Posts by Doctor Syntax

A toast to being in the right place at the right time

Re: He's toast

The thing to remember about theatre, security or otherwise, is that it's only intended to look convincing from the audience's PoV.

Microsoft’s Azure mishap betrays an industry blind to a big problem

Re: rm -r *

"echo *" still worked for a short time though

echo is a shell built-in. If yiu have a shell you should have echo.

In my case it was mv rather than rm but when you can no longer reach mv it doesn't make too much difference. A live distro would have fixed it but this was back in SCO days so no live distros about.

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

Re: Performance isn't free...

If something needs specific libraries or whatever, install it in /opt. I have Seamonkey, LibreOffice, VirtualBox, stuff from Brother, Informix and others all packaged that way. It was an accepted and successful way of doing things long before Snap & friends arrived.

Re: Performance isn't free...

I'd be more curious about ways in which it benefits desktop users.

As far as I'm concerned systemd resembled Snap & the rest in that they attempt to solve non-existent problems.

Straw man alert

"You can still do it that way today, as in this example of how to install Node.js v8.1.1 to your Linux desktop." with a link to a build from git-hub repositories The alternative is simply:

apt install nodejs

May I refer the honourable gentleman to the analysis of my LibreOffice installation in /opt https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/06/07/red_hat_drops_libreoffice/#c_4676282

This is an application for which the download site provides 1 DEB and 1 RPM archive* for amd64 Linux for each version**. The vast majority of the file it contains are what might be summed up as "resources" almost certainly cross-platform.

There are 10 times as many html help files that would need translation for language as .so files that might conceivably need adapting to compile on a particular Linux distro.

There are about half as many again XML & XSLT files as .so and .jar combined.

Anyone who's been using Linux for such a long time must surely be familiar with the notion of installing applications along with a selection of libraries and resources in /opt. It's the problem that Snap, Flatpak & the rest of them set out to solve. It was solved long ago without the extra baggage that those bring along. In terms of baggage I find it particularly ironical that some time ago I decided to have a look at Flatpak and tried to install it on whatever vintage of Debian I was running at the time. It failed to install because some dependency wasn't satisfied by the Debian's version of some library, a notable failure of the KISS principle.

* A tgz archive that expands to 42 individual .deb files, In addition there is language pack, a further archive bundling 3 .debs(including dicitonary and readme files) and a help pack containing a further .deb

** Currently 7.5.4 and 7.4.7. The two files per version is the same as are provided for Mac (Intel & Apple silicon) and for Windows (32 & 64 bit).

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

Re: So ? Is AI the new "cloud computing"?

"Have a Friday pint, becasue it is, well, Friday"

Other days of the week are also available.

Surely you're both old enough to know better.

Re: So ? Is AI the new "cloud computing"?

"an AI that understands what they are doing"

That statement - and AI - fails at the word "understands".

It understands nothing. It's a pastiche generator.

Re: AI Infused

Maybe AI is a brand of one of those fruit teas my daughter is keen on.

Scientists claim >99 percent identification rate of ChatGPT content

Re: But for how long?

Just bear with me while I click my mouse to find out.

None of this should be surprising. Computers have been used in textual analysis since the days of punched cards. They were quickly into the "Who really wrote Shakespeare?" game - I remember reading about it in the New Scientist when I was at school and that's a very long time ago. With more and more CPU cycles and more and more storage available one would expect them to get better.

Just consider the last sentence of my first paragraph. I could have written it in passive voice - "it would be expected that...". Having chosen the active voice I could have chosen a different pronoun: "I", "we" or "you". I didn't have to be as emphatic with "more and more". I could have used "might" or "could" rather than "would", "anticipate" rather then "expect". I could have written "improve" rather than "get better" etc. Without trying too hard about alternatives I can think of almost 200 ways I could have written that one sentence*. If you (note different pronoun) were to look over my writing it would (switch to passive voice) be possible to build up a list of probabilities for my choices. Repeating that for different authors would produce different choice profiles and hence different voices.

On the other hand an automated pastiche generator producing text with no intrinsic meaning, no variation of emphasis to convey, no concept of elegant variation and no instinct for deliberate repetition for emphasis is going to deploy the relatively few phrases that come at the top of its statistical heap from the training material. In terms of the multivariate statistics I dabbled with (and dabbled is a very deliberate choice of word) about 50 years ago it will occupy a very confined part of the multi-dimensional space such statistics define and that, I think, is why this paper (and Turnitin referred to in the article) are claiming such high discrimination. It has one voice . A bot writes like a bot and, with maybe one exception, humans don't even want to do that.

