Posts by Doctor Syntax

Former Amazon exec appointed as boss of UK's competition watchdog

Re: Former head of competition watchdog not "sufficiently focused on growth."

"What would you suggest?"

Scapegoat appointed.

PowerSchool theft latest: Decades of Canadian student records, data from 40-plus US states feared stolen

"We do not anticipate the data being shared or made public, and we believe it has been deleted without any further replication or dissemination,"

That needs to be put alongside their prior belief that they were secure. Neither belief is likely to be the basis for successful defence in court although maybe they also believe they are.

I suppose it's too much to hope that the courts award sufficient damages to put them out of business and serve as a warning to others or, if they're insured, sufficient to make the insurance companies insist on client security reviews which are more than a box-ticking exercise.

Meta, X sign up to Euro Commish code of conduct on hate speech

Re: I'd much prefer to notion

"I think you misunderstood me, I was referring to the subsequent violence by the mobs."

No, I do not. But they were responding to a trigger. We now know that there were missed opportunities to reel him in and he was the one who actually committed murders - possibly only lack of opportunity prevented others. An important factor here is that he had come to the notice of the police - he even had a conviction - but without successful intervention. This is an aspect where arguably government had an easier job and failed.

Re: I'd much prefer to notion

If you take a look at the information now released because of the guilty plea it's quite clear that the posts that stoked up the riots were not the primary problem. That was someone just on his own working himself up on everything from Gengis Khan to Jihad via Hitler - political labels don't really apply in such cases.

Trump hits undo on Biden AI safety order, EV mandate, emissions standards, and more

What could possssibly go wrong? Not that it matters to him unless a complete sewage works gets into the ventilation very quickly. He'll be gone and it will all be SEP.

AI pothole patrol to snap flaws in Britain's crumbling roads

Re: Time for some creativity.

Publicity can be effective. I know of one road that was promoted as being the worst stretch of road - presumably in some sort of competition along the lines of "our local road's worse than yours". People started to visit it to see for themselves how bad it was. They were too late. All they could see was a billiard-table smooth surface because it had ben properly resurfaced PDQ.

Re: The fix is conceptual

Unless the council is running the buses themselves reports from them would rank alongside reports from A.N. Other.

Re: Find the right council

I've had success in writing an email addressed to the CEOs of the council and Yorkshire Water suggesting they sort it out between them to decide who was responsible. It makes it impossible for them to reply that you should have addressed it to the other. In that case YW stepped up.

Re: SEP

AFAICR, however, it was called something like a road fund licence and paid to the local county council. Central government couldn't stand seeing money that didn't bring it into their own control. Giving it a name that related to roads would be far too dangerous - there would be a strong implication that it had to be spent building and maintaining roads so Vehicle Excise Duty was born.

Treasury dislike of tying tax to specific areas of government is so strong that they invented a word for it: hypothecated.

Without understanding what it meant nobody would want such a dreadful sounding thing as a hypothecated tax. Once it's understood it would be seen as a good idea - people like to get what they pay for and government could be held to its obligations.

Re: A myth? Realy?

The situation hasn't been helped by the bright idea of adding a high friction coating at areas considered to be dangerous. Heightened friction combined with a strong binding to the tarmac has resulted in the tarmac being torn apart.

Re: AI?

Did he give you the budget to bring solutions?

Re: AI?

"I really am getting sick of anything that's remotely clever being labelled AI, just because it's the latest buzzword."

You need to take a look at this from the department's side. They may have been wanting to get this gadget for some time and not had the purchase approved. Add AI and it suddenly becomes something the Council has to be seen as investing in so as to keep up-to-date and furnish senior officials with bragging rights.

UK aims to fix government IT with help from AI Humphrey

Re: I await developments

You underestimate the Civil Service.

You have a problem.

You decide AI is the answer.

You now have two problems, at a conservative estimate.

Microsoft joins CISPE, the Euro cloud crew that tried to curb its licensing

Yet another place to stage a brawl, I suppose.

How Windows got to version 3 – an illustrated history

Re: Grumpy

If they could they wouldn't be words to be repeated in polite company.

