Posts by Doctor Syntax

Yep, the 'Who owns Linux?' case is back from the dead

Did you read the article?

Re: What?

As this quote is normally attributed to Einstein my guess would be that it was intended as a disparagement of quantum mechanics.

Yep, you're totally unique: That one very special user and their very special problem

Re: When turn off/turn on fails

"Was browsing in a jewelry store with the wife one time"

You like to live dangerously!

I used to be short-sighted like that. I still am except that with age my range of accommodation has shrunk. back in the day something had to be quite small before I had to reach for a lens. I miss that.

Re: When turn off/turn on fails

As vengeance I'd have recommended the all-black HP that my daughter's previous employer supplied for home office use. It was built long after HP was a force to be reckoned with in printer manufacture.

This was an all-in-one so you'd have needed to spray the scanner glass with black paint, of course.

Re: (Can't...stop...the... voices....)

"because she refused to admit that her beloved piece of Apple-ware had any problems."

Or maybe she cottoned on to the fact that she'd given you the perfect excuse to simply tell her she's the one who knows about Macs, not you. We Linux folk use the same approach to the family Windows users.

A floppy filled with software worth thousands of francs: Techie can't take it, customs won't keep it. What to do?

Re: re: Welcome to the information age!

You mean you can transport them by smartphone? Who knew?

"sorry, not possible to pay money to England without proof of import'"

"OK, we'll switch it all off."

Not impossible to arrange payment when that happens.

Easily distracted by too many apps, too many meetings, and too much asparagus

Re: black-and-white television into a colour set using nylon stockings.

After going up a ladder to fix the aerial.

Turns out humans are leading AI systems astray because we can't agree on labeling

Maybe they don't. Maybe they just click on something until its accepted.

Openreach out and hike prices on legacy fixed-line products: Broadband plumber pulls trigger after Ofcom gives the nod

Re: it's not private infrastructure

Substitute "needs" for "requirements" if you must. Read it as "does everything they want" if you like. But the point is that if somebody simply has a POTS phone and nothing else because they don't need, want or require any sort of internet or somebody else has ADSL or FTTC and nothing else because they don't need, want or require anything fast why should they have their prices raised because you want Netflix for yourself and your kids to watch two different films whilst another of your kids plays online games and you don't want to pay the full whack for that?

The plain fact is that you're asking for a subsidy. If BT/Openreach take out loans to install an FTTP network for those who want it the interest and capital on those loans should be paid by those who are making use of that network and not by those who aren't. If, when those loans and interest have been paid off, the economics of the maintenance of the two systems might look different and FTTP might well be cheaper than the legacy network. Loading the costs of building it onto those who do not intend to take it up is simply inequitable.

Frankly a better way of investing would be to continue rolling out a better service to those who cannot even get a decent ADSL connection. That's the other side of the argument. Upgrading the existing better connected areas will inevitably take away resources from extending the existing fibre network. Living in the country I can think of a number of premises where FTTP might well be a sensible option - properties are so thinly spread that FTTC isn't going to work well. Fine, subsidise those who live and work there rather than have them subsidise those who already have a good service to get an even better one.

"On the pricing front another thing to consider is that the less BT charges the harder it is for alternative providers to get a look in. If you make BT operate at a loss then other CPs will have to do the same thing and their pockets are not as deep."

The plan here seems to be to make FTTP operate at a loss and cross-subsidise it from POTS and FTTC. Cross-subsidy was a no-no all the time I worked at BT.

Well yes but that's because most of your customers are discerning and demanding need, or at least think they need, and already prepared to pay a premium for a better service. Out in the greater world I very much doubt that's true.

FTFY

Re: squatting on copper for long enough.

Nobdy's saying you can't have FTTP. Just put your hand into your own pocket instead of somebody else's and pay for it yourself.

Re: it's not private infrastructure

This logic ignores the fixed costs of supporting your "requirements"?

Either those fixed costs are being met at present or BT has its billing wrong. Inflation might raise those costs in the future. That's not what's being suggested here. What's being suggested is cross-subsidy. Back in the day cross-subsidy in BT was frowned upon by the regulators. That was to stop BT simply squeezing smaller competitors out of the market. It appears that when the subsidy it only working against consumers and not competitors it doesn't matter.

BTW, can you explain a good reason for those quotation marks? You seem to be implying a fault in the argument which you can't articulate, maybe because it's not there.

