* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32768 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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Word turns 40: From 'new kid on the block' to 'I can't believe it's not bloatware'

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Re: Ah the memories...

"Hey MS... look customer feedback!"

MS: You think we care?

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Somebody probably got a bonus for thinking up that wheeze.

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Let's not forget the guerrilla marketing of upgrades. Each new version could read what an older version had written but not vice versa so that needing to read a document you might receive from someone on a later version forced you to buy an upgrade and in turn force upgrades onto anyone on an older version to whom you might then send a document.

That game stopped when a requirement for standardisation was forced on Microsoft.

What do do next?

Subscriptions, of course.

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It could be. It could also be argued that it started life on Xenix.

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Re: FreeOffice

"It would be more appropriate to talk about WordStar, WordPerfect, pfs:Write, or IBM's DisplayWrite. (Other ancient discontinued word processors are also unavailable.)"

Can I throw SmartWare into the list. An office suite for DOS including word processing.

Canada goosed as attackers shutter hospitals and China deepfakes its politicians

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Headmaster

Re: "...trolls have moved into pretty convincing deepfake... "

You'll find the usage embedded in those online bastions of US language, the University of Cambridge dictionary, the Collins English dictionary, and no doubt, if I could bother walking across the room for my 1950ish Pocket Oxford, in there too.

And then in the Oxford edition of Fowler, the introduction quotes a 1911 letter from Fowler to his publishers:

"Not but what we may be of some use to the foreigner who knows English pretty well"

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

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Re: Easy to work out costs.

"You've missed out the bit about where Spain did no cost-benefit analysis (FWIW) on the programme before starting, and after the programme finished were unable to supply EU authorities with any information about how much the programme had cost."

Give or take the EU bit that sounds much like any UK govt I can recall.

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Re: No corruption here.

EDF might stop calling at 8am every Saturday trying to persuade me to fit a smart meter

That's easy to deal with:

"You're calling me because I'm an EDF customer?"

"Yes"

So if I cease to be an EDF customer you won't call me?"

"No"

"That can be arranged."

Pro-Russia group exploits Roundcube zero-day in attacks on European government emails

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"The exploit started with a convincing-looking phishing email that aimed to spoof the Microsoft Outlook team."

It depends on how you parse this. Any email purporting to be from the Microsoft Outlook team convincingly looks like phishing and should be treated as such.

AWS says it wants in on the European sovereign cloud game

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Re: Contradictory

The sensible route would be franchising at arm's length to an EU owned, managed and staffed operation. I'm sure there are a few lawyers where they live would know about setting up franchises.

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Re: Why Amazon??

AWS, Azure & Google cloud all have other businesses which can underpin the investment and, perhaps more crucially, brand names that even the potential customer board members can recognise.

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"this will be physically and logically separate from existing AWS Regions"

What about legally, taking into consideration the reach of the US CLOUD Act?

RISC-V champ SiFive confirms it's laying off 1 in 5 workers

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As I said in response to another report the other day, there's the staffing for their closest competitor, who knows their strengths and weaknesses and has all the contacts to hit the ground running.

Brits sign Axiom Space deal for human spaceflight in name of science

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What sponsors?

Who's going to sign up before the next election so HMG can wave the flag?

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AFAICS this is an agreement for a flight to be sponsored by commercial partners who are not only as yet unannounced but might not even have volunteered and with no announced objectives to be achieved in orbit. What is the point apart from PR the cost of which might very likely fall on UK taxpayers?

Former IBM Canada worker wins six-figure payout for wrongful dismissal

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That's how you get even.

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Don't get mad, get even.

It's 2023, so Lenovo made a bendy smartphone concept all about hybrid cloud AI

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What I'd really like to see use a foldable screen; a full size laptop - e.g. the size of a 17.5" with a screen folding out to a full size monitor of about 35".

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Re: And here it is clinging to a wrist.

"looking at their wrist to check the time"

You can do that! Who knew?

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"has a foundational model uniquely personalized to the user [and] also has a knowledge base that adapts to patterns and usage with natural voice or text interaction capabilities."

Translation : "Slurp"

UK to crack down on imported Chinese optical fiber cables

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"So the EU may previously have protected the French fibre producers at the expense of the UK."

How?

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It is if you're a company producing optical fibre in the UK.

Google Cloud misses revenue estimates – and it's your fault, wanting smaller bills

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Re: How to save money?

Even better - they may even arrive marked "Paid"

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If Google can save cost by extending server life then maybe potential customers can do the same with their own servers and not even move to the cloud Google's.

Red light for robotaxis as California suspends Cruise's license to self-drive

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"cars with a safety driver behind the wheel can still operate"

Yes, the self-driving cars that need a safety driver are supposed to be safer than human drivers.

It is 20 years since the last commercial flight of Concorde

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Re: Twice!

"It passed over several times a day for a while one summer, early 70's I suppose."

We had a few sonic booms in Belfast when they were flying along the Irish Sea. Later sitting in the queue for a runway at Heathrow and there was one several places in front of us taking off. Our own pilot over the PA was quite enthusiastic about it. My flight, of course was just a hop back to Belfast.

Dropbox drops bucks to ditch digs in long-term WFH model

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Re: Green

Long commutes arer not sustainable. CHange will have to come. The only question is who's leading and who's a laggard?

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Re: C suite descisions based on retirement income value

I don't think we could collect that much - we might have to go for a slightly used one.

Windows 11: The number you have dialed has been disconnected

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Re: Look a little deeper

"So... how do you rollback failed updates with Linux?"

I'll tell you when that happens. Given that it hasn't happened to me in my long experience, don't hold your breath.

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"but it's very difficult to find a Linux desktop GUI that Just Works"

Oddly enough, IME the difficulty of a desktop that Just Works lies with Windows.

