Posts by Doctor Syntax

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

So we started out with a few big incumbents. They had controlled innovation to take place where they chose. That left them vulnerable so disruption. The disruptors came along and now they have become incumbents. They are now controlling innovation to take place where they choose. What does history suggest happens next?

Re: Root Cause

"How to fix it? Dunno."

Better education about the fact that exponential growth and the early stages of sigmoidal growth are indistinguishable but the first is a construct of pure mathematics and the second is all that reality can provide. Learn to be content when you reach the top of the S.

Re: Bog Zech?????

"All too often, once they taste the power that they have they devolve into an organization whose main aim is to increase the power and wealth of their leaders, while demanding ever larger pay packets for ever less work for their dues-paying members"

I think they come to regard the second part as optional if not an encumbrance to pursuing the first. That at least was my experience.

Leaked email: Unit4 ERP system leaves some school staff with 'nil pay'

Spokespeak translation

The Council has apologized for "any inconvenience to employees and schools."

apologized: couldn't help acknowledging it happened

inconvenience: the complete havoc we wreaked

Microsoft's vision for the future of work is you trusting Redmond to get AI right

Re: " the future of work after miscreants use AI to publish garbage"

"But the greatest hazard we face is decline of human capacities to recognise garbage as garbage as reliance on the unreliable becomes automatic."

AFAIKS social media have already made great strides in achieving this before LLMs came into the picture.

Competition is decreasing in enterprise IT – and you’ll be poorer and dumber for it

Re: IT and Services both....

7 and 8 can be no-ops. Target is just as likely to be public sector.

"But with on-prem enterprise IT now a shrinking market, investors and innovators alike will be wary."

It's only a shrinking market until customers realise they might be better off on-prem. What's described here is not dissimilar to the days of mainframe dominance. Those days were ripe for disruption which happened when PCs were invented. Now we don't even need the invention step, the PCs are already here.

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

Re: Why is toplevel query to "zghjccbob3n0"?

As generally applicable a statement as I've ever come across.

Re: .woosh

The packets would get sent but never received.

GPS interference now a major flight safety concern for airline industry

Nobody suggested a few missiles locked onto the spoof/jammers?

Re: Is it naive to suggest ...

Navigating the dronw could get tricky.

Re: Any mention of GPS spoofing .....

But how do you know they're genuine OS maps?

X hiring 100 content cops in bid to tame Wild West of online safety

How many original moderators are these 100 replacing?

Linus Torvalds flames Google kernel contributor over filesystem suggestion

There was the thing about depending on their filling to have buffers flush frequently. And then memory got cheaper and bigger and consequently so did buffers ... I believe the quote was "What moron put that in there?"

Re: If the didn't insist on sticking with a monolithic kernel they wouldn't have these arguments...

Having a lot of stuff in modules, loaded as needed, achieves a lot of what you're thinking of. But even with a microkernel you still need the bits to talk with each other and present an agreed interface to userland - even if your drivers are in userland. AFAIKS this is what the argument is about here and presumably microkernels have the same scope for arguments.

Re: Here’s a bigger issue….

"What if this “emperor” jackass gets run over by a truck one day? What then?"

AFAIK that's all agreed, Greg steps up.

In the meantime, if you think he's a jackass, try to outsmart him. Fork your own kernel and see how many contributors you can get.

Re: Here’s a bigger issue….

I fear that might be a whoosh.

Re: Linus being shouty is not really news

"I also stand by my comment that shouting in the workplace is completely unprofessional and counterproductive."

The situation is not a workplace as you understand it. You might, in a normal workplace, take the person concerned aside and have a quiet word. In the context of Linux kernel development stuff happens on the mailing list under public scrutiny. The equivalent to your quiet word in private would be to email outside the mailing list.

Once that starts it's likely to be repeated next time a similar circumstance comes up. And again. What now has happened to development on the mailing list under public scrutiny?

Re: One of these virtual ones

Thanks.

Re: Linus being shouty is not really news

"Linus should reconsider the value he places on those unpaid volunteers."

