Posts by Doctor Syntax

Windows 10 refuses to die, and the security bill is coming due

Before Windows the medical kit would have been using some proprietary H/W for the controlling computer, PGP/8, MicroNova, one of a variety of HP bench-top computers or whatever. The IBM PC and compatibles were eating into that market. Even before the IBM PC came along Apple & S100/Intel/Zilog H/W was moving into labs. It would have been very obvious to the techies making the choice that the choice they had to make was to the H/W of the future, not of the past. It wouldn't have been hard to see the old suppliers dropping out and, along with them, spares. What would you expect them to have done? There were instrument makers not (except for HP) computer makers. Nor were they OS developers, so they had to go along with whatever was commercially available.

Exactly what, in the real world, was the better decision you think they should have made?

Re: Cost versus risk

If it's a subscription model why put in artificial barriers for uptake? It's not like you want to put in a H/W barrier to force the sale of a new one-off licence. Follow the money. You just need to be more cynical.

Re: Cost versus risk

"I fully expect W12 to require a specific set of AI capable hardware. Ie. I don’t expect being able to run W11 as being sufficient for W12."

Maybe. But there's an alternative.

Look how MS makes money out of OS now: they sell you a licence for W11. Previously there were upgrade paths but they didn't get money for that. If they just said "no more free upgrades" they'd have been sued by those who'd just bought a new and not obsoleted W10. So they had to allow upgrades but how to restrict that? Restrict it by some period of time, say 2 years, and they still have problems with people whose 2 years had just expired. Put in a H/W requirement instead and it put in a cut-off date without putting in a cut-off date. They can sell new licences instead of offering free upgrades for everybody, it's just that the licences come wrapped up in H/W that's more expensive than most want to pay for. They'd still not be selling licences to those who couldn't afford new H/W. So we now have OS income stream 2. Sell extended support on a yearly basis.

Now look at how MS makes money out of other stuff: subscriptions. Even ESU looks like a subscription for W10 without having to squint too much.

If W12 adopts the subscription model there's no point in putting in H/W obstacles, the more people who can be persuaded to move their old H/W to W12 the better as far as MS are concerned, even if it never made the cut for W11.

"another perceptive commentard"

Thank you, but it wasn't another. It's a point I've been making for some time.

Re: Which 16.9%?

"it doesn't really matter how old/insecure your OS is"

And this is the attitude of a lot of users irrespective of whether they're online or not. My SiL is typical. She recently swapped to a new W11 box, not because her OS was the old/insecure W7 but because the old H/W was about the most knackered laptop I've ever seen. Within days of getting the new one all sorts of scammy pop-ups appeared on the supposedly new, secure W11, not all of them from Microsoft.

"I suspect Microsoft will be forced to continue support"

"Forced" by being offered money.

Re: Which 16.9%?

"Games are the last anchor holding the user to Windows"

Only for gamers. Other users have other concerns. Those include the computer having been seen as a major purchase when it was bought (even if it was a fraction of what a game might may). The computer is seen as working for what it was bought for and there is no perceived need to upgrade nor to move to a different OS, even if the possibility is known.

Inertia, cost and lack of understanding will be bigger anchors than gaming.

Chinese memory ban would cut off RAMpocalypse relief

It's and us and US situation.

"So you're saying that increased supply to rest of the world will allow the remaining unsanctioned Taiwanese and Korean suppliers to reduce their prices in a restricted American market?"

An increase in supply is going to lower the price for us in the long run. We have no particular interest in what it does for the price for US. Nor in the bridge you have for sale.

Re: More for the rest of us.

If there's an oversupply there's no point to sitting on stock. The price would ultimately go down and the longer the lower the prices when they eventually sell at and the longer they'll have had cash tied up in the stock.

Re: it's in nobodies interest

There's a saying USians don't get irony.

Brit Scattered Spider duo handed tickets to prison over Transport for London attack

Things have improved since last time I travelled on a rush hour tube. "Sandwich" wouldn't even come close.

