Posts by Doctor Syntax

BOFH: The Christmas party was so good, an independent inquiry is required

Re: Plagiarism?

You've got to realise how difficult it makes his life when he's the only one marching in step.

Re: Three point one pints please

If you're an accountant you can get it to any figure that's required.

Re: Plagiarism?

"the UK's COVID inquiry where no one can remember anything clearly and no names will be named"

That depends on the witness. Those who took contemporary notes were able to remember and name names. Let that be a lesson to you all.

Re: I guess the truth hurts.

Or hallucinations if it's chatting with a LLM.

Lapsus$ teen sentenced to indefinite detention in hospital for Nvidia, GTA cyberattacks

"assessed by psychiatrists as not fit to stand trial"

I wonder if the psychiatrists took into account that this gang have proved highly manipulative "The crew's tactics included phone-based social engineering".

I wonder who was assessing who.

Programmable or 'purpose-bound' money is coming, probably as a feature in central bank digital currencies

Re: They call these "savings stamps" or "green stamps"

Se Truck Acts.

Philips recalls 340 MRI machines because they may explode in an emergency

Re: Speculation

Making it unburstable sounds more like a factory job than a site modification. A diaphragm that would rupture a a moderate pressure was what occurred to me but I'd settle for a balloon. It must be richly decorated, of course.

Artificial intelligence is a liability

"Really it is Tesla executives who should be facing jail-time if any is to be dished out."

There's no need for confinement to be confined. Tesla and the driver.

The people fashioning these laws were also responsible for GDPR so I think they have more than an inking.

OTOH they do seem to be under the impression that if personal data is transferred to a jurisdiction and leaked there it's a satisfactorily addressed if the victim can sue in that jurisdiction. It seems to be the same sort of thinking - that if some aspect of a transaction is handed over to a third party then the original vendor can duck any responsibility.

"But the increasing money mountain extracted from all those people is just too good."

To which people are you referring?

"Current liability rules, in particular national rules based on fault, are not adapted to handle compensation claims for harm caused by AI-enabled products/services,"

I don't see what adaptation should be needed. It's just a tool being used to deliver a result. If a corporation causes harm by a product or service it shouldn't make any difference as to whether it was caused by human action or by faulty hardware, software or AI. The corporation chooses whatever means it prefers to deliver the product or service and must take responsibility for the result.

"auto dealership was talked into agreeing to sell a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1 with a bit of prompt engineering. But the dealership isn't likely to follow through on that commitment."

Given that the bot said it was a legally binding offer it might be a bit more difficult than the dealership hopes to wriggle out of it. That wouldn't be more difficult than it deserves, of course.

California approves lavatory-to-faucet water recycling

Diluted 10,000 times for extra potency.

Re: Used for landscaping

"Growing up in London I was told that my tapwater had gone through eight sets of kidneys before reaching my tap."

When I told my co-workers in Belfast I was leaving and moving to London someone said "You're not going to drink the water, are you?". "Why not? Everyone else has." I didn't tell him about the radon in the South Belfast supply from the Mournes.

SEC charges ex-medtech CEO with fraud for selling plastic fake implants

Re: Sound business principles

The March case referred to in the article refers to the criminal case for fraud and the $10million was "to avoid prosecution" in relation to that one report. I'd like to think that the actual victims would be first in line for compensation before the state gets its hands on whatever amount of money might actually be available (the corporation declared bankruptcy) but I somehow doubt it.

NASA makes purrrr-fect deep space transmission of cat vid

Cats in spaaace! Sort of.

UK officials caught napping ahead of 2G and 3G doomsday

Please get it right: 'one' had to ask the operator to connect you one. "You" simply wouldn't have been U.

System 4 was subscriber dialled. It coexisted with TACS for quite a while.

No, they only started counting from the first digital, GSM. Obviously the marketing folk involved only had digital memories

TACS, like its predecessors in the UK was analogue but it was the first truly cellular system in that a handset could transfer from one base station to another in mid-call which the early versions couldn't. That allowed for more and smaller service areas, the cells.

Re: Millenium bug 2.0

Even for those of us who know POTS is going to be switched off it's quite obscure as to when in any given area.

I thought Smart [sic] meters used 2G. And what, I wonder, do pacemaker monitors use?

I've always found the "generation" thing a bit odd. Back when TACS was introduced BT's existing car-phones were called System 4 so I assume they were the 4th generation, TACS became the 4th and the first GSM phones 6th.

Re: Millenium bug 2.0

Either that or lessons will be learned.

Maybe it's a case of one in a thousand years events coming along every thirty years or so.

Danish techies claim they can predict your next move (and your last)

"education, health, income, occupation, and other life-event data"

It's that "other" stuff that stretches credulity.

I can think of a number of life-events that have influenced the course of my own life for decades ahead, all unpredictable events occasioned by other people and even the weather. I'm sure that this is a universal rather than a unique situation. Whatever data they have on any individual they will be as unable to predict future external events in their subjects' lives and the consequences of those.

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

Re: Telemetry

I wish I'd remembered earlier Clive of India's comment which seems to sum up what you suggest to be Microsoft's position on this: "I stand astonished at my own moderation"

You can imagine the editor tearing a strip off some young reporter for having the temerity to do that. What did he think they were going to do for next year's end article?

