Posts by Doctor Syntax

Delay upgrading the UK's legacy border systems has added £336m to taxpayers' bill

John Reid (remember him?) said the HO was not fit for purpose. That was a long time ago. Nothing seems to have changed.

CentOS project changes focus, no more rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux – you'll have to flow with the Stream

Re: Erm ...

"Am I just hopelessly naïve?"

I'd have thought a business that puts its faith in suing IBM would be the one that's hopelessly naïve.

Re: To the surprise of no one

"accept a proprietary blob in the init, or fork and replace it,"

Other inits are possible and preferred by many.

Re: To the surprise of no one

"the community as a whole would be quite badly affected if Redhat (and, by implication IBM) left"

You mean they might stop pottering about?

Maybe White Box Linux will be revived. It was another RH clone but discontinued, largely, I think, because Centos covered the same ground. Fermilab also opted for Centos 8 instead of developing a new Scientific Linux 8. Maybe they'll reconsider. It would be surprising if nobody picked this up.

FOSS developer survey: Mostly male, employed... and many don't care about 'soul-withering chore' of security

Re: A proper security review of the code

That would require that security experts join FOSS projects.

The survey suggested that half the people working on such projects are actually paid to do so. The employers sponsoring them might usefully consider seconding any such specialists they have on their staff to spend some time doing this. However some such companies may only be contributing to the extent that specific features of the project benefit them and may be reluctant to pay for something that benefits the project as a whole - including other contributors who may be commercial rivals.

Other projects which can be quite critical to the whole FOSS "ecosystem" have turned out to have very few contributors and generally run on something less than a show-string with no commercial support. That needs some external foundation to step up to support them.

Re: Why is lack of security a surprise?

I'd go a step further. The average member of the pulic doesn't want security because it would make the product more difficult to use. Security generally gets traded off for something - convenience, performance, cost, whatever. Right up to the time it becomes obvious it shouldn't have been.

Re: Other big 'not do' is good documentation

Brookes' view was that the manual should be the first thing you start and the last you finish.

Seagate says it's designed two of its own RISC-V CPU cores – and they'll do more than just control storage drives

"may signal a coming surge in RISC-V processor shipments"

May also signal concerns about the future ownership of Arm.

Court orders encrypted email biz Tutanota to build a backdoor in user's mailbox, founder says 'this is absurd'

All the people who want exclusive back doors for encryption have to do is tender a contract for the writing of one - payment to be made only when a committee of independent experts confirm it does what it says on the tin. If they think it's possible why haven't they done that?

PSA: The 2020 monolith is a dead meme. You can stop putting them up now. Please

Re: There is a difference between ...

The poor deluded idiot appears to be former Israeli general and their of space security which may be slightly worrying. He may not be in full possession of his marbles now but was he then?

Re: Reaction

Art is also anything made by an artist studio assistant that sells

Re: IoW "art" claimed...

I think whoever suggested the foil was thinking that it would hold the glass together if he bumped into it rather like a laminated windscreen. Before switching to a mirrored plastic I'd take a hammer to a sample to make sure it doesn't shatter too easily. In fact, take professional advice - I'm sure the safety elves must have looked at this.

Mirrored Perspex is the preferred material on the Isle of Wight.

If the US art group is valuing them at $45,000 perhaps they'll bill the MAGALouts this amount for the one they destroyed.

Cops raid home of ousted data scientist who created her own Florida COVID-19 dashboard

Is Ms Streissand about?

Meanwhile how did it work out hushing up these allegations about massaging the COVID death figures?

Re: How soon

Excess deaths also includes deaths due to COVID taking up medical resources that could have been deployed elsewhere.

Re: How soon

My preference would be having it mentioned on the death certificate as the sole criterion. Otherwise the "hit by car on leaving the test centre" problem is still there. In the early days there could have been a problem with a doctor misdiagnosing some other respiratory illness as COVID or vice versa when there was insufficient testing capacity but that's not going to be a problem now. However the GRO isn't going to process death certs quickly enough for monitoring purposes.

Re: Probs just standard operating procedure

Of course. They may have to protect themselves against what might happen if they broke into the wrong address by mistake. Can't be too careful.

What's that? Can't be too careful about getting the right address?