Airbus migrating 70 critical apps from AWS to France's Scaleway amid digital sovereignty push

Re: Why are they in the cloud at all?

Do you know where they can buy them off the shelf?

Re: You'd think Airbus is big enough...

Getting from where they are not to that fully staffed Data Centre and IT team would not be a quick process.

Re: "The Cloud" --- What "Cloud"?

Like a lot of other businesses who've outsourced IT operations they may have been hollowed out by that. Bringing things back on-prem wouldn't be something they could do quickly and quickly seems o be one of their requirements.

Law firm insisted on one password to rule them all

I notice in TFA that the correspondence address for new articles is @sitpub.com. Was this doamin set up by the BOFH?

In this case it's a law firm. That might present a different approach - a sufficiently frightened partner. Get one of the partners to review whether the arrangement is compatible with various bits of legislation.

MPs fear Treasury cold feet could sink Whitehall's £1.15B shared services push

Re: Wny?

That puts all the eggs in the wrong basket.

That's just one of the wrong baskets, of course. A wrong basket is one that can be up-ended at the whim of a foreign head of state.

Re: Treasorry

I wonder if it has a good pensions module...

Welsh Doxbin admin jailed for egging on swatters from behind a screen

Re: Mental Health

Perhaps that mitigation should be accepted with the acceptance having a mandatory consequence of confinement to a secure mental hospital.

"I hope the sentence today deters others from carrying out these criminal acts."

Putting a 1 in front of it might have. Extraditing him to the US might have. Depending on how long he's been on remand he's going to be out again before long.

How do you solve a problem like Capita?

You really are gullible if you believe that crap you read on social media somewhere.

CS pensions are paid direct out of current taxation. They always have been.

Read the following sentence several times until you understand it and its implications.

THERE NEVER WAS A POT TO BE STOLEN.

Re: Pay the market rate

Time was technical (i.e. engineering) grades were behind even scientific. Then there was a recruitment problem and they went ahead. So things could change.

This particular instance is HMG's not running (or no longer running) its own pension system. That applies to other areas that it has outsourced. It wanted to reduce headcount (possibly a motive that you would support as you seem to be persistently anti-civil service). (It also applies to a lot of other companies who want to tell their shareholders that they are reducing headcount.)

One of the things lost - by both client and outsourcer, - is the institutional memory that kept things working effectively. Even if some of the initially TUPEd staff remain with the outsourcer for a while after a few contract cycles even that resource is lost. From the outsourcers' PoV it's purely transactional and the clients' abilities are hollowed out. This seems to be the point they're reached.

It's becoming clear that this state of affairs can't go on.

"The argument that they don't need capability all the time is absolute nonsense."

I assume your vague "they" refers to clients - HMG or others. I assume your even vaguer "capability" is the requirement to run operations on an ongoing basis. That they don't need that certainly isn't an argument I made. They clearly do need that. But bringing it back in-house would be a project and projects are apt to require temporary additional expertise. That's why destroying the industry with IR35 comes back to bite.

These "temporary" contracts run for decades in practice.

That was not my experience, neither from my time as permie bringing an freelancers not my subsequent time as a freelancer.

"Problem solved."

Not a solution but it would aid in solving the problem which is to start regaining the capacity to run things themselves. That requires rather more than the ability to hire specific expertise as and when it's needed. Nevertheless, having that sort of expertise available as required would be necessary. The rest of the UK economy would also benefit from that being made available again.

Capita is not the problem. It's a symptom of the problem. The problem is the loss of ability of HMG to do the job themselves.

Microsoft emails Windows 10 holdouts: Fine, keep your old PC another year

Re: They are going to have no choice but to keep extending this

Microsoft are not being forced into this. It serves two purposes. Firstly, it screws more income from the Windows 10 licences it already sold. Secondly, it establishes the principle of paying annually for Windows.

