Posts by Doctor Syntax

EPA flushes water supply cybersecurity rule after losing legal fight with industry, states

Re: Ah, the land of the best Justice money can buy

It has to be asked whether the US constitution - of which they are ridiculously proud - is fit for purpose in the C21st.

Re: This will end well

So any hackers taking over a US water installation will be elected and accountable, right? Or have I misunderstood you?

NASA reschedules Boeing's first crewed Starliner flight for mid-April 2024

Was the crewselection by drawing straws?

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Let me guess. There was an old printer just sitting there waiting to be scrapped.

Microsoft gives unexpected tutorial on how to install Linux

Re: WSL 3

"I have spent some time trying to get OneNote to run under WINE."

The W10 installation on one of my laptops couldn't run it either. When it booted up it complained about a wrong dll or the like. After a lot of patch Tuesday cycles I noticed it stopped complaining. Whether it works I know not. I'm tempted to look at the possibility of creating a Tb's worth of random words - or select a few random words, arrange them in loose associations and embed copies of them in more random words. Just to add a little data to MS's data mining.

That reminds me, I must check to see if it's monthly patching run has finished yet. It's been going several hours. The Devuan run took about quarter of an hour.

"Why not install Open Shell for her? It makes nearly all of the pain of W10 go away."

I think you underestimate the situation.

Her desktop is littered with icons for all sorts of things including email, most of which seem to be invocations of ie to open specific sites. There's no way I'd start to replicate all that and I suspect there's no way she'd want to do so either. It still would look different even if that were done*. From my point of view it's a matter of quietly tip-toeing backwards out of the room.

BTW she has a degree in physics - from the early 1970s as far as I can recall.

* I could, of course, fake up a Linux desktop to present a reasonable facsimile of either 7 or 10.

"Perhaps recommending Chrome OS Flex as a replacement for macOS is a step too far even for Microsoft just yet."

It's possible they're trying to edge their business to a Microsoft equivalent of this - it's just that they expect you to run their web services rather than Google's and don't really mind if you do that from Linux.

My SiL has a W7 machine and uses nothing beyond the web browser (including email) and Excel. A few months ago she had a look at W10 & decided it would be too different for her to upgrade.

I don't have a W7 instance I could try this on but the download link in the Which article appears to work in that it downloads an exe file.

Bennu unboxing shows ancient asteroid holds carbon and water

There is still only one planet demonstrated to have life on it. The fact that this is extended to anything between "must be others" and "must be ubiquitous where ever conditions are right" is extreme observe bias.

Looked at objectively the number of systems which have to come into existence, come together and become integrated into a working whole makes the existence of life extremely unlikely. Once it exists it's extremely good at propagating the unlikely which is maybe why it seems inevitable.

The panspermia hypothesis is just throwing the problem over the wall. As regards organic compounds its proponents need to read up about Miller and Urey and then visit Occam the barber for a closer shave.

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

Re: Excel Errors

"Then they feed it into the real financial systems."

Either that or it is their real financial system.

"so in the real world what is the right solution if it isn't Excel?"

It would appear that there's a gap in the market for a tool which manages data rather better than Excel but which can be configured by non-specialists even if it's not in the Office suite. Of course as it's not in the Office suite the need for it is not even visible to many business users.

with whole company structures being beholden to beancounters

The problem with having things run by beancounters is that there's never budget to do it right in the first place but there's always budget to recover the disaster.

Excel is cheap, fast and "mostly-good-enough *right now*"

I think it's a often a case of looking mostly-good-enough rather than being that.

Re: "The NHS suffers from a chronic shortage of anesthetists"

Rotweillers notwithstanding, going straight to A&E is the appropriate measure. The ECG & biochemistry diagnostics are not likely to be within your GP's capabilities. SWMBO was in a similar situation last year. I took here straight to A&E who transferred her the same night to the cardiac ward at the other hospital in the trust. They got her in for a heart valve replacement ASAP.

Re: This is not an IT failing

Management at a higher level still should have determined that spreadsheets were not an appropriate tool for the job and formidden their use.

Re: Excel for dodgy databases

Once you start involving professional design, data types, etc Is the spreadhseet even needed. Just design and build a real application to do the job.

"a complex and confused approach to using spreadsheets led to the disaster"

When managers try to manage by spreadsheets is there any other approach and any other outcome?

AI safety guardrails easily thwarted, security study finds

Re: " AI safety guardrails easily thwarted"

"Until the machine actually understands what it's spewing forth and exercises moral responsibility for it"

If the two were linked that would exceed a good many instances of human intelligence.

Re: Bollocks

Which? Benevolent Rust or Corrosive Contradiction?

Everest cybercriminals offer corporate insiders cold, hard cash for remote access

A high risk strategy. I'm sure law enforcement could use such an approach to gain access to the gang.

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

Re: How many simulate consciousnesses ...

I'm disappointed. I'd hoped someone would come along to say they had but the margins weren't wide enough to fit it in.

Re: How many simulate consciousnesses ...

"Philosophers gotta eat, too."

Do you have a proof of that statement?

Re: Critical Questions

I doubt Jake cares about that. neither do I, for similar reasons.

No, at best it's a hypothesis. He needs to make predictions which cannot be satisfied by any other hypothesis and which are falsifiable.

This "law". What tests have been made of it? Let's get the essentials done before we start thinking of anything fancy.

Generative AI slashes cloud migration hassles, says McKinsey partner

Re: Why would anyone trust someone from McKinsey?

