Posts by Doctor Syntax

Lost your luggage? That's nothing – we just lost your whole flight!

I suppose that even with Maryland cookies it's possible to get to a point where you never want to see another,

Re: UAT into PROD clone...classic!

Or work as a pair and check each other's commands.

"realising I had not highlighted the WHERE statement"

Maybe a GUI front end isn't ideal for database administration.

I keep saying the prime requirement for a DBA is paranoia. I suppose Leo acquired his more or less instantly.

Re: LIMIT 1 before running an SQL statement

Or, as "already?" said above, start off with a SELECT or SELECT COUNT with the appropriate WHERE clause.

Musk's first year as Twitter's Dear Leader is nigh

Re: Where's Bond?

Including a hollowed out volcano?

Re: Twitter^h^h^h^h^h^h^hX

The contents do.

Re: Social media is overrated

Up until the last sentence - or have I tripped over Poe's law there?

Re: Mastodon remains the most exciting alternative

"As an end user of Mastodon I do find it a bit confusing that you have to select a particular server to join with"

I suppose the answer would be one well publicised server for onboarding new users until they find their way around. Call it omething like JoinMastadonHere.

Not very well, maybe but better than expected. It's still there.

NASA delays already-late $1B Psyche probe's visit to metal-rich asteroid

Re: Issues with the spacecraft bus and flight software?

"Issues with the spacecraft bus"

's OK. There'll be 3 coming togehter any minute now.

Lyft driver takes off with cat, global search ensues

Re: That's criminal

And even if it was it might not be possible to prove it.

Techies at Europe's biggest council have 8 weeks to pull finance reports from Oracle system

With any luck Kirklees will follow.

Re: Those close to the project are skeptical

"A deadline from the auditors should hopefully at least force a confirmation of whether reliable data actually exists."

It would only be possible to confirm whether the data's reliable if they know what it should say.

Now MOVEit maker Progress patches holes in WS_FTP

If it includes sftp that's at least a start. But bolting on a GUI would be worrying.

And yes, I have tried configuring sendmail. Once. Long ago.

We've been pushing information backwards and forwards between boxes for longer than the almost 40 years since I started in IT. FTP is one of the oldest tools I've used for the job. There have been some long standing, solid implementations since well before .Net was even thought of. Why anyone thought a reinvention of that wheel should be necessary is beyond my comprehension. And countless sysadmins have scripted ftp and the like into their processes for years without the need for some 3rd party overlay which I presume is to make it easier for businesses that aren't prepared to employ admins with scripting skills.

Adding that up it's a substantial increase of the attach surface most likely accompanied by a weakening of the guard. Is anyone surprised we have problems like this? And weren't we supposed to replace FTP with something that didn't sedn passwords in plain text years ago?

PhD student guilty of 3D-printing 'kamikaze' drone for Islamic State terrorists

Re: (that implies) universities are more interested in the income than the quality of research.

For some value of supervision.

Re: Looks like something a 10 year old designed!

That implies that the universities are more interested in the income than the quality of research. WHo'd 'a' thunk it?

Re: The cops also reportedly discovered at the home an IS application form,

Given that the "S" stands for "State" a Civil Service attitude is to be expected.

CERN experiment proves gravity pulls antimatter the way Einstein predicted

Re: we've only made enough antimatter ...

Or four candles.

55-inch Jamboard and app ecosystem tossed into the Google graveyard

It would have avoided the ill-will if Google had said we'll send an update to remove the internet dependency and provide a cross-platform application to replace the functionality locally.

Re: Another Solution In Search Of A Problem

"A good smartboard makes quite a difference from a traditional whiteboard"

But does it make enough difference to justify the cost?

Going out of its way? No, this is its way.

EFF urges Chrome users to get out of the Privacy Sandbox

Re: Give us the money

It did.

Re: only a matter of time

FireFox is your choice of browser. What if, next release they decide the number of FF users isn't worth bothering about? After all, the other choices are all WebKit based.

Re: only a matter of time

Sadly, it's getting more difficult as more and more sites and applications are taking it upon themselves to dictate users' choice of browser. It's even sadder when FOSS applications start doing this - looking at you, NextCloud.

Re: Regulators are indeed a pain in the arse.

"All GDPR did was lock European users out of some American sites "

What you mean is that the response of some American* sites to GDPR was to lock themselves out of the European* market.

* Adopting the OP's usage of the terms.

If I don't want adverts thrust in my face there are NO relevant adverts. Any which are shown to me are liable to bias me away from whatever product is being pushed should that product class subsequently become relevant.

The only time ads become relevant is when I'm explicitly searching for something. If I search for excavation report of Ballygobackwards horned cairn adverts for hotels wouldn't be relevant. If I search for hotels near Ballygobackwards they would. If I were to get an hotel ad in response to the first it would bias me away from that hotel on its appearance in response to the second.

It is, of course, not in the advertising industry's interests to understand this. It would be very much in the advertisers' interest to understand it, however, and to insist that the advertising industry take note; unfortunately narcissism is likely to imped this.

UTM: An Apple hypervisor with some unique extra abilities

It's emulators all the way down.

Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

Re: Landscape/portrait

"i wholeheartedly concur with your point about the utility of talking with real users."

