Posts by Doctor Syntax

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

Re: In the raw

Comic Sans is OK. AriaI and the Iike are those which do not distinguish between capitaI l for lndia and Iower case I for Iima.

As a resuIt consider Al: is it short for ArtificiaI lntelIigence or the name AIlan? You have to copy and paste into something set to dispIay serif or a better sans serif font to teIl the difference.

GilI Sans throws in confusion with the number 1. l think at least one of the Johnson variants differentiates the Ietters but then confuses l for lndia with the number and some of them do differentiate. lt's an interesting exercise if you have muItiple fonts avaiIable to fire up your word processor, put the offending Ietters and numeraI together and see how many fonts give you three cIearIy differentiated gIyphs.

Re: In the raw

What about the fonts it uses to display. I'd like to think that Courier and Times New Roman survive and that the sooner Arial* dies a miserable death the better.

* and all sans-serif fonts like it

Re: A job for AI?

AI's job will probably be looking at the file and explaining almost what the format is. Alternatively it may be simply telling you it can't help because the bubble burst almost a century earlier.

Re: Should visit a

"serial terminals with various VT100, and the ones which came after had networked serial terminal servers for console access"

Do I know you?

Re: When I retire

"fixed format data structures"

A long while ago we had an accounts system which I'm pretty sure was written in COBOL although it was proprietary. It used C-ISAM as did the older versions of Informix and it would have been convenient to use it as look-up tables. On investigation it turned out that although there was a single data file it had multiple format records. The main "fixed" thing was the record length although I think there must have been some format indicator as well. AFAICR we CREATEed a table with the columns corresponding to the record type we wanted, deleted the files that that wrote and sym-linked in the data and index files from the accounts and accessed them with the WHERE clause picking out the appropriate records with whatever identified that format. In fact we might have repeated that for multiple format types.

"musicians have discovered there's no easy way to port Finale compositions to any other format"

Following the link reveals two points. 1. There's no hint of an apology to their customers, just thanks for contributing money over the years and 2. files can be exported to an open standard MusicXML.

How Microsoft gave customers what they wanted: An audience with Bill Gates

Re: I think he was too busy preventing other people stealing Microsoft innovation /s

The timing of the Jim Allchin memo is very interesting. The memo is 2002, the SCO suit started in 2003.

Re: Not just BillG but Balmer too…

"no fun for anyone involved"

Least of all for the customer. Food distribution is one of the most sensitive to delays and a computer system giving problems going to be very stressful for them. It might be small money to Microsoft but it would be big money to them.

Email to the CEO email address* can be effective.

One trick I've used in respect of a collapsing section of road was to send an** email to the CEOs of the local council and the utility addressing them jointly and suggesting they sort it out between themselves. I prevented them from than simply pointing at each other which they may well have done if I'd written separately to them or called their help-lines. It worked.

* ceoemail.com is your friend.

** Just the one email with two To: lines, no messing with BCCs so both knew the other had got the same email.

IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn’t taken over the world, but don't call it a failure

Re: The real reason nobody wants to use it

"the way telephone networks pretty much solved the number space exhaustion problem over a century earlier.. just adding more numbers."

Attractive though this is as a solution, it isn't going to work. Telephone numbers are stand-alone sequences of digits. IP addresses are embedded in fixed length headers. If you extend an address it tramples over something else, either before or after it. The only way to handle it would be to have variable length headers, count the header length and then work out from that which bytes are address and which are other things. If the IPv4 had been specified in that way initially it would have been possible but the world is full of S/W stacks expecting fixed length which wouldn't survive the first batch of extended addresses.

European Space Agency hit again as cybercrims claim 200 GB data up for sale

Re: honest question

In this case it's not tens of billions of files; it's about the same size as my Downloads directory (maybe I should do some spring cleaning there).

On the whole I think the one-word answer to your question is "convenience". It trumps security every time. "Cost" probably comes a close second and "specialisation" a close third. Between them they ensure that it's cheaper to buy in facilities and those facilities are apt to be produced by specialists who have to rely on other specialists for components and they in turn ... you know how it goes.

That in turn produces what is euphemistically called a supply chain although supply tree would scarcely so it justice. The attack surface is immense. The complexity is probably unknown and, therefore, ensuring it's secured is virtually impossible because somewhere along the line it's likely that something couldn't be conveniently secured or maybe not even secured alone.

Cybersecurity pros admit to moonlighting as ransomware scum

I'm not sure about plea deals. Sentences hard enough to act as deterrents are needed.

Re: "conspiracy to obstruct, delay, or affect commerce or the movement… etc

"conspiracy to obstruct, delay, or affect commerce or the movement of any article or commodity in commerce by extortion."

