Posts by Doctor Syntax

Biden to sign exec order calling for right-to-repair rules for farmers, maybe rest of us

It's surprising what governments can come up with when they do stuff instead of just being shrill. I wish we had some of that over here.

Jackie 'You have no authority here' Weaver: We need more 50-somethings in UK tech

Re: Promotion

The other consequence of truncated technical pay scales is that it's assumed that the reward for succeeding in IT (or whatever it might be) will be to be promoted to a managerial scale. This ignores the fact that management is - properly - a skill in it's own right and quite a rare one at that. It makes as much sense as promoting an IT specialist to chemical engineer or vice versa. This is why we have so many abysmal managers that manglement is the most apt term for them.

Age discrimination case against IBM leaks emails, docs via bad redaction

Re: Claw Back the Criminals' Compensation

"stubbornly refuse to update their skillet"

Canteen staff?

Re: I wonder how many email system old-hands were in the discard bucket?

"Keep calling the personnel department the personnel department,"

I knew someone who kept calling it "Human Remains" for more or less the same reason.

Kaspersky Password Manager's random password generator was about as random as your wall clock

Re: If you value your security get a hardware random number generator -- or two

But who certifies the certifiers?

Laptop option on the way for ortholinear keyboard hipsters in form of MNT Reform add-on

"If the keys were in a standard layout, just ortholinear then maybe"

I have a miniature one of those on a remote for an OSMC box. It's a pain although admittedly it doesn't help that numbers and punctuation are shift characters indicated by being printed in minute dark blue characters on a black background.

It sounds like somebody's PET idea.

Chinese chip designers hope to topple Arm's Cortex-A76 with XiangShan RISC-V design

"if ARM decide to launch a massive sueball"

At who and on what basis? It's not an ARM lookalike in detail and RISC as a concept has been around for a good while.

Pentagon scraps $10bn JEDI winner-takes-all cloud contract

It could give them an opportunity to carve off a couple of small bits for the losers, rather like leaving an unloved child a shilling in the will. It stops them complaining they were overlooked.

The wheels come off Formula 1's notification service as fans plied with attacker's messages

Combine the two and work out what the result would have been.

"Or perhaps the announcement that Nigel Mansell or Nelson Piquet were once again on pole."

Announce that Verstappen had been disqualified and Norris's 5 second penalty had been cancelled. That really would have caused uproar.

Sing a song of Office, a pocketful of why: ARM64 version running in a Pi

Fear of a generation coming along who've played with Linux on Pis and will prefer to keep using it on the big stuff when they get older. They need to get them while they're young.

Things that needn't be said: Don't plonk a massive Starlink dish on the hood of your car

Could have been worse...

... if Darwin had got to him before the Highway Patrol.

Arm chief hits out at 'ill-informed speculation' over proposed Nvidia buyout

Either he has a remarkably effective crystal ball to see into the future or he's just as ill-informed about what will happen then as the rest of us.

Audacity is a poster child for what can be achieved with open-source software

Nobody is kidnapping devs off the street and sending them into the salt mines.

At one extreme is a group of people, maybe starting with one individual, who have a need for a particular piece of software which isn't met by anything or, at least anything they can afford and decide to cooperate to write their own. By cooperating they can produce something better than each doing their thing. They are not being paid* - that comes from their day jobs - but nevertheless they're getting something for it: they're getting the application they wanted for themselves and are prepared to share it.

At the other extreme are developers working for hardware makers such as Intel. They're producing the sort of drivers and other support software that turns the company's products from inert tim or silicon into working systems that customers are willing to buy. I've no idea what they're paid but I assume it isn't just pizza and Coke as long as they're in the office. Some of them may also be in the first group in their spare time.

Somewhere in the middle there are businesses that happen to need something in the same way that the individuals in the first group but not as a product but as something to support their operation and see the benefit of cooperating to produce it although in other respects they may be in competition. Again, nobody's suggesting that the employees who work on it aren't being paid proper salaries.

Try exercising your favourite search engine to find who develops Linux; there are a number of annual reports. The many individual contributors (and that includes those whose affiliations aren't known but some of whom might be contributing on behalf of an employer) collectively are about the same order of magnitude as several of the corporate contributors.

