Posts by Doctor Syntax

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

Re: And for other reasons

They shouldn't. The clue should be in the name. Take the 20th century. Does the 2000 start with 20 (and continue with 00 for 100 which is what century means)? Then it should be in, and the last year of, the 20th century.

Somebody who should have known better, the editor of the 3rd volume of the Wakefield manorial rolls, made the same error in relation to regnal years (the rolls are dated in the form the umpteenth year of Thingummy) so consequently all the dates given have an off-by-one error in the years.

Re: And for other reasons

"You'd have MAGA conspiracy theorists out the ass screaming about how this is a complete hoax because Jesus was born in the year zero"

Unsurprisingly this makes them numerically ill-informed. The AD/BC dating was devised by a monk called Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis is the English form of the name) who only had Roman numerals to work with and they have no zero nor any concept of zero.

I admit to having been tripped up with this one when writing the program to calculate the dates from 14C dating data. Dates are calculated BP (Before Present) where Present is taken as 1950* when Libby introduced the technique. The standard is a bit arbitrary because for the last century or so increasing amounts of fossil carbon had been added to the atmosphere making it appear older and more recently nuclear weapons testing had added 14C making it younger again. But I digress - having calculated the BP date I then added the AD/BC calculation by simply subtracting 1950.

As we reported dates rounded to to 5 years it didn't really make a noticeable difference. Until I got an Iron Age date that yielded 1950 BP.

* I've been out of that world for a long time now so I've no idea whether they still do that.

"Chances are good that, were we to dig into the postmortem of all those little issues we'd find a lot of IT admins with eggs on their faces for not responding to the need to patch things."

Not the IT admins. My problem was the client's bean-counters who had run UAT successfully on their new Y2K system (the old one wasn't) insisting that they couldn't cut over until they'd finished their year-end routine. We were going to cut over between Xmas & new year; they insisted on mid-January. Nutters.

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Re: English is one of the easiest human languages

My wife had to translate between her Co Anrim father & me although I'd have thought that a few years in London should have ameliorated the Yorkshire accent.

Re: All I will say is this...

"French is a significantly more minimalist language, with both simpler grammar and smaller vocabulary"

OTOH it suffers from serious inflectitis* and has to borrow vocabulary from other languages for new concepts until the Academie Francaise gets round to dealing with the matter.

* But at least it handles 2nd person better. English has removed the intimate tu/thee.

Re: English is one of the easiest human languages

"I think English was used in BASIC because it was written by people in the US and UK to be sold to people in the US and UK."

A little more indirection might be necessary. It was more likely to have been because English was used in FORTRAN & COBOL but used there for the reasons you give.

It becomes a self-sustaining processes. People whose native language is not English are likely to create programming language that use English words simply because the programming languages they land their potential users earned, possibly even BASIC, also use English words.

Re: You had me...

Imagine a world without pocket calculators where you've never interacted with a minicomputer, you've never sat at a teletype which is waiting for a BASIC command and you're sitting at a desk with a pencil and got a stack of coding sheets in front of yu.

That's where some of us started. What was worse, once the compiler (for that's what it was) had encountered PRONT it would issue an error but then continue and as, after PRONT, it had no continuing context which made sense so it would issue an error on the next line and each succeeding line until it was knocked on the head by a counter which ony allowed it to issue 100 errors or the like. Then you had a little while to correct it - if you were very lucky you'd be allowed to punch the card yourself - before the next deadline to put the job through again followed by another 2 hour wait.

You either made very slow progress or you got fairly good very quickly. You also really appreciated every step towards a personal computer far more than anyone who started out later than that.

Re: A generation of gray-haired IT folks

It doesn't matter. We're just pleased if we've got any left.

"A generation of gray-haired IT folks learned computing using BASIC on 1980s home computers"

Just don't say such things. This is my children's generation.

Encryption backdoor debate 'done and dusted,' former White House tech advisor says

Stables with back doors.

US logic in question, but perhaps American memory can still prevail

Following your analogy, perhaps also the 741 supply.

Tech titans hide in shadows awaiting Trump tariff threats

"Being more diplomatic than the politicians"

It would be pretty extreme to be less.

A New Year's gift from Microsoft: Surprise, your scanners don't work

Re: This is not news!

Naughty. You know this isn't April 1st.

Re: A New Year's gift from Microsoft: Surprise, your scanners don't work

And telemetry so we don't really need to test - the AI can find out what's going wrong when you run it.

Re: "It seems to work or fail randomly for different users in different situations."

"they still can't be arsed to make it consumer friendly"

Who's "they"? And in what way is it not consumer friendly?

Your answer to the first would be quite significant because "Linux" as a generic concept ranges from servers to desktops (and on to numerous consumer devices including Android devices and all sorts of stuff where it's embedded and not really visible in any typical computery way).

