Posts by Doctor Syntax

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

Thunderbird? Mail, RSS and Usenet all in one place.

Re: IRC

"Google intentionally killed it."

When? It was working last time I looked, about 10 seconds ago.

PlusNet offers Usenet. I know because I use it. I don't know off-hand whether parent BT does.

They also still offer email as far as I know. Dropping that would be a silly move because it locks in users - which is why I haven' used an ISP provided email for years.

You may find that your ISP provides a newsgroup feed as part of your subscription, probably linking to Giganews.

I think the September bit of Eternal September came from annual influx of newbies who'd just arrived at college in the US and got their first internet connection. They would quickly absorb netiquette and things would quieten down till the next September. Then AOL arrived.

Chinese vendor apologizes for claiming Microsoft open source code was its own product

Maybe it could be forked by adding a start up popup displaying a random entry from the FONT (File Of Naughty Things).

Re: "with a small amount of modification and some functions added"

A good programmer would have dealt with the copyright notices?

Germany's wild boars still too radioactive to eat largely due to Cold War nuke tests

Re: Question

It would be the situation in a nuclear reactor before it had a big hole in the top. What came out of the big hole would have been what was produced before the big hole was made.

Re: Care?

Geologists define geological periods. If they define us as being within a new period than, by definition, we are. It may, in your eyes, be an arbitrary definition but that's the nature of geology. On the one hand changes are unusually gradual but they are none the less real and it's not feasible to understand the Earth's history without dividing it into phases of some sort. Given that we have become a major influence on the processes that happen on the Earth's surface it would be foolish not to recognise a new phase.

University cuts itself off from internet after mystery security snafu

Re: Confused.......

University network has one internet connection - if that connection gets attacked the entire university network is attacked.

Individuals use their phones for a network connection - if one of the phones gets attacked that phone and whatever's been linked to is attacked. But assuming that the entire university intranet isn't connected to that one phone everyone else's phone connections are OK.

Re: Cybersecurity tracker BetterCyber tweeted Monday

"tends to X these days instead of 'tweeting"

Xcrete?

Meteorite is 4.6 billion years old and still rocking the solar system dating scene

I'm not sure I've fully grasped it but checking with Wikipedia it seems that Al26/Mg ratios give a date for the meteorite falling to Earth. Al26 is produced by action of cosmic rays on Si while it's in space. That process stops when it lands so the ratio of Al26:Mg tells you how long it's been sitting there on the Earth's surface. One of the awkward bits here is that it Al26 will have been decaying to Mg while it was in orbit. I suppose the lead dating must be the key to working out how much of the Mg would have been present when it fell.

But the paper then says there's too high a ratio of Al26:Al27. This is the what seems odd to me. I take it the Al27 is s component of the cosmic dust from which the meteorite was formed while the Al26 is generated subsequent to the meteorite's formation. As they have different mechanisms by which they arrive in the meteorite's contents why should there be a prior expectation of any particular ratio?

I think I must be missing something here but what is it?

HP blames discounted PCs and China chill for Q3 revenue drop

Is it too much to hope that printer sales are suffering because the public is finally starting to realise what HP Ink are getting up to?

Japan complains Fukushima water release created terrifying Chinese Spam monster

"There is, in fact, plenty more in your body depending on your age weight because when we were doing atmospheric nuclear testing, we put a lot more of it up there."

FTFY

With a half live over 5k very little of it will have decayed so it's still in circulation. However the more carbon you have the more C14 you have.

IIRC C14 provides about 12 disintegrations per minute per gram of carbon in your body (or in any other biological material).

Re: new

"some chunks were located and recovered by teams with detectors"

I used to know someone who was on one of those teams. He said they used scintillation screens to locate particles.

Re: Carbon 14

"Again, modern computers make this kind of thing pointless"

Not really. You still need a measurement of background to subtract from the counts.

In the Belfast C14 dating lab the methane counter was in a pit with some old steel sheets above that and concrete paving slabs (not reinforced) sitting on top of the steel and forming the floor of an office. Eventually the office was repurposed to house the scintillation counter for the benzene system. The methane counter was 1.5 litre, a much bigger target for cosmic rays then the few mls of benzene in a vial so the scintillation counter didn't need that shielding. The problem with the scintillation counter was K40 in the vials. The vials had to be individually calibrated for background.

