Posts by Doctor Syntax

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

"But the flipside is that it means systemd will gradually encroach on even more of your operating system."

BSD gets closer.

After fears that Europe's space scope was toast, its first images look mighty fine

The gaffer tape didn't stick properly.

Virgin Media O2 offers plug-in 5G network in a box

"a prototype Raspberry Pi-based private 5G network-in-a-box"

Presumably that will be within carry-on limits. I'm sure there will be use cases where that's a deciding factor.

MIT boffins build battery alternative out of cement, carbon black, water

What voltage are they using? The abstract which is all I can see at PNAS doesn't say? The comparison of volume seems to be with 12V batteries but the article doesn't say that this is the voltage used. 12V would be innocuous, 1.2kV less so.

If you sequester some of the carbon from the CO2 emitted during production you could use it as the dopant. It's not going to amount to much, however.

But what do they mean by cement? My understanding of cement is Portland cement - the calcined mix of clay and lime. Mortar - the stuff that holds the bricks together contains mostly of sand with some cement. Concrete, the stuff your foundation are made of, consists mostly of aggregate, sand and cement. The amount of cement is an order of magnitude less than the volume of the foundations.

MIT bods offer PhotoGuard gadget to thwart AI deepfakes

Re: MIT Bods?

"Oh, and how long will it be before the artificial stupidity folk find a way of defeating this?"

No doubt it's the beginning of an arms race.

Arc: A radical fresh take on the web browser

There seem to have been very recent changes. Waterfox has escaped from System 1. Basilisk has separated from Palemoon. BinaryOutcast seems to be busy rebuilding the website - it appears to have gone through some sort of trauma; I don't know if the browser has been discontinued and only Interlink is surviving. There also seems to be a new Thunderbird fork, Epyrus on the go related to all this.

The issue for me, and, presumably for many, is that after Mozilla made their changes (TBH I never really followed their Quantum, Australis or whatever it was and all that other branding stuff) they could no longer follow existing desktop theming and just looked as if they didn't belong - not as ugly as GTK4 but certainly not as intuitive to use. The marketing and crayon departments are in charge - both at the browser vendors and the websites - and they want New, New, New whilst a good user interface needs, the opposite: clarity resulting from consistency and familiarity (which is consistency with the past).

Re: Astronomy picture of the day website

Your Netscape Navigator lives on as Seamonkey.

"For a while, it remained possible in the Waterfox Classic fork of pre-Quantum Firefox, but today, sadly, that browser is barely usable anymore."

What about Palemoon and/or Basilisk?

Actually an article on the Mozilla spin-offs would be welcome. I've read the long article on the Palemoon site and left with the impression that it's the XUL Liberation Front vs the Liberation Front for XUL or something along those lines. Throw in Epyrus & the Matt Tobin projects for good measure.

What would sustainable security even look like?

Re: Nobody is legally responsible, oops

The accountability needs to be at the level where the decisions are made, not at sysadmin level.

"greenhouse gases are a byproduct of an economy wedded to cheap energy in one case, and in the other single points of failure in an industry wedded to huge datasets in under-engineered systems"

In the first case you have to remember that as a result of allegedly environmentally based Luddism use of nuclear was minimised for decades. In the other we have the opposite of Luddism - a rush to either transfer data out of the data centre to somebody else's computer somewhere on the internet or to keep it in-house but insufficiently separated from the internet.

Fed-up Torvalds suggests disabling AMD’s 'stupid' performance-killing fTPM RNG

So it's not always the DNS. Sometimes it's the TPM (whenever it isn't the UPS of course).

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

Re: Legacy systems

OTOH https://ibms360.co.uk/ hasn't been updated for over a year.

Re: Auto-correcting antenna aiming! Amazing!

It depends on how wide the beam is.

Re: Off topic

Their namesakes are still going - point of the article.

Re: Variation

A whole can? Not a single can cut in half?

Re: Off topic

"Local terminals were attached to the computer using RS-232 running at 9600bps."

You were spoiled with a glass tty. If your terminal was a real teletype it communicated at max 10 characters per second, local or not.

