Posts by Doctor Syntax

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

Re: Strategy

It won't help the share price if investors are saying to themselves "Is that what he really thinks?".

Boffins find AI stumbles when quizzed on the tough stuff

It always pays to include a trick question: Can you explain how you worked out your answer?

Tenfold electric vehicles on 2030 roads could be a shock to the system

Re: NIMBY

There seems to be a whooshing sound round here and it's not wind turbines.

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

You're going to put a nuclear reactor on wheels?

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

The more immediate issue for motor vehicles is an energy store that isn't fossil and is portable. That's not going to be fusion. Where the energy that goes into the store comes from is SEP.

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

"What's not to like?"

Your garage burning down?

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

Do they have anything more than negativity to offer? Bearing in mind that the self-styled greens have run us into this situation over many decades.

Re: No shit

Terraced houses able to charge cars? No such luck round here - they either open direct onto the pavement or just have the narrowest strip of land between them and the pavement. Trip hazards of charging a car parked on the road would be a no-no. And there are a lot of properties like that. It just points up the lack of public charging infrastructure.

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

"Yes we ought to think about an alternative to petrol/diesel."

True. But I've no idea what it might be.

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

"it hasn't needed a report to show this"

The bad news is that it has. Successive HMGs seem to think that all they need to do is pass legislation setting targets of whatever and whenever and it'll all happen whilst lacking any notion of what actually has to be done.

The Just Stop Oil & similar should also read it. You can't just do this, that or the other. You have to plan, put real money in and work hard at implementing the plan over a number of years.

BOFH: Adventures in overenthusiastic automation

Safeties? No safeties with BOFH. The very idea!

"HIDE FOR TWO WEEKS THEN REPEAT LAST INSTRUCTION – INDEFINITELY."

I wonder how this language is parsed. It could hide for two weeks and them go into an infinite loop of dog-turn smearing or go into an infinite loop of one turd every two weeks. In the first instance extra error handling is needed unless there are a lot of dogs about.

Word turns 40: From 'new kid on the block' to 'I can't believe it's not bloatware'

Re: four decades on ...

That means you're writing two things, the text and the formatting instructions, in the same document but in two different languages. If you want to just concentrate on the text then just write that and then use whatever formatting application you want but I'd have thought WYSIWYG is going to eliminate a few print/review/fix-up cycles.

Re: Ah the memories...

"Hey MS... look customer feedback!"

MS: You think we care?

Somebody probably got a bonus for thinking up that wheeze.

Let's not forget the guerrilla marketing of upgrades. Each new version could read what an older version had written but not vice versa so that needing to read a document you might receive from someone on a later version forced you to buy an upgrade and in turn force upgrades onto anyone on an older version to whom you might then send a document.

That game stopped when a requirement for standardisation was forced on Microsoft.

What do do next?

Subscriptions, of course.

It could be. It could also be argued that it started life on Xenix.

Re: FreeOffice

"It would be more appropriate to talk about WordStar, WordPerfect, pfs:Write, or IBM's DisplayWrite. (Other ancient discontinued word processors are also unavailable.)"

Can I throw SmartWare into the list. An office suite for DOS including word processing.

Infosys co-founder calls for youth to work 70-hour weeks

Slowly?

"The 70-hour work week plan has another problem: it's illegal.

India’s Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code [PDF] limits working days to eight hours.

Aren’t billionaires and their opinions just great? "

That's easily solved. You define a few 21 hour days. Day one starts at 00:00ends at 21:00 and a new one then starts. That ends at what everyone else is claiming is 18:00 but is, on your redefinition, 21:00. That way you can have a 9 day week and can squeeze in 70 hours without even using up the full 8 hours per day. Anything is possible when you're a billionaire.

PIRG petitions Microsoft to extend the life of Windows 10

Re: My roadmap is "move to Linux" (for non-Mac users)

"it's the lack of an Outlook replacement that previously stopped me. But now we don't really use email at all."

There are plenty of email clients for Linux. Some of them pre-date Outlook. You may remember that Microsoft were late-comers to the internet. When Bill Gates finally realised that it wasn't going to go away there was panic all round to adapt.

Re: Updates are not that difficult

"basic updates of Win 10 should not cost MS much."

They cost them OEM sales. That's too much.

Your ex isn't the only one stalking your social media posts. The Feds are, too

Re: It's the users

It has allowed TPTB to get rid of that irksome presumption of innocence.

Re: El Reg comments are web 2.0...

Maybe implemented by Infosys's youth employees working 70 hour weeks.

Are you suggeting US presidents should be deleted?

On-by-default video calls come to X, disable to retain your sanity

Re: Not Holding Junk Debt

"I just cannot understand why anyone would take that job."

Money. If you don't pay the rent and the redundancy there's still enough money in the kitty to pay a CEO enough to make it worthwhile. When there isn't she'll move on - or retire on the profits (hers, not the company's).

