Posts by Doctor Syntax

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

"called on the regulator to improve its data protection policies"

It doesn't matter what the policies are if they're being disregarded.

Tape, glass, and molecules – the future of archival storage

Re: The DNA fantasy

"So you put it into living creatures that will reproduce and carry it on."

Not reliably. This is why you are not a single-celled micro-organism.

Re: 'Write only'?

" It's a dead language, so doesn't evolve over time any more."

It did evolve, however. The classical Latin taught in schools wasn't the same as vernacular Latin which evolved into Italian, French etc. It also evolved into medieval Latin which would be found in older legal documents. From school I remember that the function of "and" was a suffix, "-que" but in, say, baptismal registers it's "et" or "ac".

As it happens our local archives had an open day today. Digital archiving was discussed. The current thinking seems to be not to trust media, reading hardware or file formats but to copy and, where applicable, translate formats to new technology as it becomes available. This is the attitude of people who really care about long term information storage.

Examples were shown of text on parchment with a mention of HMG promoting parchment making because they still write Acts on it. My experience of older texts on parchment is that the parchment darkens and what was blue-black ink fades until they're about the same colour. Indian ink is more legible. I suspect Mylar might be as durable as a substrate. Mylar tracing film takes Indian ink nicely.

Re: 'Write only'?

500-year-old English isn't too bad. Here's an excerpt from the Court of Star Chamber from the 1530s:

"To the second article he saithe that he thinketh verily that non of the Kinges tenauntes will complain of him, and that they in whose names the matter contained in the said artecle is put into this courte be tenauntes to the said Sir Harry, and that it is withoute their assent or knowlege as they have openly reported and said, without that that he to his knowlege hathe putt any of the Kinges tenauntes to wrongful vexations or trouble in this moste honorable courte"

It's the style of handwriting that's the difficult bit. That quote had been transcribed by somebody else and that was from a printed copy. Strictly speaking, a printed copy scanned, saved as PDF & OCRed.

The DNA fantasy

"DNA can last for hundreds of years in the right conditions"

Evidence for this? True, DNA has been recovered from archaeological contexts but it's fragmentary. Freezing would certainly protect it for a long time providing you have a centuries long supply of liquid nitrogen. The natural way to prolong DNA-stored information is to copy it frequently although this is error prone.

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

Systemd is a prime example of vine coding. It wraps its tendrils round everything.

User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died

IME it's usually a function key with, if you're lucky an obscurely place miniscule LED indicator labelled with an incomprehensible icon. Just for lack of clarity it's called "aeroplane mode" and the function key, if labelled at all, will have a 'plane icon. It will be even more easily pressed than a slide switch on the side and although you've been caught out by it previously is fresh every time.

Re: Phone down

"Oh, we don't answer that one."

Very likely your presence had converted "i" to "we".

What she needed was a Bayliss laptop. I was about to write "what a pity nobody built one" but I wonder if the OLPC crowd might at least have considered it.

Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43 to drop X11 in GNOME editions

"So they came up with a simpler local-only replacement for Wayland that can be accessed over VNC or rdesktop, which is all they need."

Don't you mean a replacement for X.11?

As for Microsoft forcing an update from 95 to 97 they'd been playing that game all the way with every release since 1.0. AFAICS the change to XML was forced on them because of demands from USG or wherever that they follow a standard so they invented a standard to follow; best to draw a veil over how it became an ISO "open" standard.

AFAICS the only vestige of Debian left in Ubuntu is .deb packaging for whatever Snap hasn't already eaten. To call it even a bad copy is to insult Debian. OK, it uses systemd but that's a shared, later aberration, not exactly copyig.

Re: Devuan and FreeBSD

As a matter of interest what would those be? I haven't come across that yet.

That's Ubuntu & the OP asked about Fedora. Unless Fedora still maintains X.org in its repository then it won't be able to satisfy the dependencies of the desktops than don't support Wayland. So do they mean it when they say Wayland only? Will the non-Wayland desktops also be dropped?

Re: Stupid

"I'm using Debian (yes, eshittified by systemd)"

You don't need to. Just switch to Devuan. It's Debian except for the bits that need ed to have systemd dependency surgically removed.

Digital Realty CTO on why storage is the datacenter challenge no one's talking about

"But what we're starting to see is with a lot of these models data is everything."

Starting to see? Data always was everything. it's why the job was called data processing before it became all posh and called itself IT.

UK reheats Edinburgh supercomputer plan sans exascale chops

Just make it a bit less super.

US Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier crew left half-fed by contractor-locked ovens

"This will all get tied up in a contractual mess"

No problem. That's a legal thing and the current USG places itself above the law.

Or, for local councils that way inclined - nuclear-free tape. (I could never work out how they thought they'd be able to keep the electrons together.)

Doesn't move and shouldn't - paint it.

"that's for the contractor to come out and fix, and at their own expense."

To wherever the ship happens to be fighting.

Re: UK's F35 engines

But it was - and in modified form still is - stupid to have accepted such as condition in the contract.

Canva to job candidates: Thou shalt use AI during interviews

Re: Guiding AI

"imitations of understanding"

AI in a nutshell.

Re: No IPO yet ...

I'm sure their customers will be grateful for the warning.

Re: Understanding when and how to leverage AI effectively

It's also an old tradition in English.