Are you calling your partner a crook?

It sounds like a house of cards.

Software patch fixes Euclid space telescope navigation bug

Re: Windowlicker

As things stand it seems to point to a gap in existing physical theory. Experience shows that when you fill in gaps the new knowledge means something potentially useful right here on Earth.

Go ahead, let the unknowable security risks of Windows Copilot onto your PC fleet

Re: User free

You won't operate Windows, Windows will operate you.

What to expect when the UK-US Data Bridge comes into force this week

Re: It's always from The World to The USA

I think there's one simple principle that would sort this out for good. If I hand over personal information to a second party for some reason that party becomes directly responsible to me, and answerable in a court in the jurisdiction where I live, for safeguarding that information. If they hand it over to a 3rd party they're still responsible, even if that 3rd party hands it over to a 4th party etc. up to infinity, it doesn't matter whichever party is responsible for any abuse, it's the second party on the hook.

The sole exception would be access required by law of the jurisdiction where I live. CLOUD Act? If I don't live in the US the 2nd party is on the hook.

International agreements? The 2nd party is on the hook.

If the 2nd party wants to use a 3rd party they need to come to a judgement about that party's reliability and exposure because they're going to be liable for the 3rd party's failures.

Microsoft says VBScript will be ripped from Windows in future release

Thin end of wedge.

Microsoft's view will be that given that it's not in the browser it can't be tolerated elsewhere because from Microsoft's PoV everything has to be run in the browser using Microsoft's cloud. Of course that applies to any other programming language too. The logical consequence is that all the other programming languages available to Windows will have to follow it. Elementary when you think about it.

SBF on trial: The Python code that allegedly let Alameda hedge fund spend people's FTX deposits

"The defense's explanation for this, according to White, is that Alameda was responsible for converting US dollars to stablecoins (digital tokens pegged to the dollar) and used the flag to borrow funds from FTX before returning them as stablecoins."

Sounds plausible. After all it's wrapped up in this code to ensure the transaction completes, isn't it?

Isn't it?

Is it?

Where is it?

Fresh curl tomorrow will patch 'worst' security flaw in ages

Jam tomorrow

Why wait a day? Or to put it another way, why announce a day early?

If it's urgent tomorrow it's urgent today so waiting a day (or however many days it's been) isn't justified. OTOH if it's really not ready don't announce it in advance and tip the bad guys off that it might be worth looking for something for which a patch isn't available. It doesn't make sense.

RISC-V org claims export restrictions would stifle innovation

If the US wants to shut itself off from the rest of the world RISC-V market place as it develops - fine. Let them play catch-up later on.

SAP customers on brink of ERPocalypse as 2025 support cliff looms for ECC

Re: “ and instead try to make the leap to S/4HANA”

But why have SAP come out with this statement now? It sounds as if they're wanting to rustle up a bit of panic buying.

Why do I keep thinking "never give a customer reason to review the market"?

IDC: AI is a solution for a PC industry with a sales problem

An alternative meaning might be "it could go either way".

"uses cases have yet to be fully articulated"

Does this indicate peak generative AI may already be near?

Next fad, please!

Qualtrics culls 780 jobs amid 'complex' growth spurt

Re: "We call it empathy at scale" "Software to improve employee engagement and retention"

They seem to make software for the intelligence insulting business consultancy industry. Their front page will appeal to those whose intelligence can't be insulted.

"Rapid hiring was essential to enable our growth up to this point, but it also created complexity that does not support continued growth at our scale,"

Translation: "We were lemmings."

Blockchain biz goes nuclear: Standard Power wants to use NuScale reactors for DCs

Re: Whose paying for waste disposal?

"while sustaining a modern style of life"

You're just going to upset the green hair-shirters with this. You're supposed to be living on a vegan diet of nettle leaves whist wearing clothes knitted from the fibres of the nettle stems.

Two Mile Island is smaller. Or is that less? Or fewer?

Scripted shortcut caused double-click disaster of sysadmin's own making

Re: cd /tmp && rm -rf *

"Of course I've still had several ohnoseconds over my ${too_many} years in this game. That's why I'm quite keen on backups..."

With age comes learning from experience, preferably somebody else's experience.

Re: Yes

My UK reading of "learned" makes the "ed" a distinct syllable and the word an adjective as in "learned friend".

It's worse.

Re: It is mandatory to have an Oh No Oh Second experience

I always use a script to dd a download onto an SD card, usually duplicating the last line* of the script, commenting it out and then editing the if=value to be the new file name. Nevertheless between pressing enter on ./script and the red LED starting to flash on the SD adapter there's an enormously elongated couple of seconds of thinking "Could I have gone wrong and be doing this to /dev/sda?"

* The script ends up being a series of commented out lines and one non-commented line. From time to time it gets pruned.

Obscured by clouds: Time for IaaS vendors to come clean and play fair

"Microsoft's decades-long lead"

Perhaps this should be a hint to regulators to take an immediate interest as soon as Microsoft does anything new.

ESA funds space weather satellite swarm to understand and combat orbital debris

"I don't think a vaccum cleaner would work in space."

You mean it would just go "whoosh"?

FTC: Please stop falling for social media scams, you've given crooks at least $650M so far this year

"These usually involve someone buying something advertised on Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat, and then never receiving the product."

As opposed to buying from some of the more regular sites and not receiving the product.

But did they try looking on the doorstep? Somebody else's doorstep.