Posts by Doctor Syntax

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

Re: Again

Yes, but they'd not be getting internships at Microsoft.

Re: wait till some dev gets hold of vi/vim

Anything that needs to have default cruft removed to become useful is bad choice in the first place.

Re: wait till some dev gets hold of vi/vim

apt install nvi

Re: Everything is old is new is old is new again

"But also that those same people tend to want, and be happy with, slightly larger cars as time goes on and they get older"

and as their children arrive and get bigger.

It doesn't explain the compulsion to expand a basic text editor, though.

Re: Pointless

"Wordpad was fine for basic formatted documents, & vaguely useful as it supported a simple RTF format"

I thought the whole reason for retiring Wordpad was deprecation of RTF. The sensible thing would have been to retain it - or even reintroduce it - as a Markdown <spit> editor if that's what they want.

Re: Correction

Remember a short name. That sounds suspiciously like a command line. The next thing you'll have the Usual Suspects coming along insisting that command lines belong in Linux because it doesn't have any GUI options etc etc.

Re: Wordpad

Decades Wordpad's presence set an upper limit into extra could be added to Notepad's without becoming Wordpad itself, i.e. nothing.

Do one thing and do it well. Where did I here that? Certainly not from Microsoft.

Please tell us Reg: Why are AI PC sales slower than expected?

Re: We all know what'll happen

"Expensive yet full of cheap electronics and even cheaper plastics."

And even worse software.

Re: Because nobody wants AI in their PC?

The ones the vendors think are most likely to buy then are those who think they're unmitigated shite. The ones actually likely to buy them are those who don't know any better, believe what the salesman says and think they need what the salesman's telling them it will do. And then can get the budget signed off if they need to. That probably leaves the usual suspects - the senior executives whose PAs handle their email - as the largest group.

" customer adoption is slower than expected."

That depends on who's doing the expecting.

Meta pauses mobile port tracking tech on Android after researchers cry foul

Re: Meta

"User's should have a positive means of blocking any and all access from any web service if they so desire."

Delete any Meta or other offending app. Better still, never install it. You know their entire purpose is to abuse you for monetisation even if they're stopped from using one particular channel so why go there? The only way to win is to not play.

Cops want Apple, Google to kill stolen phones remotely – so why won't they?

Talking to the wrong people

Surely it's the network that has access to the IMEI. I don't use any Google services on my Android and don't see why they should have the IMEI even if I did.

Numpties.

Microsoft will stop pestering Windows users about Edge in EU

Re: But will they stop Edge

quietly taking taking over every default "Open with" action every Patch Tuesday?

Or automatically opening Edge at first login.

You say Cozy Bear, I say Midnight Blizzard, Voodoo Bear, APT29 …

"Unfortunately, they didn't actually do anything to deliver this clarity"

Cut them some slack. PR announcements are for making, not for acting on. Surely everybody knows that.

Crooks fleece The North Face accounts with recycled logins

"targeting users [i.e. customers] who reused the same credentials across multiple websites"

It's hard to have too much sympathy for them although I suppose North Face and the previously hacked sites require an email address as the login ID which means that half the credentials are already shared. But that puts the onus on the customers to use unique passwords.

AWS forms EU-based cloud unit as customers fret about Trump 2.0

It doesn't even matter if it's encrypted. If the next brainfart is to sanction your company, country or continent the plug would have to be pulled. A franchise operation might be OK of the entire ownership is locally owned and managed and all the IP licenced under irrevocable terms with the contract subject to local law. Anything which gives a US-owned entity a way in after the contract has been signed is just theatre.

"Regardless of Amazon's data sovereignty pledge, the parent company remains under American ownership"

So everything else is window dressing. No need to even give the small print a careful look.

Workday promises to grow workforce slowly and differently after shedding 1,750 jobs

There are probably a good few kids coming onto the market now who've got experience of using chatmots to do their homework for the last while. They'll be cheap and as experienced as anybody.

"with a focus on investments in AI,"

Ah - the ritual utterance.

