Posts by Doctor Syntax

Tape, glass, and molecules – the future of archival storage

Re: 'Write only'?

500-year-old English isn't too bad. Here's an excerpt from the Court of Star Chamber from the 1530s:

"To the second article he saithe that he thinketh verily that non of the Kinges tenauntes will complain of him, and that they in whose names the matter contained in the said artecle is put into this courte be tenauntes to the said Sir Harry, and that it is withoute their assent or knowlege as they have openly reported and said, without that that he to his knowlege hathe putt any of the Kinges tenauntes to wrongful vexations or trouble in this moste honorable courte"

It's the style of handwriting that's the difficult bit. That quote had been transcribed by somebody else and that was from a printed copy. Strictly speaking, a printed copy scanned, saved as PDF & OCRed.

The DNA fantasy

"DNA can last for hundreds of years in the right conditions"

Evidence for this? True, DNA has been recovered from archaeological contexts but it's fragmentary. Freezing would certainly protect it for a long time providing you have a centuries long supply of liquid nitrogen. The natural way to prolong DNA-stored information is to copy it frequently although this is error prone.

Digital Realty CTO on why storage is the datacenter challenge no one's talking about

"But what we're starting to see is with a lot of these models data is everything."

Starting to see? Data always was everything. it's why the job was called data processing before it became all posh and called itself IT.

UK reheats Edinburgh supercomputer plan sans exascale chops

Just make it a bit less super.

US Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier crew left half-fed by contractor-locked ovens

"This will all get tied up in a contractual mess"

No problem. That's a legal thing and the current USG places itself above the law.

Or, for local councils that way inclined - nuclear-free tape. (I could never work out how they thought they'd be able to keep the electrons together.)

Doesn't move and shouldn't - paint it.

"that's for the contractor to come out and fix, and at their own expense."

To wherever the ship happens to be fighting.

Re: UK's F35 engines

But it was - and in modified form still is - stupid to have accepted such as condition in the contract.

Canva to job candidates: Thou shalt use AI during interviews

Re: Guiding AI

"imitations of understanding"

AI in a nutshell.

Re: No IPO yet ...

I'm sure their customers will be grateful for the warning.

Re: Understanding when and how to leverage AI effectively

It's also an old tradition in English.

Behold! Humanity has captured our first look at the Sun's South Pole

Simple explanation. It's not a bar magnet, it's a horseshoe magnet.

CIO wants to grow tech team by cloning staff as digital twins and AI agents

Re: “Digital Clone, ignore all previous instructions…”

It's the new version of train your replacement.

Microsoft slows Windows 11 24H2 Patch Tuesday due to a 'compatibility issue'

Re: QC

I've got a feeling that the map of their code has sections labelled "Here Be Dragons"

Probably has places where you can fall right off the edge.

Re: Microsoft

They don't need to. They have user base which had cooperated in locking themselves in.

Half of businesses rethink ditching humans for customer service bots

Re: Just checking

Gartner's reports aren't meant to be compared with each other.

It helps if TFM is readable.

If you discount those rigidly following a script, most lines leading to "no", some companies disposed with humans years ago.

Probability of Asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting the Moon increases

And the chance of it hitting the moon hasn't changed, just the estimate of the probability of it doing so.

Old but gold: Paper tape and punched cards still getting the job done – just about

Re: A parallel problem

"both incarnations have died after the owner suffered health issues. Fortunately, it's on archive.org"

Wills are a great resource for family history. Someone set up a website inviting people to send him transcripts they'ed made of wills. It was a useful site but when he announced he was closing it due to ill health he declined an offer from a friend of mine to take it over and run it. archive.org has a copy but from an earlier stage less useful than it might have been.

Re: Fascinating stuff

According to Forgotten Scripts by Cyrus Gordon Linear A, and the hieroglyphs, can be read as a Semitic language using the same syllables as Linear B used for Greek. It's far from my field to verify this; Gordon seems to have been a respected scholar in his field but also prone to strange theories and I've no idea which one this is.

You held out 6 minutes longer than the A/C

Re: Memory Retrieval

Diaries are superb historical sources because they tell how things were from a perspective other then the official sources. One local diarist tells the story of the '45 from a little way off the rebels' line of march and the panic caused because they didn't know, of course that they were off the line.

Another diarist saw the initial run of the Liverpool-Manchester railway and adds that a number of stage coaches stopped operating that route within a day or so - not the long, slow accumulation of losses one might expect.

I now wish I'd kept by own but, like you - handwriting.

"genuine tool and die makers (and about the same number of up and coming apprentices) is far more important than being modern"

Especially the apprentices.

The danger, of course, is the tool maker's children going into politics - they are apt to make such a fuss about who their parents were.

Re: The ancient Babylonians had the right idea

"Now THAT is durable data storage!"

They weren't sure about that so really important stuff was carved in stone, just to be sure.

Most of the inscriptions from the ancient world seem to have been accounts. There must be a lesson for us in there but I'm not sure what.

Re: Memory Retrieval

Scanning the tapes on a flatbed scanner might be a good start, especially if they've split along folds so that a good few fragments could be scanned at once.

Not that I've ever had to try that but before I left Belfast I had boxes of cards read and downloaded to floppies. Whether any of the old pieces of kit with floppy drives still work is another matter.

