Posts by Doctor Syntax

Missed expectations, zero guidance: Tesla's 'great year' was anything but

Re: It’s inconceivable to me

"Luckily, he can't be VP or POTUS"

Unfortunately they have no shortage of unlucky choices.

Re: Right

I'm old enough to remember when Japanese products were cheap junk, were continually derided as cheep junk when in fact they no longer were and eventually their producers walked all over local businesses because they improved design and quality.

I think this mistake is being repeated with China. There's certainly a lot of junk but a couple of gadgets I've bought recently seem to show good build quality and attention to detail in the BoM such as a lens cloth included with a document camera and a dual charging cable with a radio mic. Those things don't happen without somebody thinking of them and while a few years ago nobody might have given that level of thought it is starting to happen now.

Re: "focus the team on the launch of the next-generation vehicle"

The victims could come to a sticky end.

Re: FSD on old Hardware

Surely the people on the conference call should feel greatly complimented that Musk took time out to talk to them. What more could they possibly want?

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

You have to wonder just when it will dawn on HR types that personal data held for a moment longer than needed becomes toxic waste. Perhaps a mandatory fine of 1,000 GBEurollars per retained passport scan discovered on audit* and 10x that for each taken in a heist would have some effect. But probably not.

* It's time for compulsory unannounced audits of organisations licensed** to hold personal data of more than, say 100 people.

** Yes, it's time for such licensing.

Top-tier IT talent doesn't stick around in 'mid-market' organizations

Not retaining good staff. Being mid-market.

Which is cause and which is effect?

Knew and admitted?

Re: No surprise

"A couple of takeovers ago the company at the time openly stated the reason they did not offer market leading salaries was because people should stay employed for a couple of years, gain experience, and then move on."

Which is an open admission, of which their customers should take note, that they only employ inexperienced people and those too incompetent to move on.

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

"Linux doesn't really have any standard interface, and while the various Distro makers may have their own UIs and guidelines, the fact the user can just replace the UI negates the whole idea of UI guidliness.."

It's true that Linux offers the opportunity to experiment and one way to do that with UIs is to produce a distro to feature it. It's also true that Ubuntu had a similar rush of blood to the head as did Microsoft, producing Ubity and W8 respectively. Ubuntu users were lucky - they just had to switch to whatever they'd used previously.

If you look more closely at the Linux GUI desktop world the most popular have followed CUA principles. Special mention goes to the founders of Mate and Cinnamon, both of whom took on the task of perpetuating the Gnome 2 look and feel when the Gnome developers started going rogue. The ability to switch desktops means that it becomes possible for users to main consistency through time where as Windows, with its imposed this-year's-standard approach, drags users along with it however unwilling.

Re: Mac User Interface Guidelines, the Ribbon Interface, and Changes to Interfaces

"Money needs to be made by companies!"

That's no excuse for abusing customers by breaking interfaces at the same time as you're exploiting them by selling them what they've already bought.

Re: Torn

"There was FVWM which was vaguely like Windows 3.x, FVWM95 which was a shameless Windows95 ripoff, IceWM"

A quick check on Devuan. "Was" is only the correct tense for FVWM95.

"On the other hand, this tends to stifle innovation and is why we're still using the same basic desktop metaphor almost a half-century later."

If it ain't broke... In fact there has been innovation that doesn't break and innovation which does. The former just fits in more or less unnoticed* because it seems natural, the latter gets complains.

* Unnoticed because people don't notice it wasn't there before.

Re: ...

Also a > will indicate another level of menu.

Kate (KDE Atdvanced Text Editor) manages both an ellipsis and an arrow for Save with encoding - the arrow indicates a further menu for the choice of encodings and the ellipsis the save dialog which will follow once you've chosen the encoding. Not that I've ever had a need to use that option.

Re: Ellipsis

That was one of Liam's points.

Re: not just software

"Most programs that deal with multi-line text have some way of inserting a line break which is not an end of paragraph. Usually it's either Ctrl+Enter or Shift+Enter. In Outlook, one of those two will just send the message, ready or not."

My first reaction to that is that in plain text the notion of a non-breaking new line is nonsense so why would you need a key combination for it?

But wait, this is Outlook, the home of top-posting HTML, get as far as way from standards as possible without actually breaking email so - yes, you're right. It is odd.

Re: Unix shell and web browsing

You're right. Not since May '21. Like you, I hope he's still OK.

Re: GUI Standards?

None of which explains the fact that my car end my wife's have the wiper stalks on the same side but mine moves anti-clockwise to turn them on and hers moves clockwise. It's just sheer contrariness.

"That is how Locoscript on the Amstrad PCW handled insertion as well. It's a lot lighter on CPU than trying to move all the existing text after the insertion point up, and rewrapping, character by character."

Ah, we agree on something - on the rest we agree to differ. I never used Locoscript but it sounds as if they had the right idea.