Re: Carbon 14

The precision depends largely on how long you're prepared to count* sample, background** and standard.*** The possibility of fractionation - changes in isotope rations between photosynthesis and the preparation of the sample for counting - meant that C12/C13 ratios were measured by MS and that precision of that measurement had to be factored in to the overall calculation. Somewhere I probably still have a listing of my program to calculate all this.

However the calculation of calendric dates assumes that the C12/C14 ratio in the atmosphere remained constant. It didn't. Practice now seems to be to use "calibrated" dates corrected by dendro/C14 measurements. At best the calibration curve carries the error bars due to the precision of the C14 measurements used to construct it and this widens the precision of the calibrated date. Even worse, the non-linearities of the calibration curve can widen them much worse for certain dates. This, unfortunately buggers up the answer to a fairly basic question: are these two dates different? In essence that means: do the net counting rates differ? It may well be the case that a calculation on the bare dates would have shown that they do but the extra baggage of calibrated dates could hide that.

* I'm harking back to the days of measuring radiometrically. Since my day mass-spectrometry came to be used for the actual C12/C14 measurement. I'm so long out of that I've no idea what the present day practice or mix of practices is.

** i.e. the background due to cosmic rays and any emissions from the equipment. It's done by filling the counting chamber with inert methane, benzene or whatever.

*** Back in the day this was - maybe still is - a sample of oxalic acid distributed by the US NBS. 95% of this was supposed to correspond to "present" which was set at 1950. Why oxalic acid was chosen I have no idea. It was inconvenient, at least for us and I suspect for most if not all labs. We started by charring any sample that wasn't already carbonised to prevent getting tar from one sample deposited in the pipework and then getting into later samples. The sample was then burned in a stream of pure oxygen for the methane system or heated with lithium to produce lithium carbide for the benzene system. AFAICR the oxalic acid was burned directly without charring. I suppose the NBS expected us to release CO2 chemically**** but even if it had been feasible to introduce an alternative wet chemistry process into the system I doubt we'd have wanted to.

**** Yes, Iknow burning is a chemical reaction.

"Of course, it's a little absurd that South Korea and Hong Kong are testing seafood that may have been caught before the release of water started on August 24, caught far away, or spent very little time anywhere near Fukushima's discharge."

Their actual thinking might be absurd. If they were thinking rationally they might still do this - as a control to compare with subsequent measurements.

Re: Carbon 14

IIRC it was cobalt 60 we were worrying about. We had a good source of old steel locally - the Belfast shipyard. C14 & tritium are weak beta emitters. That's not going to penetrate the measuring equipment from outside.

The printout may be dead but that beast of a print queue lives on

Re: What's striking is how many of the fixes were either technically possible but not implemented..

"Get to market first"

Then buy the company that took the time to get it right.

Print queues go back way beyond PCs. They go back to mainframe line printers and those were terrifying machines when you consider what could and sometimes did go wrong. But like all queues they're necessary to match progress through some fixed speed process and the arbitrary creating of work for it. But the old mainframe printer would have had a human in attendance as part of a larger job - mounting and unmounting tapes, running punched card stacks and so on. Its queue would be fed by batch jobs so duplicate submissions would be unlikely unless the operator had determined a print job was irretrievably lost. If a shared printer/print queue combination is giving rise to multiple job submissions it isn't the fault of the print queue, it's the fault of the users, lack of their training or general organisation which assumes looking after the printer is everybody's job. It's a well established principle that if something is everybody's job it ends up as nobody's job.

None of which is relevant to the stupidity of relying on somebody else's computer when it's not necessary of of leaving a potentially hazardous machine to its own devices howwever inconvenient that might be.

This profiler chatbot promises to help speed up your Python – we can believe it

If you can optimise it with an external optimiser why not just build that capability into the runtime? The most easy to use option isn't a chatbot, it's not having to explicitly use it at all.

We're about to hit peak device count, says HTC veep, as AR takes over

I think the bowl of Petunias had it right.

FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

Re: Strangely enough ...

And when you need a new process you just exec one instead of firing up a whole new kernel to run it. Seriously, if I follow the description correctly this is what's happening: job needs a new process so spend 25ms firing up a new server, new server then execs the required process and somewhere along the line the new process server has also to work out how to connect to the process server that needed it. Marketing then calls it "serverless computing". "Yes, Minister" series one, episode one had a name for that: "getting rid of the difficult bit in the title".

NHS watchdog expresses vendor lock-in concerns over Federated Data Platform deal

I'm afraid that the Dunning-Kruger wing of the party thinks it should be above the law. This is very dangerous and the sooner it finds itself unelectable the better. I feel sorry for One Nation Tories.

"That deal was subject to the threat of judicial review"

It's increasingly clear that it needed to be more than a threat.

More UK cops' names and photos exposed in supplier breach

Re: "Security measures have been taken by the MPS as a result of this report," the statement said

Lessons should be learned from mistakes but it's best if you can learn them from other people's mistakes.

Wordpress sells 100-year domain, hosting plan for $38K

Re: Do you remember?

Did they specify who or what's lifetime? Obviously the lifetime of the servers.

"The outfit's CMS is currently built on 28-year-old PHP, rated the seventh-most-used language on GitHub in 2022 – down from third place in 2014. Wordpress also employs the open source MySQL relational database, which is controlled by 46-year-old Oracle."

it's not so much the technology becoming obsolete that I'd challenge - after all a site is just data and that can be migrated. If I were splashing out that money I'd want to see what arrangements they had for putting money into a fund that could pay a hundred years' of hosting costs. But then I don't suppose those who are going to go for this are the sort of people who think about enquiring as to the arrangements to pay for a hundred years of hosting.

Re: The sound of whalesong and the smell of incense are strong with this one

"Whether it's giving a newborn the special gift"

The Barnum principle - there's one born every minute - seems to have reached marketing in a slightly distorted form.

It's certainly a new twist on unlimited storare, bandwidth etc.

Aerial cable tangles are still being strung up, but carriers are slowly burying the problem

"above ground cables will face more outages"

I'm not sure. We have about 2-300 metres underground to the sub-station. In about 22 years our connection to the cable in the road failed, then the neutral developed a resistance of several ohms, dimming the lights when the kettle, etc, was switched on and a short in the cable damaged the adjacent gas main (17 hours for the double repair). Our neighbours subsequently suffered a failed connection at the same point that we did and most recently the road was closed for a couple of days for emergency repairs 2-300 mtered on the other side of the substation.

OTOH there's an overhead connection from the pole opposite our house that's supposed to just supply street lights further along the road but was and possibly still is also supplying houses on overhead lines because their regular supply was/is faulty. A tree branch shorted that one out in a gale a year or two ago. (I must try to take down that tree but with the wires so near it's not easy.)

Polishing off a printer with a flourish revealed not to be best practice

Re: Stories from Grandad

I suppose you'd switched it off at the mains so he'd lean over to see why it wasn't working.

It was a shining example of how not to add a sparkling finish to a job.

Re: Stories from Grandad

It's stories from the future that need a time machine.

Whiffy malware stinks after tracking location via Wi-FI

"Ransomware actors don't like cyber insurance, becuase if their target has a policy it can cover the cost of remediation, therefeore reducing the incneitve to pay a ransom."

OTOH the victim may be better placed to pay if they can claim on insurance. I'm not sure this is a carefully worked out approach.

Bodhi Linux 7 brings Enlightenment to Ubuntu

Re: Tell me that Linux is never going to be a mainsteam option without telling me....etc.

"but the difference is that on Windows, people already know what to look for"

Do they? Or is it that Windows is now a vehicle for selling software much of which comes as standard with Linux?

If a Windows user wants, say a PDF editor and it's not something for which MS have included an advert do they know by osmosis what a suitable Windows PDF editor is or do they turn to their favourite web search?

OTOH I wish KDE would take a look at all the queries about making Discover work. It needs to be moved from the only just works* to the Just Works category.

* Allegedly. I've never seen it work at all.

