Posts by Doctor Syntax

Average Adobe staffer makes $170k a year, and 185 of them = 1 CEO

Margins in software locking customers into subscriptions.

FTFY

The Shakespearian question of our age: To cloud or not to cloud

Re: Shakespearian question?

You had me puzzled for a moment but, yes, it is that time of year. "The old sheep of the Lake District" to quote Rumpole.

Police pounce on 'pompompurin' – alleged mastermind of BreachForums

Re: Meanwhile over at Microsoft

I find it not at all difficult to not use their browser because a find it not at all difficult not to use their OS.

It's best to fix problems at source.

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

Re: Microsoft "Active Desktop"

"This content came over the Internet, even if there was nobody sitting in front of the computer overnight."

So did the electricity. If you're not using it, switch it off.

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

Re: Hal seems a bit dumb

... but nowhere near as dumb as Sue

"They had borrowed the empty room for 5 minutes and hadn’t logged out."

Well played, sir. That's the way to get the policy changed.

It's a linguistic/vegetational oddity that "thicket" is related to "quick"

Re: Back in the day

I forgot the other one: BAN - brightness adjustment needed

Re: Well that was unfortunate.

If the boss was cool she'd have appreciated the success he'd had in improving helpdesk/user relationships and not taken it personally. Unfortunately the characteristics that enable people to climb the managerial ladder are just what makes them bad managers.

Re: Back in the day

For apparently blank screens: KAM - knob adjusting monitor.

Cosmic rays more likely to glitch out water-cooled computers

Re: Hmm

"I tremble a little to think how these effects might manifest themselves in quantum systems."

Wrong and right at the same time.

Add boron to the cooling water.

Ellison's healthcare obsession carries risks for Oracle

Re: FUBB

They still need the yachts to get between islands.

Shareholders sue Google, claim it hid anticompetitive ad practices

I hope they win so they get some of their own money given back to them, less lawyers' fees. Who do they think owns Alphabet's money? And, in light of the first sentence, who do they think is really going to benefit from it, win or lose?

The Stonehenge of PC design, Xerox Alto, appeared 50 years ago this month

"I think you might mean CuriousMarc's video series?"

Yup, that's the one.

"The chap suggested I could go meet Dr Kay ... this may yet happen."

I'll look forward to reading that.

Re: Stonehenge?

So what would be Long Kennet? IBM360?

Re: Proper paper orientation

It's ideal for displaying rolling news.

Re: Proper paper orientation

"I've always thought the portrait screen is the correct way to go."

It depends what you're doing. Writing on one document with another containing reference material would probably be harder that way. Your rotating monitor is probably a better option than one fixed vertically.

Somewhere on YouTube there's a series of a computer museum refurbishing an Alto (spoiler alert - they started by replacing the PSU electrolytics). IIRC the hardware looped through a number of phases, mostly handling the peripherals, only one of which was actually running code by emulating a DG Nova in microcode. It's well worth finding & watching.

Having ignored OO for years I found myself slumming on Windows in 2000, using Delphi. I'd encountered UCSD Pascal in the distant past so the nuts & bolts of the language were familiar. Suddenly all the OO stuff made sense - it's just old-fashioned Entity/Relationship with methods bolted on. The obfuscation was zealots (a) being zealots and (b) adopting the industry standard of giving old stuff new names.

Re: Round corners!?!

At about 8:30 on the video is what I take to be the Parc demo and it shows overlapping windows.

UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is a… what user now?

If there's any trolling it's the "because I was sort of born into it" about running Apple. It's not surprising that he finds Debian/Raspbian an accessible replacement for Unix. The questions following the talk do reveal two things. One is that the trojan is no longer in the C compiler. The other is the answer to "Who ate all the Pis?". He's got so many v4s its not surprising the rest of us can't get any.

Got Conti? Here's the ransomware cure to avoid paying up

If the clueless luser doesn't work for marketing themselves they'll have been trained to do it by clueless lusers who do work in marketing who don't see what's wrong with this and spam their customers with training material AKA "valuable marketing messages".

The npm registry's safe word is Socket

"I wouldn't know how to fix the fundamental issue either. JavaScript just does not have a standard library worthy of the name"

Having identified the problem it should be straightforward to identify a solution.

Lenovo ordered to pay $140M for InterDigital patents – sees this as a 'major win'

Standards committees need to look and learn. If patented technologies are accepted into a standard the actual terms should be included in the standard as binding on all parties, not leaving FRAND to be fought out in court later.

AI-generated art can be copyrighted, say US officials – with a catch

Re: a meaningful amount of creative effort

Judge? Won't all these be going to go before Texas juries?

Re: Realistically this is less of an issue than people make out...

Obviously some actual work will have to be done to touch out the Getty and Alamy watermarks (other watermarks are available).

Budget: UK chip strategy still nowhere to be seen. Money for quantum, AI? Sure

Re: Grown-Ups

I remember a government semi-conductor strategy of long ago. I think they even got the EU to adopt it in due course.

