Posts by Doctor Syntax

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

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.

European Space Agency to measure Earth at millimeter scale

Re: What are they using as their zero point?

"To achieve this goal down to millimetre level,"

Note spelling.

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.

Re: users quoted in the WSJ want it to be their financial analyst. "And it's going to disappoint"

The back-pedalling has started.

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.

Investment advisors pay the price for selling what looked a lot like AI fairy tales

"Delphia and Global Predictions marketed to their clients and prospective clients that they were using AI in certain ways when, in fact, they were not."

If they actually had used it perhaps they should have been charged more.

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

Re: Get rid of street furniture cabinets

"I rather suspect some of these acts might be provoked by annoyance over where these cabinets are sited."

Ditto siting of 5G masts. Friends have one of these fuggly monstrosities towering over their garden. It's sited on a verge which had had a bus shelter refused planning permission because it would have blocked the sight-lines of a road junction. A mast and large box doing the same thing isn't so constrained.

Award damages against them. Attachment of earnings, charge on house, whatever. Just bring home to them that what they do has a cost.

Re: "Stop putting cabling in easy to reach, easy to breach ducting"

You make a fair point but to some extent it would be up to the property owner to make their decisions. My own cabling is underground and was laid before a concreted drive and paving laid in concrete was installed and an orchard planted over the route between perimeter and house. That makes replacing with any other media by the same route fairly unlikely. As FTTC speed is quite adequate for my needs and I don't particularly care to have overhead cabling my considered choice is to stick with that. In the situation the OP described, however, the cable appears to have been at the edge of the flagged courtyard so some sort of protection could have been fitted fairly unobtrusively into the angle between yard and wall. As for laying across a lawn which is what I mostly had in mind....

And your salesdroid sounds as if he well deserved to be fired along with whoever hired him. Grade I listing and conservation areas should be a warning flag that it will cost a lot more. I bet the building owners were amazed to get a quote at a fraction of what everyone else was quoting.

Re: "Stop putting cabling in easy to reach, easy to breach ducting"

The installation should at least have been done competently. I doubt laying the fibre on the ground surface would count as that. I hate the overhead mess that's being made (or made worse depending on the number of copper lines already strung overhead) but it's at least a reasonably secure way to get the connections to the premises. I'd have thought there'd be some minimum standards for height of non-buried cables and maybe depth of buried ones. Zero wouldn't work for either.

Re: <list of effective ways of dealing with threats>

This is why such services get at least some degree of regulation. The guilty here are HMG (other, similar gummints are available) who are in such a hurry to digitalise (sic) that they're not only failing to do that, they're willingly downgrading any existing regulation to get it done.

Re: "Stop putting cabling in easy to reach, easy to breach ducting"

Maybe it's time to get the exterior of your house repainted. It could cause some accidental damage. Alternatively you could bill SFR for rent.

"There was one national network operator and two threats: nuclear war and terrorism."

There was and is more than that: floods, fires, landslips, JCBs, power outages and, not least, field engineering doing stuff without telling customer service.

By phasing out POTS we're ending the immunity of the domestic telephone to power outages. I'm not expecting everyone to realise they need a UPS, nor of a cheap UPS's chances of surviving a real power outage. What's more the last power outage here seems to have tripped something in the local cabinet as the network went off at about the same time as the power but didn't come back until much later. In the dash to Go Digital the telcos have been handed a free pass to end the old requirement that the phones should just work.

Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4

Almost every interaction with a business these days results in a "feedback survey" by email or phone.

If it's an SMS phone message it gets the report and block treatment. If I absolutely have to deal (as rarely as possible) with those who are apt to end such guff I allocate them their own email address and set it to bounce as soon as the transaction is complete.

Re: As expected

I hadn't come across Thorium so went to take a look.

Oh, they seem unable to develop a website that doesn't show anything useful with Javascript blocked. It doesn't lend confidence to their ability to develop a browser.

Re: Fingers crossed

Hoping for a full-scale monopoly investigation that ends with Microsoft being broken up instead of being allowed to get away with making promises whilst keeping their fingers crossed.

I suppose the downside to that would be Oracle coming along to buy up the pieces.

These are all obstacles and speed bumps in our lives that aren’t designed to help us at all, they’re designed to block us, frustrate us, annoy us and generally use us. tell us to take out custom elsewhere.

FTFY

Re: Chrome used to do the same thing

I don't know about google.com, I've never seen that on google.co.uk. I suppose it could be the ad-blocker handling that, of course.

Infosec teams must be allowed to fail, argues Gartner

Re: If all incidents are inevitable..

Perhaps the killer comment would be "Are you prepared to sign off, here and now, the unquantifiable costs that may be incurred by this decision?".

"infosec teams responding to incidents by attacking them without a rehearsed plan."

No plan survives contact with the enemy.

I've successfully rehearsed DR plans for the systems I was responsible for. I doubt very much they'd have worked in an emergency, not least because I had no idea how the DR centre was to be linked in to the recovery plan of the rest of the businesses. In fact didn't know what the rest of the businesses' plans were or even if they existed. As tot he latter I had suspicions.

How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

Re: Or ...

There are implementations in a number of languages so you don' really need EMACS.

Re: ... and ...

Yes, it reminded me of the fabled recipe for jugged hare: "First catch your hare..."

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

"Lesson learned."

Not really. The lesson that should have been learned was to set up a helldesk email address.

The server was pining for the fjords.

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

Re: The owner has two Ferraris. They have that kind of money

"When I see somebody in a Ferrari I always feel kinda sorry for them."

When I saw somebody in a Ferrari I used to feel pleased for my cousin-in-law. He used to service them.

He was also racing mechanic for a local farmer (related to a a cousin-in-law on the other side of the family, as it happens) who raced a vintage car. For a road car he had Lancias. When the V6 Dino came out he bought one of those instead. Callied in to visit one of his mates and got "Yer do, Cec. I hear tha's bought half a Ferrari."

Re: Aaron?

You win the internet.

Fresh version of Windows user-friendly Zorin OS arrives to tempt the Linux-wary

Re: Coincidence...

"NirSoft which hosts small useful Unix-like utilities (do one thing and do it well) for Windows"

Perhaps they'll even have to run them from the command line.