* This dreadful word "compensated" really doesn't fit. It's just puffed up language in this usage. It really means something other than a salary or wage despite being used that way. Used in this way it's the typical PR-speak used to make it seem that highly paid execs are being compensated for the hardship of their distasteful labours.

" If the majority are happy to have free software (paid for, perhaps, by invasion of privacy)"

Linux. Windows.

Which is free (as in beer as well as in freedom)?

Which invades privacy?

Not for children: Audacity fans drop the f-bomb after privacy agreement changes

"They are looking into a new name for it too."

Maybe Muse should change the name of their version to "Downright Cheek".

Big Blue's big email blues signal terminal decline – unless it learns to migrate itself

"IBM wants growth"

That's pretty close to the core of the problem.

Simply running something that makes good money without too much cost should be good. It was the essence of what used to be called blue chip companies. You invested pension funds in them and they paid the pensions. It's what IBM used to be.

Now everyone wants growth. Growth can't be unlimited. Trying for perpetual growth simply results in crashes when the buffers are hit.

Go to L: A man of the cloth faces keyboard conundrum

Touch typist?

On the basis that users often consider tjis stuff to be magic you could try "Press A Key, Any Key, To Continue".

Re: The Joy of Date Routines

The man page for cal back in Unix V7 said "For England and her colonies". For modern cal it says "The assignment of Julian–Gregorian switching dates to country codes is historically naive for many countries." so the answer is "perhaps".

Re: Pedant alert

Muthry's law strikes again.

Re: Not Clerical but Judicial

I've seen something similar running a netinst. It kept refusing to use the repositories on the basis that they weren't valid yet because the clock was set was a day behind.

But what date was that in 1296?

Does not apply to medieval documents.

"third Sunday in Lent"

Not in July.

Having spent some time sorting out medieval dates when the membranes for different years had been mixed up, the variable feasts were a great source of circular reasoning. It didn't help that the Easter calculator I found online disagreed with another Easter table I found - resolved when I discovered that in some years the calculator gave me dates that didn't fall on a Sunday.

I don't remember ever using a typewriter that economical but I've certainly encountered the O/0 situation.

IT management biz Kaseya's VSA abused to infect businesses with ransomware

Re: Ghost Guns

TFA says "components". From what I recall when this issue came round previously it some components were strictly controlled by weapons legislation and some weren't and the printers were being used to make the controlled components.

As to competent machine shops making weapons, back in the troubles it was reported a few technicians working in a shop in the basement of a QUB building had been discovered making sub-machine guns - Sterling replicas IIRC.

There were also home-made mortars in use back then. I've seen a few which had been seized and some of them and some of those had failed with strips of barrel peeled back from the muzzle end rather like a banana skin. I don't know whether their operators had been standing close enough to collect their Darwin awards.

I'm curious to know what the liabilities are in these supply chain attacks. Does it fall on the vendors or does the small print include disclaimers? I suppose it's early days and there'll be a few years of litigation before it's all cleared up.

Devilish plans for your next app update ensure they never happen – unless you start praying

Re: Flying car

"if there were places to park a flying car"

Multi-story car parks. Don't even need the ramps.

"Doing stuff for the Hell of it with no real thought of the consequences… Isn’t this the very definition of disruptive design? Isn’t this the core value around which the whole modern IT industry revolves these days?"

No, the core value of the modern IT industry and motive for disruptive design is what it always was: hopes of profit.

Unfortunately the hopes are all too often fulfilled. The wages of sin are several good quarters.

Ex-boss of UK's Competition and Markets Authority asks: How can it tackle Big Tech when no one knows what the CMA is?

If he's looking for someone to blame he needs to start with a mirror.

A real go-GETTR: Former Trump aide tries to batter Twitter by ripping off its UI

Re: It is more than a Twitter clone

Perhaps they did it knowing a lawsuit would result, hoping that being a "victim" would give them street cred among conservatives to help with uptake?

In which case the better option might be to ignore them.

Re: Conservative products

It all depends on perceptions of reason and reality.

Another JEDI saga that doesn't need a sequel: Oracle petitions Supreme Court over Microsoft Pentagon contract

Re: Which one should fail?

It might be entertaining if Oracle got it and then started trying to shaft the DoD. Real tanks on their lawn!

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone

Re: Last sentence ...

Although the barbecue attendees will then consume the caesium in some quantity or other.

