Posts by Doctor Syntax

Australia asks Twitter how it will mod content without staff, gets ghosted

Re: “Digital identifiers”

"Political stupidity ahead"

Situation normal. Everywhere.

Telco giant Vodafone to cut 11,000 staff as part of its turnaround plan

If it were there in the first place there'd be no need to put it back. Condemned with her own words.

Re: "it has earmarked “significant investment” for FY24 towards customer experience and branding"

"I’ve never picked anything based on how cool their advertising/branding is."

I'd be inclined to be negatively influenced if anything. The more that gets spent on such fripperies the less gets spent on the product.

Dyson moans about state of UK science and tech, forgets to suck up his own mess

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

Polonium doesn't respond very much to antibiotics.

Re: Really?

Any time I see "neo" as a prefix to any political description I can rely on the rest of the text as being a load of convoluted political theory which has no point of contact with the real world. When I see two I can be sure it's degenerated into word soup.

Re: Oh no

"Science is the main thrust of the piece."

Which makes his silence about Horizon deafening.

Re: Reporting just as bad as ever in El' Reg...

"What has Dyson's comments got to do with Horizon?"

Nothing, that's what's wrong with them.

The Times' headline above the article was "PM's focus on science is hot air says Dyson".

TFA describes Horizon as "EU's €95.5 billion ($91 billion) science investment vehicle".

If Dyson was really concerned about UK science he should be concerned that we're not involved with Horizon. We're not because of people like him so it's not surprising that he's avoiding the topic.

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

It isn't actually a national treasure role. Head of state represents the nation as a whole. While it's desirable that the various branches of the state, military, judicial, civil or whatever should be responsible to the nation humans really work best if their relationship is with another human rather than an abstract entity. That's what having a head of state provides. OTOH separating head of state from head of government avoids gathering all the power into one pair of hands which is generally a Good Thing.

You can debate at length how best to achieve that. At least a hereditary monarchy avoids making it a political office which is hard to avoid with an elected head. It also means that you don't have someone whose event horizon is no more distant than the next election. It's not a fate I'd wish on anyone, however - I'm slightly older than the king and a long time retired whereas he's only just got started. It also means that you have to take pot luck to some extent although we do seem to have solved that problem - it took a lot less time to get rid of Edward VIII than it did to get rid of BoJo.

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

"Would any of them as President really be an improvement"

I can't think of anyone in the UK I'd vote for as president.

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

Planned obsolescence doesn't just happen you know. That's why he needs a new research centre.

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

"almost sucks the slippers off my feet whilst hoovering"

Worse things have happened. You can't be too careful.

"The only area where that can work ... is finance"

The London Sock Exchange is having trouble getting business to list or maintain listings so it's not even working well for finance.

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

Or be born in N Ireland (or have a parent or grandparent who was). My children and grandchildren have Irish passports so can still be treated as EU citizens. It may well stand them in good stead.

Re: "the PM refuses to meet entrepreneurial, technology-focused employers and investors like me"

Yes. "modern, forward-looking economies" is an odd way to spell "low-wage".

National newspaper duped into running GPT-4-written rage-click opinion piece

<Sigh>

Mention of the Irish Times prompted me to dig out and read again Ian Blake's diatribes against "Mrs JB Priestly writing as Jaquetta Hawkes". I doubt any LLM could have written anything like that but that was a long time ago. How the mighty have fallen.

FTC sues VoIP provider over 'billions of illegal robocalls'

They should be required to compensate the recipients. Say a $10 call-handling fee for each call made, That might well break the company. Fine, let that be a warning to others.

An unexpectedly fresh blast from the past, Freespire 9.5 has landed

Re: Shame really

I really wish they'd just stop it. Making the panel floa by default, apparently just so they don't look like Windows? There's oly one change I want them to make there and that's to revert to the earlier arrangement, namely allowing unhide to be restricted to a corner rather than have the panel unhide any time the cursor touches any part of it.

Yup, I know it's a great OS but does it have a text editor?

Re: No

"less shocking to people used to the Microsoft ecosystem than, for example, LibreOffice."

I wonder about that. I think a lot of home users may be using LibreOffice rather than fork out for MS Office and others may have been using ancient pre-ribbon versions. A few days ago I was told of someone who had a new laptop (presumably Windows) and had a friend set up a lot of software for her. She mentioned he'd installed OpenOffice. ?! Had I misheard OnlyOffice? But no, she sent out minutes a few days later as a .odt file and I know she's not the only one in the group using LO or OO.

