Posts by Doctor Syntax

GitLab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

Re: ... these days I don't hesistate, I just take my toys and go

In this case it's Gitlab who's doing the throwing.

Re: Neat, must remember to put bugs into code so it has to be continuously revised

The correct metric is surely the number of downloads over a given period. If people need to download it it remains important.

Why you should start paying attention to CXL now

"Just pop a CXL memory module into an empty PCIe 5.0 slot, and you're off to the races."

Memory expansion boards. Everything old is new again.

Sonatype shines light on typosquatting ransomware threat in PyPI

PyPi and NPM, also mentioned in the article, are not, on the face of it, collections of random uploads. They present themselves as resources for developers in their respective languages. A user might reasonably expect them to be sources of high quality S/W. AFAICS the reality is that both collections simply accept contributions on trust with mechanisms to remove malware once the damage has been done.

Should you have the misfortune to fall victim to one of these, possibly as a result of a library downloaded by someone else acting in good faith, you might have occasion to reflect that there are worse problems than spelling variations although these are, in fact, at the very heart of typosquatting. You might even come to the conclusion that uploads should be vetted before being publicly posted. You might even use the term "curated".

PyPi's "terms of use" make no mention of not uploading malware: they're entirely concerned with an uploader having the rights to distribute the material. They make no mention of the terms on which material is provided to the downloader. Neither is there any mention in the code of conduct.

NPM is slightly better. The acceptable content, in its 3rd paragraph forbids malicious content. Perhaps reasonably this positions it after licencing considerations but both are placed after "harassing, inappropriate, or abusive".

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

Pull jet fuel from thin air? We can do that, say scientists

Re: At scale??? Yes, easily

Energy is used all over the place. One of the problem with such centralised schemes is distributing it to where it's needed. The other is storage.

And that's without some idiot deciding to use all of it to mine Bitcoin.

Re: only 4% efficient ?

One sun but how many planets?

Re: Chemical process

"There's plenty of land that has lots of sunlight but isn't suitable for agriculture."

It would still need something with a much bigger yield than this. How, I wonder, does this compare with using the same area as the reflector to grow algae?

Re: Chemical process

But as commentards have pointed out below, there isn't enough of it. Not nearly enough. Not enough by several planets' worth. Fossil fuels have built up over geological time and they're being burnt in a few years. When it's gone it's gone. We need much smarter solutions than this.

"Once suitable craft are produced all sub 100km flights, city to city or island hoppers can and should be electric" or trains.

Re: Chemical process

This process would also require land. Anything harvesting energy from sunlight uses the land on which that sunlight falls. If a process produces something from waste products (why do you use scare quotes?) then the land has already been used in whatever process it was wasted from. You also need to consider how the waste might otherwise have been disposed of; waste organic matter is apt to give rise to methane if simply buried.

GitLab plans to delete dormant projects in free accounts

"Happy loyal free users become advocates of GitLab, which brings more users and strengthens our brand,

And unhappy loyal free users?

The many derivatives of the CP/M operating system

Re: Sage

Yup, that rings a distant bell.

Back in the day I was using something called - IIRC - SDOS, or maybe SD/OS which was either a rebadged CP/M or a knock-off. It came with a system built on S100 boards from a company called SD. There seemed to be no difference at all from CP/M except for the name. We accumulated all sorts of freeware, even Algol (probably as a compiler) although the main language used was Microsoft FORTRAN.

Solana, Phantom blame Slope after millions in crypto-coins stolen from 8,000 wallets

Maybe by now there are only thieves left & they're all busy stealing from each other.

Re: Again

There's an endless supply of people who think it can onley happen to someone else because they themselves are much too smart.

Re: Surely

Barnum says otherwise.

Financial exchange's efforts to replace core systems with blockchain founder – again

Re: Not suited for task

there are very few things a blockchain is actually needed for other than getting money thrown at you during funding rounds

Funding rounds seem to be unnecessary for finding suckers in this game.

Student crashes Cloudflare beta party, redirects email, bags a bug bounty

Re: Good for him

He's not skiving.

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?

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.

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.