Posts by Doctor Syntax

Why have just one firewall when you can fire all the walls?

Re: We've all been there.

As monkeys are involved it's clearly a combination of sitting and swinging and as blaming is involved somebody's going to have to swing for it.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: Worst case I ever saw ...

I think I might have been relieved. Depending on $CORPORATE the authorisation might have been turned down after the bookings were made and the money taken out of pay.

Re: The rumored traditional IBM script for that...

Managing your users is almost as important as managing your manager.

Definitely not. He was a well-regarded defence lawyer with a self-deprecating sense of humour. I certainly regarded him well after he eventually objected to the prosecution leader cross-examining* his own witness, namely me.

* No way was I going to put any great weight on hair comparison as he wanted me to do. I could never understand why the FBI lab seemed to make a big thing about hair comparisons; years after I read an article proving that their evidence was unreliable.

Re: Too many to count

I'll admit to forgetting my document camera had a sliding lens cover.

It took me ages to work out that it was actually finding the camera but the signal was all black.

Re: Too many to count

Slight problem with that being that after nearly 40 years I can't remember the names - in fact I'm not sure I even knew all of them by name.

The names that stick in the mind were the really bright ones such as the one who managed to shuffle the order of his witnesses so as to ensure a key witness was called the next day. He knew the defence leader had to appear in another case and reckoned the junior was one of those who wouldn't be up to asking questions. Possibly the junior in question was the previous owner of the house of one of my colleagues who kept getting debt-chasing letters addressed to him.

Re: Some places do get it right

"you had to take a 1 hour training session from the office manager"

Somehow that reminded me of the time when you had to pass the chief technician's test to drive the departmental mini. He was a bit deaf and had obviously been used to driving cars with bigger, slower revving engines. He didn't know the engine was really labouring when he drive it and he complained about people changing up too late.

Re: Are you sure, this isn't the plot of an IT Crowd epsiode?

"Comedy and satire are built on reality."

Yes, but this is Reality being lapped.

Re: Too many to count

There have been one or two where random chance is the only explanation.

Re: Guy was an arse BUT..

"to discover she had somehow moved every heavy item of furniture & plugged into a dead data wallport"

I'd have been tempted to say "put it back as you found it and then raise another ticket if it's still not working".

Re: Seems to me that ...

"PS: Pluto is a planet, dammit."

And very annoying to have it downgraded just after somebody had composed the extra piece for Holt's suite.

Re: clicking on the screenshot

"you're sure you are not updating the output print file from the compiler rather than the code itself?"

You don't make that mistake with punched cards.

Re: @Doctor Evil: Clicking on "close window"

"Not a Microsoft Windows Issue"

I think it is. Prior to Microsoft putting Close there it used to be the button on the left hand end of the title bar along with the system menu so it wasn't going to be clicked in error that way. As a consequence a lot - maybe all - software released prior to that didn't have a safety dialog because they didn't need it.

I've come to the conclusion that anyone who wants to change a user interface feature just because they can should first have some interface in their daily life changed, say their car steering set to work the other way round or the brake and accelerator pedals swapped.

On behalf of lawyers I should say that there was at least one who showed signs of self-awareness. His car registration was FIB 1.

Ex-IBM sales veteran sues for access to health benefits

Re: Oh look

And it will be surprising how pre-existing your condition may turn out to be.

IBM pauses advertising on X after ads show up next to antisemitic content

They might also define what "hate speech" actually means.

IBM might define it as complaining about the ageism.

Re: maybe he is a genius

"so Twitter is another way to get some real cash"

And it's all going so-o-o-o well.

Re: maybe he is a genius

"a sale of Twitter to the highest bidder"

Would anyone pay enough to get them their money back?

Re: Nobody complained for years

Poor historical knowledge there. Christianity was adopted and spread by the underclasses in the Roman Empire. It was suppressed by the state until the time of Constantine, emperor from 306.

Re: Hamas

"their chosen idol"

Was that a spelling error?

Re: Hamas

the "Orange Man Bad" crowd

Musk articles bring out those of us who want to rubberneck at slow-motion car crash (metaphorical, of course).

Re: Hamas

"We're just anti-dumb."

In consequence the dumb are going to accuse you of bias.

The main step being that he's not doing it from orbit - he's actually standing in the target zone.

Time for a wee "vacation" at Betty Ford...

He'd only want to buy it, sack most of the staff and run it according to his whims of the day.

"that thread rots my brain."

Don't read it, then. Reading it is what he wants you to do.

"using the word incorrectly"

Which is pretty well what aerogems said. Just pretentious padding.

Control Altman delete: OpenAI fires CEO, chairman quits

Re: Deliberate

And they certainly crowed about it enough.

Re: Scandalous revelations coming out in 3...2...1

Or https://time.com/6300522/worldcoin-sam-altman/?

Windows users can soon ditch Bing, Edge, other bundleware – but only in the EU

Re: UK workarounds ?

Good idea. I can always use my old address in Lisburn - Oh, I forgot. I don't need to. My only bit of kit which dual boots int0 Windows* won't go beyond 10 anyway.

* I keep it mostly to remind myself of what I'm missing and reassure myself I made the right decision years ago. Tomorrow I'll maybe run this month's patches and marvel at how long it takes and how many times it reboots.

"On the other hand, Europeans have to wait for Copilot"

So - a double win for being in the EU.

Copilot coming to Windows 10 to help navigate the OS's twilight years

Re: Why are Microsoft being so obstinate?

