Posts by Doctor Syntax

FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

Re: Strangely enough ...

And when you need a new process you just exec one instead of firing up a whole new kernel to run it. Seriously, if I follow the description correctly this is what's happening: job needs a new process so spend 25ms firing up a new server, new server then execs the required process and somewhere along the line the new process server has also to work out how to connect to the process server that needed it. Marketing then calls it "serverless computing". "Yes, Minister" series one, episode one had a name for that: "getting rid of the difficult bit in the title".

NHS watchdog expresses vendor lock-in concerns over Federated Data Platform deal

I'm afraid that the Dunning-Kruger wing of the party thinks it should be above the law. This is very dangerous and the sooner it finds itself unelectable the better. I feel sorry for One Nation Tories.

"That deal was subject to the threat of judicial review"

It's increasingly clear that it needed to be more than a threat.

More UK cops' names and photos exposed in supplier breach

Re: "Security measures have been taken by the MPS as a result of this report," the statement said

Lessons should be learned from mistakes but it's best if you can learn them from other people's mistakes.

Wordpress sells 100-year domain, hosting plan for $38K

Re: Do you remember?

Did they specify who or what's lifetime? Obviously the lifetime of the servers.

"The outfit's CMS is currently built on 28-year-old PHP, rated the seventh-most-used language on GitHub in 2022 – down from third place in 2014. Wordpress also employs the open source MySQL relational database, which is controlled by 46-year-old Oracle."

it's not so much the technology becoming obsolete that I'd challenge - after all a site is just data and that can be migrated. If I were splashing out that money I'd want to see what arrangements they had for putting money into a fund that could pay a hundred years' of hosting costs. But then I don't suppose those who are going to go for this are the sort of people who think about enquiring as to the arrangements to pay for a hundred years of hosting.

Re: The sound of whalesong and the smell of incense are strong with this one

"Whether it's giving a newborn the special gift"

The Barnum principle - there's one born every minute - seems to have reached marketing in a slightly distorted form.

It's certainly a new twist on unlimited storare, bandwidth etc.

Aerial cable tangles are still being strung up, but carriers are slowly burying the problem

"above ground cables will face more outages"

I'm not sure. We have about 2-300 metres underground to the sub-station. In about 22 years our connection to the cable in the road failed, then the neutral developed a resistance of several ohms, dimming the lights when the kettle, etc, was switched on and a short in the cable damaged the adjacent gas main (17 hours for the double repair). Our neighbours subsequently suffered a failed connection at the same point that we did and most recently the road was closed for a couple of days for emergency repairs 2-300 mtered on the other side of the substation.

OTOH there's an overhead connection from the pole opposite our house that's supposed to just supply street lights further along the road but was and possibly still is also supplying houses on overhead lines because their regular supply was/is faulty. A tree branch shorted that one out in a gale a year or two ago. (I must try to take down that tree but with the wires so near it's not easy.)

Polishing off a printer with a flourish revealed not to be best practice

Re: Stories from Grandad

I suppose you'd switched it off at the mains so he'd lean over to see why it wasn't working.

It was a shining example of how not to add a sparkling finish to a job.

Re: Stories from Grandad

It's stories from the future that need a time machine.

Whiffy malware stinks after tracking location via Wi-FI

"Ransomware actors don't like cyber insurance, becuase if their target has a policy it can cover the cost of remediation, therefeore reducing the incneitve to pay a ransom."

OTOH the victim may be better placed to pay if they can claim on insurance. I'm not sure this is a carefully worked out approach.

Bodhi Linux 7 brings Enlightenment to Ubuntu

Re: Tell me that Linux is never going to be a mainsteam option without telling me....etc.

"but the difference is that on Windows, people already know what to look for"

Do they? Or is it that Windows is now a vehicle for selling software much of which comes as standard with Linux?

If a Windows user wants, say a PDF editor and it's not something for which MS have included an advert do they know by osmosis what a suitable Windows PDF editor is or do they turn to their favourite web search?

OTOH I wish KDE would take a look at all the queries about making Discover work. It needs to be moved from the only just works* to the Just Works category.

* Allegedly. I've never seen it work at all.