From my own PoV I use Linux because I want to do actual stuff - mostly, these days, historical research - and don't want something that gets in the way. I want browsers, an email & newsgroup client, office suite, graphics SW etc. that Just Works. I really haven't time to faff about with stuff that doesn't. Devuan/KDE provides all that, all through GUI applications. SWMBO also uses Devuan/KDE. A cousin-in-law uses Zorin. It all Just Works. I call BS on your contention.

By comparison I have an old laptop that came with W10. For a long time it ran as my daily driver once I'd blown away Windows & installed Linux (Debian back then). When I replaced it as a daily driver I reinstalled W10 from its backup and made it dual boot. AFAICS W10 is useless. If I turn it on now it spends all its time failing to update and chewing up pretty well all its throughput doing it.

Re: still included with Windows 11

"Not sure about ... files"

du / |wc -l yields 138,541

77,045 are in my home directory.

Re: Another good reason to stay with Windows 10 for now?

Zorin is what I put on my CiL's computer years ago when her W7 got hit by ransomware.* I can't say it really resembles what I recall of W7 to any great extent but it was easy enough for her to use. Useful reminder - I promised I'd go over this month to update it to latest version.

* Beginners! write out encrypted version without overwriting original. Everything sitting there, waiting to be discovered with PhotoRec

Re: How?!

"firefighting after a release is even more expensive."

As is testing. What better that to push as much as possible onto the customers.

Re: still included with Windows 11

Not sure about Mint or files but my current Devuan lists 4,419 packages installed out of 65,676 available. I wonder how many are fonts.

Tech support warrior left cosplay battle and Trekked to the office

Re: Bathing attire

Ah, that reminds me that one of my sparky BiL's numerous jobs was field* service with a manufacturer of some sort of bathing pool plant and bathing attire was essential.

* Maybe not the best term in this case.

Apple offers to settle 'snooping Siri' lawsuit for an utterly incredible $95M

It's not a legal thing, it's an easy life thing. You pay us a fine without admitting guilt, we make your problem go away by not doing the work needed to bring it to court. What I would like to know is whether there are financial rewards over and above salary, possibly not directly attributable e.g. by having met overall annual argets, for those offering such a deal.

With 10 months of support remaining, Windows 10 still dominates

Re: Not so much that Win 11 is awful ( though...)

Compared to what? Cholera?

It'll be to make up for the fact that those users aren't buying new licences with new H/W.

Re: Error bars

Good call. Will it reverse in january.

Re: how many patches?

You're assuming the patches fix things without breaking others. It's not removing errors, just moving them about.

Re: Spin it as a success

Their story now is that it was just some employee. They didn't officially deny it and you know the rule: never believe something until it's been officially denied.

Re: Windows 11 is fine.

"I'm not updating it"

It'll stop being borked on a monthly basis.

"The Register asked Microsoft ... whether it would consider changing the hardware requirements of Windows 11"

Why would they? There's nothing in it for them. The free upgrade is likely to stave off class actions from people who'd just bought W10 boxes. All the rest are expected to buy new kit and with it new licences or, failing that, extended support. Those are revenue streams. Free upgrades for those who they don't have to upgrade aren't. About the only possibility - if it happens you read it here first - would be a paid-for "special" W11 version with the H/W requirements removed.

Honored guest Bork visits Warsaw, Poland

Re: The world needs a new OS

Proof that marketing works.

If it were in a Scandinavian country would it be Bjorked?

Edgio bankruptcy results in endpoint change for Microsoft

Remember it's not really a cloud, it's somebody else's computer and you have no say over whether it stays on nor on anything else about it.

Trump's tariff threats could bump PC prices by almost half

Re: Seriously who cares

But those tech companies aren't manufacturing at home so this tariff bump will hit their sales.

Remember that it won't hit them directly; it's always the customer that pays the tariff.

Re: But surely

With added handling fees, of course.

Screwed by the cloud: Hardware vendors looking for that raison d'refresh

Weasels strike again

"Four in ten of the servers currently residing in datacenters across the globe are at least six years old. Meanwhile, not only does this 40 percent slice consume 66 percent of the energy used by all bit barns – they also only provide 7 percent of the world's total compute."

They always think we can't see what they're up to. In this case we're supposed to think that 66% of DCs' energy is producing 7% of the DCs'output. But the world's computing power is not all in DCs so it's a false comparison.

As a matter of interest hat %age of the world's and DCs' computing power and DC energy is mining cryptocurrency and training LLMs?

Workday on lessons learned from Iowa and Maine project woes

Looking at Eschenbach's former companies the obvious questions are who's going to take over Workday and when?