My own trajectory was punched cards to Z-80 basically as an instrument controller to IBM-compatible as a Z-80 replacement. Overlapping that was VT100/220 talking to Unix boxes or PCs running Kermit as terminal emulation. Windows initially came along as a vehicle for running multiple terminal emulations to Unix boxes. IBM only entered that world through its Unix offerings - and without CUA.

Re: This far down in the comments

Whoosh!

Re: Motif?

I think that oversimplifies the history. OTOH W95 took a lot from HP's overlay for Windows 3 (memory says it was called New Era but I may be confusing it with something else). The early W95 and beyond included a copyright declaration for HP. New Era (or whatever) had a huge number of tiny files with character salad names defining odd bits and pieces which, I think, became the foundation of the registry when gathered into one place. It also have a better text editor than W3.

Re: Motif?

Oh, come off it, Liam. The primary school is no excuser. When I'm not wasting time here I'm looking at medieval history and before that I've done research that went back to the late glacial. And even i am not that old.

But as to "there is absolutely no reason why the legions of existing text-only apps that take over the whole console shouldn't support the same standard UI as the graphical desktop" there are two reasons. The first is that they belong to the character oriented world, not the pixel oriented one. Screen space is valuable and not to be wasted with on-screen menus that are not needed. The other is that they're key-board oriented and we ancient curmudgeons are well aware that if your UI is designed to work solely with the key-board taking your hands off that to faff about with a mouse or put greasy fingermarks on the screen ruins your productivity.

By and large these character-based editors were designed - and honed to perfection even - before CUA and, much as i support the latter in its rightful place, there's no reason why they should have chucked away their essence to adapt to an entirely different UI approach.

Re: Motif?

The 95 - W2K era did bring together a lot of good ideas that had been around in the previous few years (given the previous art they built on Microsoft were just taking the piss in patenting any of it). W2K was a good jumping-off point for further refinement. Instead Windows just went down the tubes, what with wanting to phone home and visual coarseness (Windows for Tellytubbies) and others, particularly, IMV, KDE got it right - although these days even KDE are showing worrying signs of going off piste.

Re: Motif?

I can't accept that excuse. They must start with the previous version as their workbench. They have to have seen it. It's sheer wilfulness at work, like any badly behaved toddler.

Re: Mint, which methodically put that UI back

That's Gnome/GTK's constant attempts to fix what wasn't broken.

Re: First time I have heard of the CUA for decades

What's even worse, there is little agreement on mobile apps as to where functionality is to be found. One might have some functionality under a menu at the top of the screen, another might have something similar behind an icon at the bottom.

A pox on the lot of them for bringing their own chaos to the desktop.

Re: First time I have heard of the CUA for decades

"A computer system would start out with some unified GUI design, with carefully-thought-out conventions catering for the tasks that were commonly performed at the time the product came out."

We're dealing not with a specific design but with design principles. I'm sitting here in front of two windows, browser and mail/news opened by Seamonkey. The entire application is based on code for Firefox, as is the Thunderbird email/news client.

SM sticks to the CUA guidelines. It has the expected menu bar descended from what you'd have encountered on a text-based terminal application built to CUA guidelines. But the contents of those menu bars are somewhat different. They both have the File, Edit, and Help options you'ld find on pretty well any such application, View and Tools found on quite a lot and Window found on applications capable of displaying multiple windows. They both have Go menu options which reflect specific needs of what they do. Between Go and Tools they have window specific options - Bookmarks on one, Message and Events & Tasks on the other. If I select a drop-down menu of any of the apparently common options I get a selection which I get s somewhat different selection of new options - some are common to both windows some are not. Only the Windows option shows the same entries although event there a different box is shown ticked.

If I open a LibreOffice tool I see the File, Edit, View, Tools, Window and Help options and, between View and Tools, a set of options relating to that particular office function.

On all these different windows, despite the differences I'll expect quite a few commonalities. Under File, for instance, I'll find whatever New, Open, Close, Save, Print and Quit functionality that applies to the particular window, that despite SM & LO being quite unrelated to each other. I can open Pinta and again find File, Edit, View, Window and Help along with some image editing related options between View and Window. I can run through the KDE-related tool set and find much the same thing, It doesn't matter what the application is, even if I'm unfamiliar with it, I can start to find by way around because the corresponding areas of functionality will lurk under File etc. as they do under the menu bar of the old friends. The guide lines do not limit the functionality, they provide a level of agreement between different developers and all users as to where similar things are to be found.

Now I open Firefox or Thunderbird. Where is that familiar menu bar? All the basic functionality of the appropriate SeaMonkey window is there - after all SM uses the same underpinnings - but I have to go and hunt for it simply because the developers decided to do their own thing. There is now no agreement, there is chaos.

Re: Efficient interface

"I often wonder how much better than the version we use that lost version would have been."

