Posts by Doctor Syntax

Type-safe C-killer Delphi hits 30, but a replacement has risen

I still have a legit Delphi on a W2K VM. Arguably the high point for both products.

Re: A colleague of mine uses Delphi/Lazarus

"Nobody knows Pascal apart from him."

This is certainly untrue. It may be that there are no people with Pascal skills whom you know. Or possibly there are no people you know that you know have Pascal skills that you're aware of.

However Pascal was designed as a teaching language so it should be easy to learn although IME it's at just the worst distance from C to make learning one from the other tricky.

Also once your mate retires he could have a nice little earner maintaining all his old stuff.

Hundreds of Dutch medical records bought for pocket change at flea market

As the company no longer exists no action can be brought against them. That just leaves the directors. We can but hop.

In the meantime does this leave Robert with the costs of certified erasure now he's in possession of the drives?

Acer signals 10% laptop price hike in US, blames Trump's extra China tariff

Re: Not Unexpected

"maybe got missed in some analysis"

What analysis? If you know what you're doing you don't need analysis.

Re: Tariffs are taxes with nationalist spin.

Expect the US to adopt measures of inflation that ignore tariffs, rahter like measures of inflation that ignore housing costs. That fuelled low interest rates that went into climbing house prices, unsustainable loans and the great crash of 2008..

Trump teases 25% semiconductor tariffs that will go ‘substantially higher’

Once upon a time the UK had this great idea, which seems to have become an EU idea as well, that the best way to grow a semiconductor industry was tariffs on components but they missed out components on pre-built boards. As anyone looking at a populated PCB knew the components on any one board came from multiple countries. Until the miraculous day dawned when the entire semiconductor BoM could be sourced from the UK any PCB assembler would be paying tariffs to bring in some of the components from abroad. Result - not that much of a PCB assembly industry in the UK, therefore not much of a home market for a semiconductor industry therefore not much of a semiconductor industry; that day never dawned.

TL;DR It's been tried before. It predictably didn't work then. It'll predictably not work now.

City-slaying space rock 2024 YR4 still has 2.4% shot at smacking Earth

Time to take a DART at it.

Nearly 10 years after Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier says: Privacy’s still screwed

No, minion. Your advertising budget is cut forthwith.

Re: Privacy is dead...

What we really need is arguments experience that can break through to the average person...

They'll learn. One at a time, the hard way.

Re: Sadly

My guess would be that the little guy who's selling products to real customers is less likely to trip up over GDPR. The little guy who's a data aggregator like the one in the states who got pwned and now deserves to be sued to oblivion along with his progeny to the 10th generation - he deserves to be not just tripped up by grabbed by one of those leg-breaking man-traps.

Agreed. It would take a skeptic at board level who's prepared to ask questions like "I just bought one of our cars and now I'm seeing lots of adverts for it which are obviously irrelevant. Can you explain to me why you think this isn't a waste of the advertising budget which we give you?".

* Or any other expensive and hence rarely purchased product.

The thing that will stop it fairly quickly is for businesses to wake up to the fact that their marketing departments are paying out good money for a backward looking product of poor S/N ratio which would be better seen as toxic waste.

Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?

IOW bootstrapping all the installs of all these systems listed above uses a bootstrapping approach.

Bank of England Oracle Cloud bill balloons – but when you print money, who's counting?

Re: Just wondering ...

"trusted cloud transformation experts with a future-focused, value-led approach and deep sector experience."

That should be warning enough to ay reasonable person.

Re: Does Oracle work?

Lots of them, but to their own expectations which they didn't share with the client.

Re: As a British tax payer ...

Some of us are long retired.

There's a slight chance Asteroid 2024 YR4 could hit Moon in 2032

Re: Soup Dragons Beware

One would prefer better.

Open source maintainers are really feeling the squeeze

Re: Let me quote from the MIT license....

This is the amazing thing. We regularly get commentards banging on about corporates can't use FOSS applications because of lack of support and yet the distinguishing feature of Microsoft support seems to be a monthly supply of apparently lottery of patches which may fix things and may break others.

1. Do you think the maintainer role is trivial in comparison with contributors?

2. What millions?

The itch was scratched, life went on, other things to do.

Re: Obligation to maintain?

To emphasise the point: a corporate - and anyone else - can make mods and not submit them upstream but would then have to incorporate them into later versions. That might be no more than a recompile from source providing the relevant source file was unchanged upstream in later versions. I did that myself for years when Wine decided that 24 bit video could be treated as 32 bit (it couldn't & shouldn't and broke a lot of applications in consequence).

The Doom-in-a-PDF dev is back – this time with Linux

Re: Coolness aside

"Coolness? It's an abomination."

Why not both?

If you dread a Microsoft Teams invite, just wait until it turns out to be a Russian phish

You've just described meetings in general.

Why AI benchmarks suck

"Tests that haven't kept up with the rapidly changing state of the art."

Rapidly changing state of the art? Is that another way of saying "immature technology"?

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

Re: More than light fingered

"By the greatest stroke of luck imaginable"

Maybe luck wasn't involved.

Re: Holy fucking stupid idiot

It was probably necessary to fudge the problem as far s the client was concerned on behalf of the employer - contract at risk. Escalating to the manager would be separate matter.

Re: So many questions…..

