Posts by Doctor Syntax

Windows 10 to hang on for five more years with 21H2 update

Re: okay...

Let's just take some time to think out the multiple desktop choice thing in Linux. Simple guide:

Some folk prefer a smartphone style approach - nothing but apps on the desktop. For them Ubuntu's Unity fits the bill. No need to hop once they've settled on it.

Some folk prefer a minimalist, clear desktop approach. For them Gnome fits the bill. No need to hop once they've settled on it.

Some folk prefer a maximalist approach - anything you like on the desktop, apps and data. For them KDE fits the bill. No need to hop once they've settled on it.

Some people prefer just data files on the desktop. There doesn't seem to be anything that actually enforces this but KDE is OK - you don't have to put anything there if you don't want to. Again no need to hop once they've settled on it.

The one really disruptive event took place a few years ago when Gnome grew a hair shirt and took a really minimalist turn. Mate and Cinnamon arose from projects to resurrect the previous Gnome (Mate) and reimplement it with the new Gnome underpinnings (Cinnamon). Those and XFCE sit around somewhere in the middle. They all have their adherents, as do Enlightenment and again, once they've settled there's no need to change.

Basically, to mix metaphors, it's horses for courses and no need to change horses in mid-stream. Unless, of course, changing horses out of curiosity is something you want to do; there's no accounting for folks which probably must also explain why so many people complain bitterly about Windows but simply put up with whatever Microsoft deigns to shovel out month by month and half-year by half year.

It's choice, If you don't relish the thought that you can choose the desktop approach that most suits you, maybe you're suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

FWIW SWMBO has a mixture of files* and apps (just Seamonkey and Zoom) on KDE whilst I also use KDE but with only files* on the desktop with most used applications on the panel (task bar in Windows parlance).

* In reality files and folders.

NASA fixes Hubble Space Telescope using backup power supply unit, payload computer

Fingers uncrossed.

Iffy voltage: The plague of PC builders and Hubble space telescope controllers alike

Re: Breaking the cardinal rule of IT

This one worked. Hooray!

Re: fingers and toes crossed

It's already switched itself off. It's switching it back on again that's tricky.

BOFH: But soft! What light through yonder filing cabinet breaks?

Long ago our lab acquired a greenhouse to maintain cannabis plants which were due to become court exhibits. My office mate at the time said that it was the only greenhouse in Belfast where cannabis plants were hiding the tomato plants rather than the other way around. I suppose that could all be updated nowadays aboyt the bitcoin mine being used to hide the cannabis farm or vice versa.

That's to dispose of the biological detritus.

This page has been deliberately left blank

Well, TFA says his error so it sounds like he got what he ordered. Should've gone to SpecSavers*.

* Seen at the recent Yorkshire Festival of Motorsport on the back of a half-size model of a camper van which was actually a trailer.

Google demonstrates impractical improvement in quantum error correction – but it does work

Simple solution. Let the computer generate a superposition of all possible outcomes & then pick the right answer. Or the one you like best.

All hands on Steam Deck: Fancy a handheld Linux PC that runs Windows apps, sports a custom AMD Zen APU and a touch screen?

Re: Sounds interesting...

"and asking if it could run Crysis"

How unimaginative. Much better to ask if it can run anything else.

Re: I am intrigued

Fails on two grounds: only one word and not enough letters.

"Reservation fee" is only marginal. "Advance monetary securement arrangement" would be better as it's not only longer more impressive and includes a word that's not even in the spell checker.

Try placing a pot plant directly above your CRT monitor – it really ties the desk together

Death by dry cleaning

Back in the early days of TV one of my aunts took a look in the back of her set and saw the amount of dust it had accumulated. She decided to vacuum it. I suppose it was switched off as she came to no harm. The TV, on the other hand...

Regulating facial recognition technology? It's the 'Wild West out there,' says US law boffin

Re: FRT - never ready for prime time

"That data survives a lot of fuzzying pretty well."

Until you take into account the lack of precision in the measurements and then reduce the confidence in the results to match.

Making good measurements can be a hard task, even in the lab.

How many Brits have deleted life-saving track and trace app from their phones? No idea, junior minister tells MPs

Let's not forget that it was going to be the great saviour until it wasn't ready in time after which it became a nice to have.

Re: Technology to the rescue

Now? It seems like forever.

Testing was available before the app. There was no excuse for going straight to self-isolation. The only action to take based on a positive result from a presumptive test is to apply a more definitive test. When telling people to self-isolate they should then have made provision to support those self isolating. If the latter had been done a back of the envelope check on the likely costs would have suggested requiring a test first. In fact I'm surprised the Treasury didn't demand testing on the basis of likely cost to the economy.

Re: Surprise

The requirements are what HMG said they wanted.

Re: Surprise

The problem wasn't in the development, it was in the requirements.

The likelihood of this happening was obvious before the scheme was launched. Anyone capable of thinking one step beyond "wouldn't it be a good idea" would have thought about what happens beyond a match being identified. Unfortunately that requirement seems to exclude any politician, or at least any minister and their SPADs.

