Posts by Doctor Syntax

Big Blue's quantum rainmaker jumps to room-temp diamond quantum accelerator company

"Unless your quantum computer is normalised and does not require magic infrastructure you are limited,"

I thought magical infrastructure was the essential requirement.

Still 5 years away.

Re: Diamonds simultaneously are/are not a girls best friend

It'll work and simultaneously not work. You'll only know if it worked if you got the right answer.

The magic TUPE roundabout: Council, Wipro, Northgate all deny employing Unix admins in outsourcing muddle

Re: "Assuming they and only they have the relevant root passwords"

I quote one of Nixon's henchmen "When you have them by the balls their hearts and minds will follow".

Assuming they and only they have the relevant root passwords I don't see the problem lasting longer than it takes for any work to need to be done. Then the council and Northgate can squabble between themselves as to who contracts the work out to their company.

UK.gov is launching an anti-Facebook encryption push. Don't think of the children: Think of the nuances and edge cases instead

Quite right. I missed out "banning". Sorry.

I have no direct involvement with Facebook. Nevertheless before I give anyone, official or otherwise, extolling E2EE a hearing I want to see them publish the following:

Their name and address.

Their online banking credentials.

Any additional ecommerce credentials they may have.

If they think think those are things that must be kept hidden then they need to realise that I have similar things that need to be kept hidden and that's what E2EE is about.

'This is the new normal,' Microsoft tells US workers: Work from home until further notice

Re: Wow.

And I certainly don't want anyone in the medical profession treating me if they've indicated a wilful ignorance of standard medical procedures.

"By European standards the Dem party would still be regarded as Centre Right."

Only centre?

One thing that worries me is the UK govt having to make vaccination mandatory in health workers. Excepting those with medical conditions I'd have thought that refusal to be vaccinated would be an indicator of professional incompetence.

Vaccine dreams: A trip to Oxford to see a biscuit tin, some bed pans and ChAdOx1 nCov-19

Re: Journalistic sarcasm

"shock, anxiety and visitors"

Not forgetting treating the condition of it being a couple of hours since the last one.

Sweet vernal grass - largely responsible for the small of new-mown hay.

You walk in with a plan. You leave with GPS-tracking Nordic hiking poles. The same old story, eh?

I remember one time there were a lot of compressed air tools which seemed to be quite slow to sell out. No compressors.

Re: Embarrassing Photos

Monkey? Richard Whitely would have seen your monkey and a still photographer and raised you a ferret on TV.

Council culture: Software test leads to absurd local planning SNAFU

Re: my reading was that this is some jobsworth...

"told anyone querying it to take them to court if they want."

With a very good chance of winning and costs very likely being awarded against the council in any case.

Re: my reading was that this is some jobsworth...

It's not an erroneous CC, it's a legally binding notice. The fact that it's possible to send out such a notice in this way doesn't make it any less legally binding. If you look at the PDFs they have a facsimile of s signature on them.

It would be well for those permitting their signature to to be used in this way to consider the safeguards they require - perhaps documents should require their personal release. (I've worked on a system that not only send out such "signed" documents. I was a sub contractor to the sub contractor to one of the usual suspects to whom the entire operation had been contracted out. OTOH I don't think the "signed" documents in this case carried the same legal weight.)

Re: Jeez.

They're official notices giving or withholding permission to do things which have large amounts of money depending on them. So much so that there are frequent casual allegations of corruption surrounding them - any thread dealing with local govt. here is apt to include a few - and I have memories of at leas one scandal that became national news. This is serious stuff. It's not somebody ordering a gross of boxes of paperclips instead of a box of a gross.

Re: This seems like a real legal loophole

The PDFs in the article are of notices sent to the applicants with the relevant official's signature on them. From the point of view of the recipient of an apparently official notice it should be assumed that it won't be rescinded as a mistake at some future date. The incorporation of nonsense in an official notice isn't a reliable indicator that it wasn't meant.

Re: This seems like a real legal loophole

"Judicial review seems like a slightly oversize hammer"

What alternative do you suggest, bearing in mind that the alternative has to work in circumstances where a reversal could meet legal challenges from interested parties?

Re: This seems like a real legal loophole

Anyone automating a legal decision-making process needs to consider that getting the design wrong can have legal consequences.

