Posts by Doctor Syntax

Innocent techie jailed for taking hours to fix storage

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.

Latest Ghostscript vulnerability haunts experts as the next big breach enabler

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.

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.

Re: Though given the latest 'who needs save? It's all in the cloud automatically'

That's the symbol for an Oracle audit.

Has he removed just as a requirement or gone all out and removed it as an option? If not it might hang on a good while longer.

Many years ago we ran a service which required data with floppy as one of the options - I can't remember exactly but it might have been the only option. It kept everyone on the team who needed them well supplied with floppies. Somehow, back then we weren't unduly worried about the personal information on them although, in practice, as it was a matter of public appointment s it wasn't really confidential anyway

That's nature's way of telling you it's time to find a better company.

Re: The next....

"Files in these formats can be simply copied to what ever is the data storage medium du jour."

That seems like an awful faff. Vellum doesn't need to be copied and has proven itself to be a very long lasting medium. OTOH the mylar drafting film we used to draw pollen diagrams on is probably equally long lasting and maybe more durable still. Cut into A4 and whatever's needed could be printed on it. The only worrying thing would the how long the ink would stick.

Seriously, long term digital storage is an unproven matter. Not only does the medium have to survive and remain current,* so does the file format. It's possible to visualise someone copying hundreds of files every 10 years or so for 300 years and then it being discovered that the format has been out of use for so long that there's no software to make sense of it. "Yes, we still have the PDF documentation available but it's a PDF document..."

* Domesday book from 1086 is still extant** - the Beeb's Domesday videodisc project of 1986 not so much.

** It still has a format problem in that C11th script isn't that easy to 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.

I see it not so much "accessories must diverge from their upstream GNOME bases" as upstream GNOME diverging from everything else. Maybe some of the old apps will be forked to remain at Gtk3. The UI of pdf shuffler or whatever it's called now isn't just looking out of place on my KDE Devuan, it's disappeared entirely. Fortunately I found a Java equivalent; it also looks a bit out of place but it works.

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.

Ransomware scum who hit Indonesian government apologizes, hands over encryption key

"Politicians and the public alike appear on the hunt for a scapegoat"

A scapegoat is one thing, the source of the problem is another. In this case I'd guess the source is the corporate culture of the government machine as a whole.

Tech luminaries warn United Nations its Digital Compact risks doing more harm than good

Re: That horse has already bolted

Despite your long explanation the only person forcing you to use Facebook is yourself.

I can communicate with friends and family by phone, email, occasionally text and - wow this is old-fashioned - meeting them IRL Facebook is entirely unnecessary.

RIP: WordPerfect co-founder Bruce Bastian dies at 76

Re: WordPerfect had me stumble on the first step and never recovered

"WordPerfect left you with an empty screen after launching"

So does vi. RTFM is the way to go.

Did I miss the article or did el Reg miss the death of Lynn Conway, also last month? Without Lynn Conway & Carver Mead literally writing the text book on VLSI the computing revolution might have been set back quite a bit.

That's an interesting thought. If the word processor and spreadsheet vendors had said Windows wasn't fast enough, they'd stick to DOS would Windows have caught on, Microsoft released the APIs or would they still have won the day with Windows & Office? The latter might not have been a foregone conclusion.

Traeger security bugs bad news for grillers with neighborly beef

Maybe the recommended was to chill.

Wifi controlled barbecue problem?

First world problem. You get what you pay for, it's just that it isn't always what you thought it would be.

VMware license changes mean bare metal can make a comeback through 'devirtualization', says Gartner

"the trough of disillusionment – the point at which a tech has failed to deliver on its promise."

The more sceptical of us get there directly without climbing the hump of whatever Gartner say we should have included. Is this quantum tunnelling?

BT bets big on AI with ServiceNow to cut legacy baggage

Re: HR without the himan?

Human Remains of course.

Oak Ridge boffins twist exotic metal into eco-friendly, solid-state cooler

Re: I remember that

The freezing microtome stage used water to remove the heat from the warm side. Any refrigerating system is simply a means of transferring heat from one place to another so the heat has to be removed somehow, even if it's just be air cooling. It's not at all clear from the article how this Oak Ridge method does that. From TFA it seems to be just a heat sponge that's going to have to be wrung out somewhere and with no moving parts it sounds as if it that would be the same place it got it from in which case the cooling would only be temporary heat removal.

