Posts by Doctor Syntax

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.

Re: The GSA's guidance would determinate contracts

Reinstate them after a court rules then to have been illegally terminated?

Microsoft ducks politico questions on Copilot bundling and lack of consent

"He explained that Microsoft hadn't increased the prices of either the Personal or Family plans since 2013 despite adding various new features in the 12 years since."

But did the customers want those new data mining features?

Tesla Cybertruck recall #8: Exterior trim peels itself off, again

Re: Recall won't fix the big problem

And it seems we've found a bell end who thinks the it would make him look cool and resents the implication.

Re: Recall won't fix the big problem

But complete bell ends think it makes them look great.

No big changes to UK broadband regs, despite no real competition for BT

"Ofcom claims the country is on course to have "full-fiber" internet connectivity (i.e. fiber-to-the-premises or FTTP) available to 96 percent of homes and businesses by 2027, if all the planned network deployments are realized."

And the 4% will be those that get crap FTTC and even worse analogue to the exchange. No thought of getting everyone up to a basic standard before adding the shiny.

NASA's inbox goes orbital after email mishap spams entire space industry

"The US space agency has not yet responded."

Probably still trying to clear its inbox.

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Re: Questions will doubtless be asked

"You don't want to try to build the network capacity to shift a significant amount of London's data processing demands to, say, Dinorwig."

To Dinorwig, certainly not - that's not the purpose of that installation. There would be better options. London exceptionalism is an entirely different can of worms.

Re: Really...?

"If you want to create redundancy you would need a second substation connected to the same grid."

How about two or three smaller substations, each with its own connection to the grid, each supplying part of the load and emergency generators to cover the outage of one of them? Or separate substations for each terminal?

The fact is unavoidable: this was a single point of failure, just the sort of thing that should have been eliminated in the planning for previous expansions.

Re: How?

Phone calls are even cheaper. It always stuck me that a bomb threat to one particular motorway service station would cause both road ans rail chaos.

Re: Questions will doubtless be asked

"somewhere in England that isn't as power constrained as inside or around the M25"

Make that somewhere in the UK unless you're worried about a devolved government cutting off London. In these wild times I suppose you have to envisage such situations.

Feds charge three over Molotov attacks on Tesla sites in multiple states

"an individual armed with a suppressed AR-15 firearm who threw eight Molotov cocktails at a Tesla dealership."

I suppose the AR-15 wasn't a problem in itself.

Dept of Defense engineer took home top-secret docs, booked a fishing trip to Mexico – then the FBI showed up

Re: This just in

Perhaps the Pentagon has a stock of disinformation available.

Re: Shame

Bob, is that you?

Cloudflare builds an AI to lead AI scraper bots into a horrible maze of junk content

I think I'd be inclined to start by just throwing the crawler randomly selected words from the files in /usr/share/dict, then pick out clusters of those words and throw them into the steam, also at random. That way the LLM gets lots of meaningless associations of words to chomp on so that instead of hallucinating stuff that looks real it would be hallucinating random lists of words. For added maliciousness sprinkle in about 50% randomly selected words from PR spiels.

Re: AI generated content is poison for AI

If they follow the search engine in obeying robots.txt than it shouldn't be an issue.

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

Also Marchant calculators on division. That was long before your flashy electronic computer things were available for the typical science statistics course.

Re: Typing Pools...

We were in a similar situation in the biology dept of a forensic lab. One of the aspects of our statements of evidence was that there was separate stationery for single sheet statement and further statements for first, continuation and final pages of multi-page reports. Easy enough to cope with now when the whole thing could be printed on blank paper but back in the day with a single tray printer and simple text editors it was better to leave it to the typists who, apart from anything else, had a better sense of which to take.

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

Re: I definitely need new glasses

Then there are the ones that reach 100% and then go back to 20%. With a bit of luck they move forward again.

Yes, I'm thinking of Windows updates. That's why I prefer to do Linux updates from the command line - you get an actual commentary of what it's downloading on a file by file basis, what the current download ed amount is and they speed before moving on to what it's unpacking or setting up. You might not know what all those library packages are fore but at least you know progress is being made.

Oops, they did it again: Microsoft breaks Outlook with another dubious update

Your IT chappie could spend the few quid a year it costs to set up a domain and an email service with somebody like Mythic Beasts* and access them with a genuine email client like Thunderbird, downloading the emails to your own device. (You could leave the emails online but would then eventually have to pay a few quid more a year for for storage. If your IT chappie can't work out how to do that you need a new one.

* Other registrars and MSPs are available.

"The issue also highlights the complexity and scale of cloud services"

Part of the complexity is shoving things into it that don't belong there. Things like email. Email was a solved problem years before clouds and the web - yes, webmail is another unnecessary complication.

Privacy warriors whip out GDPR after ChatGPT wrongly accuses dad of child murder

If everything that comes out of an LLM has to be checked and at least some of it discarded what useful purpose does it serve? People ask questions because they need answers. The LLM only seems to be useful if you already know the answer to check it.

In reality LLMs are going to be put in customer-facing positions where the customer is looking to customer service as the only definitive answer for a problem. When that's done without adding the disclaimer then the customer isn't going to believe they must check elsewhere and, in fact will have nowhere else to check. If the definitive answer comes with a disclaimer where do you go from there?

A better point is that S/W, being that S/W can be fixed. It is orders of magnitude less complex than the data in the LLMs and, unless the vendor has lost the source, accessible for correction. How does an LLM get debugged?

Re: This AI malarkey

Or pimp Elon?

Re: No care, no responsibility

"As a non-IT engineer, I wish my mistakes didn't have the potential for people dying."

