Posts by Doctor Syntax

Elliott Management to WDC board: Spin out or sell flash biz

So which half do they think should make hybrid drives?

AI helps scientists design novel plastic-eating enzyme

Re: End of the Polymeriferous Period

TFA says "low temperature" with the implication that 30 Celsius is low. It's probably not as low as the wild-type bacteria were experiencing. Something doesn't quite hang together here. Were they planning to extract the enzyme to use on its own from the bacteria and discovered that it doesn't work as well as it does in vivo? I can see the attraction of using purified enzyme: it will leave the product of the breakdown to become a potentially useful industrial substrate instead of letting the bacteria respire it all the way to CO2.

But why AI? What's wrong with the traditional approach of seeding a substrate with a weak suspension, incubating and selecting the colonies that grow best? Not eye-catching enough?

Don't hate on cryptomining, hate the power stations, say Bitcoin super-fans

Re: Wow

I suppose in their case such a disconnection from reality is to be expected.

Spanish PM, defense minister latest Pegasus spyware victims

Maybe the best way to handle that would be to invite the Israeli ambassador into the Foreign Ministry for a chat and when he arrives wheel him straight into a press conference for a public bollocking.

A discounting disaster averted at the expense of one's own employment

Re: Alarming, fired.

It depends entirely on whether you choose to monetise support.

I think a lot of us have worked for James's former employer. Too many managers with too little to do roaming the place looking for something they know nothing about nothing about in which they can dabble.

Apple to bin apps that go three years without updates

Re: "They work"

"What kind of updates it needs?"

It probably doesn't look like this year's idea of "modern".

US appeals court ruling could 'eliminate internet privacy'

Re: Very interesting...

"Actually my reply would be a) and yes, it does raise the question of who they [criminals] are.

See my previous post about terminology and the way it can lead you away from clear thinking. You're in danger of equating "suspect" or "defendant" with "culprit".

In my post above i said "undisputed" evidence as i do perfectly understand that evidence should not be considered if there is reasonable cause to think it was made up or tampered with or even a coerced "confession".

If there is other, undisputed, evidence then that should surely be allowed to stand and there can be a conviction.

OTOH if evidence is improperly obtained than what it tells you should be regarded as suspect. It could, for instance, be missing context. Lets say $ProminentPerson has been killed by shooting. Someone trawls through some sort of harvested social media posts and comes up with somebody saying "I once tried to shoot $ProminentPerson but missed out. I'll try again sometime." Does missing context make a difference?

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What if the context was that of photographers trying to grab pictures of celebrities?

There have been a number of cases where evidence from mobiles has been presented out of context and the case overturned when the defence finally got there hands on the complete data.

Re: Very interesting...

"Suspect = as yet unpunished perpetrator"

Yup, that's one that really gets my goat. "Culprit" is the word for whoever dunnit. Sloppy use of language leads to sloppy thinking - or perhaps is the consequence of it. I'm not sure it was used as much back then. Perhaps it's become more common as a result of more sloppily thought out TV crime series. Or sloppy thinking journalists.

Re: Very interesting...

"I do not understand why a criminal should get an out of jail free card when an investigator doesn't follow the rules."

Let's take that apart. What do you mean by "criminal"?

(a) Somebody who's committed a crime or

(b) Somebody who's been convicted of committing a crime?

If you reply (a) this raises the question of how do you know who they are? Because they've been convicted? So really your only option is (b) unless, of course, it was yourself, then you'd know for certain.

Having established that, let's say you're going about your innocent way (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here) when some investigator who can't be arsed with following the rules thinks you might have committed the crime he's investigating and manufactures some evidence against you.

You're duly convicted and, by the standards I hope we've agreed on, you're a (b); a criminal. You know you're innocent but we all have to call you a criminal because you've been convicted.

You appeal about the investigator having made up evidence and your appeal is upheld. What happens to you?

Your statement which I quoted seems to disassociate "criminal" from investigator not following the rules. By that thinking you're still a criminal because you were convicted so you don't get a get out of jail free card.

Do you now see why the strict rules of evidence aren't to protect criminals, they're to protect the innocent.