It seems fairly straightforward to me. You need to remember that the law tends to treat things rather literally. If, say they'd been accused of simply obstructing commerce etc they could argue that they didn't actually obstruct the victim's operations, they merely delayed them and on that basis they might succeed. So the charge includes a series of almost but not quite synonyms to close off such arguments. Likewise they could argue that something was a commodity rather than an article.

You just need to parse it properly, just as you'd have to parse a complex conditional statement in a program.

(obstruct, [or] delay, or affect) (commerce or (the movement of any (article or commodity) in commerce))

New York’s incoming mayor bans Raspberry Pi at his inauguration party

Re: Brands...

Even so, raspberries grow on canes, not trees.

Re: Brands...

Granny Smith? No, Bramley.

Re: Brands...

"An All American Apple Pi (Designed in Cupertino) is preferable"

I thought it was the apple that was the forbidden fruit.

ServiceNow lays out possible co-CEO structure, but says no change imminent

Re: co-CEO

It would avoid spending shareholders' money on a second salary. If the business is concerned about shareholder value that should be a major consideration.

Re: ITSM ??

IT Services for MBAs?

Imagine there's no AI. It's easy if you try

Re: That's not survival. It is an unnecessary nightmare.

"As Tron says above if the battery and the frame are one and the same then when the battery dies, as it will, so does the frame."

I think I've worked out the solution. When the battery won't hold charge you fit the car onto a new battery.

Re: Hmmm...

"This, like GDPR, is a burden that falls unfairly on small businesses, community services and new entrants to the market"

GDPR is only a burden to those intending to misuse customers', clients' or members' personal data.

Banksy's Limitless limited by Windows Activation

"That said, we would not put it past the artist to make some Windows borkage part of the exhibition itself."

Neither would I. It seems a bit - shall we say dismal?

When the AI bubble pops, Nvidia becomes the most important software company overnight

Re: Follow the money

Hopefully the response will be "good riddance".

Tis the season when tech leaders rub their crystal balls

Re: "tech leaders rub their crystal balls"

"Must make a dreadful racket when they bang together"

It certainly is. We all hear it.

“By 2026, brands won’t be defined by logos or slogans; they will be defined by their AI. These customizable agents will become the ultimate brand ambassadors: smart, personalized, and continuously evolving with every exchange. In this new reality, the divide will be absolute, and the brands that win will be the ones whose AI delivers a consistently exceptional experience, and everyone else will fall behind.”

Bingo. What else would you expect from a salesdroid whose customers are salesdroids?

I think there are going to be opportunities for businesses prepared to offer real customer service rather than the oxymoron of something consistently exceptional.

"While Roese said solid ROI has begun to emerge among large companies capable of integrating AI, ServiceNow said in 2026 AI will be defined by the value it brings to the bottom line."

Whose bottom line? The AI vendor, the integrator or the recipient of the slop who expected a sensible response?

Europe's cloud challenge: Building an Airbus for the digital age

Re: there is a lot more to this than meets the eye

"which is why many brits voted to leave the EU" and ended up stuck between all three sides with no influence in any of them.

Re: The EU needs a law

A subsidiary is just that - a subsidiary and the parent is subject to the law of its own country. Something more arm's length is needed - something like a franchise operation where the franchisee is EU owned, managed and legally bound. That's what the EU should be pushing, if not legislating for.

Re: US has just denied visa to Breton because his stance on US "big tech"

If they're really risk averse they should be recognising their short-sightedness by now and seeing that what they thought was low risk really wasn't.

Re: Big three

A hosting business of any size would be outside IR35.

Much as I despise IR35 it has its limits.

Re: "Digital Sovereignty" -- More Misdirection

"There's degrees of cooperation. MS put up quite a stout legal fight against the US law enforcement request for access to an email account hosted in Ireland. They lost in the end."

They were grateful for the CLOUD Act. It meant they didn't have to bother fighting any more.

Re: "Digital Sovereignty" -- More Misdirection

Some clothing is more likely to leak than others.

Re: air gap

Could you give a reasoned explanation of that?

Re: So Airbus Builds Out It's Own "Cloud" Provider In Europe......

What should now be clear is that a monopoly or even an oligopoly is unacceptable, especially if it's subject to extra-territorial control. The lure of using somebody else's computer was saving costs, especially the cost employing all those IT people. Of course it only swapped one sort of cost for another - the cost of security.

Where the EU effort has really gone wrong has been a total lack of urgency and the main conclusion I take from the article is that it's improved to being a simple lack of urgency. With such a whimsy in the White House with designs on an EU member's territory they really should be looking at scenarios which don't allow for lack of urgency.

"clients will have to migrate the SaaS stack and the workspace suite too, something that is sometimes not even technically possible."

If Trump sanctions them, their country or just their CEO they'll find that it is technically possible. Necessity is a great driver and there are three more years to go.

