupp has engaged with Law Enforcement"

But which law enforcement?

It could be they're pinning a target on him. It could be they're trying to panic affiliates.

A path out of bloat: A Linux built for VMs

Since as long as I can remember in computing the goal of the multiuser machine has been to present each of the users with the illusion that they were operating their own individual machine by slicing up the resources, especially processor time and memory. My experience of that goes right back to being a user on an experimental system running on a 1904 (the illusion was somewhat shattered by the fact that I managed to crash the entire 1904).

The core task facing system developers was how to provide that illusion with minimum resources but maximum performance and security.

Roll forward a good many years from that and I found myself running Unix boxes of various sizes for various businesses which were rather less experimental. Under Unix we would be running an instance or maybe more than one instance of an RDBMS server and each instance might run one or more databases and against a database we would have applications serving individual users. As far as possible the users would indeed see what looked like individual machines - they would certainly get menus tuned to their roles in the business. Not totally isolated, of course, because their activities amended the contents of the database they were sharing: only one user would be able to enter an order for the last item in stock, etc. The overhead for that was one kernel with its data structures in memory, (usually) one RDBMS server with its data structures and the applications with their per-user data structures in memory.

The modern trend seems to be to have an overall kernel/hypervisor - either as 2 layers or a hypervisor running on bare metal - with its/their data, and then a host of virtual machines, each with its kernel, it's own data, running - what? A database, a web server, whatever application sits on that combination? Whatever, all with their own memory allocations. Even if the virtual machines were to share the same code images in memory they're all going to need their individual memory allocations for kernel data, server data etc. as well as the application memory for the individual tasks. The while the kernel/hypervisor is going to be busy hypervising doing all the usual kernel tasks of managing time, memory and IO for the virtual machines, each virtual machine kernel is going to be doing the same thing for each process running on it, including the virtualised IO.

As I understand this proposal it's a means of paring back the resources seen by each virtual machine to reduce bloat. If one were to wish to go further the virtual machines could be eliminated and the single layer of kernel could oversee the services directly and maybe one database instance could run all the databases for the services etc.

OK, I've heard the sneers about cattle vs pets. What we ran weren't pets, they were work horses.

Prompt engineering is a task best left to AI models

Re: "I have no good explanation"

I find it difficult to explain a lot of what passes for intelligence in other humans.

So we need to models to produce prompts which themselves have to be prompted. It's prompts all the way down. Or is it models?

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

Re: So whose bright idea was it in the first place?

"My concern would be why is this some sort of bespoke project rather than just what everyone else uses for the bog-standard business practices (ERP, HR and bank reconciliation?"

HR and payroll should be common with other businesses. Rented property management will have commercial packages available, even specialist social housing packages have been developed for housing associations. But managing electoral registers or bin collections isn't something that a regular business requirement.

"Gosh, if only there were other places who needed those!)."

There are. Other councils. That's why it makes sense to sponsor a modular local government administration system; modular because the various functions are distributed differently between different tiers in different parts of the country.

Re: So whose bright idea was it in the first place?

"Delivery is quicker, but commonly the wrong thing gets delivered."

https://miro.medium.com/max/2800/0*K9vXpKMfe6hNQQnw.png

Re: Why?

The only Oracle reaction would be "This will make money for us".

Re: So, continuing the follow-up of the disaster

High pay is essential for a successful consultation.

The people at the bottom of the pile usually have a good idea of what's wrong and what needs to be done. But those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing will disregard such information - it can't be worth much because it comes from someone on a much lower pay scale.

Successful consultants aren't blinkered by this attitude. They ask those in a position to know best and present it to management with a high price tag on it. Because it cost a lot it must be worth a lot.

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, openSUSE to get better installation

Re: Non-issue

And also providing there was nothing on the machine that you wanted to keep when you clicked "Use entire disk".

"Installation remains a pain point for many Linux distros"

I think the pain point is largely that it asks the installer to make choices about partitioning. This is not an issue for an OS that just tramples anything on the boot drive even if the partitioning it sets up becomes a problem for later updates.

Re: Not mentioned....but should be......

Likewise in Debian land, run any updates due on the current version, switch the distro name in /etc/apt, run another upgrade and reboot. I'd hope that this is now expected across Linux distros. Perhaps, to appease the "Oh, it's the command line" mouth-foamers perhaps there should be a GUI version (maybe there is somewhere but as CLI is often the far slicker way to do things I stick to that).

However there's always the need to install on new H/W or to replace Windows. And on the matter of Windows, which Liam raised in the article, I think there's a need for an installer that starts out from a PoV of "Oh dear, I see you've got Windows. Let's make space, install something better but let you keep your old data available." and automate that. If, as I suggested earlier, it could use Wine or virtualisation to run any installed Windows applications that weren't going to be replaced with Linux ones, so much the better.

Having said that SWMBO's laptop threw a H/W wobbly so I dragged out an old one of mine, W7 vintage, only to discover that the resident version of Debian was so old that its repositories were "archived" as were at least the next two succeeding ones. So that did involve a reinstall of Devuan.

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

Re: What the hell?

"a lot of skills/staff were lost"

No problem. Any manager or politician will tell you you can just order up some more when you need them.

Europe's data protection laws cut data storage by making information-wrangling pricier

Re: Sounds good but ...

Criminal legislation tells you what not to do. What's needed is legislation that tells you what to do when you get something wrong, irrespective of whether it was deliberately, negligently or anywhere in between. Lack of that allows the gross foot-dragging we're seeing in operation there.

Re: Law of unintended consequences

"Are you the same Dr Syntax that has collaborated with Elemental?"

You need to consult mine onlie begetter Thomas Rowlandson.

Re: Handling extra costs

"but the good guys - still the majority hopefully"

I know you're thinking about businesses as a whole but you have to extend this to the people who work there. How far back do you have to go through el Reg articles to find a report of someone, possibly in public service roles who turned out not to be one of the good guys? If you collected this toxic waste on the basis that it's of value to the shareholders you'd better contain it very safely. If you don't then your shareholders should expect to be heavily penalised for your failure. At the very least they'll expect you to have insured against it and in turn your insurers will be weighting up the risk and charging you for it. Non-compliance shouldn't be a free ride.

London's famous BT Tower will become a hotel after £275M sale

"used for corporate hospitality events for some years afterwards."

Also to celebrate allegedly successful sales projects - but only if you were on the manglement side. If you had to make it work when told about it the morning it was going live you were too late, the places had already been booked.