Posts by Doctor Syntax

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

"gas holders are not how gas pressure is retained nowadays alas"

Nevertheless we have run gas fires and hob in outages. It's a big network and rather more resilient than the electricity supply.

No. Stratigraphically we're well below where the coal measures. But back in the 1950s there were these people who periodically arrived with wagons selling a few hundredweight of coal at a time.

The majority maybe only last for a few moments and present no threat (except for the one a couple of weeks ago that took out my ancient NAS ago the real killer was the 3 hour one a few days later when I'd got the firmware restored & was running a disk scan). It's the longer ones in winter when hypothermia sets in in the all electric households and nobody can call an ambulance.

There's a difference between pushing us into a brave new world of unreliable power supplies and requiring the electricity supply people to look up the word "resilience" in their dictionaries.

As things go we at least have a gas hob and a couple of gas fires so a power cut still leaves us with heat and limited cooking. Decarbonise utilities entirely and we would be pushed back way beyond the experience of >60 years ago when I grew up in a house without any electricity at all - but had gas and coal fires.

Re: Plug into back of broadband hub

From what I can make out a number of more recent routers have VOIP outlets and there are adapters. The bigger worry is if DV only works with BT lines what are the rest going to do. Last time I spoke to PlusNet I got an airy I'm sure they'll do something. If, as someone up thread mentioned, something is going to be nothing I'll count that as a termination of contract as the contract is for broadband and phone. Zen seem to be offering both and their FritzBox sounds rather snazzy with their reputation even more so.

Re: Absolute chaos

"so if 30 mins after your call, an ambulance is drifting around your village trying to find your address"

Or some other village if you tried What 3 Words & was misheard.

As I read it they're just installing a version of the Digital Voice whatnot back at what's left of the exchange and then running it over the copper as before. Or, cynically, given that the back-haul for the switch is already digital, they're just leaving everything as it is instead of disconnecting it with the rest.

"I have used DECT phones on the landline for probably 25 years."

I've also had DECT on the landline. I also have a POTS phone on it. It works when the power's out on account of a big bank of batteries about 2 miles away at the switch. I call up the electrickery people on it when the power goes off and the mobile signal's playing up.

Re: “Roads? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads” (Doc Brown)

IOW "Works for me"?

I'm wondering how effective battery backup in the home will be if the power in the FTTC footway box isn't backed up. Are these powered from the DC supply at the switch in the same way as POTS?

We seem to have increasing numbers of power cuts recently and mobile signal can't be fully relied on. Longest outage in c 20 or 21 was 17 hours.

Doom developer John Carmack thinks artificial general intelligence is doable by 2030

Re: Bard says...

They're really mashing up text that they've been given their material is words which only connect with other words. By the time you were capable of saying "Mama" and "Dada" and standing on two feet you were already building an internal model of the real world by virtue of being a physical entity and encountering other physical entities that constitute that external world. Other animal species also do this. Where words enter things is that you then learned to use them as symbols for those external entities and use them to better manipulate and extend that internal model. You associate words with objects in [your model of] the real world. That's what gives them and the ways in which you use them meaning. Those LLM gimmicks only associate words with other words. They have no other model with which to connect them. By drawing on the associations between words they can appear to be indistinguishable from real thought when things fall that way spew garbage otherwise. They have no meanings for the words outside the statistical associations..

That's because the Bar Exam is a series of questions which have been answered many times in the past. Train up on that and there is existing material to answer Bar Exam questions available to be mashed together and regurgitated. Require the preparation of documents for a new case and there is no material which has been prepared for the case so it has to provide a pastiche of the sort of papers it has been asked to prepare without any real guidance of what should be said.

In the Turing test that the prescribed thinking is that if you can't tell after 20 questions if the respondent is human or not, then its' a win for the "AI".

There are help desk agents who could fail the Turing test.

Re: "...thinks artificial general intelligence is doable by 2030"

There are rumours to that effect but I'm not convinced.

Re: "prototype AI to show signs of life."

"he definitely considered that his robots were intelligent"

They were also fictional.

First define intelligence. Not artificial intelligence, real intelligence because unless we agree on that we can't tell whether you've achieved your goal in producing an artificial version. Not in some airy-fairy philosophical terms but in terms which has be independently confirmed and agreed upon. 2030? Good luck in achieving that first step by then. Otherwise you're simply putting whatever you've got in a box, calling it AI and claiming success.

