Posts by Doctor Syntax

Energy breakthrough needed to build AGI, says OpenAI boss Altman

This guy seems to have discovered the centre around which the rrest of the universe revolves and it's himself.

Poor communication led to complete lack of communication

Because testing obviously wasn't.

BreachForums admin 'Pompourin' sentenced to 20 years of supervised release

Re: "forbidden to use the internet"

I can only assume that the prosecution had a word with the judge that he's been very useful to them in bringing cases against some of his former users, otherwise it seems inconceivable that he'd get off so lightly, even with guilty pleas. Either that or it was in the "too much likt hard work to bring to trial" box.

Re: "forbidden to use the internet"

So in due course his lawyers will go back to court and apply for a relaxation of the terms.

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

Re: HP Toner

Laserjet 3020 AIO here. The HP badge looks to be more solidly engineered than some of the later models I've seen. It doesn't get much use these days as it's supplemented by a Brother with colour and 2-sided printing. Even so, it would probably have outlasted me.

Re: Security

I'm sure the entire tech media have run stories about printers quite frequently. If anyone in the investment world reads them it probably helps keep the share price up. It's not the tech media you need running such stories, it's the media the general public reads.

Five ripped off IT giant with $7M+ in bogus work expenses, prosecutors claim

Re: Wait, what??

It was the IRS that finally got Al Capone.

Zuckerberg wants to build artificial general intelligence with 350K Nvidia H100 GPUs

Given that these are going to consume stupid amounts of energy we need to set some rules about this:

1. The data centres to run this are to be powered entirely by sustainable energy.

2. This must be generated carbon free. Carbon offsets will not be allowed.

3. The generating capacity must be new, built specifically for this purpose and would not have been built otherwise.. Simply diverting from an existing source will not be allowed.

4. To ensure that 3 is obeyed the data centre must use only 50% of the new capacity with the other 50% supplied to the local grid.

5. Carbon offsets must be used against the CO2 released during construction of the generating capacity.

Russians invade Microsoft exec mail while China jabs at VMware vCenter Server

"Some of them have already been found by the Bad Guys who, it seems, have a very much better record at finding them than do the security firms."

If the good guys get prosecuted and fined for finging and reporting them, then this situation is inevitable.

Fujitsu gets $1B market cap haircut after TV disaster drama airs

In the PO case there has been a case decided in favour of the sub-postmaster. In the PPE case there has been none and it would be legally hazardous to risk making such a programme.

Re: 4% down ?

"Up until now the investors have been assuming that they'd get away with it."

For the current quarter. No need to look beyond that.

Re: Accounting system

There were all sorts of strange things happening including some in the message handling system communicating between the counter and head office so that at the end of a day's trading the accounts didn't balance and the discrepancy was assumed to be the sub-postmaster's fault. Double entry book-keeping doesn't automatically keep you right but it helps to tell you when something's gone wrong and by how much. You still have to work out what went wrong or, if you're the Post Office, jump to an unwarranted conclusion.

Re: If government contracts with Fujitsu

Could you cite the cases where guilty verdicts have been given against the Post Office and a government in this case.

I agree that there could eventually be successful prosecutions brought against the PO and some of its employees in this case at which point you could say they're criminal but I'm struggling to work out what evidence and argument might be used in relation to the governments* in this case. The PO is at arm's length from government.

* Note the plural. There have been several governments, Labour, coalition and Conservative during the period this was running.

Re: If government contracts with Fujitsu

Firstly, at least in the event of a jury trial, the jury is the tribunal of fact. If the criminal rials were held before a jury then the evidence was weighed and believed by 12 members of the general public, people like you and me (unfortunately I'm above jury age now so not exactly like me).

Secondly, in the event of the evidence being one-sided, including the situation that the computer is assumed to be right unless proved otherwise, it would be very difficult for a normal* jury to come to reject it.

Thirdly, if there is expert evidence on both sides the outcome can be very different and you might be surprised at the ability of an experienced judge to evaluate evidence.. This is a long read but if you tackle it you may find it enlightening: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/bates-v-post-office-appendix-1-1.pdf

* I have come across at least one irrational jury.

Re: Justice

The company doesn't get to choose who's charged, let alone who's found guilty.

Re: Fushitesu

Interesting idea.

Situation1.

