Posts by Doctor Syntax

Windows XP's adventures in the afterlife shows copyright's copywrongs

For an extreme example, imagine a government paying millions for custom software (work for hire so the government ought to be the copyright holder)

"Work for hire" usually means employment in which case the copyright would automatically belong to the government if that was the employer.

More likely this will be a contract to create a product. It differs from "work for hire" because in one case you're buying someone's time and in the other you're buying a specific item. If the government contracts to buy a custom package and doesn't get ownership then unless there is specific political interference you'd have to blame the department's legal team who drew up the contract.

"What was not part of the equation was the incredibly accelerated time frame of technological innovation."

Another thing not part of the equation is the incredibly extended time that the software may need to be in operation. Any OS can have no commercial value* other than as a component of the system in which it is installed. Where that system has a planned service life much longer than the OS vendor considers commercially desirable we have a mismatch.

To some extent we should blame the designer of the system for using an ephemeral component (a physical comparison might be lubricating oil) with no provision for changing it at EoL. However there may be no available alternative. What seems to be needed is a concept such as a "Capital equipment grade" grade for S/W which comes with some form of assurance - maybe code escrow - that it will never become unsupportable.

* This may not be the vendor's view. However a moment's reflection should show the vendor that unless it has such value to a purchaser it has no market and hence no value at all.

Air Force colonel 'misspoke' when he said an AI-drone 'killed' its human operator

"Challenger, Gray & Christmas reckon nearly 4,000 jobs have been replaced with the automated technology."

Maybe it's a sensitive topic for them. Writing reports like this must be a prime target for AI.

Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file

Re: ??

A Unix sysadmin who trusted Windows for anything at all?

This ain't Boeing very well: Starliner's first crewed flight canceled yet again

Re: .. Paying attention to History

It'll be left on Venus's doorstep instead.

Re: Rename comimg up

A one-horned goat? It could be a unicorn if you don't look too carefully.

Re: Pissup/brewery

You only need a reusable pad where real estate's expensive. Not even Musk could destroy the moon - could he?

Twitter loses second head of Trust and Safety under Musk

Re: Snowballs grow as they roll downhill

He bought it because he had to buy it. Hehad to buy it because he discovered that when he made an offer it was legally enforceable.

Elon Musk hit with insider trading claims over his Dogecoin crypto-hype

Re: The elderly?

Yup. It starts out OK but then wanders into territory that suggests a US equivalent of Dickens. Written by AI?

This typo sparked a Microsoft Azure outage

Re: Various fixes and reconfigurations have been put in place to prevent the issue from recurring.

One of the great things about software sticking plasters is that you never run out of them.

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

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

The thing the board needs to consider is what happens if it has a cash flow problem; the business will have replaced capex by opex and now has to meet those bill on schedule or go under.

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

Google has form for starting and abandoning all sorts of things.

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

The thing with this sort of situation is that the spreadsheet was the wrong platform to start with. LO Calc would be equally wrong. MS Access would have been better than Excel (and probably better than LO Base; any time I've looked at that I've just shaken my head at it and I was an RDBMS specialist back in the day).

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

And when Fred, who's been piling macro on macro and is the only one who (thinks he) knows what they do, retires the company is screwed, has to work out what it was all about and, if it's got any sense, does a clean sheet reimplementation.

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.

Microsoft Windows latest: Cortana app out, adverts in

Re: Two words for Microsoft:

But will this voice commanded stuff obey?

"And those tools are: voice-controlled functionality in Windows 11; the updated Bing search engine with its interactive chat-based interface for looking up info; all that Copilot stuff in Microsoft 365, allowing users to create and edit documents among other things using natural-language instructions"

What happens when it's volubly cursed for yet again getting it wrong? Will it swear back? Will it do what it's told such as Bing finally return only what it was asked for and nothing else? Will it cower in a corner or hide by uninstalling itself?

"We know that this change may affect some of the ways you work in Windows,"...

and what's more, we don't care.

It's amazing the way those wedded to the Microsoft way will accept this kind of abuse and yet resist the one change that would get them out of it. Stockholm syndrome fails in comparison.

Meta threatens to pull all news from California rather than pay El Reg a penny

Re: Do people really only use Facebook?

Better to read it on an aggregator than to be sent to some Reach site.

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

Back before my time, so it must have been the '60s, a filling station on the outskirts of small toen out in Co Tyrone kept getting done over. It was just nicely positioned for lads who'd been out on the booze to help themselves to a few ciggies & some cash on their way home.

Solution: alarm sensor in the filling station, bell in the local police house and a few quid to the local GPO linesman to run a length of twin core between them.

The way i heard it, at one point there were 3 lads doing time in Crumlin Rd., all nabbed separately.

Meta tells staff to return to office three days a week

Back in the real world we've rented all this office space and it looks a bit silly if we're not using it.

Buckle up for meetings on the road as Cisco brings Webex to Audi autos

Re: On the contrary....

"designed to reduce the number of Audi drivers"

And for the rest of us, it confirms our good judgement.

UK.gov reboots ERP refresh with £934 million procurement

Re: "a cluster of Whitehall departments"

"will eventually receive a new ERP system"

That seems a bit optimistic.

Re: Another Tory spend on complete pish no doubt...

This is the DWP. I take it you've never worked with them. They've always been like that under one name or another and quite immune to changes in government..

I remember helping one of my clients trying to sort out their (DWP's) self-billing system, that was the best part of 20 years ago. The colleague I was working with described them as "not the sharpest knives in the box". More than 50 years ago when I had to make use of a labour exchange (Job Centre) I formed the opinion that at least some of the staff were on the wrong side of the counter. Both those were when Labour were in power.

Microsoft embraces Apple Mac loyalists – as long as they're using its software

"a healthier mix of Windows and Apple Mac devices being embraced by enterprises and workers alike"

Where Microsoft is involved it's best to keep a close eye on who is embracing whom.

Software rollout failure led to Devon & Cornwall cops recording zero crime for 3 months

If you regard such things as "not unusual" then that's what they'll become after going through a phase of "not unacceptable".

Millions of Gigabyte PC motherboards backdoored? What's the actual score?

A few years ago you might have found a vendor-specific driver provided as a separate disk or maybe included with the pre-installed OS. It would have filled the same role but a little more overtly, Why do they do things differently now? Because they can. Back then the BIOS was a relatively simple (less so than back in 8-bit days) that did a few things and (hopefully) did them well. Now it's an OS running under the user's choice of OS with greatly enhanced powers including greatly enhanced powers of doing things badly or doing bad things. And we're told it can do things such as "secure boot" and provide a "trusted platform module". In whose view is the boot secure and who trusts it. Not the user, that's for sure.

Re: You missed a question.

Its only job is should be to start them.

FTFY

US Air Force AI drone 'killed operator, attacked comms towers in simulation'

Re: Human behaviour

Or in 3 words: gaming the system.

Get ready, Snowflakes: Azure AI is coming for you with one click

Re: "As clouds offer elastic access to hardware"

It'll stretch the budget.

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.