Posts by Doctor Syntax

Meta convinces Blue Owl to cut $30B check for its Hyperion AI super cluster

"set to mature in 2049 "

Somebody else's problem.

Windows 11 update breaks localhost, prompting mass uninstall workaround

Re: Of course we all know the permanent fix

Download the Debian installer which includes the proprietary drivers and try that. The only problem is likely to be really new H/W whose drivers haven't made it onto the distro yet*. OTOH is still supports my ancient (Win 7 days) net-top with an Intel CPU that won't recognise more than 3 of the 4Gb or memory it has. It even runs the ancient Informix system I installed on it years ago. I don't know Debian is seen as "difficult" and Ubuntu "easier".

* The only problems I've personally experienced along those lines was before there was a proprietary-included installer when it would quibble about Wi-Fi. The solution was to use the wired connection to download the extras. For some reason more recent installers still quibble but it can now be ignored - I think the file of allowed channels per country is missing from the installer's boot image.

Re: The new testing team

No, just the usual ones - the paying customers.

Re: Beyond satire, beyond parody

If you have huge fleet of devices and applications and you're running them on S/W whose vendor regularly breaks them with updates and tells you you must install those updates to stay "secure" and forces you to replace it all every few years you deserve some sympathy. Not a lot because you've decided to keep making the continual investment that instability demands.

Re: Of course we all know the permanent fix

" a disastrous attempt to deploy a box that would simply load and repeat a video"

If you installed any of the usual desktop distros it would have had VLC available assuming it wasn't included in the basic install.

Any of the desktop distros will automatically pull in any dependencies. In Debian, for instance apt install vlc is the only command you need to give to do that if you're using the command line.

Click the loop button on VLC - 2nd from right and your video will loop.

"A cursory glance showed a similar process would be needed to build my own sound card support."

Again, unless you built the box with some unusual sound card any modern desktop distro will have the support there.

I guess from your description this was a very long time ago and/or or you were using something like Gentoo or Linux from scratch. Your account does not match what happens with today's desktop distros but will undoubtedly be repeated endlessly as an example of why Linux is unusable by those who have never touched it.

Meanwhile, does Windows still have DLL Hell if you ry to install a few applications outside of the Microsoft store?

Re: Of course we all know the permanent fix

"I don't want to tinker, not anymore, I just want it to work."

Yesterday evening was out local Civic Soc's monthly talk. Our speaker who was having some vision problems, had his presentation on a memory stick (PP has it's good uses) and I got dragged into helping find it on our president's W11 laptop and was reminded again of the mess that is the Windows UI. It was almost impossible to keep track of the cursor as the equivalent of Dolphin seemed to throw up a directory listing of everything the cursor was dragged over.

If I'd have known I'd have brought along a laptop of my own as well as the mics & spare presentation remote. It wouldn't have had PP but no promblem - Impress would have done the job. In fact the laptop we were using was on LO so Impress was what was being used.

Re: Of course we all know the permanent fix

"Linux doesn’t stand a chance with 4000 text editors to choose from."

And none of them with AI forced into them (AFAIK).

Re: "Microsoft's quality control department"

And UI design to painting by numbers.

Maybe they should just jack it in and use Linux or a BSD kernel instead.

Re: "Microsoft's quality control department"

"They were fired a decade ago."

More precisely, testing was outsourced to users.

It sounds as if the testers are reporting the bugs they found exactly as intended.

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

A client of mine (engineer's supplier - think big shelves of bits of metal and counter staff in brown coats) had a fax machine into the early 2000s to take orders. He also had a modem on the back of his Unix server. If he wanted me to look at something he'd ring my mobile, tell me what the problem was and then ring off, unplug his fax and plug the modem into the fax line. My phone was one of the clamshell Nokia Communicators so I'd flip it open, dial in sort out whatever it was.

All advanced tech for its time. All outdated now. All a good deal more secure than leaving everything connected to the internet. Have things really got better?

"Sometimes you didn't, nay couldn't, leave the telex room unscarred...."

Don't just leave it there. How scathed were you?

Re: Reply-all

I suppose even then they didn't learn that messages from sales people are often unwelcomed by the recipients.

The way I read it suggested that he was the hoaxer which would be why he was fired.

Hand in your door pass at reception as you leave.

OK, when you've all finished laughing at fax machines - think of all those big businesses who've been taken down with malware breaches recently. What wouldn't they have given to be able to revert to fax for some of their communications.

