Posts by Doctor Syntax

Near-undetectable malware linked to Russia's Cozy Bear

Re: insistently dumb

Every week I hear of users who _demand_ to open any email and attachment they receive.

Sign this:

"I request permission to open any email attachment I choose. I acknowledge that I have been warned about the risks this brings to the business which pays my salary and confirm that I understand that warning and those risks. If this request is granted this document becomes my unconditional resignation effective immediately an attachment I open causes damege.

Signed ........................"

Re: Cunning ?

Your average HR bod is about the same risk to their employer as your average sales and marketing bof.

"Hacker was a very average minister" - Yes Minister Diaries.

Marriott Hotels admits to third data breach in 4 years

Re: "A deliberate and considered lack of competant action": fire and forget

He sounds like an excellent fit with the rest of BT muppets top management.

Re: Three strikes

New directors? No;make three strikes mean out. There needs to be a mechanism to compulorily wind up companies who fail so repeatedly.

Health trusts swapped patient data for shares in an AI firm. They may have lost millions

Re: Absolute v Proportional

Maybe, as per The Producers, they have several hundred percent.

Europe passes sweeping antitrust laws targeting America's Big Tech

Re: They are not equal...

Which just goes to show the risks of using other peoples' computers to perform critical tasks.

UK tribunal: App Store class action seeking up to $1.8b can continue

Despite the headline I assume the UK tribunal is working in £££ and that the actual $$$ value will depend on the rate of exchange at the time.

FedEx signals 'zero mainframe, zero datacenter' operations by 2024

"For those greedy shareholders"

Don't forget you may be one of those shareholders via your pension fund. Pension funds are collectively one of the biggest groups of shareholders. It does worry me, however, when a pension fund buys an entire company.

Re: "where it hopes to save an estimated $400 million annually"

Success at delivering parcels depends entirely on having the right systems to control it. Whether they reslise it or not or whether they like it or not they are an IT business.

Amazon are also in the parcel delivery business wnd realised they were an IT business. That's something FedEx seem not to have noticed.

Gtk 5 might drop X11 support, says GNOME dev

Re: In other news

Except for the occasional GTK-based application that does odd things with scroll bars and just looks out of place in various ways.

"Although the X window system is nearly 40, it still works"

So don't break it, which is the opposite of the Gnome developers.

Re: Wayland is missing one critical feature needed by content creators

"it appears to cut across many of Waylands founding assumptions about information hiding and security"

Assumptions; never a good thing. Make an early design decision to do something specific and you find you've exluded the possibility of doing several other things.

Tuxedo Pulse G2: Linux in your lap

PC Specialist will supply laptops without OS to install your own choice of distro. The base units seem to be maufactured by Clevo but can be configured with a variety of options.

"you may have removed or modified the pre-loaded OS and can't return the machine anyway."

Make a restore image before blowing away Windows.

Will cloud giants really drive colos off a financial cliff?

The thing about bets - you win some, you lose some.

Past performance is no indicator of future returns. Etc.

$185m anti-malware patent dispute: Norton and Columbia University fight on

"The Register contacted Columbia's attorneys as well those for Norton. Both have yet to respond."

Maybe you're lucky - if the responded they might have sent a bill.

Everyone back to the office! Why? Because the decision has been made

Re: that jerk with the annoying voice and that other bastard who sniffs all day.

Brown as PM had an economic meltdown which he inherited from the policies of the chancelor of the previous PM, that chancellor being himself.

Re: that jerk with the annoying voice and that other bastard who sniffs all day.

"No matter what. After all, the Tories are still blaming Labour for the ills of the world 12 years after Labour were last in power."

To be fair the aftereffects of Brownomics were pretty severe. BoJo has had the gift of a pandemic and now a war to make it hard to allocate due blame for his own policies.

Re: that jerk with the annoying voice and that other bastard who sniffs all day.

To be fair, most "boomers" are now in their 70s.

How long are such "generations" supposed to last? AIUI these are the cohort born 1946 or later so they're mid-70s or younger. That puts the majority in their 60s.