Contract is going to take 2 years to go live. We expire contracts every year. So half way through development the contract's expired and work stops until review is complete and contract re-let to previous incumbent. In the meantime the contractor reallocates the staff who were working on it to another contract. Contract restarts with new staff until some of the original staff can be reallocated back to it. The re-reallocated staff now have to catch up with what's happened while they were on the other contract which itself has had to cope with the influx of staff and their release.

Situation 2.

Contract is live and is processing work so the client is completely dependent on the contractor. The annual expiry date comes round. Contractor demands a massive hike in price to continue. Expiring the contract when it's in operation simply puts the clients balss in a vice and gives the handle to the contractor.

Re: Fushitesu

Let's try a small thought experiment.

Imagine you, Jonathan Green, were working for Fujitsu from, say the early '90s.

Somewhere about 2009 you hear about this problem with Horizon with which you have had no contact at all.

What do you, personally do next? What are your options?

Re: Let's set things straight

"most of the large IT projects you ever hear about turn out about the same."

And conversely most of the large IT projects you never hear about were on time & budget. Good news is no news.

IT consultant fined for daring to expose shoddy security

Define exploit. On first discovery it wouldn't be possible to know whether the password was a bit of stale code from a test environment as opposed to being live. The only way to determine that is to check that there's what looks like viable data at the end of it. We're not told whether he made a copy of it. We're not told that he used it for gain (other, perhaps, than doing his job and warning his client that their supplier was insecure). I find it difficult to call that exploitation.

From what I read into TFA the first court appears to have taken the reasonable approach and dismissed the case. Having a superior court toss it back at them sounds a lot like double jeopardy which has long been held to be unacceptable in English law. Although there are now exceptions where fresh evidence is available there doesn't seem to be any in this case. Does the prosecution get to appeal verdicts in Germany?

Re: The problem is law is old and tech is new

And regarding Horizon, just read what a judge is capable of understanding, at least is expert witnesses have provided evidence:

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/bates-v-post-office-appendix-1-1.pdf

Fujitsu will not bid for UK.gov business until Post Office inquiry closes

Re: "We welcome Fujitsu's decision to pause bidding"

Paragraph 8c appears to fit the case.

IBM Consulting is done playing around, orders immediate return to office

Re: I thing it is OK

"Being on site has a lower barrier to ask someone for input/help and discussions are more direct."

Maybe I didn't understand what you were getting at but I'd understand "in office", at least in this context, as being at the employer's office but "on site" as at client site. In this context "on site" may be essential depending on the nature of the project. "In office", however, adds nothing positive and very likely plenty that's negative if the work can be done from the worker's choice of location.

As Broadcom nukes VMware's channel, the big winner is set to be Nutanix

"shift customers entirely to subscription licensing"

Did someone mistype "shaft"?

Perfect timing... US Navy throws Boeing $103M to update its sub recon jets

Fitting outside toilets?

I read on the Beeb that Ryanair were sending extra engineers to Boeing to increase inspection of the planes they've ordered. I wondered if having the plane inspected would be an extra charge flying Ryanair

Study: Thousands of businesses just love handing over your info to Facebook

Re: adverts specific to your needs

There are still usable search engines

For some small value of "useable".

"I believe some of the ad slingers have more than enough data to know i am not interested in most of those products they show me ads for"

I doubt it. It's the sort of thing they'll scrupulously not know. If push came to shove they'd need to be able to prove that they never did know such a thing.

The actual targeting is at advertisers. The advertising industry sells adverts to advertisers. If it can make them think they're getting some extra service by showing them all the data they've collected that can be used for "targeting" then they make more money.

Asia beat US, EU in chip building because the West didn't invest, Intel CEO claims

Re: No choice

But all this outsourcing is the result of the capitalist system of striving for ever increasing short-term profits.

FTFY

"the chip giant was facing pressure from investors to transition more of its production portfolio to outsourced foundries like TSMC."

I think that identifies the guilty parties - activist investors

Could immutability be a Leap too far for openSUSE users?

Re: Would be nice for Windows

What WINE-like emulation layer. It'll be a thin client to connect to your Windows 365 running in a Microsoft data centre somewhere.

Re: re: A read-only root file system makes the OS much more resilient against disk corruption,

"image-based update distribution works"

Ah, yes. I remember it well. HP-UX. We got a new coaster CD every 6 months and had to find downtime to re-install. I don't see that as being in any way a better way to update.

There was a companion Informix CD to re-install at the same time and as we had a CD set for each box we really did end up using them as coasters to the consternation of a user who came to visit me at my desk.