I should point out that for a considerable chunk of my working life my job was, essentially, one of the investigators. My ongoing dread was the risk of finding myself part of a miscarriage of justice if I were not ultra careful.

Re: Very interesting...

It seems to be a viewpoint the courts never consider when a big "content provider" sues someone for "stealing" their valuable IP.

Citation needed. Are there any precedents for treating this as theft? Just because it's loosely bandied about as theft in media or on forums that doesn't mean it's the word that appears in the pleadings.

BOFH: Something's consuming 40% of UPS capacity – and it's coming from the beancounters' office

Re: A possible solution

"Such a round earth pin socket would have eliminated this problem."

Not really. It isn't apparent that the vacuum cleaner won't fit until the server has been unplugged.

Re: You'd have thought that pros would do it better...

So the UPS really was up the wazoo.

Re: Designed to fail

We had the building UPS taken out by a lightning bolt. The rest of the building was OK & it took ages to get the UPS fixed during which time we ranthe servers on the uninterrupted interruptible power supply.

Re: The security system

A tip to the local fire service that an inspection might be a good idea should have fixed that.

Your software doesn't work when my PC is in 'O' mode

Re: it was a button with 'I' and 'O' on it

You must be a tester. I remember it being said that a tester was somebody who could look at the system button on the original Windows title bar and see a minus sign.

"perfectly functional for other tasks in "O" mode"

It made an excellent door stop.

India reveals plan to become major RISC-V design and production player by 2023

Re: Curry in the sky..

TFA specifically say 2023 but I did wonder if the actual words were "next year". That would just be an acceleration of "in the next ten years" or "in the next five years". It's always ten years, or five years, every year.

If they're going to achieve anything their employee churn is going to have to be less than Infosys's.

Windows 10 still growing, but Win 11 had another bad month, says AdDuplex

Re: "MS seem oblivious to the financial problems that people are experiencing all over the world."

And they just don't care about that, either.

Re: Seconds out... round 3

That could go horribly wrong the the vendors, however. If the new version is disliked there's no incentive to replace H/W for a new OS version and they have to offer the old version in order to make non-replacement sales.

Re: So which is it?

It might be better from a management point of view (IT and dealing with the "why can't I get a new one now" issue) to replace the lot at one go. We don't, of course, know how old the existing batch of PCs is nor the spread of ages.

Thinking about the OP it seems as if the boss might be prepared to go out & out Mac on the desks. If I were the A/C, however, instead of just putting W10 on the laptop I'd have tried a dual boot, W10 & Linux, so that the boss could compare W10, Linux & Mac as desktops.

Re: Seconds out... round 3

MS will work to fix the problems and over time (a year or two) the new version will become usable...

at which time MS will make it EOL.

Re: So which is it?

Asking costs nothing. He can make up his mind what to buy when he sees the price.

Pop!_OS 22.04: New kid on the Ubuntu block starting to show real muscle

By the few good parts of W10 do you mean those where it's finally caught up with KDE?

The word "modern" appears a few times

I always take that as a warning.

They could write their own and call it Crackle.

Indian government hauls Infosys in to explain non-compete clause

Re: Indian Law...

You have to wonder at the mentality of manglements who entrust their IT to a business with staff churn at that level.

Ex-Googlers take a stab at building 'general intelligence' that makes software do what you tell it

Re: the ambitious goal of teaching machines how to use "every software tool and API in the world."

Cottage industries were how everything was done before industrialisation. Isn't burning through VC funds major industry nowadays?

"every software tool and API in the world."

That's a problem, right there. It will spend all its time training as the rest of the software world adds new tools & APIs and makes breaking changes to existing ones.

"carry out someone's commands on its own initiative"

I'm not sure "someone's commands" and "its own initiative" aren't two separate and conflicting things.

BT starts commercial trial of quantum secured London network

Re: UK government has signalled its intent to develop the country into a "quantum-enabled economy"

As it understands none of it it can quite easily back all of it without any hint of cognitive dissonance.

Microsoft points at Linux and shouts: Look, look! Privilege-escalation flaws here, too!

Re: "most distributions don't even package"

I see it listed by synaptic which at first sight looks odd as this is Devuan but, of course, Devuan falls back to Debian (11 in this case) repositories for what it doesn't maintain itself. So although you might not be running you would be able to see it listed there.

