Posts by Doctor Syntax

Arm to drop up to 15 percent of staff – about 1,000 people

Re: stop work that is no longer critical to our future success

"What if you get rid of that person?"

You have a problem with the next HSE inspection.

If they've been made redundant the present tense doesn't apply: they've left and it wasn't their decision hence going to competitors wasn't their purpose. If the former employer then starts to throw their weight around they're just making a case to be taken to an employment tribunal and subsequently to the cleaners. However I suspect your use of the term "General Counsel" means you're from parts where there might be less protection for the victims.

I suppose Arm's loss will be RISC-V's gain.

Re: Haas, who has been in the chief exec's chair for about a month

It depends on his view of long term. That might be until the IPO is done and dusted and it's time to collect bonuses and go to improve the profitability of another unfortunate company.

"They are not going to layoff their skilled and experienced people"

Just their more expensive ones - CEO & the like excepted of course. Those wouldn't also be the most skilled and experienced, would they?

"many will probably be legally blocked from using a lot of their accumulated knowledge"

Would that really be the case? I'd have thought it would be difficult to argue that the knowledge you've just declared redundant is valuable. At the very least it would be ammunition in an employment tribunal and would likely earn a bigger payout.

Research finds data poisoning can't defeat facial recognition

Re: Data overload

Also the same image, real or fake, with multiple times with different identities attached and multiple faces with the same identity.

I wouldn't even call what they were doing poisoning. It doesn't force the signal to noise ratio into oblivion.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine tears open political rift between cybercriminals

Re: "Is the West OK when the gun points the other way?"

But not usually at the same time.

Re: "claims of Western warmongering"

"it's just them trying to gain the high moral ground."

I don't think they have any alternative. While Putin's there if they're not for him they're against him and if he's not there they're in trouble anyway. They've got to prop him up for their own sakes.

Re: Thick as fucking mince

"For them to still claim that this is the result of Western aggression makes them either thick or liars."

I think they're looking after their own interests, or think they are. They've flourished while he's in charge and rely on him continuing to be there. They probably expect him to be ousted if the invasion fails and that the price of Western help putting the Russian economy together is going to include their being rooted out.

Startups bag billions to fill gaps left by chip world giants

"applications move to probabilistic computing models, in which processing and decision making is based on inferences drawn from large piles of data"

Back when I was doing these things it never occurred to me to decide where to address an order based on inferences drawn from large piles of data. I took the simple route of dispatching it to the address given with the order. This might be wild supposition on my part but I think that's still how it's done today and that that's how business collects money from customers. That raises the question of what extra value is added to a business by making inference and whether that added value, if it exists, justifies the expense of making the inferences.

Microsoft slides ads into Windows Insiders' File Explorer

Maybe it's the point where a few more Windows users decide enough is enough.

UK criminal defense lawyer hadn't patched when ransomware hit

It seems tht once they were aware of the situation they acted appropriately. But it always seems to be the case that although there's no time and/or budget to fix things before the disaster strikes there's always time and budget to fix things after - including budget to pay a fine.

Ford to sell unfinished Explorers as chip shortage bites

"probably lessens the life of the starter, battery, and engine"

SWMBO as an Ignis which has this feature. It's allegedly a hybrid in that it has a small second 12V battery charged by a generator/motor coupled to the engine by a toothed belt similar to a cam belt. It's this that provides the start/stop facility so it doesn't affect the ordinary starter or primary battery.

That ancillary battery doesn't have much capacity. I habitually drive over a hill to get to the next village. If I take the Ignis the battery will be fully discharged by the time I get to the top and fully recharged by the time I get to the bottom.

The stop/start isn't enabled unless there's enough charge in the battery. I'm not sure how it affects the life of the engine, my concern might be the other way round. A few years ago I looked at, but didn't buy,t a car with stop/start but AFAIK just an ordinary battery/starter arrangement. I wondered how well it would work with 100,000 on the clock.

Re: liking the new normal

"The general public is now completely conditioned to everything being a subscription or monthly credit payment of some sort."

With rising inflation the public might start looking at expenditure a little more carefully and unnecessary subscriptions are the easiest things to cut out. The subscription model could soon be one whose time has gone.

