Posts by Doctor Syntax

Allianz UK joins growing list of Clop’s Oracle E-Business Suite victims

Re: "Unfortunately, large-scale zero-day campaigns like this"

The bonus becomes payable for recovery from the attack. The longer it takes the more difficult it must be so a bigger bonus is justified.

SpaceX and Musk called on to rescue China's Shenzhou-20 crew

Re: Try it on earth.

ISTR there were a few things hastily put together to get Apollo 13 back which had not been previously tested.

Big Tech's control freak era is breaking itself apart

Re: As irrational as it sounds...

"Willful ignorance is humanity's Achilles' Heel. Once people decide they no longer have to learn then they stop learning altogether. You can't teach them after that. Sadly, they must come to realize the truth on their own and that only happens when things go wrong for them."

Experience is a dear teacher but there are those who will learn by no other.

Re: Open source is not a magic bullet.

Agreed there is no magic bullet. But TFA's point was about control and something that offers multiple choices provides a degree of control. Why do the monopolists generate so much FUD about choice - choice of distro, choice of UI, choice between Linux and the BSDs? Because choice is the the enemy of the control they exert over their customers. There may be no magic bullet but choice is the closest thing.

Re: "Open source is the ticket out of here." Etc

"doubly so in N.America"

For the Rest of the World it's North America (or a large part of it) that's the problem and the paradigm shift that's the answer.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

Re: Implausible to say the least.

"After 6pm. At least by 1994 line time (the 'sole phone line occupied for the several hours') was the bottleneck for residential dial-up, not the cost."

The bottleneck was how long before a call-waiting bleep cut the connection when a double-glazing salesman called.

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

What do you mean by "too damn technical"?

Anything that demands holding things up every month for a massive update requiring a reboot or two* and hangs itself up the rest of the time because the multiple anti-virus crapackages the PC vendor prei-installed are fighting each other it too technical for my liking. Especially when at least one of the crapackages keeps reinstalling itself after it had been supposedly removed.

And, when plugging in something as simple as a USB stick, it pops up a menu that witters on about installing drivers rather than just asking for permission to mount it and open it also seems unduly technical.

* That, of course, assumes that the update actually works and doesn't require low level command line stuff to shuffle about storage and a few other incantations to fix - or even a complete reinstall.

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

A microcosm of how the *nix mindset has studiously avoided actually looking at what the noddy user *wants*.

Give that TBird does both email and calendars on the one screen and more (it still does Usenet and RSS doesn't it?) this is hardly a a matter of not giving the noddy user what it wants, it's a matter of the noddy user being unable to see what's in front of their nose. You should have put an entry for it onto the menu and called it Outlook.

On the other hand if the UI is made to resemble whatever Microsoft are currently offering too closely we get Liam complaining they lack originality (it looks too much like W95) or, when I've suggested easing users into Linux by Windows-like KDE themes, commentards demanding why would one do that.

And, of course, I find my W11 using friends complaining about what MS are doing to Outlook.

Re: Elvis has left the building

There are two reasons for all those vi clones:

1. Vi is a damn good text editor

2. It used some AT&T proprietary code so it couldn't be open-sourced in its original version

Because of those two factors there were a lot of people who wanted the vi goodness so, independently, decided to write their own clone. It wasn't a matter of people writing their own clone just for the sake of writing a vi clone, it was people writing a vi clone because it was the only way they could have the vi goodness.

Some were better than others. I remember - vaguely - having vi for either DOS or Windows which even came with its own terminfo which lived in \etc, of course.

The AT&T code was eventually freed so now there's no need for clones. Just use nvi.

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

Re: Ah ha! my dear engineer

Have I understood you correctly?

1. There is no such thing as a Home edition for private individuals.

2. If private individuals were do get their data slurped that would be a bad thing but as there's no such thing as a Home version for individual users they really shouldn't be using it.

3. Either

3.1 Enterprises for whom Windows is solely intended don't have any information that is regarded as confidential so there's nothing to slurp

or

3.2 It doesn't matter if confidential information gets slurped

AFAICR XP was where activation started so on that basis the last good version was W2K.

I thought it was there to support badly coded games that had use after free in them so they wouldn't upset that particular set of punters.

