Posts by Doctor Syntax

Anthropic to Pentagon: Autonomous weapons could hurt US troops and civilians

Re: Seeking a seat at the table

Is that you, Pete?

Which article were you reading?

Re: American civilians and warfighters

"It always irks me that American military speak values 'murican own nation lives 1000x 'foreigner' lives."

This is the design principle behind all armies.

BOFH: Nobody would be stupid enough to go live with the mirror system, surely

So at least one board member is aware of the BOFH's special talents.

NUC, NUC! Who’s there? ASUS with a client device for Microsoft’s cloudy PCs

Re: Thin clients were unreliable enough when it was all on-prem

Freelance I had a couple of gigs a few years apart running UAT for application server upgrades. It might have been a coincidence but I'd worked on development of the application a decade or more previously. The application was character based and the client was running thin clients with a separate terminal server. By the time we got round to the second upgrade someone -possibly the terminal server company, had put together some sort of layer that took the terminal control codes to turn it into a GUI interface although the users were told not to use this.

The morning of go-live on the new server everything was working as expected and I was about to go home when I was called back. Performance had collapsed. It didn't take long to find out who'd switched to the GUI terminal setting in advance of the beefed up terminal server that was due next week.

Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now

Re: What are the memory manufacturers doing?

"vendors should be investing in extra capacity. But they're not."

See https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/27/micron_continues_fab_expansion_with/

The headline is about NAND but scroll down the article.

Re: Recycle / re-use?

Or vice versa.

Re: So let me get this right

The limited resource is money and from time to time the right way is subject to fashion. Tulips or AI, it's all the same.

Re: Not only Zorin or Mint

"But virtually all other Linux Distros will do the job just as well."

Zorin & Mint are supposed to be the most Windows victim friendly so that's what I quoted. Personally I think anything running KDE would be preferable as there are plenty of cosmetics to make it look like W10. The unfamiliarity would be sensible menus, the fact that updates appear to be broken because they install so quickly and the lack of advertising.

Re: So all those PCs I've hoarded

A whole load of newly minted Mint users?

Re: What are the memory manufacturers doing?

ISTR shortages and gluts of memory in the past. We'll see this cycle turn just like the last.

Re: We just need to hang on for a year or two

Never underestimate the ingenuity of someone seeing an abundance of potentially valuable material going cheap.

The OS's function is to run applications. The applications' functions are to allow the user to do stuff. As you, williamyf, know quite well as you've told us of your excellent work in using Linux to make computing available to those who would not be able to afford it, it the being able to do stuff that's important.

"To put it bluntly: the average person doesn't care about their OS, unless or until it changes to one they're unfamiliar with!"

OK, let's assume this average person has a W10 laptop that can't be upgraded.

Would the Zorin GUI on their old laptop be less familiar than that on a new W11 laptop?

And which would cost them money?

Re: Recycle / re-use?

They could consider a special edition - as a new purchase of course, for older H/W. OTOH if the extended support wheeze brings in enough money they wouldn't want to kill that and, of course, it establishes the practice of Windows as and annual subscription, preparing the way for Windows 12.

Is this AI bursting its own bubble?

Meanwhile Zorin or Mint will keep that old laptop running with an up-to-date OS for quite some time longer.

ServiceNow boasts its AI bot is resolving 90% of its own help desk tickets

“How does it know it got the right answer? Because the outcome is measurable inside the same platform, Did the ticket resolve? Did the workflow complete? Did the approval get the right sign-off?

The fact that a ticket is closed doesn't mean it got the right answer. They'll discover that when an attacker gets a password reset or access authorised.

Salesforce CEO 'SaaSquatch' Benioff says his company will monster the SaaSpocalypse

Re: Fluffy Bear, Fluffy Mule, Fluffy Einstein , and "I want your soul"

"as we are developing our own"

Things turn full circle.

"They can also measure this per customer to show how much work agents are performing."

And bill for it as customers will discover.

NASA safety watchdog says it's time to rethink Moon landing

Very, very lucky or very, very careful?

Microsoft to auto-launch Copilot in Edge whenever you click a link from Outlook

"Most of us don't have a choice. My employer mandates"

You don't have a choice but your employer made one, even unthinkingly.

This just confirms my choice not to use Windows nor even the Linux version of Edge. It is beyond my comprehension why Windows users, or at least those who know there are alternatives, continue to tolerate this abuse. Yes, I know - this thing for which you think it's essential or that thing. But do they really justify putting up with it all?

Rapid AI-driven development makes security unattainable, warns Veracode

Security Convenience is our first priority.

And checking thinks is so inconvenient.

Debian 14 will drop Gtk2 – unless Ardour rides to the rescue

Ongoing tinkering is just as likely to introduce bugs. And interop problems, this being a case in point.

Qt is an option for Lazarus. However I wonder if it's better to regard projects such as GTk2 as not dead but "complete". Does sofware have to be in continuous development once it's good enough?