This is exactly what I feared from all those pushing for the FTTP that they wanted - that the rest of us, using FTTC or whatever is perfectly sufficient for our requirements, would get our bills increased to subsidise this.

Nominet ignores advice, rejects serious change despite losing CEO, chair, half its board in membership vote

"while being accountable directly to its membership"

This seems to be an aspect that's escaped its attention.

Here's another interesting link for you:

https://www.gov.uk/search-the-register-of-disqualified-company-directors

Just check on who maintains it.

Re: Put your money where your mouth is

A number of people here recommend Mythic Beasts*. They seem fine to me but I only have a couple of domains so be guided by those who have more.

* After I'd signed up it turned out that I'd the guys responsible through another forum - which I counted as being in their favour.

Re: a captive market

"Look at the sheer number of policies that continue across (allegedly) diametrically opposed administrations..."

No plan survives first contact with reality.

Re: Strategy 101

Never announce an investigation unless you already know can fix the result.

Re: Should we take the ball away from Nominet?

Yup, taking it out the hands of the amateurs and bringing in the professionals.

It's very simple. Companies House are the regulator for listed companies. Nominet, like any other company has to follow the Companies Act.

Like most people here I don't have any standing to take this sort* of complaint about Nominet to them, the members do. They'll have to exhaust other options first.

* I have, in the past, set them onto a business sticking "Ltd" after its name when it wasn't. The business had brought it on themselves by keeping sending me spam.

I'd expect another EGM with a motion of no confidence in the board. If such a motion passes then either the board has to resign as a whole or Companies House get brought in. It seems the only option left to Public Benefit other then giving up.

Re: Put your money where your mouth is

No, look at how your registrar voted and then move to a different registrar if need be.

While truly self-driving cars are surely just around the corner, for now here's an AI early-warning system for your semi-autonomous ride

Re: And the purpose of self-driving cars is..?

There are solid use cases for (a) some people giving up driving and (b) your mother getting her cataracts seen to.

Re: self-driving cars are surely just around the corner

But, after acting as a passenger, will they be alert and even itf they're alert will they take over in time to assess the situation and act?

The underlying theory of both this and, in fact, speed limits, is that "we don't trust the driver except in the most difficult circumstances".

Paging Donald Rumsfeld.

So we have a set of known situations on which the driving S/W has been trained and everything else is, therefore the set of unknown situations. AFAICS this then takes some of the unknown situations and creates a new set of known unknown situations. Or have I missed something?

State of Maine orders review of $54.6m Workday project as it alleges delivery failure and threatens cancellation

"Fail twice, and you have to start to look at what the customer is doing wrong."

Choosing the supplier?

Re: Big systems IT disasters?

ERP systems try to provide catch-all provision to a lot of individual requirements. As RDBMS products they depend on a database schema that probably started off trying to capture a "typical" business with various add-ons to pick up variations.

For instance the core might be something that sells finished items such as a garment business. It might have to deal with quantity discounts but it's simple. Stock control is just how many of this, that & the other. A business that sells the fabric from which the garments are made may, provided it just sells whole rolls of fabric may have the same simple model but one that cuts and sells lengths of fabric has somewhat different requirements as there may be a number of rolls of the same material, all with different lengths and there may be a need for algorithms to determine the bast way to choose which of them to pick to fill an order to minimise being left with short ends. The factory which makes the garments has to deal with both types of items as it needs to account for raw materials and stock.

Other customers might have more complex requirements such as complex bills of materials - a kit comprising several parts might be charged at a different price than the sum of the various parts sold separately. Another requirement might be a need to account for serial-numbered parts. In the early days of the mobile phone industry both were combined in that the product might be a receiver, a car kit and a variety of other bits and pieces giving the bill of material problems together with the need to keep track of the serial numbers.

Some businesses have quite different approaches - I had a client who had a conventional ERP which was based on stock control and order processing which dealt with stationery logistics and a separate system to deal with print ordering because the print business looks at things in a quite different way and there are specific products for that.

