Posts by Doctor Syntax

PhD student guilty of 3D-printing 'kamikaze' drone for Islamic State terrorists

Re: (that implies) universities are more interested in the income than the quality of research.

For some value of supervision.

Re: Looks like something a 10 year old designed!

That implies that the universities are more interested in the income than the quality of research. WHo'd 'a' thunk it?

Re: The cops also reportedly discovered at the home an IS application form,

Given that the "S" stands for "State" a Civil Service attitude is to be expected.

CERN experiment proves gravity pulls antimatter the way Einstein predicted

Re: we've only made enough antimatter ...

Or four candles.

Ah, but as hydrogen balloons rise the fact that antihydrogen falls proves that it does do the opposite.

Mine's the lab-coat hanging upside down.

Now MOVEit maker Progress patches holes in WS_FTP

We've been pushing information backwards and forwards between boxes for longer than the almost 40 years since I started in IT. FTP is one of the oldest tools I've used for the job. There have been some long standing, solid implementations since well before .Net was even thought of. Why anyone thought a reinvention of that wheel should be necessary is beyond my comprehension. And countless sysadmins have scripted ftp and the like into their processes for years without the need for some 3rd party overlay which I presume is to make it easier for businesses that aren't prepared to employ admins with scripting skills.

Adding that up it's a substantial increase of the attach surface most likely accompanied by a weakening of the guard. Is anyone surprised we have problems like this? And weren't we supposed to replace FTP with something that didn't sedn passwords in plain text years ago?

55-inch Jamboard and app ecosystem tossed into the Google graveyard

It would have avoided the ill-will if Google had said we'll send an update to remove the internet dependency and provide a cross-platform application to replace the functionality locally.

Re: Another Solution In Search Of A Problem

"A good smartboard makes quite a difference from a traditional whiteboard"

But does it make enough difference to justify the cost?

Going out of its way? No, this is its way.

EFF urges Chrome users to get out of the Privacy Sandbox

Re: Give us the money

It did.

Re: only a matter of time

FireFox is your choice of browser. What if, next release they decide the number of FF users isn't worth bothering about? After all, the other choices are all WebKit based.

Re: only a matter of time

Sadly, it's getting more difficult as more and more sites and applications are taking it upon themselves to dictate users' choice of browser. It's even sadder when FOSS applications start doing this - looking at you, NextCloud.

Re: Regulators are indeed a pain in the arse.

"All GDPR did was lock European users out of some American sites "

What you mean is that the response of some American* sites to GDPR was to lock themselves out of the European* market.

* Adopting the OP's usage of the terms.

If I don't want adverts thrust in my face there are NO relevant adverts. Any which are shown to me are liable to bias me away from whatever product is being pushed should that product class subsequently become relevant.

The only time ads become relevant is when I'm explicitly searching for something. If I search for excavation report of Ballygobackwards horned cairn adverts for hotels wouldn't be relevant. If I search for hotels near Ballygobackwards they would. If I were to get an hotel ad in response to the first it would bias me away from that hotel on its appearance in response to the second.

It is, of course, not in the advertising industry's interests to understand this. It would be very much in the advertisers' interest to understand it, however, and to insist that the advertising industry take note; unfortunately narcissism is likely to imped this.

UTM: An Apple hypervisor with some unique extra abilities

It's emulators all the way down.

Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

Re: Landscape/portrait

"i wholeheartedly concur with your point about the utility of talking with real users."

OTOH - S/W prints picking list. Users then enter the serial numbers of what's been picked. They should then print the despatch not, complete with serial numbers and "Despatch Note" printed across the top. No amount of talking with them would stop them writing the SNs on the picking list and sending it out as a despatch note.

Try resizing your windows to something more appropriate.

Re: delivering an early release driver.

It sounds more like an act of revenge against a nuisance customer.

Re: Monitors need monitoring

It's always the knob that works the monitor that needs fixing.

Re: Only 2.5 years in the NHS ....

"because they had to be bought when the budget was available"

That's standard public sector accounting and maybe some private sector places as well. If only they'd let you spend the budget on gold bars until it's really needed....

It depends entirely on what you're using. Plain vi - maybe portrait is OK providing it doesn't sacrifice line length. IDE's I've seen tend to have various panels, toolboxes or whatever lined up side-by-side for which landscape is ideal, otherwise you might end up with a line length of about 30 chars for your code. But even it you're just using plain vi you may well want some sort of reference material in view so that's either a second monitor or two portrait windows side-by-side on a landscape display.

