Posts by Doctor Syntax

Tech employees demand their leaders take a stand against ICE

True, but who, in this situation, are the SEDITION/TREASON/CRIIMINALS? If the US is to have a hope it needs to work that one out PDQ.

Re: Correction to article

Some of us are.

Re: Correction to article

Could we settle for "alleged murder"? "We" being other than the A/C nutjobs. (If you complain about being called an A/C nutjob it at least proves you know what you are.)

Re: CSuite are doing the right thing

"we have the County Council controlled by Reform"

They'll soon fall out with each other. Farage seems to have been collecting a leader-challenging awkward squad. I'm looking forward to the whole thing disintegrating.

I'm not sure they're repairing the damage of BoJo's dumping of anyone who looked like a One-Nation Tory but I think the desertions are the beginning of a move back to the centre where the votes are most reliably found.

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

""but it's WIRELESS, it doesn't need those""

"Well, you've just proved yourself wrong, haven't you?"

Re: During COVID

WFH pre-COVID my daughter had an employer provided HP all-in-one which looked fairly like my old, pre-enshitified-HP version until you touched it and felt how flimsy it was. Some minor problem and neither of us could even get the paper tray back into it, partly for fear of breaking it. She had to get it swapped out. That old HP stuff is almost indestructible by conventional weapons.

Re: Users and printing devices...

Not exactly your trailer park situation but anyone growing up in the household of a skilled craftsman will probably be familiar with the notion of not buying something you can make yourself. Even today I have to steel myself to buy anything other than basic supplies irrespective of not being able to make it myself.

Re: Users and printing devices...

Nice catch. I have to admit something like that passed though my mind as I typed it.

No idea why you got a down vote.

Re: "You Can't Use a Chainsaw in a Library"

I have an electric chainsaw. It's far from being library quiet.

Re: "we never loaned any of our tools to any of the non-IT staff ever again"

" Now living on the US East of Coast, ... dating many of the oldest buildings in the country with pinpoint accuracy."

"Oldest buildings" or, as we say, "recent".

The Belfast dendro project was inspired by piles of bog oak drag-lines out of bogs when the NI M1 was built. Bog-hardened and sun-dried they were no fun to cut with a blunt Bushman saw. A chainsaw was an early acquisition.

We were offered the chance to whack the end off a floor joist that had been exposed when some work was done in Trinity College Dublin Library. Sadly, you can't use a chainsaw in a library so it was back to the Bushman.

In retrospect starting a project like that and expecting to get back from modern to those bog oaks was sheer bravado but Mike Baillie made it work. RIP, Mike.

Re: Memories...

Easy to blame users, but perhaps the blame should fall on the designers who produced an easy to jam and easy to damage when jammed. Pulling is more obvious than finding which od several visible tabs and levers opens the magic release or door.

Re: Users and printing devices...

Beancounters know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Re: Users and printing devices...

I suppose that they had a stationary cupboard - stationary because the contents weren't going anywhere.

Re: "we never loaned any of our tools to any of the non-IT staff ever again"

"a pro tree surgeon might need one one day"

So might a dendrochronologist.

Re: "we never loaned any of our tools to any of the non-IT staff ever again"

"Equally I'm rather impressed that someone in marketing actually knew what a pair of pliers was. Much like a software dev asking to borrow a screwdriver, that should have set off alarm bells all on its own."

Kids today!

Time was when we did everything.

Goes off mumbling into grey white beard.

China-linked group accused of spying on phones of UK prime ministers' aides – for years

"The allegations surfaced days before current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is due to travel to China"

What a coincidence!

France to replace US videoconferencing wares with unfortunately named sovereign alternative

Quite. For avoidance of doubt, good for them (i.e. the French).

I'd guess they didn't give a damn either way.

Re: Viso

However Visio the Microsoft product may get elbowed out for similar reasons. Maybe a re-named Dia will replace it.

So the rest is just a bit of flag-waving.

Re: Deja vue all over again

Maybe it was a cunning scheme to get IBM's attention so they'd buy the company.

Succession: Linux kernel community gets continuity plan for post-Linus era

Re: So negative...

Oh, well played, sir.

I thought the stand-in was established as Greg but that would be for the Linus falls under a bus scenario. It wouldn't work in generational terms. I keep thinking "but they're all so young". They aren't any more so a plan is needed.

Microsoft illegally installed cookies on schoolkid's tech, data protection ruling finds

Thanks.

So no penalty mentioned? I suppose it must be a procedural thing and if they don't stop then penalties get decided on then. So we can hope for a percentage of annual revenue.

"should stop tracking the complainant ... within four weeks."

What's the penalty if they don't? I see a mention of 50 Euros in the PDF but without knowing German I'm not sure of the significance. Is that 50 each day of failure? If so they might not bother. 50 per day per affected pupil in Austria might get their attention. 50 per day per pupil across the whole EU might get something done.

High Court to grill London cops over live facial recognition creep

Well, why do you think they wanted to leave the EU? Too much adult supervision for their liking.