Induction and training are no use if they're ignored along with the criminal law.

Why do younger coders struggle to break through the FOSS graybeard barrier?

Re: Also ...

With the costs of universities today the need for dosh is not a negligible factor.

Re: "As most contributors report, working in FOSS can often lead to a terrible life/work balace."

You could have just said "Not in my experience"

I suspect that might have been a difficult thing to have said.

But backing up to your reluctance to VAT registration - I find that surprising. When I was freelance my clients were VAT registered businesses so would be setting my VAT against their own VAT; in fact thay might have been expecting it and possibly reluctant to deal with somebody who wasn't. The VAT accounting was the simplest bit of the book-keeping (which I just handed over to an accountant anyway) and it meant being able to claim back VAT on any business purchases.

Re: What are the actual demographics?

"it's bringing any developers at all into a mature project."

Maybe mature projects don't really need much input. Fiddling with them just for the sake of it is more likely to annoy users than please them unless there a re a lot of open issues.

Our world faces 'unprecedented' spike in electricity demand

Re: The problem, like Soylent Green...

Nobody gets out of here alive. There are no special cases. I hope this doesn't come as too much of a surprise to you.

Lawyers face judge's wrath after AI cites made-up cases in fiery hoverboard lawsuit

Re: Here we go again

The other side will pick it up as will the judge. If they're presented with a citation they don't recognise they'll look it up. They have to because they'll be expected to comment.

Re: Onwards for AI to greater things

"Given that the quality of people sitting in legislatures"

You don't think that lot are trusted with writing legislation do you? There are professionals who do that job.

Re: Hoo boi...

I very much doubt that there's a company template for such documents other than getting a few recitals in at the start.

Re: Another query made was 'Add a paragraph...'

"Why do lawyers keep all this shelves full of books on the wall behind their desks? Do they never read them?"

They were, at least in my time, wielded in court in the sort of legal argument described although it was usually relatively few - Archbold being the most frequently used as far as I could see. However I'd guess that those few most used books would then send someone off on a long trail through the less frequently used reports.

Re: motion in limine

I tended to find these the most interesting parts of the trial when observed from the body of the court. The lawyers including the judge could be seen doing what I'd class as real intellectual work producing and discussing huge, bookmarked tomes. It seemed unfair to the jurors to be excluded. I never heard of such episodes being given a title of their own but I suppose it sould be necessary to have one to refer by later.

Re: what are you paying for

"can a lawyer sanctioned by the court for citing ficticious cases turn around and sue his or her AI provider for damages?"

Only if they can cite appropriate cases.

Re: what are you paying for

"add a filter in to verify that the cases it comes up with actually exist"

It's one thing to add a filter to pick out stuff that shouldn't be in there but what about the possibility that stuff that should be in there and isn't? If it can make one set of errors it can also make others.

Re: what are you paying for

In this particular case to whom should they say they use AI? The clients? The court? The other side?

There are all sorts of ramifications. It's one thing accepting the consequences for presenting obviously incorrect references in the pleadings. But if the AI conjures up non-existent reference is it going to miss references that should have been found? And if so how will this be discovered - if it's discovered at all. Their clients might lose the case because the AI doesn't find a reference a competent attorney would have known about.

Unless the AI assistant can be relied on to make no errors of omission or commission then it would be wiser not to use it at all.

LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab

Re: All you need

"If VLC can be back, why not Thunderbird?"

You'd need to ask Apple. At a guess Apple aren't content with a 30% cut of free. But as you can download and install LO and TB for Macs for free it's a little extreme to claim they're not available just because you can't pay Apple for them and to then somehow blame it on the projects that developed them.

But with age comes wisdom.

And the power goes off (OK, in the last few months I've started getting a bit obsessive about this for reasons) taking out the router, modemand wifi but the laptop battery keeps going.

Re: LibreOffice was nothing to do with Sun?

It's always a good working assumption.

Ribbon in LO

It's kept decently hidden on account of the Document Foundation being people of good taste.

Re: All you need

"Outlook stinks, but it's cross-platform."

Not really. It's only available on Linux by having an Electron wrapper.

OTOH see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/installing-thunderbird-on-mac and https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/install-howto/macos/

Re: All you need

A good while back when Mozilla in their infinite wisdom were pushing TBird adrift and there was at least one well argued proposition that the Document Foundation should give it a home. They turned it down on the basis that users should be free to choose their own email client. I thought then, and you have just confirmed it, that they should have done this on the basis that there are users who don't see an office suite as being complete without it.

I doubt they could have been integrated (the various LO applications are all the same executable called with the application name as a parameter). Nevertheless it wouldn't be a bad idea for the two projects to get together and draw up a combined installation bundle.

As for availability on Apple platforms, I wonder how much of that might be due to Apple's sense of amour propre.

Re: All you need

Of the three tools you mention Outlook deserves particular condemnation by defaulting to top-posting.

the flow.

breaks up

Top-posting

US lawmakers press Trump admin to oppose UK's order for Apple iCloud backdoor

"US intelligence sharing with the UK"

The reality is likely to be US intelligence will be delighted to get a share of the product.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an illusion, but it soon might be

Re: Seems to match

"We select the one that looks like me."

Do you?

Re: Seems to match

"Techbros hiring techbros"

Be fair. They deserve each other.