OTOH - S/W prints picking list. Users then enter the serial numbers of what's been picked. They should then print the despatch not, complete with serial numbers and "Despatch Note" printed across the top. No amount of talking with them would stop them writing the SNs on the picking list and sending it out as a despatch note.

Try resizing your windows to something more appropriate.

Re: delivering an early release driver.

It sounds more like an act of revenge against a nuisance customer.

Re: Monitors need monitoring

It's always the knob that works the monitor that needs fixing.

Re: Only 2.5 years in the NHS ....

"because they had to be bought when the budget was available"

That's standard public sector accounting and maybe some private sector places as well. If only they'd let you spend the budget on gold bars until it's really needed....

It depends entirely on what you're using. Plain vi - maybe portrait is OK providing it doesn't sacrifice line length. IDE's I've seen tend to have various panels, toolboxes or whatever lined up side-by-side for which landscape is ideal, otherwise you might end up with a line length of about 30 chars for your code. But even it you're just using plain vi you may well want some sort of reference material in view so that's either a second monitor or two portrait windows side-by-side on a landscape display.

For almost anything I do landscape works out best to cope with several windows open at any one time.

Infosys launches aviation cloud it claims can halve lost luggage

Re: 5%???

The best ML can do there is learn that it's usually the bastards in shed 3 who CBA to get their dodgy scanner fixed. But everyone else probably knows that already.

"Therefore it does nothing."

But it does do something. It transfers money to Infosys.

Former IBM services outfit Kyndryl said to be mulling China split

ARM's experience with it's Chinese - errm - arm night be a hint to go carefully here.

More and more LLMs in biz products, but who'll take responsibility for their output?

Re: "There is no liability to the model"

Other jurisdictions might not be quite so prescriptive. It's interesting in that some vendors, e.g. MS & Alamy are saying they'll indemnify against copyright violations*. It's going to become very messy for a while. It could be a question of deciding who's best to sue, balancing depth of pockets for paying compensation vs depth of pockets for defending the case.

* I wonder if that's to discourage whoever called up the material that's being challenged turning witness for the plaintiff against them.

"The simple answer is no,"

The definitive answer is the one the judge gives if the issue ever goes to court.

Zuck dives deeper into the metaverse, dragging Snoop Dogg along for ride

"make judgements about them based on it."

Or make judgements based on judgements of their parents based on what the parents chose to post.

Volkswagen stuck in neutral after 'IT disruption'

TITSUP

Teutonic Industry Totters - Stops, Ultimately - Production

"Some of Volkswagen’s operations have screeched to a halt"

It could be worse. A handbrake turn might have set the lines to run the other way.

NTT will take those SAP licenses off your hands if it helps ease cloud migration

Re: Really?

And because migration out will be even harder.

The alternative to stopping climate change is untested carbon capture tech

Re: Carbon sinks

Forests will achieve a steady state. The standing crop represents carbon not floating about as CO2 but long term it's going to be a fixed quantity.

Re: Carbon sinks

I haven't looked at figures but I've noted in passing comments that simply planting trees isn't going to be adequate. One factor is going to be that it takes some years for a newly planted tree to develop much of a canopy for photosynthesis and mature forest is going to be in more or less steady state with respiration and decay matching photosynthesis. The standing crop represents the CO2 captured in the long time it took to get there. If you look at a substantial tree and take into account the time it took to get to that size it will be a disappointingly small amount of CO2 per year. Less woody materials such as bamboo will be quicker then trees starting from cleared ground although you'd need to harvest them and store them.

It's also worth noting that carbon stored in roots and humus in pasture represents a greater standing crop than arable crops and grazed grassland is a natural ecosystem with which the planet has lived for a long time. That's worth bearing in mind when deciding whether vegetarianism is helpful dealing with climate change* and also remembering that pasture is more floristically diverse than arable, especially if it's not intensively conducted.

* I've never been convinced that it represents anything more than switching methane production from the livestock to the vegetarians.

Re: Carbon sinks

"In absence of oxygen" is the key here. Waterlogged soils, e.e.g peat bogs, can halt decay (but see below) but over the last few centuries these have been drained leading to carbon dioxide being liberated as they decay. Most places you'd bury anything would not be sufficiently waterlogged.

Even in waterlogged soils preservation can vary. Bog oak and pine is pretty solid. On the other hand any sub-fossil birch I came across in my days as a palaeoecologist was usually in a pretty miserable condition so most of the carbon would have been returned to the atmosphere. I have encountered a fairly solid lump of hazel in a core - just where it wasn't wanted.

But on the whole, if you want to bury wood and prevent it being oxidised in any reasonable time frame it needs to be reduced to charcoal.

After failing at privacy, again, Google is working to keep Bard chats out of Search

Re: "We're working on blocking them from being indexed now"

It requires forethought, that's why.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Re: Pi on the moon

"a cross between a Wagon Wheel and..."

Does that mean it keeps shrinking?

PS If Jamie from The Pi Hut is reading this: 1. It gets thoroughly annoying having everyone who sells something following up with an email touting for feedback/reviews 2. Try looking at your email in plain text and decide if that's the impression you really want to give 3. Opt-out on emails that were never requested is BAD. 5. Spamming from No-reply addresses is WORSE. 6. Note to self - never order from Pi-Hut again.