* I didn't write the sentence intending to analyse it like that. I wrote it without any changes although I had changed words in the previous two. It was only looking at it after I'd written it that I realised the possibilities it held for taking the rest of the post along the route I did although the direction was intended. That's something a bot couldn't do.

Sysadmin and IT ops jobs to slump, says IDC

Re: Advanced Cull Call Us

Temporarily is right. There'll be money to be made when the mess has to be sorted out.

Re: Phew.

Nostalgically - back in the day, at least for a small business unit, we would provide application code and administer the system as a single team. It had distinct advantages as each aspect of the role informed the other; if you'd written it you knew what do do from the administration PoV and if you wrote with the need to administer it in mind. In at least one, later, disassociated rolw I felt liike screaming at the admins for completely underestimating what was intended to be done via the user interface.

a high percentage of "Systems Administrator" roles have been replaced by DevOps / SRE"

I think it's not so much "replaced by" as "renamed as". It's just what we did years ago updated to current ways of doing things. The roles remain, the nuts and bolts change.

Salesforce lures staff with $10 donation to charity for each day they're in the office

Even better, you could attend several virtual events a day and have the company make several donations.

10 years after Snowden's first leak, what have we learned?

There's no point in laws saying what agencies can and can't do if there is no punishment for transgression. Agents should be personally liable for breaches they may make. Having spent about 14 years in a job where I had such liability I don't see anything unusual about the idea. Snowden shouldn't be pursued for his disclosures if those wrongs he pointed out went and continue to go unpunished.

Search engines don't always help chatbots generate accurate answers

Web search engines, including those on trading site, universally fail to perform as well as at least one I used back in the '80s. They simply OR all the search terms together, even if terms are entered in an attempt to exclude*. At best they may use the combination of terms to partially order the results. To use the results of the search engine the chatbot would need to parse the query properly and then use the parsed query to filter the results of the search engine. It is, of course, the search engines that should be doing that parsing and filtering.

* eBay's search used to respect minus signs so that "car - Honda" would return cars of any make except Honda. Then they changed it so it would return all makes of car including Honda plus Honda motorcycles and any other Honda non-car products. Now it seems to return only Hondas and even provides check-boxes for Honda models.

UK government proposes legislation to regulate umbrella companies

Re: Drunks in charge of the brewery

Who are you designating as "the people who created this mess"? Their successors are currently sitting on the opposition benches.

We'd need to look at those contractors in more detail. They should be paying Income Tax, NI, making provision for sickness etc. themselves. They'd have been doing that either as sole traders or via companies.

Clients, at least in IT, preferred the contractors to work through companies because if the contractor failed to make proper returns it would be the client who would be held responsible. Oddly enough c 2000 I discovered that a client had a stock sole trader contract for freelance graphic designers so it seems that in some industries that sole trader was still acceptable, at least back then.

Going back 20 years pre-IR35 it may well have been that those contracts had started out as sole-traders and maybe stayed that way. If so it indicates a great deal of either trust or naivety on the part of the client. In any case it seems likely that this situation was mutually acceptable to both client and freelancers. That acceptability would have included a rate from which the freelancers would have been able to pay all due taxes. It doesn't amount to being on the cheap. The usual permie complaints include the fact that the freelance rate is higher than the equivalent salary while failing to realise that it has to include elements such as employer's NI.

I think to a large extent brollies came into existence for those who wanted to go freelance but couldn't be arsed to set up proper companies. As to companies not dealing with what you call employees in what you call an honest manner I, as freelancer would have taken considerable offence at a client who tried to strong-arm me into becoming an employee. As a matter of fact I did have a client who tried to recruit me into a vacant permie managerial role; one interesting aspect of that was that they hadn't realised how close I was to their mandatory retirement age and had exceeded it by the time the contract ended. In this context that's an indication that there are considerable differences between employee and freelancer which escape the cursory glance that tries to class freelancers as ersatz employees.

Re: "Sort out the mess that is IR-35"

"Daft"? I wish I could be so generous.

Re: Government creates red tape to fix IR35 mess of its own creation.

"creating problems"

Let me remind you of who created this particular mess: Prime minister Tony Blair, Chancellor Gordon Brown. The best you could do to absolve them would be to argue they were just the front men for IRC (as it then was). Given that previous Tory governments had resisted the idea it's not much of an absolution.

Red Hat to stop packaging LibreOffice for RHEL

"one massive incomprehensible pile of ancient rotting C++ and Java code, dragged along over 38 years [since] StarOffice."