Re: Fax machines, that brings back memories

"Sometimes the phone number hadn't been entered correctly"

I remember being on the sending end of that. We used fax S/W and the number was correct. The receiving office had two fax machines and for some reason redirected their calls on one to the other overnight. It was they who fumbled their own number.

I'd have thought that a strongly worded message to the agency was called for - either they get their act together or they will be banned from providing services and a more capable agency will be asked to take over her contract.

Turns out the end of Windows 10 is good for something: The PC refresh cycle

Re: Time to move on

Probably also some sort of list-keeper for which the sledge-hammer will be a spreadsheet.

Boris Johnson confesses: He's fallen for ChatGPT

Re: Johnson sacking

I think that should be "Also found to have misled Parliament etc". That report postdates his having been ousted. The remarkable thing is that he lasted so long.

Literal crossed wires sent cops after innocent neighbors in child abuse case

About 10 years ago I wrote to my then MP telling him that I would not be prepared to support his party because they seemed to be celebrating the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta by removing the due process of law, the consequence introducing short cuts in whatever was the version of investigatory powers at that time. This is the sort of outcome I envisaged.

Allegations are easily made but they're not necessarily true and this really needs to be kept in mind by anyone investigating crime. An incorrect allegation against an individual is damaging and the fact that one wrong has been committed does not justify or excuse a second one being committed by an investigator. My daily fear as a forensic scientist was that I might find myself in the middle of a miscarriage of justice. Even now I find myself being stressed by recalling those days although they were many decades ago.

We've seen too many instances in recent years of the victims of miscarriages being shoddily treated even if they have suffered for years and this seems to be yet another example. It's true that the police had been mislead by an error on BT's part but those wrongly suspected should be treated and respected as being as much victims as abused children.

There are no short cuts to investigating crime if this sort of thing is to be avoided and yet the Home Office persists in trying to get Parliament to give it more.

Auction house Sotheby's finds its data on the block after cyberattack

Are they threatening to sell the data off in lots?

Larry Ellison's latest craze: Vectorizing all the customers

"Now some people who are cynical, you would say there is nothing more valuable to us than our customers"

Not at all. The customers' bank accounts are what's valuable to him.

Apple goes all in on AI acceleration with M5 MacBook, iPad, and Vision Pros

My first laptop had an IR link built in. It was, briefly, useful as I had a gig doing where It needed to write and print off some documentation and there happened to be a convenient printer with an IR link built in.

It seems a curiosity now. I wonder when we'll be thinking the same about AI accelerators.

Schleswig-Holstein waves auf Wiedersehen to Microsoft stack

Re: Yay for Schleswig-Holstein !

You have Impress presentations instead.

Re: Nextcloud works

And kilometres closer to Schleswig-Holstein.

Re: Open-Xchange ?

It looks as if the PDF was more of a tool for selling the idea to management & government types. It seems to be very readable once on gets past the initial BS Bingo couple of pages. One interesting aspect is that there's also an OSS at Federal level. That will help.

"it's also notable that shortly after the switch back Munich became the location of a major Microsoft office for Europe"

AFAICR the announcement of that office move preceded the switch back. And there's a limited number of times an office can be relocated without losing credibility.

Re: Proof (if it were needed)

If you read TFA you'll find that the appropriate word is "did", WRT Outlook/Exchange. I'd like to see a report on the pregress with Office. They have provision for exceptions for professional requirements but, this being a top-down mandate and, assuming they have some sort of annual reporting system in place, I can't see many users wanting to be exceptions.

Frightful Patch Tuesday gives admins a scare with 175+ Microsoft CVEs, 3 under attack

Re: Oh look, so many, many patches you Win10 holdouts won't get

Surely they wouldn't pull a stunt like that, would they? Would they?

Chinese gang used ArcGIS as a backdoor for a year – and no one noticed

Re: Misleading summary

I may have misunderstood TFA but I think it's saying that they got in to add the code to malware to server application code in a repository, not breaking into a single server instance. If that's the case then any arcGIS servers with that plug-in enabled will be running it. If that's right it's potentially quite a serious issue because utilities run this kind of stuff so the risk is that it's let them in to all sorts of infrastructure.

What do we want? Windows 10 support! When do we want it? Until 2030!

If you're already on W11

On the basis that MS is supporting Windows for 11 years look on the next six years as time to work on your migration.

Re: Not the same?

