Posts by Doctor Syntax

Microsoft signs settlement with US Justice Dept over 'immigration-related discrimination' claims

Much as it annoys me to support MS in anything later than FORTRAN for CP/M it seems to me that, given the government policy at the time this would have been a reasonable defensive strategy.

Virgin Media fined £50,000 after spamming 451,000 who didn't want marketing emails

Re: Wow!

I think the rate for marketing bumf - phone or email - should be £1 as a fee paid/credited to each recipient or £2 for opted out/TPS. Enough to make it financially infeasible. Any fines to go on top of that.

2033 is doomsday for 2G and 3G in the UK

Re: 4G, 5G I'll take fibre

Somebody made similar enquiries here a good while ago. I told him it follows the same route as the water and sewer underground: under the hedge, under the orchard, under the greenhouse which has a concrete base, under the concrete drive, under the concrete laid paving, through the concrete foundations and into a crawl space under a concrete floor. It's why I'm not keen on FTTP seeing as FTTC is Quite Good Enough. He left muttering to himself.

Not enough votes unless they're marginal constituencies.

Switching off 2G and 3G will enable operators to transition fully to more energy efficient and high capacity networks finally force customers with near-indestructible old phones onto a regular and profitable upgrade cycle.

Microsoft gives Notepad a minimalist makeover to match Windows 11 style

Re: Real Ctrl-Z freaks

Those were the days.... when reading a file meant you had to actually know how things worked. getting out of the drawer in the filing cabinet.

Re: FFS. How slapdash can Microsoft get? It's Notepad one of the simplest Apps ever written.

If it's a back-lit screen the back-light will be working just as hard but more of it gets blotted out.

NASA installs a new and improved algorithm to better track near-Earth asteroids

Re: software used to protect humanity

If it's wrong debugging is the least of your problems.

Intel updates mysterious 'software-defined silicon' code in the Linux kernel

If this is against future H/W how can it be satisfactorily tested now? If they need it for internal development purposes then they can build their own kernel with it in.

It's primed and full of fuel, the James Webb Space Telescope is ready to be packed up prior to launch

Re: New! Improved! oxidiser!

A lovely description of a monopropellant: "a molecule with one reducing (fuel) end and one oxidizing end, separated by a pair of firmly crossed fingers,"

Re: I am feeling two conflicting emotions

Please stand right over there. No, further that that. Right back some more.

Thought NHS Digital's wind-down meant it would stop writing cheques? Silly you. It's gone on an IT buying spree

Re: IT helps administrate treatments

I might have excused her without the absolutely and only one of either needs or should. As the quote stands, however, it seems that her focus is in the administering rather than the medicine. Admittedly administration is her role but St Edward's Hospital looms rather large.

Even worse, lurking in the background is the suspicion that "digital" isn't about administration but about data fetishism or maybe about bypassing those medics with on-line self-service diagnosis.

"Digital needs to be – should be – absolutely at the heart of everything we do in the NHS,"

That's put me right. I was thinking medicine needs to be - should be - absolutely at the heart of everything they do in the NHS. You learn something new every day.

Tech Bro CEO lays off 900 people in Zoom call and makes himself the victim

Re: staying in contracting from now on.

"You still have to deal with wankers in management, what's the advantage?"

Not to anything like the same extent. If you're freelance and doing it right you'll be managing company finances to have a reserve. It's much harder to build up a FY fund as a permie - I know, I've been there. That reserve means that if need be you can walk bring the future forward a little quicker.

Re: Get ready for the permies to attack you though.

Could you explain that comment a little further. I assume from it that you're not freelance. In that case why do you stay on as a permanent employee instead of going freelance yourself?

Is there actually some difference between the two ways of working which means you're not able to do so? If so might that not account for the difference between rates?

And when you were looking at the difference did you take into account that the amount in your pay packet is net of employee and employer taxes whilst those remain to be paid from the freelancer's fee?

This House believes: A unified, agnostic software environment can be achieved

"How long will we keep reinventing software wheels?"

