Posts by Doctor Syntax

More ads in Windows 11 Start Menu could be last straw for some

Re: The race to the bottom

Remember this: advertising companies don't sell you fridges or cars or anything else. The clue's in the name: they sell advertising, or more specifically, an advertising service. They sell it to advertisers. Unless you want to advertise you're not their customer.

That targetting? It's a service. The adverts? They're a service.

The ads are counter-productive? The advertising companies don't know that. They want to not know that. They almost certainly have ways of proving that they don't know that.

"the tax is hidden in a new PC sale price to cover all consumers running Windows"

There used to be a view that it might be finely balanced with the bloatware payments offsetting the tax but these days I just by from PC Specialist with money off for removing Windows from the spec.

Re: lots of possibilities

"Fortunately this would fall foul of the laws that prohibit you watching video etc whilst driving"

Car maker: That's your problem. There are no laws prohibiting us showing you video.

Re: OS Adverts

I suppose it cuts out those long distance calls from India.

"Switching over from office to anything else requires people to relearn the tools they use to do their chores, and nobody wants to do that."

Each new version or even update of Windows? Switching UI to ribbon?

You're quite right, of course. That's why I'm sitting in front of a Linux UI which looks more like W2K than anything Microsoft serves up these days. (Actually when I fire up a VM with W2K it looks a bit pixelated in comparison. Was it really so rough sitting directly on the H/W?)

Re: "More ads ... could be last straw for some"

"Me, I'm resigned to being one of the last of the dinosaurs"

And keeping glancing nervously upwards.

"Besides, Linux is simply not user friendly for most people once you get beyond clicking on icons and have to go into the terminal"

It's always easy to spot those who haven't used Linux in the last 20 years or so.

Sometimes the terminal option is quicker than clicking through a list of stuff and for a lot of work vi is a better option than any GUI editor on Linux, Windows or anything else which is why I used it in a terminal emulation window on Windows just as I do on Linux. But the occasions when it's really necessary to drop into a command line? - about the same has having to edit the Windows register.

The frogs are well boiled by now. Or is it Stockholm syndrome?

Re: Nice operating system you have there...

I think it was my old Latin master who used to say "That's not a threat, it's a statement of intent".

Yes, an responded to the negative feedback PDQ. Monopolies are different in that regard, at least until TPTB start investigations when they promise to be good little children, all the while crossing their fingers.

Deplatforming hate forums doesn't work, British boffins warn

Re: Missing half the population?

"The big problem is that every time a woman lies it hurts not only the man/men directly involved but it hurts women in general."

This, above all.

It means the genuine cases are apt to be severely cross-examined in court. It's far from misogynistic to believe it wrong that so few cases get to court. Not only do investigators want to avoid miscarriages of justice, they want to avoid making things worse for the genuine cases when they do get to court. Setting quotas for prosecutions, let alone convictions helps nobody.

"A good number of these women are suffering from some personality disorder and think they are the centre of the universe and nothing else matters."

Maybe mores have changed since I was professionally involved* - '70s & early '80s - but experience of reading a lot of statements suggested that personality disorder very rarely came into it. Complainants mostly fell into two groups:

1. Those who woke up realising it might not have been the good idea it had seemed at the time and were probably worried about being pregnant. The police surgeon provided them with a morning-after pill.

2. Those who wanted an excuse for daddy who had been waiting up for them. I'm pleased to say that my own daughter never gave me any problems in this regard and I'd have tried to avoid putting her in that position if I thought there was a possibility. I did have one variant of this go to court; the DPP for some reason insisted but eyewitness evidence totally demolished the claim, embarrassed the complainant and left her family looking rather angry with her.

I have to add that my personal view was that if under-age drinking had been heavily stamped on there would have been a much lighter caseload. Certainly one or both parties in many cases were under pub-age but had drink taken.

There were, of course, a number of cases which were taken very seriously by everyone and, if at all possible, brought to court.

* Alleged sexual offences are a large part of the forensic biologist's workload.

Meta's Zuckerberg paid $27M in 'other' compensation for 2022

Why do we indulge corporations by allowing them to get away with that weasel word "compensation"? They mean "pay".

Brit cops rapped over app that recorded 200k phone calls

The way the police force is telling it it just seems to have happened spontaneously.; nobody made a decision.

Well, it may be true that nobody made and informed decision but that was lack of due diligence.

