Posts by Doctor Syntax

US Department of Defense will stop sending critical hurricane satellite data

Re: There isn't a hurricane on the way

Didn't the hurricanes arrive via the Gulf of Mexico? Now it's the Gulf of Idiocy America they'll behave themselves and go elsewhere.

Re: There isn't a hurricane on the way

"You get what you vote for."

Sometimes. And sometimes you get what other people voted for.

Don't shoot me, I'm only the system administrator!

Re: Never drawn a gun

Imagine somebody has drawn a picture of a gun. If you take a coloured pencil to fill the shape with colour, that's "colouring in the drawing". English is the language of the pun, in this case based on two meanings of "draw" and a dig at the intelligence of cops.

Policemen also get shot. That includes two of my acquaintance in N Ireland. One had been a SOCO so I'd taken part in his training and then encountered many times after that, the other I'd only spoken with by phone in a couple of cases.

The year of the European Union Linux desktop may finally arrive

Re: It's the final countdown.

"This would require competence and intelligence from politicians, which is too great an ask by some margin."

Given TFA gives numerous examples of change being driven by politicians of all levels maybe it's not as big ask as you think. Even those who are not technically competent must have gained some glimmer of understanding that they are a bit exposed to risk and are likely to be asking their advisors. If their advisers are earning their money they'll be researching their answers if they don't already have them to hand.

Re: "This, in turn, means their data and meta-information will be kept in a US-based datacenter."

Nor will it mean anything if your customer, company, country or continent get sanctions by the whim of the current, whimsical POTUS.

Re: Maybe this is finally he time

Oddly enough, having been forced to move to an "open standard" they changed the UI, forcing their users to relearn. LO's UI was rather close to the previous MS Office's. Now, of course, the having to relearn the UI is the argument for adopting LO. I wonder why MS changed the UI - but it's worth remembering that all MS's corporate users had to relearn the product and .... the sky did not fall in.

Re: Maybe this is finally he time

"Then, 5 years after, they also announced the were back to Microsoft due to all the headaches about file format et all ..."

From TFA (you did read it, didn't you?):

"Oddly, this move came after Munich's city leaders were pleased to announce in 2016 that Microsoft was moving its German headquarters to town. Funny that, eh?"

What if Microsoft just turned you off? Security pro counts the cost of dependency

Re: It's all built on sand...

Perhaps I should clarify that I do use a commercial provider, for myself and for a local organisation. They're Mythic Beasts who definitely seem to be in their right senses. In fact I rely on multiple email addresses to avoid spam. There are a few businesses that seem not to understand spam can lose customers. I either tend to shut off their specific email address except when it's needed (hello, insurance companies) or tailor filters to bounce specific villains (e.g. a dentist sent me stuff to be signed by Docusign so now my medical address has a filter to bounce them).

The question is, who in their right senses would trust their non-US business email to one of the US gargantuans?

Re: I have 2 words for you

"I'm Irish now"

In which case I commend you Frank Mitchell's book "The Irish Landscape"*. He traces the huge rise in the Irish population (graph on p205 or thereabouts) and finds it difficult to find any other cause than the cultivation of the potato as a staple.

* Actually I commend it to anyone interested in Ireland. He was one of the pioneers in the discipline which took me to Belfast almost 60 years ago.

Re: We need more options

Alternative summary - if you're in IT management and you're not conducting risk analysis and contingency planning are you earning your salary?

Re: Choosing risk

You're stating known odds and outcomes. Businesses, thinking themselves to be smart, are risking unknown odds and consequences but the evidence seems to be that the odds are getting shorter and the consequences higher. Without being told it's as if you discover the hard way that only 2-5 pay £100 while 1 & 6 lose £1,000.

Re: I have 2 words for you

Ooooops!

"did two" indeed. Grrrr.

Re: It's all built on sand...

"Nobody in their right minds runs a mailserver."

Really? The people who run mine definitely seem to be. OTOH there's a good argument for saying that nobody in their right mind would let a large US corporation run their mailserver, not if they're paying attention to what's happening.

"A failure to properly anticipate the security risks has led to a dependency on scale that leaves us with all our eggs in someone else's basket."

The problems of M&S and a good many others seems to be not just a reliance on their suppliers but the suppliers' suppliers. Hence the term supply chain. It's time to reflect on the saying about the strength of chains.

Re: It's not just Microsoft

"Email is likely the biggest"

You can have email without depending on any of the four.

