Posts by Doctor Syntax

Intel's mystery Linux muckabout is a dangerous ploy at a dangerous time

I certainly hope so.

"After the vessel driftied through the Straits of Lateness towards the Rocks of Irrelevance"

Are you saying they Haven't A Clue?

Ooh, an update. Let's install it. What could possibly go wro-

Re: Windows NT 4 SP2

"This shows how old I am.."

Remembering CP/M gets closer to showing how old you are. Remembering GEORGE shows how old you are.

Clearview's selfie-scraping AI facial recognition technology set to be patented

What's reasoning? If working out that doing something a bit more than see food, eat food is reasoning then some crows have exhibiting reasoning without using language at all. It's very dubious whether any language is needed let alone written language.

Google advises Android users to be careful of Microsoft Teams if they want to call 911

Re: Does this issue impact all emergency phone numbers?

It's a long time since I heard the Arlington described as ex-Systime.

Re: Yes, it’s an annoyance

They make a lot of money for selling targeted adverts. The actual targeting is things you've already bought, of course. The fact you've bought it already and aren't going to buy it again doesn't affect Google's bottom line because Google have no interest in selling you anything.

Let me repeat that. Google have no interest in selling you anything. Unless, of course, you want to buy advertising.

All they sell is advertising to advertisers.

Re: Surprising bug

There may well be stuff on Zoom that needs it - perhaps if you want to present images or something - but SWMBO took part in weekly Zoom chatter meetings without it during lockdown. They might have to revert to that next year (icon).

Re: Surprising bug

"swaps the keyboard layout from UK to US"

Take a look at what ibus might be doing.

Zoom does this, at least on Devuan & Debian. The actual culprit is ibus which gets installed because the Zoom deb lists it as a dependency. There's a workaround which involves unpacking the deb, editing out the dependency and repackaging. Whether that would work with a Teams install is a different matter.

Re: Time to lawyer up?

"Um, whose testing process is at fault here, Android or MS?"

Both. If it's on Google Play MS should have tested it before submitting and Google should have tested it before accepting.

Re: And when we are all FTTP?

And it's only when you need it that you discover age has reduced battery life to 6 seconds.

Re: Yes, it’s an annoyance

There are two answers to that.

First there's no excuse for not doing things properly. If you want to do things at large scale do them properly and if you can't scale doing them properly at scale then admit that to yourself and work at a scale you can manage.

The second is that Google also makes a big noise about its AI abilities. If they're that good then they can use their AI on sorting the issues. If they're not that good then stop the empty bragging.

One of the other things that Google need to investigate is to why the issue has to become a big issue on social media days after the it was filed with them before they respond by asking for a bug report. Should social media really be the only working method for reporting and the triage for a serious failure?

OK, boomer? Gen-X-ers, elder millennials most likely to name their cars, says DVLA

"Like you, we used to give our cars names based on their registration."

In the older registration scheme Oxford plates were -UD so on that basis quaite a few car's names really were MUD. There were also DUDs.

DVLA were having problems keeping up with renewals of driving licences. Have they now caught up and have time on their hands for this nonsense? Or was this given to somebody to stop them getting in the way of those who were doing the work?

Better CEO is 'taking time off' after firing 900 staff on Zoom

Re: Making people redundant

And think of how motivated they'll be when they get taken on my a competitor.

Take some time off. Don't come back.

What came first? The chicken, the egg, or the bodge to make everything work?

Re: Bootstrap

It's probably the re-use as a PIN that keeps reinforcing it.

"small and uncomfortably warm due to underspecified HVAC"

I hope you explained that that's not what a hot standby means.

In practice I think you usually get there. The most significant thing we learned from our first DR was that, left to itself, the vendor's backup routing left /etc well down the list. We almost ran out of time before it was restored. Having rewritten the backup to prioritise the directories we needed to boot, we could do that and then get the database restore running in parallel with everything else. I suspect the everything else that originally stood in the way of /etc was largely a huge stack of crud whose owners would have been prepared to defend it to the death.

Re: The chicken or the egg?

2I can do anything left handed except write legibly and that is lack of practice."

By that measure I'm ambidextrous - I can't write legibly with either.