I was intrigued about this so I took a quick look at what's installed in /opt/libreoffice7.4

ls -lR|wc -l gives 20338 files. Wow, even taking into account that some of these will just be noise such as directory names it seems a lot. But wait:

In the help directory that command gives 9022 files. IOW nearly 45% is mostly a mixture of html (2569)*, png (211) and svg (5089) of which the html represents stuff that needs language translation.

In the share directory there's even more files, 9916, or nearly 50%, which comprise all sorts of data files including fonts, templates and more

The program directory which includes most of that C++, Java and Python comes to just 1337 files of which 591 are .py files which seem to be just straight python 3.8.16 library files. This isn't to say that there aren't a few jars and pys scattered elsewhere.

There are also 751 xml & xsl files around the place which outnumber the total .jars (282) plus .so files (245 including a few .so.1 etc). (.x[sm]l and .jar counted across the whole installation, .so in /program.)

All-in-all there's little scope for localisation to a particular Linux distro and it certainly doesn't look like a massive pile of C++ and Java, rotting or otherwise. It's not surprising that the download site can get by with just a DEB and an RPM option for Linux.

* For specific file types the counts are filtered for the appropriate file name endings which should eliminate the noise.

Re: Original star office

I once read that early versions of OO & maybe LO had SeaMonkey tucked away inside but never exposed, mostly to get access to the address book database, which seems a bit excessive.

Mail/Usenet/RSS/Calendar functionality is the one thing that's really missing even if only to stop Office fans whining that it doesn't have them.

Debian also packages LibreOffice but the current version there, as I assume is also the case with RHEL, is quite old. A quick trip to https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download-libreoffice/ brings a choice of the Business Edition and Community editions.

The Community edition comes in the advanced ("If you're a technology enthusiast, early adopter or power user, this version is for you!") and more conservative "This version is slightly older and does not have the latest features, but it has been tested for longer.") versions, currently 7.5.3 and 7.4.7. For each of those there's a choice of 64-bit Linux, DEB & RPM packaged as .tgz; Mac, Intel & Apple; and Windows, 32 & 64-bit. For each of these there's the language and help packs for your preferred language.

The DEBs install or update in /opt with any library files they need, with integration into the KDE or Gnome desktop and without fuss. It's an arrangement that Just Works. This is the established solution to the problem that Flatpak, Snap etc unnecessarily set out to solve.

It would be useful if DEBs could be kept in either Debian's contrib repository or in a Debian-style repository of LO's own so they can be updated by apt. I assume the RPMs could be dealt with similarly.

Perhaps this move by RH will prompt LO to set up suitable repositories.

Florida man (not that one) sold $100M-plus in counterfeit network gear

Which makes this "the Justice Department claims Aksoy did little to hide his activities" deeply ironic. Who else did little during that period?

Windows XP's adventures in the afterlife shows copyright's copywrongs

???

Several issues confused here.

Most glaringly, how did public domain get into this? Nobody else suggested that.

Secondly note that it was custom software that was under consideration. If a client, government or anyone else, commissions some custom S/W they certainly should expect to receive ownership of that. Where does the market cap of the vendor come into it? The custom application code might well run on top of Oracle or some other database (and both on top of an OS) but it is still a separate and separable layer, capable of being delivered to the client as a discrete package, including source.

Thirdly, if custom software is being specified then the implication is that it will be written from scratch. What would it be rewritten from? And how do you rewrite from scratch?

Fourth, if a client has engaged you to write something for them why on earth would you think yourself entitled to sell what had been written and paid for by them to another client? I have worked for a company who agreed to go into partnership with the original client to sell the package to other customers but this was some sort of joint venture, not a behind the back operation.

Re: What's the monetary damage?

"You do know that using the latest Windows isn't viable if you want (need, in more than a few industrial cases) to keep older hardware running?"

I think that was the OP's point.

Re: What's the monetary damage?

YMMV in the US which might allow punitive damages.

"The best justice system that money can buy."

Malwarebytes may not be allowed to label rival's app as 'potentially unwanted'

Somewhere the case seems to have lost site of the essentials: Can Malwarebytes prove that Spyhunter is a bug and/or can Enigma prove it isn't?

Identity thieves can hunt us for 'rest of our lives,' claims suit after university data leak

Re: With just an SSN,

"so you get the worst of both worlds"

Which are the two worlds you're referring to? As a native of an Anglophone country I'd rate abuse of ID cards by TPTB to be one those of which you can have the worst.