Re: "Digital Sovereignty" -- More Misdirection

"they too are not immune to problems"

Not least, a man with a JCB.

Re: So Airbus Builds Out It's Own "Cloud" Provider In Europe......

This may be a radical suggestion but - try reading he article before commenting.

Accused data thief threw MacBook into a river to destroy evidence

"stuffed it in a Coupang canvas bag"

Good to see an (ex)employee showing brand loyalty.

Crims disconnect Wired subscribers from their privacy, publish deets online

“Conde Nast does not care about the security of their users’ data" and neither do the hackers so they might as well stop trying to claim the moral high ground.

Sam Altman is willing to pay somebody $555,000 a year to keep ChatGPT in line

Impossible tssk - deshittifying the intrinsically shitty.

No plan survives first contact with reality. In this case reality needs a means of predicting how harm might be caused.

Indian cops cuff ex-Coinbase rep over selling customer info to crims

But,but,but...

... isn't crime what cryptocurrency was made for?

How California built one of the world's biggest public-sector IT systems

"$4.5 billion to $5 billion" for 16,000 users. Say $300,000 per seat. Maybe not quite as bad as it looks if that includes operational costs and some thousands of those users have been using it for some years but still expensive. How long before it's obsolete?

BOFH: The Christmas spirit has run dry – time to show some chiller instinct

I don't think last week's Boss will be coming back so we must already be on (yet) another Boss.

With 43 gallons of isopropanol on fire the halon must be about to be released. The questions is, is this Boss's standing with BOFH good enough to survive that?

Re: Hot Cross Buns Here

Should have mentioned that the chat partly arose from the Christmas Chocolate Reindeer bearing a remarkable resemblance to Chocolate Easter Bunnies.

Humanoid robots are still novelty acts, but investment is surging to make them real tomorrow

Re: Events may be overtaking us

"a live situation in a battery factory where the robots replace humans for high voltage testing of battery packs. This task is potentially hazardous but it also involves plugging in and unplugging cables."

This does not need to be humanoid.

"answering the same dumb questions from never ending lines of people"

Neither does this. This is already deployed on web sties where you can experience it yourself being unable to answer slightly differently phrased dumb questions where it will cope about as badly as a human whose first language is not that of the site's users or humans of any linguistic ability stuck in a non-enabled, script driven environment. The resort of enshittified companies everywhere competing to reach the bottom of the barrel.

"patrolling areas looking for people and things that are out of place."

This is where Real People have a distinct advantage.

You don't need Linux to run free and open source software

Re: Amazingly title happens to be correct;

"what happened to him?"

Good question. Made his last post the day before Eric 9001 made his first.

"UI design is certainly a different discipline; it may be a slog for you but it's bread and butter for those who like doing it. "

And I just wish they'd stop doing it an leave well alone.

Back in about the 1980s we had the CUI guidelines which a lot of early GUI S/W more ore less followed (I know Liam has complaints about the less aspects) but it resulted in a fairly standard design language. Then the UI and UX designers got busy. On the one hand it might have simply been gratuitous busy-work for idle hands.

On the other, I strongly suspect Microsoft threw its weight about to impose the ribbon interface on its victims so that after a few years new users wouldn't understand the FOSS competition's UI which continued to follow the same lines as older versions of Microsoft applications. I also suspect them of having made top-posting the norm for similar reasons whereas we oldies always saw it as an indication of newcomers who lacked the wit or manners to see and adopt netiquette norms.

In consequence what was regarded as good practice and still followed by some FOSS developers (Mozilla fell from grace a long time ago) is seen as "difficult" or "hair-shirt".

There are also instances where FOSS just does its thing for very good functional reasons. The vi editor is one, of course and regular users would not swap it for an editor hampered by a "conventional" but less functional UI. Another instance is the Gimp save functionality discussed about. Pinta is more conventional and all too easy to make the sort of mistakes avoided by having a choice between "Overwirte", "Export" and "Export as" options as well as "Save" depending on the use case.

Re: AoL

Games? Not interested. But from the Unix/Linux world:

1. /home, /opt, /usr/local and /srv (if you use i) have their own partitions. You can blow away the rest with a new installation and keep what's special safe.

1.1 About /srv. Debian and followers have a habit of putting stuff that really should be there into /var including Mariadb databases and Apache webstes. I only tried a reinstall without formatting /var once and it didn't go well. So put those sort of files in /srv and set up symlinks to hide that fact from the OS

2. Use logical volumes, then you don't have to worry about sizes until you really need a bigger/second drive. Set up with unused space and check occasionally. If a volume gets to about 2/3 to 3/4 full add more space to bring it down to about 1/3 to 1/2 full.

Keeping Windows and macOS alive past their sell-by date

I think the kick-backs from all the bloatware trials probably helped lower the price in the old-days.