Re: Security

It still doesn't prevent you having a manual process around it. Click on the relevant fields without completing the process, collect P45. I take your point from earlier that it's a piece of S/W with problems but that just makes manual authorisation more necessary.

It would appear that in this case someone has been given access without any warning as to the risks or without being told what, if anything, is the authorisation process,

Re: Not absolutely no means.

We hadn a similar situation. I used to live not far away from Late Bronze Age/Iron Age hill fort, later converted to a Normal motte and bailey castle. It had an Arts and Crafts period stone-built pub built inside it which was a nice enough building although it would almost certainly never have had planning permission. I'm not sure if it was listed with the rest of the site although I think it would have been worth it.

The owners got permission to extend the pub which required a certain amount of demolition. They demolished more than the permission allowed and were starting on a larger extension than allowed (which in turn would have broken extra ground within the scheduled monument). I think they would have been made to reinstate the excess demolition in the original materials. However they had, shall we say, failed to retain the (no doubt quite valuable stone on site. Oddly enough nobody knew where it had gone. So as they couldn't restore it they were ordered to demolish the remainder and grass over the site.

I believe they keep applying to rebuild. I'm not sure what the situation is now but occasionally there are murmurings of sympathy for them - frankly if it had been my decision they wouldn't have got the original extension position and I think the outcome is exactly right to set an example to anyone else who decides to mess with scheduled monuments.

"These errors will have to be rectified"

Which is nonsense. As the article points out, if they're acted on first there'll be no means to reverse them.

If the council has some means of imposing a hold whilst the JR takes place then there'll likely be civil action torecover the cost of the delay and £8k might only be the advance payment.

Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you

Re: me too

The WiFi trap is one that designers have worked on to improve over the years.

Removing the LED to indicate whether it's on or off has been one improvement. The move onto a function key was a master stroke. They could label the key with some nonsensical icon or go a step further and label it with something apparently irrelevant - of course an icon of an aeroplane means WiFi. And does the Fn key enable the actual Fn or the hardware functions.

Industrial design has contributed a lot to laptop ease of use over the years.

"he spared the CEO's blushes by not itemising what exactly the issue was."

Fixing problem $1

Diagnosing problem $$$$$

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/627/

Australia rules Facebook page operators are legally liable for user comments under posts

Re: Out of curiosity ...

We thank you for your detailed analysis.

Re: Out of curiosity ...

I don't know about the justices concerned but I'm sure all the Oz politicians will have. Expect legislation soon although, as Gareth says, it'll be left laid around as a common law precedent to be quoted elsewhere.

We're going deeper underground: New digital project to map UK's sub-surface 'assets'

Re: Prior art

"actually do anything to confirm/verify/correct the data"

digging it up seems to be the only sure way to do that.

"avoiding accidental asset strikes, improving the efficiency of works and better data sharing."

That means they need better data to share. Much better data.

Talent shortage? Maybe it's your automated hiring system, lack of investment in training

Re: Why is there a shortasge of candidates?

"This is likely not the skill set the employer most needs."

It's the one the employer deserves.

Re: An alternative approach:

The operative word is "do", not "write".

It's designed to: a) avoid the pre-filtering by some Turing failure; b) avoid opening all the envelopes unless the very last one is that of the only viable candidate; c) be fair in that none of the applications are checked before closing so someone who takes time over their application isn't disadvantaged; d) try to cut down on the number of applications by warning off the bull-shitters (although this might fail for Dunning-Krugger reasons); e) lean towards actual experience rather than paper qualifications and f) be upfront about the whole process.

An alternative approach:

"Here's the job description. If you think you can do it tell us why. Applications close on $DATE and none will be considered before then.

"Applications will be reviewed by people who know what they're talking about, not HR, and who can spot BS a mile away. If there are too many to go through them all we'll pull out a sample at random until we get the sort of person we're looking for.

"You might be a good fit but someone who's good enough might get considered first and offered the job. It's a matter of chance but we think it's at least as fair as drawing up a short-list by looking for reasons to exclude you. If you don't like it, don't apply. If you do apply and you're the person we need, good luck."

I wonder if anyone would have the wit to do that.

Re: Cr4p software

Cut out the middlemen. Don't accept CVs from pimps agencies. That's one layer gone. The other is HR of course.

