Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK watchdog blocks Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition

"Laws would have to first be passed to allow that."

Like this: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-bill-to-stamp-out-unfair-practices-and-promote-competition-in-digital-markets

Microsoft probes complaints of Edge leaking URLs to Bing

" the feature was limited to a subset of social media sites"

That's not a feature, that's a bug.

Re: One question?

Grandchildren are just as likely to do that, maybe more so.

Elizabeth Holmes is not going to prison – for the moment

None of whom are likely to have any knowledge of biological or medical science. But that's true of most investors and the domains in which they invest. The system depends on honesty when the investment is offered. I could envisage a less extreme case where the investors do have some knowledge and the project looks sufficiently feasible but isn't.

A good idea would be to add the length of time delayed by failed appeals to the overall length of the sentence. Delay 6 months, get to when the sentence would normally have ended and there's still a year to go, 6 months due to the late start and another 6 as added time.

US watchdog grounds SpaceX Starship after that explosion

"but it wasn't ready in time for last week's flight attempt"

Project management usually requires some tasks can be completed before others can start. I'd have thought two such task would have been "Build launch pad" and "Launch rocket" in that order.

Techies all GUI-eyed as Xerox says goodbye to Palo Alto Research Center

Re: Need to cut them slack

But they still didn't when others proved it had become practical. There's no point in commissioning future-looking research if you ignore it when the future arrives.

Re: Need to cut them slack

AIUI the H/W the code ran on emulated a DG NOVA The microNOVA would have been a possibility for a production model although I suppose it could have been ported to any of the 16-bit chips as they became available.

Re: Need to cut them slack

"no time travelers to say which one was right"

It didn't need time travel, it needed a bit of vision and a lot of application. Those are things senior management are paid to provide. Plenty of people had the vision about one innovation or another and succeeded. It was Xerox who had the best opportunity who didn't.

Re: Not for profit

The management certainly didn't realise how much money they could have made themselves. Once others were making the money I don't think they'd have dared realise how much they lost. The risk of shareholders suing them into oblivion would have been too great if anyone had put a number on it.

UK becomes Unicorn Kingdom, where AI fairy dust earns King's ransom

Re: How many times?

"Any system of Proportional Representation would have forced sensible compromise government for as far back as you wish to look"

I remember having that hope when PR was introduced in N. Ireland.

It didn't work out that way. Instead of the moderates such as Alliance coming to the fore it meant that eventually even the existing sectarian parties were pushed aside by their more extreme rivals.

Re: How many times?

45 years takes us back to 1978. It includes the time that Gordon Brown spent getting us into a big financial hole under labour. I also remember the years that lead up to 1978 and the winter of discontent as it was called. No party in my lifetime has had a monopoly of governing the UK badly.

Re: The UK is going to the dogs, not the unicorns!

"he knows we loaded the Brexit gun"

We?

Re: Brexit

Not just promised, but relied on them.

Re: "The UK’s GREAT"?

My experience was that there were some not so good people from East Belfast saying that and you'd have been at risk of getting more than your Asperger's rubbed up the wrong way had you tried to tell them that.

Identity is more complex than you allow for. However if you want to confine it to geographical terms, just look on a map for the British Isles.

Re: "...to make up for the inflation which has ravaged their pay packet, according to unions..."

"based on some very dubious science"

I don't think I'd have put it in such complimentary words.

AI, what is the sum of the iternal angles of a triangle.

The four internal angles of a triangle add up to 360 degrees.

Re: "The UK’s GREAT"?

It's more complicated than that. E.g. my children, both born in Belfast (as was their mother), would assure you they're British despite having taken out Irish passports so they can also be EU citizens if need be.

Apache Superset: A story of insecure default keys, thousands of vulnerable systems, few paying attention

Re: Got there in the end.

"don't want to break existing installs"

It's best to look on those installs as already broken and needing to be fixed.