"the risk of upsetting tens to maybe hundreds of thousands of free users of its free distros is worth the possible benefit of making a considerably more robust OS which it can _sell_ to its big corporate clients?"

There are a lot of free distros out there. If their users didn't think Suse's were robust enough they'd jump ship. If they're the ones who make the decisions, or at least the recommendations, for the big corporate purchases and Suse alienates them they're not going to be on Suse's side when those purchasing decisions are made.

Adding what may well be perceived as a lot of weird, and therefore potentially flaky, stuff to something which is already perceived as good enough, is going to be a big point against buying it. And if the weird stuff really does prove to be flaky...

There's another point in the article which struck me, which I didn't comment on yesterday. If you're selling support and think that this improves robustness you're doing this to reduce your support costs. If, then, I'm a potential customer and look at what you're doing in that respect I'm likely to think if this is in the free edition and it's made it more robust* then why would I need to pay for the support?

Yet another alternative view is that if they system is designed to make rolling back upgrades easier if they go wrong, does it mean they're anticipating upgrades going wrong because they're planning to cut testing on them?

I suppose early encounters with Suse have left me feeling that it was a little outside the mainstream so I went Ubuntu > Debian > Devuan instead.

* This assumes I'm buying the "not robust enough to go without support" line.

If you alienate existing users to achieve something you think is important then either it really isn't important to them or you've done an inadequate job of explaining why it really is important to them.

IBM overhauls rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points

Re: It's the IBM of the 21st century, what do you expect?

9 carat? Pinchbeck.

Re: Why why oh why

"You’ll find that your employment contract states that any idea you have while working for IBM belongs to them."

OTOH if you were to leave and start a small business, say fixiing PCs, pulling network cables on contract or something and then, six months later, you suddenly have this bright idea...

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

"This particular study looked narrowly at product review content, and it doesn’t reflect the overall quality and helpfulness of Search for the billions of queries we see every day," a Google spokesperson told The Register post-publication.

Did he really believe that?

Did he even think his collection of words meant anything at all? The only explanation for so many PR utterances is that they don't think that. It makes them easy meat for replacement by LLMs.

Microsoft touts migration to Windows 11 as painless, though wallets may disagree

Re: TPM 2.0

That's the entire point. If users can't be forced to buy new H/W they won't be buying any new Windows pre-installs.

Re: Money

What a shame it's not working out like that.

Can we have a crocodile tears icon?

Re: Pointless

It's probably simpler than that. It won't run on H/W that W10 is running on and W10 more or less does what the user wants, or at least they're used to it so there's no reason to update and certainly no reason to shell out cash for new H/W.

Re: Pointless

Users: "What's a platform?"

Can solar power be beamed down from space? Yes. Is it commercially viable? Not yet

A great success. Funding obtained from billionaire. PhDs granted. Papers published.

What's worse than paying an extortion bot that auto-pwned your database?

If I follow this correctly then the main reason this is happening is - drum-roll - cloud.

I can more or less understand the need to export a database connection to support remote working if the users have the DB client application local to them. In that case it ought to be wrapped up in a VPN and have proper security. Even then, it would be better to put the application on the server so the remote link is only handling the UI.

Working from home never looked better: Leopard stalks around Infosys and TCS campuses

Re: And Today

And Murthy hasn't changed his spots either.

The leopard was coming to complain about it.

Or to put it another way: "It was fast. He wouldn't have felt any pain. He didn't know a thing about it."

Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered

"countless millions of pounds"

If it had worked properly they'd have been counted.

Re: As a Non Legal Opinion

That long running enquiry is a problem in itself as it's furth postponing the actions that were already well overdue when it started.

Re: As a Non Legal Opinion

"Any and all convictions surrounding accounting fraud and based upon the Horizon evidence are unsound and should be revoked. There's no need for new legislation or other grandstanding. If the Post Office wishes to pursue a re-trial of a genuine fraud case, they are entitled to do so based upon sound evidence."

They should all have been quashed, including those that had guilty pleas as soon as the problems were identified as it was manifestly obvious they they were all unsafe. As to trying to prosecute any possible genuine frauds - no chance of that as they would be unlikely to be able to produce untainted evidence.

Re: As an ex-Sr. Director of a software company...I'm apalled!

"the company handed a massive fine that will be paid DIRECTLY to the subpostmasters!"

No. A fine AND compensation to the subpostmasters.

And the directors jailed should be those in post at the relevant times. All the relevant times.