You've got to remember that the Home Office's core competence is house-training ministers. That could be qualified with "if they need it" because some don't.

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

"Companies have a brand that can't be cloned and goodwill that can't be cloned,...But product features can now be cloned."

And then all you've got is a clone. Where's the ambition in that?

How one developer used Claude to build a memory-safe extension of C

Re: Interesting read.

"If I'm unsure I'll question the change and ask for the reasoning."

Reasoning?

Re: LOL

I guess the meaning is that the bubble will burst before they get round to that.

You have been warned.

"Our strategy is to combine AI and algorithms to rewrite Microsoft's largest codebases."

Keep it simple, stupid: Agentic AI tools choke on complexity

I thought summarising complex data for the simple human being (i.e. manager) was the sort of thing that AI was sold as being good at. Now they're telling me it isn't. Surely the salesweasels weren't lying, were they?

AWS's inevitable destiny: becoming the next Lumen

Re: Cloud direction

Outside the US more people will finally start asking where their data actually sits. Geography will become a criterion.

Re: "have a life wtihout KFC waiting in retirement."

I think the idea was that the chicken would by putting the C in KFC but who really knows?

Re: So the future is built on clueless devs who trust fully AI?

As I kept reading I wondered who, at least in a corporate environment, lets developers deploy wherever they choose (or, as it now seems, let their tool choose for them). I suppose they must just be the knock-up-a-website-for-your-small-business types. As Carney's "Middle Powers" speech sinks in corporate boards outside the US will finally be asking questions about what's happened to all the IT stuff they shoved out of sight over the last few decades.

Re: A dumb pipe

Maybe not so easy as that. If everyone's got out of the way who fettles the pipe when it gets blocked?

KDE Plasma 6.6 beta ships a login manager that won't log in without systemd

Better than what? Systemd, KDE, Wayland or Linux?

Was your advice AI slop?

I guess Devuan are going to keep using SDDM or fork it themselves.

Three is the magic number for Alaska Airlines: triple redundancy

I suppose they ran up against the problem of never knowing if the redundancy will work until you test it and it's risky testing it without knowing it will work.

UK digital ID goes in-house, government swears it isn't an ID card

Re: It's not an ID card

Especially if PC Plod is your next-door neighbour.

Re: It's not an ID card

"Look up the 1939 England and Wales Register. Everyone's name, address etc. was collected for WWII id cards"

Which were ditched when the emergency for which they were required was over. Unless they're claiming a new emergency that's not a justification for reinstating them and if they do declare an emergency then it need so be sufficiently well defined that they can undertake to ditch them again afterwards. But, of course, this is just a retread of what happened last time Labour were in office - they want them because they want them and it's not our place to ask why.

Re: It's not an ID card

Like everything else - To Be Decided.

Re: It's not an ID card

If your ID is on your phone it means that in reality your phone is your ID then whoever has your phone is you - and that's the case with much existing security theatre.

Re: It's not an ID card

First define identity. Have you given it much thought? Have you ever tried, yourself, to prove someone's identity? Do you even know, positively, that you're the person named on your birth certificate? You were told you were but, given the occasional reports of babies being mixed up in hospitals, even those who told you that were not necessarily sure. And in any case that birth certificate will say it's not evidence of identity. Given that being a UK native is one of the entitlements to work in the UK that this is allegedly all about then not having the ability to trace an individual back to birth puts the whole thing on a shaky foundation. It leaves whoever's issuing these IDs having to believe a lot of what people say in which case Rice Davis applies.

Surrender as a service: Microsoft unlocks BitLocker for feds

"key escrow"

Surely the point about escrow is that material is only released in appropriate circumstances. Appropriate in this case would be verified customer request and nothing else.

Emmabuntüs DE 6: A newbie-friendly Linux to help those in need

Re: Protect All Noobs

"But I could never in good conscience recommend anything other than an Atomic OS to a noob."

From what's been described here the only use case I can imagine for that is a bleeding edge distro where you might want to roll back to a known good version because essentially it's planning for failed updates. In good conscience I wouldn't recommend anything that wasn't solid, LTS mainstream-based.

No one talking about a datacenter could be a sign one is coming

Re: "We won't tell the public anything

"In the UK something that kind of size would require an EIA,"

I don't think they're concerned with the UK. The el Reg's USian focus reporting.

£45B savings remain theoretical as UK digital roadmap delayed again

Re: Do you mean this one?

It seems to be a lot of puffery, I don't see an actual document.

Ofcom probes Meta over WhatsApp info it was legally required to provide

Hoe wouldn't send a cheque; he's USian so he wouldn't know how to spell it.

Re: Ofcom

Now here's an interesting conflict. Someone of Lord Grade's age - and wealth - doesn't need to worry about future employees so has no need to worry about doing the right thing. Perhaps you should sort things out between yourself & VoT and his accompanying A/C as to which is the best age range for board members. Or perhaps you could get together and come up with different selection criteria.