Posts by Doctor Syntax

Microsoft yanks Windows 11 preview update after install failures

Progress. It looks as if they're starting to take notice of the alpha testers before rolling it out to beta.

Google is to journalism what Vikings were to monks. Now their man will run the BBC

It's possible that, like many of us, he's spent years thinking "WTF is the Beeb coming to?"

Yes, I'd like to have seen the appointment of someone with a good background as a well-regarded hands-on programme maker who went on to become a well-regarded hands-off programme maker, giving others their heads with good projects. But this is the Beeb today's broadcasting; where do you find anyone like that? I strongly suspect that anyone from within the organisation would just favour their own little corner of it.

As to the headline - after they & Alfred fought each other to a standstill the Vikings settled down to run the Danelaw, rather democratically, and provide that wisest of rulers, Canute. It was presented as a victory for Alfred, not because it's the victors who write history but because it's the literate.

Re: And then we wonder why things are going so badly

Forget foxes and hens. The main quality needed here is cat-herding.

The first thing vibe coding builds is confidence it will help you succeed

Re: AI bro's that can't code and have replaced crypto bro's as the most irritating twats at parties.

They can't function, they just wave.

In the spirit of Grouco

Downvoted if only for going to parties which are likely to include tachbros or AIbros - or implying you do if you don't.

All the siver bullets.

"I have ... experimented with multiple waves of software specification processes from traditional functional specification, through behavior and test-driven design."

Oops,make that 3 decades. Doesn't time fly?

"My prototypes all worked because they were an isolated scenarios"

A good developer will want an overview of the entire requirement so that they can see how everything fits together.

My first foray into the world of commercial development I was asked to do an order and stock control system. It was about 2 weeks to go-live when it was revealed that the sales price for kits wasn't the sum of the components but components was how they wanted the parts stored. The resulting recursive kludge worked and stuck around for a long time - for all I know it may still be buried in the code I last saw a couple of decades ago but not obsolete. Then they wanted an invoicing system on top of it to feed the existing accounts package. If they'd said all that first time round it would have been easier.

It was like being asked to design a ball-bearing and later being asked to balance a house on top of it.

Only with an overview will you be able to get an idea of the data structures and build the rest of the design round those. Scenarios and user stories are what you use to implement a design as something useable. They are not the design.

Security contractor blew the whistle on support crew's viral indifference

Re: Lazy by design.

Not good for those on the other end of the tickets. It sounds like something that should have been escalated and not put back into a queue where thye'd probably be continued to be ignored - or a t best put in front of a more tickets which had probably been ignored from earlier in the week.

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

Re: Amstrad 1512

"we are a marketing organization"

That explained a lot. I always looked at Amstrad kit as having just enough components to look like a product but just not enough to actually be a product, or at least not one I'd want to buy.

Re: Heat Sinking

"A paper temperature thermostat "

Chart recorder?

Factory control room near Naples> There was a chart recorder at the top of a rack. By normal English standards nobody was tall but for some reason the shortest of them had the job of jumping up and down to read it.

Re: At my place of work

Back in the day the Home Office had a Forensic Sience research lab on the site of a nuclear research site - for all I know they still do. I only visited it a few times which was more than enough. There was accommodation on-site and I was told some of the nuclear staff lived there permanently and that some of them were quite odd.

I did wonder if that applied to some of the FS side as well:

"You''re flying back to Belfast tonight? Could you take these [QA] samples back with you?"

Solutions of explosives.

Re: At my place of work

An "I'm an engineer. I use tools." engineer.

Re: Back in the late 90s/early 2000s

"took the speaker out of her computer"

The more subtle one is to find a way to short out the speaker. If it's connected by some sort of twin cable a pin does nicely - just clip it to length so nothing obvious shows.

That's the way to burn them in.

Bees and hummingbirds aren't just buzzing – they're sipping trace booze

Wasps from rival nests have nothing at all to learn about tribalism, not even from football hooligans.

Re: Bees

Have you tried hand pollinating the few flowers you do have?

UK government admits Capita pension portal was crapita at launch

Interesting. The projects I worked on as a sub-sub-contractor were in the end run as back-office by them - I dodn't even realise they did that as the project development got all the (bad) publicity. The only one where I had a meeting with them surprised me at how much everything was contracted out - including the project manager's role. The last might explain why one (or in my experience two) project(s) went well while others - shall we say not so well.

