Posts by Doctor Syntax

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

Re: "Red Hat and others have been doing okay for decades"

"If they were really doing OK, they would have bought IBM."

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.

Tesla Full Self-Driving 'fails' to notice child-sized objects in testing

"I have no doubt that one day, self driving cars will be better at driving than humans ever were."

It might vary depending on where you live but if you take the number of vehicles on UK roads, reasonable estimates for annual mileages and the statistics for fatal accidents the bar for self-driving cars is fairly high and higher still when you realise that it should match or beat the experienced driver and the accident statistics are skewed by inexperienced drivers.

Re: Road Awareness and Secondary Sensors

"The underlying issue is situational awareness"

Or even just plain awareness.

Re: Comparison

"I hope the California DMV slaps them down hard, he needs to be taught a lesson about false advertising."

Not just the California DMV. Isn't this stuff that could affect the share price? In that case the SEC should be interested, particularly given that he has form on this.

Re: Comparison

"The important difference being that it wasn't really the autopilot that landed you, autopilots were on airplanes for literally decades before the automated landing systems were flight rated"

Which really proves the point. If people over-estimate what autopilot on planes do and confuse it with automated landing systems it's very likely that they'll over-estimate what it does in cars.

Will the Tesla cars run down Tesla robots? And which will come off best?

Re: Cats and Dogs?

This is what's apt to go wrong with specifications. Specify exactly what the system is supposed to do and it might do that and nothing else.

Never mind the flock of sheep, can it cope with just one sheep that looks as if it's about to head into the road? And how does it recognise "looks as if it's about to head into the road"?

Re: You're supposed to keep your hands on the wheel and be able to take over at any time.

"actively malicious"

Not really. Just blame shedding.

Micron pledges $40b for US fabs as financial headwinds mount

Here we're told falling demand is causing problems. A couple of stories back we're told that car makers are cutting production because of shortages. Two apparently contradictory stories. Just what is happening in the semiconductor industry? Perhaps el Reg could give us an overview story.

Digital Ocean customers back away from blockchains

Cheers, Charlie. I wondered where it had got to.

Re: Blockchain Hype Cycle --> Trough of Disillusionment

"At least drones have some kind of viable, believable and remotely feasible use cases. NFTs are a gigantic steaming pile of festering bullshit designed to part even more fools from their money."

Parting fools from their money is the feasible use case for NFTs.

"the company reported a $7.4 million loss"

A drop in the Ocean.

OK, that's enough for now.

"That vertical is under extreme pressure,"

So it's not standing up too well.

Report slams UK plan to become 'science superpower' by 2030

Re: thank you

"What about just sticking to what was agreed, cannot be that difficult."

I'm not sure which agreement you mean.

The Good Friday Agreement was for no hard border in the island of Ireland which worked because both N & S were in the EU.

The withdrawal agreement left NI effectively in the EU whilst Britain left.

The agreement by which the Irish Republic became independent of Britain whilst the six northern counties remained in UK (full name The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland).

Any two are mutually consistent, the three are not. This simple piece of logic may have not have given rise to a problem in Brexiteer's heads but in reality it's been a problem since day one. Brexit done? Only if you shut your eyes to reality.

Re: thank you

"What sort of referendum in N Ireland could solve the problem of a border with "The South" ?"

Unification of course

And why should the north vote for that just to let Brexiteers off the hook.

Re: thank you

Then it only leaves southern England to melt / sink into the waves / fall victim to a plague of zombie estate agents (delete as appropriate) and "Global Yorkshire" will be free.

This is an attractive idea but I'm not sure that the post-glacial rebound* is even still continuing and it would never have been enough for the sink beneath the waves option.

* The weight of the Ice Age ice on Scotland, N England & N Ireland caused them to sink somewhat and sea levels fell due to the amount of water tied up in the ice cap When the ice melted sea levels rose quite quickly. The deformation recovered much more slowly but did recover. It gave time for Late glacial beaches to be formed which were then hoisted tens of feet higher giving rise to the phenomenon of raised beaches, readily visible around the coasts of N Ireland and Scotland if you know what you're looking for. But the S of England wasn't covered by ice so as the north was pressed down the south bulged up a bit and then when the rebound took place it sank slightly.

Re: thank you

It may have escaped your notice but the Irish Republic is part of the EU. They joined when we did but they didn't leave.

Why on Earth would the EU want to fence of part of itself? They didn't instigate this, the Brexiteers did and obviously considered that fencing off part of the UK as their logical solution was an acceptable price to pay.

Well, Cameron's background was in PR but I always assumed he was chosen as the most Blairalike candidate they can find so it's a tendency of governments of both hues going back into the last century.

Re: thank you

I think the problem can be summed up like this:

United Kingdom - no internal border of any kind

Good Friday Agreement - no hard border in the island of Ireland

Brexit - a border somewhere.

Pick any two because all three together are impossible. Brexit was BoJo's addition. The conundrum won't go away just because he's going. Goodness knows what his successor will do with it.

Re: @Doctor Syntax

"The Blair years! It took over a decade to pay off."

For those at University in the Blair years when tuition fees were hiked it will take a long time for that to pay off.

Re: @Doctor Syntax

"We have had the tories for a while but varying governments from Cameron to Boris."

I think it's a truth that applies universally to governments of all hues and shades. Announcing the same money for whatever it might be several times over as if it's new money each time is part of the same mind-set.

Re: a slogan, not a policy

With Johnson United Kingdom was also a slogan, not a policy. (I think the past tense should be acceptable now.)

"just as good as actually delivering on it,"

And much cheaper.

According to a report by the Lords Science and Technology Committee, it's currently on track to make the phrase an "empty slogan."

It won't matter to the government. Governments work on the principle that the slogan is the product and better an empty one than none at all.

