Posts by Doctor Syntax

Not even the ghost of obsolescence can coerce users onto Windows 11

Re: "I wonder if someone... might use this to sue Microsoft under the Trades Descriptions Act."

"and widely reported."

But no widely reported contradiction. But never mind: plausible deniability.

Re: Advert

"Windows never has printing hiccups"

Hmmm. I remember having to help out a cousin-in-law. He'd got an HP inkjet (OK, first mistake). Windows couldn't see it. That was because the Windows setup for it had configured it to a completely different subnet address.

"a subscription model"

That'll be W12. It'll be interesting to see what that does to the home PC users. Will it finally turn them to something else? If not and users get used to paying a subscription to use their PCs will that ease the social media site users into paying subscriptions?

Re: not happening

"Companies will not spend man-hours to upgrade and retrain"

If you want a UI that doesn't require periodic retraining of users - nor requires them to just take UI changes in their stride without retraining - then you're a lot better off moving to Linux.

Do the retraining once and from then on enjoy the stability of UI. Between KDE 3 & KDE 5 there's only been one change that's really annoyed me and that's the fact that I can no longer confine un-hide of the panel (task bar to you) to a corner. I suppose for Windows users that would be classed as a minor annoyance given what Microsoft have wrought on them over that time.

Unfortunately a few applications, particularly browsers have changed their UI for the worse. That's because they've followed what happens on Windows and, believe me, that imported lack of stability bugs me no end.

Re: So0rry, Linux still is nowhere near ready to replace windows.

Unspecific claims from an A/C are soooo convincing.

Re: Needless, wasteful churn (aided and abetted by less-than-helpful media types)

"As in, it will suddenly go away or stop working at Micros~1's whim and wish??"

Are you giving them ideas? The upgrade that installs W11 if the hardware meets spec or wipes the PC if it doesn't?

Re: "A collective shrug from PC users"

" It was supposed to be the last version until Redmond got an aneurysm and decided to do another one."

I wonder if someone faced with a large, otherwise unnecessary, replacement requirement might use this to sue Microsoft under the Trades Descriptions Act.

Lenovo to offer Android PCs, starting with an all-in-one that can pack a Core i9

"it's seventy three competing GUIs"

You say that like it's a bad thing. But one size does not fit all. Liam reviewed Elementary here the other day. I'm sure it has users who find it to be just what they want, likewise Cinnamon, XFCE, Gnome, Unity or whatever. If I personally find KDE fits my way of doing things then I don't have to use any of the others (a couple of which would be an extremely bad fit for me).

To take just one aspect of it - the versions of Windows from 95 to 2000 had a fairly configurable and on the whole user-friendly hierarchical start menu organised on more or less functional lines. Over the years since it has changed into what appears to be an inflexible lumpen mess ending up resorting to alphabetical ordering because nobody seems to recognise that functional organisation is what's needed. I understand that many users resort to typing the name of the program they want into search - they've reinvented the command line in desperation. The Linux desktops I've used have retained the functional organisation and improved on it. KDE, the one I'm most familiar with is fully editable to achieve the arrangement that best suits the user and has remained that way as long as I've used it and has also sprouted a couple of extra choices as to how the user wishes to view the menu.

It's a world away from the Windows approach of use this whether it works well for you or not, until the next one which might work in an entirely different way. I can have something I can tailor to my needs and enjoy consistency of UI from one release to the next.

That choice of desktops isn't a reason to avoid Linux - it's actually a very good reason to use it.

The desktops are over a clone of a 50 year old minicomputer operating system? Fine, there were some very clever people about 50 years ago. Even back then I preferred the one that was cloned for Linux over the one that was cloned for Windows.

Police ignored the laws of datacenter climate control

When you hear of some of these installations you wonder about the installers. Did they not flag it up as an unsuitable installation? Maybe they'd strayed into the wrong genre - cops and robbers when they should have been in cowboys and indians.

"twisted-fabric electrical cables"

You had fabric? Luxury! We moved into a house where some of the cables were lead-sheathed with paper insulation in the last stages of rotting away.

Cisco warns of critical flaw in Emergency Responder code

"The inclusion of hard-coded credentials is a textbook security flaw."

Good to see developers following the textbook.

NASA taking its time unboxing asteroid sample because it grabbed too much stuff

I hope they're not in the "bringing organic materials to seed life" group. If they are William of Occam might recommend that they read up on Miller and Urey and that they have a closer shave.

X confuses the masses by removing all details from links

Re: Cats and Vultures

What on Earth were the banks thinking of to lend him money in the first place? He'd bid so much that he tried to get out of it almost immediately.

Cat accused of wiping US Veteran Affairs server info after jumping on keyboard

Ferrets are too good at weaselling out of things.

Re: Won't someone think of the rodents?

"I had also had a rat for a pet previously, but that was completely unrelated to this mouse."

Obviously. Different species.

They may have said cat it to /dev/null and he used mv instead.

A cat that can type "DROP DATABASE veteran-affairs;"? With a bit of extra training it could be set to work providing it doesn't spend too much time playing with the mouse.

