Posts by Doctor Syntax

Trump stomps feet, pulls out 't-word' again over China rare earths ban

Re: We have tremendous power over them, and they have some power over us

"It would be no less traumatic for China if the US was to stop trading with them."

The US can't stop, at least not within the span of a presidency, and China knows it.

Re: We have tremendous power over them, and they have some power over us

His thin skin gives other leaders great power over him. Putin in particular has been playing him for years.

Florida prison email blunder exposes visitor contact info to inmates

No mention of phones. From TFA: "Prisoners are able to access emails via kiosks and secure tablets in the facility."

Microsoft tweaks Windows Out of Box Experience for enterprises to adjust control freakery

Re: I'll just...

Roll of carpet and quicklime?

Crypto thief earns additional prison time for assaulting witness

I suppose with a sentence of 47 years another few years seems neither here nor there although I suppose if he survives the 47 years he might start to feel a bit stupid although by that time he might be so institutionalise that he might not even want to be released.

Nvidia touts Jetson Thor kit for real-time robot reasoning

Planning ahead for the post-AI bubble market. Very wise.

Trump threatens extra tariffs, tech export bans, for any nation that dares to regulate Big Tech

“As the President of the United States, I will stand up to Countries that attack our incredible American Tech Companies.”

"Incredible". Yup, that's the word. It also describes him.

Re: Golden oppturnity

Why are you talking such perfect sense as an A/C?

Re: Yes please call the orange pedo's bluff

"Tell Trump to fuck off and that any tariffs he imposes will be matched tit for tat by the EU."

No. He is harming his own economy. There's absolutely no sensible reason for anyone else to harm theirs in retaliation. It would only allow him to point to such tariffs as justification.

Two wrongs don’t make a copyright

Re: Ad Blocking?

In such circumstances I exercise my right not to visit the site.

PS. I see from other threads that my universal downvoter is back. I was beginning to worry that something had happened to you. Maybe you've been on holiday for the last few days.

Re: Charles Dickens, a pungent critic of the law

"is it all about the interests of the publishing conglomerate?"

More or less. It's about the interests of the advertising industry of which the publishing conglomerate is a part. Their interest is in selling advertising to advertisers. It does not extend to selling the advertisers' products. It most certainly does not extend to avoiding pissing off the ads' viewers and thus harming advertisers' interests.

Re: Such as?

"If they are not noticed, they will not work."

But what is their effect when they work. They are almost universally hated by those who have them pushed onto them. This is especially true of those who use adblockers. As a result they are more likely to build negative associations with the product.

The best an advertiser can hope for is that their ad gets blocked and thus avoids that fate. The next best is that their product is something the viewer wouldn't want.

The only advertisements which can guarantee to be useful are those which provide information the viewer is looking for when they're looking.

"That was the point at which the advertisers made their collective bed"

More like when that shit in it.

"At one time ad agencies would produce TV ads that were genuinely entertaining in order to prevent viewers leaving the room to put the kettle on."

They tried. They mostly failed.

At best, however entertaining it might have been the entertainment value fades to zero and then turns negative with repetition. The advertising industry has never cottoned on to that, largely because it's not in their interest to do so. Their function is not to sell the advertisers' products, it's to sell their own, advertisements, and it's advertisers' marketing departments to whom they sell it. The marketing departments are complicit because their jobs depend on not realising it either.

Re: Modification without distribution

"Changing a copyrighted work in your possession for your own purpose and not distributing the result to others but yourself, the person who possesses the work and performs the modifications, can not be considered copyright infringement."

The logic in the decision is that the adblocker makes such a change and distributes the result to the user. I can see why the court came to that decision. As the article says, it's up to the lawmakers to fix that - if they choose to do so.

The simple option for the adblocker would be to not distribute any material from Axel Springer that contains ads. The nuclear option would be to not distribute any material from any site that contains ads.

I suppose what the defence now needs to do is go back to the lower court and argue that they're not distributing anything, the material is in the user's possession once it arrives in their PC and that they are simply the scissors with which the possessor chooses to cut a hole in the newspaper.

Re: A bad decision. Stupidity or Corruption?

"Either the justices at the Federal Court of Justice are all so old* that they have no idea how a browser works and what latitude it has in how it renders content"

Go back and read the article again, paying attention to this:

"[The legal process's] job is to test propositions against the logic and tests embedded in the legal code, and if that produces an outcome that brays and kicks like a mule, so be it."

True the article then goes on to say "It’s up to lawmakers to fix that" but until they do it's up to everyone else to comply with the decision. That included those who write browsers; it's their problem.

* Obviously you are too old to understand how the legal process works.

Malware-ridden apps made it into Google's Play Store, scored 19 million downloads

I treat such devices as being untrustworthy so don't link to la bank account and don't install banking apps.

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Re: Solution to a problem

"There’s Meta/Google who think it will help them harvest significantly more personal sellable data. It probably won’t - they already know everything and AI will dilute that with hallucinations."

Not that it will make any real difference. Those not running ad blockers will still see car ads after they've bought a car etc.

