Posts by Doctor Syntax

Sweden seizes cargo ship after another undersea cable hit in suspected sabotage

Re: You know, bad weather can sink bad ships

And there's no good weather in which to be hit by a torpedo.

British Museum says ex-contractor 'shut down' IT systems, wreaked havoc

Re: Closed

And, of course, here's a knock on effect with ticketed exhibitions. We made a trip to London - travel, hotels, etc. - for the Terracotta Army exhibition. As it was, the entry time was late night so if something like that had happened then the chances of getting a new time whilst we were there would have been negligible.

No doubt there were a good number of ticket holders who've also made a special trip and missed the event at the heart of it just because some pillock decides to commit professional suicide.

Being freelance really requires a professional approach to everything including the fact that the contract might be terminated at any time; an approach which was clearly lacking. But sometimes the permies just look at the money and think "I could do that" and make the jump when they really shouldn't.

Tired techie botched preventative maintenance he soon learned wasn't needed

Re: one way of getting the budget for an upgrade

"the amount of money being spent on this task force would pay for the hardware upgrade 5 times"

I was once stuck in a meeting where the item previous to mine was about when to replace some ancient ICL system. While sitting listen to them witter on I was musing about whether the electricity the beast would consume during the delay would cost more than the replacement.

Re: one way of getting the budget for an upgrade

And possibly adding "...unless you have to."

Re: Ah, hardware replacement...

Directly correlated? Inversely more likely.

Stargate, smargate. We're spending $60B+ on AI this year, Meta's Zuckerberg boasts

And they're all dicks.

Hmmm. I wonder what they really do measure.

Going to?

Re: Opportunity knocking?

"But then, that 500B$ has to go somewhere I think"

As the first post in these comments said - somewhere where it will do actual good. There are a lot of the world's problems - the real world - which that amount of money would ameliorate or even solve.

Re: Hopefully, not real money

Careful reading of OP suggests it's not saying what you think it's saying. Of course I may have misconstrued it.

Re: But...

More likely an Oracle plot.

UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project

Re: And in future years?

I think Kirklees would refute any suggestion that they are Conservative controlled.

The real problem is that none of them are effectively controlled by anybody.

Re: And in future years?

But it looks so cool in the comments to label something neo-

Re: Oracle

They also don't seem to have considered pulling the plug. Sunk cost fallacy gone ape.

Microsoft's London 'Experience Center' packs up and goes home

What other reaction could there have been to the Microsoft experience?

WINE 10 is still not an emulator, but Windows apps won't know the difference

Re: MS-Windows "Proprietary Malware" On My Linux System

"That is the sunk cost fallacy in action and you are continuing to pay with your freedom."

Hold on there! Are you saying that in order to be free one shouldn't have the freedom to use the software of their choice where that includes S/W they have paid for.

Looking here at my Linux laptop there's certainly some GNU stuff in it. There's also stuff like KDE which certainly isn't GNU and without doing a full trace-back I don't know to what extent it relies on the GNU underpinnings - and I've better things to do with my time than find out. There are one or two bits and pieces which have been increasingly broken due to the underlying GTK stuff so the reliance on GNU could even be something of a liability.

But one thing I do know is that, GNU or not, they are all seen on the Linux kernel and not Hurd.

Re: Soooooo....

I suppose you've got to count it as advantage that it won't run something you don't like.

I suppose the reason they killed Cardfile is because it compete with OneNote - and ran locally.

Re: Soooooo....

MS is wise to it now.

So Wine has replaced Lotus in "Windows ain't done 'til Lotus won't run" .

Someone is slipping a hidden backdoor into Juniper routers across the globe, activated by a magic packet

Re: "Does rebooting permanently remove it?"

they are a) "Critical infrastructure" WRT their companies network b)Inaccessible. so difficult to "Cycle the power" as NASA likes to put it.

In that case they become a SPoF, a situation which should have been avoided in the first place.

Linux rolls out the welcome mat for Microsoft's Copilot key

The first time it's pressed it should pup up a notification to remind you how lucky you are that you're not running Windows. Thereafter it should do what modern Windows is incapable of - stay out your way which it would be able to accomplish by doing nothing.

What happens when we can’t just build bigger AI datacenters anymore?

Data centre capacity is going to become very cheap once the bubble bursts.

Europe, UK weigh up how to respond to Trump's proposed tariffs. One WTF or two?

""[The legislation] is very different from that in the UK, and the digital area is certainly an area where the UK has a competitive advantage."

A bit less competitive if it results in losing equivalence with the EU in terms of date protection and unlikely to earn brownie points from Trump.

Mega UK datacenter greenlit, but we still don't know who's moving in

Re: Why the obfuscation?

I rather think they found themselves left with a site on which they'd had their previous development blocked (see my post above) and now wonder what to do with it. As any developer will tell you, a site with planning permission is more valuable than one without. Getting planning and selling it on is fairly common practice in the property industry and as DCs adjacent to the M 25 which is where the site happens to be, what better sort of permission could there be?