One thing that did strike me was that their core S/W development work was subcontracted to an Indian S/W house. My meeting, in fact, was due to my piggy-backing onto a trip by a couple of my client's people to a project meeting so that I could explain to their developer the use of entities in XML and why they couldn't just put a name like O'Connor into the middle of a string in an element. It was something that had to be repeated several times over the course of that and particularly the next contract as, presumably, a new, recently graduated, developer was rotated in on a 6 month visa and removed bits of code he didn't understand. (This was a time when XML was new and trendy. Why hadn't they covered it. And why didn't they run a check for well-formedness if not for validly on all the data they sent out?)

This may be another reason why projects go wrong - their S/W is not only developed by teams of recent graduates but the team finishing it might not even be the team that started it. Also, if their code goes straight to the web-server instead of to a subcontractor, it isn't going to get sanity checks by somebody other than the end user.

Pension fund? What pension fund? It's a Ponzi scheme. Like State Pension, it's paid out of taxation.

Re: Performs as Expected

I worked as a sub-sub-contractor on a couple of Capita contracts. I've no insight into how the costs matched projections but our element was delivered on time as, I think, were the contracts as a whole. OTOH sometime afterwards I should have received one of the documents we printed for one of them and it never arrived.

Re: Crapita has a crysal ball apparently

It certainly has balls. Less sure bout the crystal bit.

"in conjunction with the Cabinet Office, it had agreed to split the functionality between December 1 and the end of March before go-live"

When exactly did this agreement happen? November 30th? 2 minutes before go-live?

Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow

Re: Here's where IT "pros" fall over yet again...

Liam, I think we come from different places. Bolting NUCs on the back if monitors is fine although in that case maybe you should have considered all-in-ones (why flog the customer a replacement NUC when you can flog them a replacement monitor at the same time;). Back in the day I was putting together lab kit where being a single integrated box was vastly preferable so that the specialised stuff such as the ADC was inside, plugged into the motherboard. You don't get that with an NUC. Later,I was working in in a situation where big industrial printers were hung onto the PC with SCSI. I suppose the SCSI could be replaced with USB or whatever today but you're still going to want something that can live in a factory environment (IIRC the SCSI was pretty substantial - I think it might have been built as armoured cable just to help it survive).

Re: Expansion cards

I stand corrected. Never used one myself. IIRC the first hard drive I used was 14" (apart from the one in the ICL mainframe that had a building all of its own).

Re: Extrapolation

"Their GPUs are used in datacentres to provide graphics capabilities for virtual desktops. "

I'd be surprised if it's all strung together with Thunderbolt cables.

"it's the freedom to locate and orient your specialist harware"

Actually, it's not. It doesn't include the freedom to locate the specialist hardware in a single box, securely plugged into the processor in a unit that can be tested in a workshop, picked up whole and positioned in a production environment sll ready to go without having to be reassembled and retested. Anybody needing that is going to tell you that your separate boxes are an unacceptable mess of cables and they're certainly not going to buy it.

50 years or so down the road and we're being offered something that looks like a hobbyist solution as the future.

A TV signal tends to be available where the TV is, or vice versa, which amounts to 2 places in the house,, each with a TV there. The solution is likely to be a rat's of cables pushed behind some item of furniture, not good for reliability and not good for working on.

This approach to system-building is a lash-up. It doesn't look as if it's been properly engineered and possibly the best solution would be ot grab an old VCR case or the like and hide it all in there.

Old MythTV boz:

1s Mini-ITX case, board, disk drive and optical drive containing a Huppauge tuner card. The tuner card has 2 tuners, each able to extract several digital channels from a single mux so that it can record half a dozen programmes at once provided they're on a couple of muxes.

1x Powerbrick (powerbriks don't have fans to using a motherboard that takes external power means I don't have the noise of a fan and the box is lower profile).

New MythTV system when I get round to finally putting it together (or it might be some other S/W).

1x Pi in its box

1x Powerbrick for the Pi

1x Silicondust tuner box containing 4 tunsers. AFAICS although each tuner can be on a different mux, so recording from 4 muxes at once, only one channel per tuner so no more than 4 channels at once.

1x Silicondust power brick

1x Netowrk hub - the Silicondust tuner is networked, not USB connected

1x Powerbrick for network hub - can I work out which is for the hub and which for the tuner as they both has the same size plug but different volteges

1x External drive for the Pi

Verdict: old - neat, new- a visual mess

Re: Here's where IT "pros" fall over yet again...

We have the contrary situation here among people who are apparently IT pros. They think it's acceptable to put together a system with a lot of little boxes strung together with leads. It isn't going to play well controlling industrial machinery or a medical scanner, or the like.

Re: Expansion cards

A thin laptop disk? These were full 5¾" jobs. The thickness of the drive mean that the adjacent slot was blocked. Looking back they may seem like an oddity but they were real. Look up old copies of Byte on archive.org &you'll find the adverts. This was before HP/UX and maybe before SCSI.

