Posts by Doctor Syntax

Top Trump officials text secret Yemen airstrike plans to journo in Signal SNAFU

"My assumption is that an intern was tasked with setting up a secret group chat"

That's right. An intern called Mike Waltz.

Fedora 42 beta has so many spins, it'll make your head whirl

Re: About maintenance using SSH....................

If you're using the command line to start a GUI application then a remote desktop client would do the same thing. I tend to use ssh to just run oredenary shell commands on the remotes. Most frequently top to find and kill an errant muthbackend on an ancient Mythbuntu.

Re: About maintenance using SSH....................

$ ssh -l username 192.168.1.XXX

Or one of the remote desktop alternatives?

23andMe's genes not strong enough to avoid Chapter 11

Re: The court will now oversee the sale of 23andMe's assets

How do they "know" you are 12.7% Norse?

It used to be said that particle physics is like hitting a watch with a hammer and gathering up the bits to find out how it worked. This is more like hitting several watches with a hammer and working out which bits came from which watch.

Is Washington losing its grip on crypto, or is it a calculated pivot to digital dominance?

Re: Is Washington losing its grip...?

I'm pretty sure the tossers in charge are seeking to get a grip on as much of everything as possible. It's what was the actual government that's losing. I've said a few times here that the US was looking like a failed state. That's now becoming the reality.

Perhaps Canada will offer states the chance to become Canadian provinces.

A site that would enable a kleptocracy gets sanctions lifted. What does this tell us?

2 in 5 techies quit over inflexible workplace policies

Re: Reducing Headcount

It seems like the staff need to get together and use the desk shortage to weaponis RTO on their own account.

One thing which seems to be missing: the proportions of the 40% who quit with a better job lined up and those who just quit.

Bearing in mind that FOSS projects work as online communities it seems a very reasonable statement.

Microsoft tastes the unexpected consequences of tariffs on time

Slightly disappointed. I hoped to find a link to a video demonstrating one of Microsoft's own systems being pwned as proof. Now that would really get their attention.

Re: Computers have screen recorders you know?

A spoken commentary with by people who do not have English as their first lanquage will not help. Screenshots do not need to be animated into a video.

Mobsters now overlap with cybercrime gangs and use AI for evil, Europol warns

"The very DNA of organised crime is changing,"

I doubt it. It would make forensic science a bit harder if it did. At least she's not quoted as including "literally".

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

My take on all this

Some of us see "GIMP" and immediately think of an image editing program, some of us think of an ableist insult and some of us think of something relating to BDSM.

What does that tell us about each other?

It seems akin to Dr Johnson: "So you looked for them, then?"

Now seems to be OK. Perhaps it was the additional drop of libraries that came in later wot dunnit. Interestingly, it opened a .ora file.

Re: Still slightly awful to use

I think you answered your own question as far as Photoshop is concerned.

As regards Affinity (both, in fact) it appears I'd have to buy a Mac of some variety or give my computer to Microsoft in order to run it, neither of which I will do. I don't, therefore, see any point in giving their authors money to support their efforts if they don't support my OS.

Re: GTK3 -- More Information Required

I wonder how much bigger n will be when Gtkn and GNOME deprecate everything.

Re: > a couple of Youtubers

"Even if Vim is better than Gedit, who cares if you need to spend 2-4 weeks mastering it"

I've used vi since 1986. I don't think Geidt existed back then, why should I want to master it now? I'm results oriented.

"Best known" assumes context. Anyone concerned with upholstery or interior decoration would have that in mind.

As it happens there is another use relating to textiles, at least in my part of the world, as a verb. A gimped edge is one that has been cut zig-zag to prevent fraying and gimping scissors or shears are implements used to create them.

Re: names

"loving to associate themselves with BSDM"

Could you please explain this curious leap in logic a little more fully.

Re: names

Ah, so you're now resorting to whataboutism.

And can someone remind me where the confrontation here started.

"the company I worked for, which took DEI very seriously"

There is a difference between taking DEI seriously and assiduously seeking offence to take.

If DEI is to mean anything real then the core must be consideration and it really doesn't take much consideration to realist that GIMP in upper case is an initialism, especially when it actually is shown on the menu as GNU Image Manipulation Program.

And you're suggesting that a program that is both a grossly offensive ableist insult and quite literally named after a BDSM portrayal, would be taught in primary schools?

"a program that is ... a grossly offensive ableist insult"

Can we clarify this? Are you now saying that the program itself is a grossly offensive ableist insult?

I though it was just the name against which you were contriving to take office.

"You might know them as boomers or GenX."

You keep saying "names matter". Why are you labelling people with these names?

BTW, if you think older people are incapable of flexibility in understanding I take that as a personal insult, being slightly older than those whom you choose to label "boomers".

Just the opposite. Grown-ups get on with things. It's children who have to have them explained.

Re: [citation needed]

Words are wonderful things, and if you lack the imagination to use different ones if someone points out something is offensive, that's very much a "you" problem.

Life is too short to be driven by dedicated offence seekers.

Re: [citation needed]

"also tossed around XIMP (X Image Manipulation Program) following the rule of when in doubt prefix an X for X11 based programs"

That would have had to be renamed for Wayland.

If you thing sequences of letters can only have single meanings I strongly advice you to avoid looking up "set" in a dictionary. Of course if you do have such a belief you may already have been confused as "letters".