Someone who works for Google is unlikely to be an unpaid volunteer. Most kernel contributions come from companies who want something in the kernel for their own purposes in the first place. Although such contributors are such as employees of someone none of them are Linus's employees, nor is he their line manager. As a maintainer he has no ultimate sanction except to insist that stuff he doesn't think belongs is either fixed to fit or kept out. Very occasionally - and it always was AFAIK, very occasionally, that is going ot lead to a heated situation with someone who won't back down.

OTOH, what's happening with inodes?

The real significance of Apple's Macintosh

Reading some of the linked stories it's amazing that the Mac survived Jobs' interference. No wonder it took them a couple of revisions to get it useable.

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

Re: Standards

Thanks, bazza. That raises the possibility of a Mil-Std for distros to meet, including SysV Init and X-Open with RedHat/IBM locking themselves out of it. Lovely!

Re: No, FreeBSD lost out due to the legal issues, not the GPL

"No-one likes doing free work for other companies to take."

So no-one developed BSD? Or did somebody develop it and then have an "Oh shit!" moment when they got round to reading the licence? Or is it possible that those developing BSD knew exactly what the licence implied and were not only OK with the implications but welcomed them? Should they have gone to some random A/C on the internet for instruction on what licence they should have used?

Re: Proprietary

There's Linus's kernel, then there are the various LTS kernels which are managed by Greg K-H. Then there are the kernels which might or night not have additional tweaks. And, as I pointed out, your own kernel if you want one. But where is the non-MS Windows kernel?

I've pointed out elsewhere that the maintainer system which FOSS projects have adapted is a good solution to the problem posed in TMMM of how to coordinate multiple developers while maintaining clarity of vision. It doesn't put the maintainer in the position of a proprietor because anyone can fork it and become a maintainer without reference to the original maintainer or anyone else. It's an important aspect. Let's not obscure that, even tongue in cheek.

Re: Flatpak and Disk Space

" the packages you want to download are current in Flathub and literally years out of date from the distro"

If the packages in the distro being old upsets you, pick a different distro.

Re: Proprietary

You can download the entire source code of the Linux kernel. You can tweak any bit of it you think needs tweaking to make your very own version, not Linus's, not anyone else's. Yours. You can compile your tweaked version (assuming it's still syntactically correct after your tweaks). When/if you've compiled it you can run in (assuming your tweaks didn't make it crash).

Try to repeat that for the Windows kernel.

Now do you understand what proprietary means?

SCO on the laptop was my choice partly because I could run development versions of Informix products on it I could support clients running Informix on SCO servers. I never met Interactive as a desktop product but as Onix it provided my first Unix server; I believe they also ported the original Aix.

But let's look at "Does that [the Unix wars and need to compile multiple versions of applications*] sound familiar? That kind of thing is still a problem for the Linux desktop, and it's why I'm a big fan of Linux containerized desktop applications, such as Red Hat's Flatpak and Canonical's Snap."

Go and look at the download page for LibreOffice. At any time LO offers two versions for any platform, the leading edge and trailing edge versions. Check either of them. What options are offered for each version? For Linux there's 64-bit RPM and Deb. For Windows there's 64 and 32 bit. For Mac there's Intel and Apple silicon. That's right, there are no more versions offered for Linux than for Windows or Mac. Why is Linux considered to present more of a problem?

Now let's look at another staple on my desktop, Seamonkey. We have a choice of 64 and 32 bit Linux, 64 & 32 bit Windows and just x64 Mac with a choice of languages (it looks like macOS is the difficult one here, not Linux). They've even removed the RPM vs Deb choice because all that has to be done (and it's all the LO options automate for you) is copy the download over to /opt and extract it. The same method has been used for years for installing non-distro applications. What Flatpak and Snap are ostensibly solving is a non-problem, something that's never been a problem, a straw man. What they are very clearly doing is creating their own little walled gardens. What sounds familiar about them is that they're reviving the Unix wars for exactly the same reason the original wars were conducted - to conquer territory.

* In part the need to recompile was driven by multiple H/W architectures: DEC, HP, IBM, Intel, MIPS, SPARC, Zilog and various others. The only H/W choice at present is between 64 and, where it survives, 32 bit Intel** and Apple.