Profits just keep rolling in at T-Mobile US. So only thing to do is axe 5,000 workers

Re: Old El Reg quote fits here

You place too much confidence in the efficiency of HR.

Re: The ManSpeak / PR Department Seems To Be Fully Staffed

What it comes down to is having intelligent and talented managers and there aren't enough of those to go round. The vacuum is filled with MBAs.

"retaining customers had become more expensive of late"

This smacks of management by ChatGPT

Manglement: Retaining customers is costing too much. What should we do?

ChatGPT: Save money by not retaining customers.

Manglement: How do we do that?

ChatGPT: Cut staff to provide a worse service, then the customers will go away.

US Republican party's spam filter lawsuit against Google dimissed

Re: Simple

The notion of free speech on the internet conveniently forgets that somebody has to pay for the bandwidth. The spammers' free speech arrives at the cost of my ISP subscription.

Re: More performative bullshit

Isn't that the very definition of "anti-American" to support the overthrow of the American governmental system?

I'm not sure. Having done it once it seems to be regarded as the epitome of being American. Hence also the right to get shot bear arms.

Re: No bias found, but…

I suppose if the spam gets filtered into oblivion it might actually work to their advantage. The intended recipients don't see it and get pissed off by it and the senders. Because that's the likeliest outcome of spamming.

Simple

You send spam, you go to the spam folder. What else did you expect?

Politicians, advertisers and marketroids all share the same mentality: they believe the entire world is waiting to revel in their next fart, brain or otherwise, and anything that gets in the way must just be wrong, wrong, wrong.

Hope for nerds! ChatGPT's still a below-average math student

"the largest performance gap between ChatGPT and students was for math-related questions, followed by trick questions"

So for courses other than mathematics, throw in a few trick questions.

Dropbox limits ‘all the storage you need’ unlimited plan, blames abusive users

Re: the company saw more of this abusive behavior

It's probably more a case of marketing overruling engineering and advertising unlimited service despite being told they can't provide it.

Europe's tough new rules for Big Tech start today. Is anyone ready?

Given the whining this produced from big tech ISTM that they are indeed expecting expert scrutiny.

Zoom CEO reportedly tells staff: Workers can't build trust or collaborate... on Zoom

Re: I suggest the author is missing the point

Would he be prepare to put his the company's money where his mouth is? Pay commuting time as company time, pay commuting costs and pay for relocation for those who have moved out of commuting range?

Their problem. They have a choice of two problems to solve: that one and getting no rent.

"Unfortunately it would also mean that the owners of these buildings would have to invest into remodelling for residential use, only to see a lot less income (it might even be below of what they can get from tax write-offs), and then there often also are zoning laws which prohibit using commercial real estate for residential purposes."

The income from residential would still be more than the zero from an empty property. Tax write-offs only become worth while it you have income on which you're paying tax.

The local authorities are already complaining that lack of people going in to work means the small businesses which used to provide services for those people are closing down, they're losing the income from those property taxes and the whole place is starting to look run down. If they're against re-zoning they need to start joining the dots.

Re: Context is everything

"the next job required a 15 minute walk and two changes (the middle bus being a city-to-city express)"

I once looked at the timings for a 3 stage commute like that. It meant leaving home at about 6:25 am to get to the client site a tad after 9:00 am. The first step took 10 minutes longer than it used to do because the bus has been re-routed to amalgamate 2 routes. There was then a 40 minute wait to change buses. The other change had a 4 minute gap, easily eroded by the vagaries of an over-crowded motorway and weather conditions delaying the "express". Miss that 3rd bus and it was another 15 minute delay. The direct route was about 25 miles, 40 - 45min by car. I never got round to working out how long the return would have taken.

Re: Context is everything

sod the rest of the world or anyone who actually produces something tangible ie the stuff <s?without which there would be no need for IT at all</s> which, without IT wouldn't be produced at all.

FTFY

I used to reckon that I had a better grasp than at least some of the management about the implications of their ideas on various parts of the business because IT was threaded through multiple departments. e.g. Marketing want to sell direct rather than through distributors - have they told accounts who'll have to handle more and smaller payments and looked at the implications for staffing and costs?

I suppose it depends on your nationality.

