Posts by Doctor Syntax

Trump Media jumps aboard the speculative nuclear fusion bandwagon

Re: Tokamak and Stellerator

"I read what I mean not what I wrote."

We all do.

"an arguably impossibly ambitious goal of breaking ground on a utility-scale fusion power plant in 2026"

Not at all impossibly ambitious. They can break ground. All that means is they dig a few trenches, even pour sume concrete into them. It doesn't mean they build anything operational on them.

GOV.UK to unleash AI chatbot on confused citizens

"We want people to be able to ask questions as they would in everyday life; for example: 'I've just had a baby, do you know what help I can get?' Responses would combine material from multiple departments including HM Revenue and Customs, the Department for Work and Pensions, and the Department for Education into "a single, simple conversational answer."

Simpler, less new shiny, of course, but probably better, to have a single, well written, information page bringing all that information together, linked from wherever someone might look including the sites of those departments and NHS.

I suppose it's the "less new shiny" that's the killer. If it's AI it must be better, mustn't it?

Mustn't it?

Ten mistakes marred firewall upgrade at Australian telco, contributing to two deaths

Re: yank trained manglement ?

World-wide manglement attitude.

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

"And certainly not on the window of the 11:30pm train after The Reg Christmas party."

So what was it that el Reg tried to stick on the windows of the 11.30pm train? Curious minds want to know. Or maybe it would be better not to know.

Your car’s web browser may be on the road to cyber ruin

Re: I must be getting old ...

oh to go back to the time when the headline wouldn't even make sense - as it shouldn't in a saner world.

BBC tapped to stop Britain being baffled by AI

Re: White heat of technophobia

Likewise all the actual broadcasting. It went ti Arqiva.

Re: The time has past...

"Nobody does serious education via broadcast TV anymore, let alone on a fixed schedule!"

That's no reason for not going back to do it. OTOH I do agree that HMG's idea is junk. It's the consequence of being duped by the idea of yet another magical solution to our ills.

Re: Big problem there, BBC

"And yet many who have jobs and work with AI will tell you that is clearly not the case."

Rice Davies applies

You may not have noticed my omission of the comma between "Culture" and "Media". I've seen some nasty things grown ofn culture media.

Re: Why a TV licence?

Factual post downvoted. Interesting.

Re: British spelling returns?

Reply "You have a question?" - with the intonation that you're asking a question, not making a correction. They may catch on that it's not normal usage here.

Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) says it wants the Beeb to become a "trusted guide"

Given what I suspect they want the Beeb to tell us, trust might be difficult.

Re: Why a TV licence?

Think of it as a subscription.

DVSA's clapped-out booking system gets bot slapped as new boss rides in

Re: Oh please no!

"I think they just leave the message on as a tacit admission they don't want to speak to you"

They probably turn it off for a few minutes every few months so that they can deny leaving it on all the time.

The candidates are being defrauded. AFAIK fraud is amenable to quite wide interpretation and the threat might be sufficient. If the slots are booked with a false address or an out of the country address cancel them without a refund.

Re: It's been a disgrace for years

"grocery shopping could be means tested"

It is. If you don't want to mix with the rest of us you go to an upmarket supermarket or Fortnum & Mason or Harrods - whatever your choice.

Have an upvote but fraud is already an offence. If existing legislation isn't being used it seems pointless to add more.

Re: Why not

"Should be bread and butter for Google/AWS/Azure" - True

"with whom the government" - There's the problem

There's an effective non-technical solution for this. Announce those responsible will be prosecuted for fraudulent bookings with a one week amnesty on cancellations.

United Nations agrees to persist with multi-stakeholder internet governance

Re: All your DNS in one basket case

The internet is not just the cloud.

Re: Par for the Course ... More of the Same for Nothing to Progress

"The first WSIS process saw participating nations pledge “to build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented information society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge."

That's just getting the necessary PR speak out of the way.

"It also saw participating nations agree to the multi-stakeholder internet governance arrangements that persist to this day, and which sees organizations like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet Society (ISOC), and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) each play a role."