I agree, there are at least two separate issues here. One is update support, the other is dependence on a vendor-provided server. However the quote from the campaigners: "The end of Windows 10 support is just one example of a systemic issue: software-driven obsolescence." does, in fact, cover both and the vendors have the same motivation as well: "We've got their money, lets not spend any more on supporting them.".

Re: Awareness Of Linux Is Still A UK Media Problem

Kudos to the Grauniad but - "Make sure you back up all your files to an external drive or similar safe storage, as replacing Windows is likely to wipe them or make them hard to access."

Unless there isn't enough room on the drive to install Linux alongside the Windows partition that can be left in place and the user's Windows directory linked into the Linux home directory. It would help if this was a prominent option on any Linux desktop distro installer.

"Ironically, the decision will become effective as of 14 October: International E-Waste Day."

No irony. It's just Microsoft's contribution. They're generous that way.

Ubuntu 25.10 lands: Rustier and Wayland-ier, but Flatpak is broken

Re: After trying different distros.....

I'd add Debian or preferably Devuan for anything.

But as a KDE user XFCE is too weird; I haven''t looked at Cinnamon for years but AFAICR it sets out to emulate older versions of Gnome so probably a bit weird too but could be worse. It's just a matter of what you're used to and long live the variety of FOSS desktops.

It sounds as if establishing a release date and releasing whatever you've got then is no match for releasing only when it's really ready. Which is fair enough if you regard non-LTS as bleeding edge development releases.

DGX Spark, Nvidia’s tiniest supercomputer, tackles large models at solid speeds

"In 2016, Nvidia CEO and leather jacket aficionado Jensen Huang personally delivered the first DGX-1 to Elon Musk at OpenAI."

Has he settled the invoice yet?

Researchers intercept unencrypted satellite traffic from space blabbermouths

I suppose the consequence would be to encrypt IP traffic going via satellite and leave all the other internet traffic as is.

British govt agents demand action after UK mega-cyberattacks surge 50%

Re: Anything of substance?

The Beeb reports more on the letter to CEOs (worth taking a look as it takes a complementary view the TFA's https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ced61xv967lo ).

The headline there is that they say to have a plan on paper (quite likely a fair number of CEOs might not realise having on their PA's PC won't help when that's down with the rest) and it should cover falling back to manual operation as well as recover. It's also the sort of sound advice any of us could have given but, of course, as it would have come from us it wouldn't count for much. The same advice coming from govt. stands a better chance of being heeded. Iet's hope it is heeded because, done properly, it's far from trivial and it would involve taking a serious look at their current defences and maybe even deciding to do something about them as a result.

"The NCSC doesn't name them"

The Beeb's story also includes the Harrods breach as nationally significant. I suppose it tells us something about what's significant to the Beeb.

Microsoft's OneDrive spots your mates, remembers their faces, and won't forget easily

Re: Mac v Windows

They'll need an OS kernel to go with it. How's the Hurd these days?

Re: OneDrive - no thanks

"I don't put any photos anywhere near it"

Anywhere on your PC is probably "near". Maybe anywhere on a device connected to it.

Re: Nothing

Fortunately governments are gradually having second thoughts about Microsoft.

Re: You have to lawyer out their claims

Paging Max Schrems

Then shalt thee

s/ee/ou/

Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters rage-quit the internet (again), promise to return next year

With half a dozen already arrested it's quite likely that the police now have names of a few others, either from somebody hoping to plead to a lesser charge or from the devices that have been seized. No wonder they keep ducking out of sight.

Keep looking over your shoulders, lads. It could be you next.

Bose kills SoundTouch: Smart speakers go dumb in Feb

What did they expect? They bought a product dependent on somebody else's computer so shouldn't be surprised when it gets switched off.

You'd expect that be now people should have learned better but, no, the Gadarene rush continues.

Benioff retreats from idea of sending troops in to clean up San Francisco

Perhaps the shareholders should seek to have him removed on medical grounds. If he can contradict himself so blatantly without appearing to recognise it he may have cognitive problems.

Microsoft 'illegally' tracked students via 365 Education, says data watchdog

"Microsoft 365 for Education meets all required data protection standards and institutions in the education sector can continue to use it in compliance with GDPR. We will review the Austrian data protection authority's decision and decide on next steps in due course."

Translation: "We're right. Maybe we'll ge round to reading this bit of paper that says we're not and then work out how to ignore it becuase we're right."