Posts by Doctor Syntax

Flox rocks the Nix box by conquering code chaos

Yet another project that can't build a website that says anything unless javascript is enabled. Also, yet another project that can't explain what it's about without assuming the reader knows all about another project. So what I take from this is just a guess but it's a development system for a development and/or packaging system that, like too many others, depends on taking the familiar, well understood - by some of us - Unix-style file system and rearranging it.

To which I can only respond by quoting two well-known sources:

"Oh no, not again" (Bowl of petunias)

"The great thing about standards is there so many of them to choose from" (Tannenbaum)

CNCF boss talks 'irrational exuberance' in an AI-heavy Kubecon keynote

"a quick tech demo, to the delight of the audience...went off without a hitch"

That's not what usually delights an audience

What's brown and sticky and broke this PC?

Re: glueing thin clients

You can buy adapters which are double size plates drilled with VESA-pattern holes, intended to solve the problem of one size mount on the monitor and another size on whatever you wish to attach (I have one to mount a Pi on the back of a TV). That's one option. Another is that you can also get an adapter with two parallel VESA plates joined with a bracket to sandwich your computer between them an fit the mounting bracket onto the back.

Re: Off topic

The thick "sticky brown" coating of nicotine

Did anyone not expect that to be the case in TFA when they read the article? Nice piece of redirection there, ed.

NVD slowdown leaves thousands of vulnerabilities without analysis data

I doubt the opposition is slowing down.

BOFH: So you want more boardroom tech that no one knows how to use

Re: Hmm ...

Put it down to research.

Re: Oh yeah !

If you're going to screen out all the bad ones you'll need ->

Re: Oh yeah !

On't work. You'll just get another board indistinguishable from the first. Oops, sorry, previous board. It can't be the first because we recently lost a board in that unfortunate accident at bonus time. In fact, with the BOFH about there must have been quite a few boards and accidents over the years.

Whistleblower raises alarm over UK Nursing and Midwifery Council's DB

Re: Includes sexual orientation

"Given the difficulty in recruiting nurses you want to be sure the number of reasons limiting recruits aren't more than the pay and conditions on offer."

So the offer should be made without asking questions other than qualifications although those will include the checks on barring or whatever the term is now.

"but you don't know how well you're doing if you don't measure it."

And if it's not your business to know you won't need to measure it.

The underlying problem here is the busybodies and professional umbrage takers who make it their business to know, probably because it's an easier gig than getting nursing or any other useful qualifications.

Obviously ideas from the op are worth more than those at the coal face. Those at the top are paid more so their ideas are worth more. Stands to reason & all that.

"gender, sexual orientation, gender identity"

To think that we just used to use a single CHAR column with 7 wasted bits.

UK council won't say whether two-week 'cyber incident' impacted resident data

Re: BZZZTTT FAIL

"Your ERP goes down and you're not giving the CFO hourly updates on the expected recovery time and process - your IT dept is a clown car."

The best responses here are along the lines of "It'll be back when it's back. Now get off my back." or "Do you want me to fix it or stay here talking to you about fixing it?"

As to the OP's comment he is actually saying the same thing as you and making the point that what both of you are recommending isn't being done in this case.

Re: Pilots have an axiom for emergencies:

"I suspect those on the ground haven't told those at the top how fucked they are yet."

They must have tried. But there's none so deaf as those who won't listen.

If they're saying nothing things must be really so bad that they've even lost the scripts to "Your security is important to us, only a small number of people etc".

Nominet to restructure, slash jobs after losing 'major deal'

Re: I'm sure at one time, the companies coffers were considerably stocked...

I'm beginning to wonder if the new CEO is an actual improvement on the former.

Why France this week fined Google €250M over web news

As I read it the complaint is that the French want the brioche to be provided to them not just for free but they want to be paid to have them provided.

"In 2019, Google said it would not use snippets from French publishers without explicit permission due to the copyright law. But the FCA deemed that refusal to negotiate an abuse of market power."

So the French want to have their brioche and eat it?

Euro-cloud consortium CISPE calls for investigation of Broadcom

The merger got a lot of scrutiny from the various monopolies regulators before being approved. Were there no undertaings given about this?

Canadian arrested for 'stealing secret' to speedy Tesla battery production

It could also make proving someone else isn't using it - i.e. it's not that secret - difficult as well.

Is that the secret information that's published in the patents or other secret information that they didn't bother to patent?

European Space Agency to measure Earth at millimeter scale

Re: What are they using as their zero point?

Fortunately it also falls twice a day.

Re: What are they using as their zero point?

"To achieve this goal down to millimetre level,"

Note spelling.

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

I think that claim can be explained by some people liking to brag about anything.

Re: Correct me if I'm wrong...

"And isn't that also where you tend to find banks branches and/or ATMs?"

Not any longer, these days.

Re: Pronoun police

Taking "company" as a collective noun (the company is the collection of those who have investments in it) we can turn to Fowler* for advice. The advice there is that consistency is essential but either usage is acceptable. So you and your friend can both be right.

Fowler falls foul of Muphry's law in giving an example of incorrect usage:

"The government is pressing ahead with their policy or privatization"

Note the "or".

* Yes, I have a copy tucked away in the "Misc user guides" folder on my desktop. Why do you ask?

Re: A Suggestion Or Two......................

The general point is true but with cash the counter is no longer tightly bound to the computer so the system is tolerant of quite long outages unless..."If a POS system fails, the retailer may not be able to process transactions at all, regardless of the method of payment."

There you introduce a tight binding and if the PoS depends on a PoS at head office (or The Cloud) then when (not if) that goes out so does the entire business. If individual tills at the counter only need intermittent connection to head office, say to report the day's takings, then the rest of the business continues. In fact, if there's more than one till available even that branch's business continues. At the very worst tills depending on a single branch server only result in loss of the branch in the event of a server failure.

