Posts by Doctor Syntax

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Re: The AI bubble

And to the Boards who believed them.

Re: Dot Dumb

They say that those who made money in a gold rush were those who sold shovels. NVDIA is in the shovel business.

Solid-gold nav bars? Trump plans redesign of government websites

"lagged behind in usability and aesthetics"

usually those two go in opposite directions.

CIO made a dangerous mistake and ordered his security team to implement it

"We should really get more memory for the server."

Nothing.

Then the 6 monthly OS and RDBMS upgrade over the weekend (those were the days when upgrades came on CDs).

On Monday explain to IT manager what and why thrashing is and how it relates to the problems we're having now.

In such circumstances it's surprising how quickly decisions can be made and fortunately the field techs arrived pretty quickly.

Re: Had a customer recently...

They didn't simply blame the guy who died?

Re: "leave operations to us techies and focus on management"

OTOH the manager had presumably learned something by the experience. After such expensive training I can see why the company didn't fire him.

Re: Has your boss ever ordered you to break things?

And it seems that each new company behaves like the old.

BOFH: HR plays checkers, IT plays 5D chess

Re: I believe the current nomenclature is...

A lot of pees.

"IT has usually been in the basement"

The basement is occupied by the killer robot and the sewer pressure release.

Re: he's not enough of an idiot to wander too close to a full-height window that opens out ...

If something fails under ISO9000 it just shows the quality manual wasn't lax enough.

"free fall experience that's only interrupted by a parked car, two stories below."

Only two?

Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker

Re: Why in the world did he have to bring a ladder?

"some random janky ladder"

The very last court appearance from my forensic science days was a civil hearing from an event years earlier. Somebody had been hired to wash (no, I don't know why) a tiled roof. There was a wooden roof ladder of the sort that hooks onto the ridge that was too short to extend to the bottom of the roof. It was "extended" by being suspended on a rope from the chimney stack, and extended so part of it overhung the bottom of the roof. The guy stepped onto one of the overhanging rungs. It was a very home-made ladder the sides each had a very large knot between the same pair of rungs.

Re: Fun at the DTI

It's a big secret.

Re: Other way around

It was a good length.

Re: How did you get in here?

A few odd memories returning from that place - like the car park on the roof of the building opposite.

Re: Higher ranking officers

I think Corporal Captain was the MASH-up.

Re: It is interesting

"pictures of life 100 years ago and seeing literally EVERYONE wearing a hat. Its crazy!"

Less than 100. It was still the case when I was growing up.

Re: Indiana National Guard not very guardy in comparison

I remember passing a military convoy which was driving down the slow lane of the M1, slower than normal slow lane traffic. I don't think there was anything like that bringing up the rear behind the Big Stuff. The escort was all at the front to clear the way...

Re: met by a military office

They might have been thinking of RF radiation.

Re: How did you get in here?

"he said he worked for our company, but was not in the internal phone directory."

Although I worked in a different building I used to eat in the canteen of the tower block, half occupied by BT*, at the corner of Euston Rd & Hampstead Rd. There was rumoured to be an entire hidden floor floor that the lift bypassed.

* The company I worked for had BT and the other occupants of the building as clients. The price paid in the canteen depended on which client you were working for.

Re: Other way around

"This cost us tens of thousands of pounds on the lost board and its replacement"

You didn't bill them for it?

OneNote for Windows 10 support clock counts down

Re: Nota bene

https://alternativeto.net/software/microsoft-onenote/

Re: Gave it a try for work, didn't like it

Write once, read never? I know the problem well.

"nobody cares about Microsoft software itself"

AFAICS that "nobody" includes Microsoft. We now what Microsoft cares about. Money. That's obtained by milking the cash-cow and the cash-cow isn't the software. I wonder who or what could it be?

AI giants call for energy grid kumbaya

Re: Train when the sun shines

The OP used the word "all". I guess there was a reason for that.

"but not at any price the tech companies would be willing to pay"

To which the answer should be simple: your problem, you fix it.

"Together, we can design for a future where AI training is not only powerful, but also power-aware"

"Together, we can design for a future where AI training is not."

I think that's an even better solution.

And why does el Reg, of its own volition, add a Re: to a title string and then complain it's too long?

Thunderbird 142 lands with modest upgrades – plus talk of Pro service ahead

I too looked at Betterbird but it didn't seem significantly different so I'll stick to Seamonkey. Even that has had its enshittifcation by making the calendar a tab with its own (and jarringly fuggly) task bar under the tab which cramps the actual calendar really badly.