Maybe it would have been a victim of Brooks' second system effect.

Re: Motif?

"Unfortunately that also seems to have led to a proliferation of UI designs whose main aim is NOT to be like Windows"

Including, of course, Windows where the object of every iteration is not to be like any previous version.

Re: Efficient interface

"Even with vi available if your TERM env var wasn't just right "

You've raised another thing that came in alongside vi: termcap and, later, terminfo (was terminfo the result of a fit of NIH by Bell Labs?) so that, providing you had the correct description for it you could hang whatever ASCII terminal you liked on the end of your serial line. No need for an ADM3A - VT100 or VT220 were where it was at as far as I was concerned.

Re: Efficient interface

"Yes. But it's very picky about who its friends are."

I'd express is more along the lines of "you've got to make friends with it".

"But its[CUA] influence never reached one part of the software world: the Linux (and Unix) shell."

It would be more accurate to put this the other way around. The Unix shell was in place well before CUA. Command line interfaces in general, VMS, CP/M, MSDOS or whatever, don't belong to the screen oriented world of CUA.

Like you, I decry the declining influence of the CUA in UIs such as KDE and especially in broswers. Consistency is a good thing and should be preserved wherever possible, both from one generation of S/W to the next and between applications. Life is easier if GUI applications such as browser, email client, word processor etc. all share a common UI approach.

But in the world of 80x24 editing text requires usage of as much of the screen space as possible and CUA is just so much clutter. That, I think, is why CUA editors didn't display vi for so many of us.

Recollections are rather dim now but at the time I thought the UCSD p-System UI rather slick. IIRC the menu was just a single line across the screen top. Sub-menus were just another single line over-writing the previous. when text editing the menu line would eventually scroll off the screen to make maximum use of space and return when you quit editing mode (Ctrl-C I think). It also had another neat trick that I've never seen elsewhere: enter editing mode with the cursor mid-line and, if there was any space at the end of the line it would shift the line contents right to open up some free space into which you could type. If there wasn't any space at the end of the line or you'd used up the space it has created it would split the line and move the right hand portion onto the next line. If you needed more space than the line you started on it would make it by moving the following text down, eventually clearing it off the bottom of the screen. No shuffling text down a word at a time. Quit editing mode and it closed everything up again. There was a lot of good stuff in there which has been largely lost in later UIs.

Boeing goes boing: 757 loses a wheel while taxiing down the runway

"172 passengers (which conflicts with the FAA's count of 184) were transferred to another aircraft"

IOW only a dozen of them changed their minds.

Major IT outage at Europe's largest caravan and RV club makes for not-so-happy campers

"the dreaded C word"

Caravan?

"the only way to have people's understanding and patience is to keep them informed."

This is not standard practice. Standard practice is simply to thank them for their patience irrespective of the fact that they are actually fuming with being kept in the dark.

Taiwan connects its first home-grown quantum computer to the internet

Has it been pwned yet?

Macy's and Sunglass Hut sued for $10M over face-recog arrest and 'sexual assault'

Re: scary

That reminds me of my office-mate's Clone A Criminal idea - except that it was tongue-in-cheek.

This was before the days of DNA fingerprinting. At that time we used blood grouping including a number of enzymes such as erythrocyte acid phosphatase (EAP) for which there were a number of alleles. In the blood these alleles were expressed as proteins which were sufficiently different to be separated by electrophoresis. They sere still functional enzymes, which allowed for detection, e.g. acid phosphatases will convert mehylumbelliferyl phosphate into a methylumbelliferol which is fluorescent so the locations of the spots on the electrophoresis plate can be seen and compared.

The idea was to be able to retrieve cells from trace tissue such as a hair root, culture them and then get them to express the relevant genes. As I said, strictly tongue-in-cheek - I think.

Ex-IBM staff ask US Supremes for help in bringing age-discrimination battle to court

An even more interesting variant is what happens if one signs such an agreement, joins another company that is then taken over by the ex-employer? Or the converse, what happens if part of the company is floated off subsequently? Could one go back to the new company? And what if it was the part of the the old company from which the employee had been made redundant?

On similar lines I knew someone who said he'd been made redundant twice (or possibly 3 times) by the same CCEO moving from one company to another.

Accused PII seller faces jail for running underground fraud op

20 years in prsison or 20 years of supervised release?

DPD chatbot blasts courier company, swears, and dabbles in awful poetry

Re: Downvote me, if you are surprised.

Somebody at the meeting that decided to use it probably tried to warn them and was told not to be negative.

Re: As Arthur said

"They forked it into the back of our van, and it didn't even survive the journey. I opened the back doors - avalanche!"

Easy to say, but you should have refused to take something so badly packed.

Re: In training, you learn for life

If... I could actually select "my parcel non-delivery company can't be bothered" and the parcel gets delivered to a nearby collection center ... then everybody is happy.

