Posts by Doctor Syntax

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

I wondered if I might have been anticipating where you were going.

The list of things that make something look like Unix needs to include Unix system calls.

Dave's not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like, arrived

Re: What happened to the server?

I'd guess they sold it back. It would have been the safest way to get money for it with no possibility of questions being asked afterwards.

Re: So, he was just fired ?

I'd guess the dealer got paid off to return it. It would very likely have been at the director's personal expense, given how you wouldn't want that pay-off showing up on the books. After all the dealer probably wasn't even VAT registered.

Apple Vision Pro units returned as folks just can't see themselves using it

Re: re: Overall, once you've had the Watch, it becomes very difficult to live without it.

I've got a stop and alarm watch right here on my wrist - don't need to scrabble in the back of a drawer for one. I can't remember exactly what it cost. It must have been more than a tenner but it's a cheap Casio.

Re: Killer App & Price

Aha! Just thought of one. An app that lets micro-managers wander round an empty office seeing all their staff, who are actually working at home, sitting at the desks and virtually interrupting them to their hearts' content without doing any actual damage.

Re: Killer App & Price

"The question is whether they can be translated into actual use cases rather than interesting curiosities."

That's the critical bit. A Demo is not a killer app. What can be done with a VR/AR headset that can't be done as well, or well enough, more cheaply on a screen?

Quest Diagnostics pays $5M after mixing patient medical data with hazardous waste

Re: Quest takes patient privacy and the protection of the environment very seriously

The media could stamp on it by simply refusing to publish such statements without further questions being answered - such as "Well you didn't that time, did you?". Or "But you said that last time and the time before, didn't you?" to serial offenders.

Air Canada must pay damages after chatbot lies to grieving passenger about discount

Re: What a strange position to defend.

Maybe their legal team used a chatbot to decide what to do. Or the C-Suite used a chatbot that told them they didn't need a legal team at all, just use a chatbot. Perhaps Ait Canada has already been taken over.

Worried about the impending demise of Windows 10? Google wants you to give ChromeOS Flex a try

Re: Mint

"at least as maintenance free to use as Windooze"

Damning with faint praise.

Re: Chrome appears to be more or less Andriod

"you'd be surprised just how well the thing works"

Actually, I wouldn't.

US Air Force's new cyber, IT skill recruitment plan: Bring back warrant officer ranks

Re: Pay grades might be a problem

"I'll bet if you redid the math taking into account that pension and lifetime health care the picture looks a bit different."

The phasing matters, however. The pension doesn't help bring up a young family unless the family is your grandchildren.

European Court of Human Rights declares backdoored encryption is illegal

Re: Three cheers...

Oops. ERG.

Re: Three cheers...

Maybe we should make the "E" stand for something other than "European" to assuage the EG. How about "Essential"?

Re: re: Don't they get enough from Microsoft already?

Bing, although a good mile out of place, has a better idea of where my computer is than Google. Google, OTOH has a much better idea of where my phone is although as it's not welded to my ear it's very frequently not where I am.

Re: Cue Daily Heil headline "Euro Court Won't Protect Our Children"

"Brianna Ghey's mother Esther says Online Safety Act does not go far enough"

There's an old legal maxim about this sort of thing: Hard cases make bad law.

Re: Puzzled....Again!!

"Politicians of course will be exempt."

They'll backdoor their communications anyway. One of them will hand over all their messages to a journalist who's going to ghost write their autobiography for them and then publish elsewhere whatever else they find of interest.

Re: Puzzled....Again!!

Don't complain to Kevin, complain to your MP or whatever party. (Who will almost certainly, given that there's an election in the offing, reply with a platitude but otherwise ignore you.)

Re: Problem solved

"MI5 knew about the Manchester Arena bomber months before it happened, but didn't have the resources to follow it up."

And quite a few others IIRC.

Re: Well good thing the UK had Brexit

Legal with a visa, illegal without.

Re: Well good thing the UK had Brexit

And assorted North Africans, AKA Barbary Coast pirates.

Cybercriminals are stealing iOS users' face scans to break into mobile banking accounts

Re: Wahahahaaaaa!!

A variant on phishing but using facial features. Perhaps we should call it "fishing"?

Microsoft 'retires' Azure IoT Central in platform rethink

Taking a leaf out of Google's view. OTOH it's IoT...

IT body proposes that AI pros get leashed and licensed to uphold ethics

BCS favours registration. Wow.

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

Re: Ecco-destruction

Why stop at within?

Re: Work PC fine. Home PC? Waste my hardware!

It's not arbitrary at all. It's quite specifically intended that you should replace your hardware and hence buy a new Windows licence to provide themselves and their hardware buddies with revenue.

Re: cool beans!

Then there's Mark Pesc's story in his column yesterday about a friend whose Dunning-Krugerrands got raided overnight, apparently because the PC was left running.

Re: cool beans!

"Because you have something very wrong with your computer. Mine goes from powered off to Windows login screen in roughly 1 minute."

I just switched mine off and restarted. 26 seconds to login screen. A few seconds extra to KeePass prompting for its password with the full desktop displayed a second or so later, WiFi being established in the background. Admittedly no VPN to start. A minute would be about the time from switch-on to getting KeePass and email logged in.

8 × Intel® Core™ i5-1035G1 CPU @ 1.00GHz, 16Gb

Re: I'm no fan of some of MS's previous decisions

Home users don't have the help of your IT department.

Irritation isn't a desirable quality of something that's supposed to help you do your work.

Re: It is easy

"Show me a press release, sent out by the company's official channels, that makes this claim. Is there any official statement on the MS website that claims Windows 10 would be the final version ever?"