"SSNs are assigned at birth, and never change"

Given the extent to which these have been plundered (and equivalent identifiers in other jurisdictions) maybe it's a principle that needs to be rethought.

Metaverse? Apple thinks $3,500 AR ski goggles are the betterverse

Re: Definitely for pr0n

"where the entire furniture plus equipment probably cost less than 3500$"

Apple is deeply disappointed by this parsimony and wants to do something about it. This is their something.

Re: Wrong game

"is bound to sell more as demand picks up"

If the demand needs to pick up it might be an indication the market is saturated.

Re: Vision Pro?

I think you may just have discovered the money making plan here. Suing all those companies.

Healthcare org with over 100 clinics uses OpenAI's GPT-4 to write medical records

"I do hope that there were extensive trials"

These should be properly designed and conducted clinical trials such as would be expected for any other medical device. I know Covid introduced new approaches to speed up clinical trials but even so GPT-4 is of such recent introduction there doesn't seem to have been much time for those.

The challenges Intel faces to compete with TSMC, Samsung

"Intel's 20A will see the chipmaker move away from nanometers as a naming convention in favor of ångströms."

Ah, that explains it. I was wondering whether 20A referred to the electricity consumption.

Cry-pto: Feds bury Bitcoin exchange giant Binance in 13-count fraud lawsuit

I see from reports elsewhere they're also going after Coinbase. Maybe they've decided the party's really over and it's time to start tidying up.

Maybe we should expect AI-based currency to be the next fad.

Election Excel blunder declared a 'low point' for Austrian social democracy

Re: 600 votes

Even when you do that there'll be someone, somewhere who'll want to put the counts for each box into a spreadsheet to add them up.

"There will be ridicule and mockery, and we have to accept that."

Politics in Austria must be different. I can't imagine any UK politician being so self-critical however deserved it might be.

Netherlands digital minister smacks down Big Tech over AI regs

"Mazhari said thousands die in road accidents every day but car manufacturers are allowed to carry on."

Every day may be an exaggeration. The main weakness with this argument is that people trade risk for utility and a huge number perceive cars as having a great deal of utility.

Yaccarino takes wheel at Twitter early as advertising woes become public

Re: Make sure you get paid

In advance.

Re: Absolutely nothing new under the sun...

Maybe she has a contract where salary is paid monthly in advance. That would make it a bit less conned.

Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file

Re: Years ago....

No offline backups for the stuff you had to keep?

UK warned not to bother racing US, EU on EV subsidies

"The erratic conduct of UK industrial policy over the last two years has been confusing for business and bad for investment."

Only the last two? Since 2016 seems more likely and it seems unlikely to improve whatever party is in power. That's the difficulty with taking irrevocable steps.

Raspberry Pi production rate rising to a million a month

Which is fine if you live there but not if it's >100m each way, a long way to drive, especially if you're not 100% confident they'd have stock. You can order from our resellers - who are either out of stock or only accepting orders from existing customers.

Great.

Just great.

Will the old Intel NUC be price competitive in running costs with the possibly hypothetical Pi 4.

Debian 12 'Bookworm' is the excitement-free Linux you've been waiting for

"the inclusion of non-free firmware on the installation medium as standard,"

I took a quick look at the Devuan equivalent. It claimed the Atheros driver was missing - and then went on to connect to the WiFi anyway. As it happens the previous release does that as well. Actually, I think it's just a data file, possibly listing the channel requirements for various jurisdictions and it's now been realised the error can be displayed and ignored.

What puzzled me is that it refuses to use logical volumes. Unless my memory is playing false - at my age it might - I remember many times working through the Debian installer and assigning logical volumes to /usr, /usr/local, /opt and /var as well as /home with no problem whatsoever. A quick check shows that the previous (i.e. current) version also does that. I think that on the test laptop I was using the version I was trying to install had been an in-place update from the still earlier version. I decided I hadn't time to explore further and it's something I'll have to come back to. It's possible to work round it but it'd be a bit of a faff.

The bonkers water-cooled shoe PC, hexagonal pink workstations, and IKEA-style cases of Computex 2023

Transbuds

"The earbuds include a proprietary chip hidden in their USB-C adapter, which hooks into the API for Google's enterprise grade cloudy translation service and pipes real-time conversation translation into users' ears."

Oh, dear. We all know what the name ought to be, don't we.

"This one's an actual product the company plans to sell from July for the lace-knotting price of $5,999."

You'd hope that there's nobody with enough excess of money over sense to buy one. And you know you'd be wrong.