Posts by Doctor Syntax

NHS Highland 'reprimanded' by data watchdog for BCC blunder with HIV patients

Regulatory capture in action.

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

Re: Ask the dictionary

Growing up in the post-WWII years the typical usage seems to have been anyone involved in the sort of R&D that won the war (excepting, of course BP & the like which we were never told about). As such is was a term of respect. The IoPs problem seems to be that it's neglected to polish its own image.

more than 10 times the number of respondents thought the term described a man compared with the number who thought it described a woman

I wonder what response they'd get if they asked about the term "scientist" or "physicist".

EU mandated messaging platform love-in is easier said than done: Cambridge boffins

" If you want to message someone on telegram, use telegram. If you want to message someone on WhatsApp, use that."

And what if you just want to have one ID on one system instead of buying into every service every would-be tech bro sets up

I don't have to have a mobile on every network and a landline from every landline operator because they all inter-operate.

I don't have to have email addresses with multiple MSPs because email inter-operates.

What's proposed here is to try to make messaging work the same way.

Legislators really need to commission a proof of concept before legislating.

Germany sours on Microsoft again, launches antitrust review

Maybe they're hoping Microsoft will open a very large EU office in Germany. After al it worked for Munich.

Microsoft scrambles to fix Windows 11 'aCropalypse' privacy-battering bug

Re: It beggers belief...

The problem here is not with what's done and why. It's with the term "crop". If that's what's offered to the user then it's reasonable to expect the user to think that that's what will happen. What's actually happening would be better described as "frame".

LibreOffice Writer acts in the same way and the compress option only affects the image's resolution, not its boundaries.

Re: Why expect the PDF converter to do more than Word did?

I didn't. The Word files were already bloated by uncropped images.

It seems to be a general thing with "cropping" tools. I had the task of turning some Word documents of books into PDFs. The files turned out to be much bigger than expected, largely because the supposedly cropped images weren't. In one case several different faces had been "cropped" out of a larger image. The entire image was embedded several times. I think there must be a misconception amongst devs that "crop" really means "frame" as that's what seems to be happening. Fortunately Gwenview did a proper cropping job for me (other FOSS image editing tools are available).

Critical infrastructure gear is full of flaws, but hey, at least it's certified

Re: But I followed the rules...

They can wave it at the press, possibly successfully. Waving it in court is apt to be subject to more rigorous cross-examination.

Accenture puts 19,000 staffers' heads on the chopping block

Re: 35 years and Greed is still Goooood!

That comes later when they discover what the laid-off workers had been doing all these years.

Utah outlaws kids' social media addiction, sets digital curfew

Think of the children...

... and remember that some of them may be voting as soon as the next election.

Oracle reportedly making job cuts at health IT arm Cerner

Our patients

Larry Ellison said: “As we move our Cerner patients ..."

Is that Larry Ellison MD?

Barred from US tech, Huawei claims to have built its own 14nm chip design suite

Re: Intel

The logical extension of this is that they get down to 0nm & then have nowhere to go but negative numbers. Although, as you point out, the existing numbers are already imaginary.

Forget general AI, apparently zebrafish larvae can count

Re: Tigers vs Zebra (fish)

It raises the question of how they behaved when they thought the hide wasn't empty.

Red Hat veteran will head up SUSE from May as Di Donato steps down

"that was the good SCO"

Good it was but it still managed to price itself out of the market that could have been its own. It was doing well in the small server market but was too dear for the desktop. They did throw developers the sop of a distribution with full developer tools (which were an extra for the the normal server product) but with only a 6 month licence (although there was nothing in the software to enforce that).

By supporting them Microsoft not only spread FUD against Linux, the effort and cost of the litigation weakened SCO. Without that it might not have been as easy for MS to take over the server market.

Microsoft breaks geolocation, locking users out of Azure and M365

Toshkent

I'd assumed Toshkent was just because their explanation was a load of tosh but it turns out that Toshkent is the area around Tashkent.

You can always learn something new at elReg

If scammers use your AI code to rip off victims, the FTC may want a word

generative "AI" systems

I think you misspelled "cryptocurrencies"

Re: What does this regulation prohibit that isn't already prohibitted?

"Your jurisdiction will vary"

That's not necessarily the US's view.

First-known interstellar Solar System visitor 'Oumuamua a comet in disguise – research

Re: That's just what we want you to think Earthlings

"the chances of life in the universe is 100%"

As someone with degrees in biological sciences I already knew that to be the case.

IT depts struggle with skills shortages despite Big Tech layoffs

Having made that mid-life transfer - although that was into IT - I can endorse the idea of a mid-career change. However, in my case the trick was to have built up the skills for the second career as a side-line in the first. If you've worked in IT in some particular industry review your experience of that industry. Have you picked up sufficient knowledge of that to transfer out of IT into a wider business role?

Re: Twitter shouldn't even be counted

If you're laid off you're laid off. It doesn't matter where from.

Russian developers blocked from contributing to FOSS tools

Re: "This seems backward to us"?

You think pull requests aren't reviewed before they're accepted?

" it's a matter of protecting code bases from malicious actors"

You think pull requests aren't checked before accepting them?

Re: Ridiculous

This is, or should be, about FOSS. You cannot hold individuals, even citizens of a democracy, responsible for actions of their governments with which they do not agree, nor should you punish them for them and these would-be FOSS contributors are not even living in a democracy. What would you do in their situation?

Hospital to test AI 'copilot' for doctors that jots notes on patient care

"three bottles of wine every week.... Wine would be an entity, and an attribute would be three bottles, and other attribute every night."

If that's how it works the time saved in taking notes will be spent in fixing the results.

Ferrari in a spin as crims steal a car-load of customer data

Maybe they should send in the mafia to deal with them. Unless it was the mafia...

How the Internet Archive faces potential destruction at the hands of Big Four publishers

Re: For those neigh saying..

"I am under no obligation to publish more if I choose not to, just because someone wants a copy"

OTOH you should not have a problem if someone else makes a copy for the person who wants one. No skin of your nose etc.

In fact, my local history group has published a number of books in small print runs. This introduces the problem of what to do when they go out of print. Given the economics and likely sales of a second print run we have decided to put them on line as PDFs. Other historians, schools or whoever can still obtain copies & we don't have to deal with on-demand publication which can't be achieved at our typical prices.

BBC to staff: Uninstall TikTok from our corporate kit unless you can 'justify' having it

What happens when/if the Online Unsafety Bill becomes law with every device backdoored by HMG? The present situation is going to be looked back on as the halcyon days.

Google Cloud's US-East load balancers are lousy with latency

Re: make a hasty move to another region

"one of the selling points"

You know what they say about being able to tell when a salesman's lying. His lips move.

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

Re: Ah, the good'ol days..

"It Still Does Nothing"

But obviously not true. It racks up charges, that's what it does.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.