Next-gen Wi-Fi to trade ludicrous speed for the boring art of actually working

Re: cost

"Consumers, and small businesses, are going to get tired of the relentless upgrade cycle, that'll give them something they don't really need"

They've already proved this in respect of PC upgrades.

Boffins ponder paltry brain data rate of 10 bits per second

Re: The brain

A cat wouldn't deign to answer a human.

Re: The brain

Boris, just the man to answer this. How fast do your industrial machine activators get clocked compared with the speed of the predecessors driving them? AFAICS these guys are measuring the equivalent of the former.

I started to run into trouble with the first example in the linked article: "this suggests that the thinker can access about 2^20 ≈ 1 million possible items in the few seconds allotted" Huh???? What's the logic behind this? Ah, I see. It makes a lot of assumptions about how the "thing" is selected and also about the actual number of bits communicated in a yes/no question.

Very likely the thinker can only access a relatively few items when asked cold and most of the time will be spent in doing a lot of processing about what will be an answer which will be hard to guess and maybe also constrain the answer to be within the shared experience of thinker and guesser* Treating that as simple random access is going to seriously misrepresent what's actually happening.

Also, even if the questions are posed as yes/no it's not necessarily easy to answer as yes or no. If, for instance the question is "Is it red?" it will be a good deal easier to answer if "it" is el Reg's banner rather than a terracotta pantile, somewhere between orange and red. Whatever the answer, the hesitation, intonation and facial expression of the answerer will convey more than one bit of information.

What else? Typing speeds? How many bits are actually needed to select a letter? A good deal more than they seem to think givern the number of muscles that need to be controlled with considerable recision. In fact most.if not all the tasks they measure are input or output tasks and depend on the rate at which things happen in the external world. There's a limit as to how fast the fingers can move in typing, how fast a pen might move to produce legible writing. Speech recognition needs a lot of processing to turn sounds into meaning and, of course there's a limit on how fast they can be spoken with fast speech putting an extra burden on the listener to sort out the badly articulated sound.

What may well be beyond measurement is the purely internal processing when problem solving. How many bits per second are involved in running through a lot of complicated ideas? How many bits is an idea?

* If that isn't done the guesser will routinely not win. Zheng and Meister may be biologists but, as another biologist I would have no problem thinking about biological objects outside their experience - and, of course, vice versa

Eight things that should not have happened last year, but did

Re: (Dis)honourable mentions

"brick a large portion of the internet"

Not a large portion of the internet, just a lot of individual but internet-connected computers running WIndows.

Arrive on doorstep, ring bell, hand over two packages and drive off before I open the packages to discover that there must have been a third. Clearly Amazon still don't know that software should be designed to look for and handle things not being done right. It would be perfectly straightforward to alert the driver if he fails to scan out all and only the correct packages at a delivery point. I suppose it's always something to be done in the next sprint.

Second Jeju Air 737-800 experiences mechanical issues following deadly crash

Re: Not a landing gear problem

"The consensus of opinion amongst armchair experts is the plane had a birdstrike on #2 engine and the crew shutdown the good, #1 engine."

Shades of the Nottingham crash, then. And that was very close to landing on the M1.

More telcos confirm China Salt Typhoon security breaches as White House weighs in

Re: Typical nonsense

"Do they really think the 9 Telcos that were breached are not currently spending billions and employ some of the best cybersecurity talent money can buy?"

Forget what they think and look instead on what they - and we - know. that in spite of all the spending and employment the telcos were required to provide back doors for the good guys to monitor communications based on the magical thinking that the bad guts would be unable to find and use them.

Very likely your PIO will have nothing to learn from the example.

US Treasury Department outs the blast radius of BeyondTrust's key leak

"One thing every org needs to start to plan for: SaaS provider breaches. What's your playbook for when your SaaS provider gets breached?..."

And when do you need to start to plan?

Before you sign up for the service!!!!

When do you finish planning?

Never.

And, of course, you not only plan, you act on your plans.

It's only a matter of time before LLMs jump start supply-chain attacks

Re: Full circle

"Those and a deal too good to be true."

This is the basis for a con, always has been, always will be, whatever the technology - or its absence. The sad sact is that however many warnings yu issue there'll always be somebody whose reaction will be to see the "deal" part, not the "too good to be true".

Re: Protection must improve first

Yes, we know that.

Re: Protection must improve first

"We're in for a rough ride!"

We certainly are if we're relying on AI for protection.

"And this is why Crystal Morin, former intelligence analyst for the US Air Force and cybersecurity strategist at Sysdig, anticipates seeing highly successful supply chain attacks in 2025 that originated with an LLM-generated spear phish"

Is it too cynical to ask what, having achieved a big scary headline, Morin and Sysdig are flogging?

After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus

Re: My fastest fix

There was a saying "There are eight ways to insert a disc into a dive. Only one is interesting."