Solid stae cooling? Peltier effect. Used it more than 50 years ago in a freezing microtome*.

* A microtome is laboratory equipment to cut thin sections of a specimen for microscopy. The specimen might need support to stop it collapsing. For small fragments of wood ice is a suitable support.

How tech went from free love to pay-per-day

Re: Speaking the copium

"On the other hand, mostly in the creative markets, FOSS software has historically lagged WAY, WAY behind their commercial counterparts."

And in some markets the commercial offering is largely or entirely someone running a FOSS product as a service. And in still others, GIS for instance, you'll find that if you can't afford the very expensive commercial product the FOSS one is a very good alternative.

Re: Confused Old Person Here.......

On prem equipment could also be leased. However the attraction of using really somebody else's computer (as opposed to that leased computer that's on prem) is the ability to dispose of all those expensive IT folks. Which is fine until they come up against a situation where it would be really useful to have one of those expensive IT folk to advise or help out. And it's fine until the somebody else's computer has a problem and somebody else doesn't really put restoring their system ahead of restoring all the other suers' systems. And it's fine until there's a cashflow problem and payment of the rent for somebody else's computer becomes really important because not paying might not just mean loss of ability to do business right now, it might mean permanent loss of the business's records if somebody else doesn't retain data whose rent isn't being paid.

So many businesses these days are really IT companies at the core but aren't prepared to admit it to themselves. The accounts, the stock records, the order processing are all there. Renting the core of the business might please the CFO but it's a very risky thing to do - looks good until the risks materialise.

"But they're not identical, and many people don't want to relearn or take the time to switch."

And yet Microsoft repeatedly switch UI, most egregiously when they introduced the ribbon interface. If you have a locked in user population you can do this, losing a few users at a time.

Salesforce investors reject plan to add extra $20M to Benioff's total pay

Re: Do tell.

Just wondering - what's happened to the Tesla share price since then.

It may be non-binding but wouldn't the shareholders be able to dismiss the board if they were sufficiently annoyed with them?

I think it wouldn't be a bad idea if occasionally shareholders did fire an entire board, just to keep them on their toes although it would be a good idea to have nominations for a replacement already in hand.

MIT's bionic leg upgrade leaves amputees walking like the wind

Re: Seems a lot more practical and vastly less invasive than Musk's Neuralink offering

I wouldn't have thought so. They're the two halves of a feedback mechanism.

'Almost every Apple device' vulnerable to CocoaPods supply chain attack

Re: EVA negligent?

Claim them, lock them, throw away the key. The individual projects could still be forked to release them. It would be a more widely visible process than quietly using curl to take them over and the forks would therefore very likely get scrutinised before they were used in place of the originals. Perhaps this is what ought to have been done when the original migration took place.

Brace for new complications in big tech takedowns after Supreme Court upended regulatory rules

Re: "experts"

"But the experts don't always get it right either."

True. But they've got the best chance, especially when compared to those who think they've no use for them. Unfortunately all too often they're the ones left saying "told you so". Maybe that's the ultimate measure of expertise.

Re: It's actually good.

"One of the problems is that no political system operates how it's supposed to."

That's why I think it's a good idea to have a part of the system working at a level of being above (or outside might be a better word) politics taking a longer term view than the political cycle. We have whittled down the role of monarch to be just that in the UK whilst still, as head of state, embodying the nation as a whole - it really is a terrible fate to be born to and I have no envy at all of anyone who is. It's obviously undemocratic and arguably very effective.

The judiciary is another such element; AFAIK the legal profession is able to ensure experienced and respected judges get to the top. It's been very noticeable that one of the ambitions of the DK wing of the Conservative party has been to restrict their influence as a result of the Supreme Court's rulings about BoJo; that in itself provides proof in the value of the system.