** And that itself is really an OS rather than a H/W choice.

The pen is mightier than the keyboard for turbocharging your noggin

Re: Connectivity

This is modern academia. Getting the paper out is what matters. Evidence is whatever you can scrape together.

Re: Why aren't you taking notes?

"Reading it back later, it wouldn't be retained in the same way either."

Even if the scrawl could be read - which in my case it usually couldn't.

If you use AI to teach you how to code, remember you still need to think for yourself

Perhaps it was easier learning programming in Fortran. OTOH it didn't mind if you introduced a new variable halfway through the program with a small typing error...

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

"Around 25% of people are over sensitive to bitter ...

Also roughly 25% of people are under sensitive to bitter ..."

That''s normal distributions, for you.

As to sprouts, plant breeding has made great strides over the years. They're not like they used to be when I hated them.

I think I can spot two problems in your experimental method at step 3. First you're adding milk. This ruins it. Secondly you mention weird floaty brown stuff. This indicates you're using hard water. If you have the misfortune to be in a hard water area you should try a water softener although this may wll put sodium ions into the tea anyway.

As to Franci's argument for salt, it rests on the assumption that the bitter receptors need to be blocked. Why?

Apple redecorates its iPhone prison to appease Europe

While the article mostly mentions the EU or European Union ot also, at one point, just says Europe as does the earlier linked article. So just what is the scope of these changes Apple is making? Do they just apply within the EU or also to other parts of Europe? Has Brexit once again protected UK iFans from the dangers unleashed across the Channel by those dastardly EU bureaucrats?

TSMC finds its green chips are highly sought after... the edible ones

Re: Where do you get the newspaper?

That's why they no longer taste like they used to. Just like everything else.

Snow day in corporate world thanks to another frustrating Microsoft Teams outage

This isn't just Cloud, it's MS Cloud.

As NSA buys up Americans' browser records, Uncle Sam is asked to simply knock it off

The problem isn't that it can be bought with or without a record. The problem isn't even that it's for sale. The problem is that it exists.

What is Model Collapse and how to avoid it

Re: Already the case ?

Maybe not but it's already leaning a bit.

"if you then take all of this and you train a model on top of ... all of this distribution of data that exists out there that humans have produced ... including facts as themselves – and then you ask a model to model the whole thing and start generating data – which is statistically indistinguishable from this distribution of data – the model inherently is going to make mistakes.

And it always will make mistakes. It's infeasible to assume that in some hypothetical future, we'll build perfect models. It's impossible. "

But let's carry on anyway because we can make money out of it.

(Somewhat abridged and my emphasis.)

Guess the company: Takes your DNA, blames you when criminals steal it, can’t spot a cyberattack for 5 months

It's the old trade-off between convenience and security. In reality, of course, it's more a matter of trading short-term inconvenience for considerably worse long-term inconvenience.

The best simple solution for the individual is to at least use a password manager to generate per-site complex passwords. Even better is to double it up with having generating individual email addresses for each site as well. If the site's won't protect you against password-stuffing you just have to protect yourself.

Re: On the other hand ...

"Most of that data isn't online, much of it isn't even centrally filed anywhere"

The world's rather a big place to file everything in one place but central filing of census,and BMD (births, marriages and deaths) has been instituted in many countries since the C19th.

In England and Wales, for instance, that has been done since the middle of 1837. There are crowd-sourced indexes at freebmd..org.uk. To make real progress may require purchase of birth & marriage certificates (you can click through from freebmd to the registry's online ordering site) although it's surprising what progress can be made just with such indexes and images of the census returns (useful reords startin 1841 for E&W). These would require one of the subscription services, Ancestry or FindMyPast but again quite a lot can be achieved with the free service of familysearch.org (apart from freebmd these sites cover world-wide sources).

Prior to civil registration in any given jurisdiction you would usually need to rely on religious records such as baptisms and burial regiters in place of birth and death records. These are not necessarily centrally filed although bishops' transcripts supposedly exist for the Church of England but not as complete as one would like. However local societies and individual genealogists have been transcribing and publishing these since the late C19th and a great deal of these publications can be found on archive.org and, of course, have also been transcribed by the sites I mentioned in the previous paragraph.