Money? That'll be the OEM licences they're looking for.

Re: Déjà vu all over again

Or Clipilotana

Britain proposes 'super-complaints' to help keep the internet safe

Re: Suyer-complaints process and preventing exposing users to “harmful content”

"If your msgs pass through a server then it ain't end-to-end-encryption"

What about asymmetric key encryption, e.g.PGP?

It's just the atheist fundamentalists being as predicable and boring as any other belief system's fundamentalists.

I suppose when you pass legislation that's inherently broken it's entirely consistent to propose equally broken stuff to surround it. I wonder how long it'll take for ministers - of any political persuasion - to grasp this.

UK won't rush to regulate AI, says first-ever minister for digital brainboxes

Re: UK won't rush to regulate AI

But if we didn't have a minister for AI some other minister might rush to regulate it and then where would we be? Instead we have a department that can evaluate the options and in fulness of time take the appropriate decision. Probably not to do anything because then you can't be blamed for the results of what you did do.

Re: Congratulations, Viscount

As far as I can make out his qualifications are that his family owned the Daily Telegraph for 60 years, his father was science correspondent there and wrote a book about AI several decades ago, he himself has been interested in AI & sci-fi since about age 5, he has an MBA from Carnegie-Mellon and was a management consultant. In terms of ministers responsible for science and technology over the years that seems to make him a high-flier.

HP sued over use of forfeited 401(k) retirement contributions

Re: Who benefits if this changes

"The first is why the people suing HP here are doing it, because presumably they wouldn't gain from having the rule changed."

Possible altruism.

Probably lawyers.

I thought the vesting period was to take on employees and then replace them without having to make any contributions.

Re: Seems mean...

On the other hand, for defined benefits schemes HMRC instructed employers to take a contribution holiday because schemes were seriously over-funded.

Then Brownomics introduced rampant inflation to increase the liabilities and low interest rates to decrease funds' ability to pay (interest declared here) and defined benefits schemes were closed to new members because they were now grossly underfunded. Whoever made the original decision would, of course, remain oblivious to this as HMRC pensions, like those of all Civil Servants (interest also declared here) was, at least back then, essentially a Ponzi scheme underpinned by the taxpayer.

Francis Maude mulls mulligan on muddled merger of UK govt tech services

Re: Francis Maude

"If anyone can explain and give an example of the actual difference in handling between 'OFFICIAL' and 'OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE' please let me know."

Sir Humphrey might have expressed it as "OFFICIAL means everybody knows. OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE means only the Russians know."

It would need updating for the post-Cold War era - s/Russians/Chinese/

"the centre is now frequently providing multiple (and mixed) signals,"

That sounds like too many chiefs. Merging GDS back in will provide a few more. What was the problem again?

Canonical intros Microcloud: Simple, free, on-prem Linux clustering

Windows Server ... wins because any idiot can just run a wizard from a clean install and create a HA cluster with storage and VM and other role capabilities....Linux has a long way to go on making this "admin friendly"

As opposed to something like https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/16/microsoft_windows_server_patch/ ?

On the whole I expect a system administrator to be something more than a GUI jockey.

Japan Airlines fuels up on hydrogen hype with eye on cleaner skies

"the critical mission of decarbonizing commercial aviation,"

Whether it decarbonises aviation or not depends on the source of the hydrogen. Just developing the planes on the basis that somebody else is going to produce hydrogen is throwing the problem over the wall.

Use AI to accelerate adoption of central bank digital currencies, says IMF head

Digital currencies and AI. What could possibly go wrong?

Airbus to test sat-stabilizing 'Detumbler' to simplify astro-garbage disposal

"so that a future deorbiting mission can come and collect the defunct satellite."

It may be that tumbling prevents an EoL satellite from firing thrusters to deorbit itself. In that case stopping the tumbling would eliminate the need for a deorbiting mission.

RHEL and Alma Linux 9.3 arrive – one is free, one merely free of charge

Re: RHELatives

RHELiberated

FBI Director: FISA Section 702 warrant requirement a 'de facto ban'

"A warrant requirement would amount to a de facto ban"

I can't imagine a clearer admission of current wrongdoing.

To pay or not to pay for AI's creative 'borrowing' – that is the question

Re: Two questions for the price of one

"The secondary question is whether certain materials going into certain training sets were obtained in a way that wouldn't have been legal if a human were reading or viewing them."

Some books include words to the effect of "not to be stored in an electronic storage system" as a condition of sale. That would be a clear infringement if such a book was used without specific permission. Even if the trained model doesn't contain verbatim text the training data would be an electronically stored copy falling foul of the condition.

As to the wider issue, if the trained model is not a derivative work of all the previous works that were in the training set what's the point of training it on that data as opposed to random lists of words? Would such a trained model be simply fair use of the individual works? My understanding of fair use would be that I can embed one or several quotes from some author(s) into a work which is mostly my own. I'm not sure that embedding the entirety of another's work would count as fair use and much less so the concatenation of several such works in their entirety.

If I were to produce a work which was simply a collection of material from other sources my understanding is that I would have database rights to the collection but not necessarily to the material which went into it. I think I'd have to agree that the training of the model would add database rights for the trainer. However, unless the original material can be passed off as fair use then surely the trained model remains a derivative work of its training material. As such it must surely also include the collected rights of the authors of the training material.

If the production of the derived work is the infringing act then it seems somewhat disingenuous to offer protection against legal costs of those who use a product of it. It's misdirection as to where the potentially infringing act occurred.