A smarter bit of marketing would be to let the buyers choose which bits they don't want. I'd choose all those that try to double guess what the driver wants to do.

Canonical: OpenStack is dead, long live OpenStack

"When multiple companies strenuously deny something, it tends to cause more suspicion than it allays"

Never believe anything until it's been officially denied. Yes Minister

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

Re: One step too few

Oops. 1904

Re: One step too few

Normal distribution blobs to stick on the C14 age/depth section at the end of hand-drawn pollen diagrams. But with a 1804 & Calcomp plotter.

Driver in Uber's self-driving car death goes on trial, says she feels 'betrayed'

"It will be difficult for Italy's data security agency to force the company to pay up, but the decision could deter Italian companies from using Clearview's software."

GDPR has options for holding officers of the company responsible. I think an extradition request for the CEO, CFO and directors for non-payment of the fine would produce quick results.

Re: Who cares....

"Turn it into a T to make their shareholders take down the entire C-level bunch of prats with pitchforks, burning tar, & bags of feathers."

The shareholders are equally reprehensible for investing in this antisocial crap. Don't let them escape the the tar and feathers.

114 billion transistors, one big meh. Apple's M1 Ultra wake-up call

"Above it all, the stratospheric mysteries of supercomputing hung like the PCs the gods themselves ordered from the Mount Olympus edition of Byte."

My recollection is that by 2001 Byte's glory days were well behind it. That in itself was an indication of things to come.

"a new budget iPhone"

This must be some meaning of the word "budget" with which I was previously unfamiliar.

Re: Blame the web for that...

"requires you to be tethered to a remote server that may be at the end of a still slow connection"

Too true. A colleague in our Civic Soc. usually sends our lecture posters as PDFs to somebody's farcebook page. She was recently told to use some web page to convert it to a JPEG. Really? Somebody thinks you need a remote server to convert a PDF page to a JPEG?

Re: Hyperbole...

RaspberryPi marketers have it right... all that we really need is Sufficiency products in stock, unfortunately.

Re: I'm holding off

Don't worry. The next generation os S/W will be along soon to soak up the performance of the next generation of H/W.

Re: Hmmm..

"He didn't once stop to ask what benefit anyone using the tech would receive."

Didn't you ask him?

Re: "they can still watch cat videos. Or prOn. Or both"

It's good that you quoted the URL in full. It ensures I'm adequately informed without needing to follow it. Thanks.

Those who don't ensure there are processors for those who do by buying the same processors to run bloatware.

China's top tech city Shenzhen locks down completely for at least a week

Re: 5 Year Review

A lot of media whose standard product is a load of bollox produced a load of bollox about Y2K and devices which had no relationship to dates. So what?

Re: Oligarchy

Could you clarify why Gates and Bezos are part of NATO, who the others implied by "to" are and how they are also part of NATO. If they were part of the old "industrial-military complex" I'd understand your thinking. However neither Microsoft nor Amazon can be no more thought of as part of that than they are part of any other industrial complex, anywhere on the globe, that uses their ubiquitous products and services.

Re: 5 Year Review

I suppose you also think all the fuss about Y2K was nonsense because in the event nothing went wrong.

Re: eggs->basket!

I wonder what his attitude to backups was.

Prototype app outperforms and outlasts outsourced production version

A former colleague - also Harry as it happens - could never get it through to his users that the prototype/demos he presented them with were just that. They kept complaining that he was giving them software that didn't work because of this, that or the other.

Re: "It is a warm feeling when your prototype lash-up outlasts the production tool"

There's no indication in TFA of how complex the job was. I'm with you on the subject of properly designed systems being easier to maintain. From the account given this was easy to maintain.

Not just hikes. Income tax was a temporary measure when first introduced.

Like several other people I once developed a code generator for Informix 4GL which would delve into the system catalogs and put together some generic but table-specific code for basic retrieval, update and deletions which could then be augmented with application-specific code. At that time Informix SQL didn't have a scroll cursor so it was largely prompted by the need to provide an emulation of this to enable the user to scroll backwards as well as forwards through the retrieved rows. It had some placeholder prompts in it which would be replaced by something more application-specific when the program was worked up.

