Posts by Doctor Syntax

808 lines of BBC BASIC and a dream: Arm architecture turns 40

Re: Science Museum

Maybe it's my age - and possibly yours - but the progress from chip wrapping to history seems to have speeded up even more than CPU clocks.

"It would take bigger companies many years to start seeing things the same way as that early team."

Maybe not bigger companies but MIPS was launched about the same time and SPARC a year or so later.

The one interview question that will protect you from North Korean fake workers

Perhaps I should pass on some of the emails I get from people with impeccably Anglo-Saxon names offering all sorts of skills such as web-site development, mobile development, webapps etc. They arrive at the same address as the emails telling me Elon Musk says I shouldn't pay my electricity bill and always from gmail addresses.

Re: The key to fixing this

I'm wondering if my daughter had an in-person interview given that the company is almost entirely remote working - she certainly hadn't seen the UK office then and I'm not sure whether she's seen it now or even if it exists. It would certainly be unacceptable to use anything other than company computers for the information she handles.

Re: How fat is Kim Jong Un?

"as miraculous as wine from water."

AKA too good to be true but never realised by those whose credulity is only matched by their greed.

Re: Or...

A) The Polish name might well be from a US citizen.

B) I'm not familiar with the IT industry in Poland but doubt that it would be "outer" in any other respect than it not being in the US.

C) If a job advert is placed globally then a response is as likely to come from Poland as elsewhere without specifically seeking out "outer" countries. OTOH it does, at the cost of the risk of finding a Nork, extend te talent pool.

I suppose a return to office police does protect against this specific problem as well as protecting against finding the widest choice of talent.

Re: Or...

"And you're unwilling to invest a couple of grand at that final interview stage as part of your due diligence?"

Who's the "you" in this. Obviously it should be the business but more likely the "you" wanting to perform due diligence as the recruiting manager doing the interviews is not necessarily the "you" who's the beancounter unwilling to invest in travel or the "you" who's the bum-on-seat counter requiring return to office.

Ex-Disney employee gets 3 years in the clink for goofy attacks on mousey menus

And he's a muppet so obviously in the wrong place.

The State of Open Source in 2025? Honestly, it's a mess but you knew that already

I'm not sure I'd put too much weight on names given to versions unless they were specifically asked. If Angular started as Angular.js it might still be that in respondents' minds irrespective of what version they're actually running - "Oh, yes, Angular.js version 19 now you ask".

What would be interesting to know is how the various distros are used. Are they, for instance, running Ubuntu on the desktop and Debian or CentOS on the server?

One impression I get is that in many cases the Linux systems were set up by somebody else who's moved on, maybe a vendor, and have been inherited by people who just know how to keep them going. Because they just keep going, there's nobody tasked with planning replacement or even what to do in an emergency. It all Just Works so it's allowed to drift, run updates, take backups, maybe manage user IDs, It really is saving money.

Infosec pros tell Trump to quit bullying Chris Krebs – it's undermining security

And the result will be ---- nothing.

Trump is just going to continue throwing his weight about. It's what he enjoys. He's not interested in national security or anything else.

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

Re: Another pathetic "plese, use Linux, it will be good (some day), we promise"

"The very problem of Linux is that FOSS is at the very root of enshittification. You get software whichi is not paid by users, so it's not develooped for the end users - but those paying its development."

Arse about face.

Commercial S/W needs to have something new to keep selling. Windows was pretty good about W2K. Replacement and growth of the global PC fleet would have kept sales going but there's more growth if refresh can be forced so there was an unholy alliance between Microsoft & H/W vendors - new "must have" OS needed bigger and better H/W and the bigger and better H/W came with a new licence.

And who can forget the enforced Office upgrade via new file formats.

Then there are all the other up-sell tricks, the EOL that forces new purchases.

None of the commercial development takes place because the developers want to use it - it takes place to have something different to force onto the user base. Once there's a monopoly a vendor can force whatever they want onto the market.