A match on this basis is nothing more than an indication that a chance for an infection has occurred which is very different from saying than an actual infection has occurred. The likely number of false positives would dictate that the next step should be to organise a test to see it it actually occurred.

If the idea had been handed over to someone capable of working that out for themselves it might have been saved. Instead it was handed over to the person who was even less capable of that than the government.

Facial-recognition technology gets a smack in the chops from civil rights campaigners

The two cases are different.

The weaknesses of the ID parade are that people are trying to match a fleeting glimpse with a limited choice of people who are put in front of them. There's also the possibility of suggestion. But it's attempting one in few identifications.

The weakness of AI, at least in mass surveillance, is that it's trying to fit faces from a large database to members of a crowd. It's attempting many to many. Even if it is better than human efforts, which remains to be proven, because it's making many orders of magnitude more comparisons.

From a justice PoV the worry is that it will be believed because of the thought that it's "objective" and numbers can't be wrong despite just about everyone having had experience of a computer letting them down.

Re: Customer Service

I think there's ample evidence that marketroids are very, very bad at working out what people want. Anyone who doesn't block adverts has tails of the irrelevant or no longer relevant ads following them online. Anyone who regularly uses Amazon or other online store has a similar experience with recommendations.

It follows that if they think people want what they don't want they're likely to think they don't want what they do want and consequently products get discontinued or at least becomes more difficult to find. You may be on a mission and prepared to look where the product is now but if it's no longer stocked you're not going to find it.

You're assuming the AI does do a bit better.

"The technology doesn't put people in jail, the justice system puts people in jail, and the only way evidence can be used to support a conviction is if that evidence supports that conviction."

If he evidence is from the technology and the technology is faulty then it can indeed result in wrongful convictions.

As someone directly involved in producing evidence one of the most stressful elements in my job was the possibility of being involved in a miscarriage of justice if I got it wrong. It rather seems as if distancing from the actual business of going into court has removed that concern for those developing this sort of technology.

In the Horizon instance the system was producing evidence of crimes were there was none. In more general situations, if there is a genuine crime and someone is wrongfully convicted it also means that the real perpetrator will have got away. That's something that should worry even the keenest advocate of raising conviction rates.

Re: Customer Service

And possibly make it less likely that you'll be able to find what you really need.

Re: What's the problem?

And how do you even know if X is using face scanning?

Not that I really care that much - it's too much trouble to get into my nearest big town. Like so many they're hostile to cars and public transport from my own small village is not good. My best bet if I need to go into town is to drive to another, bigger village, park there and get their better bus service although obviously for the last year plus that's been a non-starter. But when I park there I might as well do any shopping there that's possible there or maybe some other village and for the rest there's online.

Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class

Re: Privacy is free!

For email services I'm quite content to pay for a service and domain name to go with it, not least because it's then easy to issue different addresses to different correspondents and to chop one address if it gets abused.

For syncing between devices there's home storage, in my case NextCloud on a Pi although I assume commercial domestic NAS devices would do that.

As to the net being paid for by advertising, I wonder when advertisers will start to question what value they actually get. Just how many adverts does the world need?

But is there any reason why the phone & PC can't synchronise directly?

"After that, I will need reasonable alternatives to Google Calendar and Google Docs."

I'm curious as to why people need - or think they need - such services.

Is it because they want to share data between devices?

If so do they never have two devices in the same place at the same time? If they bring devices together then they can, at least in theory, be synchronised. If they can't in practice then look to the vendors for an explanation (or, more likely, an excuse).

BT to phase out 3G in UK by 2023 for EE, Plusnet, BT Mobile subscribers

Re: sensible thing

Given that my (non-smart) water meter is in what looks like a pretty good Faraday cage I'm still puzzled about how they can read it from a range of several metres. Apart from being underground it's enclosed in a steel tube on top of which, at ground level, there's a hinged cast iron cover. Could the gap between cover lid and frame act as a slot aerial.

"We did the sensible thing"

And what was that?

It had to happen: Microsoft's cloudy Windows 365 desktops are due to land next month

The tragedy is that it'll be sold as cheaper, you don't need all those expensive staff and manglement will go for it in a big way.

Re: Umm...

I suppose the browser could be run on a Pi. The the users might discover there's a lot of other interesting stuff on there as well. Ooh, look - a word processor ... and a spreadsheet - and email ....

Microsoft does not want it called VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). "We're not shipping anything that's infrastructure. We're providing all that as a back-end service... If you were to classify it, it would be most aligned with DaaS (Desktop as a Service),

Some mighty fine hair splitting there.

Google fined €500m for not paying French publishers after using their words on web

Re: If you can't tax 'em fine 'em

If they didn't have Google distributing their click-bait they might have to write interesting articles.

Re: Thick skin

"BTW. I imagine that Google's response other than sending a platoon of lawyers to France to argue compliance with EU copyright law will be to stop ever reporting news from French sources."

This seems to be the best option from Google's PoV, giving, as it does, the possibility of letting them pay to have sponsored snippets appear.