A developer built an AI chatbot using GPT-3 that helped a man speak again to his late fiancée. OpenAI shut it down

Re: OpenAI declined to comment.

Getting rid of the difficult bit in the title.

Cloud...

... yes, you know the rest.

Intel's Mobileye unveils first 'production-grade fully electric self-driving vehicle,' partners with Sixt for Munich launch

In fact the nature of car use is that the bulk of demand will be during the morning and evening rush hours. It won't be a demand that will be cheap to meet. The reality will be where the cost of rush-hour journeys balance out against the cost of owning a private vehicle.

The bright colour will help as a safety measure. Even so I won't be changing my plans re going to Munich. I haven't any.

Open-source software starts with developers, but there are other important contributors, too. Who exactly? Good question

Some of us don't "get" Windows.

A Linux distro isn't a project as such, it's a collection of projects. But in terms of building a user community each one needs to understand what its particular user base requires. I've made a similar point in the past in relation to deskoip managers - an app-based manager such as Unity is useless to a user whose requirements are document based.

One thing I've never been able to understand is the number of distros claiming to be very lightweight. Is the hair shirt community really that big?

A big omission: users.

If a project can't garner users it's pointless.

Miscreants fling booby-trapped Office files at victims, no patch yet, says Microsoft

Re: ActiveX still around?

When you've been using Unix and Linux for so long it comes as a shock to be reminded that it ever existed, let alone to discover that it still exists.

Re: "a Microsoft Office document that hosts the browser rendering engine"

Because they can.

All too often the explanation for all manner of stupidity.

Convenience beats security every time. Right up until the security fail turns out to be insurmountably inconvenient.

And by asking for a password su and sudo act as a slight reminder that this is serious stuff. Somewhat diluted, of course, by the Ubuntu approach of the sudo password being your own instead of root's.

Guntrader breach perp: I don't think it's a crime to dump 111k people's details online in Google Earth format

Re: Amazing target miss from "Ernie"

I'm not sure about your comments on sheep. Although they haven't learned to understand the plain (very plain) English instructions shouted at them from his quad bike by my neighbour they can be a lot more cunning than you realise.

Re: Quick Straw Poll...?

"Did I miss anything?"

Yes, using Street\View is cheaper than sending out your own photographer for a pic of where it happened..

HashiCorp runs low on staff, calls a halt to Terraform pull requests

Re: Which one is it?

It sounds as if both are companies who adopted OSS as model because it was trendy without working out in advance that it wasn't going to fit their needs.

British data watchdog brings cookies to G7 meeting – pop-up consent requests, not the delicious baked treats

Re: Realism please

And popups for anything else should be a warning to go elsewhere. What's needed is a public educated to realise that these aren't something mandated by the EU to trip them up, they're an indication that the website isn't to be trusted.

UK gov blocks the acquisition of Welsh graphene fiddler Perpetuus Group over national security concerns

It's almost as if HMG has discovered supply chain risk.

When the bits hit the fan: What to do when ransomware strikes

Re: Opportunity

Not cheap?

Back in the day small businesses quite frequently ran on Informix/SCO/Intel tower server combinations. It was cost effective enough for them then.

I've no idea what the cost comparisons would be with Windows stuff today but in any case you could take the SCO out of that and replace by Linux or BSD You could take Informix out and replace by PostGres or MySQL. Or your could replace them by Microsoft products, only the server remains constant. Which is cheapest?

Re: Opportunity

"But a lot of stuff -- likely including mission critical software isn't available for Unix"

Let's look at that one. Storing the day-to-day data is fairly mission critical. The sort of stuff for which you use an RDBMS. There have always been Unix packages for that. Microsoft started development of SQL Servier from one of those, Sybase.

Perhaps a good start would be to use one of those for the main business database(es) and have an isolated system to test the backups, just in case.

Why we abandoned open source: LiveCode CEO on retreat despite successful kickstarter

And I wonder if there's punctuation hiding there in plain sight. How are statements delimited? I suspect that EOL has a function in the language.

If so then either

1. They can't write multiple statements on one line

2. They can't write statements that run onto the next line unless there's a way of escaping the new lines in which case

3. They now have to learn about escape characters, a more complicated concept, and

4. They also have to learn about statement delimiters which is more complicated because

5. They're hidden in plain sight.

I suppose if you're encountered programming earlier in your schooling you might have added Logo to that list.