Posts by Doctor Syntax

Open-source software starts with developers, but there are other important contributors, too. Who exactly? Good question

Some of us don't "get" Windows.

A Linux distro isn't a project as such, it's a collection of projects. But in terms of building a user community each one needs to understand what its particular user base requires. I've made a similar point in the past in relation to deskoip managers - an app-based manager such as Unity is useless to a user whose requirements are document based.

One thing I've never been able to understand is the number of distros claiming to be very lightweight. Is the hair shirt community really that big?

A big omission: users.

If a project can't garner users it's pointless.

A developer built an AI chatbot using GPT-3 that helped a man speak again to his late fiancée. OpenAI shut it down

Cloud...

... yes, you know the rest.

Miscreants fling booby-trapped Office files at victims, no patch yet, says Microsoft

Re: ActiveX still around?

When you've been using Unix and Linux for so long it comes as a shock to be reminded that it ever existed, let alone to discover that it still exists.

Re: "a Microsoft Office document that hosts the browser rendering engine"

Because they can.

All too often the explanation for all manner of stupidity.

Convenience beats security every time. Right up until the security fail turns out to be insurmountably inconvenient.

And by asking for a password su and sudo act as a slight reminder that this is serious stuff. Somewhat diluted, of course, by the Ubuntu approach of the sudo password being your own instead of root's.

Talent shortage? Maybe it's your automated hiring system, lack of investment in training

An alternative approach:

"Here's the job description. If you think you can do it tell us why. Applications close on $DATE and none will be considered before then.

"Applications will be reviewed by people who know what they're talking about, not HR, and who can spot BS a mile away. If there are too many to go through them all we'll pull out a sample at random until we get the sort of person we're looking for.

"You might be a good fit but someone who's good enough might get considered first and offered the job. It's a matter of chance but we think it's at least as fair as drawing up a short-list by looking for reasons to exclude you. If you don't like it, don't apply. If you do apply and you're the person we need, good luck."

I wonder if anyone would have the wit to do that.

Re: Cr4p software

Cut out the middlemen. Don't accept CVs from pimps agencies. That's one layer gone. The other is HR of course.

Guntrader breach perp: I don't think it's a crime to dump 111k people's details online in Google Earth format

Re: Amazing target miss from "Ernie"

I'm not sure about your comments on sheep. Although they haven't learned to understand the plain (very plain) English instructions shouted at them from his quad bike by my neighbour they can be a lot more cunning than you realise.

Re: Quick Straw Poll...?

"Did I miss anything?"

Yes, using Street\View is cheaper than sending out your own photographer for a pic of where it happened..

HashiCorp runs low on staff, calls a halt to Terraform pull requests

Re: Which one is it?

It sounds as if both are companies who adopted OSS as model because it was trendy without working out in advance that it wasn't going to fit their needs.

British data watchdog brings cookies to G7 meeting – pop-up consent requests, not the delicious baked treats

Re: Realism please

And popups for anything else should be a warning to go elsewhere. What's needed is a public educated to realise that these aren't something mandated by the EU to trip them up, they're an indication that the website isn't to be trusted.

UK gov blocks the acquisition of Welsh graphene fiddler Perpetuus Group over national security concerns

It's almost as if HMG has discovered supply chain risk.

When the bits hit the fan: What to do when ransomware strikes

Re: Opportunity

Not cheap?

Back in the day small businesses quite frequently ran on Informix/SCO/Intel tower server combinations. It was cost effective enough for them then.

I've no idea what the cost comparisons would be with Windows stuff today but in any case you could take the SCO out of that and replace by Linux or BSD You could take Informix out and replace by PostGres or MySQL. Or your could replace them by Microsoft products, only the server remains constant. Which is cheapest?

Re: Opportunity

"But a lot of stuff -- likely including mission critical software isn't available for Unix"

Let's look at that one. Storing the day-to-day data is fairly mission critical. The sort of stuff for which you use an RDBMS. There have always been Unix packages for that. Microsoft started development of SQL Servier from one of those, Sybase.