My possible scenarios for W12 are:

1. You can have a choice of using the subscription only W12, starting to pay a subscription to keep the Windows 11 that you already bought or keeping paying the subscription for the Windows 10 you've already bought and have been subscribing for for a few years.

2. You can upgrade from your W10 or 11 (or even 7) to the new subscription only W12.

Re: There's an easy way around that

"Add support for older, perfectly capable systems back to Windows 11"

There's no money in that.

There's money in selling a new licence wrapped up in new hardware.

There's money in selling extended support.

There's money in using some hardware requirement to avoid a suit from people who would otherwise have to be forced to use one of the other money-making options by being denied an upgrade simply on the date of their licence.

Why do people fail to see that Microsoft isn't come kindly charitable organisation that would adopt the first two but not the third?

Another way of looking at it is they're getting users accustomed to something that looks very much like paying subscriptions for Windows.

Zig creator calls Bun’s Claude Rust rewrite ‘unreviewed slop’

I think the original statement was meaningless - err - shall we say - slop.

Re: Seems a bit like painting yourself into a corner

I want one but the greenhouse has to have the traditional ash frames.

Re: Rewrite in Rust, source code size doubles to 1000000 lines

No problem at all. AI will fix it. Repeatedly.

Capita hears demand for pension scheme cleanup 'loud and clear' – but won't say yes

"Maybe if GDPR level fines were levied (and enforced) they would pay attention."

On what basis? Name the law which has been broken.

Re: negotiating further penalties.

How often does this have to be said. Fines are for criminal offences.

The only "they" who can fine Capita are judges and to do that Capita would have to be found guilty of some specific criminal offence against some law.

This whole business falls under civil law where there can be penalties in the contract but those are not fines. The only way in which Capita, Oracle or any other of the big contractors would be found to have broken criminal law would be if actual fraud were involved and, whatever you may think and whatever you may wish, it would be unlikely that actual criminal intent would be there and proven to be there.

One thing for which the CEO has no excuse whatsoever was saying it was ready to go live when it very clearly wasn't and still isn't.

His real worry should be that he may have prompted a change in thinking about the wisdom (or otherwise) of outsourcing. There may have been penalties if he'd simply say they weren't ready to take over. They may even have been heavier than those that have to be paid as a consequence from taking over and getting into this mess. They wouldn't have been heavier than the consequences of a policy of taking work back in house.

Re: National Insurance doesn't build you a pension pot

Let's put a few things straight. Landrover driven once a week to a garden centre? You have no idea what rural public transport is like. It;s almost 8pm. I've just come back reom my 3rd journey of the day & have another to come. Tomorrow, probably won't go anywhere but Wednesday will be three journeys, Thursday probably one and Friday two. It's not a Landrover but it is 4WD because its 2WD predecessor caused me quite enough problems getting up the hill when it snowed so back to 4WD it is.

Triple lock? I'm with you there except for the double p (I have to admit that I had the same problem with triple points when I was writing a book that mentioned them rather frequently).

But you're not the only one to go through rental, mortgages, costs of bringing up kids etc. We all did it. Are you suggesting that once we get the mortgage paid off we should go back to paying some rent-seeker for a retirement flat, miles away from family & friends (there aren't that many round here) or, worse still, buy some that can't be resold because a scammy developer has set the ground rent to double on some schedule and the management charge to be increased on a whim? Len Deighton had some line about Catholic countries where families work hard to keep aged relatives with them and Protestant countries where families work hard to keep aged relatives in retirement homes in genteel desperation. You reminded me of that line.

FYI my dad built () not had built) this house which I inherited but a great deal of my teenage weekends went into mixing concrete, mortar and plaster, or helping put timber through the circular saw and planer. No way am I going to leave other than be carried away, a feeling I shared with my parents. No, we live here, where there beside the few left of my generation of my family, my daughter and my grandchildren - to whom we provided child-minding of course.

Yes, life is topsy-turvy. You have least money when you need it most. Nobody's found a way to get round that by paying top salaries to 20-somethings and young 30-somethings. We were there in our turn. Your children will be in theirs. You will also be here in your turn. The situation doesn't change. Your perspectives on it do and will.

