Posts by Doctor Syntax

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

Re: Kathy Burke said it best...

Oops. "with whom".

Re: Kathy Burke said it best...

Before it was called "woke" it was called "politically correct" and the politically correct had the mantra of not being judgemental. Anyone with who they disagreed was judged as being judgemental. Cognitive dissonance was unknown to them.

Open source devs consider making hogs pay for every download

Re: No such thing ..

"I think the economist Milton Friedman coined that one."

What one is that one? If you mean "tragedy of the commons", no he didn't.

Re: Easy solution

How does your billing infrastructure work?

Cops back Dutch telco Odido after second wave of ShinyHunters leaks

Re: Well it's a tough one

Odido's business deserves to suffer on account of holding passport and driving licence numbers in the first place. These are surely not necessary for providing a telecoms service. However as customers have provided this data they must be OK with it unless Odido made them a requirement in which case they would appear to be in breach of GDPR.

BOFH: Nobody would be stupid enough to go live with the mirror system, surely

I'd draw the line at that but a 36" screen would be quite useful as my eye-sight deteriorates (and why is the Register comment entry page in a smaller font than the comment display page?) if only some sort of fold-away screen could manage it.

The Boss turnover is suspiciously high anyway. Fortunately the management records will not show this.

So at least one board member is aware of the BOFH's special talents.

UK copper fired after faking keyboard taps using photo frame

Measurement is hard - especially when you want to do it right

Productivity is a measurement of output per head. In order to measure it you need a good metric of output. Devising that requires thought. Capturing the metric also requires thought.

Keystrokes are not a good metric of output. They're not a metric of output at all. They're a metric of input. Someone using them as a metric of output in place of doing the work of finding something that really does the job (in this case, something related to monitoring of calls as far as can be told from TFA) is the one who is actually "making it appear they were working when they were not." Perhaps they should be fired.

What's more it would appear from TFA that this pseudo-activity was a device for keeping the computer from going into sleep mode, thus blocking an activity which appears not to have required key inputs. She appears to have been given a device which was not intrinsically fit for purpose and been fired for fixing that.

Anthropic to Pentagon: Autonomous weapons could hurt US troops and civilians

Re: Seeking a seat at the table

"Do you really believe VC's would supply this kind or money and having no say in the company's direction?"

Of course they have a say. The say will likely be not to put that money at risk (and more than it already is!) with the legal consequences of unrestrained use by the likes of Hegseth, especially if that use is against US citizens. Just think of all the class actions.

Re: Seeking a seat at the table

Is that you, Pete?

Which article were you reading?

Re: American civilians and warfighters

"It always irks me that American military speak values 'murican own nation lives 1000x 'foreigner' lives."

This is the design principle behind all armies.

NUC, NUC! Who’s there? ASUS with a client device for Microsoft’s cloudy PCs

Re: Thin clients were unreliable enough when it was all on-prem

Freelance I had a couple of gigs a few years apart running UAT for application server upgrades. It might have been a coincidence but I'd worked on development of the application a decade or more previously. The application was character based and the client was running thin clients with a separate terminal server. By the time we got round to the second upgrade someone -possibly the terminal server company, had put together some sort of layer that took the terminal control codes to turn it into a GUI interface although the users were told not to use this.

The morning of go-live on the new server everything was working as expected and I was about to go home when I was called back. Performance had collapsed. It didn't take long to find out who'd switched to the GUI terminal setting in advance of the beefed up terminal server that was due next week.

Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now

Re: What are the memory manufacturers doing?

"vendors should be investing in extra capacity. But they're not."

See https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/27/micron_continues_fab_expansion_with/

The headline is about NAND but scroll down the article.

Re: Recycle / re-use?

Or vice versa.

Re: So let me get this right

The limited resource is money and from time to time the right way is subject to fashion. Tulips or AI, it's all the same.

Re: Not only Zorin or Mint

"But virtually all other Linux Distros will do the job just as well."

Zorin & Mint are supposed to be the most Windows victim friendly so that's what I quoted. Personally I think anything running KDE would be preferable as there are plenty of cosmetics to make it look like W10. The unfamiliarity would be sensible menus, the fact that updates appear to be broken because they install so quickly and the lack of advertising.

Re: So all those PCs I've hoarded

A whole load of newly minted Mint users?

Re: What are the memory manufacturers doing?

ISTR shortages and gluts of memory in the past. We'll see this cycle turn just like the last.

Re: We just need to hang on for a year or two

Never underestimate the ingenuity of someone seeing an abundance of potentially valuable material going cheap.

The OS's function is to run applications. The applications' functions are to allow the user to do stuff. As you, williamyf, know quite well as you've told us of your excellent work in using Linux to make computing available to those who would not be able to afford it, it the being able to do stuff that's important.

"To put it bluntly: the average person doesn't care about their OS, unless or until it changes to one they're unfamiliar with!"

OK, let's assume this average person has a W10 laptop that can't be upgraded.

Would the Zorin GUI on their old laptop be less familiar than that on a new W11 laptop?

And which would cost them money?

Re: Recycle / re-use?

They could consider a special edition - as a new purchase of course, for older H/W. OTOH if the extended support wheeze brings in enough money they wouldn't want to kill that and, of course, it establishes the practice of Windows as and annual subscription, preparing the way for Windows 12.