Perhaps a good start would be to use one of those for the main business database(es) and have an isolated system to test the backups, just in case.

Why we abandoned open source: LiveCode CEO on retreat despite successful kickstarter

And I wonder if there's punctuation hiding there in plain sight. How are statements delimited? I suspect that EOL has a function in the language.

If so then either

1. They can't write multiple statements on one line

2. They can't write statements that run onto the next line unless there's a way of escaping the new lines in which case

3. They now have to learn about escape characters, a more complicated concept, and

4. They also have to learn about statement delimiters which is more complicated because

5. They're hidden in plain sight.

I suppose if you're encountered programming earlier in your schooling you might have added Logo to that list.

Facebook apologises after its AI system branded Black people as primates

They're also the more general kind.

Re: No "I" in this AI

Artificial? Some of those are genuine.

Virginia school board learns a hard lesson... and other stories

A lot of substances fluoresce. It doesn't seem very likely that there would be an evolutionary advantage in these wasps producing some compound specifically for its fluorescence. It's more likely to be either something produced for some other reason or simply a waste product and just happens to fluoresce.

Alpha adds to tally of exploding rockets, takes out space sail prototype with it

Re: First Launch? And with cargo?

A payload designed to de-orbit satellites promptly is the ideal payload. After all, if it doesn't reach orbit there's no need to de-orbit it.

Only 'natural persons' can be recognized as patent inventors, not AI systems, US judge rules

His first step should be to get an AI qualified as a lawyer. Then it can work its way up to becoming a judge. That way he'd get a more sympathetic hearing from the bench.

His human lawyers might be less keen on helping him with that first step, however.

Software piracy pushes companies to be more competitive, study claims

"Fortune 500 companies have long understood the importance of IP management practices to their bottom line, from Xerox to IBM; there’s a lot of value in patents, including (but not limited to) patent-licensing royalties."

So how come so many of these companies have gained themselves a reputation of hollowing out their R&D?

A speech recognition app goes into a bar. Speak up if you’ve heard it already

Re: At the AC, re your dog...

She's not stupid. Postman, delivery boy, it's one to one. With a squad she's outnumbered.

Re: Aroogah, Aroogah, Aroogah!

"And it's hard to beat the enjoyment of a row with some management wanker or security knob insisting the fire exit shouldn't have been used"

I worked for a while in a glass-walled building that was subject to bomb threats (it also held the service desk for a large business and ne'er-do-wells liked to call threats into the widely advertised phone number). I had an argument with the facilities manager who insisted that for an escape route we proceed round the all-glass end of the all-glass building that might have a bomb in it to congregate in an open area on the opposite side of the the building to our exit. I made clear that even through the chance of a call being genuine was slight I would proceed in as straight a line as possible as perpendicular to the building as possible until I got to a safe distance.

"Wild animals should be faced head on with a trusty cane."

Or his old service revolver.

US Air Force chief software officer quits after launching Hellfire missile of a LinkedIn post at his former bosses

One of the characteristics of the military has been that it is liable to being physically attacked as it does its job. It needs to be able to defend itself.

Now it's liable to be electronically attacked as well. IT security is a significant part of the defence it needs.

Oh! A surprise tour of the data centre! You shouldn't have. No, you really shouldn't have

"It has not been a good day, so far."

POETS

Re: Cliche

I think it's some sort of special training cleaners get - be sure to unplug everything before you start cleaning.

Fired credit union employee admits: I wiped 21GB of files from company's shared drive in retaliation

Re: I did the same by accident...

Murphy says don't bother with before. Just read iafter you press return.

And BTW it doesn't have to me an rm. It's surprising what you can do with a simple mv.

Re: Several levels here…

How much of that work should be on a shared drive rather than on a proper RDBMS with a proper transaction logging system running? Restore to the last checkpoint and then roll the transaction logs forward.

"Those files are constantly monitored and anything messing with them gets killed on sight."

So why didn't that happen?