I'd like to think the HoL would be another but it repeatedly gets stuffed with superannuated politicians and supporters. At least I can't see it being made an elected body as long as the HoC realises that as such it would be a rival institution although a party with a large majority might have a sudden rush of blood to the head. What I would like to see would be ex officio appointments such as the presidents (or whatever the title might be) of the institutes which represent the various professions,e.g. the various medical Royal Colleges. I doubt that would happen by law as a body those who demonstrably knew what they were talking about would be even more feared by MPs. OTOH if we have a run of sufficiently bright PMs to make such appointments it might simply become part of accepted tradition. Wishful thinking...

Re: "experts"

Ah, that use of quotation marks which allows for denigration without justification.

Re: It's actually good.

Looking at it from the outside that;s how it seems to me except that it's not only the appointment of the judges that's politicised. Officials around that, such as the Attorneys General are elected and therefore inevitably political offices. And that runs right up to the very top in that the head of state is also a political office. The US has nothing to keep politics out of anything. Maybe it was put together by people sufficiently high minded to make impartial decisions (or believing themselves to be). If so they didn't allow for their successors not to be so.

Re: It's actually good.

"Regulation will be completely decided by elected representatives."

At best elected representatives in the US are no more likely than those in the UK to have the necessary expertise. At worst they'll be subject to the Dunning-Kruger effects experienced by political parties and the lobbying influences. And in any event, no legislature can determine in advance the circumstances all the cases to which its laws will be applied.

For several centuries one mechanism in England for fitting the theoretical to the real has been the judges' role in interpreting how laws should be applied to circumstances. That has been inherited by other legal systems including that of the US. Another mechanism in the UK has been the statutory instrument. Legislation makes provision for the relevant ministers - in effect their departments and whoever advises the departments - to make make detailed rules within that legislation which are then brought back to Parliament and so have at least the tacit approval of the elected representatives.

In the UK system, therefore, the judges are then interpreting not only the primary legislation but also the secondary legislation which is still under the oversight of Parliament. They are not free to ignore the latter. I take from this report that in the US the agencies have much the same role in making rules under enabling legislation but don't have any mechanism analogous to the statutory instrument to put the authority of Congress behind them. Is this the correct reading.

Nasty regreSSHion bug in OpenSSH puts roughly 700K Linux boxes at risk

Re: sshd restart required after upgrade

The usual upgrade scripts for Debian and its children include restarting daemons.

Re: 2024 finally Year of the Windows desktop

"I use Linux to talk to my real UNIX machines"

Back in the day many of us have even used Windows to do that.

Re: 2024 finally Year of the Windows desktop

"I never put you down as one of the butthurt fanbois"

And what part of "we grok the joke" would make you think otherwise? One of Bandacious's early upvotes was mine.

Re: 2024 finally Year of the Windows desktop

It's OK, we grok the joke - including how long a similar problem on Windows would take to be detected, buried within Microsoft, fixed, held back to the next Patch Tuesday, applied, rebooted and the resulting breakage fixed the following month - maybe. Did you miss that bit?

Mythic Beasts beat both of us to it. First I heard of it was an email from them telling me of an urgent update to a server.

So - to them (but not before they've finished all their patches) >>>

Debian & Devuan patches also landed this morning.

Microsoft tells yet more customers their emails have been stolen

"Microsoft are the most valuable company on the stock exchange and should have the resources to pay for the best software engineers and devs"

If they did that they might not be the most valuable company. Paying appropriate salaries to enough of those people takes money.

Along with the messengers who used to carry snail mail around the buildings, no doubt.

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

Re: You touch it, you own it

He never touched the second printer and if, by that thinking, he owned the arc welder they should have asked his permission to use it.

Re: Let's start a fight with the Welders

Barry next door will probably set the hedge on fire.

Re: Soldering vs. Welding (was: Blame-shifting gone mad)

"welding is joining two pieces of metal into one"

And, of course, the original technique is fire welding where no new material is added - the two pieces are heated in the hearth to such a temperature that they can be beaten into single piece by a smith wielding* a hammer.

* Back to the amateur etymology - is this the origin of "weld"?

Boeing to reacquire spun-off supplier Spirit AeroSpace to shore up safety

"what began as a beancounting exercise gets undone in the interests of good engineering"

Yes, let's hope the beancounters get spirited away for good.

Like you, I'm orry to see what keeps happening o Shorts. I had a couple of colleagues who'd worked there, as did my BiL for a while.