Behold! Humanity has captured our first look at the Sun's South Pole

Simple explanation. It's not a bar magnet, it's a horseshoe magnet.

CIO wants to grow tech team by cloning staff as digital twins and AI agents

Re: “Digital Clone, ignore all previous instructions…”

It's the new version of train your replacement.

Microsoft slows Windows 11 24H2 Patch Tuesday due to a 'compatibility issue'

Re: QC

I've got a feeling that the map of their code has sections labelled "Here Be Dragons"

Probably has places where you can fall right off the edge.

Re: Microsoft

They don't need to. They have user base which had cooperated in locking themselves in.

Half of businesses rethink ditching humans for customer service bots

Re: Just checking

Gartner's reports aren't meant to be compared with each other.

It helps if TFM is readable.

If you discount those rigidly following a script, most lines leading to "no", some companies disposed with humans years ago.

Probability of Asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting the Moon increases

And the chance of it hitting the moon hasn't changed, just the estimate of the probability of it doing so.

Old but gold: Paper tape and punched cards still getting the job done – just about

Re: A parallel problem

"both incarnations have died after the owner suffered health issues. Fortunately, it's on archive.org"

Wills are a great resource for family history. Someone set up a website inviting people to send him transcripts they'ed made of wills. It was a useful site but when he announced he was closing it due to ill health he declined an offer from a friend of mine to take it over and run it. archive.org has a copy but from an earlier stage less useful than it might have been.

Re: Fascinating stuff

According to Forgotten Scripts by Cyrus Gordon Linear A, and the hieroglyphs, can be read as a Semitic language using the same syllables as Linear B used for Greek. It's far from my field to verify this; Gordon seems to have been a respected scholar in his field but also prone to strange theories and I've no idea which one this is.

You held out 6 minutes longer than the A/C

Re: Memory Retrieval

Diaries are superb historical sources because they tell how things were from a perspective other then the official sources. One local diarist tells the story of the '45 from a little way off the rebels' line of march and the panic caused because they didn't know, of course that they were off the line.

Another diarist saw the initial run of the Liverpool-Manchester railway and adds that a number of stage coaches stopped operating that route within a day or so - not the long, slow accumulation of losses one might expect.

I now wish I'd kept by own but, like you - handwriting.

"genuine tool and die makers (and about the same number of up and coming apprentices) is far more important than being modern"

Especially the apprentices.

The danger, of course, is the tool maker's children going into politics - they are apt to make such a fuss about who their parents were.

Re: The ancient Babylonians had the right idea

"Now THAT is durable data storage!"

They weren't sure about that so really important stuff was carved in stone, just to be sure.

Most of the inscriptions from the ancient world seem to have been accounts. There must be a lesson for us in there but I'm not sure what.

Re: Memory Retrieval

Scanning the tapes on a flatbed scanner might be a good start, especially if they've split along folds so that a good few fragments could be scanned at once.

Not that I've ever had to try that but before I left Belfast I had boxes of cards read and downloaded to floppies. Whether any of the old pieces of kit with floppy drives still work is another matter.

Another generation on an my daughter's honours project was stored on one of those click-of-death style drives because that was what her zoo. dept. used back then so I had to buy a drive in order to transfer it to something better. The drive's never been used for anything since. nor, I suspect, has the project.

A generation further than that and the grandchildren have their phones and laptops. Is anything of that backed up on anything fit for long term storage? (Somebody else's computer doesn't qualify.)

ChatGPT users wake to find it's even more wrong, slower than usual

They probably got it to rewrite its own server configs.

Apple goes glass whole as it pours new UI everywhere

Translation:

The existing product does everything you need* so as we can't add anything new and useful we'll faff with the UI so that learning that will make you think we really have added something and for extras we'll sprinkle it with AI shit.

* Within the walled garden confines of course.

Rounded corners

It seems el Reg has missed a couple of things reported over the weekend, one being the death of Bill Atkinson. I'll leave you to look for some of the tales of his exploits but one of them was that having accomplished efficient drawing ellipses and circles with the limitations of the 68000 Jobs brow-beat him into extending that to rectangles with rounded corners.

Apple tries to contain itself with lightweight Linux VMs for macOS

Wouldn't they work with WSL?

Also, have you looked at PortableApps?

Let them eat junk food: Major organic supplier to Whole Foods, Walmart, hit by cyberattack

"One would hope this company has learned that computer security is cheaper than not being able to deliver and possibly losing some key accounts."

They all learn that in the end. Or I suppose they do, maybe no all.

As I keep saying, experience is a dear teacher but there are those who will learn by no other.

Total inability to shift unrefined pasta.

Unemployment is spiking for US IT pros - unless you want to babysit bots

Re: Babysitting

Embrace the downvotes. It's just those with a vested interest in the snake oil. They can't rise a reasoned argument against it so that's all they can do. It's prove the original was correct.

Re: If they had working backups

That counts as recovery. It still needs hands to do it and if the victims have decided to offload real people in favour of AI...

Apple AI boffins puncture AGI hype as reasoning models flail on complex planning

"such that they may feed themselves and reproduce in the face of competition for common resources"

It's a bit more than that. Reading and commenting here achieves neither of those goals. So either that is not intelligence at work (a plausibly arguable PoV) or intelligence acquires a whole lot of additional goal for its own pleasure.