You need to realise that there are several Linux distros that are good for production - they get name-checked here often enough.

There are a lot of others which, I think, exist for various reason (such as Neon which exists to showcase the current KDE desktop) of because someone has there own idea of what an OS should be with Linux providing a good base on which to do that and the GPL providing encouragement. Unless one of these latter chimes with your own idea of what an OS should be like you can ignore them.

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Re: So have we reached, forty years on...

"buy a new one every 10 years or so when the old one breaks"

Only to discover that the price has gone up and the build quality cheaper and nastier.

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Re: Look a little deeper

"But, they're already living in a hell of their own making where they need the validation of others to reassure them that their choice is the correct one."

Validation?

Let me tell you a little story. Some years ago I bought an ex-display W10 laptop, created a Windows reinstall image on a USB* stick and blew it away to install Linux. After a few years I decided I really needed a bigger screen so bought a new laptop. As the old Linux installation was now redundant I decided to reinstall W10 & then add Linux as dual boot.

A number of attempts at reinstalling failed. Eventually I discovered it would work if I switched off secure boot. Not very impressive given that it's MS who is so in favour of this. Ho hum.

The reinstalled image would complain about a mis-matched dll for OneDrive or words to that effect. No amount of updating cleared it. Not that I wanted OneDirve, it was just an annoying pop-up. In the meantime I marvelled at Windows Updates: how could it be so slow? Why did it trip over its own feet so often? Why did it need so many reboots? And why did it seem to want to keep installing what appeared to be the same update for an Intel display driver? Eventually, BTW, the OneDrive message went away. Nevertheless it gave the impression of being a lumbering system written by a corporation that doesn't understand the difference between Just Works** and Only Just Works***. I am amazed that anyone thinks that this crud is a viable operating system to do real work.

I have to admit that a few updates did go smoothly. But I made a post on the thread referring to this month's Patch Tuesday saying I'd checked the speed for a fairly large batch of Devuan updates against that of W10. I failed to do that. The Devuan went smoothly, of course, although unusually it said "update at your inconvenience", not just because of a new kernel but also because of a new daemon. This is unusual because most services are simply stopped and restarted if there's a new version of the daemon but the DBus daemon obviously needs starting before a lot of other. No problem. But the reason I failed is because the W10 update has completely crapped itself. I've had it run long disk-checks and all manner of other stuff but it's still firmly wedged with an error code that's not the one that's widely cited. I've tried the RestoreHealth trick to no avail so it looks like a complete reset is going to be needed.

So validation? I need no validation to tell me why I run Linux. I have a direct comparison between that, a completely reliable OS, and a hell of Microsoft's making.

* If the H/W proves faulty it would be preferable to take it back to the shop running an OS the shop understands - providing it's not so faulty the OS is invisible.

** Debian or, these days, Devuan

*** Windows 10 - some of the time.

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Re: 7 years of Android

"But they realised that people want a higher number because then it feels like their new thing is better than the old thing even if its not."

With experience comes the expectation that unless the old thing is a real lemon it will be worse.

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Re: Number of distributions

They have been trained by commercial offerings to think that a different interface means a different product.

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Re: Tim Cook's punishment?

"Gotten" was forgotten?

However "it has become worse" is not clumsy sounding and does roll off the tongue smoothly.

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"Ten ESSENTIAL new features you NEED to know"

Try Linux Today. Links to all manner of listicles and How to install X on Y

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I'm sure W12 will arrive and it will have a big new feature: subscription only.

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Re: Change and the obsession with the new…

It is indeed. So is my handwriting. Both are alien.

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"let's call it...the Trabant"

In any colour providing it's black.

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Re: It's not hard

There might be a difference between yourself & MS as to what counts as "modest".

It is 2023 and Excel's reign of date terror might finally be at an end

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Interesting. The linked blog kicks off "We have consistently heard from customers over the years".

They're consistently heard for years but only just got round to listening.

Martin Goetz, recipient of the first software patent, logs off at 93

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Why would copyright not be equally effective? Apart, of course, from the fact that with copyright you have to go to the trouble of actually writing an implementation.

That script I wrote three years ago is now doing what? How many times?

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Re: Software RAID

By way of contrast a client of mine had all the disks (a lot because back then disk sizes were small) mirrored at the controller and then mirrored the mirrored pairs in S/W. 4 physical drives for each logical drive.

We didn't have disk failures but the tape drive for the overnight backups need changing at least a couple of times while I was on that gig.

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Re: On the flip side

"When I'm retired and I have spare time"

There's a big surprise in store for you when you retire.

Admin behind E-Root stolen creds souk extradited to US

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So he was in the UK? Was he running this from here? For how long? How long had TPTB been aware of his presence here before arresting him?

Corner cutting of nuclear proportions as duo admit to falsifying safety tests 29 times

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Re: Errrr

I suppose they want to deter others from attempting in case they should also succeed.

Bad Vibrations: Music publishers sue Anthropic AI for using copyrighted lyrics

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"That principle does not fall away simply because a company adorns its infringement with the words 'AI.'"

Almost poetry in its own right.

Microsoft CEO Nadella's compensation drops... to $48M

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How about payment by results: $4m for each botch-free Patch Tuesday?

Look ma, no fans: Mini PC boasts slimline solid-state active cooling system

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Flanders & Swan said it first

"tiny membranes that vibrate at ultrasonic frequency"

"The human ear can't here as high as that/But you've got to please the passing bat"

Biotech exec sentenced to eight years for COVID-19 testing finger-stick fraud

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Re: You would have thought there would be some regulatory oversight

"Why did insurance companies accept claims of the allergy-COVID bundles if they were that much more expensive?"

Higher premiums?

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