Given that there are plenty nutjobs believing whatever AI tells them it's quite likely that AI will, if it already hasn't, led to deaths. The difference is that the techbros don't care because they're unlikely to be held to responsibility in the way they should.

Re: However ...

"tell them to delete it under gdpr, which they are obligated to do"

Easier said than done.

Norway isn't in the EU so the EU regulations don't protect anyone resident in Norway no more than they do in the UK. It may well be that Norway has its own version but then does OpenAI have a legal entity resident in Norway that can be brought to book?

(Yes I know the UK also has its own version which successive govts. seem to want to move out of the way of LLMs and their owners in the interests of putting, as they think, GDP ahead of GDPR.)

The post-quantum cryptography apocalypse will be televised in 10 years, says UK's NCSC

Yes, quantum computing is sticking to the schedule it's always had - 10 years away.

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

Probably too late for the new Debian & hence Devuan so no need to learn a new interface for a next couple of years. I don't suppose I use (?understand) more than 10% of Gimp anyway but what I do use is useful.

Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options, says Dutch parliament

I see we've found somebody who never heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleswig-Holstein_question

But what's the question and who understands it?

Modern supply chains are global. Only a complete idiot would seek to disrupt them by starting trade wars.

Re: Short-Term Ease, Long-Term Pain

"I'm not going to write about Oracle and SAP lock-in."

Just as well in the case of SAP, at least as far as US lock-in is concerned:

"SAP SE ...is a European multinational software company based in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The company is the world's largest vendor of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP

Re: I hope this happens

That can be rapidly reversed with a policy of "You will get sacked for buying ...."

Re: I hope this happens

but then it needs "a lot" of work to make all the bits work together

Yes, it's a lot of work to download an installation ISO for any desktop Linux distro, copy it to a USB device and then install it on as many PCs as you need. You want some online storage?

Fine, look for any European company offering NextCloud. You want an email provider that's not US? Fine, look for any of the European companies offering that. Wouldn't it be difficult using such a service without Outlook on your computer? No, look at the Thunderbird or other email client that was included on the distro you downloaded.

For all the office stuff, it's already there. You need to do some work to put it together but that's going to be paid off in not chasing whatever migrations commercial suppliers will force on you or cleaning up after yet another Patch Tuesday broke something.

Re: Lies, damned lies, statistics, and Trump

I think in his case the test of whether he's lying is whether he's breathing.

Re: before they die more slowly.

"And addressing that is probably the most important part of any attempt to reduce drug traffic."

But it doesn't have the same appeal as battering somebody's door down at 4 am and, to make matters worse, might be hard work.

There's certainly a need to deal with these vicious gands fighting turf wars but that's essentially symptom treatment.

And Dabsy.

Re: Rather escape Earth than what exactly?

"where they can watch us die in agony from a safe distance" before they die more slowly.

Euro semi firms push for 'Chips Act 2.0' to expand beyond manufacturing

" Figure out how to deal with Trump's America first policies (Again, the signs are not good so far that the EU has the first clue how to go about that)."

Has anyone? Even Trump himself? OK, especially Trump himself.

US Space Force warns Chinese satellites are 'dogfighting' in space

"three Shiyan-24C experimental satellites and two Chinese experimental space objects, the Shijian-6 05A/B"

What are these space "objects" if they're not satellites?

Re: LEO robot wars

For some value of American. Just so long as the US doesn't start referring to it as the 51starm.

SAP legacy ERP customers still in no rush to adopt latest platform

SAP, like many others, are forcing their customers to make a huge investment in migrating simply to suit themselves, the supplier. Even if the new platform is functionally similar to the old it is a deeply customer-hostile move. I suppose the only way they can get away with it is the possibility that the customers might find the grass even more shrivelled up on the other side.

HP Inc settles printer toner lockout lawsuit with a promise to make firmware updates optional

"But to change an already-working printer to suddenly not work any more is beyond defensible."

In many jurisdictions it would probably fall under some form of anti-hacking legislation.

Don't give them ideas.

Re: Once!

I bought one longer ago than that. I've never bought another as it's still going strong although being a mono printer it doesn't now get as much use as the Brother colour printer which I bought after HP started this lark.

China's EV champ BYD reveals super-fast charging that leaves Tesla eating dust

Re: "Works for me"

Again, you are maybe thinking in terms of flat country. I'm not sure how well the average mobility scooter would tackle of of our hills and the consequences of running out of power half way up would be a bit problematic - and I do wonder about the brakes going down. There's local guy who had a stroke in, I think. his 20s who I see about on a scooter down on the main road along the valley bottom and covering quite substantial distances but I've never seen him up here.

Personally, I was up and down everywhere when I was a kid. Now I'm old and short-winded I can still walk up from the village if need be but it takes a few stops, either that or I take the longer route which takes out some of the rise over a longer distance. The rest I can manage not too bad but not as well as when I used to take that same path to school.

VA IT contract cancellation DOGE boasted about ... was due to end in 10 days anyway

"The department anticipates significant additional savings once its review of the remaining 88,000 VA contracts is complete."

If their review of the other 80,000 contracts is as intelligently carried out as this one there's a lot of scope for balls-ups. A lot of scope.

'Once in a lifetime' IT outage at city council hit datacenter, but no files lost

Re: Props to the IT dept

But without some DR capability how did they test the backup?

Re: Did they try turning it off and on again?

This is why DR tests are so important. You learn why it won't work, or only work badly, then you fix whatever you discovered in time for the next test and hope you don't have a real disaster until you have it sorted.

Crew-9 splashes down while NASA floats along with Trump and Musk nonsense

Re: Stick a fork in US credibility, it's done.

"It's not too surprising that NASA admins would turtle up rather than correct the assertions made by The Two Idiots."

Any corrections made would have - or perhaps have been - "corrected" again before being made public.