Posts by Doctor Syntax

Open source turns 20 years old, looks to attract normal people

Humpty Dumpty

Does anyone else, however committed to FOSS, have an uncomfortable feeling this narrow redefining of words to suit some agenda?

At the same time as Open Source was being defined in this way I was taking on a gig where the vendor provided most of their code to us (just not quite enough to be able to edit it and recompile).

In appropriate open source manner we were able to find some of their bugs. And explain to them how to fix them. After all, somebody had to.

Nevertheless it was still proprietary code and we couldn't just disseminate it how we wanted.

Re: Open source is leading to single source

"AC, You're just a dinosaur."

Not necessarily. Maybe an actor paid to dress up in a dinosaur suit.

Disengage, disengage! Cali DMV reports show how often human drivers override robot cars

Re: AI seldom makes mistakes, people do

"How about we just teach people how to drive properly? It's not that hard, I do it all the time, and none of my trainees has ever had a collision that was their fault since, for over 20 years. A computer can mess things up, it is humans who excel at making it unfixeable."

Perhaps you should re-read this and ask yourself it the first sentence contradicts the second and, indeed, the entire thesis.

Also ask yourself if, given, as you say, it's possible to train human beings to drive safely, why isn't it possible to build a machine that can be trained in the same way as a human with equally good results*. Because it's quite clear that that's not the way self-driving cars are being taught.

* And, unlike a human, have the taught state cloned into all the other cars.

Re: GPS NIghtmares Made Worse?

"Sounds like you bought from a manufacturer who cheaped out on a proprietary satnav instead of licensing one that gets updates."

And if your car is useless without the frequent updates the vendor of those updates will have you by the balls every time your subscription is due.

Re: Paradoxically, yes

"So long as the rate of disengagements is less than the rate of crashes of the driver, the self driving car is still safer."

That means we have a very long time to go before the self driving car reaches the standard of an inexperienced driver.

Re: Optimistic

"Tesla is Big-Brothering their cars and can conduct a Delphi Poll on what a good driver does in very, very many circumstances."

What it can't do is record why the driver did it if the Tesla system didn't register the problem. e.g. the driver recognises from the behaviour of a pedestrian that they're about to side-step off the curb and breaks in anticipation. The system will record the pre-emptive breaking followed by the entry of the pedestrian onto the roadway but the actual movement of the pedestrian will only be recorded as a random action at the time it actually happened. The driver, being a sentient being like the pedestrian, can see that the pedestrian is unsteady, is being confronted by another aggressive pedestrian or whatever and has sufficient understanding to realise what they, the driver, would do if they were in that situation.

The critical word in the previous sentence is "understanding". That's the difference between man and machine.

Re: Override Idiotic Wetware Drivers Option Please

"At a very minimum, automatic speed limiters would improve compliance and reduce driver stress"

And cause accidents every time a driver needed to accelerate out of a situation.

You are right to point out that a manual intervention is not the same as the control system flinging its hands in the air and screaming for the meatsack to take over. Intervention implies the control system was about to do something bad and had to be stopped from doing it as opposed to "realising" it might not be able to handle an upcoming situation and requesting help.

Both your cases point to the fact that when the going gets tough the AI can't cope. As long as that remains the case perhaps you should reverse your vocabulary and refer to "bag of spanners" and "capable human driver"

"Second was General Motors' Cruise. However, GM's fleet was involved in 22 collisions last year, and two already this year"

Perhaps the better figure to have quote was the number of disengagements that oughtto have happened rather than those that did happen.

Capita contract probed after thousands of clinical letters stuffed in a drawer somewhere

Re: ICO angle

"the proverbial tonne of bricks."

The proverbial version is a ton. 112 hundredweight.

"Capita told us that, with hindsight, it believes it could have reported the backlog sooner,"

Hindsight: the poor substitute for foresight.