Kids today...

LLMs appear to reason by analogy, a cornerstone of human thinking

Re: Another reason LLMs give wrong answers

Mirrors do not reverse left and right. They reverse back and front.

Re: Not clear cut

Thanks, a link to a very useful article I may need to read it again and follow up the references. The lest bit - on whether models had developed the ability to reason and that it might not be possible to decide left me wondering about the reasoning of those doing the tests. Did none of them additionally ask the model to explain how it reached its conclusions?

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

Re: Ravioli Code

I'm glad you liked the twist.

Sounds like you produced what I call "ravioli code".

If your analogy is correct there would be just the same amount of code there, just packaged differently. The main object of the refactoring was to reduce the LoC and hence the amount of memory consumed at run-time.

It sounds as if you were on the north coast. On the south coast there was no moment.

I get the impression that some people have been brainwashed by the low resolution of digital cameras and don't realise what photography can actually do with a large format. The information in a large negative would be hard to match in digital although Leica did,as I recall, try setting what was essentially a scanner mechanism on the focal plane of a large format camera. The time needed to set up a shot on a large format means that the result reflects a degree of thought denied to that of a point and click.

"the only way to test the output of a change is to actually deploy it in production."

One program in the system I looked after had been written by a programmer who, thankfully, had left long ago. It always annoyed me because of her odd programming style. It largely consisted of much the same code repeated multiple times. It was ripe for refactoring as we say now but maybe not at the time.

Late one afternoon I decided to tackle it.

One block of code was repeated several times. Copy that into a function and replace all the repetitions with a function call. Very straightforward. This must have shrunk the LoC to about half.

The remainder of the repetition consisted of two similar but not quite identical blocks of code each repeated several times. Not quite so straightforward. Copy one version into a new function adding a switch parameter then add the different sections of the version using the switch parameter to decide which t call.

Replace the repetitions with function calls taking care to use the correct value of the switch.

We now have a much simpler program, a fraction of its original size. It ought to be easier to understand what it's supposed to do which was one of the objectives of the change. But the remainder is still a bit of a tangled mess. Sorting through it to work out just what data would be need to test all the alternative paths would still take ages.

Well it was really all very much a mechanical replacement - the same code is being run, just from one of the two new functions instead of inline. Of course it must still work exactly the same as before.

It was now early evening. Why not put it live?

So I put it live.

Of course it worked exactly the same as before - what did you expect?

" stop bath, rinse, leave them to dry"

No fixer?

AWS: IPv4 addresses cost too much, so you’re going to pay

"Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr"

Surely a Chief Evangelist should be called Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.

BT hires chartered management accountant and telco veteran as next CEO

"Just like Jansen, Kirkby inherits a massive cost-cutting programme that will see up to 55,000 BT jobs wiped by out by 2030."

I think the target is to reduce staff to board, C suite, an outsourcing contract manager, their PAs and receptionist, a tea-lady an extensive catering staff and a cleaner.

Google's next big idea for browser security looks like another freedom grab to some

"make themselves more ad revenue by blocking bots"

If they can get paid for "showing" an ad to a bot why would they care? They're selling advertising, not the goods being advertised.

Re: Attestation

The rest of the advertising industry are for ever complaining about Google having a monopoly. When they see Google shooting themselves in the foot they'll be quick to remind sites there are alternatives.

You need a better package manager.

'Weird numerological coincidence' found during work on Linux kernel 6.5

Re: The what?

And responses from Twitter X in actual words.

Millions of people's data stolen because web devs forget to check access perms

Re: Some companies just offer other people's data without even asking

"Tried reporting the issue to them on several occasions but never got a response."

All too common. Their system is perfect, anything else must be your or your client's problem and that can't be anything to do with them.

Re: Web devs forget to check access perms :o

Web applications are missing a lot of the "systemness" we expect from traditional computing environments

It depends on what you consider a traditional computing environment. In my working world that was a multi-user database system. If there were access levels for different categories of user it may well have been down to the application designer to build in safeguards.