BYOD should stand for bring your own disaster, according to Microsoft ransomware data

"Some take the stance that it can never match the security levels of a fully managed and provisioned approach"

I have a feeling that this also describes quite a few businesses' entire IT operations without users' additions.

Canva creates $200M kitty to pay creators for stuff they feed its design-bot

Re: Manhattan

I think you missed out 6 orders of magnitude. But the bigger questions would be how do you or anyone else know what contributed to the output and if nobody knows, then nobody can be paid, can they?

In this context what does "should they opt in they can later choose to opt out" mean? If it's gone into the training data how does it get removed without running the entire training operation again? Is it a case of "you can check out but you can never leave"?

It's time to celebrate the abysmal efforts to go paperless in the NHS

Over the past few year or so my wife's cardiac and, particularly the last few weeks, blood pressure problems - together with a few of my own have given me chance to observe the local hospital trust and especially the local A&E.

Firstly they do have a trust system. It has links to a national system so they can look up NHS number from name, DoB & post code (as can online booking for flu & covid jabs). The only connected printer in evidence at A&E reception spits out a wrist band with name, NHS number and a QR code. That solves the patient ID as they're moved around. BP testing devices have an RJ45 so presumably could be networked but aren't - it would probably be impractical - so readings have to be typed in but doctors and nurse practitioners can review what's been done. The cardiac ward in the other main hospital in the trust has hand-helds which look like smartphones but I suppose might not be which are used to register the readings. I'm not sure how the doctors review this on ward rounds but in the A&E offices they can review everything without needing a paper record. On the face of it it appears that this trust is largely if not entirely paperless apart from the wrist bands, at least on a functional level although it's possible there might be a paper back-up. I don't know the origins of the system but I doubt it's written in house; it will be bought in.

Our GP also has a practice system so they also are largely if not entirely paperless, at least on a functional level. I know this is system is bought in, in fact I'm pretty sure it runs on the provider's server.

The need for paper, then, seems to be communicating between trust and GP and possibly between trusts (SWMBO was sent elsewhere for a TAVI last year). This set me thinking: bearing in mind that perfection is the enemy of the good, let alone the workable, is it possible to build a bottom-up system instead of some grand plan, especially one to be handed over to a major data-broker? How does email work, or the web, or any effective communications system? It has scarcely any central requirement other than data standards - communication protocols and defined message formats and a hierarchical, distributed registry. There's no need for everyone to use a specific client. There's no need for MSPs to use the same server software. Providing the clients and servers follow the protocols and handle the same message format everything works. It should be possible to build something on those principles.

A quick online search shows that there's a lot of information about medical exchange message formats. Pick one, preferably one that's extensible. Specify a core amount of information and a go-live date. It doesn't matter how different the internal databases of the various providers are, all they have to do is to provide an interface to read or write that subset of data to that format. Now we have to decide how to exchange data about the patient. As the system evolves extensions for extra data can be defined and added in phases.

On the basis that the patient is registered with a GP (not all patients may be but let's start with what's practical) the GP (in practice the GP's service provider) is the obvious place to exchange information; it's the GP who will refer patients a lot of the time and even if a hospital trust encounters the patient as an A&E walk in the GP will need to know eventually. Clearly a network is needed to transmit messages securely and I'm assuming that NHS.net can provide this and that most, if not all, trusts and GPs have NHS.net addresses. Again "most" can be the starting point.

What the network needs to provide is a central registry to provide identify the patient's GP and I'd be somewhat surprised if the system which already provides the lookup for NHS number didn't already include this; and a store and forward message handling system which looks remarkably like email. It may well be that the GP service providers could handle the latter

TL;DR A system could be built bottom up. No massive central contract is needed. Software would be an add-on to existing medical record systems by the providers of those systems. Not every patient nor every possible item of data might be served by this but the system could start earning its keep from go-live and grow out from there. Perfection is the enemy of the workable.

Re: meh

You think the entire paper record couldn't get lost? Or become part of the overflow of an overflowing bin somewhere?

Microsoft introduces AI meddling to your files with Copilot in OneDrive

Re: Much todo about nothing

Outlook spam detection is odd. Sometimes it's very effective. Sometimes it's effective for everything except spam pretending to come from Microsoft itself and sometimes it just doesn't seem to be there at all.

it sounds like more and more lock in.

Mint freshens up its Linux garden for Ubuntu and Debian fans

Re: In a galaxy far, far away...

Last time I ran Mint I ran it with KDE. I see no reason why thet wouldn't be available with apt install kde-plasma-desktop and your choice of extras or apt install kde-full

Re: In a galaxy far, far away...

Snap!

No, I wasn't agreeing with you.

$17k solid gold Apple Watch goes from Beyoncé's wrist to the obsolete list

"but first I have to remember where I left it"

In my case that's usually at home and I'm not going back for it.

Re: It's not a watch

Primarily it was a wrist-mounted display object whose prime function was to show, by having been purchased, what the owner could afford to by. Having been purchased and flashed about most of its utility value has been used up. Being a wrist-mounted gadget that could also tell you the time was its residual utility value (plus the melt price of the gold, of course).