On the NHS tech team? Weep at ugly WannaCry post-mortem, smile as Health dept outlines plan

I've spent more time than I'd have liked hanging about NHS outpatient waiting rooms over the last few days. Having nothing better to do (I wasn't the one being treated, just to lay your concerns at rest) I wandered up to look at some of the large message boards scattered lavishly around the hospitals of this particular trust. The applications being run are: a digital clock in the top left hand corner, the trust's name and NHS logo in the top right, a rolling display about booking in and waiting for your turn to be announced across the bottom, a list of who's been called recently in the centre overlaid as required by a large pop-up making a new announcement. It's not exactly a taxing job.

Out of the 5 I had opportunity to observe three had small alerts announcing that they couldn't find their network drives, click here to fix that. Of these three two were displaying the top of a menu bar at the bottom of the screen, identifiable as some sort of Windows by the top of an IE logo being visible. A fourth display for some reason had the mouse pointer visible in the middle of the screen. The fifth had problems all of its own. The digital clock took a second or two to refresh the figures each minute, the refresh was a variable number of seconds later than its neighbour and the alerts were also a bit later. It looked as if it had something chewing up CPU cycles. Bitcoin mining?

So the trust, which is, BTW, in dire financial straights having been sunk by a large PFIed new build some years ago, has spent the price of a Windows licence on these and the many other similar displays across multiple outpatient clinics across two hospitals. And running Windows means that they also have some sort of Intel or AMD board bolted on behind them. Even a Mk 1 Pi would scarcely be stretched to do this task at a fair saving on both H/W and S/W.

Re: The NHS

"Turns out the old clunker was certified as an integral part of some medical kit, and it was cheaper to round up second hand machines than re-certify them with new kit."

OTOH while it might have been certified when new after 6 years it might have been heading for FCS (Fat Capacitor Syndrome) or some other ailment of ageing IT kit. Maybe a H/W certification should be time limited to reasonable life after which it should be replaced. It would build the recertification with a new model and replacement of the installed units into the financial planning of the system.

In fact, although I was thinking only in terms of hardware reliability when I wrote that building recertification of the computer element into the life of a system would also make provision for updating the OS as well as the H/W.

I think there's a problem here which isn't unique to the NHS. In fact its endemic through just about every business and government body that uses IT.

It's "we're a medical/banking/insurance/manufacturing/..... organisation, not IT".

And yet IT is central to whatever they try to do but, because "we're not an IT organisation", they try to outsource everything to the lowest bidder. The essential awareness of risks and opportunities alike is lost. At least it's lost at the top of the organisation, it might not be lost at the coal face but, because those coal face people are on low pay grades and their opinions are worth what they're paid, and because any large organisation has a built-in reality distortion field to ensure cries of distress from below arrive at the top as messages that all's well, that awareness stays at the bottom.

A Wannacry, a DC outage for a few days or whatever has no effect. It's not perceived as a consequence of top-level decisions or of the corporate culture. It's an external problem, a cleverly contrived attack or a one-off failure of a piece of kit that "we can't plan for". No, you can't plan for it because you've lost the ability to do so. You need to get that ability back because, whether you like it or not, it's one of those things you need to do and do well.

Re: The NHS

"It resolves the problem of not being able to disentangle security patches from other updates and puts you (the device vendor) in complete control of the patch deployment process."

It doesn't help if the security patches affect system stability. We've had a recent demonstration with Intel's firmware patches being rolled out over both Windows and Linux and then rolled back again.

There's no silver bullet.

Re: The NHS

"Presumably, this means that you discontinued new product development using embedded Windows a decade or so ago and this is a legacy tail problem that will diminish as your newer Linux/OpenBSD/FreeRTOS replacements progressively come online?"

In this context the OS doesn't alter things. If the regulatory framework ties knots in operation the knots will strangle any OS or other S/W component.

The regulatory framework needs to be fit for purpose.

Re: "To properly fix this problem needs central governance"

"other elements including but not limited to strategy, finance, standardisation, planning and oversight"

Throw accountability and transparency into the mix as well.

Re: Suits having meetings and producing reports is not going to help...

" Ergo, you invest in the computer first and then spend whatever you have left on the best quality peripherals you can afford."