The reality is, of course, that the simple (even with point releases) numbering had been running for some time. Basic marketroid behaviour requires that by then an entirely new branding has to be introduced because (a) the existing stuff was done by the previous lot and (b) there's an awful lot of crud to be distanced from.

Re: Happier Days

"Windows 2000 was the last good one"

Definitely. That's the one that lives in a seldom used VM on my daily driver for the rare occasions when I need anything Windows related. Anything Windows related would also date from that era. The only exception to that is the W7 which shares a little net-top with Linux and has an OBD package on it - except that I haven't seen the OBD to USB lead for a long time.

Re: Brilliant!

I know that layout was done by cutting and pasting. I can also assure you that when drafting the original text there was a lot of cutting out bits and stapling then onto fresh sheets of paper with scribbled annotations. Staples were less messy than paste for that purpose. When it got too much the whole lot was send to the departmental typist for a clean copy so we could start again.

I remember also getting proofs as galleys which, I think was hot metal. And the subsequent page proofs with the added fun of ensuring that any corrections made at that stage didn't alter the pagination.

One of my first jobs as a research assistant was checking page proofs for a Proc.Roy.Ir.Ac. (Irish equivalent of ProcRoySoc) and finding a whole load of numerical errors converting from imperial* to metric which, on checking further, went right back to the guy's PhD thesis and had gone through every other stage unnoticed.

* Yes, imperial measures. The work had been done with a surveyor's staff marked in decimal feet. My first essay into the world of punched cards and Fortran was combing the levels from that staff with metric from the Hiller borer to tables that I could use to plot on old-fashioned graph paper with old-fashioned Indian ink. Happy days and a strong hint that this computing stuff deserved a closer look.

It's really an example of the big organisation being a big organisation pitted against a couple of guys being empirical.

"So, yes, these tiny apps [Calendar and Cardfile] were more useful than they looked ... although more so to Microsoft than to you, especially today."

I found Cardfile quite useful, so much so that I knocked up something similar with Lazarus/Free Pascal.

Does Outlook really have that facility built in other than for contacts? I don't remember it.

Re: Happier Days

"To my mind, the crap started with the disaster that was Windows 8."

I'd put it earlier - XP that wanted to phone home.

Re: Brilliant!

When drafting text it was "cut and staple". The word processor has saves a lot of punctured fingers.

It may have been unfamiliar to you. It's certainly a word I recognise, understand iand have met before n that context even if I wouldn't use it myself - I'd probably just say "analyse".

The mention of HP NewWave is is worth following up. The really big advantage from my PoV was that it added a spill chucker to basic text processing without having to fork out for Word. The real advance, however, was what they called object orientation which was essentially being able to click a data file and have it automagically opened with appropriate application. AFAICR prior to that you used program manager to open the application and then the application to find and open the file. It seemed to depend on a l-o-t of files which strange looking names.

AIUI it became the basis of the functionality in W95 with the strange looking files being corralled into the registry with equally strangely named keys. Certainly the copyrights of W95 included HP along with Berkeley for the network stack.

VMware migrations will be long, expensive, risky, Gartner warns

Some recent reports here of what Gartner have said were beginning to show worrying signs of awareness of reality. It's good to see that they're back on form.

Microsoft to force Windows 11 24H2 on Home and Pro users

Re: Opt out of support

Regular readers may know I've kept a W10 installation on an old dual-boot laptop out of morbid curiosity and to remind myself how bad it is. Bad as in now having been able to complete an update for at least a year. At the weekend I finally decided to install from a fresh ISO and at least cut out all the vendor's bloatware such as the McFee that even a wooden stake wouldn't kill.

Oh, what a faff. It wouldn't install from a DVD onto a drive with GPT, only MBR. Possibly if I'd worked out how, and let it blow away the Devuan installation it might have converted the drive to MBR, otherwise it has to boot from a UEFI medium. OK, the boot menu claims I can do a UEFI boot off the DVD or USB but just drops into the BIOS if I choose that.