Profits just keep rolling in at T-Mobile US. So only thing to do is axe 5,000 workers

Re: Old El Reg quote fits here

You place too much confidence in the efficiency of HR.

Re: The ManSpeak / PR Department Seems To Be Fully Staffed

What it comes down to is having intelligent and talented managers and there aren't enough of those to go round. The vacuum is filled with MBAs.

"retaining customers had become more expensive of late"

This smacks of management by ChatGPT

Manglement: Retaining customers is costing too much. What should we do?

ChatGPT: Save money by not retaining customers.

Manglement: How do we do that?

ChatGPT: Cut staff to provide a worse service, then the customers will go away.

US Republican party's spam filter lawsuit against Google dimissed

Re: Simple

The notion of free speech on the internet conveniently forgets that somebody has to pay for the bandwidth. The spammers' free speech arrives at the cost of my ISP subscription.

Re: More performative bullshit

Isn't that the very definition of "anti-American" to support the overthrow of the American governmental system?

I'm not sure. Having done it once it seems to be regarded as the epitome of being American. Hence also the right to get shot bear arms.

Re: No bias found, but…

I suppose if the spam gets filtered into oblivion it might actually work to their advantage. The intended recipients don't see it and get pissed off by it and the senders. Because that's the likeliest outcome of spamming.

Simple

You send spam, you go to the spam folder. What else did you expect?

Politicians, advertisers and marketroids all share the same mentality: they believe the entire world is waiting to revel in their next fart, brain or otherwise, and anything that gets in the way must just be wrong, wrong, wrong.

Hope for nerds! ChatGPT's still a below-average math student

"the largest performance gap between ChatGPT and students was for math-related questions, followed by trick questions"

So for courses other than mathematics, throw in a few trick questions.

Dropbox limits ‘all the storage you need’ unlimited plan, blames abusive users

Re: the company saw more of this abusive behavior

It's probably more a case of marketing overruling engineering and advertising unlimited service despite being told they can't provide it.

Europe's tough new rules for Big Tech start today. Is anyone ready?

Given the whining this produced from big tech ISTM that they are indeed expecting expert scrutiny.

Zoom CEO reportedly tells staff: Workers can't build trust or collaborate... on Zoom

Re: I suggest the author is missing the point

Would he be prepare to put his the company's money where his mouth is? Pay commuting time as company time, pay commuting costs and pay for relocation for those who have moved out of commuting range?

Their problem. They have a choice of two problems to solve: that one and getting no rent.

"Unfortunately it would also mean that the owners of these buildings would have to invest into remodelling for residential use, only to see a lot less income (it might even be below of what they can get from tax write-offs), and then there often also are zoning laws which prohibit using commercial real estate for residential purposes."

The income from residential would still be more than the zero from an empty property. Tax write-offs only become worth while it you have income on which you're paying tax.

The local authorities are already complaining that lack of people going in to work means the small businesses which used to provide services for those people are closing down, they're losing the income from those property taxes and the whole place is starting to look run down. If they're against re-zoning they need to start joining the dots.

Re: Context is everything

"the next job required a 15 minute walk and two changes (the middle bus being a city-to-city express)"

I once looked at the timings for a 3 stage commute like that. It meant leaving home at about 6:25 am to get to the client site a tad after 9:00 am. The first step took 10 minutes longer than it used to do because the bus has been re-routed to amalgamate 2 routes. There was then a 40 minute wait to change buses. The other change had a 4 minute gap, easily eroded by the vagaries of an over-crowded motorway and weather conditions delaying the "express". Miss that 3rd bus and it was another 15 minute delay. The direct route was about 25 miles, 40 - 45min by car. I never got round to working out how long the return would have taken.

Re: Context is everything

sod the rest of the world or anyone who actually produces something tangible ie the stuff <s?without which there would be no need for IT at all</s> which, without IT wouldn't be produced at all.

FTFY

I used to reckon that I had a better grasp than at least some of the management about the implications of their ideas on various parts of the business because IT was threaded through multiple departments. e.g. Marketing want to sell direct rather than through distributors - have they told accounts who'll have to handle more and smaller payments and looked at the implications for staffing and costs?