Re: I watched the video. He's basically describing Linux.

"GNU made substantial improvements over 40+ year old Unix, which was full of arbitrary size limitations and crashes "

Arbitrary size limits. Do you mean ulimit? Unix was designed to be used as a multiuser system. System managers might need to use it to ration limited resources. Maybe you don't remember when 1.6Gb was a big, BIG disk. It's still in Linux but there's a reason you've never seen it used. Do you mean the default 10 process limit? I remember seeing that once in 1986. Generally the stuff that was there to make it possible to run Edition 7 or the like on 3/4 Mb memory ad tiny disks faded away.

Crashes? Application core dumps - of course. That's down to the application developer. Kernel panics, not so much. The one really crashy system I remember back in 1999 was down to a dodgy memory module*. I drove a lot of Unix variants back in the day. After SCO decided** to divert their efforts into litigation instead of development Linux was the alternative to running a Unix-like environment of PC H/W. I'm sorry to say that with gimmicks like systemd GNU are working to enshittify it.

* A bit traumatic. I was installing S/W on a cliant's client's system in Italy. The client's client didn't want be to leave until we had a clear run and I was due to fly back. I think it likely that the extra S/W was pushing up the memory requirement ant it was the first time the dodgy module had come into play. Fortunately it ran once & I managed to get away. The client had to sort out the H/W later.

** I often wonder how far they were being deliberately led on by Microsoft. SCO had been a great server OS for SMBs. If it wasn't deliberate it was extremely serendipitous to accidentally get SCO to take their eye off the ball while MS moved into the server market.

Re: I watched the video. He's basically describing Linux.

"You left out the endless room of GUI toolkits…"

One of the strengths, of course.

Re: Thumbs up

"Like setting up automatic backups to my Linux servers, file-sharing with our home cloud, "

Nextcloud server in a Pi (or whatever server you're already running) and the deskop client which can be set to copy contents of selected directories automatically. The copies are versioned so if that edit accidentally deleted half the file content you can go back to the last good one. Likewise if the laptop should get hit by ransomware the last backup should still be good.

Re: If only there was an alternative OS

"Linux coud become an alternative to Windows when it starts to offer a common, standard GUI system that dosn't look designed by small children."

Classic marketing ploy. Pick the competition's feature that you're most afraid of - choice of UI - and disparage it as if it's something bad. Pick your own weakness - UI looks like it was designed by small children - and attribute it to the competition.

Completely transparent, of course, once you recognise it.

"And that's [adds] corrosive in a way that telemetry will never be."

It's more corrosive because it's more noticeable. AKA What the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve over.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

Re: You want

"because us victims cannot make the change to get away for windows"

Mostly you could. But because Microsoft are skilled at frog-boiling you won't.

How bad are you going to let it get?

It's easier to not ask forgiveness because it's already too late. and hence irrelevant

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

"Ms has been able to provide solid software with MS-DOS."

And that was originally bought in.

Re: Program / Programme

"the other day and was surprised to find them talking of 'flashlights' rather than torches"

Maybe it's a regional thing or even a class thing but we used to call them "flashlights", not "torches". (Damn spill chucker wants to hyphenate it!)

Re: Program / Programme

"tires" means "exhausts"

So your car has twin tires sticking out of the back.

Re: Well, it compiles!

Mostly.

(Scripts and config files don't even need to compile.)

Google's Gemini Deep Research can now read your Gmail and rummage through Google Drive

They're quite welcome to any spam that lands on my long-abandoned gmail address. I wonder if they'll put give any work to the "companies" that will build/improve my website, build webapps, mobile apps or whatever is the fashion today.

Bank of England says JLR's cyberattack contributed to UK's unexpectedly slower GDP growth

Re: So now we know that cyberattacks cost ...

"When will it change?"

By now it should be dawning on boards and, I hope, fund managers, that insurance isn't really going to cover the reputational damage and general chaos that they've seen the Co-op, M&S & JLR experiencing. They should be asking their IT depts what they're going to do about hardening systems, building in resilience etc. (BTW have any commentards been on the receiving end of such questions?). I do fear, however, that some are going to simply reply "More Microsoft" if comments here are anything to go by.

