Posts by Doctor Syntax

Switch off the mic if it makes you feel better – it'll make no difference

Re: Four......

I'm sure if you search news reports hard enough you'll find reports from c 1980 of a police investigation which involved digging a trench near the practice tee of a Co. Down golf course (Crawfordsburn IIRC). It will include mention of police taking away samples in white plastic bags. In fact nothing of significance was found (it was one of several reports alleging buried bodies, all false) but it was like a golf ball mine. A lot of police officers were keen golfers and the bags were clear plastic, full of golf balls.

Back in those days the golf club restaurant served such delicacies as chicken in a basket....

RAD Basic – the Visual Basic 7 that never was – releases third alpha

Re: Xojo

I'm sure there was a REALBasic, although maybe with different capitalisation, long before Macs. Probably on CP/M.

BT signs deal with AWS with aim of speeding up digital transformation

Re: Supercharge BT and drive its return to growth

There were two parts to the mobile venture. There was the network part, CellNet, and the customer facing part, BT Mobile, originally the merger of the phone, paging and voicemail services.

It was already growing rapidly when they split it off - remember it was a share split, not a sale so BT got no cash for it. Any competent telecoms management should have seen mobile had to be part of their future and faced down the naysayers. To get back in required giving Deutsch Telekom 1/8th of the business, probably a bargain but something that should never have been necessary.

As to cable, you're quite right, of course. It's something most critics forget when complaining about fibre - BT was compelled to make a very late start.

Re: AWS?

This is BT. Please don't assume that because it has competency in some levels that that implies competency in top management.

Re: Supercharge BT and drive its return to growth

To say nothing of the fact that they decided they didn't need to be in the mobile market. The regulated bit always irked them. That's why they made disastrous investments in things they didn't understand because they thought there were fat profits in unregulated ventures.

"More buzz words than you can shake a stick at."

Indeed. And those at the workface can only watch yet another lurch in direction.

Twitter buyout: Larry Ellison bursts into Elon's office, slaps $1b down on the desk

Re: Where's the mindwash

Is it the one in the room?

Re: Customer support

At some point either the advertising budget runs out or manglement starts to take a look at what they get for their money. I suspect that right now there's an advertising bubble as the entire consumer side of the internet seems to depend on it and that it's going to get very messy when it bursts.

Re: It could have been worse...

This has been explained a number of times but try this exercise.

Look at the things you own. Include any investments, pension rights etc. How much money would they be worth if you sold them? (For this purpose just take the present valuation less the outstanding amount of any loans taken to buy them.) That, plus any money you have in the bank or your pocket, is what you are worth in the way in which these personal valuations are made.

How much of that could you actually spend? Only the money in your bank and your pocket; this is what's known as liquid assets. You probably wouldn't even want to spend that much on a single purchase. If you wanted to buy something big you'd have to sell some of the other stuff or borrow against its value and possibly get some of your mates to chip in if it's something that they might want to share.

Shareholders turn the screws on IBM and its gag orders

"an IBM spokesperson declined to comment."

Obvious. He'd been gagged.

Arm China CEO refuses to go despite SoftBank taking control

Re: B b b Boris

I'm sure he manages to convince himself of anything, sometimes for hours at a time, until he needs to convince himself of the opposite. He probably thinks that works on other people as well.

TurboTax to pay $141m to settle claims it scammed millions of people

Re: "we admitted no wrongdoing"

I find it amazing that they have to promise not to make mis-leading claims. Isn't making such claims illegal in the US? Or do US businesses only have to obey the law when they promise to do so?

TFA describes the states as suing Intuit. That's the source of the problem. A civil suit can be settled like this with no admission of wrongdoing; in a criminal prosecution the only way to stop it going to a full trial with witnesses giving evidence would be a guilty plea.

Outlook bombards Safari users with endless downloads

Re: Until Microsoft determines the cause of the problem

There's nothing like proper testing and this is nothing like proper testing.

Elliott Management to WDC board: Spin out or sell flash biz

Re: Confused

"what exactly can the two parts do when split that they can't do now?"

Ether:

Have a sum of share prices for the two parts a bit bigger than Elliot paid for their shares or

At least one of the halves can be bought up with a leveraged buy-out leaving Elliot with more money and somebody else with debt.