Microsoft makes Windows Server 2022 licenses a little less cynical

Re: Squeezing the process

"I wonder when they will come up with licenses that charge by-the-instruction as to how many clock cycles you are using in your program."

Don't forget to charge extra for branches and exponential charges on the number of times round a loop.

Oracle's examplar win over SAP for Birmingham City Council is 3 years late

"It's like saying Tesco's and Lidl are both supermarkets, so why don't they use the same systems?"

They're competitors. They're very likely to have different approaches to almost anything to give themselves competitive edge over the others.

Birmingham isn't in competition with my local council. There's no reason why either of them should be looking to their systems to differentiate them from the other. It's true that with the variation of local hierarchies we have these days different councils might have a different mix of responsibilities so that somebody else's council might, in their area, have some of the responsibilities my parish council has here & some of those of my metropolitan council. Even so that situation could be dealt with by the relevant councils using the appropriate mix of modules from a common design.

In practice it tends to be "We've always done it badly this way".

What are they doing that's unique to Birmingham? There are enough local councils that there should be an off-the-shelf package to service there needs. Maybe a combination of off-the-shelf packages that need some integration. Integration that, given the number of councils, should also be standard practice because it's been done elsewhere.

You can cross 'Quantum computers to smash crypto' off your list of existential fears for 30 years

"and the latest Pentagon leak is alleged to have involved a guy showing off classified information on Discord to impress friends"

And let's not forget the showing to journalists so they can ghost-write your book leak especially when you forget that they might write other stuff as well.

First attempt by Japan's ispace biz to land on Moon ends in awkward silence

"we have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface"

They may well have landed. There are landings and there are landings. A good landing is one you can walk away from (not that that would apply on the moon at present) and a great landing is one where the vehicle still works.

Building your own private 5G is as easy as Wi-Fi

Well played, sir.

Re: What I need is a 3G network.

My final client before I retired had a femtocell (or possibly several) so that their mobile phoness would work inside the large metal shed that housed their factory. I never looked at the mechanisms or costs of this but I assume it must have been put together in association with their mobile operator.

"ivory tower architects"

Whilst a finely carved base station tower would be an improvement on the normal run of things you, quite rightly, can't get the ivory these days.

US to focus on stifling online attacks rather than snagging criminal convictions

It's a welcome change.

We frequently see reports that investigations have run for months or even more than a year before the operation is shut down. Do they really need to do that in order to get sufficient evidence for a case worth taking to court or are is the case taking its time going through the prosecutor's system long after sufficient evidence has been gathered?

If you don't get open source's trademark culture, expect bad language

Re: Well, I'm not gonna use rust again for the forseeable future.

Follow the lik and check out the bit about fair use.

I've always considered Windows to be quite opaque.

Tech giants could pay 10% of turnover under draft UK law

What part didn't you understand? "Global" or "turnover"?

"this is still way better than a situation where tech giants manage to lobby the government to the point that no such laws are put into place."

Let's wait and see. This is early days.

Quantum computing: Hype or reality? OVH says businesses would be better off prepared

You could start trying to brute-force decryption now by conventional means. The only criteria to decide whether to do that are the cost and the likelihood of the result being useful when you get it and the "when" starts now. That will still be the case if you wait for quantum decryption. What's more, if you've already got the data the "when" still starts now. You have to work out whether a slow ongoing process will take longer than a long wait and a quick process. I don't suppose either process will be cheap.

Brit politicians, Big Tech grumble about India tech laws

Re: 'government-run "fact checking" unit'

In an environment where people seem free to introduce their own alternative facts the only approach to fact checking is to trust nobody, check for yourself and use the historian's source criticism skills, training in statistics and domain knowledge.

We're doomed, I tell you, doomed.

techUK's position that any trade deal should include "free and trusted cross-border data flows; a ban on data localisation requirements"

Are either of the parties in a position to earn trust? And isn't data localisation a good idea, always assuming that you can trust the place where it's localised which isn't going ot be easy with HMG's Online [Un]saftey Bill?

