Posts by Doctor Syntax

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: "I can understand why he wanted to maintain uptime on the mail server,"

It's a colour that can be spelled either way

A client had a Unix system uptime running into years. Not for bragging rights but because they'd heard rumours of the disk drives not reliably restarting and it had a lot of drives (single digit Gb sized drives. There was a lot of worrying when it had to be moved - just to the other end of the building. Given that every drive in the database was double duplicated it shouldn't really have been so much of a worry but it caused considerable angst in the lead-up to the move - which went without a hitch.

Open Compute Project figuring out how to get quantum computers into classical datacenters

That would need silver threepenny qubits.

SpaceX loses debut V3 Super Heavy in ground test mishap

Something about only blowing the doors off.

Google's AI is eating your email by default. Here's how to shut its mouth

I do hope my long disused Gmail addresses are getting a good helping of spam. It can make a sandwich with that.

AI nudification site fined £55K for skipping age checks

Re: Big picture

Could you walk that one through in greater detail. There seem to be a few steps missing in the logic.

Re: Bet the fines will go nowhere

If it's in the process of being struck off and theirs a fine against it then it may well be that the striking off can be suspended until the fine is paid.

Re: Undress.cc

Agreed. The fine should have been for existing and a few ordersof magnitude greater.

Windows boss defends 'agentic OS' push as users plead for reliability

Re: The Masses Will Get An Agentic OS And Will Not Complain

Usually because reality catches up with them.

Re: New features! New Features!! PUMP THAT STOCK PRICE!!!

"I'm gonna refill my glass with some whisky."

Non-offer appreciated because you misspelled it.

"High-end CAD product ... my CAD vendor want's all this AI crap ... concern is in regard to IP"

All in all i'd say your CAD product is starting to head for the bottom of the barrel and it's time to start looking around.

Re: The problem is ...

"To turn them is going to take something pretty cosmic, something so bad that it would threaten the companies very existence. And I am not talking about the malware groups - this would be something that Microsoft did to them."

Don't discount the malware groups and don't also discount that their effects, on further analysis, can be partly seen as something Microsoft did do to the victims.

There was a story on the Beeb site the other week about a reasonable-sized UK haulage firm - one whose name I recognised from seeing their fleet on the road - that was taken out of existence by malware and we have seen several large UK businesses severely hit this year.

It's not inconceivable that a few board members of some of these companies take a bit of time to reflect over Christmas and come back in the new year asking "How did this happen to us?" and really start digging. They then discover that being anything through and through is a bad idea. They discover that "Enterprise versions and all the active directory, policy settings etc controls that come with it" didn't prevent what happened. At that point some of their senior IT professionals are going to get asked some questions as to what they're going to do about it and if they don't come up with convincing answers (more of the same won't be convincing) the questions will get put to other IT professionals who can answer them.

How many high profile migrations by high profile victims does it take before a few other boards decide the time to go is before they get hit?

Re: The problem is ...

"There are far fewer of us than we think that know anything about how all this works."

From what I regularly see here that would apply to a lot of people in the IT industry. I think Microsoft is banking on that.

Re: They really don't care.

"you're not shareholders that matter"

Once upon a time people also talked about "stakeholders". I suppose they stopped doing that when they remembered what could be done with a stake and hammer.

Re: The Masses Will Get An Agentic OS And Will Not Complain

It will come as quite a shock to my cousin-in-law, long retired hairdresser and 90 in a few days time, to discover that she's a techno-geek. She's been using Zorin since some (fortunately incompetent) ransomware in an email she thought was from someone she knew hit her W7 computer years ago.

OTOH a friend of mine, almost the same age, runs W11 and has some sort of support arrangement with a Windows specialising techno-geek to sort out her problems.

Your "brutal truth" is BS.

I wonder if it starts out like this:

Kid is enthusiastic user of Spectrum, BBC, Atari or whatever.

Goes off to do CS degree

Emerges with all enthusiasm and curiosity knocked out of them

Goes into industry

There's one person on this planet who may actually be changing this. Government and boards alike, outside of the US, seem to have grasped the idea of digital sovereignty and are slowly coming to realise that it might have to be taken seriously.

Odd how things turn out, isn't it?

Re: Pennies

I've already said this once in this thread: frog boiling is Microsoft's key competence.

UK minister ducks cost questions on nationwide digital ID scheme

Re: The next Windrush scandal, except that everyone gets to take part

"Does that mean you have to unlock your phone to access it to show a police officer on demand?"

No need. It's already on the inside and you've no idea what it is doing.

Re: re: I could probably knock something up in Excel

You think that would be a consideration in ministerial and Perm Sec minds?

"I could probably knock something up in Excel if you dont want to pay for an Oracle license"

It may well be knocked up in Execl but at Oracle prices.

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

"I grew up playing Snake on a Nokia phone!"

Not an impressive thing to highlight in your CV to run a tech business. It explains a lot.

Fired techie admits sabotaging ex-employer, causing $862K in damage

Re: What exactly...

"My advice to contractors that feel a bit sour about being let go is don't let it get to you"

I'd go a bit further than that. Remember that what the client is paying for includes flexibility. Your USP over a permie is that you let the client manager smooth over the conflicting peaks and troughs of demand and the peaks and troughs of staff availability and part of that is being easy to let go, something that you're actually charging for in your hourly or daily rate.

However in this case it seems like he got fired rather than let go which is pretty unprofessional in itself. Not temperamentally suited to the job I'd have thought.

Re: Doesn't make sense

Yes, but Common != Universal

It sounds as if the guy got himself fired in the first place. That's pretty stupid for a contractor because the basis of the business is being reliable so it would have just been more of the same.