I took this with me on several jobs. One which I've mentioned before, in a software house, needed a lot of work to disentangle an application which was one mess of Informix Perform screens into a set of discrete 4GL modules using the core generator to start things off. As I've also mentioned I parachuted myself out of that job leaving some of the modules as work in progress with default prompts in there. Roll forward to early retirement out of that subsequent job and into freelance.

One of the freelance gigs was to oversee UAT for a migration to a new server for an organisation in the field that that system was aimed at although I didn't recognise the application name. This was about 10 or 11 years since I was working in that area. Standing in reception when I first arrived I could see some of the screens in the distance & thought they looked very like how I liked to lay out a 4GL screen. Sure enough, when I got there it was my old application having been through various name changes. The default prompts were still there in the stuff I'd left as WIP and so, I think, was the scroll cursor emulation although the Informix engine had had that for years now. A couple of years later I got called back to repeat the gig for another server upgrade. Still all the old stuff left in.

BOFH: Gaming rig for your home office? Yeah right

Re: Every company!

Then you produce the signature acknowledging that either they accept that this is not the standard product bundle that IT currently have the skill-set to support and that either they arrange their own support or they will, out of their own budget, arrange for sufficient IT staff to go on sufficient training courses to be able to provide support. That would be the memo they were obliged to sign before getting their kit. It's now accompanied by the requisition they need to sign for the aforementioned training courses which will take place in reassuringly expensive locations and to be paid for out of the aforementioned budget.

Re: Simon is on form, these days!

"if it were me, I'd suggest a replacement"

Ah, but you're not the BOFH who now has Carl under obligation. Who knows what might come of that.

Re: It's time to kill the dragon!

I had a gig on a secure site that required clearance. They required it a step higher than the regular employees. No problem, that went through; given my previous career it would have been strange if it hadn't. Perhaps it was that process that alerted someone to the fact that the regular employees clearance should also have been a step higher than it was.

Re: Every company!

Should have made clear they were on their own for support.

Cryptocurrency ATMs illegal right now in UK

Re: are unregulated and high-risk

"The value of your investments can go down as well as up."

If you're lucky. Otherwise they just go.

Not exclusively, There are all the exchanges where you can store your currency before they mysteriously close down and their operators disappear. That's an application in its own right.

Afraid of the big bad Linux desktop? Zorin 16.1 is here

Re: Zorin, Ideal for beginners

You can always tell those who've never used Linux but you can't tell 'em much.

Re: Zorin, Ideal for beginners

And Mint.

Re: @RegGuy1

"Agreed, it does have loads of irritations, but there are fixes for many of them."

That's the problem with Gnome. It seems to have to be tweaked to make it useful. These limitations seem to be design choices. I've never seen the point in starting with something that has to be taken so far from its designers' intentions to be useful. Maybe it's intended to be a blank canvas for the likes of the Zorins to customise but even so KDE has always seemed a good deal more functional straight out of the box.

Having said that Zorin has been what I've used for relatives' ex-Windows boxes.

Mary Coombs, first woman commercial programmer, dies at 93

Re: Paper tape at first.

I know about Jacquard looms; I grew up in a textile area and my holiday jobs were when I was young were in milla.

Jacquards are more limited in function than you may think. None that I saw in the mills 60 years or so ago could do no more than control healds so although they were capable of making complex patterns in the warp they were no use if there was more than one weft. In the woollen mills of the West Riding Jacquard mechanisms were limited to what were termed "Woven lists", lettering woven into the edges of the cloth saying things such as "SUPERFINE WORSTED". The main control mechanism on looms such as the Dobcross used a chain rather like a very heavy bicycle chain with disks on the cross-pieces of the links. The disks acted as cams and although they could only control a limited number of sets of healds - AFAICR the biggest gears we had used about 12, they could control the selection of the shuttle boxes, i.e. the weft.

None of this is relevant to Mary Coombs's story. If you read the PDF linked in the article you'll find that although punched cards were used for storing data - Lyons already used them already with tabulators - the programs were entered on paper tape.

Re: All punch cards at first.

Paper tape at first.

Re: I hope there is more than this somewhere

Read the linked PDF. Fascinating. And, as the article says, things don't change. They were working with the French firm Bull and she was doing some technical translating of manuals in her own time. When she suggested they pay her for that they outsourced ot to a firm of translators instead.