That's an easy one. As long as there's good money to be made repackaging old stuff by wrapping it in new jargon.

The Omicron dilemma: Google goes first on delaying office work

Re: On-again-off-again

"..., expectant mothers etc.

Many people in those groups can now be vaccinated."

The message to expectant mothers seems to be that they can and should get vaccinated. That keeps getting reinforced from mothers who put it off because they were pregnant got infected and came out of their induced coma to find they'd had a caesarean some time ago and are only now being reunited with their child. No such reports from those who didn't survive of course.

I suppose working in your home office is a bit like being in business in your own right in that you can make choices like that. Not in as many things but in some. If you prefer more expensive coffee then you can use some of the money you saved on commuting to buy it.

Personally, I'll keep to tea. Coffee's far too complicated with pods, flat whites & goodness knows what else.

Re: @Doctor Syntax

OK, tell me when and where the next one's coming from.

Would you prefer a different idiom such as "out of the blue"?

Re: Safely reopen?

We have a great many viruses that don't pose great problems, that are "stable". Why?

Did the more dangerous ones that emerged in the past die out because, in a time when they emerged fast long distance mass travel didn't exist so they burned through too much of the community where they emerged?

Or did they mutate to a state where they could live with new hosts? Remember, for instance, that in their natural hosts they are "stable" whatever that might mean.

I think that a major problem now is that we propagate viruses faster than they can evolve to adapt to us as a host. Note that - we propagate them, we don't simply allow them to propagate.

Re: Safely reopen?

"Actually, people do respond rather well to their own view of risk."

And some have irrational views of it while others have irrational responses.

Re: Safely reopen?

"It's not rocket science."

No it isn't. It's not as easy as that.

Undoubtedly fast mass international and intercontinental travel have enables diseases to spread fast than they have in the past. And undoubtedly many diseases in the past burned out completely by killing off the isolated population in which they emerged in sufficient numbers to stop propagation. But the reality is that you'll always be chasing. You don't catch all contacts with testing because putting together the tests let alone the number of test kits in time. On the whole the medical technology came on stream pretty well as fast as it could. But epidemiology, for instance, needs to get data from how the actual disease works - prior to that they only have general-purpose models based on different pathogens. Treatments need to be developed and tested. Test kits need to be developed and tested.

"We will just have to learn to live with it at some point"

I suppose it depends on what the "living with it" entails. If it means learning to live with the notion that you might feel a bit ill and a few hours later the last thing you see is someone putting you into a medically induced coma that might not be an acceptable lesson.

If an alternative is that the cities we have developed over the last century and a half or so and particularly over the post WWII period are not a sustainable way of living then it might just have done us a favour.

We should also learn the lesson that this is not the only disease to come out of nowhere, it isn't the first, it won't be the last. We need to learn the lessons of how to minimise the impact of that. How saving face by denying it exists for a few weeks is a bad idea. How disinformation about treatments is a bad idea. How resisting communal action to slow spread is a bad idea. And how jetting around the world so readily is also a bad idea.

"the muscle memory of being in the office"

Do they keep bumping into the walls when they forget? Or just the glass ceilings?

The dark equation of harm versus good means blockchain’s had its day

Re: Something will come of it one day

Answer: that it will have a use.

Re: Something will come of it one day

"What tends to happen is that a new tech appears, it takes time to find a use."

Spot the unstated, unproven assumption.

Re: Aha!

+cloud +AI

Ah, the great this therefore that fallacy.

Let's think of other ideas: I'll start off.

People were wrong to laugh at Bill Gates explaining the internet therefore they're wrong to laugh at using crystals to cure diseases.

Your turn.

Re: Lack of comprehension and imagination ...

"The proof-of-work part is only required if (a) it's a store of value in itself, i.e. it intrinsically represents money; and (b) the parties want to bypass all the institutions which traditionally control money, to ensure that assets cannot be frozen or confiscated."

