Posts by Doctor Syntax

On the record: Apple bags patent for iDevice to play LPs

Re: Sooo....

My first laptop had interchangeable optical and floppy drives. IIRC it also had a second drive bay on a cable so both could be used.

Florida man accused of hoarding America's secrets faces fresh charges

"jack-of-all-trades"

Don't you think that's pitching the skill levels a bit high? What sort of job could he be set to in the US work-for-your-keep prison system?

School for semiconductors? Arm tries to address chip talent shortages

OTOH The US is having development of a plant put on hold due to shortage of skilled labour. Not my area but I'd guess the skill shortages include preparation of masks, adjustment of the machines and handling of various nasty chemicals involved. I'm sure others here could add to and correct that list.

One thing you omitted to mention is wafer manufacture. There will be a whole lot of specialist skills involved in that.

These are skills of which there are probably not many holders at any age level. I doubt anyone holding them will be unable to get a job at any age but it's not surprising that that they want to concentrate training on those who are likely to use them for longest.

Infineon to offer recyclable circuit boards that dissolve in water

Re: Springing a leak

And don't splli coffee over the keyboard.

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

Re: 100m goes a long way

"I have little time for landlords not being quick to remedy faults."

It's not necessarily landlords. When we were first married we rented a top-floor flat & had problems getting the leaking dormer fixed because we were dealing with agents. They never did fix the major crack where the staircase block was coming away from the house. It wouldn't have been in the owners' interests to let the property deteriorate to that extent but it would put the agents to a certain amount of effort beyond the collection of rent and deducting their fee.

Google's next big idea for browser security looks like another freedom grab to some

Re: Attestation

The rest of the advertising industry are for ever complaining about Google having a monopoly. When they see Google shooting themselves in the foot they'll be quick to remind sites there are alternatives.

You need a better package manager.

Re: Bye-Bye WWW: Time For A New Internet Protocol

"Vote With Our Feet"

Yes, indeed. Home page has long been DDG. Because Google, email login suddenly decided my preferred client wasn't good enough for them I switched the use (which was simply to receive the Contact us messages from a web site elsewhere). In fact almost the only email I see from gmail addresses is spam.

Re: Too late!

"the BBC has only limited resources they can only certify a restricted number of browsers such as Chrome based ones, Safari or Firefox"

In that case they should have stuck with the earlier version that worked on all browsers instead of employing kiddies who want to fix what wasn't broken. Breaking it cost them salaries. Unfortunately BBC management has never been known to be wrong. You can take their word for that.

Alex Russell ... took to Mastodon to urge people to withhold their judgment until WEI is more fully developed.

"Particularly in the early design phase, lots of ideas are bad!" Russell said.

That seems to be just the time to not withhold judgement. If bad ideas aren't stamped on PDQ they tend to stack around.

TETRA radio comms used by emergency heroes easily cracked, say experts

Re: Running wild

The politicians only want back doors because they've been told by the security services that having a back door in communications is a Good Thing. It comes back to the security services wanting it at the expense of operational security of everyone else.

I suspect politicians don't think any communication is secure because however technically secure their communication channels might be at least one of them will blab anyway.

Re: Spectacularly irresponsible.

"there just weren’t any exploits out there in the wild in practice…..until these guys did it."

What makes you think that? These folks are security researchers who publish their stuff. Exploiters would just get on with it and keep shtumm.

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

Re: X Rebirth...?

"How much is the rebrand costing when they are supposed to be cost cutting"

That depends on how many bill get paid.

World's most internetty firm tries life off the net, and it's sillier than it seems

Re: As my former boss used to tell me:

Extreme percussive maintenance.

Re: So just like most other large corporate hives then

"I do understand why this is the case, but it is a sad reflection on a companies progress from innovative development to boring reseller (or ad broker)."

However somewhere there will still bea competitor who knows how to be innovative and will eventually eat their lunch.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

Re: Agree but...

In anybody's world a socket with something lugged into it is just that - a socket in use. When you're on somebody else's premises unless you know that it's OK to unplug it you should assume it isn't. He had a flat battery in his screwdriver - his fault, of course - so why not use an ordinary one? Unless that was his only screwdriver he didn't have to plug it in. He certainly didn't have to plug it in without asking.

Re: This happened for years on Italian telephone network

"today, most of the copper lines are DSL only"

Soon they'll all be. Allegedly. Whether the target is hit remains to be seen.