In order to boost home-grown production imported components would be taxed. Just components as components. Components already mounted on PCBs wouldn't be. What would be a really important boost for local production? A strong local market in the form of a strong PCB assembly industry. Looking at any PCB the chips on it would be stamped with all sorts of countries of origin. That wouldn't change overnight. Any local PCB assembler wanting to produce a board with a putatively locally made WonderWidget3 would still have to buy in a handful of SN74xx, 555s, 741s or whatever from abroad (who's going to set up a new factory just to produce commodity stuff?). So the local PCB assembler is facing foreign competition selling the board with WonderWidget3 and all the rest already assembled without paying the tax that he'd have to pay to get the rest of the components.

Beware of someone from the government here to help.

Re: Jobs for the boys

Government money isn't for spending. It's for announcing. If you dig into it you might find it's already been announced before and will be again. That way governments get extra value for money. Value, in government terms, is measured in headlines.

"All this tech kinda needs semiconductors."

This is a government aspiration. All it needs is smoke and mirrors.

Here's a fun idea: Try to unlock and drive away in someone else's Tesla

A flash mob of cars! Where shall we send them? Not the M25, obviously, no rrom for another 10,000...

Re: You laugh

"Your email daemon still has to bounce the junk mail"

That's Mythic Beast's daemon, not mine.

Re: Cop Car Keys

I had a Subaru with a key and/or lock so worn that the key could be taken out of the ignition without turning it off first. I found out by discovering the key had fallen out whilst I was driving. Great for cold mornings; start the car, take out the key, lock the car and go back indoors until it had defrosted the windows.

Unlocking the car and driving it away lacks ambition. Keep the car locked but have it drive itself away.

Re: You laugh

This is why you have your own domain so you can hand out individual email addresses and cancel them when they're finished with.

Enter Tinker: Asus pulls out RISC-V board it hopes trumps Raspberry PI

Re: Wrong

"it probably won't be until the end of the year before things get more or less back to normal"

Which year?

Bing AI feels like ChatGPT stuffed into a suit – not the future

"Reinventing search may take even more work, and a willingness to look backwards to what makes search useful today."

Maybe that should read "look backwards to when search was more useful than it is today".

"Once past their mid-30s most people struggle to pick up new skills without significant effort. It's easier to just criticise something as useless than it is to try it out."

Those of us well past out mid-30s remember (a) search engines that understood "not" as part of the search string and (b) Eliza.

Actually I was well past my mid-30s when those (and dial-up internet) came along. And when Unix and RDBMSs became available on hardware affordable for organisations that didn't have big or biggish iron budgets, something which enabled me to move into an IT career in my 40s.

"we do ramble a bit off topic sometimes"

It's one of those acquired skills.

"Think of the LLM as Barbara Woodhouse"

The OP is now entering a query "Who's Barbara Woodhouse?" Or possibly, being a youngling with a modern education, "Whose Barbara Woodhouse?"

Microsoft dips Teams in the metaverse vat with avatars ahead

Re: I want to make a teleprompter type set up ...

"But if they can come up with a 3D avatar, it can attend meetings on my behalf whilst I do some work."

Use it as your photo on your LinkedIn and job adverts. Then you it can "work" multiple jobs.

Re: Meanwhile at my bigcorp

"Managers are lamenting that only 50% of people turn on their webcams in Teams meetings."

Don't they realise the speakers aren't turned on either?

Re: If I designed products this way, we'd go bust

"We know Microsoft hates standards with a vengeance.."

Not really. They just want the standards to be their own.

Cancer patient sues hospital after ransomware gang leaks her nude medical photos

Or to put it plainer (it needs to be plain enough for directors and investors), until fines and compensation have actually taken a few noticeably big corporations down entirely. The first two or three might get noticed but it mike take more to start the panic that's needed.

Biden wants to claw back, flog off 1.5GHz of spectrum

How about grabbing some of the WiFi bands? They're just sitting there not being used monetized.

Microsoft picks perfect time to dump its AI ethics team

something for all employees to consider is kinda like when Bill Gates told his engineers in 2002 to make security an organization-wide priority

There's a saying "when it's everybody's job it's nobody's job".

Watch Reg vultures wrap their heads around Silicon Valley Bank collapse

Re: Make it harder, please

"while they can put a percentage of those depositors' monies to work they need to be very conservative about what they do"

AIUI this was the trouble. The were very conservative and put it into 10 year bonds. The price of 10 year bonds went down when interest rates went up. When they needed cash they had to sell the bonds at a loss.

Anyone want an International Space Station? Slightly used

Re: Mir

"and of course lowering the orbit of one module would raise the orbit of the rest"

Despite the name Canadarm is attached to the ISS, not Canada. It also raises the question of how would Canadarm deorbit itself.

Re: Like a circle in a spiral Like a wheel within a wheel

I think it will be buyer collects.

Requiem for Google Reader, dead for a decade but not forgotten

Re: "Why did it never get easy to subscribe to things in RSS"

The strategy worked, then.