Re: Context is everything

with a couple of "office" days a week, and employees encouraged to be in the office more often than not on those days.

The employees have discovered that work without commuting is possible. They're now going to regard those office days as punishment. It would be interesting if those in favour of the office would tell us how long their commute is and what the conditions are like. I've long believed that those who think public transport is a good way to commute live close to a bus or train route that also passes close to their place of work with no need to change.

"do something profitable with the money instead"

Or give it back to the investors if there isn't anything more profitable on the horizon.

Feel free to join it.

Why do I read this and keep thinking "Ratner"?

Intel seems to think Wi-Fi 7 is too cool for old-school Windows 10

Remind me - wasn't Windows 10 supposed to be the last version ever and from then on it would be updates all the way?

Neighbors angry as another North Korean 'satellite' launch attempt fails

Siege mentality.

Two teens were among those behind the Lapsus$ cyber-crime spree, jury finds

Re: Hold on...

Didn't the reports at the time say that their MO was social engineering. If that was the case then it must show an abbility to understand other people's minds in a way which doesn't fit with what I understand autism to be. I suppose that now I've written that somebody will be along to explain that autism is something else entirely but it's looking as if it's whatever the defence lawyers want it to be.

Xebian is the Marie Kondo of Linux distros – it's here to declutter

Re: defaults to a very simple disk layout

A manual option, yes. But if we assume the uninformed first time user then it would be better to make it the default. This isn't a Windows install - Linux can and should do better.

Once is enough. In fact there's a good argument that once is more than enough.

Re: minimal partitioning

There's no reason to only have two partitions nor to have a home partition as an alternative to swap. I would use considerably more but /home in addition to root and swap would be a better default. Personally I'd add partitions for /opt and /usr/local. Depending on what it was to be used for I might also add one for /srv.

"It defaults to a very simple disk layout with a root partition and a swap partition and nothing else."

Why do they all do this? A separate Home partition should really be included as a default. With that you can wipe the rest,install something else and not lose your data. OK, you could backup home before wiping and restore afterwards - right up until that bowel loosening moment when you realise you've been a tad over-anxious to get on with the install.

Why these cloud-connected 3D printers started making junk all by themselves

Re: Cloud connected? FFS why?

"Because print jobs can take a long, long time to complete and it can be useful to monitor them from wherever you are and, yes, even schedule a new print job: you have an idea, start a small job there and then, piece is ready to use when you get back that evening."

That's the utility. You have to consider the cost of providing that. The cost is the risk that the increased complexity brings. Anything from a screw up like this via malware being introduced to the printer through that carefully crafted hole in the firewall that allows the printer to become a staging post to attack the rest of your network* to Bambu going TITSUP** and no more printing.

* Did you remmber to put the printer on its own VLAN?

** Terminal Inability To Service Users' Printers

Re: Sounds like this cloud thing was programmed as if it was a local server

But this wasn't your local HP printer, it was a Bambu printer controlled by the cloud and that seems to be where the error was. You're correct about rubbish being rubbish but the more complex you make things by going outside the local setup the more things are available to go wrong. If there wasn't a solid reason for it to be done this way then it looks as if an unnecessary risk was introduced.

Rocky Linux backer CIQ rejects lawsuit's claims it was founded on stolen IP

Re: How is this possible ?

On the whole I agree but there's a nagging doubt as to who signed on behalf of Sylabs.

China cooks covert chips, recruits global geeks to dodge US restrictions

Re: Unexpected consequence ?

Unexpected? Who didn't see this coming? Other than successive US governments.

Blazar Token creator accused of using investor funds for renovating bathroom

Gamekeeper turned poacher.

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

Re: MS asked the EU to standardize

Proprietary? Shame on you sir. Microsoft would have you know it's an open standard, the best openness money can buy.

I regard email as a transmission method to deliver mail ultimately to my own computer, not somebody else's.

And ain't we all a lot of miseryguts here!

Re: long-form writers...

Ah, yes. Should have said I use a Lazarus/Pascal program to process the data first. I copy a paragraph's worth of text from Okular, paste it in, the program reassembles it and a quick inspection lets me spot and correct a few typos at that stage.