Re: * All she actually needed was an update to Firefox

Got one! I knew somebody would come up with a comment like that.

Her original DE was Windows 7. That fell to a ransomware attack many years ago clicking on a file in an email she thought was from a friend.

Fortunately it wasn't a very sophisticated one. It had written out encrypted versions of files but simply deleted rather than overwritten the old ones. So I booted up the System Rescue distro (so many of these distros) to recover the files onto an external SSD. The only problem was finding the files that mattered amongst all the shrapnel of old cache files and working out what they should be called. Then installed Zorin which she's been happily using ever since.

Today's update changed nothing on the DE. The W7 partition is still sitting there, perfectly accessible. It just doesn't get used.

Nevertheless I had to go over to my cousin in law's today to update her Zorin,* It doesn't actually look that much like the W7 that had been on there originally. It would be easier to knock up a more convincing Windows look-alike for any version of WIndows with KDE. It's distros like this that save us the bother. Having read Liam's review earlier I did idly wonder whether I should have burnt a DVD & done a fall reinstall.

* All she actually needed was an update to Firefox because she couldn't get John Lewis & M&S to work but it seemed best to do the lot.

But what is it with a lot of sites recently (Screwfix, I'm looking at you too) that have caused them to start throwing "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred" if they don't like the browser? It's a case of being too clever by half but not half clever enough. Nevertheless I doubt Screwfix would turn away customers for wearing the wrong brand of boots or John Lewis for carrying the wrong brand of handbag so why put obstacles in the path of online customers?

It depends on what you regard as a step back - or maybe the value you put on the step forward.

My objection to vim dates back to my very first encounter. I wanted to remove the carriage returns from a file which originated on Windows. Opened the file in vim and saw....no ^Ms at the end of the lines!

Some unfortunate default in a config file obviously but my reaction is simple: if it can hide that from me what else can it hide? It is not to be trusted. Far simpler to go back to the real vi, which, in effect, nvi is rather than learn the ins and outs of vim's "imrpovements" when I'm not going to trust it.

Trust is hard to gain and easy to lose. As far as I'm concerned vim lost it instantly on first contact and, as vi is all I want, it just isn't going to get the chance to regain it.

"Vim is preinstalled for Stockholm Syndrome sufferers"

That's what I think of vim users too. One of my first moves is always to install nvi.

But ksh - that's really a blast from the past. I don't suppose they've also unwound Ubuntu's idea of there being only a single user password to get root privileges via sudo? Having one user PW to log in and a different one to gain root is just basic 2FA.

Remember those millions of fake net neutrality comments? Fallout continues

That was my thought too. They've outed those doing the dirty work but we're not even told who they were working for let alone seeing them being dealt with.

Gartner: Stop worrying and love the cloud, with all its outages and lock-in

Re: Can I borrow your watch

There's a good reason for that type of consultancy.

High salaried manglement want to know what's going on in the business and how to improve it.

They could look at the watch - i.e. ask the workers ho know.

But workers aren't paid very much

And the high salaried manglements aren't going to encourage the view that the value of anything is might not be the same as its price.

What to do?

Simple, commission a consultant who can borrow the watch - i.e. talk to the workers - write up what they said and present it as a reassuringly expensive report.

Problem solved.

I'm sure there should be scope for a website that tracks these consultancies - what they say now vs what they said a week, a month, a year and more back, how consistent they are and how their predictions turned out.

Re: Another bad analogy

"you effectively own the thing"

Even to the point of having to work out how to dispose of the remains at end of lease.

Tech companies cut jobs to chase growth, but watch out for those shareholder returns

I take it the pressure will come from activist shareholders who are waiting for the knee-jerk increase in share prices to take a quick profit.

Toyota's bungling of customer privacy is becoming a pattern

The penalties should be big enough to bring a few companies down in a blaze of publicity. It's the only thing that will motivate boards and shareholders to be pro-active. And no nonsense about being too big to fail - the bigger the business the bigger the blast radius when the breach happens.

You'd like to think that at some point the board gets sufficiently worried that they start sending internal security to check just what marketing are hoarding.

Will LLMs take your job? Only if you let them

Re: Overly optimistic

Aa far as I can see they're the ultimate GIGO machines with an added twist. If you put in something that's no garbage you might or not get somebody else's garbage out and if you knew enough to tell the difference you wouldn't need the machine anyway.

