Posts by Doctor Syntax

Openreach nudges another 112 exchange areas toward full fiber

I'm sure you're both correct. It's not unknown to have different parts of BT (and they own OR) to not know what others are doing.

"BT doesn't like bad publicity"

BT is a good deal thicker skinned than that. The threshold is probably questions in the House or front page on one or more national newspapers.

It's a subset of the technically knowledgeable as you have to exclude those of us who have an adequate FTTC service. OTOH you can include the "Ooh shiny" punters.

Re: Still copper

If they're terminating the subscriber lines for FTTC then presumably they have to be left in place. But what happens to all the POTS cabling back to the exchange?

Re: 1980's Infrastructure

"BT (when it owned Openreach) poured money away on crap ventures (Italy) and TV"

They were out of OFCOM's reach so were considered less trouble to run than running a regulated service. When manglement prefers things to be less trouble it's not hard to see where they're heading in the long run.

Re: Still copper

With the switch to digital voice FTTC will still have copper from cabinet to premises but the copper from exchange to cabinet becomes redundant as does analogue in the exchange. The analogue signal is generated by a DAC in the premises. That needs power so unless you have a UPS (which, as we know, works until it's needed) you can't ring the electricity supplier to report a power cut.

Maybe the way to get a survey is to let them go ahead to attempt an install and fail.

Also out in the sticks. FTTC speed is adequate for what I want.

A significant consideration here is that the analogue phone service is reliable, the electricity service is not. A digital phone service would be no more reliable than the electricity supply needed to operate it.

And, before you ask, yes the mobile phone gets a signal at home - on WiFi calling only.

"The PSTN analog network is obsolete, becoming harder to maintain and significantly more expensive to run,"

Accountant: How expensive do you want it to be?

Signals are grim for Jodrell Bank Observatory after UK science funding decision

Re: Foot meet Gun

Your joke is sadly out of date. These days banks do everything they can to avoid having branches.

Re: It isn't just physics

Not really. They're just following the lead given from the other side of the pond. And you can't say ruder than that.

Re: criminal

The political class are mainly humanities graduates who will tell you if asked that STEM disciplines are important for the economy but have no idea what they actually involve and thus run the country from on a basis of deep ignorance.

Uncle Sam needs you to fight for 6G leadership and security, lest Beijing get there first

"America wants its allies"

America famously doesn't have allies, only interests.

To the extent that it might have conned other countries into thinking they were allies it has spent the last few years assiduously undoing that.

Hyperscale, hypersensitive: US teacher cuffed for applauding datacenter critics

Paging Ms Streisand.

FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

Re: What's the bet ...

Markdown is a late-comer. Why should anyone support yet another document format?

Re: Remember the Approval Process for OOXML?

"Only one thing is going to change this - which is for a nation somewhere to have national government agencies standardize on LibreOffice."

There seems to be a chance that that will happen. Non-standard formats get declared legacy.

"That history (assuming you mean Munich) is going to rinse-repeat"

Not even MS can have that many national HQs.

Kudos to you for debugging a web page realising that a web page might need debugging.

Re: M$ has killed email

If, however, you're looking for a sin MS has committed against email I suggest defaulting Outlook to top-posting.

And who was it who decided that email clients should be enabled to include HTML? That might have been Netscape rather than MS.

Re: M$ has killed email

Not all academic colleagues work in the same, or even any, university.

"The internet had been born open and its protocols evolved rapidly without the weight of corporate motivation around their ankles. Open source servers and networking worked better and could be deployed at scale without the need to generate revenue. Open source rendering engines and frameworks freed the browser market to out-innovate the lock-in machine of Internet Explorer"

I wish that were true. For a while it may have been but no longer. Using my preferred browser, SeaMonkey, I can't see the comment ling on TFA nor on any of the other articles, not even by unblocking everything on the entire page in NoScript.

That's a silent one and an oddity in only, AFAICS, blocking one aspect. Some will just display a screenful of the first page and refuse to scroll to the rest of it, fail to follow links or whatever. Others will simply display a message to the effect that they don't like your browser and list the ones they prefer. They'll even complain about your browser being out of date which suggests they only deal with recent ones.

I don't think we can lay that at Microsoft's door. Possibly at marketing specifying something which pushes the limits so that the quirks of every single browser has to be taken into account. More likely, I suspect, of developers of frameworks trying to be too clever by half and not being half clever enough and the site developers using those frameworks. If only there were tests that could be run against sites known to and used by those developers.

Digital sovereignty is real in Europe. The UK? Not so much

"The EU runs on Microsoft. The US could turn us off inside one hour."

The UK thinking is probably along the same lines with the addition of "but they wouldn't do that, would they?".

It's a pity they chose the platform they did for their petition. It might enable them t have a nice graphic on it but it can and will be ignored. Placing it on https://petition.parliament.uk/ would make far more sense because it it were to gether sufficient signatures there it would have to be debated in Parliament.

Which raises a related issue. The Leader of the Opposition is well qualified to ask informed and pointed questions about this at PM's questions. Why doesn't she? Is anyone here a constituent of hers who could raise it with her?

Foxconn unit drops VMware, adopts hyperconverged upstart Arcfra for workloads including AI

Re: hyperconverged infrastructure…

What could go wrong?