This is why you get enshittification of commercial S/W.

FOSS isn't interested in selling anything. There are no commercial pressures to force anything fresh into the market.

But, hey, I recognise the technique. Attribute your principal's worst failings to the other side.

"Macs have been a sensible competitive desktop / laptop option for quite a long time and has carved out a healthy slice of the market."

At the expensive end of the market.

Re: Even With Windows Being Bad, Linux Is Still Too Hard for Most

"Most people will put up with telemetry, ads, and bad design choices long before they'll take on a system that needs technical know-how, constant tinkering, and a fair bit of learning."

As far as I'm concerned it's Windows that needs the technical know-how, constant tinkering and a fair bit of learning so why put up with the telemetry, ads and bad design choices.

I don't use a rolling distro. I don't even use supposedly user-friendly distros such as Ubuntu or derivatives such as Mint - I suspect Ubuntu has been over-tweaked in order to be promoted. came to realise that something as unassuming as Debian, and subsequently Devuan, were far more straightforward and Just Work.

As per another post up-thread there was a time when it was fun to tinker with computers and Linux was (and still is if you want it to be) a tinkerer's platform and Windows was a workhorse. Personally the tinkering urge has been grown out of, the Windows workhorse has aged badly and is well overdue for a visit to the knackers and Linux, at the non-tinkering end of the spectrum, has matured into the workhorse.

Re: Haven't we moved on from this shit?

"As a 40 year old I grew up on a C64, then DOS and Win 3.x, NT3.x"

While you were playing with your toys some of us were using Unix in production systems and watched Windows develop as a Johnny-come-lately mess. We didn't have to make a personal journey from Windows, we just had to wait for Linux to mature.

The main reason I'm using Linux today is because Microsoft encouraged SCO, which used to be my laptop OS, to commit suicide in fighting Linux in the courts instead of cutting its prices whilst competing on quality. At one point SCO was one of the main platforms for small businesses so it's no wonder that Microsoft offered to hold its coat while it got itself into a fight with IBM.

Let me enlarge on that. If you want some form of service for shared storage you have, of course, run and SMB server on prem. You can also run a WebDav server (e.g. NextCloud) instead which, depending on the care you take, be rather less easily hit then an SMB server if you have the misfortune to be hit with malware.* If you don't want to run a NextCloud server you can find a number of services who will run one for you without having to deal with a mega-corp.

* The semantics of storing data on an SMB server are similar to those of a local drive - that's the point of SMB. The semantics of WebDav are different so assuming you don't also but unnecessarily expose the server via SMB the malware shouldn't be able to install itself on the server and as the v of Webdav stands for "versioning" you should be able to get your last version back.

It's about 2 decades since I used Outlook. AFAICR it was basically an ordinary email client with the usual address book and a calendar. I can't remember whether it also included RSS and Usenet readers or an IRC client. It was a rip-off of the email client* of Netscape Navigator without the Navigator's web browser.

I do recall, however, that it also included a Basic implementation because the development manage at my client back then spent his time writing a Sudoku solver in it - some productivity gain.

What else? Oh, yes the Outlook/Exchange integration. Kudos as usual to Microsoft for persuading the gullible that lock-in to proprietary protocols is a feature not a bug. Another addiction to add to that which is Windows. As the world comes to realise that dependency on US companies that integration could become a real killer application but not in the sense it was intended to be.

Right here, in front of me, I have the full descendant of Navigator (including the built-in calendar). In fact I'm typing this into the browser window. Instead of lock-in I have (and use) open standards integration with any server that uses CalDav and CardDav. Alternatively I could use Thunderbird which is the stand-alone equivalent.

Frankly I don't think there has been much advance in email clients since Navigator other than cosmetics.

And let's not forget nor forgive Microsoft's persuading the world that top-posting is the way to answer mail.

the flow

breaks up

Top-posting

* I can't remember whether the calendar was a component of the original Navigator.

