Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK uncovers novel Microsoft snooping malware, blames and sanctions GRU cyberspies

In real practical terms exactly what do these sanctions do? As opposed to generating press releases?

Fujitsu sorry for Post Office horror – but still cashing big UK govt checks

Re: Whoa! Get some perspective here....

On one level you may be correct but you also need to consider their place in the chains of events that resulted in people being imprisoned or committing suicide and the moral responsibility of the part they played in that chain.

As companies race to add AI, terms of service changes are going to freak a lot of people out

Re: We've got to stop sending files to each other

Rent a Next\cloud instance of your own with proper ToCs. It's not expensive and certainly cheaper than having your stuff nicked in transit.

Re: try the real world

Just because Excel is included in excellent that does't mean it is.

Re: Moderation

WeTransfer isn't, or at least wasn't, a social media company.

‘I nearly died after flying thousands of miles to install a power cord for the NSA’

Re: Vintage Kit from the 1980's

Last Xmas my grandaughter told me that her then boyfirend, a history student, had a vacation assignment writing an essay about the late troubles in N Ireland. That was part of my working life. It does raise the question of how long does it take for the chip wrapper to become history.

Re: Step onto the scales sir!

The Brotherton Special Collections at Leeds University Library do that. Some years ago we were looking at some of the C19th manorial rols which are huge but which were very dusty. They weighed a bit less when they were returned because most of the dust had fallen out. They were still doing that wen I was there last week.

With you on the seminars but I'd only share your lack of concern about the crashes if there was no chance that I was going to be a passenger nor the person into whom he crashed.

The Smoot – How an MIT prank became a lasting unit of measurement

Re: the thickness of screw threads was not fully standardized in the US

It's just a matter of calibrating the unit, the millitrump.

Quantum code breaking? You'd get further with an 8-bit computer, an abacus, and a dog

Re: Probably true, but meanwhile

Of course the threat well understodd. In theory. It's just the practicalities that are proving harder.

WHy does it need a dog? To provide the bollocks?

TSMC aims to make 30% of high-end chips in US with Arizona fab build out

Given the amount of work to get such a plant up and running "several" quarters early will still amount to a lot of quarets away.

Open, free, and completely ignored: The strange afterlife of Symbian

Re: The Burning Platform

I wonder if MBA courses have a foot-shooting module. It would be a nice case study to go along with Ratnerisation.

Retailer Co-op: Attackers snatched all 6.5M member records

Re: Where's the GDPR fines in all of this?

Quite. And no doubt we'll soon have ambulance chasers offering to sue the Co one behalf of those members - and, no doubt, getting sign-ups.

Re: There will always be cyber attacks and glitches.

Login problems since last night? They borked mine years ago. Phone support made it worse. A while back they started send in me emails that my card had expired. I emailed them to say that as I couldn't log in they might as well delete the account. The reply - log in and delete it online. The emails stopped coming. Whether there's still and "account" in my name with borked login and out-of date card details I have no idea.

With the cross party habit of declaring the intent to make the Uk the best place form whatever they'r promoting this week one of the best ways of doing tht would be to introduce a sentencing policy aimed at deterrence.

The really up-to-date firms have supply chain attacks. Why leave an S3 bucket unsecured yourself when somebody you've never realised was in the chain can do it for you?

The nature of the Co-op is such that the "investors" are the members as it says in the TFA.

Re: Brilliant

It appears that she doesn't realise the difference between data and information. Some data might be "out there" (not necessarily every member's data) but that same data is now combined with other , Co-op specific, data which wasn't and such cominations turn it into information which is far more valuable and which wasn't out there but now is.

VMware reboots its partner program again – and it looks like smaller players are out

Re: Broadcom only interested in $$$ - who would have thought it?

It does make a strange kind of sense.

A software-defined radio can derail a US train by slamming the brakes on remotely

"Neither the AAR nor the Federal Railroad Administration responded to questions for this story."

They'll need a bit of time, say 12 or 13 years.

Junior developer's code worked in tests, destroyed data in production

I suppose that sub-record thing is a hangover from a COBOL origianl. I've seen that in an accountig system as well. Why did they not realise that disk and especially RDBMS is not like tape to tape processing.

Re: Pro tip for DELETE queries

Yes, do that - even just a COUNT to check if the number looks right. Then do the delete in a transaction and only COMMit if it still looks right because up to that pint you can still roll it back.

The price of software freedom is eternal politics

Re: "in software, copying does not remove the original,"

Could you try again and address the points in order?

1. Do you think those who unterake the development are ignorant of the effort to do so?

2. Could you explain why those doing so that gives others a right to use the product freely are ignorant of the fat that that gives others the right to use it freely?

3. Can you then explain why those accepting the gift are doing something wrong?

I think there's a concept here that you seem bent on pretending you don't understand:* Giving

* I assume you really do understand the concept. If you really don't you have problems.

Re: "in software, copying does not remove the original,"

"Just the freetards can't understand the efforts in writing (or generally creating) something."

Could you explain this in greater detail. In particular could you explain why those writing, for instance, an operating system kernel do't understand the effort that goes into creating on operating system kernel? Could you then explain why they might not undertand that by publishing it under conditions that wll allow oters to use it freely* they might be unintentionally allowing others to use it freely**. Can you then explain why those who use such freely given gifts are in some sense committing a wrong or acting against the intentions of the developers?

* With definitions of "freely" varying depending on whether the actual licence if GPL-like or BSD-like.