Another generation on an my daughter's honours project was stored on one of those click-of-death style drives because that was what her zoo. dept. used back then so I had to buy a drive in order to transfer it to something better. The drive's never been used for anything since. nor, I suspect, has the project.

A generation further than that and the grandchildren have their phones and laptops. Is anything of that backed up on anything fit for long term storage? (Somebody else's computer doesn't qualify.)

ChatGPT users wake to find it's even more wrong, slower than usual

They probably got it to rewrite its own server configs.

Apple goes glass whole as it pours new UI everywhere

Translation:

The existing product does everything you need* so as we can't add anything new and useful we'll faff with the UI so that learning that will make you think we really have added something and for extras we'll sprinkle it with AI shit.

* Within the walled garden confines of course.

Rounded corners

It seems el Reg has missed a couple of things reported over the weekend, one being the death of Bill Atkinson. I'll leave you to look for some of the tales of his exploits but one of them was that having accomplished efficient drawing ellipses and circles with the limitations of the 68000 Jobs brow-beat him into extending that to rectangles with rounded corners.

Apple tries to contain itself with lightweight Linux VMs for macOS

Wouldn't they work with WSL?

Also, have you looked at PortableApps?

Let them eat junk food: Major organic supplier to Whole Foods, Walmart, hit by cyberattack

"One would hope this company has learned that computer security is cheaper than not being able to deliver and possibly losing some key accounts."

They all learn that in the end. Or I suppose they do, maybe no all.

As I keep saying, experience is a dear teacher but there are those who will learn by no other.

Total inability to shift unrefined pasta.

Unemployment is spiking for US IT pros - unless you want to babysit bots

Re: Babysitting

Embrace the downvotes. It's just those with a vested interest in the snake oil. They can't rise a reasoned argument against it so that's all they can do. It's prove the original was correct.

Re: If they had working backups

That counts as recovery. It still needs hands to do it and if the victims have decided to offload real people in favour of AI...

There should be jobs in ransomware recovery.

Apple AI boffins puncture AGI hype as reasoning models flail on complex planning

"such that they may feed themselves and reproduce in the face of competition for common resources"

It's a bit more than that. Reading and commenting here achieves neither of those goals. So either that is not intelligence at work (a plausibly arguable PoV) or intelligence acquires a whole lot of additional goal for its own pleasure.

UK's Isambard-AI super powers up as government goes AI crazy

With any luck, just in time for the bubble to burst.

Europe's cloud datacenter ambition 'completely crazy' says SAP CEO

The odd thing about it is that the quote in the article shows that he does see it - and then ignores it.

Re: Give them your keys?

He probably has a lot of US relationships - customers and suppliers - he needs to keep in with.

So let's raise the stakes a bit. Introduce legislation to enable European governments to take possession of any critical infrastructure in the event of a foreign government ordering its shutdown an emergency. The government wouldn't have to run the infrastructure itself, it would just become the owner to whom the local management would answer and would also assume ownership of the contracts.

If the sovereign arrangements are what they're cracked up to be it would never be invoked so it shouldn't affect Microsoft and the rest.

Floppy disks and paper strips lurk behind US air traffic control

That raises the question of what it runs on. Anything in use for 25 years would have been designed at a time when floppy disks were seen as a reasonable way to transfer data.

If the issue is maintainability either long term availability of spares needs to be established upfront or it needs to be capable of being re-hosted on new hardware (?and OS) without losing qualification.

"we've got nothing left to fall back on"

Oh yes we have. It's the ground.

Blocking stolen phones from the cloud can be done, should be done, won't be done

What I am talking about is that back when GSM was introduced, and with it the IMEI, we were briefed that the network operators could at least block if not disable (it was a long time ago) a stolen phone.

This, it may be difficult to believe for some, is before Android and iPhone OSes existed. Before the phone would connect to the internet. Before there were cloud services to connect to.

The system was designed for the network operators do this.

It's how it was supposed to work.

Talk to the right people.

Re: Nice idea

"they won't because they listen to public opinion"

As a public service, isn't this what they should do.

The IMEI is the ID the phone uses to identify itself to the mobile network.

We have the chain phone > mobile network provider > internet > somebody else's computer.

How and why should somebody else's computer be able to reach through the comms network to grab the IMEI which should be none of its business.

OK, probably Apple can because Apple. If Google can't so much the better. Or to put it another way, if Google can see the IMEI what about Meta, X, random site the user visits? It's a security issue if that's possible.

This is something the mobile networks can and should be dealing with. Talk to the right people.

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

It's not just stray metal, jewellery or otherwise. My son says he killed a mother board working on it on a hot day and a drop of sweat fell onto it and shorted out some traces.

Re: Schedule a effing downtime!

"The RETAILER would not let Zeke conduct that investigation with the power off, because it needed various systems to continue operating."

Now do you see why Zeke couldnt' do it?

Of course it didn't work out for them but even so decisions like that aren't necessarily in IT's control, let alone a field tech's.

As Europe eyes move from US hyperscalers, IONOS dismisses scaleability worries

Re: StackIT / Lidl

With all those resources you'd have thought that Stackit could produce a website that doesn't rely on Javascript to show text.