For almost anything I do landscape works out best to cope with several windows open at any one time.

Infosys launches aviation cloud it claims can halve lost luggage

Re: 5%???

The best ML can do there is learn that it's usually the bastards in shed 3 who CBA to get their dodgy scanner fixed. But everyone else probably knows that already.

"Therefore it does nothing."

But it does do something. It transfers money to Infosys.

Former IBM services outfit Kyndryl said to be mulling China split

ARM's experience with it's Chinese - errm - arm night be a hint to go carefully here.

More and more LLMs in biz products, but who'll take responsibility for their output?

Re: "There is no liability to the model"

Other jurisdictions might not be quite so prescriptive. It's interesting in that some vendors, e.g. MS & Alamy are saying they'll indemnify against copyright violations*. It's going to become very messy for a while. It could be a question of deciding who's best to sue, balancing depth of pockets for paying compensation vs depth of pockets for defending the case.

* I wonder if that's to discourage whoever called up the material that's being challenged turning witness for the plaintiff against them.

"The simple answer is no,"

The definitive answer is the one the judge gives if the issue ever goes to court.

Zuck dives deeper into the metaverse, dragging Snoop Dogg along for ride

"make judgements about them based on it."

Or make judgements based on judgements of their parents based on what the parents chose to post.

Volkswagen stuck in neutral after 'IT disruption'

TITSUP

Teutonic Industry Totters - Stops, Ultimately - Production

"Some of Volkswagen’s operations have screeched to a halt"

It could be worse. A handbrake turn might have set the lines to run the other way.

NTT will take those SAP licenses off your hands if it helps ease cloud migration

Re: Really?

And because migration out will be even harder.

The alternative to stopping climate change is untested carbon capture tech

Re: Carbon sinks

Forests will achieve a steady state. The standing crop represents carbon not floating about as CO2 but long term it's going to be a fixed quantity.

Re: Carbon sinks

I haven't looked at figures but I've noted in passing comments that simply planting trees isn't going to be adequate. One factor is going to be that it takes some years for a newly planted tree to develop much of a canopy for photosynthesis and mature forest is going to be in more or less steady state with respiration and decay matching photosynthesis. The standing crop represents the CO2 captured in the long time it took to get there. If you look at a substantial tree and take into account the time it took to get to that size it will be a disappointingly small amount of CO2 per year. Less woody materials such as bamboo will be quicker then trees starting from cleared ground although you'd need to harvest them and store them.

It's also worth noting that carbon stored in roots and humus in pasture represents a greater standing crop than arable crops and grazed grassland is a natural ecosystem with which the planet has lived for a long time. That's worth bearing in mind when deciding whether vegetarianism is helpful dealing with climate change* and also remembering that pasture is more floristically diverse than arable, especially if it's not intensively conducted.

* I've never been convinced that it represents anything more than switching methane production from the livestock to the vegetarians.

Re: Carbon sinks

"In absence of oxygen" is the key here. Waterlogged soils, e.e.g peat bogs, can halt decay (but see below) but over the last few centuries these have been drained leading to carbon dioxide being liberated as they decay. Most places you'd bury anything would not be sufficiently waterlogged.

Even in waterlogged soils preservation can vary. Bog oak and pine is pretty solid. On the other hand any sub-fossil birch I came across in my days as a palaeoecologist was usually in a pretty miserable condition so most of the carbon would have been returned to the atmosphere. I have encountered a fairly solid lump of hazel in a core - just where it wasn't wanted.

But on the whole, if you want to bury wood and prevent it being oxidised in any reasonable time frame it needs to be reduced to charcoal.

Re: Carbon capture at home?

If the lithium hydroxide was made from lithium carbonate you only get back to where you started apart from any extra CO2 from the extraction of the carbonate and the generation of the enrgy to convert it to the hydroxide.

Re: Carbon sinks

I wonder how much charcoal the fires leave behind. Unless someone comes along and gathers that for burning it will stay out of circulation for longer than it would have done as timber although obviously it's a small part of what had been the standing crop.

Re: Carbon sinks

Food and fodder gets returned really quickly, textiles less so. Structural stuff should last a good while. There are limits to the rate at which photosynthesis will remove carbon, however. it would be trying to replicate a process which took millions of years to create the fossil fuel in a few decades. That's not going to happen.

Re: Carbon sinks

The carbon fossilised at any one time was a small proportion of the total amount in circulation. You're looking at deposits which formed over periods of millions of years.

