Posts by Doctor Syntax

LibreOffice adds voice to 'ditch Windows for Linux' campaign

I'm a little surprised they didn't suggest installing LO on the existing W10 as a first step, just to show the sky doesn't fall in if you venture outside the Microsoft cage.

Re: That's bullshit

If you only need W7 for some specific application like that surely a small partition on a dual-boot laptop is enough.

Japan builds near $700M fund to lure foreign academic talent

"the geologically slow wheels of the British Parliament"

Make that wheel in the singular. I'm not sure they'd even fund a unicycle but w wheel on a stick like they use to measure roads might just be affordable.

Put Large Reasoning Models under pressure and they stop making sense, say boffins

Re: Breaking: Intelligence works like Intelligence.

ISTM that sentience is a pre-requisite for intelligence. Without it all you have is a lot of number juggling and maybey some randomness.

Re: Breaking: Intelligence works like Intelligence.

Intelligence is not present in LLMs. The situation with those advocating it is open to debate.

Re: Breaking: Intelligence works like Intelligence.

"we don't typically consider it prudent to employ Neanderthals to run multi-billion dollar enterprises"

The limiting factor will be the extinction of Neanderthals, prudence doesn't come into it.

It isn't clear how humans make expert decisions

And that can apply to questions that don't require much expertise at all. I'm not sure if it's been superseded but the standard book from my student days for identifying British seed-bearing plants stands about 2" thick, printed on thin paper and consists of a key, mostly binary but sometimes offering more choices, and s series of descriptions to check. It represented the combined knowledge of three leading botanists of the time. It's the sort of thing you might end up with if you asked a group of experts to codify their knowledge in their particular domain.

Following it you could, in a few minutes, identify an oak tree assuming it was in flower. A machine could probably follow it although it would have to do quite a bit of image analysis to answer the questions in the key. OTOH most people in Britain will be able to identify an oak tree from just the leaf at a glance. We don't identify things we know, nor diagnose things in our area of expertise, by following a decision tree - we just know them and it's very difficult to put how we know into words in a way that can be communicated to another human let alone a learning machine.

Salesforce study finds LLM agents flunk CRM and confidentiality tests

Could this test be adapted to outsourced customer service teams?

Eurocops arrest suspected Archetyp admin, shut down mega dark web drug shop

"Deep Sentinel also released a cartoon-style video"

Does this mean that law enforcement operations are now required to have avideo maker on the team?

BT chief says AI could deliver more job cuts, hints at Openreach sell-off

"open to selling off any part of BT, including its infrastructure arm, Openreach"

Yes that went well when BT decided it didn't need a mobile network part of the business so obviously it can manage without a wired network either.

The fact that it later had to buy one of its former competing mobile networks at the cost of about a third of its shares is neither here nor there.

Microsoft adds export option to Windows Recall in Europe

"allowing Recall snapshots to be shared with third-party apps and websites."

I take it this means knowingly allowing them to be shared.

Spy school dropout: GCHQ intern jailed for swiping classified data

Re: Bethan David, head of the counter terrorism division at the CPS, said

True, but I'm not sure that the general public know that. "Signing the Officiel Secrets Act" is just an acknowledgement that you've been told - although if you sign things without reading it first you might sign it without having been told.

Re: Imagine if he'd hoovered up millions for useless PPE, or....

Unless you've been in complete isolation except for this one news story you must be well aware that there were a number of determined attempts to do this just this, prevented only by substantial police operations and fanned by just such posts. So no, it is not trivial.

Perhaps you are too young to remember the several thousand deaths mostly in N Ireland but spiling over into the rest of the UK and Irish republic. They too were fanned by words - and many from what you might well describe as middle class people if you think that makes them in some manner less likely to incite hatred. And in those days words didn't have the amplifying power of alleged social media to assist them.

It is not a change of political wind to condemn such provocation, not is it loony. Incitement it violence is incitement to violence at any time and, just as the incited violence would be, it needs to be treated as the crime that it is.

Re: "Signing" The Official Secrets Act

But you might be breaking the Act to go into such detail on a public forum.