Boffins build 'AI Kill Switch' to thwart unwanted agents

I wonder if the scraper could be directed to simply consume the model's existing data. Something along the lines of "tell yourself everything you know". That should keep it out of mischief for a while.

Commodity memory prices set to double as fabs pivot to AI market

Re: Bloody hell!

May? I bought a16Gb SODIMM at the beginning of October. It's now about 2/3 more. In fact, that price increase happened within days. Same supplier's prices.

Manchester hits snooze again on joining Palantir-run NHS data platform

Re: Time, bribes & coercion

Mancunians might be wondering whether he's taking his eye off the ball.

Eleven years after Lenovo acquired IBM’s x86 server biz, profits are still elusive

"but AI PCs only account for a third of the new fleet"

Only? Proof that Barnum was right.

Microsoft-SAP pact aims to keep Euro cloud running in a crisis

Re: Seamless failover

You probably don't get an email. You find you don't have data on their cloud. You find you never even had any data on their cloud.

"Customers that Microsoft could no longer serve would have the option to migrate workloads"

Is there anything in the MoU that would protect that option being trumped by a fiat from the US? Is there anything which would protect the contents of the customer cloud being copied to some USG server on receipt of a National Security Letter or frm being deleted with no notice?

Ford rolls into the Xen Project as hypervisor gears up for autos

Re: Coming soon to your car

The rot set in when they gave the Mini wind-up windows.

"it is untenable for safety software to stop working if an infotainment system glitches, and so are exploring in-vehicle hypervisors to isolate different workloads"

The most effective way of preventing the infotainment system from stopping "safety" software working would be to isolate it with its own processor and nothing more in common with the rest of the vehicle than its power supply. The alternative proposed here is to build a SPoF.

Given the quality of the alleged "safety" S/W the best use of resources would be to concentrate on building some sanity into it.

Whatever your job, mentoring is your job – and the one that matters most

Re: How does permanent homeworking fit in with this?

"Leaving aside the touchy-feely human component of social interactions"

Just as well. It can get you into a lot of trouble with HR.

Re: There's an extra reason why you want to mentor

"Someone else will always ask questions about things you may not have thought"

I used to be a tutor/counsellor for the science foundation course in the Open University. The best question I was asked (not at all difficult to come up with an answer on the spot) was from a student who was a science teacher* "Why do I have to use this balance** when I have a digital balance in school?" The answer, of course, was about measurement in science in general and the ability to be able to identify the reference standard on which the measurement depended.

* It was standard experience in the OU that the staff were younger than the pupils and there were a lot of teachers who didn't have degrees in their subjects.

** It was fairly primitive.

Tens of thousands more ASUS routers pwned by suspected, evolving China operation

Re: Open source alternatives - some additional hints and tips

Buy the cheap router first and apply the upgrade to it. If you don't intend it to be a permanent replacement you can put it into service while you upgrade that existing router.

While I agree about short life-times there's also a concern that with state actors about do you trust the manufacturer's update?

Researchers claim 'largest leak ever' after uncovering WhatsApp enumeration flaw

Re: University of Vain-a

"behaving exactly as designed"

There's a basic assumption in there - that anything approaching design was even considered.

Microsoft spins up Azure HorizonDB to take on distributed Postgres rivals

Once upon a time people would complain if a FOSS database wasn't compatible with SQL Server. Now Microsoft is having to produce databases compatible with FOSS. Interesting times.

Ignite awash with agents as Microsoft triples down on AI

I suppose by now there must be agents to manage the agents but are there any agents to manage the agents managing the agents?

Yes, it's agents all the way down.

Anthropic is at the heart of the latest billion-dollar circular AI investment bonanza

Re: Hot air (and water)

When you measure any process only in terms of its inputs it means you don't have a measure of the outputs. You don't even know if there are any outputs worth counting.

"MS ... are spending real money, but also building real AI barns they get real money for renting out."

What's missing in this argument is that when the music stops tso does the demand for AI barns. They might not get the returns for the money they spent.

Musical chairs - with a difference. When the music stops it will be a case of who's not holding an unsustainable load of debt. It might be none of them.

Cloudflare broke itself – and a big chunk of the Internet – with a bad database query

Something goes wrong and the reaction is "We're under attack" and not "Oops, was that me?" from someone who just changed something.

SAP's migration narrative suddenly looks messy as Kingfisher goes off-script

"Earlier this year, German-speaking user group DSAG said that if users eventually wanted to get back on the upgrade path with SAP, they would find that they had lost commercial leverage."

Really? Do SAP not employ salesdroids who will offer just about anything to get a sale? If not they must be very unusual.

FCC looks to torch Biden-era cyber rules sparked by Salt Typhoon mess

Not so much a matter of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, more a case of arguing that it isn't even letting in water.

Brussels eyes AWS, Azure for gatekeeper tag in cloud clampdown

I wonder if they've considered treating CLoudflare as a gatekeeper.

Linus Torvalds is OK with vibe coding as long as it's not used for anything that matters

Re: Boring is good

The applications need to be boring as well.

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: Single point of failure

If half of the Internet is in the same boat no-one half the internet is in trouble.

FTFY

Zoomers are officially worse at passwords than 80-year-olds

Re: "They can probably set up a printer faster"..?

Every week SWMBO sends out a PDF handout for her patchwork class. The class members need to print it out, or at least the last sheet. Why? Because the templates are on the last sheet (sometimes on the last several sheets) and they need to cut those out. Not everything can be just read.

Brits to help foot power bill for datacenters under government AI plans

Re: Burst bubble clause

Or a discount based on inverse of average employee commuting distance.