One of the remarkable things is that Elliot and their ilk seem to be able to offer what I assume they will insist are informed opinions on so many varied industries. If they're so smart one has to wonder why they don't generate their own product ideas and build up businesses to exploit them. Surely it couldnt be that breaking things is easier and requires less knowledge than building them?

So which half do they think should make hybrid drives?

AI helps scientists design novel plastic-eating enzyme

Re: Breaks it down?

The linked article says it breaks it down into monomers, presumably ethylene terephthalate that can then be reused. The intent seems to be to use the enzyme in an industrial process rather than release the bacterium which already exists in the wild.

Re: End of the Polymeriferous Period

The enzyme evolved in bacteria in the wild, presumably in temperatures <30C, so forget about the risk of escape. For an industrial process the less the energy input the better so as low an optimum the better. It may well be, of course, that although the wild-type optimum may well be higher although it can work at ambient temperatures.

Re: End of the Polymeriferous Period

According to the summary this enzyme breaks it down to monomers. Presumably in vivo there are other enzymes to convert the monomers into something the existing bacterial enzymes can use.

Re: alchohol?

Make that alchohohol for Christmas.

Re: End of the Polymeriferous Period

TFA says "low temperature" with the implication that 30 Celsius is low. It's probably not as low as the wild-type bacteria were experiencing. Something doesn't quite hang together here. Were they planning to extract the enzyme to use on its own from the bacteria and discovered that it doesn't work as well as it does in vivo? I can see the attraction of using purified enzyme: it will leave the product of the breakdown to become a potentially useful industrial substrate instead of letting the bacteria respire it all the way to CO2.

But why AI? What's wrong with the traditional approach of seeding a substrate with a weak suspension, incubating and selecting the colonies that grow best? Not eye-catching enough?

One in five employees at top Indian outsourcers left in the past year

So, business as usual.

Re: Not surprised

Not if he has to pay for the electricity.

Apple to bin apps that go three years without updates

Re: I for one love this idea

"Rule number one of operating system design. Don't fuck up existing applications."

Also rules 2, 3, 4, 5.... And rule zero.

Re: I for one love this idea

The correct solution to this is not have the OS break it.

Re: I for one love this idea

"If something still works and is not a security risk then it doesn't need fixing"

I'd go a step further. It needs not fixing.

Re: "They work"

A thumb down. I think we've found a UX designer.

Re: "They work"

"What kind of updates it needs?"

It probably doesn't look like this year's idea of "modern".

A discounting disaster averted at the expense of one's own employment

Re: those beans don't count

The original manglers had probably been reorganised elsewhere and a new lot reorganised in with different criteria and no knowledge that they had a customer complaints problem. That's the way it works there.

Re: Access is not the problem

That's the problem.

Re: Alarming, fired.

The Civil Servants almost certainly know it. Civil Servants follow policies laid down for them. Who do you think makes the policies? The clue's in the name - and they certainly don't know it.

Re: Alarming, fired.

Some FOSS organisations do monetise support. But that was only one half of the OP. The other was support being a cost for closed source. It's not if they monetise support. That's why as a system manager I had support contracts with HP & Informix and why, when I was freelance at some of my clients had support contracts with their vendors.

Re: Alarming, fired.

It depends entirely on whether you choose to monetise support.

I think a lot of us have worked for James's former employer. Too many managers with too little to do roaming the place looking for something they know nothing about nothing about in which they can dabble.

Don't hate on cryptomining, hate the power stations, say Bitcoin super-fans

Re: Wow

I suppose in their case such a disconnection from reality is to be expected.

Spanish PM, defense minister latest Pegasus spyware victims

Maybe the best way to handle that would be to invite the Israeli ambassador into the Foreign Ministry for a chat and when he arrives wheel him straight into a press conference for a public bollocking.

US appeals court ruling could 'eliminate internet privacy'

Re: Very interesting...

"Actually my reply would be a) and yes, it does raise the question of who they [criminals] are.

See my previous post about terminology and the way it can lead you away from clear thinking. You're in danger of equating "suspect" or "defendant" with "culprit".

In my post above i said "undisputed" evidence as i do perfectly understand that evidence should not be considered if there is reasonable cause to think it was made up or tampered with or even a coerced "confession".

If there is other, undisputed, evidence then that should surely be allowed to stand and there can be a conviction.

OTOH if evidence is improperly obtained than what it tells you should be regarded as suspect. It could, for instance, be missing context. Lets say $ProminentPerson has been killed by shooting. Someone trawls through some sort of harvested social media posts and comes up with somebody saying "I once tried to shoot $ProminentPerson but missed out. I'll try again sometime." Does missing context make a difference?