I have no experience with other jurisdictions except Ireland and the experience there is frustration due to the destruction of the registries in a fire in 1922. I've found it difficult to get any of my wife's lines back beyond the early C19th and one individual has proved extremely difficult.

And, of course, the occasional bastard will prove as difficult in genealogy as they do in management.

Let me guess: they use the email address as userID. This would almost invariably be the same email address their customers use on many other sites so as soon as one of those sites is compromised the full login credentials become available. While 23andme - and any other company - can't stop their customers reusing passwords* they can stop them reusing login IDs by the simple expedient of issuing their own, non-email, IDs. There's no need to go to 2FA. The only reason that that's industry standard is because email as userID is also industry standard.

* Actually there is something they can do. They can check any ID/password combination they find against haveibeenpwned, reject them and advise their customers to reeset all their other passwords. They could also monitor haveibeenpwned for additions which match their own customers' credentials and force a password reset on any that match.

Virgin Media comes top of the flops for customer complaints

"In VM's case the front line staff often seem to be the last people to hear about a wider problem, offering to send out an engineer to your home to solve a problem that is keeping half the bloody town off-line."

In BT's case the front-line staff weren't even informed that there was (presumably) planned work going on on all the connections from the local footway box but offered to send out an engineer at a cost of £80 if there was no fault. I walked down to the village first to check. I suppose we have the OpenReach split to thank for that lack of communication

On complaining that the front desk should have been informed BT marked their own homework by saying it was quite OK. I suppose I should have escalated it Ofcom but doubt the outcome would have been different - they're hardly going to say an issue ultimately of their own making is actually a problem.

"The only people who call landlines these days are scammers in Bangalore."

SWMBO is called regularly by her sister who iives a few hundred yards away and neither of us is in Bangalore. My daughter, who lives a mile or so away. My cousin-in-law. Friends to whom I regularly give a lift as they're no longer driving because of age. SWMBO calling her sister-in-law in N Ireland. Other family members. Doctors. Pharmacists. Northern Powergrid to report power failures. We receive and make a lot of landline calls. Until the great switch-off the landline is more reliable than the mobile signal and certainly better quality. After the switch off we'll be in trouble every time the power fails. Yes, I know about battery backup but the last failure took out the DSLAM and that didn't get fixed until the next day.

Trickbot malware scumbag gets five years for infecting hospitals, businesses

Re: Only

The link in the article saying he was extradited was dated Oct '21 so assuming the time since then was spent in custody and that that counts as part of sentence it means only about another 3 years on top of that time served.

Akira ransomware gang says it stole passport scans from Lush in 110 GB data heist

Re: STOP SCRAPING AND KEEPING!

You tell us why you think this isn't just HR and employees.

Translating Spokespeak

"we have taken immediate steps to secure and screen all systems in order to contain the incident and limit the impact on our operations,"

Translation: we've sent comeone to the ironmongers for stable door bolts.

"We take cybersecurity exceptionally seriously"

Translation: we/ve just discovered cybersecurity has to be taken exceptionally seriously"

Alternative translation: Cybersecurity is to be taken seriously but we made an exception.

BOFH: Looks like you're writing an email. Fancy telling your colleague to #$%^ off?

Re: Hilarious episode, once again

The PFY would be contmplating the ways the BOFH could make it backfire. They usually work as a team.

Re: "coloured pencil office"

But toasted it's still more effective as shrapnel than as food.

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

Re: A Classic Case ...

Yes, you'd have thought someone who had "bought into ISO standards, big time" would have had a tick box labelled "Conduct Risk Assessment". Of course everyone knows the words printed against tick boxes have no meaning, they're just to decorate the page before you add the ticks (and why don't they print the pages pre-ticked?).

Even so, it sounds more like a case of OCD than real adherence to standards.

Re: is to gradually push less

"And of course, a lower centre of gravity helps a lot"

Self or bike?