Posts by Doctor Syntax

Failed gambler? How about an algorithm that predicts the future

Re: A data revolution

But their tspDB's predictions of my balance might not agree with mine.

Re: Where there’s AI Will there are Myriad New Ways to Skin Dead Bouncing Cats*

"produced by a word randomizer"

Or a marketing department. You'd need a Turing test 2.0 to see if there's a difference. What does the Twitter Bot Identification System say?

Call that wet chemistry? This one, as I recall, bubbled the breath at a controlled rate through an actual solution.

Re: Half full or empty

You should be grateful that something was left on the table for you, even if it was half full; or empty.

"My entire lab really loved this project."

Back in the day N Ireland didn't use the blow-in-the-bag breathalyser. They had a device using wet chemistry, colorimetry and operator input to obtain the final reading. The RUC operators needed training courses and the training courses needed other RUC officer volunteers to be test subjects (I don't thing there were any conscripts) and consume alcohol. There was a slight downside in that it involved having several blood samples taken over the course of the day although I suppose they were feeling less pain as the day progressed.

A colleague had the job of managing herding the volunteers. She reported that some of them got a bit upset that the course was paused for the lunch break and broke into the drinks cupboard.

tspDB? A teaspoon database?

Connecting it to BitCoin & the like should be interesting - if it handles the feedback correctly it will disappear up its own oracle.

Seriously, you do not want to make that cable your earth

Re: ITN

How about guests at the Electrician's Ball:

Eddy Current and his not yet potty trains son Leak Age Current.

Come on, you know how it goes.

Re: almost whoops

Apart from new-builds are there any raised floors that don't have more cables than can possibly be needed and mostly of unknown provenance but might still be in use under them?

Re: ohhh god

Nothing that a pair of bolt covers won't deal with.

Re: ITN

Eddy Currents, the well known electrical engineer.

Re: almost whoops

"Holy crap, how big were these pictures?"

OP said there was a panel with enough space for the cable behind it. It probably needed 4" to get through that and far enough into something solid. But nailing through a removable panel?

Re: almost whoops

You didn't bother to look above the false ceilings?

Acer's TravelMate laptops arrive – complete with Microsoft Pluton chips

"Pluton ... can be updated through Windows Update as the threat landscape evolves and changes."

But what is that threat landscape?

The new generation of CentOS replacements – plus the daddy of them all: RHEL 8.6

Re: It was sad to see Centos go

"but at least he is consistent"

So is a stopped clock.

Re: Excellent

"‘cos we were running a bit short on those, weren’t we?"

Yes. We really were running short - zero, in fact - on clones of RHEL for those who need to run long term server versions but don't need to pay for commercial support. And that amounts to a lot of servers doing heavy lifting on the internet. You've probably used some of them without knowing it.

Do you mean Windows with its Home, Enterprise, PoS and Server flavours (I may well have missed some, it's not my bag)? Look on RHEL and its clones as the Linux equivalent of Windows Server. And very specifically they offer a long term path.

Does anyone have any recent figures for the relative share of internet servers for Linux and Windows Server? And are there any instances of Windows in the top 100 supercomputers?

"And there's Oracle if you want cheaper corporate support."

There's a sentance I never thought I'd read.

Re: It was sad to see Centos go

Once upon a time there were several RHEL clones of which Centos was one. Then Centos became the "official" clone and the others closed down. This seemed all very well until Centos stopped being Centos As We Know It and become a stage between Fedora & RHEL itself which is exactly what its users didn't want. Now we have two RHEL clones again. Given past history, if I were dependent on such a thing I'd regard that as very welcome second sourcing.

Second sources used to be something manufacturers looked for. Then JIT became popular so second sources would have been what you call a waste of effort (some people say the same thing about backups). With the supply chain issues we have now it wouldn't seem such a waste of effort any more.

Scrolling down the Alma Linux page reveals the availability of 3rd party commercial support. Given the shared heritage it seems likely that the same supplier would be able to support either and very likely other providers might.

Google Russia goes broke after bank account snatched

Re: Seize Russian ships

"99% of leaders are crazy and old, and that's only in Europe"

From my PoV they're mostly young even without, in one case, giving their performance of an erratic teenager.

Voyager 1 space probe producing ‘anomalous telemetry data’

Re: I knew it!

Nothing of the sort. It's being encrypted by ransomware.

Re: 41 hours of latency sounds bad...

We were luckier - 2 hour turnaround.

Microsoft-backed robovans to deliver grub in London

That should clear London streets of cyclists one way or the other.

Re: Parking like a human

"How are they going to teach robots to do that?"

The same way that they teach themselves.

Re: DPD, wtf

Despite many emails supplying exact coordinates they still can't find my house.

Apple scraps 3-day return to office amid COVID-19 cases

Re: At What Point...

One thing that the last couple of years has shown is that many people do not need to go into offices to be productive. Perhaps presenteeism is one piece of theatre that needs to be ended.

Large cities with long commutes are environmentally unsustainable. We have been given a chance to learn that we can do better. It's time to act on what has been learned.