Tight integration may not be necessary for day-to-day business but it is for business-wide failure. Designing a system that way for a business with a national or international chain of branches is an abominable mistake.

They know how many beans make five.

"The difficulty in these situations is that many companies don't ever give a detailed technical breakdown of glitches."

But we do know one common factor: single point of failure. Bean-counters want cheap, little if any redundancy and then get taken by surprise when the beans stop arriving.

Judge demands social media sites prove they didn't help radicalize mass shooter

Re: Presumption of innocence

"Beyond reasonable doubt" becomes "balance of probabilities". It is still up to the plaintiff to prove their case. If anyone doubts that this is a bad thing let me remind them that a few years ago the burden of proof was shifted to the defence where the "evidence" was produced by computer - unless the defence could prove the computer was wrong the evidence was accepted. And now we're face with a snail's pace untangling of one of the largest miscarriages of justice, criminal and civil, in UK legal history.

If we are to look to the presumption of innocence for our own safety we have to grant to to everyone - even Facebook and X - because it's indivisible.

The social middens might well have a lot to answer for but I'm old enough to remember a different procedure for trying someone in court. They were charged, the prosecution (not the judge) produced evidence against them. If they thought it necessary they could produce their own evidence and arguments to counter the prosecution's case but at the end it was the prosecution who had to prove their case beyond reasonable doubt. The defence had to prove nothing.

It was called the presumption of innocence. Without it we are all in danger of wrongful conviction. Has the US joined the UK in abandoning this?

Re: Or you could fix ...

We had a big problem with people shooting other people in N Ireland - to some degree we still do. But nobody has suggested that making possession of firearms legal without having to have a gun certificate would in any way improve the situation.

Brits blissfully unbothered by snail-paced mobile network speeds

Download speed is immaterial once it's fast enough for further improvements to be unnoticeable. For my part I'd just like a signal at home that's consistent enough to make and receive phone calls. Consistency seems to have vanished along with 3g. Coincidence?

Homeland Security will test out using genAI to train US immigration officers

Govt agencies the world over, always looking for that silver bullet so they can achieve the unachievable.

Virgin Media sets up 'smart poles' next to cabinets to boost mobile network capacity

Re: "digital electricity" technology

"However 100V DC can kill you quite easily."

Being old enough to remember the batteries used with portable valve radios my experience was that 90V could be felt but was survivable.

Re: color matched with the street cabinet beside it

"grey *is* the best colour to use to blend in"

The green box on the corner near my daughter's house was well enough blended in for the car driver not to see it.

"The issue is that councils either do not want to allow Telcos to do so or that the council have outsourced the street lamps to a third party with no interest in engaging with 3rd parties."

I'd have thought that these days most councils would be only too eager to rake money for this (as would 3rd parties) so either offering money hasn't been tried or they can't find the right option in their Oracle/SAP/whatever systems to process the transactions.

"there are no areas of outstanding natural beauty to ruin."

Outstanding natural beuty is not required. Those fuggly things will ruin an eyesore.

The usage was de rigueur back in the days when i worked for a competitor. "Zero range" was another.

Re: color matched with the street cabinet beside it

The beige ones are Voodoophone.

This was what 5G was peddled as in the first place. It looks as if we now get yet another crop of poles. Once Voodoophone get into this my daughter might get a pole beside the box they planted right in front of her sloping bit of garden which can only be easily tended from the footpath. That'll accompany the street-light a few metres away against the entrance to her garage.

Re: "digital electricity" technology

Obviously square waves alternating between zero and +5v.

Don't be like these 900+ websites and expose millions of passwords via Firebase

Re: We have a fucktonne of standards for physical security

A little home-grown post-code validation routine run locally will be a good deal better than something tried, tested and leaking data for decades.

Microsoft promises Copilot will be a 'moneymaker' in the long term

Re: Copilot Tattles

"I have generated real people"

So has every parent.

Re: substandard?

"their effectiveness is marginal, akin to being introduced to a typeahead in the search."

In other words, harmless if you just ignore it.

Apple to settle class action for $490 million after Tim overcooked China outlook

"since it seems to be all but impossible to actually hold individual CEO's to account, what else can you do?"

Make it possible to hold them to account. In fact I seem to recall a case reported here a while ago in which the management and/or directors were sued.

My guess is that in this case the plaintiffs decided there was more money to be obtained from their fellow shareholders than from Cook. If it hadn't been possible for them to sue the other shareholders then they would have turned on him instead. A bit of personal risk rather than hiding behind their employers would make CEOs, CFOs, etc a bit more careful of what they say. Perhaps in future he should be under the same sorts of constraints applied to Musk.

But remember that it won't be Tim Cook paying out this money. The money will come shareholders' funds. Shareholders who didn't, themselves, make any such statements. So it's this particular batch of shareholders suing their fellows - including themselves if they're still holding the shares. Perhaps the current shareholders should sue those who just won on the basis that it wasn't they who made the statements. Perhaps, alternatively, shareholders' suing of shareholders should be made illegal.

There is one group, however, who show an unequivocal gain out of this. The Lawyers of both sides.

What strange beauty is this? Microsoft commits to two more non-subscription Office editions

Re: Trying To Stem The Tide Of Defections To LibreOffice

"So yeah, they aren't doing it out of the kindness of their hearts."

The mind boggles at the thought of Microsoft even having a kindness of their hearts.

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

"And maybe it's time Word Processors got smart enough to fix this sort of stuff"

You mean adding AI? No way.

India celebrates rapid adoption of its internet of livestock

Ghee, we'd butter not milk this with cheesey puns.

Implementing it must have been a cash cow for somebody.