If Buildings Maintenance was to be prevented from seeing tenant financial data that might be an administrative matter to ensure that Buildings Maintenance didn't have access to the screens for financial data. If, on the other hand, Crawly Buildings Maintenance shouldn't see data on Coventry buildings and vice versa but Estates Management could see data for both then it would have to be handled by something a bit more complex in the application itself.

What web applications are missing is a lot of statefulness and shoving responsibility for that onto the client.

Re: Web devs forget to check access perms :o

"This is critical for anything IoT related..."

All true but this isn't an IoT related article. A specific example given is Teams.

Creator of the Unix Sysadmin Song explains he just wanted to liven up a textbook

I miss elm along with the days when you happily hang a dial-in modem off the back of a server. I had all the overnight jobs email status reports to me and could then log in from off-site to read them with a Nokia Communicator.

Florida man accused of hoarding America's secrets faces fresh charges

"An IT director unfamiliar with basic computer operation? Say it ain't so!"

Why should it be so?

IT directors fall into 3 categories:

- Those who have a purely administrative background - maybe a degree in music or whatever - rather than IT.

- Those who have operational IT experience but with obsolete systems.

- Those with operational experience of current systems.

It's not easy to say which category is the most dangerous.

Re: Actually probably a good call....

Add the date and time to your note - both the date and time of the request and of the note.

Best to have a procedure in place that instructions have to be written "for the log" so that asking for written instructions for something dodgy can't become confrontational quite so easily.

Re: Actually probably a good call....

"I guess Trump has a gift for recognizing corruptibility"

His minions are probably a self-selecting crowd, slow to disabuse themselves of the reality of what's in front of them. They were probably last of their age group to realise there was no Santa Clause.

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

Being above the law doesn't mean not being convicted regardless, it means not being above challenge in the courts, inluding the criminal courts if appropriate.

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

Claws-up.

"jack-of-all-trades"

Don't you think that's pitching the skill levels a bit high? What sort of job could he be set to in the US work-for-your-keep prison system?

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

Re: 100m goes a long way

It seems an effective way of getting a reputation which will lose business in the long run.

With rented houses comes the little matter of leaving the garden in good order. A group of us had rented a house which was actually the property of the parents of another student* who had gone abroad for a year. One of the students was a farmer's son so at the rental he just got one of his father's farm workers sent along to sort it out.

* The student was sent down having been discovered depositing the Greek professor's bike in a lecture room. The bike was in two pieces which he'd just separated with a hacksaw. To be fair the Greek department's bikes were an ongoing problem - I don't think the staff had grasped the fact that they were no longer in Oxford.

Re: 100m goes a long way

"that clause seems american"

Which clause?

Re: 100m goes a long way

"I have little time for landlords not being quick to remedy faults."

It's not necessarily landlords. When we were first married we rented a top-floor flat & had problems getting the leaking dormer fixed because we were dealing with agents. They never did fix the major crack where the staircase block was coming away from the house. It wouldn't have been in the owners' interests to let the property deteriorate to that extent but it would put the agents to a certain amount of effort beyond the collection of rent and deducting their fee.

On the record: Apple bags patent for iDevice to play LPs

Oxymoron warning

kpop goodies

Somebody'd get fired if it wasn't.

Re: All together now. "I hear the sound....of distant drums"

Open reel tape. Maybe you're too young.

Re: Sooo....

My first laptop had interchangeable optical and floppy drives. IIRC it also had a second drive bay on a cable so both could be used.

School for semiconductors? Arm tries to address chip talent shortages

OTOH The US is having development of a plant put on hold due to shortage of skilled labour. Not my area but I'd guess the skill shortages include preparation of masks, adjustment of the machines and handling of various nasty chemicals involved. I'm sure others here could add to and correct that list.

One thing you omitted to mention is wafer manufacture. There will be a whole lot of specialist skills involved in that.

These are skills of which there are probably not many holders at any age level. I doubt anyone holding them will be unable to get a job at any age but it's not surprising that that they want to concentrate training on those who are likely to use them for longest.

Infineon to offer recyclable circuit boards that dissolve in water

Re: Springing a leak

And don't splli coffee over the keyboard.