Re: I have several friends contemplating Windows 11

The telemetry? "That can be disabled easily".

So he thinks.

"Training costs are what will keep anyone from moving."

Every release Microsoft will foist a new UI on users just because they can. Either a company has a choice of paying to retrain users or taking a productivity hit while users fumble their way around.

I strongly suspect that because the latter doesn't show up as a line in the accounts it's the preferred option. So this excuse comes down to the company being run by beancounters being prepared to take a hidden periodic productivity hit rather than pay a one-off training fee for a UI that can then remain stable for years or even decades*.

* At first glance the UI on the laptop in front of me might be mistaken for the Windows UI from the beginning of the century.

"However, they'll still need cloud storage services"

Why? What's magic about storing data on somebody else's computer that they don't control?

Re: Buy a second HDD

" I used to like linux because it was fun tinkering with the system. Now I use Linux because it's no fun having to tinker with the system."

Nice one, Joe. It illustrates what happens to us as we get older, what happened to Windows as it got older and what happened to Linux as it matured.

Re: Price of windows

I've used LO to convert several book texts from Office format to PDF. None of the difficulties related to opening the docx files but to the way in which Word had been used -

tabs and spaces to lay out tables rather than tables,

tabs and spaces to put text beside images instead of wrapping rules,

large images allegedly cropped but just masked, bloating file size (unfortunately LO also does this).

Did I mention Comic Sans?

After leaving citizens on hold for 798 years, UK tax authority has £1B for CRM upgrade

Re: eh?

More likely it's in order to get the caller to just accept the assessment and pay up regardless.

Windows profanity filter finally gets a ******* off switch

Re: Judgement day

Judge: Have you got anything to say before I sentence you?

Prisoner, quietly: Bugger all.

Judge: What did he say?

Clerk: "Bugger all", my lord.

Judge: Odd. I was sure he said something

. Rumpole.

Re: Microsoft...

Swanee whistle. Much more expressive.

I suppose a profanity filter leads to indexing problems by not distinguishing between ****** and ****** which are obviously two completely different words.

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

Iberia to M&S: "That's not an outage. THIS is an outage."

Re: Simulated Inertia

What's likely to have happened is that a failure somewhere caused part of the grid to be cut off from any clocks and once that happened the consequences just spread.

Re: Simulated Inertia

If only the IEEE could produce a website that could deliver a document without relying on javascript being enabled. Remind me again what TBL invented and why.

Re: Not enough intertia...

"wind, solar, and hydro"

Hydro would have inherent inertia.

Re: Not enough intertia...

"I'm not really sure what point you are trying to make or prove."

I'm also not sure which is the more stupid, the chatbot or the A/C.

Also saying "rare atmospheric phenomenon".

CNCF tells main NATS contributor Synadia that it's free to fork off

"a model similar to other mixed source software companies."

Isn't this a model which tends to lead to forks at the expense of the original?

Elon Musk's X revenues in the UK crashed in 2023, down 66%

Re: 66% down

Just like software that is 90% complete still has another 90% to go.

Back online after 'catastrophic' attack, 4chan says it's too broke for good IT

So having run a service that failed to attract paying customers (advertisers) it blames those potential customers for staying away.

Google goes cold on Europe: Stops making smart thermostats for continental conditions

Not really, it's just Google doing what it's always done - dropping things when it can't be bothered to continue doing them any longer.

Re: Nest... the dumbest smart thing we have

"I really didn't have time to do any research"

Not much research needed, just one question: "Does it use somebody else's computer that I don't control?" Yes is a big no.

Re: Again

"I can't see that any UK government will pass such laws for those reasons."

Which is why so many UK voters voted against their own interests. Just stick it to the man (in Europe) without thinking that the man might be on your side.

Re: Again

"I look forward to their eventual demise."

Google or just Hive?