Microsoft's data sovereignty: Now with extra sovereignty!

Re: 21th century colonialism

"But this will never happen"

Never is a long time.

Meanwhile, as TFA points out, the message is starting to get through.

Malware-pwned laptop gifts cybercriminals Nikkei's Slack

Re: There's a lot of it going around

" Put the bulk of the signed firmware on a replaceable microSD card"

Alternatively, and this might be very old-fashioned, have some form of physical write-protection for the mobo flash so that user has to enable it.

UK space sector 'lacks strategic direction,' Lords warn

"The UK is the only country to have developed an orbital-class rocket and then cancelled it."

Developing technology and cancelling it is our national speciality. I put it down to having a political class that doesn't realise that the expense comes upfront which means that the first built appears very, very expensive and they take fright.

Azure stumbles in Western Europe, Microsoft blames 'thermal event'

Did the thermal invent produce smoke?

Microsoft apologizes for not explaining cheaper no-AI M365 plans, and all it took was a government lawsuit

The missing word is "avoiding".

Re: Microsoft apologises for getting caught attempting to rip off its customers

" “In hindsight, we could have been clearer " .... but we thought we could get away with it.

When Debian won't do, Devuan 6 'Excalibur' Linux makes the grade

"In other words, rather than provide a hyperlink, the author of the page expects the reader to copy the text, work out the abbreviation for their desired architecture, edit the URL to insert the abbreviation in place of the part delimited with a dollar sign, and proceed from there."

Errm - no. Copy and paste "https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/devuan/dists/excalibur/main/" like wot I just did, scan down the index with Mk 1 eyeball and click on the appropriate link. No editing involved.

BTW it's not directly named after King Arthur's sword. It's named after a minor planet with a name starting with "E" and a minor planet named after King Arthur's sword was chosen. Releases are named in alphabetical order.

Snap out of it: Canonical on Flatpak friction, Core Desktop, and the future of Ubuntu

Re: Just do it

It sounds as if the opacity really is your problem.

Re: All very interesting.

AFAICS it looks very much like emulating the Windows experience.

Current Linux practice is along the following lines:

libwhatever is used by a lot of executables - low level stuff such as the command line shell and the graphical shell, the command line and graphical file managers and higher level stuff such as a browser, a couple of graphics applications, an office suite and others*. Some vulnerability in it is fixed or maybe some clamoured for extra functionality is developed. The new version is placed in the repository and a user's regular update process discovers it, downloads it, either automatically or by user approval, and everything that needs it just uses it on the next invocation. It's very quick and the only things I've ever seen need a reboot are a new kernel and, on one occasion, a very low level service. In practice a few small updates might pass through every week, a larger batch of programs that work together every few weeks and a new kernel every few months.

As I understand it the immutable version of doing things is that in order to do this an entire snapshot of the core OS has to be created, installed and booted. I doubt this is going to happen just because libwhatever has been changed because it will be disruptive so it will only happen at intervals (monthly? every 2nd Tuesday?). If libwhatever has security issues the core is going to have to live with it unless an out of schedule update is issued. This becomes very Windows-like AFAICS. Maybe this is the intention - make it familiar with a lengthy, disruptive update happening every month. There's also the added detail that AIUI those higher level applications, the browsers etc, aren't going to use the libwhatever in the immutable core, they're going to have their own version in a snap, flatpak or wherever which is a bit of a lottery because they might get the newer version faster than the core if it's released more quicker** or never if the packager never gets round to it.

* In a few cases applications might have their own version for some reason and the launch process has to arrange to use it. It will be stored somewhere out of the way - an application-specific directory tree under /opt is the accepted place or /usr/local if it was locally compiled from source, Like snaps etc it might get updated on a different schedule to the main system implementation. If you're Ubuntu or whatever this suffers from NIH syndrome.

** What would be the schedule for releasing these? As and when ready as per current practice or alongside the immutable core?

Re: Just do it

It's not so much looking for a degree of customisation, more a case of not liking the growing opacity.

"people who assume you'll read the manual"

Much worse are people who won't write a manual.