Being slightly older my own definition is one whose musical tastes were defined by the Beatles, their contemporaries and successors. In restrospect I think I've always had more in common with those 10 or more years older than those just a few years younger as exemplified by the cousins on one side of the family vs the other.

They'll do that until they run out of budget. Limit the budget*. when they relise they're wasting it they'll start flogging off some of their slots. Money - real or virtual - puts a value on a resource. If the resource has no price you end up with the tragedy of the commons.

* This doesn't have to be a financial budget - you can have a virtual currence allocated to projects and departments.

Re: Scheme

"Zoom calls for stuff that could have been sorted in an eight minute face-to-face chat."

Could also be done with an exchangeof emails - and have them to hand to refer back to instead of wondering if you rememered the face-to-face chat or the Zoom call correctly.

People who regularly talk to AI chatbots often start to believe they're sentient, says CEO

Re: Contrast

Where did you find service desk operators with as much as "little"?

Getting that syncing feeling after an Exchange restore

Re: Adages...

Actually you don't even test that the write heads work, just that the backup drive accepts data.

Re: That syncing feeling ...

Always back up the original before syncing.

Re: re: "Schrodingers backup..."

Signetics - now I remember them.

Re: “Write only memory”

"You also had a single pixel monitor and it didn’t matter if it was lit or not."

Or even plugged in and switched on.

Long time retired so all I have to worry about are my own files. And, yes, in the last few weeks I have had to reclaim some from the Nextcloud server which is, effectively, the backup for my laptop. And this very day I was checking & decided it needs more disk but that can wait for a couple of weeks.

In the past distant past we had DR contracts with provision for rehearsals which included full backup restores.

It doesn't happen often, but when it does...

I think Q4 of the OP's list is better. "Have you tried?" can be answered by "Yes" even if it failed. It can be answered by "Yes" untruthfully even if no attempt was made. Asking for evidence it succeeded can only be ansered satisfactorily if the backup can be restored.

We need a Library of Congress – but for the digital world

Re: The Library of Congress already has this in hand

When I arrived in QUB in 67 they'd just had a new library. In fact they also had a new science library which is the one I was familiar with There were legends about the internals of the old one. A year or so later a graduate from Trinity arrived and was very sniffy about Queens having a new library with lots of empty shelves, clearly not having worked out that the reason you build a new, bigger library, is to give yourself more shelf space.

Re: We need a Library of Congress – but for the digital world

To be fair, the publishers of Oracle database have objections to everything except money.

For economically significant commercial software a compulsory escrow system would be a good idea, however.

Re: The Library of Congress already has this in hand

"With modern printing facilities, it is easy to order a few extra copies at a sensible price: there is no need to carry a huge stock or to have a huge initial print run."

Maybe you haven't been involved in small scale publishing.

We typically have a print run of 100* which means that the deposit libraries would take up 6% of it. I looked into using print-on-demand services to put our back catalogue back into print. The price we'd have had to sell at would have been at least half as much again as the original prices which had produced a small surplus. We now have several of them downloadable as PDF instead.

I wonder why UK copyright still specifies TCD. I'd have expected it to have been changed to QUB a century ago although the old library would have run out of storage space long before the 1960s.

* The exception was one which had a much larger than normal print run and sold badly. I think it might have been the reason the treasurer subsequently limited to 100. Depositing half a dozen copies would be no problem but it might alert TPTB to our existence.

Re: The Library of Congress already has this in hand

In the UK the libraries of deposit are the British Library & the Bodleian in Oxford (not sure if Cambridge also gets a copy). I believe TCD library serves that purpose in Ireland.

The libraries might serve a useful purpose for proving publication but it seems unlikely that ant oher proof would be ignored in court. My local history group has published a number of books with a small print run and we certainly couldn't afford to spare a couple of copies; we're out of print too quickly without that.

2050 carbon emission goals need nuclear to succeed, says International Energy Agency

Re: Stating the obvious

It's very simple. BoJo won an election*. There were sufficient people who did not, at least at that time, find him embarassing and voted for the party of which he was (and, at time of writing, still is) leader and hence prospective PM. They found him acceptable.