Re: How soon

The within 28 days limitation was introduced because the original, hasty definition was really ill thought-out. According to that if you died after a positive test you were added to the statistics. If you were hit by a car leaving the test centre you became one of the COVID count. If you died of old age decades later you'd have become part of the count. It was a definition that ensured that sooner or later 100% of those with positive tests would be defined as having died of it.

There are other definitions such as COVID being mentioned on the death certificate and the ONS figure of deaths in excess of the average for time of year. The Beeb reports these as well but they are not available on a daily basis, only the deaths within 28 days. When reporting these statistics they're properly labelled; this isn't some form of casting aspersions, it's simply good practice.

Uber sends its self-driving cars on a road to nowhere, with indefinite stop at automated truck aspirant Aurora

Re: Self driving?

all vehicles under a central control

"Yes, this is 20 miles from the destination you selected but it optimises the overall traffic distribution."

Re: Uber has near-term vision but...

It could be realisation that a long way off is where it will stay.

Re: Uber's Financial Plan

By the time that logical conclusion is reached the execs will have put enough of their earnings aside to maintain their lifestyles for the foreseeable future and/or moved on somewhere else.

Uni revealed it killed off its PhD-applicant screening AI – just as its inventors gave a lecture about the tech

Re: When will they learn

They don't seem to have applied this lesson to whatever AI chooses the products offered in response to searches. I think it might be self-reinforcing as the results get ever shittier.

Pure frustration: What happens when someone uses your email address to sign up for PayPal, car hire, doctors, security systems and more

Re: A twat in texas

"he's out of work"

Unsurprisingly.

Re: Other casual people

"A system created by remote and ineffectual dons is not fit for public and commercial use"

If the likes of Doug Engelbart, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor and Larry. Roberts are ineffectual in your view I'm puzzled as to how many people in this world you would categorise as effectual.

None of which has anything to do with the inepts who set up the sort of commercial departments described in the article assuming that everyone will type in their correct address and fail to ask themselves "what could go wrong?".

This is simply corporate obtuseness and not confined to email. One delivery company whose name is a TLA persistently fails to deliver here. My house doesn't have a number, just a name - carved 6" high on a block of stone beside the gate - and they seem unable to get their heads round this despite long exchanges of emails. They have, apparently confirmed that they have the address in their system but, despite having been send GPS coordinates seem to send their drivers to an address a hundred metres away, just out of sight round a corner. Only one recent attempt has succeeded, possibly because the driver had the initiative and sufficient command of English to phone up and ask for directions. I will no longer order from businesses whom I believe will use them for deliveries.

Businesses that have no mechanism for correcting errors in the data they hold will fail repeatably indefinitely.

IT workers join elite sports stars, fat cat biz execs, celebs and posties for special treatment under England's COVID-19 travel isolation rules

Re: No Isolation for Special People or Elites ???

"Significant business deal" implies that just because money is at stake it takes priority over health.

Money might be at stake. So might jobs. As things stand that's no small consideration from the public interest point of view.

Apple's M1: the fastest and bestest ever silicon = revolution? Nah, there's far more interesting stuff happening in tech that matters to everyone

"I’m still hoping for an expandable Mac Pro, where the 16GB of onboard memory effectively acts as a bloody enormous cache"

I think this is the obvious next step or next step but one for somebody. The next step for everyone else will be the SOC including fast RAM.

The nightmare is real: 'Excel formulas are the world's most widely used programming language,' says Microsoft

There comes a point in the life of every useful ad hoc application where it should be re-implemented from scratch in a way that enables it to be supported and adapted to changing requirements. The trick is to identify that point correctly. If you miss it the entire mess has grown out of hand, the data set has grown to big or complex, the original author has moved on leaving nobody who quite understands how it was supposed to work or you end up rewriting the damn thing every time a new requirement comes along because it's quicker than the rewrite and the fact that you've got 20 variants to select the correct one form is something that only dawns on you when its too late

Re: Shouldn't that be "a horde of spreadsheets"?

A sum difference of spreadsheets.

Six of one and A2+C4 of the other

Re: Database AND programming!

It's a bigger gun to aim at the foot.

Running joke: That fitness gadget? It's, er, run out

Re: Tried and tested model

Or c) you find somebody gullible enough to buy it - the advertising industry.