Greenfield sites are best left green and growing food. Neither electricity nor AI are nutritions.

From Companies House a previous name is HILFIELD BATTERY STORAGE LIMITED

A bit of further poking around reveals that they were blocked from building a solar farm in what appears to be much the same area: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c03d83jyekwo

Musk torches $500B Stargate AI plan, Altman strikes back

Re: great news

They were better prepared than 8 years ago. That was a pretty low bar.

Re: Calculators

As every schoolboy knows a calculator enables you to display 80085

Re: <loud swearing noises>

I think Ellison would take exception to being called "average".

Re: great news

And only a week ago I was reading that this time the transition team was a lot better prepared.

As I've said before, Mush has spend the last few months putting him in exactly the right place to take the blame as soon as it becomes necessary to have someone to take the blame. He just hasn't worked that out yet.

User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?

Re: Why is it slow?

So they set the anti-virus to run continually, the machines both slowed down. Nobody put two and two together?

As far as I'm concerned PC support takes the form of installation of Linux.

Intel pitches modular PC designs to make repairs less painful

Back to the days of S100. The motherboard was just a row of sockets with traces between them and a place at the end to attach the PSU which had a whacking great electrolytic balanced on its screw-on terminals which I'm sure wasn't designed to be fixed like that.

Everything was plugged in.

That was even before Elonex.

SonicWall flags critical bug likely exploited as zero-day, rolls out hotfix

Sonic Wall, FortiNet, Cisco, all the rest: aren't they supposed to be protecting their customers' networks?

Meta's pay-or-consent model under fire from EU consumer group

Re: Third Option

"Have a free account and we'll use your personal data to bombard you with adverts"

Given that there's no option in person data for "If I see your advert I'll take extra care to avoid whatever it is you're trying to sell". Without that they're massively ripping off their advertising customers.

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

Re: Stop the AI Marketing spin

Well done, sir. You provided a specific term. i suppose the rest just ring up tech support and say "something went wrong".

Re: If you want to know why these things will never work well

"not simply a generative process, but an iterative one"

And also an exercise in prioritisation.

Re: Stop the AI Marketing spin

Into the back of drawers of course. You've got to be careful you don't let them breed with all those feature phones you put there.

Re: Stop the AI Marketing spin

Look on "hallucination" as a useful way to describe a specific error mode. Or do you complain about "buffer overrun" on the basis that it's got nothing to do with railways? Or about BSOD on the basis that only living things die?

Brit competition watchdog takes aim at Google, Apple's mobile ecosystems

I suppose they'll just complain to HMG that the investigations are harming growth and that will be the end of it.

Who is DDoSing you? Rivals, probably, or cheesed-off users

Re: You would think

"why isn't anyone suing the living crap out of each other in this space?"

It would need evidence. Suspicion is no evidence.

Biz tax rises, inflation and high interest. Why fewer UK tech firms started in 2024

In the spirit of More or Less one has to ask whether ~50,000 is a large or iespall number?

It works out at about 1 for every 750 of the total working population and presumably a rather greater proportion of the population one might reasonably be expected to work in "tech" - whatever that word might mean. I suspect that a good number will be freelancer company and as HMRC has been devoting considerable effort to killing that sector for a quarter of a century it's surprising there are any left. I also suspect a good many more don't have any full-time employees. How many are just a rather odd name and accommodation address for a Chinese gizmo maker's product sold in the UK on Amazon or eBay and handled by Amazon themself, some other logistics operation or just posted direct from China?

LinkedIn accused of training AI on private messages

Re: Why am I not surprised ?

"If more people did that..."

You mean they don't?

Supply chain attack hits Chrome extensions, could expose millions

"malicious OAuth applications"

Oh, no! Don't tell me that by abandoning KISS, introducing a third party, a longer supply chain and increasing the attack surface things become less secure.

"one of the unfortunate ones to detect the compromise"

Unfortunate to have been compromised but detecting the compromise makes them fortunate compared to those who were compromised and didn't detect it.

Microsoft throws more cash at its carbon guilt by replanting Brazilian rainforest

Will they plant trees faster than they're being cut down?

Trump 'waved a white flag to Chinese hackers' as Homeland Security axed cyber advisory boards

Could the whole TikTok business have been a diversion?

UK tax collector's phone service 'deliberately' bad to push users online, say MPs

Sometimes odd things stick in one's mind. I recall in CofE primary school the vicar explaining that the King James version describes St Matthew as having been a "publican" before being called to be an Apostle and that publican meant "tax collector". He didn't go on to explain the moral of this. It took adulthood to make the connection - that even someone as dishonest as a tax collector could be saved. As he'd been a business man before becoming a vicar I suppose he'd made that onnection for himself.

Silk Road's Dread Pirate Roberts walks free as Trump pardons dark web kingpin

Re: sentenced to two life sentences, plus an additional 40 years,

Suppose that two of the convictions had been overturned on appeal. Now do you see the logic of multiple sentences?

However, as we have seen, logic is now out of fashion in US government.

Only to those with at least a vestige of conscience.