This is the meat of it: the realisation that if the politicians try to take over they'll find they're holding nothing because the engineers will go away and create something new to replace it, probably taking the chance to clean up on a few issues of the sort that led to the IPv4/IPv6 situation.

Former UK chancellor George Osborne finds something to do at OpenAI

Re: Wonderful choice... not

Why was he unsuccessful as a PM? Because Blair stood aside at exactly the moment the full effect of his financial policies were due to hit.

What were those policies?

1. Charge current expenditure to the future. e.g. start taxing dividends on investments in pensions. That killed the final salary pensions. OK for those of us already in a scheme but not for our children.

2. Have interest rates target 2% inflation on an index that excluded housing costs. The result was that cheap money went into house price inflation and cheap loans secured against house values. 125% mortgages? That brought about the credit crunch. It painted future chancellors into a corner as any correction would have wiped out those with over-priced houses and those whose savings had been loaned on them. All in the name of a low headline interest rate.

Arguably the after-effects are still with us. I haven't seen anyone successfully pick up the pieces. No wonder he was followed by austerity.

A successful chancellor? I don't think so.

Re: Wonderful choice... not

"Another one who has never had a proper job."

Unlike the current one who's had lots of proper jobs - some of them even existed.

Chancellors have a habit of being unsuccessful but if you want to find a really unsuccessful one then you have to go back a bit further to Gordon Brown.

Re: A valid move

It's a sensible move on their part. They're going to need someone who has experience of dealing with things when all the money's been spent.

CEO spills the Tea about massive token farming campaigns

"Some CISO, somewhere, every day is looking at his tens of thousands of packages that he approved for use"

There's the problem.

Brit broadband grilling descends into farce over targets and definitions

Someone with a background in law and history might at least be expected to be competent with words.

Re: It would be nice to have 5g

"objecting to the new masts and then complain online about how bad the mobile phone network is"

There's a conflict between providing a mobile voice coverage and going to shorter and shorter ranges to provide more digital bells and whistles.

It's worth remembering that it's voice coverage that provides for calls for help in possible life and death situations.

UK surveillance law still full of holes, watchdog warns

"He took issue with the fact that the TCN was referred to essentially as a backdoor for government snooping, describing the nomenclature as crude and erroneous." But effective.

"lawful access can be achieved in a way that strikes a balance between maintaining strong encryption and ensuring law enforcement and the government can protect the public from terrorism, serious crime, and hostile state activity." How?

All those in favour of this have to do to persuade us is to produce a proof of concept that withstands expert scrutiny. Failure to even attempt this speaks volumes.

UK plans right for flat owners to demand gigabit broadband

Re: @Doctor Syntax

Meeting regulatory requirements is a cost of doing business, not some sort of cross-subsidy. There were - probably stall are - rules about BT not subsidising one sort of business from another. It was attempts to get into non-regulated areas that started BT manglement on their loss-making international ventures in the 90s.

Re: @Doctor Syntax

"Rural. Its different from Urban. One having a sparser population than the other. As a result there is often an infrastructure difference. You feeling ok today?"

I'm feeling fine living as I do in a rural location. We have neighbours on both sides of the road back down to the pub, church and cricket field and there are houses strung along the road with very few gaps all the way back to the exchange. Off the lane there's an estate with 48 houses and a smaller one with a few retirement flats. A couple of hundred metres up the road is are three more houses and another cluster a hundred or so metres further up. That may be sparse by urban standards, it's not isolated. You need to get out more.

Fair enough we do have good connections on this side of the valley. It's not clear why the other side isn't as well served - except for the fibre that was laid for the mobile mast.

Re: Real Estate tenure in the UK…

"which is a bit Matt 25:29"

Quite. Exactly the same in the UK which is why I'd quoted it above.

That's an interesting looking operation. What a shame the community has to get together to do what the national provider has failed to do and that they have succeeded for much more remote locations than those where the national provider has failed.