Beancounters deciding that outsourcing it to someone else to save paying salaries to employees to do it so there's nobody left to take charge of it when the need arises.

That's what could go wrong. In fact that's just what did go wrong in the first place.

Burnham wants Big Ecommerce to bankroll Britain's pubs

"Unlike eBay, Amazon is both platform and retailer."

The other way about, surely. It started as a retailer.

Re: Pretty much all costs are simply too high in the UK

One cause of High Street decline is a steadfast refusal of local authorities to believe that money arrives at the High Street in cars, even as public transport has been steadily cut. If "slipping down to the shops" includes a 90p charge due to the absence of short term free parking to buy something that's probably cheaper online then I'm going to buy online. Even more so after the experience of finding that whatever it was I was looking for isn't stocked locally.

UK pumps £708 million into its future fighter jet

Re: What is this for?

"And yet they did it anyway, for reasons that looked good to them at the time."

IIRC one of the reasons talked about at the time was the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO. That worked so well several other countries bordering Russia decided to join NATO.

The real reason, no doubt, was Putin's self-aggrandisment coupled with the notion that a former part of the USSR should not have the temerity to make its own way in the world.

Unless the impact is in the aircraft's engine.

Obvious question in the circumstances - is this new money or part of the existing defence budget?

Astronomers spot exomoon candidate that's almost as massive as Jupiter

As any botanist or zoologist can tell you, nature is the enemy of taxonomy.

Linux kernel team publishes 432 CVEs in two days

We don't know how insecure closed source software actually is.

Oops. make it live

"The kernel team looks at every bugfix that is added to stable kernel releases, he added, and if it fixes an issue that meets that CVE criteria, a CVE is assigned."

This suggests that these 432 CVEs represent 432 fixes that have just gone into the current stable version. Given that a Debian/Devuan kernel update arrived in the last day or so perhaps they're already dealt with in one go. Installing a Linux kernel update doesn't tie up the system although finding an opportunity for a reboot to make it like might be a problem in some situations.

Council worker spared prison after four-day data-snooping spree

Re: An excellent example

OP seems to be a Daily Fail reader. Don't assume reasoning ability.

Airbus takes flight from AWS. What happens next is critical

When policy becomes "It absolutely cannot be the same" things change.

From TFA: "there's no organisation that can respond to a competitive tender request for a tightly specified Office/Workspace replacement. Nobody's done that before"

If it hasn't been done before there can't be one to replace so no problem.

If a spreadsheet is absurdly large it's the wrong application. Take it (cautiously) as a prototype and build a real application to replace it.

LG monitors are using Windows 11 feature to serve adware

Re: Headphones apps

“for the best experience”

A phrase which translates to "on no account should you even consider buying this".

Re: Gen Pop simply doesn't care

I think you're overestimating the intelligence knowledge of most users

This is the basic problem of all IT security.

Re: Total C-Suite fail

Back then, of course, they were dealing with much, much less bloat.

Reasons not to use Windows ...

... no 837.

But I may have miscounted.

Ireland stalls €1B Microsoft tender amid digital sovereignty questions

Given the huge concentration of US-owned date centres in Ireland this must be a Munich++ situation.

Oracle faces $100M annual bill to back Wisconsin datacenter power promises

Great

Oracle, in effect, getting audited. What goes round, comes round.

Re: The AI bubble meets the financial pin of economic reality.

"I feel sorry for Oracle's customer base."

Why? By now they should have been aware of what they were getting into.

Re: It's a symptom of the elephant in the room...

"I think the gigawatt-based metric is also symptomatic of something else"

It's symptomatic of the fact that bad managers measure inputs because measuring outputs is either too hard to do or the results too hard to stomach.

Auditors tell UK government to do the math before banking on £45B AI savings

Re: yanks and there AI

Muphry's law strikes again.

Re: Reality check

You mean the votes don't add up?

The Document Foundation says Microsoft's file formats keep users on a short leash

"All the parts of OOXML pertaining new document creation are well documented."

Don't confuse quantity with quality.

OTOH LO will stand a good chance of opening the document that Word borked all on its own.

Connecting AI agents to outside services explodes the risk radius

Re: For "people", read "kids".

Don't overlook the fact that there are people who were trainees before it* existed so couldn't know it.

* I gather it's some sort of science fiction film. I can't be bothered with science fiction - so have survived an entire working life and a lot of retirement without knowing it. A Jake said, it has nothing to do with reality.

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

My very last day on site after many years -

I'd been body shopped in originally. Then left the body shop. Then got taken on as an employee. Then been prematurely retired. Then, in unforeseen circumstances, gone back on contract. Then left again. Then had a vendor contract and ended that contract doing some hand-holding while the site went through an upgrade. The go-live was the first working day after the contract ended but as the guys there were old mates stayed on that day.

On go live an SQL statement failed. I looked at it. I remembered writing it it back in the body shop days. It replaced a non-SQL bit of code what I'd also written back then so the logic behind it was one of the oldest things I did there. It brought together stock levels for two different types of product that had stock levels determined in different ways. I couldn't see how it ever worked but it had, in practice, worked for years. Somebody else said that they couldn't see anything wrong with it. I fixed it and the fix worked.

It was a few years before I came across the explanation. It was a complex statement that involved nulls and the definition about nulls is a little ambiguous. The new version of the product changed the way it navigated the ambiguity.