Posts by Doctor Syntax

Google veep calls out Microsoft's cloud software licensing 'tax'

Re: Would it not be cheaper for Google, AWS, Alibaba

OTOH for a new project - and people do have new projects - starting with FOSS would not only be possible but a good thing.

Re: Would it not be cheaper for Google, AWS, Alibaba

In other words people do things but never for the first time.

Re: Would it not be cheaper for Google, AWS, Alibaba

And yet they did change when MS imposed a UI change. And they'll do so again any time MS repeats the tactic.

NASA experts looked through 800 UFO sightings and found essentially nothing

Right now there's a very limited number of high quality observations.

Data quality probably explains why they're unexplained.

to study and understand UAP

That seems to come under the heading of "nice work if you can get it".

Amazon Ring, Alexa accused of every nightmare IoT security fail you can imagine

"the land-sharks"

That's the problem. They're likely to be the ones who get "compensated" (in that strange US-ese way where "compensation" actually means "ordinary payment for the job"). But the FTC has identified the accounts. They've also identified the more egregious cases. How about the FTC and victims get together, agree a meaningfu*l tariff and send an enforceable bill to Amazon .

And no, the bill can't be paid by vouchers only redeemable at Amazon. We'll have no truck with that sort of thing.

* Meaning big enough to require an explanation in the annual accounts.

Re: Who would have seen that coming?

"asking themselves how they ought to be handling this"

Or enven whether they should be handling this.

WTF is solid state active cooling? We’ve just seen it working on a mini PC

So this solid state cooling system is, in fact, an air-cooled system with a solid but essentially mechanical heat pump. I was expecting some sort of Peltier effect device such as those I used in the '70s & '80s. Even though they were solid state devices they were only heat pumps and they still needed water cooling to back them up.

1. This crypto-coin is called Jimbo. 2. $8m was stolen from its devs in flash loan attack

Re: It's not a "hack"

Tax avoidance is legal, tax evasion isn't. So, yes, if the alleged hack is legal then it is semantically equivalent.

Re: I'm confused

But, but, but .... It's so UNFAIR.

"The more they can baffle you with bullshit, the easier they can pick your pocket."

Or in this case, baffle themselves.

Re: Con-currency

Please don't go into crypto-currency land waving reality about like that. You won't be welcome, or, more likely, you won't even be understood.

Twitter now worth just a third of what Musk paid for it

I thought a blue chip share as one which was a reliable money maker. AFAIK Twitter never was that so why did Fidelity put it in such a fund?

Red Hat promises AI trained on 'curated' and 'domain-specific' data

"That means, we're told, these LLMs have been built on data that Red Hat knows is correct."

There might be a touch of hubris in there.

What, I wonder, happens when something they "knew" to be correct turns out not to have been? Does being "curated" mean they can simply remove the bits which are now known to be incorrect? Or tell it to disregard that bit of training? Or do they have to go through the entire training with corrected data.

Aggressive PC discounts might not be here for long, says HP

He may also find their reputation is suffering the consequence of their shenanigans with printer DRM.

Microsoft has made Azure Linux generally available. Repeat, Azure Linux

Re: Some nuance required about "free".......

(1) "free": every time I bought an x86 PC there was $100 of the price I paid which went straight to Redmond, a "fee" for M$ supplying Windows

You're buying it wrong.

90+ orgs tell Slack to stop slacking when it comes to full encryption

Re: And Once Again People Flock To A Single Point Of Failure......

It's getting crowded in here.

I don't know about the rest but Signal is peer to peer. I believe the others use the same protocol. It's true there is a core, although absolutely minimal, directory function in Signal (maybe not so minimal elsewhere). But there will always be a core directory system somewhere - DNS.

If you're advocating home grown encryption algorithms - well the Fort Meade/Cheltenham crowd will love that.

Re: It's an enterprise chat app

I think you're missing the point. The protesters seem to have use cases it wasn't intended for instead of applications that were intended for their use cases.

Airline puts international passengers on the scales pre-flight

Re: Perfect excuse

I think resonance might also be involved.

The weighings are for updating statistics so they can be anonymous.

UK tech industry pushing up salaries – but UI devs out of luck

"The only role category to see earning fall was mid-level UX and UI designers"

Fair enough. As a group they seem to specialise in fixing what's not broken.

Seriously, boss? You want that stupid password? OK, you get that stupid password

Re: I wouldn't call it malicous compliance, but yes, I have a story

They're called managers.

Re: I wouldn't call it malicous compliance, but yes, I have a story

Yes, but even that requires competence. I live next to a farm. The farmer needs to be competent enough to feed his cows.

Re: perhaps the MD knows enough about Unix to know that the password couldn't be all numbers

"They can be anything that can be picked up on the TTY"

Including control characters such as backspace.

Re: Missing part

Like Theranos?

Re: I wouldn't call it malicous compliance, but yes, I have a story

Sometimes you wonder how manglement gets to that position with those mental limitations. I know I sometimes say that when you find someone on top of a hierarchy the only talent you can be sure they have is climbing hierarchies* but you'd expect that somewhere in the process reality would have intruded itself enough for them to be aware it exists.

* Unless they inherited the family firm.

Re: but you need the password

"His boss ... rolled his eyes."

I suppose the requester was a salesman so the boss would be well used to things like that.

Re: Simples..

Why not? It seems appropriate.

Re: root password?