I suppose what this means is that after getting rid of all those who weren't prepared to return to the office it's found itself a bit short of people to do the work.

Windows 11 market share stalls ahead of Windows 10 cutoff

You may be overestimating the number of businesses that will be affected by compliance considerations.

Engineers bring Psyche's thrusters back online

"the pressure exerted by the thrusters is about what you'd feel holding three quarters in your hand."

three quarters of what?

I think I have some loose change in this pocket.

What will UK government workers do with an extra 26 minutes a day?

Is it too cynical to wonder whether, if you've gone to the expense of the licences and setting up a trial, it might be wise to produce a report that shows a positive result?

It can't be the wrong answer. If the computer says it, it must be right.

Boffins found self-improving AI sometimes cheated

Re: Suck It and See.

"Quite amusing to recall that in the very early days of old AI there was the idea that self modifying code would play an important part but that idea was fairly quickly abandoned."

Nothing new under the sun.

"Darwin Gödel Machine,"

What happend to Escher and Bach?

"the Darwin Gödel Machine can optimize for any benchmark"

Goodhart's Law has something to say about that.

Ukrainians smuggle drones hidden in cabins on trucks to strike Russian airfields

Re: Hmm

"Luckily Zelenskyy doesnt seem to have told Trump before doing this but by hitting them Putin may decide it is safer to start hiding his nuclear capabilities"

I doubt luck came into it. He knows better. Possibly the START considerations might have prompted a warning but more likely he might just have blabbed.

I too hope the operators made their way back safely.

Re: Unintended (?) consequences

"And almost certainly intended and why Ukraine has published such detail on how this was achieved."

Or how they want Russia to believe it was achieved.

Re: Ukraine did

"Those who want the spread to lie that Ukraine is helpless without the US or that they're doomed to lose the war are wrong."

One noticeable aspect of the operation is that they didn't inform the US beforehand. I suppose they didn't trust them not to leak it.

Re: Who built/supplied the drones?

Only the term itself is nearly 100 years old, so the question is how many more centuries will this "late stage" last?

Quite. It's a term that can only be applied in retrospect.

Best pricing model for AI? Work in progress, says Salesforce

"A senior Salesforce exec says users need to be flexible about AI pricing models while vendors determine which one works best."

Does that mean easy to bend over?

Odd homage to '2001: A Space Odyssey' sees 'Blue Danube' waltz beamed at Voyager 1

Re: "it is likely We Are Not Alone"

"We aren't."

Considered as an abstract proposition the steps needed to get from a pile of simple organic molecules to self-sustaining life seem so difficult to achieve you'd have to consider it unlikely to have ever happened. It's the ultimate chicken and egg problem.

Only the fact that we're here proves it did happen once. That doesn't improve the chances of it having happened elsewhere at any time.

On the other hand...

...the time, effort and money spent on humanity's inflecting problems on itself.could be better spent on the Vienna Phil and other orchestras.

Ah, well, it's nearly time for the mid-summer concert - one occasion, along with the New Year concert, for Eurovision to redeem itself.

Re: "it is likely We Are Not Alone"

"Sentient" might be a tad less challenging to achieve.

Also Sprach Zarathustra

That was my thought. Also by Strauss, just a different one.

US community bank says thieves drained customer data through third party hole

"immediately activated its incident response process to investigate ... and initially concluded that the incident's impact would likely not be material"

Was that an initial but erroneous conclusion before they discovered customer data was leaked or did it mean these was no material impact impact on the bank as opposed to the customers?

"these filings fail to provide investors with meaningful, or actionable information to inform their investment decisions,"

If I, as a customer, deposit money with a bank I consider that I've invested it just as much as if I'd spent it on buying the bank's shares. As such I'd expect a prompt disclosure of a security problem to be both meaningful and actionable. But I don't suppose the banks complaining like this care about customers.

Likewise: "while not losing sight of the SEC's investor protection mandate." I'd hope that where the business is a bank the SEC's mandate covers customers' funds as well as those of shareholders.