** I concede that there seem to have been those who thought that free-washing their product was nothing more than a trendy marketing ploy and didn't really intend it. The explentation for that revolves quite tightly around "marketroid" and "stupidity"

Re: Sense ... still not so common !!!

That story always brought to mind the though of a research student slightly before my time in the same lab who was Sikh. I often wondered what the people of South Down made of a beturbenned Sikh cycling about with a Hiller borer and a few 1.5m extension rods strapped to his cross-bar.

Re: It all sounds...

Remote desktop was the whole point of X, especially the possibility that the esktop might be serving several remote appications at once. Removing remote is removing a good deal of its essence. It's like saying you could remove the rails from railways and simply provide carriages where people could go and sit (or more likely stand in cramped conditions) for half an hour or so and then go tot work.

More likely shit on your users/customers.

|recent discovery on Devuan Excalibuir: if the session is set to Plasma 6 Xorg the xorg error log is spammed with a message about Pipewire avery few seconds. Switch to Wayland and it goes away which leaves me wondering is Wayland the new systemd introducing new dependencies everywhere and is Pipewire the new Pulseudio?

So much for the days of clean, well-defined layers with clean, well-defined interfaces.

Trump tariffs turn techies topsy-turvy as US braces for PC tax

Re: Everyone is betting heavily that Trump will continue to TACO

Who knew "American First" meant "America all alone"? We may find out what that looks like before long.

Isn't that how it always ended when it was tried before? History repeating itself in farce.

Re: Idiotic tariff nonsense

"You can't make this stuff up"

Only Thump is allowed to do that.

Re: Not "reciprocal"!

I suppose they'll blame the price increases on Biden. Nothing is harder to shift than an ill-founded mental model.

Microsoft fixes the ESU blues for Windows 10 users

Start as you mean to go on.

Tim Cook's Tim Cook stepping down from Apple

Re: Is there a new meaning for that ?

After decades at high levels of a US corporation his ability to speak plain English isn't going to be what it might be.

Re: Is there a new meaning for that ?

It's called retiring - after 40 years working life, why not? Grandchildren are worth spending time with.

Shiny object syndrome spells doom for many AI projects, warns EPA CIO

This is going to leave a lot of CEOs asking "What's a use case and where do we buy one?".

Re: "Is that Simon waiting in the wings?"

My preferrence would be chromix acid and I'm not sure thick gloves would be enough. Just tip them in carefully to avoid splashing.

Chipmaker GlobalFoundries acquires chip designer MIPS

Sigh. I remember MIPS being the Next Big Thing when 68000 and Z8000 were powering SMBs.

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

Re: Sorry to infuriate BUT

Either would suffice.

It seems the best process Mozilla manglement could adopt would be:

1. Decide what we think we should do.

2. Do the opposite.

Unless, of course, this is the process they've been following all these years, in which case, just stop at 1.

Trump administration announces tariffs that may make plenty of tech more expensive from August 1

Re: Not content just to TACO on the tariffs

It looks as if, in the future the main trading blocs are going to be BICKS (BRICKS from which the R has removed itself) and the EU, from which we (sensibly according to some although I don't see it myself) have removed ourselves,

Re: What does the US export?

IP protectionism from the US isn't going to go down well with everyone else when US LLM businesses are hoovering up everyone else's IP as fast as they can.

"the extraordinary Economy of the United States, the Number One Market in the World"

Extraordinary certainly. I'm reminded of Bernard explaining the meaning of "egregious" to Hacker: "outstanding in, erm, one way or another". But the Rest Of the World is a bigger market than the US. The inevitable result of the US cutting itself off from ROW, which Trump seems to be setting out to do* just means the rest of us can trade amongst ourselves and the US can make do with the crumbs.

* He thinks he's an emperor commanding his domains to bring him tribute. I don't think that's what he's achieving, largely because it's his own serfs citizens who are actually paying the tribute.

Microsoft developer ported vector database coded in SAP’s ABAP to the ZX Spectrum

Aren't her points 1 & 4 the same?

Scholars sneaking phrases into papers to fool AI reviewers

Easily passed of as an experiment.

Nuclear reactors smaller than a semi truck to be tested in Idaho

"So how do you stop miscreants nicking .... them?"

Prop them up on bricks and take the wheels off.

Financial 'stretch' for UK to join Europe's Starlink rival, says minister

Re: @Doctor Syntax

When somebody goes on about the cost of this that of other it's always wise to consider the cost of the alternative.

Re: "If"

The other week we were in an hotel in the West Midlands. It wasn't in a village. It used satellite for its internet connection. Once you get out into the countryside you have a FTTC/ FTTP or you have a miserable connection. In fact it's not even either/or; friend who actually lives about a mile close to the exchange than I do has, for some strange reason, FTTC to the same cabinet as myself and a miserable connection. The only fibre near where she lives is the back-haul of the mobile base station on top of the hill behind them.

Re: I'm baffled...

"we have an asset-rich older generation who are entirely risk-averse and won't spend"

We grew up i a world where money was short. As did out parents and grandparents. What's more, it was the same for us. I got bank statements in the middle of the month so I'd be able to work out how bad things would be by the end of the month - and they were.. We've also seen a lot of inflation over the years. Once you've had a few decades of that you don't forget it. You can't get over the idea that it will all go pear-shaped tomorrow.

Money was for essentials and anything left over was to save for the disaster waiting round the corner. Even when you've accumulated a bit you spend it carefully.

Re: There are too many lawyers in parliament

And much good has it done us.