Re: there are more mobile phone owners than toothbrush owners

"nearly every human uses a mobile phone"

Even the toothless.

Re: I have 2 words for you

The hungry forties also affected England. Two of my great grandfather's four brothers emigrated in the 1840s, a third in the early 50s and probably the last one did two as I can't find him after 1851. This was a common situation. The population of both countries had spiked to what was, for the time, an unsustainable level. (The fact that we might be in a similar global situation is worth considering.)

Re: We need more options

"I don't see viable alternatives."

Then you need to start looking around.

"more likely the children of anti-vaxxers will die than the anti-vaxxers themselves almost all of whom were vaccinated in childhood."

Darwinian selection only requires that the genes are removed from the gene pool. It doesn't matter if it's in generation P or F1.

Kaseya CEO: Why AI adoption is below industry expectations

Re: because it's a grift?

Pay off half their staff? More likely hope that a return to office mandate will leave half of them to quit without having to be paid off.

Re: Maybe….

Google search very seldom returned a null result, it would almost always find something matching some word in the search term however irrelevant. Not returning null for something about which it doesn't have data would be an essential Google requirement. It's not surprising that a Google LLM would give fictitious results.

Re: Agenthicc

Is it possible that "the way the package does it" might be, if not deliberately shit, somewhat minimal in order to sell expensive customisation services?

"industry expectations"

Perhaps "hope" would have been a better word. Increasingly frantic hope as the money gets burnt.

Did SatNav "learn" to give us directions are do they just follow some graph theory problem, the sort of things mathematicians have been working on since Euler, if not before? Intelligence would not have to be arm-wrestled away from taking a busy motorway nor would its preferred route to get to the motorway be joining a notoriously overcrowded A road via a junction with appalling sight-lines.

Actually, SatNav has to do three quite complicated things of which the routing is only one. It also has to handle voice recognition and speech synthesis. I'm not sure either of the latter is handled intelligently.

For instance I set a country house hotel as a destination without adding "Hotel". Voice recognition completely failed when I gave the command to go there with "Hotel" added. Intelligence would have recognised the likely destination and asked for confirmation. Nor would intelligence offer to navigate to the centre of the city when given then name of a a small village as a destination.

Speech synthesis seems to handle place names better than road names. For instance "Denby Dale" is pronounced sensibly as a place name. "Denby Dale Road" is pronounced "Den bid ale road". I get the impression that the phrase is being concatenated into a stream of sounds and then fixed rules being applied to split up the stream. Intelligence would not do that.

Re: Maybe….

"Completing forgetting that the drudgery is usually the foundational layer of knowledge that allows you to do the exciting stuff with some level of competence."

And also forgetting it's what you get paid for.

Exif marks the spot as fresh version of PNG image standard arrives

They're - rightfully - have been described as MINGing.

They thought it was all over...

"it was all over in a year or two"

Except for the animated GIF.

BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex

+1 for the millimusa.

Fresh UK postcode tool points out best mobile network in your area

Mobility

Does anyone spot the flaw in picking a mobile provider based on provision in one particular area? Although I suppose if you abandon your landline it does become a factor.

Don't look up: NASA is struggling to execute its planetary defense plan

I suppose after a big one lands then the extra funding needed to prevent another will be available in principle but in reality it will be hard to raise it.

Supply chain attacks surge with orgs 'flying blind' about dependencies

"Cyber resilience generally refers to reaching a point where an organization can confidently and effectively detect, neutralize, and recover quickly from any kind of cyber attack. "

It's one thing an organisation being able to do that is it's attacked but what about an attack on an nth party in the supply chain? If that party's taken out in an attack can the organisation function without it? If it can why is that in the supply chain?

The launch of ChatGPT polluted the world forever, like the first atomic weapons tests

"Subsequent generations of AI models may therefore become less and less reliable, a state known as AI model collapse."

And how is this a problem?

CloudBees CEO says customers are slowing down on 'black box' code from AIs

"the founding assumptions of DevOps as a whole"

There were founding assumptions? Other than vendors being able to sell a whole lot of stuff, training and consultancy, of course.

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: PICNIC

Problem with knob controlling monitor.

Re: Manual?

Here's a slightly heretical viewpoint. If you're writing custom software for some aspect of a business's operations there shouldn't be a separate application manual. There should be a business manual for taking a sales order, terminating a tenancy or whatever. It should detail the steps taken to do that, manual, conversations with customer or whatever as well as entering the data. That is the responsibility of the department concerned but you can guarantee that if you provide a free standing application manual the department will seize on it. Offer to help them write the fill manual. Preferably starting before you write any code for what I hope will be obvious reasons.