It turns out that the USB has to be set upt to be partitioned with GPT. Then it has to boot off a FAT32 partition- that's part of the UEFI spec. Except it's going to have to have a file that's bigger than the FAT32 4G limit. Who one Earth came up with the idea of saddling UEFI with that limitation? Oh, yes, I remember whose sticky fingers are all over UEFI. So the medium has to have two partitions, a small FAT32 for initial boot and a big NTFS one for the actual installation. Of course it would be no problem if the ISO actually had that structure so it could simply be dd-ed onto the USB drive like any self-respecting ISO. No, it has to be made up just so with either some 3rd party medium creator tor some manual juggling.

In the end - yes it installs OK. Even excluding the media prep it's slower than a Linux install, of course, and has a restart or two. And it wanted to speak prompts. It has to do a lot of updates but then so would almost any Linux install except maybe for an ISO for a really fresh release. But slow. And the restart thing. And the opaqueness - several separate updates with different ideas of reporting progress, some straightforward, one sticking at 0% until it eventually competed, one that went up by quite a few percent quickly, then went back to 1% and climbed very, very slowly. Having done the initial bunch - with a restart, of course - it then found a couple more to do. Linux is just so much slicker.

And the result? Strange, of course. In some ways it's like the toddler that's decided it wants to "help" Mummy. The odd thing on the task bar that suddenly pops up news and weather I hadn't asked for and which it must have been keeping up to date, also unasked for. On the other hand where it could be helpful it isn't. For instance there's the alphabetically arranged start menu that must have been specified from high up by a paper-shuffler who's never laid a finger on a computer but has a PA to do short-hand and typing but would never dare suggest anything of her own initiative. And it's just so sluggish. And there's not only CoPilot, there's also Cortana. Maybe I'll come back to it some day and try to get rid of them. Anything useful, of course, like application software, instead of just being there, is a set of paid for extras.

Thank goodness it's not my daily driver. But it's good to be reminded of much better off I am with a decent OS, well equipped out of the box and not having to suffer this stuff to work.

"Windows 11 23H2 was rolled out in the same way – the company's support lifecycle means Home and Pro users* must be kept up to date, whether those users like it or not, in order to receive support."

What is this support of which they speak? When "end of support" is mentioned for W10 (or older) it seems to mean the time when the updates stop being rolled out. So they seem to be saying the users computers must keep being updated in order to keep being updated.

If an enforced update borks a user's computer why should MS not be prosecuted under the appropriate legislation?

* I assume they men the users' computers. Even in these days of intrusive AI I doubt they're updating the actual users. At least I hope they're not.

Trump's freshly minted meme coin passes $10B market cap

Re: MAGA is a selection process for chumps

"Nobody can take seriously the 'felonies' against Trump and the desperation to call him felon but has no consequence."

Being convicted of a felony makes one a felon by definition. And making not being one for purposes of holding a particular post makes it necessary to take it seriously and has consequences. I suppose there might be some provision for convictions to be eventually written out of the record as there are when considering the record for some jobs although for positions of such significance perhaps candidate should be held to higher standards.

Re: MAGA is a selection process for chumps

It depends on what you mean by successful. He seems to have done well out of it personally which would be his only KPI. The fact that it might have left a number of others distinctly worse off would be irrelevant to him.

Personally I think it's agreat thing to happen - but then I think Darwinism is a Good Thing. Maybe when the dust settles there'll be an awareness in the US that maybe they do have to have more qualifications for POTUS than simply being a native born US citizen. Simple things like not being a convicted felon or not having presided over too many bankruptcies. It might be a good thing to have, as SOP, a special prosecutor appointed from the day of the election result being announced who has power to collect evidence as things go along, freedom from interference and the duty of launching prosecutions, if justified, as soon as the term of office ends. Same applies to the UK PM and any other head of government.

Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?

Re: Bats..

Carrying ones bat it regarded as a good achievement for a cricketer.

Re: No, I was Wrong

If you need to test the live system you have to use the live system for testing. Fortunately this proved to be a test of the testing process which should have involved correct processing - or non-processing - of the test's tests. The results demonstrated that more work was needed on the processing of the tests on the test accounts and once remediated further testing of the process for processing test orders through the test accounts will be needed. Quite simple really.