Is this AI bursting its own bubble?

Meanwhile Zorin or Mint will keep that old laptop running with an up-to-date OS for quite some time longer.

ServiceNow boasts its AI bot is resolving 90% of its own help desk tickets

“How does it know it got the right answer? Because the outcome is measurable inside the same platform, Did the ticket resolve? Did the workflow complete? Did the approval get the right sign-off?

The fact that a ticket is closed doesn't mean it got the right answer. They'll discover that when an attacker gets a password reset or access authorised.

Salesforce CEO 'SaaSquatch' Benioff says his company will monster the SaaSpocalypse

Re: Fluffy Bear, Fluffy Mule, Fluffy Einstein , and "I want your soul"

"as we are developing our own"

Things turn full circle.

"They can also measure this per customer to show how much work agents are performing."

And bill for it as customers will discover.

NASA safety watchdog says it's time to rethink Moon landing

Very, very lucky or very, very careful?

Microsoft to auto-launch Copilot in Edge whenever you click a link from Outlook

"Most of us don't have a choice. My employer mandates"

You don't have a choice but your employer made one, even unthinkingly.

This just confirms my choice not to use Windows nor even the Linux version of Edge. It is beyond my comprehension why Windows users, or at least those who know there are alternatives, continue to tolerate this abuse. Yes, I know - this thing for which you think it's essential or that thing. But do they really justify putting up with it all?

Rapid AI-driven development makes security unattainable, warns Veracode

Security Convenience is our first priority.

And checking thinks is so inconvenient.

Debian 14 will drop Gtk2 – unless Ardour rides to the rescue

Ongoing tinkering is just as likely to introduce bugs. And interop problems, this being a case in point.

Qt is an option for Lazarus. However I wonder if it's better to regard projects such as GTk2 as not dead but "complete". Does sofware have to be in continuous development once it's good enough?

Britain's creaking courts to use Copilot for transcriptions

Re: Why does this need AI?

"We've had speech to text programs for donkey years."

OTOH they produce some odd results. Maybe text to speech with AI adding a first correction pass prior to the human making a second pass. If AI adds to the human checker's work rather subtracting then it can be eliminated.

Worried Europeans can now cut Azure's phone cord completely

Re: Wrong vocabulary

Paranoia is the first requirement of any DBA, indeed, of any system admin role.

You really should consider more imaginative menus and if you put wine first perhaps you should start keeping a record of your alcohol consumption.

Hubble in a death spiral that could end as early as 2028 without a reboost

Start a rumour that the Chinese are setting up a mission to boost it. Money will then be found.

Re: 2028 sounds like a death sentence for Hubble

"there isn't a docking port to attach a Dragon to"

Provision has been made for this. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-125 (the last service mission):

"The crew also installed ... a soft-capture mechanism that would aid in the safe de-orbiting of the telescope by a robotic spacecraft at the end of its operational lifespan."

All your bots are belong to US if you don't play ball, DoD tells Anthropic

How about the rest of the world? Should they now regard Anthropic's products as a risk and ban their use?

Re: Hegseth the clown hasn't thought this one though

Just this?

Brit dual nationals grounded by border digitization drive

"we have allowed ample time between ETAs first being introduced in 2023 and the move to enforcement"

But not between making sure people knew and enforcement.

The Home Office. Still not fit for purpose.

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

They're beginning to believe their own hype.

Recycling biz reckons AI features are destroying smartphone resale values

"A recent CCS Insight survey found 47 percent of buyers would actually pay more for a phone with AI features"

Did 53% said they'd pay more for a phone without them?

Not really, I suppose but it does say half your target market is not seeing value in them. That should be a warning sign.

KDE Plasma 6.6 isn't forcing systemd but the arguments rage on

Re: The Linux Desktop needs a Sugar Daddy

"Many Linux desktops that people like are ugly"

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. I might agree with your aesthetic choices, others won't. That's what's good about multiple choices. Unfortunately those stuck in the rut of one OS, one aesthetic can't even see over the edge to realise it doesn't have to be like that, not even when their OS maker of choice keeps forcing new ones on them every few years.

On your other point, it is possible to buy kit with Linux pre-loaded but you have to search for it.

Something that includes selecting the back-end server at boot time? Ideal for business travel. Nothing on the laptop for any border guard to check and the option of choosing something innocuous for those who want to see it logged in.

Re: "narrowly definied set of users'

"Yeah, I can make it work. I enjoy the challenge. But I got tired of proving myself to myself for the sake of proving myself like two decades ago."

So you're commenting based on knowledge two decades old. Noted.

Orbital datacenters are a pie-in-the-sky idea: Gartner

What sort of pie in the sky?

Custard pie.

Euro hosting giant hiking prices by up to 50% from April Fool's Day

It ought to be convincing evidence for anyone that AI is now seriously distorting the world economy and it's time that, instead of going gung-ho for it governments need to be looking at ways to regulate it out of existence.

UK tech hit by double trouble: Fewer foreign techies amid skills squeeze

Re: UK is Missing a Huge Opportunity

"Not sure where the UK is on the scale though"

UK universities are busy closing departments.