Posts by Doctor Syntax

Happy 'Freedom Day': Stats suggest many in England don't want it or think it's a terrible idea

Re: Apple/Google app

The real problem is in taking an indicator with a very likely high rate of false positives as being definitive. It should be no more than indicative of the need for a further test.

Re: "a shift of emphasis onto greater personal judgement and responsibility"

Washing hands is what BoJo's been keenest on all along. Clearly Freudian.

Re: No we've proven that coronavirus is very virulent and deadly

One of the things you learn as a biologist is that the outliers don't tell you about the general case. The general case here is that last winter was an abnormally low flu year.

Re: SNAFU

What do you understand by the term "lagging indicator"?

Re: SNAFU

"Thatcher was one of the last UK prime ministers with a scientific background,"

There were others?

Windows 10 to hang on for five more years with 21H2 update

Re: PR disaster

Who cares if they're abandoned and out of date? They're locked in so their feelings don't count. They'll just have to buy new kit and that means more money for Microsoft.

Re: Same old windows 10

Similar experience with previous laptop - someone in our loal history group had a query about W10 Mail. Interrupting its update completely broke W10 which wasn't really a problem as I only left it there in case I had to return the H/W as faulty and I'd taken the precaution of making restore thumb drive.

As it's now been replaced by a new laptop (got really fed up with a miserable 15" screen) I recently dug out the restore device and tried to restore W10 with thoughts of passing the laptop on. What's germane to the present discussion - it repeatedly failed with unexpected reboots until I went into BIOS and switched secure boot off.

Re: They will have to support Windows 10 for longer than five years

"Just seek the cheapest Lenovo Ideapads with AMD Athlon CPUs."

Your "cheapest" might still be too dear for many. Why should perfectly good equipment be sent to landfill?

Re: okay...

"maybe fewer projects might lead to more rapid development."

Rapid development often equates to people fixing things that weren't broken. From 4 onwards KDE fixed the idea of a hot corner to unhide the task bar so now just venturing anywhere near the edge pops it even if you were just aiming for the scroll bar on a window at the bottom of the screen...

Re: okay...

Let's just take some time to think out the multiple desktop choice thing in Linux. Simple guide:

Some folk prefer a smartphone style approach - nothing but apps on the desktop. For them Ubuntu's Unity fits the bill. No need to hop once they've settled on it.

Some folk prefer a minimalist, clear desktop approach. For them Gnome fits the bill. No need to hop once they've settled on it.

Some folk prefer a maximalist approach - anything you like on the desktop, apps and data. For them KDE fits the bill. No need to hop once they've settled on it.

Some people prefer just data files on the desktop. There doesn't seem to be anything that actually enforces this but KDE is OK - you don't have to put anything there if you don't want to. Again no need to hop once they've settled on it.

The one really disruptive event took place a few years ago when Gnome grew a hair shirt and took a really minimalist turn. Mate and Cinnamon arose from projects to resurrect the previous Gnome (Mate) and reimplement it with the new Gnome underpinnings (Cinnamon). Those and XFCE sit around somewhere in the middle. They all have their adherents, as do Enlightenment and again, once they've settled there's no need to change.

Basically, to mix metaphors, it's horses for courses and no need to change horses in mid-stream. Unless, of course, changing horses out of curiosity is something you want to do; there's no accounting for folks which probably must also explain why so many people complain bitterly about Windows but simply put up with whatever Microsoft deigns to shovel out month by month and half-year by half year.

It's choice, If you don't relish the thought that you can choose the desktop approach that most suits you, maybe you're suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

FWIW SWMBO has a mixture of files* and apps (just Seamonkey and Zoom) on KDE whilst I also use KDE but with only files* on the desktop with most used applications on the panel (task bar in Windows parlance).

* In reality files and folders.

The lights go off, broadband drops out, the TV freezes … and nobody knows why (spooky music)

Re: What is this meter thing and cut-off valve all about??

For the first 14 years of my life we also used spring water via a short run of lead pipe. Part way through that a long copper pipe was installed to bring the municipal supply so the kitchen had 3 taps, hot, cold and spring. We still used the spring water for drinking. The discharge was into the head goyt of a disused mill dam; it had probably been will filtered through the silt before making its way into the river.

BTW the problems with lead internal plumbing really arise if the water is left to sit all day in heated but unoccupied houses. That house was occupied 24 hours a day and certainly not heated.

Re: ...they try to fob you off with jargon

Use a local tradesman, preferably someone who's been recommended.

To succeed running his own business he has an incentive to do a good job to get repeat business and word of mouth recommendations. Someone working for or, more likely, subcontracted to what is essentially a ticketing operation had an incentive to close down tickets. The two are different incentives and only one works in your favour.