I've just finished re-reading Feynman's appendix to the Challenger report. His last sentence is something that should be borne in mind by anyone making such claims:

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

MOVEit breach delivers bundle of 3.4 million baby records

It's as if FTP never existed - nor SCP, SFTP...

Long-term support for Linux kernels is about to get a lot shorter

It's about the age of a lot of Debian by the time it's released!

Currently the two previous versions are still maintained as Old Stable and the two previous to that have LTS which I believe is commercial rather than community. The oldest was released in 2015. Current Stable was released in June this year running kernel 6.1.

Car industry pleads for delay to post-Brexit tariffs on EVs

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

"But for anyone who can charge their car at home"

That's the problem. A large percentage (of the order of 30% I read the other day) can't. They have to be provided for.

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

"Sounds about right, though I would think that you probably don't need *all* the spaces to be electrified because many people will have home chargers and will arrive at the car park with a full-ish battery."

You'd need to avoid the situation of arriving in the car park to find all the electrified places occupied but not all the chargers not being used because the car gets charged at home. It might still not be 100% but for locations such as motorway service stations it would need to approach it. I almost invariably manage to avoid buying petrol at a motorway service station because of the price but for charging an EV on a long journey it might be inevitable. And how does the infrastructure for a concentration of rapid chargers get put into place?

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

Of course that ignore the question of why all these cars are driving around. A lot of modelling and, even worse, policy seems to assume it just happens for no reason other than that it can. A very great deal of it is conveying people to and from employment and a great deal of that is the consequence of half-arsed planning legislation (at least in the UK) for the last 70 years or so. One of the principles of that was to separate where people live from where they work for reasons which may have seemed good in the days of heavy industry but which are irrelevant today. Couple that with the inadequacy of public transport and the economy depends on people driving cars into congested centres.

Nothing can be acieved until that gets unravelled and the unravelling has to start with government. Government should be incentivising a mixture of WFH which would include working AT home but also the possibility of fragmenting work spaces into smaller units which can be located close to where people live. Not just incentivising but setting an example. Instead we have numpties demanding to see bums on seats in HMG offices in central London. That's how bad it is.

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

"What we need is joined-up planning"

And experience says that's not going to happen.

"Frankly, you might as well get the forecasts from Gartner, they're no more likely to be right."

That's just cruel.

Re: All that is happening

I should have added "and some of them really don't like being reminded about it".

Re: All that is happening

"The real story should be why such a course of action is so unpalatable to the UK."

It's unpalatable to half of the UK because we told the other half and they didn't want to listen or didn't believe it so we're lumbered with it. It's unpalatable to the other half because they were told and didn't want to listen, didn't believe it and probably in many cases still don't so they've lumbered themselves and us with it.

Re: I'm confused....

If it wasn't minimising the effect of Brexit the tariff would be a whole lot more.

Re: Nationalism or a Green Transition.

"because there won't be enough EVs in the continent of Europe for decades"

And if there were there wouldn't be the public charging infrastructure to support them.

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

No but it evens out the load.

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

That could be supply and demand but hydrogen is certainly tricky stuff to handle. But I've no doubt supply and demand is operating between EV sales and public charging infrastructure is holding back EVs. It's not just range concerns, it's the huge percentage of properties with no private car parking where home chargers an be located and to a lesser extent charging times. I can always find a choice of petrol pumps with minimal queuing and only occupy one of them for a few minutes at a time. I can point to rows of houses near home with no chance of installing private charging facilities with numbers of vehicles parked outside far in excess of the capacity of the few local chargers. If government is serious about getting a move to EVs they need to take action to ensure that is remedied. The only effect of banning sales of ICE vehicles will be to grossly extend the working lives of the existing fleet and/or create an underclass who have no means of transport, bus services being a fraction of what they were 60 years ago. It's no use passing legislation that is little more than a pius hope greenwashing.

Not too much point building EVs if they can't put an adequate public charging infrastructure in place. But don't worry. HMG has assured us building EVs is one of the many things for which the UK is the best place in the world.

Mixin suspends deposits and withdrawals after $200m cryptocurrency heist

Oh dear. This has never happened to any other crypto exchange. We're really unlucky.

