Posts by Doctor Syntax

Ex-T-Mobile US store owner phished staff, raked in $25m from unlocking phones

If it's mobile surely that should be wireless fraud.

Where did I put my phone?

Linux may soon lose support for the DECnet protocol

Did you miss reading the bit that said VMS is still alive? I doubt those maintaining it consider DECNet dead.

The only time I was involved with DECNet the Ethernet addresses assumed that the NIC was made by DEC and hardcoded the DEC-specific part of the MAC. If you wanted to use DECNet on some non-DEC kit you have to overwrite the MAC. How is this handled these days when the NICs are anything but DEC?

We were using HP-PA hardware and first turned on the DECNet stack in the middle of the working day. This meant that all nodes using the HP server now had invalid addresses in their caches... The clamour from the users died down as their PCs re-synchronized.

SpaceX demonstrates that it too can shower the Earth with debris

Anyone hoping to find Musk's Tesla in it is going to be disappointed.

ESA declares the Sentinel-1B mission over after payload resuscitation ends

"Capacitor blew during a test of a $50,000 circuit board?"

Cheap when compared with the launch costs.

The most probable common cause,is the soldering process used to repair a ceramic capacitor on both the main and the redundant CAPS 28V regulator boards."

Repair? They launched a spacecraft with less than pristine components?

Sonatype shines light on typosquatting ransomware threat in PyPI

Does nobody curate these collections? To set them up and then pay no attention of what goes into them is irresponsible in the extreme.

AI-friendly patent law needed 'as a matter of national security', ex-USPTO boss says

Re: Less, not more!

Make the USPTO liable for negligence for patents it grants which are later proved to be invalid.

The two paragraphs starting at "But take a system with a trained neural network." say pretty well what's the whole problem with this: trusting a black box to get the right answer. "But reproducibility is notoriously difficult in machine learning."

However the next bit: "You need access to the training data and other settings to recreate it. That becomes problematic if the data is medical or personal info, or proprietary" really suggests the solution to the conundrum. It's data that matters. It can be protected by copyright, assuming, that is, that the trainers had the rights to that data in the first place.

Most experts people with something to gain by it agree AI algorithms should be patentable

Toyota's truck brand Hino admits faking and fudging emissions data for 20 years

"as if it was measured at the specified measurement points, despite results having been measured at the non-specified measurement points specified under laws and regulations."

You can see how they might easily have got confused.

China's Xiaomi teases tech to control smart homes with brain waves

"measure and display the cranial condition of professional rugby players in Australia. The team's coaches used the tech to show players how to reach certain emotional states"

A better use would have been to monitor for brain damage.

We'll get you that Wi-Fi 7 laptop by 2024, Intel says

And I'm going to buy a new network access point and new laptops for both of us to use this when what we have is more than enough already?

No.

How a crypto bridge bug led to a $200m 'decentralized crowd looting'

"24/7/365"

That just confirms my view that these people have peculiar ideas about numbers.

Anti-piracy messaging may just encourage more piracy

Re: The "poor" victims of piracy

"There are lots of people involved in the music industry, and the great majority of them are far from rich."

And they'll stay that way. You don't think their poverty is entirely unrelated to the fact that all the money's elsewhere do you?

Apple ends corporate COVID mask mandate

Re: "until everyone else shows up"

"Why do the peons need to go back ?"

If they don't the shareholders might start asking awkward questions about that empty, expensive trophy HQ.

US regulators set the stage for small, local nuclear power stations

Re: @Dr Syntax - "more radioactive"

"The stuff in the media is that wee nuclear produces thirty five times more waste per kilowatt."

35 time more waste what?

The "what" matters. What are the characteristics: type of radiation, energy, half life, chemistry? Is this 35 times more bulk with traces of radioactivity or 35 time more radionuclides? Are we dealing wih elements that are easily immobilised or elements whose chemistry leads them to be leached out of whatever you might try to trap them in.

"more radioactive" is a vague term. It might simply mean that you have more of it - 2 tons as opposed to 1 ton. It might also mean, as you suggest, a short half-life. It could even mean higher energy or a more damaging form of radiation.

"More reactive" in the article is also vague. In what way? Does it mean a radioactive isotope that's chemically reactive or just something that's not radioactive but chemically aggressive? And why can't something that's "reactive" be neutralised by virtue of its reactivity; HF, for instance is very reactive but react it with Ca(OH)2 and you get calcium fluorite which isn't.

Be careful what you ask for. HP might get in on the act.

If it can be pre-assembled and shipped to site (at 75' tall?) the maybe it can be shipped back for decommissioning or maybe refurbishing.

Bad news, older tech workers: Job advert language works against you

Re: Anon CVs

So you say what you want and somebody simply replies that they can do that you'll either (a) take them at their word and follow up even though a longer reply would have made it clear that they couldn't or (b) take pot luck out of them and the 50 other replies that say the same thing because you've no way of differentiating between them.

Re: Anon CVs

So you're trying to use the advert to pre-select on age and if you fail in that then you then end up with the situation I queried.

Re: Anon CVs

"Since my company moved to anonymous CVs¹ I've had some great hires that otherwise would have probably been discarded"

I think this might be telling you something about your ability to read CVs - or more likely about the people who screened them before they got to you.