Ransomware attack forces Brit high school to shut doors

Re: Failure to Plan and Test for Computer Failure is ... Failure

And you think that's an excuse?

Re: Why should an IT outage necessitate shutting the school

Back in the mists of time I was one of the part-time OU tutors, as was SWMBO who, incidentally, had been a school teacher before returning to University to do research. Th OU depended and very likely still does, on local colleges for premises for some tutorials. The OU year was very different from the traditional academic year and tutorials ran through the summer months when the colleges were normally closed.

From time to time the caretaker would fail to turn up to unlock the building and couldn't be found. What to do? Cope. It's summer, the weather's fine. We channel the ancient Grecian Academy and hold tutorials outdoors. At least I did. If it happened to SWMBO she just cancelled the tutorial and came home. I still don't know why. Maybe its a teacher thing.

Re: Why should an IT outage necessitate shutting the school

"The register is online."

So they can't check a register. They can't take a register with the children at home - or maybe elsewhere. No effective difference.

"It can also be the fact that security, physical security, is ran through IT."

TFA says the children are allowed in to collect lunches so access is obviously not a problem.

Coping when the world lets you down is an essential human skill.

Re: Why should an IT outage necessitate shutting the school

"catering"

TFA says pupils were allowed to go to school to collect lunch.

Re: Why should an IT outage necessitate shutting the school

Quite. We didn't have computers at school at all, not even non-working ones.

BT unplugs plans to turn old cabinets into EV chargepoints

Re: Is 1 charger for every 100 cars enough ?

"Yes, it's a guess by me"

A rather heavy guess. I can't think of one with more than 8 except on motorway service stations which I try to avoid because of their prices..

"[I] rarely use public charger"

But I'll guess that when you do you'll want one to be available with no longer a wait than in a queue for a petrol pump. That means a degree of over-provision in places where they're needed most - such as motorway service stations.

Re: the Wi-Fi connectivity challenge surrounding EVs

"Staff then blame IT"

Naturally. It's got a plug on it so it must be IT.

Re: Sounds like a BT infrastructure project to me.

"didn't even bother to speak to an Engineer"

Why would they do that? This is BT manglement we're talking about.

Re: Location

Because BT has always had the regulator looking over its shoulder it sporadically attempts to break out with businesses that won't be regulated. Back in the day it was so busy spaffing money on that that it didn't have any to spare for building out cellular networks so it divested itself of the cellular business (and the oversight which came with it which was so obviously not a core part of a communications business.

Donald Trump proposes US govt acquire half of TikTok, which thanks him and restores service

Re: To which Trump says...

"Paranoid much?"

It's not paranoid when they're coming to get you.

Re: This is ...

"Law enforcement is required to act to enforce the law and it cannot be set aside just because the incoming president thinks more time is needed: he's neither legislator nor judge."

Yes, but who's going to tell him.

Re: This is ...

You're assuming that having struck the deal he'll pay up the agreed price rather than, having acquired the shares but not yet handed over the money he'll then negotiate the price down. He might just hand the details over to his new mate who's reluctant to pay anything at all.

Re: Hey all you republicans

Socialism? It's communism!

Microsoft eggheads say AI can never be made secure – after testing Redmond's own products

Re: Check yourself before you wreck yourself

Personally I think I'd make it an order for a ton of polystyrene chips.

Re: Check yourself before you wreck yourself

Also https://xkcd.com/1807/

FCC to telcos: By law you must secure your networks from foreign spies. Get on it

Only to the extent that it doesn't cost too much.

Re: And the corollary...

"How do you know these mass intrusions are due to whatever possible access the TLA's had to different systems instead of previously unknown vulnerabilities and/or user errors?"

Because TPTB have admitted it. Certainly vulnerabilities and user errors to get in there in the first place, but the wire tap back doors, once opened, were a gift.

"Backdoors that adversaries are clearly happy to use against us."

Not possible. By definition backdoors can only be used by the good guys (whoever they may be).

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

Wright was my great-grandfather.