OK, I'm making an assumption here: that the intersect of people who found him embarassing and people who voted for him is a small one. The intersect of people who voted for him but currently find him an embarassment might well be larger.

OTOH many of those who did not vote for him found him an embarassment then and still do now. Unfortunately there were insufficient of us to keep him out but we do not find him acceptable.

* Technically his party won the election but the UK system is that the leader of the party which wins most seats has first dibs at forming a government. The leadership of the parties appears to be a substantial factor in determining the way votes go.

Re: Stating the obvious

"Why do you accept a guy like that embarrassing the whole country."

Who do you have embarassing a proportion of your country and why are they accepted?

The unfortunate fact is that BoJo doesn't embarass the whole country. and the part that he ambarasses doesn't accept him. It's called democracy. Personally I'd go for a qualified democracy - anyone standing for office should be qualified to do more than run a whelk stall.

Who do you have embarassing a proportion of your country?

Re: Building nuclear power stations in potential war zones

Identify your potential war zones. Or, more to thepoint, identify your places which cannot under any circumstances become war zones.

Re: First get your permission to build nuclear power stations

"From" or "In"?

"literally ONLY MONTHS AWAY"

That use of "literally" should be a warning. Please come back in however many months away it is to tell us when it's in production. How many months is it, BTW?

Oh, the irony!

Re: The Holy Grail...

" fission reactors, unpopular as they are, are available now"

For some value of "now". Unfortunately the unpopularity ensures that the "now" is still some way into the future. Even when unpopularity finally has to confront reality lead times will ensure that "now" will still be some way away. Even then it's unlikely that the "greens" who opposed it will accept their substantial share of blame for the unneccessary CO2 burden.

Hydrogen is also inflammable, potentially explosively so, and what's more, it doesn't stay put. A hydrogen leak in an underground car park doesn't bear thinking about.

"easily implemented energy storage technologies such as moving masses up and down the gravity well."

There's probably a limited supply of gravity wells. Pumped storage, for instance, requires two suitable spaces for water where water is in sufficient supply. Mine shafts are ralatively small even if they are more numerous, provided they haven't been filled in.

"These are proven and reliable, and more so than atomic reactors."

More so? I doubt it.

British Army Twitter and YouTube feeds hijacked by crypto-promos

Send a task force to deal with them.

Ubuntu Unity desktop back from the dead after several years' hiatus

Re: Mint Thanks You For The Memories

One of two reasons I think - the other being Gnome 3.

It's an interface which resembles a phone or tablet desktop (if thet's the right term for such UIs) in that it presents a palette of applications. Some people prefer it. I'm not one of them but I realise some do. And there may be some environments where it's by far the best fit, perhaps combined with a touch sensitive screen for some sort of embedded control system.

It's the Linux desktop equivalent of Windows 8 - or possibly the other way around as Unity was released first.

NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe

Re: aaargggh!

As suggested above re signatures - scan the image of the stamp with transparent background, overlay on the document & send it to the next in line.

Re: Ah yes...

A cousin-in-law worked for the Beeb at transmitters. He blotted his copybook & got exiled to Orkney or Shetland for a while. He quite liked the life style so got shifted back.

W3C overrules objections by Google, Mozilla to decentralized identifier spec

Re: You know something's wrong

I prefer DID-n't

Open source Office rival Collabora releases web-based CODE 22.05

Re: I've said it before

Don't worry. In a few years people will realise that there's a great opportunity to do all the work they need on their laptop or desktop. All it needs is for the capabilities of the H/W to deliver performance get sufficiently ahead of the software's ability to mop it up with even more shiny UIs.

Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

Re: Hold on a second

As I want a Linux system without systemd I do not choose RHEL. There are other distros with other characteristics. Thank goodness for all that effort that goes into producing different distros which is not, despite views to the contrary, wasted.

And yes, I do understand the difference between GPL & BSD (although I may have to check on the multitude of other licences in the spaces between, nor do I conflate FOSS with GPL. Actually I read FOSS as Free and Open Source Software regarding the "and" as a union operator, not an intersect.