" I praised him to the heavens."

Probably got him fired.

Refreshing: An Office update that won't frighten the horses

Ah, but it's only space that the users were using. The important people, Microsoft , have given themselves a bit more space which is appropriate as it's their PC it's running on.

NASA fixes Hubble Space Telescope using backup power supply unit, payload computer

Fingers uncrossed.

Iffy voltage: The plague of PC builders and Hubble space telescope controllers alike

Re: Breaking the cardinal rule of IT

This one worked. Hooray!

Re: fingers and toes crossed

It's already switched itself off. It's switching it back on again that's tricky.

BOFH: But soft! What light through yonder filing cabinet breaks?

Long ago our lab acquired a greenhouse to maintain cannabis plants which were due to become court exhibits. My office mate at the time said that it was the only greenhouse in Belfast where cannabis plants were hiding the tomato plants rather than the other way around. I suppose that could all be updated nowadays aboyt the bitcoin mine being used to hide the cannabis farm or vice versa.

That's to dispose of the biological detritus.

This page has been deliberately left blank

Well, TFA says his error so it sounds like he got what he ordered. Should've gone to SpecSavers*.

* Seen at the recent Yorkshire Festival of Motorsport on the back of a half-size model of a camper van which was actually a trailer.

Google demonstrates impractical improvement in quantum error correction – but it does work

Simple solution. Let the computer generate a superposition of all possible outcomes & then pick the right answer. Or the one you like best.

All hands on Steam Deck: Fancy a handheld Linux PC that runs Windows apps, sports a custom AMD Zen APU and a touch screen?

Re: Sounds interesting...

"and asking if it could run Crysis"

How unimaginative. Much better to ask if it can run anything else.

Re: I am intrigued

Fails on two grounds: only one word and not enough letters.

"Reservation fee" is only marginal. "Advance monetary securement arrangement" would be better as it's not only longer more impressive and includes a word that's not even in the spell checker.

Try placing a pot plant directly above your CRT monitor – it really ties the desk together

Death by dry cleaning

Back in the early days of TV one of my aunts took a look in the back of her set and saw the amount of dust it had accumulated. She decided to vacuum it. I suppose it was switched off as she came to no harm. The TV, on the other hand...

Regulating facial recognition technology? It's the 'Wild West out there,' says US law boffin

Re: FRT - never ready for prime time

"That data survives a lot of fuzzying pretty well."

Until you take into account the lack of precision in the measurements and then reduce the confidence in the results to match.

Making good measurements can be a hard task, even in the lab.

How many Brits have deleted life-saving track and trace app from their phones? No idea, junior minister tells MPs

Let's not forget that it was going to be the great saviour until it wasn't ready in time after which it became a nice to have.

Re: Technology to the rescue

Now? It seems like forever.

Testing was available before the app. There was no excuse for going straight to self-isolation. The only action to take based on a positive result from a presumptive test is to apply a more definitive test. When telling people to self-isolate they should then have made provision to support those self isolating. If the latter had been done a back of the envelope check on the likely costs would have suggested requiring a test first. In fact I'm surprised the Treasury didn't demand testing on the basis of likely cost to the economy.

Re: Surprise

The requirements are what HMG said they wanted.

Re: Surprise

The problem wasn't in the development, it was in the requirements.

The likelihood of this happening was obvious before the scheme was launched. Anyone capable of thinking one step beyond "wouldn't it be a good idea" would have thought about what happens beyond a match being identified. Unfortunately that requirement seems to exclude any politician, or at least any minister and their SPADs.

A match on this basis is nothing more than an indication that a chance for an infection has occurred which is very different from saying than an actual infection has occurred. The likely number of false positives would dictate that the next step should be to organise a test to see it it actually occurred.

If the idea had been handed over to someone capable of working that out for themselves it might have been saved. Instead it was handed over to the person who was even less capable of that than the government.

Facial-recognition technology gets a smack in the chops from civil rights campaigners

The two cases are different.

The weaknesses of the ID parade are that people are trying to match a fleeting glimpse with a limited choice of people who are put in front of them. There's also the possibility of suggestion. But it's attempting one in few identifications.

The weakness of AI, at least in mass surveillance, is that it's trying to fit faces from a large database to members of a crowd. It's attempting many to many. Even if it is better than human efforts, which remains to be proven, because it's making many orders of magnitude more comparisons.

From a justice PoV the worry is that it will be believed because of the thought that it's "objective" and numbers can't be wrong despite just about everyone having had experience of a computer letting them down.

Re: Customer Service

I think there's ample evidence that marketroids are very, very bad at working out what people want. Anyone who doesn't block adverts has tails of the irrelevant or no longer relevant ads following them online. Anyone who regularly uses Amazon or other online store has a similar experience with recommendations.