No. You invest in a system, or maybe an appliance. Choose either term or any other that emphasises the fact that it's the whole that matters. But remember that it's the specialised kit that's the sharp end of the specification. Putting the computer element first is arse about face because these days it's a commodity item, the cheap bit, probably built down to a price and hence the most likely to fail and be replaced, maybe several times during the life of the system.

A tiny Ohio village turned itself into a $3m speed-cam trap. Now it has to pay back the fines

"Presumably at some point everyone in New Miami will realize that they are only costing themselves money and maybe the council should raise property taxes slightly to cover the work it needs to do."

They could just dump it on Optotraffic.

Morrisons launches bizarre Yorkshire Pudding pizza thing

I'm getting seriously worried about Morrisons. They're not the same without owd Ken to keep 'em in line.

Re: The Universal Food

"Honey is the only way to go"

There are many paths to enlightenment.

Re: The Universal Food

"My grandmother added raisins to the batter"

That's a novelty.

I wonder...

Re: The Universal Food

"one to be consumed with the roast beef"

With the roast beef? With?

She must have been a comer-in. You eat it before the roast beef (other roasts are available).

Re: They're copying Greggs, that's all

"Hint: it's not remotely bread-like."

Is pizza these days?

Our canteen lady back in Belfast came up with a sort of Irish pizza using a soda farl as the base.

Re: If there was ever any doubt ...

".. that England was the place that good ingredients go to die"

You need to remember that England starts outside the boundaries of Yorkshire. That's the pre-1974 boundaries.

Re: Not only would i eat it

"Being bred and born in Yorkshire, I'd demolish it."

Ditto but I have to admit to having been defeated by the Old Bridge in Holmfirth's offering. My excuse is that it wasn't a real Yorkshire pudding, it was a Toad in the Hole. A real Yorkshire pudding is eaten with nothing but gravy as a starter or with sugar or jam as a dessert.

Re: Cast iron.

"Ask yer gran. I use mine immediately"

Doesn't she complain?

"not as seriously as milk in tea"

Milk in tea is indeed a serious matter. It's an abomination that must be stamped out.

Facebook-basher Schrems raises enough dosh to get his Noyb out

"the kind of people who REFUSE to learn"

And, indeed, are proud of their ignorance. The sort of people who'll tell you they know nothing about computers, science, whatever in the tone of voice that they'd consider themselves as lesser people if they did. And they consider you a lesser person if you do know about it.

Shopper f-bombed PC shop staff, so they mocked her with too-polite tech tutorial

I hope they spoke loudly and clearly enough to make sure nobody in the queue missed any of the details.

And finally: "If there's anything else with which madam requires assistance perhaps she'd take her place in the queue just like all the other equally important customers and keep a civil tongue in her head."

No Windows 10, no Office 2019, says Microsoft

Re: What's a

"Bombasic Bob?"

One where all the random upper 20 CASE words are preceded by numbers.

“As the pace of change accelerates, it has become imperative to move our software to a more modern cadence.”

Translation: "In order to keep the money flowing we have to shorten the built-in obsolescence."

What a Hancock-up: MP's social network app is a privacy disaster

"Our registration was renewed recently but this has not been reflected on the ICO registry yet," a spokesperson said.

Didn't you follow that up with a query to the ICO? Indeed, didn't you ask the ICO about any of the other interesting aspects of the app? Go on, you know you want to.

Maybe there's also scope for some questions next time it's his turn in the barrel in the HoC. A nice general question about privacy of apps in general followed up by asking how that applies to his own. Are there any MPs with sufficient technical knowledge to make a decent job of it?

"It would never crash though, because it would be strong and stable."

But it would have a back door.

Re: "May" bad for privacy.

"May" also being a name they probably feel strongly about as well.

May also being a month they feel rather chuffed about.

Re: Like the privacy policy on my new LG TV

"Question is, is there anyone to complain to (that may care?)"

Trading Standards? ICO? But best wait until after May 18th.

Re: I guess he gets points for trying?

Don;t you mean for being trying?

UK data watchdog whacks £300k fine on biz that made 9 million nuisance calls

Re: Public Records

"Its a shame you had to breach whois EULA"

What EULA? whois is a standard Unix command. The nearest thing to a EULA here is the GPL.

