Posts by Doctor Syntax

No open door for India's tech workers in any UK trade deal

Re: Nothing economically beneficial will happen until the Tories get kicked out.

As I said above, even ignoring immigration our population has increased because we're living longer but birth rates are falling. That means that the demand for services increases whilst the population supplying those services is shrinking (extending retirement age is unpopular). Household numbers are also increasing because there are more adults living singly.

Whatever your political inclinations those are the demographic trends you have to work with.

What's your solution to balancing those supply and demand factors?

Re: Nothing economically beneficial will happen until the Tories get kicked out.

I think I'd prefer a return to the Danelaw. Slaughtering Lancastrians would be a possibility but the priority would be keeping Wessex and Mercia out.

Re: I want COMPETENT, not cheap workers

ISTM that the Brexiteers were relying a lot of voters not being well-enough educated to indulge in a bit of critical thinking when it came to marking their referendum papers.

Re: "Negotiating a trade deal will be easy"

From what I recall it was political shrills who were making the deal. And remember that we're pretty good here at spotting shills when we see them.

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

Poor old Nige might not be able to pay you - he doesn't meet Coutts' wealth standards to keep a bank account there. Maybe someone will have to organise a whip-round for him.

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

"Perhaps we have issues with NHS, schools and pretty much everything because our population has increased faster than the services? Perhaps cost of living has increased due to the demand for housing, due to the population increasing faster than the housing stock."

You're looking at an issue which has a lot of dimensions to it. Population is increasing partly because we're living longer, something which I personally can only approve of. It's the ageing end of the population which has increased demand for NHS services.

Increased demand for housing stock is partly due to more people living singly, either not forming relationships or those relationships breaking up so there are more but smaller households.

The increased number of singletons, and the smaller family sizes for those having children means that the birth rate has been low for some time and is now actually below replacement rate so that there are fewer locally-born recruits to provide services - including staffing the NHS and it certainly hasn't helped that we haven't been training enough staff for the NHS for years.

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

"Hello day-old single-issue handle."

It's amazing they don't realise we can spot them a mile off.

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

"Thats a barefaced lie.."

There were a lot of those about at the time,

Rocky Linux details the loopholes that will help its RHEL rebuild live on

"As we recently described, Red Hat goes to extreme lengths to keep old kernels supported and secure."

My takeaway from that talk was that it was about the hoops external contributors had to go through and the testing RH would perform to get external submissions into the long-term supported kernels. The contributors may have been upstream recent kernel contributions to be back-ported or third parties (?H/W vendors) wanting to get things in. Unless I missed something - possible as I found the delivery extremely soporific - there was nothing there about RH providing their own additions.

Re: Licence

"can we expect a license change to the Linux kernel along with the multitude of other upstream components Red Hat uses forcing them to make their source code freely available if they want to make use of any future release?"

The Linux kernel has, over the years, had a large number of contributors. All have contributed under GPL2. In order to change it all those contributors would have to be contacted and their consent obtained. Some will not have been on contact with the kernel devs for some time, maybe years, and would have to be traced before they could be contacted. Some will have died and the tracing extended to find their heirs. And some will work for Red Hat. Failing such consent the non-consenting and untraced contributors contributions would have to be replaced. This has been pointed out in every thread relating to this.

Taking all that into account, you tell me - can we expect a licence change?

Re: To free or not to free

The copyright owners have rights here. If they think RH are breaking copyright terms then they can take RH to court. Now here's a thing to ponder. There are an awful lot of them. There may even be more of them than RH/IBM have lawyers. What happens if they individually challenge RH? How many fronts can RH fight on?

Re: making them Red Hat customers, at least briefly

"Red Hat are trying to restrict access, whilst the rest of the world only needs one person to get the source code once, then redistribute it."

The ROTW needs to access it every time a change is released.

" If you are using hardware whose vendor only offers drivers for RHEL, or the applications that you need are only supported on RHEL – " then you might be having a bit of a discussion with that vendor right now.

For H/W manufacturers drivers are a necessary means to sell their product, they aren't a product in themselves. If the availability of a say, Debian, driver becomes essential for selling product then a Debian driver will be along in due course. After all, they're both Linux drivers; it's not like they'd be starting from scratch. The reason why there's only RH at the moment is going to be because marketing tell them that's all they needed. Markets can, and do, shift.

Deloitte wins deal worth up to £100M for UK border platform

"Post-Brexit strategy set to replace legacy of patchwork systems"

It's not the strategy that counts, it's the implementation. Any fool can come up with a strategy as is clearly evident.

Re: I'm struggling...

They all had their explanations. They were all different. They all involved a minimum of 2 hands waving.

Artificial General Intelligence remains a distant dream despite LLM boom

"I grew up implicitly thinking that intelligence was this, like, really special human thing and kind of somewhat magical. And I now think that it's sort of a fundamental property of matter..."

Observer bias following on from thinking that life is a fundamental property of matter.

Re: Oh, the irony

Together with an undefined property: "soon".

AndI've come across hell desks that would fail it.

With any hype train you always have to ask "Have we seen this before?" The trouble is, they never do.

The better question is "are we really seeing this now?" The answer to that is inevitably "no". Reality falls short of the hype.

Jam tomorrow. It's always jam tomorrow.

"If you don't agree that AGI is coming soon, you need to explain why your views are more informed than expert AI researchers."

Yes it's always been "soon". Is that 5 years or 10?

China chokes exports of semiconductor secret sauces gallium and germanium

Re: poorly thought out export controls

"There were zillions of them for sale in the garden centres I visited at the weekend."

Zillions or Zinnias?

Who was who said trade wars are good and easy to win?

Microsofties still digesting pay freeze upset by Nadella's 'landmark year' memo

Re: but when you're making more than $50 billion a year

"F Microsoft who has already F'd those stupid enough to still be working for them."