Now there's a thought - the caesium which might harm thehumans who consume it won't be the same as the caesium which killed the pig.

Re: If Marvel taught us anything

Encore! Encore!

Re: Last sentence ...

Oxygen dihydride is much safer.

Re: Please, Dr. Syntax

Dr. syntax, please explain why Brits use the term "maths" instead of "math". Is this in the same vein as "statistic" to "statistics"?

Because we've always used "maths". Why do you use something different?

Last sentence ...

... ouch!

We now have two major instances of wild-life successfully moving into areas which have been evacuated. It raises questions of how they are able to do this given that the radioactivity levels are reckoned to be lethal. Is this selection of species and maybe even individuals of species which are more tolerant? Are the estimates of lethal levels too low?

Probably the former, I suspect. There are parallels in that a few select plant species are capable of living on soil conaminated by lead mining, for example.

Google to bake COVID-19 vaccine passport support into Android with Passes API update

One difficulty of linking a vaccine record with a device is establishing that the subject of the record and the holder of the device when it's checked are the same person.

In my case the invitation for vaccination was sent to my mobile but from then on the chain simply runs on a set of assumptions. What's more SWMBO received her invitation from the local GP by POTS.

The systems were designed to get as many people as possible trhough the vaccination centre doors as quickly as possible in some sort of sequence. They weren't designed to have this sort of add-on.

Rocky Linux release attracts 80,000 downloads as ex-CentOS users mull choices

Wasn't Yellow Dog another of them? I think what finished off the others was that Red Hat took Centos under its wing so it had the benefit of being the "official" Red Hat alternative.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web NFT fetches $5.4m at auction while rest of us gaze upon source code for $0

I think "proving originality" might be too strong a phrase. Viewers of Fake or Fortune will be familiar with catalogues raisonnés and institutes or even individuals specialising in authenticating the works of dead artists. Sometimes a reasonable case can be made for rejecting an object by the presence of later materials (but was it later retouching?) but all too often actual proof is out of reach. In such cases it seems to come down to personal opinion and a better approach would be to say "It's not possible to be definitive but these are my observations and this is my interpretation of them" allowing for the situation that opinions will differ between experts and over time - which will happen anyway. Being upfront about this would, however, rather get in the way of such high-priced sales.

"hacking away on a NeXTcube workstation at CERN"

Perhaps the workstation would have been a better collectible item.

Battery recycling boosted by dentist-style ultrasonics, if manufacturers can cooperate

Re: This is news

Or simply regulate to require easy recycling. If the constituents are sufficiently valuable and the products economically recyclable, preferably by an industry standard process then recycling becomes a business opportunity, it will happen; if not by the manufacturers themselves, then by third parties.

Microsoft wasn't joking about the Dev Channel not enforcing hardware checks: Windows 11 pops up on Pi, mobile phone

"What I dont get is why?"

Microsoft has managed to get H/W manufacturers to ship Windows on pretty well every desktop. This is not only to their immediate advantage in terms of sales, it keeps other options more or less out of the market place except where the H/W vendor also has their own OS.

Periodically rendering existing H/W obsolete by introducing a new version, making the old one EoL and blocking the new one on a lot of old H/W does the H/W vendors a favour.

Linux, on the other hand, keeps old H/W alive a lot longer. If you were a H/W manufacturer which OS would you rather continue to install as standard?

Re: You're nuts

Not that I'd want to praise Windows but W7 Starter was shipped on my MSI nettop that came with 1Gb and had a 2 Gb limit.

As to whether it was able to do anything useful, I've no idea because for actual use I installed Linux. Apart from being used for work whenever I wanted something really portable it's also been used as to test new releases. Debian Bullsblood & Devuan Chimaera with KDE have finally found its limits - or have they? They're still in a pre-release state.

Jeff Bezos names the fourth person for the first New Shepard flight: Wally Funk

Re: About bloody time too!

I'm hoping to see Branson announce he's working on a repair mission for Hubble. That would inspire Bezos & Musk to start in competitions and one of them might get there.

Leaked Apple memo tells employees that they'll be coming into the office at least 3 days a week from September

Re: Tough Call

"I'm an old git, and I assume that with enough time, thought, tools, etc. that things could be made to change."

Git is, of course, one of the tools that enables remote development teams to work.

"our unbelievable product launches"

I wonder if, on reflection, she might have worded that differently.