The Debian distro and those such as Devuan that follow it closely do freeze major versions for the life of a release. There will be updates during the life of the release but not major version updates. It's why they are regarded as (a) stable and (b) likely to get a bit out of date. There's nothing to stop some other project providing its own repository which a user may then include alongside the official ones. Alternatively a project may just provide their own .deb files to download by hand, e.g. LibreOffice..

It's also possible for a project to provide a tarball of either source to compile or binary to install. Pinta is an example of a source tarball and the expected behaviour of make install after a local compile is to install into /usr/local. Seamonkey an example of the latter which I uncompress into /opt although a user could equally well install into a home directory. LibreOffice .debs also install into /opt. AFAICS Flatpak & the rest are non-KISS reinventions of the /opt approach.

Gimp 3 has, in fact, made it into Devuan next but it's going to need a lot of work before it becomes Devuan current.

It has, in fact arrived, as 3.0.0 RC3 and then updated to 3.0.0. So far all it does is crash.

Oracle Cloud says it's not true someone broke into its login servers and stole data

Re: Encrypted passwords?

"Why on earth are passwords being encrypted rather than hashed?"

The two are close enough in meaning for PR speak.

Maybe it wasn't pilfered from Aoracle. Maybe an LLM just hallucinated it all.

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

Re: The spinning wheel lies.

(I don't deny that you've seen situations where somebody put the progress indicator in a separate thread. I'm just saying that they did something pointless and stupid.)

Yes, but most of us are thinking about Microsoft progress indicators.

Re: Schrödinger's firmware situation

The last 10% takes up 80%. And the last 10% of the last 10% takes up 80% of the whole.

Re: Microsoft minutes

"and nowadays on File Explorer copying too"

Nowadays? I'm sure it was like that when I was a regular Microsoft user and that was long ago.

Re: The spinning wheel lies.

I always assume spinners to be animated GIFs so the fact that it's still spinning indicates nothing more than the fact that nothing's stopped it and that something way down in the graphics sack is still working.

Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment

But the server market they occupied is still there, it's powered by the technology descended from what powered the PCs. I don't think it's as simple as the PCs devoured them from below. It was largely, I think, Unix mid-range servers that delivered the knockout before Windows servers came along.

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Re: How?

One of Gordon Brown's wheezes for taxing the future was to remove the tax-free status of pension funds' dividend income. It was one of the factors resulting in the end of final salary pension schemes.

(Others were reduced interest rates affecting annuity rates and the fact that if HMRC decided that a fund had more than they deemed sufficient the employer must take a contributions break. That meant that the surplus turned into a black hole when the interest rates fell resulting in the likes of the BT pension fund having had a shortfall for years)

Re: How?

My only encounter with the front end of the service, many decades ago was that those who were employed in it were not really suitable to be employed there. An encounter with some of the back office processing a long time after that did nothing to dispel that.

On second thoughts there was a second encounter with the front end leading to the same conclusion. When my father died I got a letter saying that his pension book (this was in the days when one signed for one's pension) would be sent to Belfast (from Yorkshire) to be forensically examined. Apart from this being no way to address anyone in a bereaved family the lab was where I worked, my boss was also in charge of the document examination department so I was familiar with the document examiners, had never seen piles of pension books around the place and didn't think there were enough of them to offer a UK-wide service.

On third thoughts where was another encounter with the same effect. My employment pensions had clear-cut terms such that if I were to die SWMBO would automatically get paid at half rate. There was nothing in DWP literature to say what would happen to state pension. An enquiry to their pensions "service" resulted in a reply that they were unable to say.

Any attempt to improve the targetting of benefits needs to start by looking at the DWP.

Re: How?

"There's no reason for an airport to need power backup for all its systems"

The evidence of Heathrow suggests there is a need for almost all of them to have backup power. OK, so long as nobody opens the door the food in the fridge will keep for a little while but that's about it.

Re: How?

Except under IR35 it waould all be treated as personal income anyway as well as having to provide HMRC with a free VAT collection service.

Re: Questions will doubtless be asked

If they had geographically diverse backups why would they all be shut down?

From some of the accounts/excuses being given it appears that this must also have been the switching centre for the power distribution network of what's now claimed to be multiple supplies.

Re: Questions will doubtless be asked

The CEO or whatever of Heathrow has been telling the Beeb he's proud of the way the event was handled. That sounds like a plan to fail successfully carried out.

Re: six runways around London for national resilience

OTOH if Gatwick and/or Stanstead had more runways then they'd be more able to do connecting flights. Your argument is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Re: Really...?

Shit!!! "more!.

Re: Really...?

The remaining capacity would be much less than zero. As the old saying goes, half a loaf is better than no bread.

Re: [Optical fibres] It's not as if one has to inject photons at 400keV just ...

"Outside of the high frequency trading brigade"

Whom I would regard with the same sort of disfavour as crypto-miners and LLM trainers.

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: Memories having a secretary

Back when a group of us took our first computer course we were given a plan of the computer centre and amused to find one square room was labelled

Secret

aries

The Secret aries probably did run the place.

Euro businesses flummoxed by Scope 3 emissions

Re: About that RtO mandate....

"I was not convinced they had entirely thought their green policy through."

I doubt anyone has.

AdTech CEO whose products detected fraud jailed for financial fraud

Fraud and adtech in the same sentence. Whe expected that?

Accenture: DOGE's federal procurement review is hurting our sales

There'll be plenty of contracts later to pick up the pieces and try to patch them back together to make a working whole.