Re: Probably '95 or '96

You were lucky. My experience was that there'd be a call-waiting bleep that took out the link. And it was always a double glazing company. I think there was a collective sigh from the whole of the Huddersfield area when we heard those bastards had - deservedly - gone down the tubes.

"free massager app"

Tell us more.

Re: "Cold boot to login ...five or six seconds"

I have the an admittedly now oldish Asus, dual booted. There is no doubt at all that the W10 partition takes a lot longer to boot than the Devuan partition even when it doesn't decide it needs to configure Windows first. Even when it gets through the initial part of the boot to the completely gratuitous hi-res background image it's strangely reluctant to put up the password box. If all's going well it will display the desktop quickly - but then takes ages to populate the task bar with very little pinned on it or to actually respond to any attempt to launch an application so again Devuan wins the password to running application race.

I'm actually reading and writing this on SM. It's getting to be a problem, though, of trying one browser after another to see which has an acceptable combination of UI and working with a given site. (Dammit - it should be possible to use an expression like "site X" to suggest any given site and now even that option's been pinched by you-know-who.) Even NextCloud has gone down this route. I haven't looked by I suspect it's baked into PHP.

Re: "Yes, I could buy an ad-free version, but why should I?"

I doubt they'll really take it back to the W7 feature set - no expectation of being online, no ads, no subscriptions....

Re: Telemetry

Go and look at Microsoft's T&Cs. Look for what they specifically exclude themselves from grabbing from your PC. Is it enough? And why should they grab anything?

If, by conversional interfaces, you mean something that ignores precisely given commands and instead tries to double guess what I want, that's not a future I particularly want.

So you're telling me that kernel design was good enough 30 years ago and CLI was good enough 50 years ago. Agreed. I'll add that GUI design was good enough about 25 years ago. And search was good enough 20 years ago. Some of these have gone down hill since.

Re: Monopolistic stagnation

They have a captive user base. That's the only reason they can abuse their customers in this way.

Re: "Yes, I could buy an ad-free version, but why should I?"

Those who have paid for software could reasonably take the view that (a) they paid for something that they expected to work so if updates are needed to accomplish that then they have already been paid for and (b) if it provides the functionality they require already they don't want the bloat.

However Microsoft has past form in changing file formats to be non-backwards compatible. It could also be argued that the updates to the installed base needed to read those should be covered by (a) above although, of course, we know that the intent was to force customers to re-buy what they'd already bought.

Re: No imagination any more

Unfortunately much innovation is going into busy work. We get new look buttons, web-sites which will only work on a narrow range of browsers. I can think of quite a bit of innovation that could usefully be done although some would involve unpicking a few years' worth of innovated crud.

"Later, Mosaic Corp evolved into Netscape, and that begat today's Mozilla."

And Netscape Communicator is still alive and hiding under the name "Seamonkey".

meanwhile NT has evolved into a monster that looks as if it wants to spend 30 years displaying the message "Preparing to Configure Windows. Don't turn off your computer".

I wonder if Microsoft have an entire department devoted to designing Wating graphics. It has a lot of them but then it needs a lot of them.

Biden urged to do something about Europe 'unfairly' targeting American tech

Errr.. China?

Musk floats idea of boat mod for Cybertruck

Re: Briefly used as a boat

I'd like to think that he'd take one for a demo sail. He hasn't personally demonstrated the brain/computer interface one of his other outfits is working on so I don't suppose he'll try this either. Pity.

"A Tesla driver was this month ordered to pay $23,000 in restitution for a crash that killed two people"

In the US? The judge must have run out of ink before he could write the rest of the zeros.

To infinity and ... just over the Atlantic

Re: [Inspired by DEC's "there are no problems, just opportunities"

Didn't DEC end up with too many opportunities?

The report, which does not use the word "failure,"

Lack of success != failure.

OK, got it.

Internet's deep-level architects slam US, UK, Europe for pushing device-side scanning

I want the proponents of these ideas to answer two questions:

1. Where's your peer-reviewed prrof of concept that shows it can be done effectively and safely?

2. Can you produce a convincing argument that this is consistent with the presumption of innocence, a legal principle that has kept us safe for centuries?

Qakbot's backbot: FBI-led takedown keeps crims at bay for just 3 months

It's not enough to take down the servers. They need to take down the operators.

Pakistani politician deepfakes himself to deliver a speech from behind bars

Re: AI-synthesized stump speech?

It's all the work of spin doctors.

PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here

Obviously not. You wouldn't want to raise f by ed

Google Groups ditches links to Usenet, the OG social network

Re: Tin foil hat .?

Next September

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

Re: Windows CLI text editor?

"emacs(1 bug)"

Seems reasonable.

Ducks.

It's important to remember that any OS, irrespective of its user interfaces, is designed to present a series of false impressions to the user. The ongoing stream of CPU operations is presented as a collection of distinct processes. The blocks of data scattered and intermixed effectively at random over the storage device are presented as a set of places containing coherent files. A single storage device may be presented as several distinct devices and, at least in Unix and derivatives, multiple devices will be presented as one. Presenting all this through multiple UIs as required is just another addition to the box of triicks.

"the early bootstrap of learning enough to learn more"

Lovely phrase Rupert. I'll take that as an early Christmas present. Thanks.

Halley's Comet has begun its long trek back toward Earth

Re: Oh the memories ...

You've got to feel a bit sorry for Harold Godwinson having to cope with two invaders in the one year even if it was a strategic error not to spend a few days recouping instead of going straight into the battle of Senlac Hill.