Re: Examples?

See my comment about over familiarity. There's a protocol. The rules are much the same as those governing tu & vous in French.

Re: Examples?

"apparently done as much with their life as the older in less than half the time"

If the older one hasn't done as much as you might expect that might be a cause for consern. But when the younger one has apparently done more than you might expect then you should consider their real talent might be in creative writing.

Re: Other job ad wank that “works against” me

I think "Competitive salary" means uncompetitive, otherwise they'd tell you.

Re: We don't get to chose the language...

Such businesses will get the recruits the deserve. The recruits they need will go to their competitors. It'll all work out fairly in the end but maybe you should consider joining one of your competitors before it's too late.

No. It's not clearly expressed but I think the point was that studies comparing age distributions in appointments with age distributions in the original applications are unsatisfactory as a measure of age discrimination. That's because they don't see the self-excluded. The age distribution of the original applicants isn't representative of the job-seeking population.

The researchers know very well that such terms get into the job ads. What they maybe haven't considered is that the applicants are using them to screen the advertisers to eliminate the jobs they wouldn't want anyway. Discrimination plays both ways.

Re: they prefer inexperienced incompetants

It's a case of wants outranking needs.

Re: Anon CVs

Word of mouth recommendations come from people who already have the information you'd otherwise see on the CV. That's very different from a mere covering letter.

I find it difficult to understand exactly what you'd expect to see on a CV from someone with a couple of degrees and 20 years post-doc experience that wouldn't distinguish them in terms of age from someone who has 6 years work experience after leaving school at the earliest opportunity but would nevertheless enable you to decide which to follow up.

I wonder if a couple of the authors are reading and downvoting here without bothering to explain why this was thought to have been an acceptable procedure.

I suppose the longer version of that is that the existing staff are on final salary schemes. New staff will be recruited into defined contribution schemes with far fewer long term implications. That also applies to older recruits but it might be difficult to get away with making older staff redundant and then replacing them at the same seniority level.

Re: Examples?

That would be over-familiar; very bad form.

Re: Not New News

s/we don't believe in/we're crap at/

Re: Examples?

"What's ageist in that ?"

It probably discriminates in favour of older workers so not really a good control. Syill, probably close enough for economists.

Re: So?

"I really don't want to go on a recruitment merry-go-round only to then discover that the environment is just not for me."

It sounds as if this research put numerous people on a recruitment merry-go-round for jobs that didn't even exist, all to prove the bleedin' ovious. What did their Universities' ethics committees make of that one? Why does it remind me of that research project submitting bad pull requests to Linux?

Like Ubuntu, just a bit less hassle: Linux Mint 21 'Vanessa'

"gets the job done with as little fiddling as possible, Mint readily beats Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, or any flavor of Debian"

I had Mint on a rarely used laptop which got a few steps behind current. In that situation I found the update process convoluted to the point of being broken. It was easier to do a new install rather then update in place. In the end I decided a fresh install of Devuan was less fiddly.

Google asks workers for ideas on being 'more focused and efficient' in internal survey

Re: I wonder what percentage of answers

You're letting top management get away scot free?

It doesn't sound like a problem that removing the top ten or so layers of management wouldn't solve.

Bot army risk as 3,000+ apps found spilling Twitter API keys

"230 were leaking enough credentials to permit a full account takeover.

What can be done?"

Lock the owners out of the account. Tell them where they went wrong and return it to them in a week or so. If they won't learn any other way but by experience give them a little experience to learn from.

New Outlook feature: It freezes up when dealing with tables in emails

Re: Tables?

"why else would they always include that 'Read in Web Browser' button"

So that those who (as the senders see it) haven't worked out how to avoid reading emails in plain text won't be denied the opportunity to see the sender's latest brain fart in all its mult-icoloured, multi-font, flashing, Comic Sans glory. After all they took so much time putting it together it would be a shame to miss it.

Yes, marketing departments really think you're interested.

What's needed isn't an email client that attempts to render HTML. What's needed is one that autoreplies with a message that the email has been delete, please resend in plain text.

No, scrub that as a client. What's needed is a server that bounces the message. Also one which bounces if the ReplyTo: is noreply or the message contains text to that effect.

Re: ...and on Mac, don't dare to use emojis

Good advice all round.

You can write a message for content and clarity.

"The fault lies with both the client systems and message designers"

Message designers? If you have a message designer you're 100% doing it wrong.

Re: Plain Text

And:

the flow

breaks up

Top-posting

HTML email. There's the problem right there.

Chromebooks are here to stay thanks to COVID, even though shipments crashed: IDC

Re: School's out for ever

Does the Debian version get upgraded when a new one is released? Or maybe they use Sid?

I thought the whole point of a Chromebook was lock in to Google services.

Oracle staff share news of sizable layoffs

I don't suppose the licence audit teams are going to be cut.

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

Re: “Drums”

If it was anything like the fixed disk installed in the QUB mainframe back about 1970 the exis would have to be aligned with the Earth's, IOW it had to be set up to allow for the sit's latitude. If it wasn't aligned precession would have ruined its bearings.