It depends. Root is always there. On annoying systems such as Ubuntu access to root is guarded only by a repetition of the user's regular password combined with the user's name being in the sudoers list. It is perfectly possible to use sudo to add a root password. That doesn't help shut the door although it does give the illusion of having returned sanity to the command line. It was a major reason why i migrated from Ubuntu to Debian and one of two major reasons why I now now use Devuan.

Singapore's sovereign wealth fund regrets investment in crypto-villain FTX

Re: we believe that we have to invest in new sectors and emerging technologies to understand them

"18,181,818 new shares available in my new AI crypto-metaverse company"

No fusion or flying cars? I think I'll pass.

Making investment decisions guided by lucky numbers in anybody's numerology doesn't seem like a good policy.

The future of digital healthcare could be a two-metre USB cable

Re: Emergeny Room? Free to use?

Australia? IIRC that's where Simon is based.

"other video calling tools"

For medical consultations I think confidentiality might be a major consideration. My preference would be for Signal.

EU tells Twitter 'you can run but you can't hide' from disinformation policy

Re: Erm

"People have an inherent distrust of any organisation that can audit itself"

It's not being able to audit itself that's the problem. It's preventing independent audits that should earn mistrust.

Mars helicopter went silent for six sols, imperilled Perseverance rover

Re: Wrong place for the solar panels?

It would answer a lot of questions if it happened. And raise a few new ones.

Why you might want an email client in the era of webmail

Re: About that local-storage advantage...

I started off, like man, with an ISP-provided email service and went through a few ISPs due to them either disappearing or bing bought up by barrel-bottom-scrapers. Somewhere along the line I set up my own domain but even then I've changed my registrar/MSP. With IMAP I'd either have had to download everything anyway before moving or leave stuff behind. I also don't have to worry about what the MSP decides to do about maximum storage.

TL;DR Local storage leaves you in charge.

The current icons look as if they're hieroglyphs written by someone who only know cuneiform. At leas on Linux Seamonkey has the option of using the desktop theme icons. It makes a big difference; it looks as if it belongs there irrespective of what icon theme is in use. I soppose it could be worse - it could be GTK4 with a menu in the title bar.

In principle I agree with you. But they broke TB & FF a long time ago which is why I prefer Seamonkey instead although that's now got worse because the calendar isn't a separate window, it's a tab; it persists in coming up with a multiple week rather than month view and it doesn't even seem to have a setting to display the tab at launch.

I have this forlorn hope that they'd revamp TB back to the original in which case I might use it.

Re: Not bad, not bad at all.

Answered mostly on the basis of SeaMonkey although I've taken a recent look at T-bird (don't like the UI)

1. Pass

2. You can have multiple calendars, local and multiple servers. SM doesn't have a server to sync with, say a phone. What I so is run a NextCloud server on a Pi and both Tbird & phone sync with that.

3. I just download all incoming mail with POP3, store locally and set to remove from server. All sent mail is also stored locally. If that's what you mean by syncing a local archive, then yes. I haven't tried imap - I suppose you can run that without local storage.

4. Integral

BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him

Re: Oh the pain!

the "community" where the same problem has been posted, numerous "me, too!" posts follow, and no solution ever provided

Such as asking what PlusNet plan to do on PSTN closure. Unanswered questions on the "community" pages are the only suggestion on the site that it's a thing.

The only reply I got on the phone was that they didn't want to mention it in case it confuses people (see icon), a hand wavy "they'll do something" and a determined effort to upsell me to a more expensive package.

Re: Oh the pain!

"solved it now"

Quite likely they don't quite know how they solved it. They applied various fixes recommended in the forum and may have clicked on something in the UI without noticing and the problem just quietly went away.

Re: Oh the pain!

At least our GPs have got their system sorted out. A while ago they had 3 different streams o f music and announcements which kept interrupting each other.

Re: Telecoms sales people...

Invite them to send an engineer around to the address to assess what's needed.

Re: Nice plot twist at the end

Where do you think the existing annual upgrade payments have been going ll this time?

Re: would resist any change to get it removed,

"have not the slightest interest in the tech or probably even the process, and from their point of view all you are doing is making their lives more difficult"

Right up to the point where something breaks down and it's still IT's fault even if they'd blocked any attempts at update.

Re: This is far too close to the truth

If there's a FOSS alternative why not open up the source, graft in the splash screen/title or whatever of the original and pass it off as the latest version of old-faithful?

They'll have to get used to the new screen layout etc. but if they've followed MS's revisions of UIs they'll accept that as normal.

Neuralink says US OKs human experiments with Elon's brain chips

Re: You first, Elon

Now he's got a scapegoat CEO to run Twitter he must have some time on his hands to be first in the queue to volunteer. Why wouldn't be, given he's so keen on this?

IR35 costs UK Research and Innovation £36M – the same it spent funding tech projects

Re: Two ways of looking at it.

The two are not mutually exclusive although not exclusively the current government's fault. It started under Blair.

Re: Who Knew?

As I recall it the official justification was to stop companies firing employees and hiring them back as contractors along with such other exploitations as zero hours contracts. It worked well didn't it?

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: 1s 6d

Nice try but remember the Welsh are British.

Experimental brain-spine computer interface helped a paralyzed man walk

Re: Regenerative medicine

And, of course, the people with skill, knowledge and aptitude for Y do not necessarily have the same in regard to X.

Research and development is done by people and people are not readily interchangeable.