Re: @Doctor Syntax

"Compare that to ass end of nowhere which is out of the way of existing infrastructure"

Why the Americanism? And why the assumption that rural properties are particularly remote or isolated?

There is the little matter of universal provision to remember. I see that, like Openreach, you don't remember.

There are not locations "out of the way of the existing infrastructure". They are on it. Some of that infrastructure was installed in the days of aluminium conductors which doesn't help. They have been left with either long ADSL connections or else equally bad, long connections to FTTC access. Meanwhile those with short FTTC runs are being offered FTTP while those with a mile or so long zig-zagged overhead cables to the same cabinet, get nothing.

It's definitely a case of those that have shall be given more and those that have not shall have the little they have taken away from them as a VOIP replacement for analogue is likely to be problematic.

BT inherited an obligation from its nationalised existence. It is not meeting it.

I suppose there's more money to be made from installing fibre in flats than providing an effective service to rural properties.

Sometimes buildings are managed through agents. For the agent there is a cost: doing something. They'd rather collect their cut for doing nothing.

Our first flat was an attic flat with a dormer window that let in showers of water onto our dining table when it rained. It took a lot of haranguing to get it fixed although the leak must have been causing deterioration to the structure of the building. They were also uninterested in a crack opening up where the back staircase seemed to be falling away from the main building.

Purdue makes 'AI working competency' a graduation requirement

AI may be of help with dealing with CAD.

"Draft me a Penrose triangle"

NATO's battle for cloud sovereignty: Speed is existential

"Modern conflict no longer rewards the side with the most data, It rewards the side with the ability to connect it, understand it and act on it first."

That connecting and understanding thing - the word is "information". It was always information that mattered but data can be measured in Tb so you can always claim to have lots of that, even if you've got no information from it.

Apple blocks dev from all accounts after he tries to redeem bad gift card

Re: Local copies of, almost, everything here

"But then again, it's the scenario you didn't think about (and there's always one) that's going to get you."

Quite. NextCloud drive died a little way from completing a sync to number 2 laptop when number 1 was away fro repair. It had temporarily become a SPoF. So the new NC server (might as well replace it with a newer Pi) has mirrored drives.

Re: Local copies of, almost, everything here

"yes, but you’re not an average user"

"Average" is a misleading word. If you're thinking of "mode" rather than "mean" you might find your "average" user doesn't have a lot of paid-for account-locked content. They may have their own material but then, the situation with that might depend on the nature of the device. For the "average" PC user it might well be local-first but any backup might be what they didn't manage to fight off Microsoft snaffling to One\Drive.

It seems that all too often it's just a matter of what the user chooses - or, rather, fails to choose - as their SPoF.

Re: I've been trying to figure out as well....

"what does an 8 Gbyte drive and enclosure weigh these days?"

The same as a 2 Tb drive!

Microsoft security update breaks MSMQ on older Win systems

Internet Information Services (IIS) sites failing with "Insufficient resources to perform operation" errors

This must be a great inconvenience to those Chinese crews who have put a lot of work into using them as back doors into networks.

Hot for its bot, McKinsey may cut thousands of jobs

Re: monthly

Of course! Thanks for that correction.

Re: the one case...

Complicated words are essential. They sound impressive. Being impressive is more important than being understood. In fact they stop the board understanding what's going on.

Re: their super sophisiticated bot

Only 0.9?

China's Ink Dragon hides out in European government networks

Re: su VoiceOfTruth

Nice one, good catch.

Re: Tools

"Email's been around since dot, so gotta be easy right?"

Sendmail?

England keeping pen and paper exams despite limited digital expansion

Re: There is no requirement for a specific make of pen

"The rules state the device being used must not have an active internet connection"

And just hope the kids haven't found a way to bypass that.

Why do bit barns keep bumping up our bills, Senators ask DC operators

Re: Confused

In particular, ask themto explain 'Some areas of "significant datacenter activity" have seen wholesale electricity prices rise by as much as 267 percent in the past five years.'

Browser 'privacy' extensions have eye on your AI, log all your chats

Maybe it's just be but I'd instantly distrust anything called "Urban".