It's no good just reprimanding the force although this is the appropriate procedure for a public body. The expectation should be that having been reprimanded the public body will take career-affecting disciplinary action against whoever landed them in that situation however far up the command chain that goes. And far up the command chain is very probably appropriate because that's where the organisational culture will have been set. Sacegoating wouldn't be appropriate Without consequences there's no assurance that things will be done right, just an assumption.

The likelihood, of course, is that it'll be reported that whoever was to have been disciplined has retired.

Rust Foundation so sorry for scaring the C out of you with trademark crackdown talk

Re: Political?

"stranger things are known"

There'll probably be people writing COBOL in the 2040s and others writing FORTRAN.

Re: The Rust community forked the language under the name Crab

They ougtht to call it Verdigris and promote it as a greener alternative.

"Not all open source projects have retained that right."

That's the essence of open source. If it gets things wrong it's possible for a sufficiently knowledgeable and committed members of the community to fix it. In practice that can be the majority of the developers, e.g. Openoffice->LibreOffice.

Military helicopter crash blamed on failure to apply software patch

Thanks for the enlightenment folks.

The frightening thing about idling on the ground is that the rotors keep going. I remember sitting in on a coroner's inquest about a squaddie who walked into the tail rotor - and being a bit unnerved getting out of a Lynx on sloping ground.

Why turn off a helicopter engine in mid-flight, even if intending to restart it? It sounds like the last thing you'd want to do - in fact the last thing your would do>

UK government scraps smart motorway plans, cites high costs and low public confidence

"Current all lane running might remain"

That's pretty well what YAAC said, isn't it?

It's stuff we got used to a very long time ago.

"I wouldn't even go that far. It's just an excuse not to spend money they don't want to / can't spend."

The whole stupid idea started out as a money-saving exercise. More lanes were needed but adding them by buying up more land was expensive. Just relabel what's already there, it'll be cheaper...

Of course, unless you really do feasibility studies before making the decisions it never seems to work out as expected. Isn't that odd?

"If there are capacity problems then motorists just need to adapt"

Best to tackle the problem at cause. Heavy traffic is a consequence of years of planning that concentrated employment in city centres to the extent that each centre requires more than 1000 sq miles surrounding it to accommodate the people who work there. Until that's dealt with complaining about traffic is simply victim blaming.

Re: Er, I thought we'd moved to hating cars for new reasons

Smart motorways are just mostly insufferably dumb

"Getting rid of the difficult bit in the title. Other candidates include the Online Safety Bill.

Firmware is on shaky ground – let's see what it's made of

Re: UEFI

It makes them completely trustworthy to those who consider themselves the true owners: the vendors and Microsoft

Re: Firmware ...

I remember the press reports from those early days. The IBM-compatible market was enabled by clean-room implementations based solely on the published APIs. The BIOS vendors were very careful about avoiding any possible basis for suggesting their code could have been copied from the originals. After all they were confronting a a massive law firm with a computer company bolted on the side of it.

Marketing biz sent 107 million spam emails... to just 437k people

Re: What a joke

If the spammers are using a mailing service fine them jointly and severally. Then it becomes a credit control problem for the mailing service.

As long as spam is cheap and the expense of dealing with it falls on the recipient this sort of thing will continue.

The solution here is to require the spammer to pay a reasonable amount, say several £ to the recipient for their trouble in dealing with it. I've used the threat of that to stop a snail-mailer who simply couldn't grasp that having their mail to a former tenant returned as "No longer at this address" meant that they were misaddressing it.

We should regard spam - snail mail, email or phone - as pollution and apply the "Polluter pays" principle where payment is the economic cost of dealing with it, not a small fine.

Brazil defies US, cozies up to Chinese tech on chip building

Re: Replace SS7 first ?

But was SS7 the peak of computer security in 1993?

Re: But realistically what have we (the US) to offer them?

Governments tend to be inward-looking. As a consequence they seldom think of how the real world will react to their decisions. The real world will very often work round the decisions so the achievement is usually at best minimal and at worst adverse.

Why the concern over rain forest monitoring? Or are they looking to see if there's any left to cut down?

Amazon CEO says AWS staff now spending ‘much of their time’ optimizing customers’ clouds

“Many of these AWS customers tell us that they’re not cost-cutting as much as cost-optimizing so they can take their resources and apply them to emerging and inventive new customer experiences they’re planning,”

But will AWS's customers' customers appreciate the inventive new experiences?

As an Amazon (not AWS) customer I'd very much like to see some optimisation of their search engine so that it delivers hits that match the search terms and nothing else.