Britain's creaking courts to use Copilot for transcriptions

Re: Why does this need AI?

"We've had speech to text programs for donkey years."

OTOH they produce some odd results. Maybe text to speech with AI adding a first correction pass prior to the human making a second pass. If AI adds to the human checker's work rather subtracting then it can be eliminated.

Worried Europeans can now cut Azure's phone cord completely

Re: Wrong vocabulary

Paranoia is the first requirement of any DBA, indeed, of any system admin role.

You really should consider more imaginative menus and if you put wine first perhaps you should start keeping a record of your alcohol consumption.

Hubble in a death spiral that could end as early as 2028 without a reboost

Start a rumour that the Chinese are setting up a mission to boost it. Money will then be found.

Re: 2028 sounds like a death sentence for Hubble

"there isn't a docking port to attach a Dragon to"

Provision has been made for this. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-125 (the last service mission):

"The crew also installed ... a soft-capture mechanism that would aid in the safe de-orbiting of the telescope by a robotic spacecraft at the end of its operational lifespan."

All your bots are belong to US if you don't play ball, DoD tells Anthropic

How about the rest of the world? Should they now regard Anthropic's products as a risk and ban their use?

Re: Hegseth the clown hasn't thought this one though

Just this?

Brit dual nationals grounded by border digitization drive

"we have allowed ample time between ETAs first being introduced in 2023 and the move to enforcement"

But not between making sure people knew and enforcement.

The Home Office. Still not fit for purpose.

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

They're beginning to believe their own hype.

Recycling biz reckons AI features are destroying smartphone resale values

"A recent CCS Insight survey found 47 percent of buyers would actually pay more for a phone with AI features"

Did 53% said they'd pay more for a phone without them?

Not really, I suppose but it does say half your target market is not seeing value in them. That should be a warning sign.

KDE Plasma 6.6 isn't forcing systemd but the arguments rage on

Re: The Linux Desktop needs a Sugar Daddy

"Many Linux desktops that people like are ugly"

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. I might agree with your aesthetic choices, others won't. That's what's good about multiple choices. Unfortunately those stuck in the rut of one OS, one aesthetic can't even see over the edge to realise it doesn't have to be like that, not even when their OS maker of choice keeps forcing new ones on them every few years.

On your other point, it is possible to buy kit with Linux pre-loaded but you have to search for it.

Something that includes selecting the back-end server at boot time? Ideal for business travel. Nothing on the laptop for any border guard to check and the option of choosing something innocuous for those who want to see it logged in.

Re: "narrowly definied set of users'

"Yeah, I can make it work. I enjoy the challenge. But I got tired of proving myself to myself for the sake of proving myself like two decades ago."

So you're commenting based on knowledge two decades old. Noted.

Just wait.

Orbital datacenters are a pie-in-the-sky idea: Gartner

What sort of pie in the sky?

Custard pie.

Euro hosting giant hiking prices by up to 50% from April Fool's Day

It ought to be convincing evidence for anyone that AI is now seriously distorting the world economy and it's time that, instead of going gung-ho for it governments need to be looking at ways to regulate it out of existence.

UK tech hit by double trouble: Fewer foreign techies amid skills squeeze

Re: UK is Missing a Huge Opportunity

"Not sure where the UK is on the scale though"

UK universities are busy closing departments.

Re: There are huge numbers of extraordinarily talented people available in the UK

Are they real jobs or just bait for agencies to top up their contacts pool?

Microsoft gives Windows laggards the 'gift of time' wrapped in licensing fees

Windows as a subscription.

West Midlands Police earn red card over Copilot's imaginary football match

"the acting chief constable moved to switch Copilot off across the organization"

That's going to be an ongoing fight with Windows if they want to keep it off.

Pop music fans literally dying to stream hot new albums – in car crashes, that is

"Aren't they just saying that Drake/Swift fans are simply poor drivers?"

Not unless they're also saying they only go out driving when a new album is released to streaming.

Re: Correlation etc etc...

"Therefore I delacre that Scandinavians are more likely to crash on a Friday"

From TFA: "They adjusted for fixed effects like holidays, the day of the week and week of the year"

And Scandinavians?

Despite the popular saying correlation may not directly imply a particular causation but it certainly requires further investigation because it does imply causality.

Cisco turns to titanium spoons and sand dunes to build a better … box?

Rebranding is the usual response to the old brand's having had problems. The immediate response of anyone not in marketing and the rebranding industry will always be "What's gone wrong?"

Microsoft execs worry AI will eat entry level coding jobs

Re: ...Then There Were Previous Attempts To Automate Coding......

Not especially but I remember many more from The Last One onwards. As you say, plus ca change....plus c'est la meme chose!

Euro allies aiming to rapidly build low-cost air defense weapons

Quick, cheap and ....?

Closest thing to an Iron Triangle icon. -->