Power crunch threatens to derail AI datacenter construction

Do those responsible for these projects never stop to wonder if all these delays are a hint that they're doing it wrong?

Google imagines out of this world AI - running on orbital datacenters

Re: …er, all of this on EARTH ORBIT?

"You're going to select or design components with energy- and mass-efficiency as a top priority"

You're also going to select for radiation hardness as a top priority. Is it going to be another of those triangles: energy efficiency, mass efficiency, radiation hardness, choose any two?

Re: …er, all of this on EARTH ORBIT?

"The problem is finding investors dumb enough to fund it."

The existing AI bubble seems to have no problem finding them.

Invasion of the message body snatchers! Teams flaw allowed crims to impersonate the boss

Re: Read the terms and shiver

Employers should certainly have their legal advisers read the T&Cs of anything significant irrespective of the supplier.

OTOH I wouldn't be surprised if their advisers have already signed up without reading the T&Cs.

MIT Sloan quietly shelves AI ransomware study after researcher calls BS

Too many (in)significant figures in a statistic is always a strong warning signal.

AN0M, the backdoored ‘secure’ messaging app for criminals, is still producing arrests after four years

"The AFP and FBI stopped using AN0M because it produced more evidence than they could comfortably handle. The AFP, however, still wants access to encrypted communications"

When it's solid intelligence they can't cope but they still want haystacks in which there might be needles. It's just data fetishism.

Google Cloud suspended customer's account three times, for three different reasons

Consider the size discrepancy between your own company and those you're choosing as suppliers. If they're sufficiently bigger than yours that your custom is insignificant to them then expect to receive bad service.

Gullible bots struggle to distinguish between facts and beliefs

Re: Somebody believes the "Intelligence" part?

The difference between an LLM or any other sort of alleged AI, general or otherwise, and you and I is that they cannot experience reality and we have spent years doing so. We have an internal model of the outside world that we spent a few years getting up to scratch and the rest of our lives keeping that way. It gets regularly checked against what we experience. We interact with that outside world. We know - from experience - that it can hurt us sometimes, that it can please us and that it is essential to our ongoing lives. When we look at things increasingly distant from our everyday experience we are less likely to add them accurately to our internal model although it helps if we have learned critical thinking skills.

There are three words I've used there that are critical to the difference between a human - or animal - intelligence and AI: "reality", "experience" and "life". Their only internal model is a set of relationships between words. A LLM trained in French will have different words between which to establish relationships than an English one. Monoglot English and French speakers have the same understanding of, say, a motor vehicle. A program existing in a computer has never ridden in one, driven one or shelled out hard-earned cash to buy one; it has no understanding beyond linking the outer forms, the words together. It is not further forward - more likely many steps behind - than the cargo cultists in Feynman's lecture who thought that, by clearing runways and imitating air traffic controllers, they could get planes to land and unload cargoes.

"It's going to be in your car, in your toaster, and in every streaming service,”

Not while it's me spending my money it isn't. Difficult to avoid some algorithmic crap in modern cars but at my age I've probably bought my last car so I'm unlikely to buy anything worse.

Network operator ponders building a new submarine cable – on land

And don't rule out private enterprise either.

Re: Political instability nixes it

I remember one lot nicking aluminium beer kegs, melting them down to cast ingots and then having the cheek to send them to the Industrial half of the Department of Industrial and Forensic Science for certificates of analysis.

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

Re: Why?

I can't say I've ever checked but I'd expect the temps to go away when the connection's closed so maybe no need to drop explicitly if you're worried about that. But give the temp tables clear names so you're aware that that's what you're dropping.

Re: Nah

Email? Require it in writing. Signed. Allow ink as a concession after making clear you'd have preferred blood.

VodafoneThree to offshore UK network jobs to India

Re: Isnt this what people want?

"On the other hand wasnt offshoring call centres to India tried and then they relocated back because customers didnt like it?"

Usual business cycle.

REPEAT

Cut costs, get bonus, move on.

Repair damage, regain customer base, get bonus, move on.

UNTIL THE COWS COME HOME

I've always reckoned an effective strategy would be cut advertising and marketing costs and deploy the saving into good products and customer service and just gain market share from the others' customer churn.