Re: Thanks for the video Alastair

When looking for our first house in N Ireland we walked away from two. The first one we didn't realise was prefab until getting a survey which pointed out that the roof ridge was a steel tube, presumably propping up the gables against each other. Fortunate - it was before the Troubles got under way and I think it was a bit further south in Co Down than would have been healthy for me in my subsequent career. The other was very obviously largely composed of asbestos panels; a pity as it came complete with an Iron Age ring-fort.

OTOH they can be very good properties; an aunt and uncle lived in one for most of their married life until they had to move to sheltered accommodation. The whole street of semis is still there and not immediately prefab unless you're told.

The wonky prefab lab with a metal frame and precast panels was a different matter - a slight shifting of weight on the floor would cause the reading on a balance on the adjacent bench to change.

Re: Incompatible because..

"IoT promises to be worse by several orders of magnitude."

If you start from the premise that IoT is bad per se then a confusion of standards to hold it back is a Good Thing. It's the Tower of Babel principle.

Re: Pine from Ikea?

"within easy reach of both the Leeds and the Nottingham stores"

I don't know about the Nottingham store but I don't associate "easy" with the Leeds store. The last straw was a notice forbidding taking trolleys up to the top deck of the car park. What do the stupid idiots think I'm going to do when the car's up there? Normally I'd have brought the trolley back down but in the circumstances left it up there for badness' sake.

Boffins from China push quantum computing envelope for 'supremacy' in emerging photon field

Re: Usefulness ... ?

And the nails being elastic will vibrate so even is there are no vibrations coming from the environment after the ball hits the first nail the rest of them will be vibrating slightly before it gets to the second. Don't forget the influence of the grain of the wood...

The real world is full of little details that get in the way of predictability.

Proteins fold themselves consistently, they're all built systematically by adding one amino acid to another so it should be possible to calculate the forces that will determine the new configuration from the old as each one is added - but informed guesswork, i.e. AI, is better at working out the configuration from the sequence than predictions based on things we should, in theory, be able to work out.

Re: Except it doesn't

Mirrors, certainly. Smoke might get in the way.

Re: The first transistor...

The first transistor wasn't presented as a computer which isn't surprising as a single transistor isn't enough to make a computer.

Is it Turing complete?

Or, to put it another way, it's a physical laboratory set-up that's difficult for a classical computer to simulate but how well can it simulate a classical computer?

Marine archaeologists catch a break on the bottom of the Baltic Sea: A 75-year-old Enigma Machine

Re: Old typewriter

Except that nobody's sufficiently in the know to know what's valid, don't you know.

Re: Old typewriter

"I'm not sure why they'd dump them when the war had ended"

The German PTB, not realising Enigma had been cracked, ordered them to be dumped. Rather like our PTB ordering Colossus to be scrapped.

Scotch eggs ascend to the 'substantial meal' pantheon as means to pop to pub for a pint during pernicious pandemic

Re: Why do you need rules?

The evidence seems to be telling us that even when people are warned they're so disregarding of them as to constitute a danger to the rest and that enforced rules are needed.

There are two sides to every story, two ends to every cable

Only half a dozen? Any link to an old Dilbert strip is usually good for half an hour.

Re: 'Tis the season after all

Oh yes it is.

Also in fairness cash machines are usually mouse-free.

Intel Labs unleashes its boffins with tales of quantum computing, secure databases and the end of debugging

Re: "once a human expresses his or her intention to the machine"

Obligatory https://www.techwell.com/sites/default/files/shared/treeswing.jpg

Anything about processors that don't leak information?

Salesforce's Dreamforce shindig hits new levels of nauseating online as... Oh god. Is that James Corden?

Re: James Corden

He seemed to be very popular. for no reason I could see. I used to wonder if it was just me; clearly it isn't.

I remember Richard Whitely hosting an internal BT motivational* event. He had the grace to appear embarrassed by it so my regard for him went well up. Perhaps senior BT managers joined ferrets in his "never again" list.

* Motivational in that it motivated me right out of the company for good. Otherwise best described as "insulting the staff's intelligence".

Where's the mysterious metal monolith today then? Oh look, it's atop a California mountain

Not quite a monolith but here's one scheduled for Blighty - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-55160220