And there are those who are stupid enough to buy rent the products made by those stupid enough to work for them.

"I want to express my sincere appreciation"

I'm sure he's sincere. There's no appreciation as sincere as that for a hefty bonus.

California man's business is frustrating telemarketing scammers with chatbots

"I try and remember that they are humans"

Including double-glazing salesmen?

"While no one can put a price on slamming the phone down on a call center worker"

If you can live without using the phone for 10 minutes or so don't do that; they'll just hit somebody else.

Ask the salesdroid to hand on a moment - there's somebody at the door, the children need something or whatever. Then lay the phone aside for a while, then hang up. Consider it a public service. Bonus points if you can get them to call back for a second dose. Double bonus if their supervisor calls to tell you there's something wrong with your phone line - yes, it really happened.

No, GPT-4 cannot get a computer science degree at MIT

"Meanwhile, Solar-Lezema told us he only helped write the introduction of the paper, and didn't know Drori was using the dataset to claim that GPT-4 was good enough to graduate with a computer science degree from MIT."

Why put your name to the introduction when you don't know what the paper's going to say? Either write the intro after the paper's written or require a right to remove the intro before submission.

Mozilla Developer Network adds AI Help that does the opposite

Re: Now for the really difficult decision

Surely you meant don't improve AI's reputation by lumping it in with managers?

"As of around 0817 UTC on Saturday, an effort was underway to undo the AI Explain function. The AI Explain button has now been paused, for the time being."

So that's one organisation that acts promptly. Now for all the others...

UK government hands CityFibre £318M for rural broadband builds

Re: FFS

It says "parts of". Those will be the flat, posh parts with houses as closely placed as is consistent with being posh.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

I think it's a description of the world as it is, not the world as you'd like it to be.

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Mrs 6 is clearly able to to that and/or has you to help. Mrs Community Centre, not so much.

Re: Desperate

What do you think "Who call" and "On me" stories are for?

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Anywhere where volunteers run things like the local community centre.

Not everyone gets along with doing things electronically and if they don't it's best not to try. I won't say it's an age thing because quite possibly she will be younger than I am. Apart from which it's not so long ago that I as a freelancer, found it perfectly convenient to produce similar paper invoices and pay taxes with the company cheque book..oh, dammit - it was a long time ago.

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Probably a COBOL program. Not necessarily written in COBOL....

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Until a few months ago SWMBO paid a local community centre for her weekly patchwork class's room rent with cheques. The community centre used a stationer's duplicate book to produce hand-written invoices. All very old-fashioned.

The centre's book-keeper retired at the end of last year. The lady who took over from him decided to go all modern and has some S/W that produces PDFs she emails out and payment by bank transfer. The first mailing included the full run of PDFs for every group that uses the centre. The next had the correct total but incorrect number of weeks which makes me think her invoicing S/W is a word processor and a clip-art template gussied up with the centre's name. The other day there was an email saying the last payment hadn't been made although our bank statement shows it leaving our account to the account used for the previous few months and presumably the correct one.

Paper invoices and cheques were much more reliable.

The number’s up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111

Thanks. For me it's spot on.

My daughter does a lot of cross-country running & hill walking. I'll make sure she has it on her phone.

Re: I still have analog landlines.

The UK solution is that if you only have POTS it will be replaced by a low bandwidth internet connection that will support a VoIP service but nothing else. It still depends on FTTC being installed for everyone but less work than laying FTTP for everyone. We'll still have to wait & see what actually happens.

It's still beyond BT subsidiary PlusNet to tell anyone what they're going to do to implement this change. The excuse I was given was that it would confuse customers to tell them now. I'd have thought it would be a lot more confusing to wait until it happens to let them know. Maybe a decision made by someone with their retirement date pencilled in?

Re: Why the down vote?

Our current infrastructure is also dependent on the public electricity supply and that would be vulnerable.

Re: I still have analog landlines.

"So I'm keeping those old analog lines until they force me to drop 'em"

In the UK that's end of 2025 at the latest. Whether they manage that I have my doubts. BT's latest shareholders' goodies offer still included PSTN stuff....

"imagine what would happen if a major catastrophe did indeed befall us."

Make that "will", "when" and "does".

Re: "if you can see the sky, you're good to go"

Flat battery? Equally tough luck.

Re: How about 112 and Advanced Mobile Location?

"Subscriber addresses are already obtained from landline calls."

Will that remain with VoIP?

Hacking a Foosball table scored an own goal for naughty engineers

"recycle the money"

As the saying goes, it's made round to go round.

How a dispute over IP addresses led to a challenge to internet governance

Re: The issue with V6 is... NAT

"although expect everything to be straight-forward if you use the ISP provided router."

You missed the joke icon.

Still less of a risk than those who put their objections into big blokes with blunt and not at all blunt instruments.

Re: Time for IPv8

And another: devices with baked in IPV4 stacks. Many are likely to be so insecure that getting rid of them would be justification in itself but there'd be uproar if they all suddenly died.

Linux Mint cuts slice of 'Victoria' as 21.2 beta lands with dash of fresh Cinnamon

Re: UIX

"a consistent experience across mobile phone UIs and a PC desktop"

All too often mobile phones have their UI elements positioned apparently at random. I've seen one where some control you'd expect to use only occasionally - IIRC the button to access configuration - was located bottom bar when other option, if they existed at all, were hard to find. If such little thought is given to the UI how much was given to other aspects - such as security?

Microsoft puts profanity filter on %@!#ing Teams transcripts

Re: Can I opt out of Fucking Teams Transcripts??

When the beancounters went all cloudy and got rid of most if not all IT staff there are no servers on which to host it and nobody to install it if there were.