Re: The Register - Organ of Record

The art of consultancy is to listen to the people and then use that as the basis of the report with a high price tag. It's the price tag that's significant. The bean counters know the price of everything and the value of nothing. If the information is coming with the price tag of a low level worker it's worth what they paid for it. If it comes from someone costing a lot of money it must be worth a lot. But it's the same information.

Re: the data IS effectively the credit union

Caller: "Do you know who I am?"

Worker: "Sorry, I can't help you there. Ask whoever's near you, they might know."

Re: the data IS effectively the credit union

"IT is only seen as a cost,"

The best way to deal with that attitude would be "OK, let's shut it down for a few hours and see how much money that saves."

"Her petty revenge not only created a huge security risk for the bank"

I think the security risk was created by whoever failed to revoke her access or maybe whoever failed to set up a procedure for doing so (according to TFA IT were only asked to revoke it, not told to do so). She only realised that risk. A risk is at least as likely to be the result of a failure to do something.

FTC bans 'brazen' stalkerware maker SpyFone, orders data deletion, alerts to victims

On the basis that every smartphone is a computer (maybe the FTC hasn't realised this) every installation amounts to breaking into a computer. Isn't that a criminal offence in the US?

Can we talk about Kevin McCarthy promising revenge if Big Tech aids probe into January insurrection?

I think it's not so much party based as role based. They're acting like an opposition because they are in opposition. When the political pendulum swings the other way they'll regard such requirements as business as usual because they are business as usual for governments. Nothing changes except the colours government and opposition wear.

Leaked Guntrader firearms data file shared. Worst case scenario? Criminals plot UK gun owners' home addresses in Google Earth

Re: Hopefully some good

That sounds a bit like the time someone robbed a bookies in E Belfast which had a silent alarm installed. It was just cross from the RUC firearms training centre. The instructors turned up within seconds.

"The business also offers software for tracking the sale and purchase of firearms for Registered Firearm Dealers (RFD)."

That sounds as if the dealers might be on the hook as data controllers. I wonder how many of them have reported the breach of their share of the data to the ICO.

Re: section 58

Sigh.

A violation is only a violation when the court says so. Nobody would dare take possession of a timetable to court because the result would be a not guilty, harsh words from the judge, very likely including the words "contempt of court" and further action for misfeasance in public office or malicious prosecution.

Perhaps you should also look up "de minimis".

OTOH gathering this information by Guntrader might not be such a ridiculous case.

Windows 11 will roll out from October 5 as Microsoft hypes new hardware

Re: "all on PCs which lack a TPM"

I doubt they see it that way.

Your trusty PC won't run W11? No problem, just buy a new one and that means a new licence. There's no point in seeing money drain away on free upgrades. That's the way they'll be looking at it.

Adding AI to everything won't make sense until we can use it for anything

Re: "But why does Samsung specify AI? "

"The map is not the territory."

And the title of the map even less so.

Re: We have AI

We had statistical analysis machines with techniques such as cluster analysis at least back as far as the mid '60s. Back about 50 years ago I was helping an archaeology student with his honours project trying machine classification of bronze swords.

That sort of analysis could certainly give the exact reasons why it made its choices provided you could handle the volume of print-out. The real problem, now as with the bronze swords is what of the input data is meaningful and how should it be weighted. Measuring is hard if you want to do it accurately so people will measure what's possible, what's easiest, or just what they recognise as being measurable. These are not necessarily the things which are relevant or the subtle cues we use when we recognise things. And it seems things can be even worse when the machine is left to make its own decisions.

Re: 25 years in IT has made me increasingly cynical about AI ...

"We used to have the Turing test, but machines blew through that years ago and it convinced precisely nobody."

I've come across customer service people - at least I think they were people - who reliably failed it.

As I said.

30 years of Linux: OS was successful because of how it was licensed, says Red Hat

Didn't Google buy Android in?

Re: Linux Desktop - Already tried and failed

ITYF local politics had more to do with that.

Re: @cornetman - Cheer up!

"Microsoft didn't just vanished after Bill Gates left the company. Same thing for Apple, HP and many others"

HP has made several determined attempts...