It follows that if they think people want what they don't want they're likely to think they don't want what they do want and consequently products get discontinued or at least becomes more difficult to find. You may be on a mission and prepared to look where the product is now but if it's no longer stocked you're not going to find it.

You're assuming the AI does do a bit better.

"The technology doesn't put people in jail, the justice system puts people in jail, and the only way evidence can be used to support a conviction is if that evidence supports that conviction."

If he evidence is from the technology and the technology is faulty then it can indeed result in wrongful convictions.

As someone directly involved in producing evidence one of the most stressful elements in my job was the possibility of being involved in a miscarriage of justice if I got it wrong. It rather seems as if distancing from the actual business of going into court has removed that concern for those developing this sort of technology.

In the Horizon instance the system was producing evidence of crimes were there was none. In more general situations, if there is a genuine crime and someone is wrongfully convicted it also means that the real perpetrator will have got away. That's something that should worry even the keenest advocate of raising conviction rates.

Re: Customer Service

And possibly make it less likely that you'll be able to find what you really need.

Re: What's the problem?

And how do you even know if X is using face scanning?

Not that I really care that much - it's too much trouble to get into my nearest big town. Like so many they're hostile to cars and public transport from my own small village is not good. My best bet if I need to go into town is to drive to another, bigger village, park there and get their better bus service although obviously for the last year plus that's been a non-starter. But when I park there I might as well do any shopping there that's possible there or maybe some other village and for the rest there's online.

Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class

Re: Privacy is free!

For email services I'm quite content to pay for a service and domain name to go with it, not least because it's then easy to issue different addresses to different correspondents and to chop one address if it gets abused.

For syncing between devices there's home storage, in my case NextCloud on a Pi although I assume commercial domestic NAS devices would do that.

As to the net being paid for by advertising, I wonder when advertisers will start to question what value they actually get. Just how many adverts does the world need?

But is there any reason why the phone & PC can't synchronise directly?

"After that, I will need reasonable alternatives to Google Calendar and Google Docs."

I'm curious as to why people need - or think they need - such services.

Is it because they want to share data between devices?

If so do they never have two devices in the same place at the same time? If they bring devices together then they can, at least in theory, be synchronised. If they can't in practice then look to the vendors for an explanation (or, more likely, an excuse).

BT to phase out 3G in UK by 2023 for EE, Plusnet, BT Mobile subscribers

Re: sensible thing

Given that my (non-smart) water meter is in what looks like a pretty good Faraday cage I'm still puzzled about how they can read it from a range of several metres. Apart from being underground it's enclosed in a steel tube on top of which, at ground level, there's a hinged cast iron cover. Could the gap between cover lid and frame act as a slot aerial.

"We did the sensible thing"

And what was that?

It had to happen: Microsoft's cloudy Windows 365 desktops are due to land next month

The tragedy is that it'll be sold as cheaper, you don't need all those expensive staff and manglement will go for it in a big way.

Re: Umm...

I suppose the browser could be run on a Pi. The the users might discover there's a lot of other interesting stuff on there as well. Ooh, look - a word processor ... and a spreadsheet - and email ....

Microsoft does not want it called VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). "We're not shipping anything that's infrastructure. We're providing all that as a back-end service... If you were to classify it, it would be most aligned with DaaS (Desktop as a Service),

Some mighty fine hair splitting there.

Google fined €500m for not paying French publishers after using their words on web

Re: If you can't tax 'em fine 'em

If they didn't have Google distributing their click-bait they might have to write interesting articles.

Hubble, Hubble, toil and trouble: NASA pores over moth-eaten manuals ahead of switch to backup hardware

It's getting difficult to keep typing with my fingers crossed. let's hope it works OK. If it does then it's time to reflect on how much more life it might have and prioritise observations.

Imagine a world where Apple shacked up with Xerox in the '80s: How might it look today?

Re: Big credit

In the early 1980s the money was to be made by flogging renting big iron. Nothing much has changed except for the nature of the iron.

Report: 83% of UK software engineers suffer burnout, COVID-19 made it worse

Re: Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.

The date is set for the sprint to finish and higher up management expect you to meet it.

Perhaps manglement would understand a car analogy:

Your car is in for service and is to be collected at 4 pm. An hour after it goes in the garage rings up and says "We've discovered a problem with the brakes, The parts won't be here until tomorrow morning. You can have it working at midday tomorrow or collect it at four today as agreed but it won't be fit to drive. Which do you want?"

Re: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means

"If we managed R&D projects like we managed building motorways they'd be a disaster. They'd all under-deliver, late and over budget - just like software projects."

Cross Rail belongs to the same branch of engineering as motorways. Just saying.