Re: Agree but...

"Some sympathy for the workman here. He has to do his job. That's his imperative."

No. He's on customer's premises. Their imperative comes first. If he has been so careless as to roll up without a fully charged screwdriver and the only socket available says "Do not switch off" then he should ask where he can plug in. He had no idea what damage he might cause by unplugging it.

Re: Agree but...

"Should have changed it to a specialist plug and socket"

You mean the sort that look like ordinary plugs & sockets until you unplug them & find the pins are at different angles?

Judge lets art trio take another crack at suing AI devs over copyright

Re: Extension of the Existing Situation

"A spoof of say the Lord of the Rings is fine if it changes names to sillier ones and rewrites the text sufficiently to avoid direct plagiarism of stretches of writing."

You might find the guardians of Tolkien's estate taking issue with you. They (or possibly it was the film company, I can't remember which) have been know to come down on what they considered misuse.

BOFH: You can be replaced by a robot or get your carbon footprint below Big Dave's

Re: Its happened again

Don't hit beancounters with your keyboard. A large spanner is quite adequate.

Re: Error in binary expression at line 61

Before I retired the boss of my company was indispensable. After all, I was the only employee.

Re: "It's in your contract"

If you're lucky.

Lawyer sees almost 1,000 complainants sign up to Capita breach class action

Capita are well back in the queue of organisations waiting to be made an example of but so far it's not happened to any of them.

Social media is too much for most of us to handle

Re: You get out what you put in

Ummm?

Both need posting messages to an account, which is what I take you mean by push.

Both need reading messages from the account which is what I take you mean by pull.

Both need both.

Re: You get out what you put in

"I use Facebook to keep in touch with distant friends and family"

Something for which email an mailing lists served just as well long before Zuckerberg went to Harvard.

Re: I did something similar

"I had tens of thousands of connections to world leaders, scientists, famous, and presidential candidates. Was instantly connected to world renown journalists and such."

Connected in what way? In any way more meaningful than just watching a news channel, for better or worse depending on the channel and people connected with?

Proposed ban on data brokers selling warrantless personal info to Feds revived

Re: Learning how to interpret

If it's not right for law enforcement to get the data without a warrant by buying it the obvious question is how can it be right for other parties to get hold of it by buying it, T&Cs notwithstanding? The only logical conclusion is that privacy of such information is a right that should not be capable of being waived in T&Cs. Does the US have an equivalent to Marcus Schrems to tkae this to court?

Weird radio pulses could be coming from new type of stellar object

Re: Data analysis is king

It seems that this one source would repay such study. According to other reports there's a fair bit of variability in the source.

ChatGPT study suggests its LLMs are getting dumber at some tasks

I wonder how many of the great and good of the country would fail to find fault with that.

Re: Can't argue.

On the basis that it was supposed to be possible to prod it into regurgitating training code I decided to see if it could be prompted into repeating a minor discrepancy from the RFC I'd noticed in a FOSS library*. It took some prompting to get it to produce something in the specified language. It didn't reproduce a minor discrepancy from the RFC - it produced something that didn't go anywhere near it.

* Note to self: get on with reporting the bug.

Re: "OpenAI’s CEO Says the Age of Giant AI Models Is Already Over" - WIRED

Does that really count as "an era"?

These days, yes.

Re: OpenAI said LLMs are toys

They said that out loud

But not as loud as they said "Hey, come and look at this!" and not loud enough to avoid being drowned out in the clamour.

Bearing in mind that these systems are essentially probabilistic a reasonable solution would be to keep a fairly short list of prime numbers and then answer "no" to any number above that, the length of the list depending on the acceptable error rate.

Always on the Horizon, UK must wait for megabucks EU science deal

Re: And the haemorrhaging continues

"it effectively self-selects only researchers that aren’t in the top half."

I think there's a fair amount of positive feedback operating in research funding. Groups become more successful because they receive more funding. They receive funding because they were previously successful. This is likely to starve researchers who could have become successful but don't have the funding to do so. I wonder how this feedback loop could be broken.

Re: And the haemorrhaging continues

"there’s plenty of evidence that Horizon is very poor at direction-finding, and produces low-quality research"

In true scientific tradition: citation needed

Re: Good old Brexit

Cheaper but less effective than doing something about the problem.