Quantum systems maker D-Wave takes the SPAC route

"D-Wave was hoping ... the merger .. would grant it access to a trust account worth $300 million... but ... the SPAC's shareholders had in fact exercised those rights and redeemed $291 million worth of shares."

They should have realised that you don't know what you get until you open the box.

Burger King just sent spam receipts to customers

They're frittering away their money on this spam.

Google sues Sonos yet again, claiming it stole IP and infringed patents

Is it too much to hope that the cases end with all the patents on both sides being invalidated.

Re: Sonos' chief legal officer, Eddie Lazarus...

... or programming in Pascal

Yeah, we'll just take that first network handshake. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: The guiding principle @heyrick

Github? Make that Gitlab, at least for a day or so before they changed their mind their mind was changed for them by public resonse.

Re: The guiding principle

It's not just teenagers. If I ask SWMBO something the answer is quite likely to be something unrelated and very likely an unrelated question.

Re: The guiding principle

"True", "False" or "undefined" drives me absolutely nuts.

But if the real value cannot be determined you either end up with 3 possible values including undefined or demand a plain unvarnished Boolean you end up with 4 possible values:

true,

false,

true but might be false because you demanded something and you've no way of telling the difference between this and true

false but may be true because you demanded something and you've no way of telling the difference between this and false.

Re: You'd have thought that a company the size of Google would have thought...

"Some things you only learn by making the mistake."

Preferably someone else's mistake.

Google hit with lawsuit for dropping free Workspace apps

Re: The lesson is :

Spam filtering? Nigerian princes & the like no longer get through Microsoft's filtering, it's true. But emails allegedly from Microsoft regularly do. If they can't work out which emails they sent and which they didn't it's not really that good.

Having your own domain (although in my case I let Mythic Beasts run it) has the advantage of setting up as many aliases as you like so that if one is abused you can slam the door and be aware of whoever it was who abused the address they were given.

Re: $5M for not getting something for free

Google should be made to give them their money back.

Google's ChromeOS Flex turned my old MacBook into new frustrations

But buying the 1st iPad gave the owners bragging rights which was presumably the whole point,

Re: moving back to Windows was a relief

"When in reality desktop Linux is (more specifically its UI offerings) still woefully lacking on the user experience front and at least a decade behind MacOS and Windows."

It's always easy to spot those who haven't used it.

It's also easy to spot those who regularly use it; they're the ones who get roped in to sort out friends and family with Windows woes.

Twilio customer data exposed after its staffers got phished

Give an incorrect password the first time. The fake site has to believe it. If it was accepted then (a) you don't give a real one, (b) you can raise the alarm and (bc the scallies have duff data,

UK wants criminal migrants to scan their faces up to five times a day using a watch

Re: Collapse

"Because he was a decent person with a chance of winning."

I rest my case. We need a party with a chance of fixing things. Corbyn had about as much grasp of reality as the Moggies on the other side. Starmer was not a great success running the CPS which doesn't reassure me that he'd make a good PM.

The current Tory leadership contest I find staggering: I'd have thought that they might have realised that what they need is that rarest of things, a safe pair of hands. They still haven't grokked that.

LibDem voters just want to be a party of protest against whatever government is in power. When Clegg did the responsible thing by joining a coalition in the aftermath of the Brownomics debacle they punished him at the next election.

Re: Collapse

Have you ever been to work meetings and found that there are a few individuals present who will drag it into the mire by finicking about minor details as far off topic as possible with everyone else losing the will to live? I rather think the average grass-roots party setup will be a magnet to them. Commit time? It would be a time sink.

Re: Collapse

This is exacerbated by the likes of some commentards here and elsewhere whose immediate attitude to anyone in politics is that they're unscrupulously corrupt and only in it for their own self-interest. Oddly enough it never occurs to them that they might, as such principled individuals, go into politics to make an improvement. Maybe that's because they realise that the likes of themselves would immediately brand them as unscrupulously corrupt and only in it for their own self-interest.

Re: Collapse

"General Elections can't come soon enough."

Whoever you vote for you always get a politician.

Unfortunately we need a candidate party capable of forming a competent government before a general election will stand a chance at fixing anything.

Too little, too late: Intel's legacy is eroding

Re: "Diversity will destroy this company"

A program that relies on quotas probably has gone wrong. If it's attracting and appointing the best candidates available across the board it's working.

Remember the humanoid Tesla robot? It's ready for September reveal, says Musk

If it's revealed in September does he propose to send it to court as his defence lawyer in October? Assuming it's the coming September of course.

Re: Tesla shares

So if the upshot of that is that the market for Tesla shares goes up it seems a good time to sell.

Last time I looked - yesterday - speeds on UK roads were measured in mph. I hope it's not changed - I might have to drive somewhere later.

Linux may soon lose support for the DECnet protocol

I should have added that if anything is still running anything that depends on DecNet now it's likely to be some quite critical and not at all easy to replace legacy system.

Re: Dual IP stacks do exist...

"since it is very obvious that IPv4 has been totally unsuitable for the internet from the very beginning "

In the same way that it's vary obvious from basic aerodynamics that the bee can't fly?

Re: what's this vim shit?

No need to get nostalgic. Just apt install nvi

"gnarly old Unix admins who still maintain the last boxes in their organisation running VMS, AIX, and OS/390."

This gnarly old - and long retired - Unix admin-and-everything-else looked on VMS as something that was already from the past but still had to be lived with

OS/390 was something with which I never had to deal although the same VMS-using business I mentioned in my story from c 30 years ago did also have some species of IBM mainframe.

IBM mainframes, of course, are still current. I've no idea what lies at the bottom of their OS stack but I do know that not only is there a Linux port for them but they're capable of/very good at running multiple Linux instances.

Re: Good by PDP11

Rubbish dump?