Re: No doubt

"the celebs will get special services otherwise they'll cost more in negative publicity"

Service? That old thing? Haven't worn it for years. It's so yesterday I'm not even sure where it is. It might be in a drawer somewhere or maybe I left it in an hotel.

Techies at Europe's biggest council have 8 weeks to pull finance reports from Oracle system

Ideally a word would have a degree of local identity with the larger entities being built from them, bottom up. It lends to greater local coherence. The 1974 reorganisation is the result of what you get from the top-down approach.

Re: "The council now plans to revert ..."

They're in stock now but that's too late to save the situation.

Re: Public Sector procurement has something to answer for here too

CV polishing might have been the best solution.

Re: When will they ever learn?

"and consider their staff are people too"

Their more expensive problem seems to have been considering that some of their staff were people and some were women.

Re: Brummie here.

Seen too late - as usual.

I don't think many people in Kirklees think it works. It was a cobbling together of areas which previously had their own administrations with the West Riding County Council on top of them. The name was presumably the consequence of there being no name within the combined area which wouldn't identify it with one of the original areas to the detriment of the other. It's not a bit of accidental daftness - it reflects the underlying lack of logic.

I suppose the destabilising factor was breaking up the WRCC to create the Peoples Republic of South Yorkshire. That, of course, is the root of your Whitby/Settle issue - Settle was also part of the West Riding.

Now, for goodness sake, we've also got a West Yorkshire mayor to no obvious purpose.

Microsoft attempts to woo governments with Cloud for Sovereignty preview

But as Microsoft is a US company they're still subject to the CLOUD Act. An access under that wouldn't be for engineering so there'd be no need to enter it into the engineering log.

ChattyG takes a college freshman C/C++ programming exam

Given that there are raster and vactor editors to learn from those aren't to trick parts of the puzzle. The bit that requires imagination is how to produce a workable paint program from it. I'd like to think that if you put that problem as a test the human would start by thinking what the interface would have to look like but what would a ML do?

A better test would be to provide it with a problem for which there is currently no solution although it should not be impossible to produce one.

For instance the open Document Foundation define a format with the file extension .odi as an image format. As far as I can follow it's a multilayered format in the same manner as, say .ora but can include SVG as well as PNG layers. Produce a paint application to generate, display and edit files which contain arbitrary arrangements layers of both types with variable levels of transparency in each layer..

It should be possible but as far as I know nobody has produced on so there is no prior art to regurgitate. Imagining and realising a good solution to a novel problem is what distinguishes a developer from a coder.

Human knocks down woman in hit-and-run. Then driverless Cruise car parks on top of her

Re: Interesting that the police

"Unless, of course, this involves you running over them again with another set of wheels"

Or even running over more bits with the same set of wheels. It depends on being able to lift the vehicle without causing further damage.

From vacuum tubes to qubits – is quantum computing destined to repeat history?

Re: Cost/Performance

That's a lot of heavy lifting for two words. Which two am I looking at?

I'm a bit concerned about agreeing with someone from Gartner.

What's always puzzled me about quantum computers - well, one of the things - is this reliance on noise reduction. It sounds a bit like "Here are all the possible answers. All you have to do is work out which is right.".

Re: Applicable

"if"

Such a trivial word. However I look forward to Musk taking the lead in testing this concept.

Microsoft takes concrete steps (literally) toward greener datacenter construction

Re: For Pennies on the Pound

I thought that market had collapsed.

Re: Fly Ash

"the concrete absorbing CO2"

Quite. Calcium really does want to become the carbonate so most if not all the CO2 is absorbed in the long run - except what's released by burning the fuel to produce the energy to drive off the original CO2. This is why I get a bit sceptical about solutions that depend on using some form of calcium to absorb CO2. There's one which involved using it as a sort of middle man to absorb CO2 from chimneys, then heating it to drive it off again for sub-sea storage. But what's the overall efficiency if it depends on a fossil fuel for the heat? And if there's some sort of renewable energy for the heating why wasn't that used instead of whatever required the chimneys? You need to look at the complete system.

US Geography is not by strong point but I don't think Boulder, Colorado is near the sea. That raises the question of where the calcium in this "biogenic" limestone comes from. If it's from non-carbonate sources such as gypsum that's fine but if it's obtained by treatment of limestone that releases CO2 then it's not a gain.

"Biogenic" limestone in quotes because all limestone is biogenic.

City council Oracle megaproject got a code red – and they went live anyway

End of contract with SAP and/or the H/W it was running on?

Train crashes depend on the momentum of the train.

Google doubles minimum RAM and disk in 'Chromebook Plus' spec

Re: Weren't Chromebooks supposed to be low-end-use-as-terminal-only ?

"With that spec you can run the ARM64 version Windows 11."

But you don't have to.

UK splashes £4B to dive into next-gen nuclear submarines

Let's hope they work better than the carriers have up to now.

Microsoft kills classic Azure DaaS, because it isn't really Azure

Re: Confusing naming?

Or naming them backwards such as WSL which is a Linux service on Windows.

Microsoft CEO whinges about Google's default search deals

As they say, it takes one to know one.

On second thoughts, maybe not. It's more a case of we know it when we see it and we're seeing the pair of them.