Re: I hate the office

However, the company is probably paying a substantial amount for the space the worker occupies in the office. Under your scheme do they pay that amount to the worker to not occupy the space so that they could move to smaller premises?

Re: "not everyone is yet ready to return to the corporate altar"

"If I'm sat at a desk banging away on the computer (and it's not updating an InstaPintaTwitFace account), that might be considered work."

A poor manager might not be able to tell the difference anyway.

Re: "not everyone is yet ready to return to the corporate altar"

"because management trusts us to do our jobs"

That's the crux - or at least part of it. Another part is that trust should be two-way.

Re: "not everyone is yet ready to return to the corporate altar"

"It's also been nice to catch up and get to know people for a beer after work."

For a couple of years I worked for a company which had most of its professional staff bodyshopped out all over London; only those working on the same site would be in daily contact. This particular issue was dealt with by putting money behind the bar of a central London once a month.

Re: "not everyone is yet ready to return to the corporate altar"

The personal computer and the internet made that possible more than 10 years ago. What they didn't anticipate was that circumstances would force them to test the feasibility of such arrangements.

Re: "not everyone is yet ready to return to the corporate altar"

There are two separate numbers. The money spent on the property and the money coming in as a result of work done. If the space was not occupied and the money coming in continued to come in then it is not a return on the money being spent; the money spent is, therefore, wasted. Whether the money was spent on building, purchase or lease makes no difference.

Re: @Doctor Syntax - "not everyone is yet ready to return to the corporate altar"

Sounds good to me.

Re: Show me someone who is dead-set on getting people back to the office

Add to that list a manager who measures inputs rather than outputs.

Re: "not everyone is yet ready to return to the corporate altar"

"That's a sunk cost fallacy, though."

The accountants should know that. There may be a bit of a problem explaining to shareholders that they've spend all this money on a white elephant office.

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

Re: Fairly obvious why its the same-but-different

I think the Windows situation is that you use it whether you like the changes or not, MS give you no choice. People didn't pay to "upgrade" from 7, they failed to avoid it. Windows users have no choice. Perhaps the take-away from these comments is that Windows is for people who get confused by choice and will put up with all sorts of vendor's abuse to avoid it.

Re: Change just to change?

"Converting Unix to a PC platform & updating for security & tech changes would have been fine."

It's been done several times.

The Sys V version was fine but expensive. Not just fine but, in Linux's early days it was streets ahead in terms of quality It was called Xenix and then SCO. Unfortunately instead of competing by lowering the price for desktop users SCO was taken over by someone who had the bright idea of suing IBM for it contributions to Linux. It didn't work out well. In my view SCO could have owned the Unix on desktop market but they blew it.

BSD versions are also fine but fragmented in a different way to Linux. They have lost out to Linux. It's not quite clear why. Maybe Linux was the new shiny. Maybe, despite what's said elsewhere, the community preferred the GPL Maybe it's because there were already several BSD versions against a single Linux kernel lineage.

You have a choice of ways to develop your visually impaired interface for the web.

One is to insist that every website can be accessed text only.

A second is to develop a browser that presents itself to websites as some browser they recognise, tracking that browser's changes but goes straight to voice. You'd also need to develop voice-based equivalents to all the other software that might be needed.

A third is to use an existing browser and only develop a screen to voice layer to sit over it, at the same time gaining access to the massive inventory of other screen-based S/W.

Which gives you more bang per buck?

BTW searching the Debian repository for Braille brings up 45 packages of which 6 are installed by default.

Re: I'm Puzzled......

No problem. I have applications on this Linux box which I run at least weekly for which I suspect there are no equivalents on Windows almost all of which are part of the distro's repositories*.

Updates? A negligible issue - the OS checks for updates on a daily basis and if there are any they can be downloaded and installed without fuss, only an OS kernel - infrequent - needs a reboot and even then only when its convenient.

* Personally I use LibreOffice from its own website rather than the older one in the Debian repository so I do have to update that myself. Other distros might use the more recent versions anyway and some Debian users might just be content with the older version.

Re: The curse of overchoice

"And you will get dozens of different answers - exactly what he was trying to avoid."

The question asked was not what Linux to use but where to get Mint. There is one glaring answer to that, not dozens. It's the Mint website which Google finds in seconds.

Re: The curse of overchoice

No, they specifically said they didn't know where to get Linux Mint. There really is no excuse for saying that when all they have to do is type Linux Mint into Google. That will take them to the Mint website and download is a further click away via a prominent link on the home page.

Re: The curse of overchoice

I'm not sure whether you'd want to call me a penguin or whether I'd answer to that but here both SWMBO and myself use Linux daily. Purpose: to get stuff done. Stuff includes researching history, maintaining local history website, including preparing some of our out of print books for PDF download (me), researching material for patchwork class (her) and preparing the class hand-outs from photos and scanned notes (me).

Tools include the usual office suite (LibreOffice), browser and email, various PDF tools, principally Okular, pdfunite and ocrmypdf, various graphics tools, principally Gwenview, Pinta & Gimp, dia, a few tools produced with Lazarus and good old vi is ideal for taking out a lot of OCR artefacts from scanned books so that clean text can be pasted into the word processor. NextCloud handles backups and transfer between the two laptops. Some of those, or equivalents, could be found on Windows but I think I might be struggling to get stuff done equally effectively without some of the others.