Re: Clouds and Blue Skies

What emailing customers achieves depends on circumstances but if the emails are effectively saying "place your orders with the opposition" then just sending emails doesn't really count as doing something about it.

Re: The one thing that is never planned for:

"that degree of paranoia realism"

Paranoia is the required degree of realism.

And that, folks, is why you have DR rehearsals. The purpose of the first one isn't to practice doing it, it's to find out why you can't.

The purpose of the second one, of course, is to find out why you still can't.

Assange extradition case goes to UK Home Secretary as High Court rules he can be sent to US for trial

Re: Two sides

I'm sure there was a sense of malice and revenge in the Trump government's setting the extradition in motion. I think there was quite possibly a smarter and more punishing sense of malice and revenge in the Obama government's ignoring him.

Re: Two sides

The bail he skipped was for extradition to Sweden. There was no extradition request in place from the US. His chances of getting extradited from Sweden are generally reckoned as less than from the UK. By skipping bail he effectively imprisoned himself giving the US several years to get round to attempting extradition. If he hadn't skipped he might or might not have gone to jail in Sweden. Where he'd have been now is impossible to determine. He might even have been ignored by the US and subsequently forgotten.

Re: Don't do it Priti

"why should we give them Assange ?"

She'll probably see him as an immigrant she can actually deport.

Nvidia CEO Huang jointly files patent for software tech in the metaverse

"The patent document takes a hack at the disadvantages of desktop engineering software, which typically require powerful computers."

The powerful computers are still needed but they're just moved off the desktop. I suppose it enables Nvidia to sell components for two computers, one on the desktop and one in the cloud. Next time round they can advocate doing it with desktop computers and sell more components for that. And then back to reinventing the mainframe in yet another form.

Re: How is this novel?

"Isn’t this literally the oldest technology in the world?"

Literally? No. Chipping stone comes way before mainframes.

More than half of UK workers would consider jumping ship if a hybrid work option were withdrawn by their company

"The only fly in the ointment is the temptation of whatever is in the cupboards or fridge."

Mmmm. My team used to sit next to an office that was often used for lunch-time meetings where the emphasis was on the rather good lunches. That was one thing that was missed on moving elsewhere.

Re: I definitely will quit

No single person might be indispensable. The workforce, or a big enough chunk of it is. The manager who drives that chunk away may then have to reflect on that first statement.

"But it never ceases to amaze me how many people think they are right up until the day they hand in their notice."

Oddly enough there was a time when I handed in my notice and was promptly offered the promotion that had been withheld for years. None of the usual formalities such as boards at least not obviously although they might have appeared if I'd accepted. I didn't. Obviously I wasn't indispensable because things didn't collapse when I left. But employers can take people for granted just as much, or even more, than employees take their supposed indispensability for granted.

Re: Losing

Trying to block a sea-change in working practices that has mass-appeal. In practice it to dawn on governments at some point that working at home or locally will be a part of meeting their carbon-neutral aspirations.

I agree. There could be a situation where people live in urban centres, suburban centres or rural centres as it suits them with all of them able to work locally.

Re: Down vote me now, you don't want to read my post, as if

"Moral, be careful what you wish for."

Indeed.

That's right.

My old firm was in Leeds with a big office which largely became call centre. Then they spread out to several other big call centres, all in cities spread over N England. There's no reason why, given suitable premises in which they could have taken small spaces, they couldn't have set up multiple small centres and recruited locally to them.

This big centre, long commute model of working isn't sustainable. The longer it takes that to sink in the worse will be the problems of sorting it out. An intelligent government would be looking at tax incentives to drive working at home or locally but those are rare and the current one seems to be on the less intelligent end of the spectrum.

The planning policy which has dictated the present situation was a response to C19th slum dwellings clustered round heavy, polluting industry. By and large that's not the problem now but the policy hasn't changed.

I'm not sure that was the sort of mingling the OP had in mind.

Re: Love being at home, hate working from home

"It breaks my heart to tell them I can't play with them"

But you can't because you have to get on your bike & cycle into work. When I worked in central London it was about an hour and a half each way on a good day so I didn't see much of my children. We weren't living like that for more than a few years but I think something got lost during that time that could never be got back.

