Posts by Doctor Syntax

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

So the US is going to find itself with a diplomatic crisis to go with its constitutional one.

Victoria's Secret website laid bare for three days after 'security incident'

Re: Where are all the acronyms?

Titillation Industry Titan Swoons Under Pressure

A two in one comment.

India none-too-subtly reminds Big Tech that local laws prohibit dark patterns

Re: Good Luck To Them

Nothing would say serious talk like a few successful prosecutions.

Sardina throws bait toward SUSE Enterprise Storage users

Bingo!

"SUSE Storage as the current storage offering from SUSE, based on the Longhorn project, represents a forward-looking, container-native evolution. It supersedes the end-of-life SUSE Enterprise Storage, which was a more traditional, broader software-defined storage solution. SUSE has been working with all of its customers on the optimal solution for their current and future software-defined storage requirements."

Trump trade policy to cost Nvidia $10.5B in lost H20 GPU revenues

I expect they're flogging all they can make anyway but maybe it trims the price they can charge.

Trump tariffs ruled illegal within minutes of Musk announcing end of government role

Re: Its a bit of a mess, bit was avoidable

"You don't have to be a Nobel laureate in Economics to know that trade policy can't be turned on and off like a light switch."

OTOH, you'd like to think a POTUS would know that or at least have advisors who'd know that and listen to them.

MIT boffins claim liquid sodium battery could one day power aircraft while sucking up CO2

"Isn't sodium ...really reactive. With ... water? But is this the best domain for their deployment?"

Ships?

Attack on LexisNexis Risk Solutions exposes data on 300k +

A management that didn't solve its own risks.

Russian IT pro sentenced to 14 years forced labor for sharing medical data with Ukraine

I suppose his labour will be carried out with Fnacy Bear or the like.

Empire of office workers strikes back against RTO mandates

Re: Cuckoo land

"The former light-industrial (garment-making) site at the bottom of our road has long gone and been redeveloped as housing"

Ah, yes. The double whammy. Now we not only have the occupants of the housing of the walk to work era needing to commute, we also have all those living in the new housing that replaced the work places. Ideally those old workplaces should have been repurposed as new-style workspaces, encourage their use as offices instead of city centres by favourable taxation policies.

Why didn't this happen? Ever since WWII having housing and workplaces next to each other was frowned upon, partly because slum housing was found in such locations (spot the syllogism) and partly because the old industrial sites were often heavily polluting by having coal-fired boilers. Yes, this mess has been carefully planned.

Re: Cuckoo land

"depending whether some tosser had been watching a movie on the M6 instead of... y'know... driving."

My experience of the M6 in the West Midlands and the adjacent bit of the M5 Is that one could easily and safely watch a movie from the drivers seat if one wished - in fact several. Being called upon to drive would be at best intermittent.

Re: Conflicting thingies

"Water cooler chat should not be underestimated. "

I never worked in a place which had, at least to my knowledge, a water cooler. I suppose we just managed without.

"if you want to equip a workspace in your home that can be a substantial capital investment"

It's not usually going to be a cost on the worker. You said you equipped the newly remote workers with laptops if they didn't already have them and I'd guess non-company laptops would have been unacceptable. True they would require an internet connection but that would almost inevitably exist.

My daughter is on her third job working almost exclusively from home had laptop, extra monitor and printer provided. Maybe the exclusive printer is one thing that the employers wouldn't have had to provide had she been office based - that and the VPN.

Re: For those who can

"The company has a 'green' initiative and has an annual report on how much we are contributing to pollution (this report is increasingly being demanded by our customers) so it is a win for everyone."

I'd be surprised if most of the businesses doing this include commuting.

Re: Cuckoo land

"Don't be ridiculous, you will have to move"

"What's the relocation package like and will you be able to arrange the viass for myself and family?" Press the erk for so many details that they can't escape thinking about the logistics.

Re: Cuckoo land

One-car households should be the norm. Not out of an authoritarian "we'll tax the bejesus out of second cars", but because public transport should be cheaper and of comparable speed for getting a worker, laptop and their lunch to a place of work.

And gravity shouldn't exist because if it didn't air travel would be easier as well.