Hubble, Hubble, toil and trouble: NASA pores over moth-eaten manuals ahead of switch to backup hardware

It's getting difficult to keep typing with my fingers crossed. let's hope it works OK. If it does then it's time to reflect on how much more life it might have and prioritise observations.

Imagine a world where Apple shacked up with Xerox in the '80s: How might it look today?

Re: Big credit

In the early 1980s the money was to be made by flogging renting big iron. Nothing much has changed except for the nature of the iron.

The simpler alternative would have been for Xerox to realise that if they took the ideas they had in the Star, reimplemented the hardware using the new-fangled microprocessors and, by that means, brought the price down they could have owned the business market for years if not decades. Unfortunately that was never the Xerox way.

Report: 83% of UK software engineers suffer burnout, COVID-19 made it worse

Re: Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.

The date is set for the sprint to finish and higher up management expect you to meet it.

Perhaps manglement would understand a car analogy:

Your car is in for service and is to be collected at 4 pm. An hour after it goes in the garage rings up and says "We've discovered a problem with the brakes, The parts won't be here until tomorrow morning. You can have it working at midday tomorrow or collect it at four today as agreed but it won't be fit to drive. Which do you want?"

Re: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means

"If we managed R&D projects like we managed building motorways they'd be a disaster. They'd all under-deliver, late and over budget - just like software projects."

Cross Rail belongs to the same branch of engineering as motorways. Just saying.

Re: Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.

For cycle times of less than a day it sounds as if testers == users. If i were a user in that situation "elite" wouldn't be a term i'd apply to the developers. They might look elite to those selling tools to them, however.

NEC to move its IT into Azure and give staff – all 110,000 of ’em – a cloudy Windows desktop

NEC made the same promise in November 2020 – but for AWS engineers. ... NEC and Google also struck a deal in 2018 to “better serve Japanese enterprises”.

I'm reminded of an old saying: "once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is getting to be a habit". Or do they believe in "third time lucky"?

Western Approaches Museum: WRENs, wargames, and victory in the Atlantic

Re: Seems a security risk

"they weren't interested in British Atlantic convoy routes"

They did, however, have a strong interest in the success of those convoys and the Arctic convoys to themselves.

We're terrified of sharing information, but the benefits of talking about IT and infosec outweigh the negatives

Re: The sanctity of the confessional

The solution to this, as in the aviation industry* is a statutory inspectorate. It would need powers and resources for pre-emptive inspection and prosecution.

Unfortunately we have a govt. that keeps bleating about being the best in the world for whatever issue drifts across their minds on the day but usually mean by that an absence of "red tape" when, in fact, the said red tape holding in place the security of the supply chain would actually be more beneficial.

* Withou Boeing-style self-certification.

UK govt draws a blank over vaccine certification app – no really, the report is half-empty

Re: OPtion?

"Maybe the validation app/reader is a work in progress?"

Not until it's urgently needed. A half-arsed version will then be delivered more or leas working, for some values of working, 8 to 10 months later.

REvil ransomware gang's websites vanish soon after Kaseya fiasco, Uncle Sam threatens retaliation

I can't help thinking that at some point a few Russians will start drinking in a bar in Moscow or wherever and wake up in an hotel room in a country that has an extradition warrant with the US and the local cops knocking at the door.

Euro space boffins hatch comms satellite hijack plan to save Earth from extinction

Re: Am I missing something...

The cost of doing that before they're needed. We'd still be haggling with the beancounters when the damn thing hits. Also, with the current Hubble situation in mind, would something that's been in orbit for a long time be in a workable condition when it's needed?

Re: Implausible

That's not what's being proposed although it was how I read the headline.

What is being proposed is something akin to what you suggest, except that the large mass is stuffed into it into the satellite chassis instead of the usual electronics. Presumably the idea of doing it this way is that the satellite itself has all the necessary bits to connect to the launch vehicle although a lot of expensive stuff that wouldn't be needed. Why not build a fleet of deflectors containing no more than is required to do the job designed to fit each generation of launch vehicles? It would cut out a lot of arguing and lead time if all that had to be done was commandeer the actual launches.

Windows 11 still doesn't understand our complex lives – and it hurts

Re: Am I the exception?

"well not yet quite for email, I have my suspicions that MSFT are working on that"

Judging by the rest of the comments you've now got a lot of people worried.

"From the support issues I've seen it is the users who get confused, not the system!"

It may or may not be the users who are getting confused but if they are it appears to be the system that's confusing them. The role of system designers and developers is to produce systems that deliver the services that users need in a form that users need them. If a system results in so much confusion then it's to those designers and developers that you should look to place the blame.

Re: Clearly

Sorry, but no. Microsoft knows where the OP works, it's the OP who's clearly wrong.

Linux Mint 20.2 is a bit more insistent about updating but not as annoying as Windows or Mac, team promises

Yes. /home needs to sit where it won't be reformatted if you reinstall - which you might do, even for a version upgrade. Likewise if you have other a large data requirement. The other requirement which you might have that needs to avoid reformatting is locally installed S/W, /usr/local and/or /opt. But, yes, /usr on the root partition might not be a problem these days.

The other thing to remember is that in the Unix/Linux world we tend to have swap on its own partition.