Where are we now – Microsoft 363? Cloud suite suffers another outage

Re: still having issues with shared calendars not being available for some O365 users

"Take the option to work in the Server Room !!!"

Once you're in there, install an instance of NextCloud and use that to share calendars.

Re: Making on-prem more expensive is a feature, not a bug

"Its a great scheme: Microsoft control the pricing of both on-prem and cloud, so they can raise the prices of both almost at will to get the most profitable outcome for each."

Only for their own products. If you don't like that situation you can go elsewhere. If you're totally sold on the idea that there are no alternatives, maybe you should review the market.

Mandiant's 'most prevalent threat actor' may be living under your roof – the teenager

Looking at that Twillio report as well as this article it appears that users are able to believe that security related messages will be sent to them by a channel that the business does not control, SMS.

There appears to be a need to establish a secure channel for such messages and well defined processes for expiry (or not) and reset of passwords, that the users are trained to recognise those and report any that fall outside them and that the training is reinforced, not only by repetition but also by tests with fake phishing programmes.

These attempts are succeeding because there are gaps in the users' knowledge of what to expect by way of genuine communication so close up those gaps.

That's cute. UK.gov gathers up £100M for AI super-models

I wonder how many times that money gets announced before it gets spent. Always assuming it does get spent.

Re: Eminently qualified

"who had his own app by the way"

Which, remembering the reports about that, is sufficient to rule him out.

Balloon-borne telescope returns first photos in search for dark matter

Re: Stabiliser?

Orientation might involve some interesting engineering, position not so much. When you're taking images of something as distant as galaxies you'd need to go a lot further than a side-wind might take you to worry about parallax or focussing.

IBM pauses counting its billions to trim Red Hat staff

That excessive growth has to be trimmed, otherwise it'll embarrass the rest of IBM.

"cutting all the HR talent recruiters who lived beyond a certain distance from Raleigh. That way they couldn’t be blamed for discrimination, but wow, what a way to lose talent indiscriminately."

That depends. The distance might be one beyond which, entirely coincidentally, only some older recruiters lived.

Techie sacked after jetting to tropical island on sick leave

Are we to assume that they still don't have enough people on duty and they're now worse off by one?

Microsoft suggests businesses buy fewer PCs. No, really

Re: 30 years or 800 years.....M$ supplies 5 minutes!!!!!

"but why can't I read or edit my M$ Word documents from 1990 using M$ software today?"

I thought it worked the other way round until MS got their arm twisted to sort of standardise the format. If you had Word x you couldn't read a .doc written with Word X+1 so you had to buy Word X + 1just to open documents someone else sent to you. But Word X + 1 had to be able to (usually) read a .doc written by Word X. Not even MS could have got away without that. I did come across one .doc with macros that was absolutely version specific and would simply hang the entire box that ran any other version.

Re: Citrix

Back about then I had a gig overseeing UAT for a server upgrade of an application I'd had a hand in developing years before that. The timing should make it clear this was strictly character-based stuff and they were using some sort of thin-client devices for at least some of their users. The UAT had gone ahead, the application had been cut over to the new H/W & everyone was happy. I was just about to pack up & go home when there was an urgent call to say somebody was now getting unacceptable performance.

It turned out that although it was supposed to be character based the business had bought some sort of package to GUIfy sessions. They weren't supposed to be using it but of course there's always one...

Your staff will be doing SFA until you send them home to work.

Of course it might be a fleet of JCBs we've not been told about but Microsoft seem to be doing the job quite nicely and sending them home to work won't help.

That 3CX supply chain attack keeps getting worse: Other vendors hit

Re: "Tapio was fired by the board [..] shortly after the breach"

"That was a very good start"

Providing it's not used by boards to cover up their own culpability.

Support chap put PC into 'drying mode' and users believed it was real

Re: Not his first rodeo

A lot of them fell foul of increasing clock speeds.