I'm glad I have sacks of old PCWs and Bytes around the place - all this sort of thing is part of our history and all too easily forgotten.

So in a production environment you expect to have a pile of little boxes on the bench, with a tangle of leads between them as opposed to a single box which keeps everything together and doesn't have so many leads to come adrift? It's not a great recipe for reliability.

When does the Hauppauge TV tuner get integrated? Or the ADC? Or the stepper motor controller?

Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field

Re: depending on whether it is allowed

11th of September 1752

"they are just trying to get ahead on what the law says they will have to do"

Which law? Those already passed, those in the legislatures or those yet to come? (Echoes of Scrooge's Christmases are not inappropriate.) In what jurisdictions? Why should our OSes be controlled by the political machinations of what looks increasingly like a failed state?

"Australia and the UK already have them"

I don't know about Oz. The UK law applies to web sites not OSes so on the one hand it's a smaller scope but on the other it calls for verification so is far, far more intrusive. Be careful what you wish for - you might get it.

Re: New Mexico Jury Gives Meta $375M Reasons To Protect Children

I have some news that may surprise you. There are places that are not in the US and many of us live in them. Even more surprising: blue and red don't necessarily have the same connotations here. We see it as just ill-informed politicians' crap, and not even the usual category of ill-informed US politicians' crap.

Shirley I think we should call the embassy

SB; That won't be necessary at this stage, madam.

Shirley: Maybe we should phone before there is another stage.

From memory, Our man in Camelot Anthony Price.

It is a field

Let's put that in with just a slight amendment to "a"

"It is just one field"

Does that clarify why "just" is doing heavy lifting? If it's puzzling you try adding the words "as yet" and possibly look up the term "Scope creep".

If makes you any happier you could deal with a radiocarbon age >= 1950 years BP (unless they've redifined it since my time).

Re: this is what I don't get

"That requires the requesting code to be familiar with the laws of every situation in every country."

Those promoting the laws will tell you that it only needs to act in their country which shouldn't be anything more than a minor problem. i doubt some of them could find another country on a map if it had a saucer-sized pin stuck in it.

Re: Not changeable? Except by root?

Is this a case of the systemd folk adding something to "just shut up people?" or is it their corporate influence showing?

Yes.

Re: It is *not* required

"Over 18" is also personal data.

Re: Limited practical utility

Yup. The smart kid llearns how to make a bootable stick. The entrepreneurial kid works out he can flog them. And so we have the next generation of Musks, Zucks etc.

Re: Yup....This root user was born on 1-Jan-1906!!!!

And no doubt you'll argue against California when they decide it has to be toughened up. It'll be too late then.

Re: Yup....This root user was born on 1-Jan-1906!!!!

"Perhaps the smoking ban for under 16s or alcohol ban for under 18s should be lifted because someone's big brother can buy them instead?"

We have the situation that if I put a packet of paracetamol in my shopping in some cases the checkout operator has to call someone to confirm that I (in my 80s) am old enough.

Staff too scared of the AI axe to pick it up, Forrester finds

Re: mandated AI

Maybe it is. Maybe it wrote the policies.

It's a good fit. There's an old saying that a lawyer who represents themselves has a fool for a client. So does an LLM givinglegal advice.

AI companies lick their chops as FCC proposes forcing call center onshoring

Re: Yechhh

If, by East Asia, you mean India my expectation would be shambles.

Re: The only thing worse than an offshore call centre is a chatbot. And that is what we will get.

The other week I phoned the car dealer to book a service. I got through to a speech activated chatbot which was about as bad as might be expected. I got a text confirmation. Afterwards I realised I'd chosen a bad day and rung again and the call was answered by a human. The chatbot's booking wasn't on the system.

Perhaps this is explained by the fact that the dealership had been taken over by another. The lot who took over was, unfortunately, one I'd decided never to deal with again - once was enough. I'm sure they consider themselves very progressive which means aggressive sales spam. If I'd known that was on the cards I'd not even have bought that make of car.

"Waitrose offer a better service proposition, but at a higher average price, that gains them 4-5% market share"

To get market share it helps to have shops. Their store locator returns a blank screen on my preferred browser with javascript enabled by default - not exactly a good way to gain customers. The nearest one is at a motorway service station, far enough away already, and the rest miles further than that. I wonder why they have a poor market share.

BOFH: Are you ready to raise our expense account limits now?

"Why does X need to be repaired?"

"It's about to be broken."

"How?"

I'm going to beat you over the head with it."