And it's only feasible if the price of the work is greater than the value that's placed on it. The fact that the price is x doesn't mean that people are prepared to value it at x/y where y <=1.

Re: Lack of comprehension and imagination ...

It should start earning its keep when we have boundless fusion energy. Until then we're best off without it.

Sun sets: Oracle to close Scotland's Linlithgow datacentre

Re: Why not continue to use it as a cloud node?

Maybe some of their customers take into account such things as data sovereignty so having their data relocated elsewhere would be an issue. But are their customers so discriminating?

Miscreants make off with $150m of digital assets in BitMart security breach

At some point all the cryptocurrency is going to end up in the hands of the thieves so all they'll be able to do is steal from each other, assuming that's not the case already.

MySQL a 'pretty poor database' says departing Oracle engineer

Re: There is no reason not to choose Postgres

"it's amazing how databases get misused"

Even Excel?

China's Yutu rover spots 'mysterious hut' on far side of the Moon

A very large salt crystal. Waiting for a delivery of vinegar and spuds.

It actually is a convenience.

Feds charge two men with claiming ownership of others' songs to steal YouTube royalty payments

Re: A lot of time

You have a problem.

Re: A lot of time

Maximum sentences and actual sentences are two different things. However the actual property concerned is the $20m proceeds of the fraud. If that's more frivolous than the pensioner's cat food allowance I don't want ot go anywhere near the cat.

Re: YouTube copyright enforcement: extra judicial and surely illegal?

From the report it seems to be biased in favour of alleged copyright owners. What seems to be missing, both by YouTube and AR, whoever they might be, is an effective means of de determining actual copyright holders.

NixOS and the changing face of Linux operating systems

Re: The right to fix things oneself doesn't necessarily accord the ability

"as long as the wetware of the installer understands the needs of the user"

Yes. And that's what the one-size-fits-all preordained enterprise or distributor build fails on.

As long as you like.

Re: A more easily understandabe file tree? Yes, please!

If Fred's installer puts it somewhere where you can't find it, doesn't document it and.or doesn't add it to the menu then the problem is entirely down to Fred's installer. Whoever put that together would probably do the same thing whatever the OS and file system and percussive education would be appropriate.

Re: @Charles 9 - rm -rf /*

It's the people who aren't just playing you need to worry about.

Prisons transcribe private phone calls with inmates using speech-to-text AI

Will AI be able to decode "Feed the cat from the 3rd tin from the left" and "Remind Uncle Joe his friends expect him to join them at the supermarket on Friday"?

Not only was the UK Financial Ombudsman Service's Workday system months late, 38 IT workers' jobs are at risk

"Workday and our implementation partner IBM are helping us to rethink parts of our business and how it operates,"

Somebody should have told her she's not in a business, she's operating a government service. It is - or should be - s different mindset.

Utility biz Delta-Montrose Electric Association loses billing capability and two decades of records after cyber attack

Re: we lost the majority of our historical data for the last 20-25 years.

It probably means the forensic analysis revealed they haven't had a tape drive capable of reading the old data since the last but one hardware refresh.

I hope they've the capacitance to sort it out without having to charge too much.

What will life in orbit look like after the ISS? NASA hands out new space station contracts

Re: Recycle

If not how are they going to get it back down safely or boost it well out of the way? Or are they going to let the Russians deal with it with their new orbiting shredder?

Dev loses copyright appeal over forensic software after judges rule suite was owned by his employer

Re: From memory...

I'm sure there have been many products and services based on ideas gained in employment, proposed to the employer, turned down and then developed privately by the employee at the employee's own expense. What rights should the employer be able to claim in that?

Re: From memory...

"What kind of IP a worker stamping washers create?"

None. Washer makers make washers, IP makers make IP. Clear, now?

American diplomats' iPhones reportedly compromised by NSO Group intrusion software

It seems the US govt need to make up their minds as to whether mobile phones are too secure or too insecure. It's no good complaining one thing on one occasion and the other on another: they're the same phones.