Are you a big AI business vendor making terrible AI business decisions? We can help

Re: options/fallbacks

"Are you feeling lucky."

Feeling lucky and being lucky are two different things.

Wanted: IT manager for UK government agency – £60k

You need to look at this fine details here. If the 28.97% goes into an invested fund like a private pension then fine. What may happen is that at retirement age you get a fund which is just the sum of all those contributions without the income an invested fund would have had. I've no idea what the Civil Service does now with but my experience of the days of final salary-based pensions I wouldn't be surprised if that's the way it works.

In those days you accrued 1/80th of a year's salary for every year worked so a graduate entering at age 21 and retiring at the standard age of 60 would be a year short of retiring on half pay. When I went into private industry ir was 1/60th so the equivalent would have been a year short of retiring at 2/3s final pay. What was more the Civil Service was "non-contributory" in that the pay was set less than the notional equivalent private sector pay by the amount that would have been contributed. That means that the final salary on which the half pay was based was less by that offset.

Re: Hidden benefits

It needs to be much further up the scale than IT manager. My last client eventually lost their main contract but it was perfectly legit: the senior civil servant who'd worked on the re-letting resiled themselves from making the final decision.

"And often without management responsibility"

This was my experience. The career grade, whatever that meant, was PSO. In practice it meant that the first in the expanding lab got that having all these other people under hiim. The reality was that several others were doing the same job. The same extremely responsible job, investigating cases and giving evidence that coul clear someone or put them in jail. As next longest there I was stuck ar SSO until I gave notice at which point PSO was magically offered without any of the usual formalities. I don't think even SPSO would have swung it at that point.

VMware drops the lowest tier of its partner program – except in Europe

You expected something better from them?

VMware will give Registered partners 60 days’ notice before deauthorization and then “work proactively with affected customers to transition them to qualified partners in the new ecosystem, ensuring continuity and support throughout the change.”

If registered partners have been paying attention they'll have built up skills with competitive products and will be working proactively with their affected customers to transition them to those products from less arrogant vendors.

American science put on starvation diet

Re: 1 makes 4

"every time you open a new station in the UK it blows it's passenger projections out the water."

The same applies to new road schemes.

Re: Open invite

An effective welcome will mean either an increase of the county's scientific budget or a displacement of the country's existing scientists. In the case of the UK I can guess which it would be.

"a constrained fiscal environment"

And we wonder what recent events might have caused that.

Barclays Bank signs 100k license Copilot deal with Microsoft

"The only thing stopping me from moving my account to another bank is that the situation isn't any different with most of them"

The bank that starts opening High Street branches is likely to scoop the whole of the retail banking market, at least it will until all the others catch on and do the same. It's amazing that nobody in any of their highly paid marketing departments hasn't cottoned onto that simple fact.

US to deny visas to foreign officials it says 'censor' social media

Re: Thanks but no thanks

That's not an EU standard for anything. It's an Adobe Howto for one of their products.

Re: collapse of global liberalism’s intellectual paradigm

We are already out of the jurisdiction of the ECJ. AFAICS both Labour and Conservatives seem to be thinking of getting rid of the ECHR. Both seem unhappy with the courts keeping them in check. The one came up with the nutty idea of of there being a safe way to intercept E2E encryption and the other tried to use the resulting legislation, onlly to be thwarted by their attempt blowing up in their face. Both seem to be enamoured of the idea of deeding everything and anything to the AI kleptocracy....

And that's before we look at Reform.

Re: But we reserve the right...

"They're saying no students that hate the US, are criminals or are anti-democracy."

The US has a convicted felon as combined head of government and state and is doing all he can to put himself above the (democratic) law. I don't think any students would be in the same league.

Mysterious leaker GangExposed outs Conti kingpins in massive ransomware data dump

"The data we've reviewed provides strong indicators that the source behind the leak is either an ex-member or a disgruntled insider from within the group"

This could get interesting. Those named, and others not yet named, looking round, wondering who it could be, settling on likely suspects and taking action. In the case of those not yet named, taking preventative action.