Re: doing so yielded "no coherent feedback at all."

documentation written *solely* for an audience who is new, not just to the program in question, but to computers in general

A variation on this is the manual which starts with how to install it - which might, in fact be how to compile from source and install it.

No, I do not need to know how to install it. I'm sitting in front of it. it was installed as part of the distro, or, in a business environment, as part of the build, or it's on the computer of somebody who asked me to help. I want something that tells me what it does and how to do it. If it needs installation instructions refer me to the Appendix which is where you could have put it. I don't want to lose the will to live thumbing through instructions to do something that's already been done.

Re: doing so yielded "no coherent feedback at all."

TMMM starts with differentiating between the professionally produced product and two people working out of "a remodelled garage" if I remember the phrase correctly, the difference being about an order of magnitude. Nowadays, however a lot of FOSS does indeed come into his category of a product. I mentally categorise things into product or project and all too often the home page of the latter used to consist mostly of the release history or a "News" link that pointed to that. Now, of course, even if it has an address for a home page it points directly to Git(hub|lab).

Re: doing so yielded "no coherent feedback at all."

4. What it doesn't do.

Eventually you get used to reading descriptions etc. & taking notice of what's not there. Remember that humongous T&C, EULA, privacy policy or whatever about Windows telemetry? It gave a few examples of what might be taken but there was no statement as to what wouldn't.

Re: manuals

"If you're talking about the saying: "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different outcome", that's fucking terrible definition of insanity."

I believe it was Einstein who said it. I think it would be his comment on quantummechanics in general and the uncertainly principle in particular.

Re: I touch it and it breaks!

My local history group has an ex-publisher who is invaluable as a proof reader.

Re: I touch it and it breaks!

I have a friend who's been wheelchair-bound for a few years to who I frequently transport. One public building we visit has a long sig-zag ramp to bypass its main steps but a tiny lift. Worse than being tiny its upper floor doors are at right angles to the ground floor door so the wheelchair has to be turned round inside the lift or she wouldn't be able to get out. Fortunately her new powered chair can more or less spin on its own axis.

Re: I touch it and it breaks!

"A laptop with a small screen"

I tried installing an up-to-date distro on a Nettop type machine to take with my document camera. It's surprising how many windows run off the bottom or tip of the screen.

Xlibre fork lights a fire under long-dormant X.org development

Re: Always get downvoted

Dammit, X, not C.

Re: I still like the principle of X

If the designers of X Windows built cars you'd have one cockpit remotely controlling several cars. Yes, with multiple steering wheels. If you wanted one steering wheel to control them all you need the designers of KVM switches for that.

It's an odd fact of life that different use cases need different solutions.

Re: I still like the principle of X

Who notices a bit of extra bloat on Windows?

Re: Always get downvoted

I don' think C was intended for the circumstances in which you're condemning its use. Because the server provides realisation of the UI as a service its relationship with the computers* doing the heavy lifting is the opposite to what one might expect. What you need is something more suited to the use case - even a dumb terminal on a serial line.

Horses for courses.

* Yes, in the plural. The whole point is that a user at one terminal can access several different providers of computation services at once. That's an inherently insecure requirement as the user can easily bridge them with no more than cut and paste.

Re: Always get downvoted

Always assuming the A/C you just replied to was the OP of the thread. That's the trouble with A/Cs.

Perhaps el Reg could look at a scheme whereby A/Cs get numbered as they join in the commentary of an article. That way they could maintain their anonymity if they need it but maintain the integrity of a discussion thread.

Re: Always get downvoted

"for explaining"

Where? Your post consists of a complaint, not an explanation.

Re: Been using Wayland for over a month now as a part of Fedora 42

"I don't know what advantages I'm getting over the Xorg server I had been using for years but I do know it is much more actively developed."

Xorg has been around for a long time. Experience is that it Just Works. There's good reason to keep it like that. Do we need something that's being actively developed? "Actively developed" can mean "still needs work" or "frequently broken" but not exclusively.

US patent office wants an AI to scan for prior art, but doesn't want to pay for it

Re: Welcome to the New Feudalism

Feudalism? No way, feudalism was based on mutual, if unequal loyalty. This is the new brigandage and serfdom combined.