In the meantime I'm old enough to think "Wow, even the boomers are retiring now" but still active enough to help drive those still older who have had to give up their cars. I am not going to be shut in some poxy retirement box somewhere. This is the countryside in which I grew up and I'll continue inhabiting it as long as I can.

I see your "Ahem" and raise you a "Kids today".

You are since my day (72-86). The possibility that things had changed and I CBA following them is why I put in that disclaimer.

I can assure you it was the case back then. Not a single contribution taken during that period, just a lowered salary to account for the lack of contributions being taken.

Re: Two options for Crapita

Penalty clauses are not fines. OP seems to think that some criminal law against incompetence exists.

Re: Two options for Crapita

No I am not. Only criminal proceedings allow for fines and fines are what the OP said. For fines to be levied there would have to be a breach of criminal law. What law against incompetence does the OP think exists?

"By January, it was clear the service was seriously failing"

The original reports indicated that it was failing at go-live. If Capita manglement believed it would work the only explanation is a reality distortion field greater than that in Microsoft. Hernandez still seems to be affected by it - or perhaps he's hoping it extends to the board and shareholder.

What pot? FFS there isn't one!!! See my comment above. It just doesn't work that way. Never has.

Let me explain something very basic about civil service pensions. There is no pot. It's essentially a Ponzi scheme*. Things may have changed since my day but there wasn't even a contribution as in normal pension schemes. It was effectively a salary sacrifice scheme which meant that the salary, and hence the final salary, and hence the pension based on the final salary was less than if it had been a regular contributory scheme. But I digress. There is no pot. Like any Ponzi scheme pensions are paid out of current income, in this case tax.

As there's no pension pot could you explain how it could have been stolen?

For completeness, everyone else's retirement pension operates in the same way. National Insurance doesn't build you a pension pot, it's just a form of taxation. HM Treasury has a dread of taxation being ring-fenced in this way. So much so that they coined a word for it, hypothecation. A hypothecated tax sounds so alarming nobody who didn't actually know what it means would want it. Just as NI payments don't go directly and accountably to running pensions, NHS etc because that would be hypothecated, so Vehicle Excise Duty doesn't go to building and maintaining roads.

AI slop writing has taken over the internet, particularly LinkedIn and X

Given that so many YouTube instructional videos have too much character in the voice a lack of character should be welcome.

Re: Reality or Nothing!

"Rare earths aren't really worth much as scrap" but the precious metals used in cat convertors are.

It's an AI web, and we're just rats in the walls

I remember reading that hunter-gatherer communities spend less time per day winning enough food to live on. OTOH the hunter-gatherer economy is the one that supports fewer people per unit area than any other. It also sound like the least comfortable.

User crippled a network while trying to learn Nmap

"anyone who knows HP-UX will remember getting code to compile can be a bit of a challenge"

We never encountered problems like that. We must have been doing something wrong. Although most of our code was written in a 4GL which went through a couple of passes to get to a C compiler.

Re: The opposite....

When all else fails RTFM

LisaFPGA brings Apple's magnificent misfire back in programmable logic

Re: LisaGUI

"One file type, one file handler: the word processor, the spreadsheet editor, the email client. So you end up with a very slick UI that can only do a limited number of tasks"

You have, of course, just described the sort of computer usage which is just about universal. The rest of us are just a fringe market.

Re: Lisas were expensive AF

"so why would you buy a Lisa?"

Because it was so clearly the future. And had the price been affordable it would have been. I doubt there were many who read the original write-up in Byte who didn't think "I want one of those." until they saw the price.

If it had been made affordable for buyers the correspondingly greater sales must surely have made it affordable for Apple as well. However I think the Mac was Job's blessed project in which case it didn't stand a chance of being allowed to compete.

Re: Neat, although there are alternatives

Maybe you need to explain HDMI and USB for the benefit of DrewPH.