This is the Amazon locker. There's an assumption in the use of these that Amazon will succeed in delivering to a locker rather than a house - after all they know exactly where they are. This is a false assumption.

On one level some products, sometimes seemingly more or less at random, are banned from lockers but instead of telling you this every locker is reported as "full" when an attempt is made to select it.

On another, even when the locker is selected Amazon may fail to deliver. At this point Amazon's propensity to only code for the "happy path" comes into play. The courier is apparently allowed to move on from the locker without having delivered all the packages. How? Does he have to provide some feedback to the system so the customer can be informed PDQ? That would require the situation to be properly handled.

Reality - non-filled locker in Yorkshire, tracking subsequently locates package in France and next day a courier turns up to collect the return of what wasn't delivered (this can also happen to a non-delivery to the door). Clearly there's no proper handling ot this situation, just more or less random stuff.

I'm sure every developer here knows that a large part of the code of successful system consists of catching and handling things that don't go as intended, if only to log things for later consideration. Amazon apparently doesn't.

Anyone dealing with customer service should learn early that when things go wrong you must keep the customer fully informed. Amazon doesn't and if they haven't collected the information they can't.

Anyone dealing with quality knows that what goes wrong should be reviewed and the knowledge gained fed back into process improvement. You can't do that without collecting data.

I find it amazing that Amazon's algorithms for predicting delivery times have improved to the point where delivery by their own transport is almost invariably within a quarter of an hour of the centre of the quoted range although the range might vary during the day as data gets fed back. They clearly have some very able developers working for them. Why then, can they not handle failures sensibly?

Re: Never, ever train your chatbot on...

Certainly not the internet. Vogon poetry is probably safer.

Re: As Arthur said

It depends what it's successful at. In customer service terms, especially for delivery companies, it probably means keeping the customers at arm's length.

To go OT here, there's scope for a lot of confusion about who's who in delivery terms. The company is usually* tasked by the company or person despatching the goods. However the intended** recipient is usually the one who pays and therefore the ultimate customer.

As a consequence there's scope for woolly thinking by the companies where there needs to be clarity. One company that had failed to deliver refused to accept revised instructions to help them do better on the basis that "We can only accept instructions from the owner of the goods.". Clearer thinking should have led them to realise that unless they'd specifically asked their clients they had no information as the actual owners but if they were delivering purchased goods the owner was most likely the recipient.

* Although it could be tasked by someone who wants them fetched.

** It's best to say "intended" here. It has a wider compass although it may exclude the actual recipient.

David Mills, the internet's Father Time, dies at 85

Re: Hmm!

OTOH, as here, it can be the stimulus that's needed.

AI PC hype seems to be making PCs better – in hardware terms, at least

Over the last few years PC makers have had the problem that PCs have become good enough and upgrades were no longer driving it - hence the W11 & TPU saga. But if they were "good enough" before why do we suddenly "need" sucha hike in performance (and power consumption). We're in danger of finding the typical business PC grossly over-specced and over-priced for what's actually needed because it's expected to run a love-child of Clippy and Cortana. I suppose there'll be some excellent bargains of good enough stuff around in the near future.

Legacy tech shoots down Ministry of Defence's supply chain improvements

Re: Boeing?

The conjunction of Boeing and Defence left me with "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off" echoing through my mind.

Boffins eyeball computer vision costs, find humans are cheaper for oversight chores

"While this paper is sweet news for bakers, fear that generative AI will replace knowledge workers is widespread and justifiable because large language models (LLMs) that handle writing chores can run on commodity laptops – no fancy cameras required."

It's not the baker's eyeball that matters, it's the knowledge behind it that enables the judgement to be made. Just because one interface is text and the other isn't that doesn't mean that real knowledge can be replaced by a dumb simulacrum of that knowledge. I'm sure there are a few disasters lying in wait for those businesses that think otherwise. Perhaps el Reg should be thinking of a companion to "Who me?" to deploy when those start to show up.

Wanna run Windows on an M-series Mac? Fine, buy a license, but no baremetal

Re: It's also not a particularly cheap platform

And you can always install a better OS on it.

Re: More Windows on ARM is good

It depends what you mean by success. Commercially for Microsoft, it's successful. As a very occasional user - really only to try something out to advise others - it's a crock which succeeds at nothing, not even in its persistent attempts at running its own updates. In terms of reliability the crossover point between Windows and Linux happened nearly 20 years ago.

Re: It isn't Microsoft not "allowing" users to run on bare metal

Why pay Apple premium prices to run Windows?

Subway's data torpedoed by LockBit, ransomware gang claims

"The biggest sandwich chain is pretending that nothing happened," the criminals said, highlighting the silence from the company's official channels.

Somebody's ego not getting tickled?

As a franchise, do individual outlets depend on the central system for normal operation?