DARPA to 'radically' rev up mathematics research. Yes, with AI

Dear ChatGPT. Find a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem that will fit in a page margin.

Obviously wrong. The letter that appears twice in Raspberry is r.

What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

Re: Be careful where you type

You mean if you don't find any you add a few?

"multiple"

That's the key word. Everyone assumes they don't need to do it because someone else will.

AKA "If it's everybody's job it's nobody's job."

Trump’s 145% tariffs could KO tabletop game makers, other small biz, lawsuit claims

Re: Sue him directly.

Fair comment, Jou so please treat my OP as information. Even in the UK I'm not familiar with the Scottish system (we have 3 different systems: England & Wales, N Ireland which follows England & Wales; and Scotland). However the civil/criminal split is central to all of them and to the US.

I don't know about the US but in the UK privately prosecuting a criminal case is rare. We have had an ongoing scandal the Post Office doing that.

Congress has the power to impeach him - no doubt he's already given adequate grounds. They don't want the insurrection they suffered 4 years ago. If the pitchforks and torches are being waved outside the White House instead they may feel able to do that, especially if they feel their own majorities are being threatened.

Re: And next, prices will increase irrespective of tarrifs

Indeed. Imagine you run a manufacturing company in the US. The prices of competition have just been raised by tariffs, Do you;

1. Just increase production to the limit of your existing capacity?

2. Increase production as in 1 but also invest (borrowing as needed) in increasing capacity?

3. Increase production as in 1 and increase prices to match what the competition now has to charge, taking a profit for as long as the situation lasts?

Now imagine you're a customer of that company.

Re: Damn.

"Setting up a new small batches mould production line takes many months at best, a year or two at worst. "

And probably requires import of machines, components and/or raw materials that have to be imported and will now cost more because of tariffs. When you apply tariffs to supply lines you don't understand things will get very bad very, very quickly.

New APNIC director general steps up to steer the internet for 4 billion users

"make registries interesting again"

That sounds like a threat. Just boringly working would be ideal.

Build your own antisocial writing rig with DOS and a $2 USB key

Re: CP/M? What about p-System?

For distraction-free editing have you ever encountered UCSD Pascal p-System editor?

My early trajectory was punched cards > CP/M > p-System so p-System was by far the most sophisticated S/W I'd encountered and I still wonder how much of what we take for granted now was invented there.

The menu never occupied more than one line at the top of the screen (I can't remember whether there might have been an additional help line) similar, IIRC, to Visicalc and to the Informix tools. In the editor that would scroll off the top of the screen so that's one distraction removed.

There were a couple of switches for autoindent (what else did one need for editing Pascal source) and word wrap, turn the first off and the second on and it became the editor on which I wrote my witness statements - nothing fancy like spill-chuckers to distract.

On entering edit mode the current line split at the cursor with the existing text to the right being moved up to the margin to leave a gap into which to type - far less distracting than having to type right up against the existing text. When the existing gap was used up it was extended to the end of the line by moving the existing text to the right to the next line. IIRC it would eventually clear the lower half of the screen so you were always typing into clear space.

On exiting edit mode the gap closed up and the menu line returned to the top of the screen. Until then, without the looming presence of the next text, it was as close as could be got to typing on a clean sheet of paper.

Re: Kernit can handle external communication

"I used to live on Kermit, for a time, back when 1200 baud was cutting edge."

In the days of glass TTYs for a while, as a bodyshopee I lived on Kermit running on a luggable with the usual tiny screen although at least it was 9600. For a long time I was quite happy with multiple small terminal emulators running under Windows or X11. Only since my eyesight has started to deteriorate do I need something bigger (on which subject could I enter my plea for el Reg to make the font in the editing box bigger - pretty please?).

Amid CVE funding fumble, 'we were mushrooms, kept in the dark,' says board member

Re: Move it to Europe

On second thoughts, staying in Washington state puts them closer to the source of many CVEs so maybe it's more convenient.