Re: Please note.

As a Devuan user I know that very well.

from the man page: "networkd-dispatcher - Dispatcher service for systemd-networkd connection status changes"

Ah, systemd.

Algorithm can predict pancreatic cancer from CT scans well before diagnosis

"the team doesn't really know what it is analyzing when it makes its predictions."

This is a big problem and common to so much of this ML stuff. It would probably be more useful in the long run to understand exactly what the significant features are in biological terms. That way there might be scope for preventative measure.

It's not helped by the fact that the fact that the sample is small.

Study: How Amazon uses Echo smart speaker conversations to target ads

And it will still deliver ads for the wrong thing:

1. Pick out some key word and throw up anything that has the same word in the description (example, try searching for a DPDT toggle switch and count the hits that are SPDT,DPST, centre-off, i.e. triple throw or not toggle swtiches).

2. People who bought this also bought...something completely irrelevant; it was a small sample but we don't care.

Re: How far will they be willing to go?

They'll just trget ads at legislators.

Smart contract developers not really focused on security. Who knew?

Are bugs in the contract code even the main problem? The Beanstalk heist, for instance, was accomplished by gaming the system. If the code is bug-free but the system can be subverted simply by throwing a large amount of virtual money at it by way of a flash loan then the system has no security.

It's not just a matter of doing things right, you also have to do the right things.

"they may be shoddier still due to disinterest in security among smart contract developers"

Is that really disinterest or simply lack of interest?

Heresy: Hare programming language an alternative to C

Re: Can someone explain the advantages in the language please?

"is the amount of effort that goes into creating a new language significantly less than working out how to overcome the shortcoming in the original language?"

The same applies to the effort of everyone else in learning the new language.

"More than 300 programming languages have existed at one time or another. Hare aims to serve as an alternative to C"

Sometimes it seems that there have been more than 300 programming languages just in the "alternative to C" category or even in the "alternative to alternative to C" category.

Oh, look! Another!

Crooks steal NFTs worth '$3m' in Bored Ape Yacht Club heist

Assorted NFTs - $3million.

Learning by experience - priceless.

Re: 3 million?

"I'm confused by the valuation"

You're meant to be. The valuation was given by a business that makes money dealing with these [no]things and has a vested interest in giving them high valuations.

Elon Musk set to buy Twitter in $44b deal, promises stuff

"there are no serious regulatory hurdles to overcome"

Given Musk's previous history with US financial regulators over his use of Twitter I can't imagine them being enthused by this. Whether they have cause to act, other than take a long time to review it, I don't know. Apart from that, non-US countries are increasingly reacting to the behaviour of multinational online businesses, e.g.the EU's Digital Services Act. I think a good few of them are going to want to take an interest.

I'd have thought this is only the start. He'll need to get acceptance from the rest of the existing owners, the shareholders. Then he'll need to get regulatory acceptance. It could be a long-running story.

Intuit sued over alleged cryptocurrency thefts via Mailchimp intrusion

The longer the supply chain the greater the attack surface. That should be obvious to the meanest intelligence. Unfortunately Mailchimp's customers are marketing departments so they fail to clear that bar.

Flaw could have granted criminals control over Ever Surf crypto wallets

Is storing or controlling any form of currency really a good place to move fast and break things?

Google Docs' AI-powered inclusive writing auto-correct now under fire

Re: IBM: Ethics is a major roadblock to enterprises adopting AI technology

Interesting, scrolling down that article. It gets to a point of comparing States' grants to large corporations. If non-US countries take such measures they get sanctioned. Where are the ethics in that?

Re: We all work for Google now...

It is. Would you just say "to and"?

Re: Just wait

the "semi" would cause offence by implying inadequacies.

And, of course, music should not be written with notes shorter than quavers.

Oh dear, "quaver" sounds a bit inadequate as well. And "crotchet" sounds altogether to much like "crotchety" (other offences are available to be taken). "Minim" sounds inadequate as well and "semi-breve" brings up the original problem. Non-offensive music is going to be a bit slow and rhythmically dull.

Re: Not a good suggestion

I wonder what it would do with "pregnant pause".