Tesla bid to become a UK electricity supplier gets politically 'charged'

On the one hand I'd guess not many follow their local MP on X anyway so they wouldn't be influenced by a move to Bluesky themselves so the MP wouldn't be loosing anything by doing so. I suppose the real difficulties would be a fear that their local press wouldn't be able to find them and, for non-Conservative MPs, the name might send the wrong signals.

The Unix Epochalypse might be sooner than you think

So this is a C compiler on a non-Unix OS; does this apply on a 32-bit Unix box? I haven't seen one of those in a long time - does anyone have one to test it on?

There seems no reason why the year should matter to a simple counter until it rolls over. It sounds more like a bug in the calculations converting the counters to date and time. ISTR there was a report of Sun's OS crashing at some particular year far from 2038 - 1986 or 1987 I think - due to such a bug.

Trump's gold-plated smartphone can't seem to decide which design to copy

I suppose it all depends on what the AI that generated the image had been trained.

"the profit margin on it will be too low after tariffs have been applied."

That depends on the idiot supertex mark up.

Kidney dialysis giant DaVita tells 2.4M people they were snared in ransomware data theft nightmare

Do these organisations just sit there thinking "it can't happen to us" and then when it does claim that security is important to them?

Transatlantic chip war fizzles as EU and US framework confirms 15% tariff cap

Ssh.

Honey, I shrunk the image and now I'm pwned

I suppose just putting the prompt into the image's exif data would be too obvious.

LibreOffice 25.8: Faster, leaner, and finally speaks PDF 2.0

Re: Still no usable database

Inconsistency is their speciality.

Microsoft's selling technique for Office was based on new versions producing non-back-portable files, forcing everyone to upgrade when they received a file they couldn't open.

The UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety

Re: Seems to let right wing propaganda thought though

On past form and present evidence Labour would have done exactly the same and are probably glad that somebody else did it for them.

Re: "When the databases of the age-verification services get hacked..."

No. Peter Kyle.

Not again! Microsoft blames config tweak for 365 outage in parts of North America

"What testing is happening before changes hit production?"

But isn't production where it's tested?

FydeOS offers ChromeOS without the Google strings attached

Re: Touch screen?

"You really need someone to be making money from businesses not individual users, or the lock in will come."

I'm not sure that that logic works out too well with Microsoft making the money. The real issue is that the back-end needs to be open so that no one vendor can own the market.

I'm not sure how this stacks up with your dislike of Linux. Yes, there seems to be agro in relation to distros - it comes from people who don't use Linux complaining about distros. As an OS it is wonderfully stable.

AI crawlers and fetchers are blowing up websites, with Meta and OpenAI the worst offenders

Re: any reputable AI company today should be honoring robots.txt

Your question isn't a headline but Betteridge's law applies.

Re: Cat and mouse

Random data is the answer. It wouldn't backfire in the same way and it would be a small contribution to messing up their statistics.

Re: Sue the everloving cr*p out of them !

I'm surprised one of the class action lawyers hasn't got involved, they don't usually mind taking on the deep pockets because as the bank robber said, that's where the money is. The victims might only get pocket change from the results but if it had the desired effect of putting on the brakes it would be a result.

Random words or even random groups of letters. Add noise to their statistics.

But the problem would remain, it eats up the ISP's band-width.

Same principle, less problematic - a DDoS against the offenders.

I wonder - adopt the same mass tactics. Issue a lot of bills that get under whatever the small court equivalent level is. 1. They can't charge lawyer fees if they win, they'll spend a lot on lawyers if they try too defend, they let one or two slip through and bailiffs turning up to seize stuff can be very disruptive.

Re: In my recent experience

"The source IP addresses are either from a large range like AWS"

I suggested previously - detect the addresses quickly and block them for a random period of time. If this causes AWS's inoffensive customers problems it's up to AWS to introduce and enforce T&Cs so as to protect those customers.

Orange Belgium mega-breach exposes 850K customers to serious fraud

Re: customers now susceptible to targeted phishing and fraud campaigns.

A marketing SMS at any time would be an indication that it's time to add to their churn figures.

Colt changes tune, admits data theft as Warlock gang begins auction

"Trend said that it quickly racked up a healthy list of victims"

Or a list of security-wise unhealthy victims.

IETF Draft suggests making IPv6 standard on DNS resolvers - partly to destroy IPv4

Actually I meant "get right".

And plugging it all in fro automatic configuration is one thing. Logging onto the router to check if your connection has gone down is another. If your router can be addressed by name and the name set up in /etc/hosts, fine. My current router insists on being addressed by numbers, unfortunately.