Public transport can work well for commuting if there is a single route, fairly direct, between your home and place of work - and it's adequately time-tabled. Many decades ago that existed where I live. It took half an hour to go by bus to the nearest town with four buses an hour, one of which served the next most outlying village. In peak times those were doubled up. Even so it only supplied a fraction of the transport needed because most people were able to walk to work as the workplaces were close by; this was the England of industrial villages.

Now the local mills are gone and the villages are dormitory, not industrial. The bus service is down to one an hour, not doubled up but reduced to single deckers out of busy periods. The journey takes 40 minutes because the route is less direct to cover (badly) two former routes. Some people work at home. For the most part the others have a choice of conurbations 20+ miles away.

Before I retired my last client site on the outskirts of one of those conurbations was c25 miles away. I could drive in 40-45 minutes. Public transport on a roundabout* route would have required about 2½ hours overall including a wait for about half an hour for one change of bus and a very tight 4 minutes for another, always assuming the bus could keep to its timetable on a crowded motorway.

A household with at least two working members is very likely to need at least two cars because those members are likely to be working in quite different places.

* Roundabout because of the hub and spoke nature of public transport. Nobody is going to provide buses for the sheer diversity of routes achievable by car.

Re: Cuckoo land

"Parking is expensive to make sure only the well-off can afford to drive into the town."

Parking is expensive because parking spaces in London are a very scarce resource. As a scarce but desirable resource it becomes expensive. That only the well-off can afford it is a consequence. Get your causality sorted.

Many years ago when I commuted into London by rail there was a train strike and free parking was provided in Regents Park (not a suitable long-term measure). I'd never seen such free-moving traffic down Marylebone Rd. I almost overshot the turn-off.

Re: Survey responses v. reality.

"And companies are folding."

Save overheads. Let those who can and wish to work at home do so and close some offices if that's possible.

Poll of 1,000 senior techies: Euro execs mull use of US clouds

"People are more alert than ever to just how valuable their data is, and it's been astonishing how quickly cloud repatriation and sovereignty have become leading strategic considerations for IT leaders,"

What's really astonishing is how they blindly walked into this situation.

Three ways to run Windows apps on a Linux box

"And, of course, you need a license for your guest Windows OS. Even if the machine has a Windows license in its firmware, which many UEFI machines will have ... a VM can't see the real machine's real firmware"

AIUI it's possible to create a virtual disk from an existing Windows intallation - not something I've tried. If this is done with a WIndows installation which has already been set up with its licence key can it then be run as an already licenced Windows instance in Virtualbox?

Re: Some Of This Sounds Like Heavy Lifting!

in the UK - PC Specialist

Alternatively look at the wikipedia list of Clevo vendors for your country.

From Russia with chokehold: Putin says foreign IT firms still in Russia should be 'strangled'

Good to see Putin assisting Western sanctions. Or is the owner of the company doing the complaining another of his mates?

Re: We can learn from their successes

For "legacy" read "lock-in". The company's MO for decades.

Arc put on ice as The Browser Company bets big on AI-powered Dia

Re: Arc - I barely even got to know ya.

And Driving Instructors' Association, Drug Information Association & doubtless many more.

Also Arc includes Arena Racing Company, Application Registration Card, Association for Real Change and again many more.

It sounds like a company that needs a decent browser to check the web when it's selecting its names.

Re: Never heard of them before...

Also the name of long-establisehd FOSS drawing S/W. It would be confusing if I installed a second application with this name on my computers so I won't.

Unhappy with the cloud costs? You're not alone

yet there is a direct correlation with improper execution of "upfront strategic activities" in many cases.

Would this in turn correlate with cloud somebody else's computer being sold by by-passing IT and going direct to CEOs and boards?

ASUS to chase business PC market with free AI, or no AI - because nobody knows what to do with it

"He’ll happily omit AI from machines sold to larger buyers, due to concerns about data security and privacy."

At extra cost?

Ex-Meta exec: Copyright consent obligation = end of AI biz

The corollary seems to be that as copyright law is well established the AI industry shouldn't exist. I'm with Nick.

AI's enormous energy appetite can be curbed, but only through lateral thinking

Re: Shadow currency

True, but one has to start somewhere and discouraging consumption may be as good a discouragement to burn peat as anything else we've got.