Re: Dolchstosslegende

Like the man said - Poe's law.

MOVEit body count closes in on 400 orgs, 20M+ individuals

There needs to be a recognition that as much of the data as possible needs to be invalidated when breaches take place. Names,addresses, dates of birth etc can't be changed but bank account numbers, passport numbers, driving licence numbers, national insurance numbers (or SSNs as appropriate can be if the need is recognised - which it ought to be - and the systems put in place to deal with it. As a lot of these are government systems they ought to take the lead in doing so to set an example to the banks. Given the general competence of government IT contracts it looks like the criminals will win hands down.

Mint 21.2 is desktop Linux without the faff

Re: The best

"Since most computers come with Windows preinstalled"

From what I can see Office, at least for consumers, is now subscription unless you have an old copy or buy what seems to be a grey-market Office 2001 with the regular buy-once office horrendously priced.

At what point does Windows also become subscription if you want features such as security updates?

My friends who run W10 now use LibreOffice or one of the other free office suites. Consumer moves in this direction mean that MS are only going to make money out of the original sale and the only way they can correct this, from their PoV, will be to move Windows to subscription.

"(and require Windows for their (obligatory) firmware updates)"

How many home users do you know who install firmware updates?

Re: The best

Like I said, Jake: Stockholm Syndrome.

Re: Just Works

Before anyone jumps in to say that that's not what most users do with home PCs let me add that my Linux usage is totally different:

Mostly local history and a bit of family history research. It includes preparing out-of-print books from our local history group as PDFs to make available online.

Throw in preparing the weekly handout PDFs for my wife's needlework class.

Writing - LibreOffice of course.

Talks - LibreOffice again.

Graphics & maps - Gimp, Pinta, KolourPaint & Gwenview (must try to get more into Inkscape & Krita).

Diagrams - Dia.

Then there are handy commandline tools such as ocrmypdf and pdfunite.

Re: The best

And, of course, the Stockholm Syndrome is immensely powerful. It has to be. I got a document camera yesterday. There are three options to use if in the Debian/Devuan repository but i decided to fire up the dual boot laptop with W10 to try out the vendor's option.

Oh wow! I thought I'd put it through the monthly patch cycle last week but it turns out it hadn't finished. In addition to the hours spent last week it went through at least another half hour of spinning dots with no indication of what it was doing, spinning dots whilst configuring, counting up to 100%, going back to 0% and then counting up again cleaning up and finally displaying the login backdrop for a while before displaying the password prompt. There was, of course, another reboot in the middle of this. Why on Earth - how on Earth - do Windows users put up with this?

Re: The best

"gets a commercial level of support from a well funded backer"

What commercial level of support do you get from Microsoft?

Days before its earnings call, Infosys announces $2B in new business

A 'B' can look like an '6' when you're scanning headlines. I thought the Sunaks would be really worried if $28 had become something to celebrate.

Tech support scammers go analog, ask victims to mail bundles of cash

"That's another point, as they'd have to mix them thoroughly before using it"

And while they're doing that they might find one of their exchanges collapsed because that had been scammed.

"And, the elderly relatives have no problems spotting social engineering."

It depends. A couple of years or so ago we had a book launch in a local hotel for one of the history group's books. The writer told me that before I arrived she'd had a call from her husband saying not to ring her on the land-line because he was waiting for the bank to call back. She quickly realised he'd fallen for a scam, called the bank, got the transaction cancelled having been able to confirm her identity by a recent card transaction - she'd just bought a coffee at the bar. Her husband is an ex-maths teach, in fact I believe an ex-headmaster so you'd think he should have been able to spot it. But he's well into his nineties and, as she explained to me, from a family of bank managers so inclined to trust anyone who claims to be from a bank.

Meet the guy trying to drag HM Treasury's data strategy into the 21st century

"Those groups tend to work quite independently; analysts tend not to share common ways of performing that data analysis."

I'd have thought that would be a good way to avoid group think, even if the end product is PowerPoint slides.

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

Re: "typical Linuxes are tools for nerdy hacker types" -- ?

What are you trying to install if you need to watch videos to tell you how?

Re: "typical Linuxes are tools for nerdy hacker types" -- ?

"Mint is end user friendly to such an extent that it can beat Windows."

You're right, of course but to be fair, it's a low bar.