Regulator delays Adobe's $20B buy of Figma, derails deal deadline

That probably means it's not a monopoly. Not being a monopoly is a Good Thing.

Not that I'd have any interest in using a graphics editor that relies on somebody else's computer.

"although Figma co-founder Dylan Field has said this won't happen"

Does he believe he'll have any say in the matter?

Firefox 119 unleashes PDF prowess and Sync sorcery

Re: Speed is of the essence

Hmm. Without making it the default I right clicked on a 272 page PDF and select Firefox (ESR version here, 115.4) to open. The first page was on screen in less than a second. However, I'll stick with Okular as the default.

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

"pay mega bucks to instil hated and loathing of your products and brand."

Could it possibly be that all these ads are placed by the competitors of the brands they're featuring? It's the only explanation that makes sense.

"But I still can't figure out how or why it would think I'd be interested in travelling to London, then Manchester."

It doesn't care whether you're interested in that at all. It only cares about selling advertising to Virgin. Virgin should be interested but YouTube is selling to Virgin's advertising department. If the advertising department get their views that's all they're interested in, that's what they get paid for. The fact the ads might piss off potential Virgin customers is beyond their comprehension.

"I'd have thought advertisers would have caught on to the fact that anybody actively blocking adverts really does NOT want to see them."

Advertisers are basically marketroids, narcissists who believe the entire world is waiting for their next frt, brain or otherwise. They cannot comprehend that anyone will not wish to see their ads or may react negatively to their product when the ads are thrust into their unwilling faces.

The advertising industry, in the meantime, has no interest in whether ads promote dispromote or have no effect at all on their customers sales. The only thing they sell is ads to advertisers.

Canada goosed as attackers shutter hospitals and China deepfakes its politicians

Re: "...trolls have moved into pretty convincing deepfake... "

You'll find the usage embedded in those online bastions of US language, the University of Cambridge dictionary, the Collins English dictionary, and no doubt, if I could bother walking across the room for my 1950ish Pocket Oxford, in there too.

And then in the Oxford edition of Fowler, the introduction quotes a 1911 letter from Fowler to his publishers:

"Not but what we may be of some use to the foreigner who knows English pretty well"

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Re: Easy to work out costs.

"You've missed out the bit about where Spain did no cost-benefit analysis (FWIW) on the programme before starting, and after the programme finished were unable to supply EU authorities with any information about how much the programme had cost."

Give or take the EU bit that sounds much like any UK govt I can recall.

Pro-Russia group exploits Roundcube zero-day in attacks on European government emails

"The exploit started with a convincing-looking phishing email that aimed to spoof the Microsoft Outlook team."

It depends on how you parse this. Any email purporting to be from the Microsoft Outlook team convincingly looks like phishing and should be treated as such.

AWS says it wants in on the European sovereign cloud game

Re: Contradictory

The sensible route would be franchising at arm's length to an EU owned, managed and staffed operation. I'm sure there are a few lawyers where they live would know about setting up franchises.

Re: Why Amazon??

AWS, Azure & Google cloud all have other businesses which can underpin the investment and, perhaps more crucially, brand names that even the potential customer board members can recognise.

"this will be physically and logically separate from existing AWS Regions"

What about legally, taking into consideration the reach of the US CLOUD Act?

RISC-V champ SiFive confirms it's laying off 1 in 5 workers

As I said in response to another report the other day, there's the staffing for their closest competitor, who knows their strengths and weaknesses and has all the contacts to hit the ground running.

Brits sign Axiom Space deal for human spaceflight in name of science

What sponsors?

Who's going to sign up before the next election so HMG can wave the flag?

AFAICS this is an agreement for a flight to be sponsored by commercial partners who are not only as yet unannounced but might not even have volunteered and with no announced objectives to be achieved in orbit. What is the point apart from PR the cost of which might very likely fall on UK taxpayers?

Former IBM Canada worker wins six-figure payout for wrongful dismissal

That's how you get even.

Don't get mad, get even.

It's 2023, so Lenovo made a bendy smartphone concept all about hybrid cloud AI

What I'd really like to see use a foldable screen; a full size laptop - e.g. the size of a 17.5" with a screen folding out to a full size monitor of about 35".

Re: And here it is clinging to a wrist.

"looking at their wrist to check the time"

You can do that! Who knew?

"has a foundational model uniquely personalized to the user [and] also has a knowledge base that adapts to patterns and usage with natural voice or text interaction capabilities."

Translation : "Slurp"

UK to crack down on imported Chinese optical fiber cables

"So the EU may previously have protected the French fibre producers at the expense of the UK."

How?

It is if you're a company producing optical fibre in the UK.

Google Cloud misses revenue estimates – and it's your fault, wanting smaller bills

Re: How to save money?

Even better - they may even arrive marked "Paid"

If Google can save cost by extending server life then maybe potential customers can do the same with their own servers and not even move to the cloud Google's.