Where are the press releases or official statements contradicting the statement that one of their employees.made. Perhaps he was being over-enthusiastic. Maybe he hadn't got the message that marketing might find that concept embarrassing. Maybe it there was an intent to make it a subscription service but he hadn't been told not to blab about it. Whatever, MS seem to have beenhappy to let it stand uncontradicted when it was widely reported.

"It still is Windows 10. The 11 designation is just a marketing name."

And thus utterly cynical, especially the inflated H/W requirement.

Re: It is easy

"That was the message from Microsoft employee Jerry Nixon"

And not, as far as I can see, contradicted or withdrawn until marketing needed to increment the number.

Re: It is easy

Learning new things helps prevent things like dementia in old age and is vastly better and more interesting than wasting time having to re-learn old things because some misanthropic martetroids decide that everything has to be changed in their new version because otherwise they wouldn't have a new version to sell.

Re: damned with faint (or feint) praise

If Microsoft want to learn how to make a good start menu they should look at KDE. The menu choices can be ordered by the user into whatever sub-menus make best sense to them and their use case and there are three options for how to present them. Nobody needs to be unhappy.

"The office 2007 ribbon was a broken concept "

A good UI is, as far as possible, unobtrusive. That's not the ribbon.

"You just need to buy a PC that supports it!"

As we used to say, ROM - Requires Only Money.

1. My last W2K lives on as a VM for the rare occasions when I need something from it. In fact I had it briefly running this morning looking for an old file. It looks a lot better than any of its successors.

2. I remember the 1950s. I was there. It would take a long time to do a detailed comparison so I won't. It was a time of hopes and promises to a large extent unfulfilled despite a lot of unexpected goodies that emerged later.

3. I've not only lived to reach 70, I'll soon be leaving my 70s behind. I don't fell anything like 100.

3. If, like me, you became a jazz fan you PDQ acquired a lot of black* musical heroes

4. There's one -ism that seems to be not only acceptable but almost compulsory today and that's ageism.

* Apologies to any professional offence-takers out there. I can't be arsed to keep up with you and I doubt any of you ever listen to Louis, the Duke, the Count, Ella, Sassy or the rest. On second thoughts, no apologies.

AI won't take our jobs and it might even save the middle class

Re: Who gets to train the AI?

We know what it's trained on. Everything that can be scraped uncritically from the internet and the contents of every account on cloud services run but the usual suspects. Given that will already include its own output, and increasingly so as time goes on it's clearly going to develop by eating its own dog-shit.

It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down

From the opening paragraphs it appears that the laptop was left running overnight. So there's one way of introducing friction, right there: switch it off when you're not using it.

Microsoft might have just pulled support for very old PCs in Windows 11 24H2

Re: Linux's moment

"It was the same basic concept as the toolbar system it replaced."

So why inflict a change on the users? (see below) And drop-down menus disappear when you've finished with them, the ribbon just sits there occupying more vertical space from what I can see so it's not a good way to make use of screens shallower in relation to their width.

"Besides, if you work smarter instead of harder, you can create your own custom tab and populate it with all the commands you frequently use, so then you almost never have to change tabs. Maybe 10-15 minutes of effort up front saves you a lot more on the back end over time."

An IT pro or power user might well. At the other end of the spectrum it'd probably take a day and end up in a worse situation. All for something that was never necessary except for one reason:

Having been forced into a corner where they had to stop breaking old versions of Office every time a user got sent an older file and, being faced with OO & LO who could read an XML as well as anyone else, they had to put new users in a position where they might not understand the old-style interface. Stuff the existing users, as ever with their hostages, they had to like it or lump it.

"We're also talking about chips that are over a decade old. I'm all for using older hardware that's still good, but you have to balance that against a developer wanting to be able to use more recent functionality."

I have relatives running much older hardware than you'd expect. One is a laptop still running on W7. The other is a tower box probably from the same era if not older.

That is on Linux largely because she got hit with early ransomware. Bless the innocent little lambs, they just wrote out the encrypted files and dust deleted the real ones, still there to be recovered but we took no risks, I partitioned the disk and installed Zorin. The only problem was the vast number of jpegs recovered, all the little bullets and buttons from the browser cache. I think she's in her late 80s now, wasn't going to bother getting a new computer then and certainly isn't now.

Re: Linux's moment

"no more difficult than going from Windows 10 to Windows 11. "

Or any Windows N to Windows N + M. Then there's the ribbon...

Crooks hook hundreds of exec accounts after phishing in Azure C-suite pond

When going phishing it's always best to go for the big phish.

NHS in Wales bets big on Microsoft with deal worth nearly half a billion

Re: How does anyone not see this as being an obscene amount of money?

It looks as if it might be prudent to wait a bit for a second generation of those Alzheimer's drugs. It's not just the cost of the drugs themselves, they also need early diagnosis, have to be given by monthly infusion and the patients monitored for potentially fatal side-effects.

Re: An agile and flexible solution

I think it means the users need to be agile and flexible to work around outages.

Meta says risk of account theft after phone number recycling isn't its problem to solve

Re: Call me old fashioned

So it's your SMS spam I'm getting?

Re: > Hanff, in a LinkedIn post, argued this is unacceptable.

"How are services supposed to deal with a proble that is actually caused by something they don't have ANY control over like, for example, telcom providers reusing numbers?"

The choice of whether or not to use phone number or any other external provider as identity was entirely in their control.

Re: My guess

"My mum recently convinced her provider to issue her a new SIM using the existing number? Then what?"

I've done this in the past, changing from a regular account to PAYG. Admittedly O2's outsourced Indian customer disservice team didn't make this easy although the problem was quickly solved when I asked for a PAC to jump ship and I ended up talking to someone in Leeds.

Unit4 software's budget bungle leaves schools counting the cost

Re: How many leavers.

All the more reason to do the job professionally.