So an ERP system which provides for the various application fields grows to be a complex beast. That's just the start, however. Businesses will have their own ways of doing things which, rightly or wrongly, they think gives them a competitive edge. If they find themselves using the same vanilla package as their competitors they'll have to give up their quirks, in which case they have the costs of adapting their processes and lose their supposed edge, or have the package modified to suit. Again, the client I mentioned had to get custom additions to their general ERP because they needed to acquire data to be passed on to a digital print operation to produce custom printed product (I was lucky in this, the printers were also one of my clients so I could handle both sides of interface between the businesses).

It's this last part that's the killer. If the changes needed to the business to fit the package or the changes needed to the package to fit the business are too great then failure beckons.

Re: There must be a better way to build these systems

"where to find staff that do cobol?"

Amongst the staff that IBM chucked out.

Re: Been there

It might be worse than that. If the previous system was payroll only there might be manual records to take on-board.

It's official: Microsoft updates Visual Studio Code to run on Raspberry Pi OS

Yes. Respect its wishes.

Pakistan’s IT minister objects to tax changes he thinks may harm local IT industry

His objections might not have an effect but at least he tried. It's more than can be said for many other ministers over the years.

Browser tracking protections won't stop tracking, warns DuckDuckGo

"There is no way to get it to search for the exact search terms I've entered. Put 'em in quotes. Prefix with plus signs. Add exclusions for the incorrect hits with minus signs. Nothing helps."

This seems to be universal nowadays. Given that steering search engines was perfectly possible in the 1968s it's obvious that this steady decline is deliberate. Quantity over quality.

Re: DDG

Thanks for that. Another off the list of possibles.

As I do not want or trust FB not to fingerprint my browser

Suggested imrovement.

"hird-party marketing firms have increased in the use of CNAME DNS records to borrow subdomains from publishers"

And then somebody will get access to a borrowed subdomain and use it in a scam. Then the lender will act all agrieved.

Wi-Fi devices set to become object sensors by 2024 under planned 802.11bf standard

"preferably before launch"

Why break the habits of a life time?

Microsoft's 0.5 release of Project Reunion dev kit has production support – just don't be touching UWP

"Our team is SUPER EXCITED"

As bad as that?

Arm pulls the sheets off its latest Armv9 architecture with added AI support, Realms software isolation

RISCY

Does this still count as RISC or has that line been dropped long ago?

Cryptic US Strategic Command tweet reveals dangers of working from home with kids in the way

Go on, admit it. It was sent from the phone in your back pocket when you sat down.

Under threat of judicial review, UK.gov agrees to consultation before extending Palantir's NHS role beyond pandemic

What's needed isn't an inquiry into one particular contract. There need to be two, one into the role of AI in public decision making wide enough to cover its role in campaigning for votes and the other into recent history in contract awarding. And forget "citizen juries", they need judicial authority to summon witnesses.

You put Marmite where? Google unveils its latest AI wizardry: A cake made of Maltesers and the pungent black tar

Re: OK, so it's not exactly Marmite but ...

Sounds OK.

Re: Sir WIlliam Ramsay Hazlemere Buckinghamshire

"Those who went to Ramsay should recall the hone econmics"

Did they have a knife problem? Just as well my children went to Lady Verney & John Hempden.

Re: I admit...

"Marmite, beer, same thing, sort of, no?"

Separated at birth.

Re: school meals

I liked school dinners. Maybe that was because we had good catering staff. It was the occasional halls of residence dinners that I had problem with: rabbit bone stew and epoxy cauliflower cheese were the offenders.

Island in the Stream: AlmaLinux project issues first stable release of CentOS replacement

"Will Red Hat be upset at the appearance of binary-compatible community builds of RHEL?"

Whether they're upset or not they shouldn't be surprised. They shouldn't be but they probably will despite it's being the obvious consequence.

And that's yet another UK education body under attack from ransomware: Servers, email, phones yanked offline

The institution itself claimed it was "at least" the fourth multi-academy trust targeted just this month alone.

So that's all right then, we're not the only ones.

And the others didn't serve as a warning?

Money can buy you insurance against network break-ins but investing in infosec hygiene wouldn't go amiss, says new NCSC chief

"yet forgetting who actually has to do the work on anything that is digital."

It's the cloud that does it innit?

Re: Won't work

"What else is there to cover?"

Loss of reputation.

After you've had your customers' personal data cast abroad over the interwebs you'll have seen the last of a good number of them. You may think you're sorting things out for them by letting Experian slurp more of their data for 6 months but it's unlikely they'll think that solves the problem and it's what they think that matters in the long run.