Oh dear, Capita: MPs put future UK.gov outsourcing in the spotlight

Re: paying dividends when the pension fund is in deficit.

"Should be a law"

For those feeding at the govt trough a better measure would be to make maintaining the pension fund fully funded a term of the contract. It wouldn't need any Parliamentary time. The problem is that HMRC has been known to enforce contribution holidays and then financial policy hits the valuation of the fund with low interest rates and a hole appears faster than it can be patched.

"Immediately after the announcement, Barnet Council ... (it has more than half a billion pounds worth of contracts with Capita) – put contingency plans in place to examine how it would handle the fallout should Capita fail."

If they're that committed I'd have thought contingency plans should have been in place anyway.

Perhaps that would be a good discipline for anyone outsourcing part of their operation: think about contingency plans. It might lead to second thoughts on the whole idea of outsourcing.

Info Commish offers privacy addicts a 12-step GDPR programme

Re: Online Law Needs Reforming

"The issue was that my credit card(s) were visible, but expired"

Whoa there! Isn't that contrary to all manner of regulations, merchant T&Cs etc? You could use that to demand answers or else but if you did I'm sure the evidence would disappear PDQ.

And incorrect data under your account? Someone suggested the other day that if the company refuses to answer questions on account the the DPA, ask them for the section of the Act they're depending on. Although in this case I'd make them a counter offer - thery can answer the ICO's questions instead because unless I could get satisfaction that would be my next port of call. Failing to maintain proper business records is probably an offence under company law.

Data-by-audio whizzes Chirp palmed £100k to keep working with EDF

Re: How?

"From context I think they mean intentionally-transmitted electromagnetic signals -- radio waves, in other words."

I'm sure you're right. But there are other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum: I'm looking at one now.

Fujifilm, Xerox throw each other a US$6.1 billion lifeline

"Last week, activist investors Carl Icahn and Darwin Deacon demanded changes at the top of Xerox and the dissolution of the 50-year-old Fuji Xerox joint venture as a response to an accounting scandal in 2017. This may not be quite the change they wanted!"

I can't tell you how disappointed I am for them. Because I'm not.

Who can save us? It's 2018 and some email is still sent as cleartext

Re: Yeah,

"Freudian reading?"

Should have gone to Specsavers.

ServiceNow plans non-devs writing non-code for real enterprise apps

"And this no-code development capability enables that.”

This really must be The Last One, mustn't it?

"[Apologies to any developers whose spines just twitched uncomfortably - Ed]"

You mean the newbies who haven't heard it all before?

Govt 'comprehensively ignored' advice over NHS data-sharing deal

"If there isn't an exemption written into the new data protection laws"

It's being argued about. The ICO wasn't happy with the first draft. We shall see.

In America, tech support conmen get a mild slap. In Blighty, scammers get the book thrown at them

" Partly because the prisons are full, it's a kind of suspended sentence."

I do wonder if the prisons are full because extended use of ASBOs, conditional discharges, tagging etc. has given them so many don't-get-into-jail-free cards that by the time their offending has reached a count where jail starts to be used they're already recidivists and from then on the jail gate is effectively fitted with a revolving door.

Re: Too mild in both cases

"switched to ITV thinking the news was on at 1pm (like the BBC)"

There's a pathetic excuse if ever I heard one.

Re: RE: Hanging has a very low rate of reoffending.

@JimmyPage

Fully agree. There's also the point that these days you'd very probably find at least one jury member dissenting on principle. Would it be acceptable to take someone's life on the basis of a majority verdict? If not what does it say about other offences where a majority verdict is accepted?

Re: Too mild in both cases

"I think the third offense was generally a hangman's noose"

If you couldn't afford to pay a fine nobody was counting. From Wakefield Court Rolls, 1315:

"John de Blakhoumore, taken at the suit of Roger Walgar of Almanbury, for breaking into his house at Almanbury, and stealing goods and chattels, value 10s., which goods were found in his possession and are brought into court, is asked what defence he can make for the said burglary and theft; he pleads not guilty. An inquisition...finds him guilty. He is ordered to be hanged. He has no goods."