Re: Imagine if he'd hoovered up millions for useless PPE, or....

"who was probably flogging state secrets to a foreign entity"

Not supported by the evidence nor, AFAICS, believed by the prosecution but no doubt you have the usual clearer vision than those who have dealt with the case at greater length.

Danish department determined to dump Microsoft

Re: Outlook and SharePoint?

You just don't grok it at all, do you? Let's look at your post:

" their auto-upgraded (strictly no choice) mail client and collaborative filesystem"

What mail client and collaborative software will they be using in future? It doesn't say in TFA. You seem to be making some assumption not in evidence, including that auto-upgrades can't be blocked at the firewall.

"start to methodically stuff LibreOffice integration in carefully-crafted-to-be-unfathomable ways?"

You seem to be assuming that whatever they use would do that. Again, no evidence that it would or even that they'd choose something that would.

Remember they're doing this to get away from any dependency on Microsoft online services so you can discount Exchange and if you discount Exchange then you can probably also discount Outlook because there'd be no reason to retain it, especially, given, as you point out, this is subject to upgrades from Microsoft.

"In this case, maybe, because you're assuming this will be imposed from the top by motivated people."

That is the exact situation TFA reports.

Re: Replacing Office is the easy part

Their preference is for FOSS.

Re: Outlook and SharePoint?

As Perry Mason used to say, the question assumes facts not in evidence.

The conversation is going to be more along the lines of:

Minister: We're going to move away from Microsoft Office to a FOSS alternative, Libre Office.

Manager: Why?

Minister: {Statement of government policy relating to data sovereignty which should be too well known by el Reg readers to state in full here but as this is Denmark might also mention Greenland}

Manager: But I don't know how to use that.

Minister: This department exists to introduce digital technology to the rest of the government. You are telling me you don't have the skills to work here.

Manager:

"As a corporation, decide what you're doing; tell people it is happening; then do it decisively."

Even more so in this case. This is a government dept. and the project is driven by the minister. It's the department digitising the rest of the government so being the one who says you can't handle it is not going to be a good look and ultimately it's going to be the department that decides which way the rest of the govt. is going to go.

A real power user will (a) take it in their stride and (b) work out a few other power tricks. The ones who'll fail will be the ones who think they're entitled to be power users and aren't.

Re: Replacing Office is the easy part

"I'll order a big stash of tartan blankets, and a bolt gun"

Don't forget the quicklime.

Re: Replacing Office is the easy part

"Then tackle the 15% of people who are (or think they are) power users"

They should be easiest to deal with: "Call yourself a power user when can't even....?"

Re: Replacing Office is the easy part

Part of the objective seems to be to get away from dependence on any commercial provider so that wouldn't count although it at least European in origin. However, if you want the ribbon interface in LibreOffice then from the main menu it's View>User Interface... Click Tabbed, click Apply

Re: @b0llchit - US only stepped on toes

Where did you arrive from?

Re: Well good luck, seriously ...

I'd guess that their email is run by the .dk equivalent of .gov.uk or .gov across the pond. Do they run Exchange?

Re: To reckon a guess...

"I'd say that in year or two some high ranking official will come in and throw a fit about how they want Office back"

In this case it's likely they will be referred to the minister* who has made this a policy. Declaring that you can't manage to use what the minister herself is using might result in questions as to exactly how this high rank is justified.

* For avoidance of doubt, that means higher ranking.

Re: how to do it in half a dozen mouse clicks

"Entities flogging e-books produced from scans of theses or academic publications may be caught out by this"

Judging by spams to soc.genealogy.medieval before the Google wrecking ball I gained the impression that many doing this were neither interested in legality, so won't be affected, and were unable to tell the difference between medieval and medical.

Re: Well good luck, seriously ...

Why would they not? Times have changed. Nobody in Denmark is going to take a US company's shmoozing seriously these days. There's no reason why they wouldn't be able to make it work. If there are edge cases in the form of really complex spreadsheets they might have to take a look and replace them with properly written and stable solutions.

Goof news. But the English language article cited contains this remarkable passage:

But changing to user-driven open source systems is also not without challenges, Damsgaard noted.