Try the other one. It's got bells on.

No customer left behind, SAP's Klein tells users angered by cloud-only decision

Re: at least they are honest now?

It's anonymised but there's this bunch of data about the Acme Mk 10...

Have I got this right?:

1. We're not going to leave you behind

2. We're going to leave you behind

3. If we leave you behind at least we're not going to slurp your data to feed the AI

4. If we don't leave you behind we're going to slurp your data to feed the AI

US Trademark Office still wants to keep faxes, but is willing to try this cloud thing

Re: not quite simultaneous

Should still be ordered by time of receipt and hence transmission. If it's buffered by the sender they've only themselves to blame. But it wouldn't be stored & forwarded during actual transmission unlike email.

"The USPTO doesn't want any responses faxed - just emailed, which begs the question why that wouldn't work as a fax alternative."

Let me guess. With patents precedence matters. If the situation arises that two inventors submit similar claims at more or less the same time they need to decide who has precedence. With fax they know - transmission and reception are simultaneous. Enail is store and forwards so time of receipt is no indication of time of transmission and if that same situation arises they won't know and the loser will always claim theirs was first but delayed and/or dirty tricks were played with clock setting.

OTOH a prolonged outage of all forms of communication to USPTO wouldn't lose anything of value to humanity as a whole.

California governor vetoes bill requiring human drivers in robo trucks

At least it's an experiment that's running a very safe distance from me. The downside is that i won't see one of these attempting our local trap for HGV drivers using satnavs configured for cars but I can live with that. Literally.

Google killing Basic HTML version of Gmail In January 2024

There are a couple of alternatives which can be used singly or together: a local email client and a better mail service provider.

OSIRIS-REx successfully delivers NASA's first asteroid sample

"it could potentially have these organic building blocks that started life here on Earth"

I suppose everyone's forgotten the Miller Urey experiment that told us there's no need to throw the problem over the panspermia wall.

T-Mobile US exposes some customer data – but don't call it a breach

So it's not a breach of security if you leak it yourself?

UK procurement is too glacial to bring AI into defense, MPs told

"The UK's procurement processes are not fit to bring AI into the nation's military capabilities, lawmakers heard at a parliamentary hearing."

Thank goodness for that.

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

Re: So the system didn't cut the ringtone when the phone was picked up

I'd like to find one to integrate a USB document camera into X-Sane.

Oh, you meant that sort of "sane".

Re: So the system didn't cut the ringtone when the phone was picked up

"because, obviously, who would configure a 90-second ringtone ?"

They made an assumption. Any assumption quickly becomes a limitation if not a bug. Assume as little as possible, Even so it should be a requirement of ringing a phone that the ring tone ill be cut off as soon as it's answered.

Microsoft hiring a nuclear power program manager, because AI needs lots of 'leccy

WFR

Windows For Reactors

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

I think Zen will be my next ISP.

Re: Interest, expertise and time

"sadly still on FTTC"

Not sadly at all as far as I'm concerned. C is only a few hundred metres away so fast enough. Why pay more?

Just go back to using a router of my own. Had to buy another because the older ones had died or probably full of unaddressed CVEs. One of the advantages of that is thet a more modern one combines the FTTC modem whereas the old setup had a separate emodem.

Re: Whoops !!!

"Cloning the MAC Address of the original ISP router can be useful to avoid 'simple' detection if you replace the router"

Didn't bother, just stuck a TP-Link in as was. Only issue with that, several generations of router have been quite happy to live with the name I chose to give the router in my hosts file. This one doesn't like it so I just use the IP address to connect to it.

Another reason not to use the ISP's router - they can't log in remotely as PlusNet did with mine, lock it down and prevent me reconfiguring the DHCP reserved IP addresses I'd previously set up when it was still open to configuration from the LAN side.

Fujitsu to quit Tokyo HQ

There's also a "dogfooding" aspect to the move. Fujitsu currently emphasizes its "Uvance" digital experience practice and methodologies.

Unlike some companies we could think of.

Of course it's possible they might need to sell off property to pay compensation to ex-sub-postmasters - if so, not before time. Justice delayed is justice denied.

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Re: Dirty environments for Computers

The old percussive maintenance.