If you want to quickly remove a small amount of carbon but ensure it stays out of circulation for a long period you could cultivate some quick-growing woody plant, say willow of bamboo, harvest it, char it thoroughly and bury the charcoal. As any archaeologist will tell you elemental carbon in the form of charcoal is extremely persistent in the ground. You still won't take out much that way and everyone will complain about the smoke from the charring process.

After failing at privacy, again, Google is working to keep Bard chats out of Search

Re: "We're working on blocking them from being indexed now"

It requires forethought, that's why.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Re: Pi on the moon

"a cross between a Wagon Wheel and..."

Does that mean it keeps shrinking?

PS If Jamie from The Pi Hut is reading this: 1. It gets thoroughly annoying having everyone who sells something following up with an email touting for feedback/reviews 2. Try looking at your email in plain text and decide if that's the impression you really want to give 3. Opt-out on emails that were never requested is BAD. 5. Spamming from No-reply addresses is WORSE. 6. Note to self - never order from Pi-Hut again.

"anyone else remember their original Morgan Camera Company shop on Tottenham Court Road?"

Yes. Got various Exakta bits from them. And a Star dot-matix printer.

Yes, ironically I've finally got my hands on a Pi 4 - not the one I ordered back when the world was young and was never delivered. As for power supply - I'm still waiting for that, thanks to Amazon's complete inability to deliver and order and a correct locker code at the same time. (Yet more business Amazon lost to eBay.)

Bids for ISS demolition rights are now open, NASA declares

The entire operation is to be run from a hollowed-out volcano.

Re: I know it's old, and I know it's wearing out...

I wonder how many of us had this as our first thought.

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

Re: Fibre Network? Don't make me laugh

It was alll hopelessly optimistic any Huawei.

"Yep, it's the grid's fault that sometimes the wind doesn't blow"

The point at issue is not providing communities with redundant connections. Without that one HV line failure and a couple of thousand households go dark.

Actually our longest outage wasn't HV. It was one of the three faults in the couple of hundred metres or so of underground cable between us and the transformer. A fun one. Not only did the power go out but I used the trusty POTS to report both that and the smell of gas. The two mains were side-by-side and the underground shorting (we could feel acoustic shocks under our feet when standing in the road) had damaged the gas main and gas got into the drains and emerged a hundred or so metres away. The gas wasn't cut off (and no >>>>) but the length of electricity outage was delayed by the gas main had to be repaired first and that was delayed due to their insistence that temporary traffic lights had to be installed, manual traffic controls not being acceptable and that was delayed due the first vehicle delivering them breaking down so the whole operation didn't start until after dark although the fault happened at about 10am.

I should have added that I also remember the changeover and the fact it was long delayed in NI because the system was so leaky thatHMG didn't want to waste their North Sea Gas that way.

But back in the days of town gas a school-mate & I had a device for inflating balloons from the gas supply which was lighter than air. Add a fuse made out of paper soaked in sodium chlorate (we were great fans of sodium chlorate) and a few match heads taped on for good measure. The balloon would rise a useful amount, go off with a bang that echoed nicely in the valley and fire burning match heads over the sky. Oh for those days back again!

Re: Waiting game...

"had to pay an Openreach *disconnection fee*"

What happened if you didn't? They reconnected you?

I detect BT manglement thinking at its finest.

Linux interop is maturing fast… thanks to a games console

Re: interesting Until....

"If you care about packaging systems then this is not the distro for you."

I have to admit that my initial encounter with Flatpak long ago wasn't very encouraging. The framework thingy which was supposed to sit on top of the distro and provide the libraries or whatever for all the little Flat things to sit on, although allegedly the correct one, wouldn't install, whingeing that something or other it needed wasn't there and wasn't available to install. If the solution that's going to solve installation problems had installation problems it was obviously too broken to consider further so I haven't considered it further. Add to that the fact there were several of these schemes all competing to be the solution for installation problems and it looked as if the solutions were collectively more like a problem in themselves.

So it's not so much that I care about packaging systems, rather than caring not to use any such system above what Debian/Devuan provide out of the box.

AFAICS for something over and above the distro provided packages it's simply a matter of parking a directory in /opt* and that can be done by simply unzipping or untarring it there (e.g. Seamonkey) using the distro-native format but installing in /opt rather than /user (e.g. LibreOffice) or some sort of contraption of its own (e.g. Informix which has a Java installer). Anything more just complicates what should be simple.

* With an entry for the launcher in the desktop manager's menu if needed.

Re: Kvetching

Sodding the "k" sounds like some sort of sex thing.