NASA's InSight doomed as Mars dust coats solar panels

Re: Insight?

"We use the arm to scoop the dirt transported over the lander, and we slowly let the dirt fall onto the deck of the lander so that the dirt is carried over by the solar winds across the solar panels, cleaning it."

If only the arm could reach far enough to give the panels a gentle tap...

Elon Musk says Twitter buy 'cannot move forward' until spam stats spat settled

Re: Strategy?

Don't discount the fact that it will have discouraged shareholders from holding out for a higher price and that it will discourage any other parties from making a bid.

Re: Less than 5%!!

That's a measure of precision, not the accuracy*. Also, the standard deviation of a Poisson distribution is skewed, not noticeably for a large number but very significantly for a small count so although the figure can't be much less (you can't have a negative count) it can be larger.

This sentence caught my attention: "Still, he claimed the internal estimates for the past four quarters have reported spam users make up less than five per cent of all accounts.". If they have estimates for the past four quarters it suggests more than a one-off sample was taken. Does it mean one sampling per quarter? One per month? One per day? And how do they decide what's a bot? And does it matter is a spammer is a bot or a human?

There's a reason why scientific reports explain how figures are obtained. You'd think that with the amounts of money at stake financial reports would be held to the same standard.

* The difference between accuracy and precision: Imagine you have a 100m surveyor's tape measure. It's marked off in metres, centimetres and millimetre. The last allows you to measure to the nearest mm. That's the precision. But the tape is a cloth tape and it's stretched by 1% so your measurement of 100m to the nearest mm is in fact in error by 1m. That's a failure of accuracy.

Tech pros warn EU 'data adequacy' at risk if Brexit Britain goes its own way

Re: Inadequate approach to data adequacy

It's three sets of requirements. The Good Friday agreement - no hard border in Ireland, the Union - no hard borders within the United Kingdon and Getting Brexit Done, choose any two.

It was pointed out that this was one of the problems with Brexit when the stupid idea was first mooted.

Re: Inadequate approach to data adequacy

"The NI Protocol was indeed signed in bad faith"

Indeed it was. BoJo was caught between the requirements to keep the Good Friday arrangements going, preserving the Union and his Getting Brexit Done*. So he did what he always does, deals with the immediate most immediate aspect letting something else go until it becomes a problem when he'll back track, bouncing back and forth from one to another. His resolution to that quandary was an arrangement whereby NI was still in the customs union and the rest of the no longer quite as United Kingdom wasn't. It was made quite clear at the time that he'd be prepared to tear up part of the Brexit agreement when the Union issue became a problem. Bad faith.

The Union issue has now become an problem so he's going to take the next step, breaking the Brexit agreement. Clearly he'd prefer to negotiate a fudge with the EU whereby they let goods "for NI only" pass through unchecked. Nobody who remembers** the old days pre-EU membership and the smuggling that took place despite the border checks will believe that "NI only" bit. Why should the EU agree to creating a huge back door?

Then he'll get leaned on by Biden about the Good Friday agreement. Goodness knows what he'll do about that but whatever it is he'll find himself getting hemmed into a tighter and tighter triangle. He probably reckons that with a bit of luck he'll have left office and it'll be somebody else's problem.

* Let's be quite clear about this. The Good Friday Agreement was predicated on both sides of the border being in a customs union. That was needed to avoid the border customs posts and hence a hard border. The only way to Get Brexit Done and avoid a customs border at the Irish border was to create a customs border in the Irish Sea instead so that N Ireland remained in the customs union. That, of course weakens the United Kingdom's Union. It's a choose any two situation.

** I remember one occasion when a whole bus-load of Christmas shoppers from the South descended on Lisburn, they couldn't wait to go the extra 10 miles into Belfast.

Re: Inadequate approach to data adequacy

"So whether or not the UK retains notional adequacy, it will still have to comply with the GDPR when processing the personal data of persons in the EU (EEA)"

The UK as a whole doesn't process such data. Businesses that want to process personal data will have to comply.

But if adequacy is not maintained will the EU accept that such businesses are complying with GDPR? Remember where Schrems keeps tripping up arrangements with the US: it's the US's surveillance legislation making it impossible to comply. There seems to be every chance that UK changes will make it equally impossible. The difference between the US & the UK is that the EU seems prepared to keep creating fig-leaf arrangements which then take Schrems some time to tear down because it means going to court and I don't see them extending that sort of arrangement to us. Why would they? They have much less need to do so and HMG keeps thumbing its nose at them.

Re: Inadequate approach to data adequacy

"Still, the UK has generally been willing to try and strengthen DP rules above & beyond those in force in other European countries."

In the past maybe. What they're saying now is that now they don't have to they're not going to do that. This is removing protection from the general public, including you and me and yet the EU, putting that protection in place is called undemocratic.

Re: "The way forward"

You forgot the magic beans.