Re: Another disappointingly shallow take from the Reg

"Information retrieval using modern ML embedding models and rerankers has completely upended the search technology landscape."

And prove us wrong when we thought it had already reached the bottom some years ago.

Re: Finally! (sigh)

"Even for Britons our state pensions are, or will be, paid out of the social insurance contributions of those younger people still active in the workforce."

Remind me again what a Ponzi scheme was and how we retired folks are eventually going to outnumber the youngsters if we keep living and the reproductive ratio keeps going down.

Experience says to really fuck up you need a computer: https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/15/air_canada_chatbot_fine/

Re: Dot Dumb

In a sensible world NVIDIA would distribute that cash to the investors because they're not going to make sensible use of it and go back to being that smaller business and the investors would be pleased with their windfall and realise it was a one-off. In the real world they'll scream and shout at the management.

"And I bet many of you thought that customer service call centers would be one of the easiest things to switch to AI chatbots."

Why would anyone think that. If the users are employees they have to put up with failing. Customers can and will complain.

Re: CBA wasn't about AI

When I see that TLA I immediately translate it to something other than Commonwealth Bank of Australia. I suppose their staff and customers felt the same.

Re: The AI bubble

And to the Boards who believed them.

Re: Dot Dumb

They say that those who made money in a gold rush were those who sold shovels. NVDIA is in the shovel business.

Trump made Intel an offer it couldn't refuse

Of course if any business in any other country in the world with a 10% government was competing with a US company we'd see a 5 on the Richter scale tantrum.

CIO made a dangerous mistake and ordered his security team to implement it

Of course back then memory was expensive. I can't remember the figures but it would be far less than the 16G undernesth my fingers right now.

"We should really get more memory for the server."

Nothing.

Then the 6 monthly OS and RDBMS upgrade over the weekend (those were the days when upgrades came on CDs).

On Monday explain to IT manager what and why thrashing is and how it relates to the problems we're having now.

In such circumstances it's surprising how quickly decisions can be made and fortunately the field techs arrived pretty quickly.

Re: Had a customer recently...

They didn't simply blame the guy who died?

Re: "leave operations to us techies and focus on management"

OTOH the manager had presumably learned something by the experience. After such expensive training I can see why the company didn't fire him.

Re: Has your boss ever ordered you to break things?

And it seems that each new company behaves like the old.

Junk is the new punk: Why we're falling back in love with retro tech

"Bringing cameras back to life with new cases that are just like the originals is where Retrospekt found its core niche."

As far as I'm concerned it should be the other way around. I'll keep what he calls the body and, even more importantly, the glassware. i just want digital innards for my Leica R4.

Solid-gold nav bars? Trump plans redesign of government websites

"lagged behind in usability and aesthetics"

usually those two go in opposite directions.

BOFH: HR plays checkers, IT plays 5D chess

Re: I believe the current nomenclature is...

A lot of pees.

"IT has usually been in the basement"

The basement is occupied by the killer robot and the sewer pressure release.

Re: he's not enough of an idiot to wander too close to a full-height window that opens out ...

If something fails under ISO9000 it just shows the quality manual wasn't lax enough.

Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker

Re: Why in the world did he have to bring a ladder?

"some random janky ladder"

The very last court appearance from my forensic science days was a civil hearing from an event years earlier. Somebody had been hired to wash (no, I don't know why) a tiled roof. There was a wooden roof ladder of the sort that hooks onto the ridge that was too short to extend to the bottom of the roof. It was "extended" by being suspended on a rope from the chimney stack, and extended so part of it overhung the bottom of the roof. The guy stepped onto one of the overhanging rungs. It was a very home-made ladder the sides each had a very large knot between the same pair of rungs.

Re: Fun at the DTI

It's a big secret.

Re: Other way around

It was a good length.

Re: How did you get in here?

A few odd memories returning from that place - like the car park on the roof of the building opposite.

Re: Higher ranking officers

I think Corporal Captain was the MASH-up.

Re: It is interesting

"pictures of life 100 years ago and seeing literally EVERYONE wearing a hat. Its crazy!"

Less than 100. It was still the case when I was growing up.

OneNote for Windows 10 support clock counts down

Re: Nota bene

https://alternativeto.net/software/microsoft-onenote/

Re: Gave it a try for work, didn't like it

Write once, read never? I know the problem well.

"nobody cares about Microsoft software itself"

AFAICS that "nobody" includes Microsoft. We now what Microsoft cares about. Money. That's obtained by milking the cash-cow and the cash-cow isn't the software. I wonder who or what could it be?

AI giants call for energy grid kumbaya

Re: Train when the sun shines

The OP used the word "all". I guess there was a reason for that.

"but not at any price the tech companies would be willing to pay"

To which the answer should be simple: your problem, you fix it.

"Together, we can design for a future where AI training is not only powerful, but also power-aware"

"Together, we can design for a future where AI training is not."

I think that's an even better solution.

And why does el Reg, of its own volition, add a Re: to a title string and then complain it's too long?