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What if the context was that of photographers trying to grab pictures of celebrities?

There have been a number of cases where evidence from mobiles has been presented out of context and the case overturned when the defence finally got there hands on the complete data.

Re: Very interesting...

"Suspect = as yet unpunished perpetrator"

Yup, that's one that really gets my goat. "Culprit" is the word for whoever dunnit. Sloppy use of language leads to sloppy thinking - or perhaps is the consequence of it. I'm not sure it was used as much back then. Perhaps it's become more common as a result of more sloppily thought out TV crime series. Or sloppy thinking journalists.

Re: Very interesting...

"I do not understand why a criminal should get an out of jail free card when an investigator doesn't follow the rules."

Let's take that apart. What do you mean by "criminal"?

(a) Somebody who's committed a crime or

(b) Somebody who's been convicted of committing a crime?

If you reply (a) this raises the question of how do you know who they are? Because they've been convicted? So really your only option is (b) unless, of course, it was yourself, then you'd know for certain.

Having established that, let's say you're going about your innocent way (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here) when some investigator who can't be arsed with following the rules thinks you might have committed the crime he's investigating and manufactures some evidence against you.

You're duly convicted and, by the standards I hope we've agreed on, you're a (b); a criminal. You know you're innocent but we all have to call you a criminal because you've been convicted.

You appeal about the investigator having made up evidence and your appeal is upheld. What happens to you?

Your statement which I quoted seems to disassociate "criminal" from investigator not following the rules. By that thinking you're still a criminal because you were convicted so you don't get a get out of jail free card.

Do you now see why the strict rules of evidence aren't to protect criminals, they're to protect the innocent.

I should point out that for a considerable chunk of my working life my job was, essentially, one of the investigators. My ongoing dread was the risk of finding myself part of a miscarriage of justice if I were not ultra careful.

Re: Very interesting...

It seems to be a viewpoint the courts never consider when a big "content provider" sues someone for "stealing" their valuable IP.

Citation needed. Are there any precedents for treating this as theft? Just because it's loosely bandied about as theft in media or on forums that doesn't mean it's the word that appears in the pleadings.

BOFH: Something's consuming 40% of UPS capacity – and it's coming from the beancounters' office

Re: A possible solution

"Such a round earth pin socket would have eliminated this problem."

Not really. It isn't apparent that the vacuum cleaner won't fit until the server has been unplugged.

Re: You'd have thought that pros would do it better...

So the UPS really was up the wazoo.

Re: Designed to fail

We had the building UPS taken out by a lightning bolt. The rest of the building was OK & it took ages to get the UPS fixed during which time we ranthe servers on the uninterrupted interruptible power supply.

Re: The security system

A tip to the local fire service that an inspection might be a good idea should have fixed that.

Your software doesn't work when my PC is in 'O' mode

Re: it was a button with 'I' and 'O' on it

You must be a tester. I remember it being said that a tester was somebody who could look at the system button on the original Windows title bar and see a minus sign.

"perfectly functional for other tasks in "O" mode"

It made an excellent door stop.

India reveals plan to become major RISC-V design and production player by 2023

Re: Curry in the sky..

TFA specifically say 2023 but I did wonder if the actual words were "next year". That would just be an acceleration of "in the next ten years" or "in the next five years". It's always ten years, or five years, every year.

If they're going to achieve anything their employee churn is going to have to be less than Infosys's.

Windows 10 still growing, but Win 11 had another bad month, says AdDuplex

Re: "MS seem oblivious to the financial problems that people are experiencing all over the world."

And they just don't care about that, either.

Re: Seconds out... round 3

That could go horribly wrong the the vendors, however. If the new version is disliked there's no incentive to replace H/W for a new OS version and they have to offer the old version in order to make non-replacement sales.

Re: So which is it?

It might be better from a management point of view (IT and dealing with the "why can't I get a new one now" issue) to replace the lot at one go. We don't, of course, know how old the existing batch of PCs is nor the spread of ages.

Thinking about the OP it seems as if the boss might be prepared to go out & out Mac on the desks. If I were the A/C, however, instead of just putting W10 on the laptop I'd have tried a dual boot, W10 & Linux, so that the boss could compare W10, Linux & Mac as desktops.