The two might not be incompatible. Those who can't teach or manage become OFSTED inspectors.

One of the factors that can affect commute is the possibility of different members of the household having to commute to widely separate locations. There might be no good location where everyone can get a short journey to work whatever the house prices. But, yes, with successive Chancellors following Gordon Brown and ignoring house prices as part of their preferred measure of inflation the cheap money they've bribed electors with has force house prices up and up so it's going to force unsustainably long commutes as a consequence.

Think more local than that. Think walking distance. Here in the old textile area of the Pennines (sub-rural rather than suburban) the mills were built in the valleys (water power initially) and housing built around them. That housing represents the heritage that the areas are so proud of. OTOH the houses weren't built with car parking in mind; I don't know how anyone who lives in them is going to cope with charging EVs but without the mills on the doorstep the places to which they commute are so diverse that public transport is s non-starter.* There's such a location near me, cars parked nose to tail on both sides of the road overnight but with a large empty mill a few hundred yards away. That's scheduled to be used for more houses. It could well be re-purposed or replaced by some form of small workspaces. By the time that planners actually see the non-sustainability of what they've created they'll end up looking for greenfield sites for workplaces and there aren't many of those left in Pennine valleys.

*My last client before I retired was about 40 - 45 minutes away by car; I worked out the public transport timing: 2h 35 minutes and that assumed the there would be no motorway holdups to wipe out a 4 minute gap for transfer between buses and would still have been 10 minutes late for anyone needing to be at work promptly at 9 am.

"a few property developers looking at the workspace solutions ... in more suburban areas so as to mean there is no commute"

I think this should be the future. There would have been a good many more suitable sites for this if the planners hadn't spent years scheduling ex-industrial premises as brownfield sites to be built on as housing. These would have been the sites big enough to build such places even if the existing premises couldn't be converted. Once they've been split up into multiple house plots it would be a nightmare putting them bag into bigger units.

It was like that in the Civil Service for ministerial visits. Real work stopped so that demonstration material could be set up.

International Monetary Fund warns crypto-related risks could soon become systemic

Re: Crypto is just another empty investment

Given the crowds the Mona Lisa attracts it must have a quantifiable value in its ability to attract tourist trade to Paris in general and the Louvre in particular.

"the $2.5 trillion market capitalisation of cryptocurrency potentially does indicate that blockchain and other crypto-related innovations have real value"

Given its turnover a similar argument could be made in favour of ransomware.

Actual metal being welded in support of the UK's first orbital 'launch platform'

Re: Testing is good, but...

"Somewhere that it's expensive to get people and kit to and there are no local welding companies"

They're going to have to get people, kit and a welding company to the launch site before they go operational. But what's the planning situation regarding launch sites atm?

As Microsoft has proved so often there's absolutely no problem with anyone having a monopoly or near monopoly on something.

Resistance is ... cheap? Cloudflare, Mandiant, and pals form incident response 'n' cyber insurance borg

In order to assess the risk they'd need to know something about how the businesses are run. For ordinary business premises they should at least have some knowledge of differences of crime rates between localities, business types likely to suffer from fraud and premises more or less likely to go up in smoke. I doubt they have such meaningful statistics on infosec yet without taking a closer look at what they're covering.

"it seems insurers are mostly raising prices and looking for ways to stop paying out so much to attack victims"

The obvious way - obvious to most of us - to pay less would be to insist on advise customers about adopting better security. Is suppose that's not in the insurers' skill set for stopping payouts.

Academics horrified that administration of Turing student exchange scheme outsourced to Capita

Re: How do they do it?

"How do companies like Capita time and again fail to deliver on government contracts yet get more of them?"

Because there are so few of them big enough to take on these sort of contracts that they can all pitch themselves as being no worse than the rest.

PC market pulls past peak pandemic demand, and IDC says it will keep growing

Are they sure the only reason the PC market seems to be cooling is the bottleneck in components?

Re: Well, this confirms it ...

"but tablets are turgid"

And weren't we told that nobody needed a new PC because they (or at least non-gamers) could now do what they needed on a tablet and cloud?