"admitting that she's got no real idea what's going on"

Degree in business studies, worked in marketing. It's almost like cause and effect.

Cisco: Don't use 'blind spot' – and do use 'feed two birds with one scone'

Re: Our work is done

"And there's only so many causes one can focus on"

Are you suggesting they can't multi-task?

This statement lacks balance. Your right side has been neglected.

Sonatype axes 14 percent of staff, reminds them not to talk to the press

Re: Phew!

For the potential supplier questionnaire

"Send copies of your last 10 press releases on any aspect of your business."

Britain's largest private pension scheme reveals scale of Capita break-in

Let me hazard a guess ast to how "US" gets expanded in this instance: "Universities' Superannuation".

Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun

Re: Not only mice

I take it you've never had to deal with architects, especially not in the design of laboratories and the like.

One architect's career was jump-started by her winning an architectural prize for a fire station in an industrial complex. The Beeb had a fireman review it, I think in the course of the programme covering the competition. He explained how it was not very functional as a fire station to the point of being dangerous. Firemen have to run through fire stations very quickly on occasion. There were hand-rails with unprotected ends that were hazardous to someone coming round a corner and possibly running into them. It wasn't used as a fire station for very long. Nevertheless it won her the prize.

My own experience of this was with an architect who liked the idea of windows meeting at the corner of the building so that the wall above appeared to be floating without support. I suppose it wins admiration from his fellows. My boss's corner office got that treatment. It wasn't actually a very big office - we needed to maximise floor space for the labs. Consequently it didn't have very big windows. The magic corner window effect was achieved by a supporting column just inside. With smallish windows substantially blocked by a column there was little light coming in although I suppose the heat loss was unchanged. Oddly enough my boss, by virtue of having another office in another department he covered, didn't spend much time there. But it looked great if you liked that sort of thing. Ever since, if I see that sort of design I wonder what internal bodge in in place to make it happen.

Re: Wait ... What?

But shouldn't the builder deliver a product fit for use? And an architect design the same?

Re: Not only mice

Beware of making unwarranted assumptions. Such as ripping off the tape.

If the vultuire had actually bitten the LNB instead of bending it we'd have to assume it was a Register journalist.

And irrespective of the county, I'd have thought sunlight would have been the least of problems on a building site.

Elon Musk finally finds 'someone foolish enough to take the job' of Twitter CEO

I didn't know you could spell "scapegoat" with only 3 letters.

BOFH: Ah. Company-branded merch. So much better than a bonus

Re: When do people understand that cash rules?

It's a sad commentary on the age of my contemporaries that the logos engraved on the pens I collect these days are those of the local undertakers.

A desk tidy for several different sizes of Post-It notes. There are no known sizes of Post-It notes that fit it.

OTOH, this being on the early days of mobiles, I was in an office with a shop on the ground floor. The carrier bags were considered wonderfully cool for the kids to take their stuff to school in.

Re: AHH the good old USB

A requirement of mine is that the stick be easily removable from the key-ring when required. One reason being that having the weight of a big bunch of keys is not good for the connectors. Another might be that the bunch of keys makes it too conspicuous.

A further requirement is that when not in use the connector should be protected from pocket lint.

Probably. But possibly a BOT that's discovered a gap in its training data.

Most of UK agriculture dept's customer interactions are paper based

Re: Rees-Mogg is missing a trick

I doubt he's aware of something so egregiously bleeding edge.

"some elements which required users to phone helplines"

If industry standard practice is being followed every 30 seconds while on hold there'll be a recorded announcement suggesting the caller try using the website instead.

GitHub, Microsoft, OpenAI fail to wriggle out of Copilot copyright lawsuit

Re: Seems like the rulings are competent and well reasoned.

"it makes me wonder the competency of their legal team"

It shows their legal team is on the ball. Defence will try any possible avenue hoping to get lucky with some of their attempts however implausible.

Privacy Framework draft isn't 'future-proof', say MEPs

"The Data Protection Review Court is a mechanism put into place by the US to give European citizens the same right of redress they'd have at home."

There's a very simple principle that would sort this out. Irrespective of where the data is wrongfully accessed the redress should be between the data subject whoever accepted the data initially and in the jurisdiction of the data subject as if it had happened within that jurisdiction. While a business can't reasonably be held responsible for the actions of some other jurisdiction they can be held responsible for exposing data to such actions. How they do that is their problem but if the incentives are there they'll do it.