I fear, however, that what I actually get is what was once a new, inventive customer experience that Amazon's marketing thought would be ideal - it's not a bug, it's a feature. Never underestimate the ability of marketing to screw things up for customer.

BOFH: We send a user to visit Kelvin – Keeper of the Batteries

"print out emails, write a reply on the back and send that back through the physical internal mail system."

An improvement on top-posting.

Re: Stationery....or not.....

Just open with a pair of scissors: cut out the bit of envelope with the staple in it.

Re: Nicknames

"And a toolkit can hold a hammer"

Just one? Surely you need a graduated set so as to select one matched with the target job.

Re: Ahh, the Orifice Manager

"ordering expensive pens only to leave them in every meeting room"

Go round the meeting rooms to recover them, then re-issue them, charging the department's budget for a new pen every time.

A user who shares a fire escape with the BOFH. Either brave or ignorant.

Automation is great. Until it breaks and nobody gets paid

Re: I have consulted in many places over the years

"I am trying to convert many of them to python scripts"

You're trying to fix what's working?

Re: This is why we need code review

"to find no obvious clue where the test was"

I've often thought there should be a recognised test procedure requiring three people.

One is the developer or a reasonably senior member of the team is there's more than one. The next is a user. The user should have no knowledge of the application that's been developed but a good knowledge of the application domain and of what the application should do.

Ostensibly it's to allow the developer to learn how users use the application, in reality it's to learn just how unusable it is.

The user is allowed to ask developer no questions other than "How does it tell me how to do X?" and the developer is allowed to answer no other questions.

Ostensibly the third person is an invigilator to enforce these rules but is, in reality, there to stop the other two coming to blows.

Re: This is why we need code review

"my IT teacher telling me I'd never have a career in IT"

Obviously someone who had o idea how things happen in the real world.

Re: This is why we need code review

Ah yes, the bad old days of "IE or nothing"

The bad old days are still with us, just a bit updated from IE to whatever short, possibly very short, list the devs bothered about. And then there are those who take umbrage and won't display anything at all unless JavaScript is enabled for their site. Or won't display a close button on their cookie pop-up (looking at you, National Archives).

While Twitter wants to sell its verification, Microsoft will do it for free on LinkedIn

Microsoft will do it for free?

If it's free, you're the product.

OVH punts hybrid water and immersion cooling for high performance systems

Re: Liquid cooling

If the plumbing arrangements support it the water can flow by convection to an external radiator. The waste heat provides the energy necessary to drive the system.

Microsoft mucks with PrtScr key for first time in decades

Re: As we suspected

I don't know what snipping tool does but in Linux, if you're running KDE, the default is that it opens a program (Spectacle) that has a copy of whatever you configured - the screen, a current window with all sorts of options such as retaking the shot when you click the mouse (useful if you want to snapshot a video frame, then you can save directly as a file or copy to clipboard. If snipping tool is as useful as that then there should be no complaint.

Pentagon super-leak suspect cuffed: 21-year-old Air National Guardsman

But they do need to vet whoever gets to do the work a bit more carefully than this.

Re: If hes

The year is yet young.

Re: makes a smidge of difference

It sounds like straightforward internet bragging but without the Lamborghinis and Rolexes.

It's time to reveal all recommendation algorithms – by law if necessary

I suppose the American Way would be to sue Youtube for the trauma you suffered.

Fancy trying the granddaddy of Windows NT for free? Now's your chance

Re: The modern museum

For a while I had to use VMS so my preference for Linux (via various Unixes that were VMS's contemporaries) isn't because it's all I know, it's because of what I know.

Python head hisses at looming Euro cybersecurity rules

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that "supply" and "commercial activity" are extensively defined somewhere

P16 paragraph 10 in full, my emphasis:

"In order not to hamper innovation or research, free and open-source software developed or supplied outside the course of a commercial activity should not be covered by this Regulation. This is in particular the case for software, including its source code and modified versions, that is openly shared and freely accessible, usable, modifiable and redistributable. In the context of software, a commercial activity might be characterized not only by charging a price for a product, but also by charging a price for technical support services, by providing a software platform through which the manufacturer monetises other services, or by the use of personal data for reasons other than exclusively for improving the security, compatibility or interoperability of the software."

Re: Something needs to be done to protect consumers

"or else there would be a second tier of commercial repositories who would vet new additions before adding them"

In fact, this sounds to be the sort of thing I had in mind: https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/04/12/1623201/googles-free-assured-open-source-software-service-hits-general-availability