“If you don’t have a member of staff who can develop the system, you can’t implement it,” he said.

This is FUD. That would only apply if they need specific modifications. It's something that FOSS makes possible but with a mature product such as LibreOffice this is unlikely; after all they've been using MS products without such modifications for years (I'm guessing here but it seems a pretty sound guess).

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

"They contended the world needs sources of clean data"

How clean? Clean of copyright data collected without permission?

Windows 95 testing almost stalled due to cash register overflow

The worst I ever say was really short lengths in the postal address fields. The users were just wrapping one address line into the next - it was all they could do. I think it was because the program was Cobollox with a lot of thinking held over from the days of tape. They had a fixed record length and it was applied to everything. Only N characters available for addresses. Allow for 4 lines and N/4 is what you get. 16 characters (or whatever it was) should be enough for anyone.

Forget Vibe Coding, we're all about Vine Coding nowadays

Re: Vibe

You need a better fitting word for the "i". Try "irrational".

Re: Kudzu

Manglement will love it.

Thank you, kind sir, and your first statement is entirely correct - I should be getting on with either gardening or writing my book. At least I've got a trip to the archives booked next week so the book is getting some attention.

Re: Remember autocorrect spelling checkers?

Too many to read in one go.

As RHEL clones hit version 10, Rocky and Alma chart diverging paths

Re: The plus symbols are animated by replacing them with some other symbol, too fast to read.

Also UCSD Pascal booting up.

AFAIK the record for the number of different time's-a-wasting features must belong to Windows. Microsoft must have an entire coloured pencil dept devoted to designing them.

Meta offered one AI researcher at least $10,000,000 to join up

Re: Meta needs more than AI

You're assuming that a FB single keyword search is intended to find what you want. This is a common error. What any modern search facility is for is to return what the owner wants you to fing.

"all the stationary that you can carry."

Why carry it if it's stationary?

Easy reminder: What you buy from a stationer's shop is stationery.

I'm just a Barbie Girl in a ChatGPT world

What could possibly go wrong?

Wanted: Junior cybersecurity staff with 10 years' experience and a PhD

Re: Time was...

Interface layer needed.

Re: Let's be clear

I suspect that some of these problems can often be laid at the door of ISO 9000 and its friends and relations.

Scene: Quality manual is being written

Wallah 1. We come to minimum experience need for any job.

Wallah 2. It can't be just anybody. All jobs must be done with somebody with good experience.

Wallay 3. How about 5 years?

Wallah 2. Sounds good to me. Should that be the current version of whatever it is they're using?

Wallah 3. That must be right. In fact current versions of anything should always be used.

Wallah 2. I'll go along with that.

Wallah 1. And me. I'll put that down.

And hence we have a requirement to use stuff which is never more than 2 years old and those needing it need to have been using it for at least 5 years.

UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off their backs

Re: Third party software

Make it a condition of employment that the employee may not enter into contracts with the establishment without express authorisation and that attempting to do so is a sacking offence. Do not giev express authorisation for installing Oracle JDK.

Re: Put another way

Be very careful about what you application requirements are before you buy them. Alternatively, have the payroll or whatever run by a legally separate entity with its own handful of employees.

Re: non sequitur

Don't give them ideas.

Re: Students don't have to be paid for

If you don't have a contract with them you haven't agreed to those T&Cs.

Suggested question for 1st year CS course exam: "Is Oracle licencing ransomware? Discuss."

Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43 to drop X11 in GNOME editions

There always seemed to be a problem that if a file was written by Office N in its default format and tent to a user of Office N - m where m was any positive integer then Office N - m would barf at it so as to get the user to upgrade.

I've even seen a heavily macroed Word 3 document capable of freezing to the point of Big Red Switch time a PC not running the exact same version of 3, just on attempting to open it. (LibreOffice wouldn't open it either but not so terminally.)

Slapped wrists for Financial Conduct Authority staff who emailed work data home

"IT kit that is so locked down that it makes work difficult or impossible"

Security theatre at its worst, or jobworthiness.