The elusive goal of Unix – or Linux – simplicity

Re: "Advocacy..."

With Android having to conform to the limits of a phone CUA wouldn't fit well. OTOH scarcely anyone seems to have found anything beyond the home screen that does - at least not that I've seen. That's no excuse to have dumped elements of phone interfaces on the desktop nor to have abandoned CUA and the consistency it brings.

I have NextCloud running on PHP on Devuan - it's ancient Beowulf and the initial installation was a bit odd as it insisted on installing X which I had to remove. I can't remember any undue issues with installation except that configuring web servers with or without PHP was never my thing. Whatever - it's been working for years.

One thing I've noticed about Devuan - I don't know if it's inherited from Debian - is that it does seem insistent on installing a GUI desktop. Leaving everything unticked at Tasksel it will install XFCE anyway. If it is inherited from Debian I can understand the author of the article to which Liam links disliking it. It appears that his business is providing bare platforms, not desktops.

Likewise a two typewriter household. I'm not sure where they are, probably in a packing case in the garage, the packing case they've been in for several house moves. Mine's an ancient Remington portable, SWMBO's something sleeker and plastic cased. Last time I saw mine it had signs of woodworm.

Techies thought outside the box. Then the boss decided to take the box away

Respiratory test subjects' pre-conditioning room.

'Close to impossible' for Europe to escape clutches of US hyperscalers

Re: Really ?

Who are you and what did you do with fg_swe?

You would now need to allow for fail-over to different jurisdictions.

Re: Brown envelopes

OTOH they can't become unavailable because some thin-skinned numpty decides to sanction the EU or just your company. the way he did the ICC.

Trump threatens to add formal Apple Tax on top of the 'Apple tax'

Re: Perhaps ...

You think there will be donations of all the components, material, plant, factories, the land on which the factories are built and the services supplied to them?

Re: Perhaps ...

You're forgetting the cost of building the factory, equipping it and recruiting and training the workers.

Re: "National Emergency"

The real emergency is that the US now has a constitutional crisis, whether it realises it yet or not.

China approves rules for national ‘online number’ ID scheme

Re: Terrible China!

OTOH it's useful to have a bogey man to point to when HMG comes up with this idea.

Microsoft dumps AI into Notepad as 'Copilot all the things' mania takes hold in Redmond

Re: It makes me happy

"there's not a chance in hell I'd ever want to switch her to Linux and make her learn all over again"

There's no need for you to make her learn all over again. Microsoft will do it for you. Unless this is her first computer it has done so in the past, possibly several times, and will do so again next time H/W replacement comes along.

Re: Shocked by the number of users here

In many cases, because they have to.. We can feel sorry for them.

Re: Command Line Editor

Command line editor - something used from the command line. In the non-FOSS past it would have been vi. Now it's nvi.

Re: Maybe I’m old fashioned

"on Linux take your choice"

On a GUI, whatever the desktop manager provides - they're all written by people who know what they want from a basic text editor. It's that simple.

What was the question?

Is there anything more we can do to screw the users for fun and profit?

Re: Just more evidence (as if we needed it)

"MS Has lost the Plot (Again)"

This is predicated on the assumption that they rediscovered it after their previous loss, an assumption which is open to doubt.

Re: It makes me happy

"They did the same for 98, ME, 7 and 8 and have the same plans for windows 10."

I doubt it's any secret to anyone here that I'm not a fan of Microsoft or its works later than their Fortran for CP/M. OTOH I seriously question this in that my sister-in-law is a a heavy user of her W7 laptop and if it had been so easily compromised not only would it have happened long ago, I'd undoubtedly have heard of it given that she only lives a few hundred yards away.

Forgotten Turing treasure trove rescued from attic goes under the hammer

Re: available to all

Agreed. They might be of historical interest if they were annotated or accompanied by letters adding commentary, otherwise straight off-prints don't add o what's in the full journals.

User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it

Re: Have you fixed tech with an unlikely tool? Have I ever

"An ingenious vendor came up with something called a HardCard, which was basically a low power hard disk on the card, so it didn't need either a bay or an upgraded power supply."

AFAICR it needed two slots because of the size of the disk rather like GPU cards today (nothing new under the sun). Maybe it also included some other interface functionality so it could replace and existing card.