Posts by Doctor Syntax

Teens maintained a mainframe and it went about as well as you'd imagine

Re: Good, but don't do that again

"It got approved in the next go-round."

It dad to wait until then?

Re: fax Feeding the Beast

"you can use toilet paper!"

Maybe that was for the original being scanned.

Re: Feeding the Beast

They needed maintenance? Anything less than a sledge hammer or connecting the data cable to mains ought to have been survivable.

Re: Feeding the Beast

This one had something home-grown called Qubos with a home-grown multi-user access layer (?MCS) on top.

Re: Good, but don't do that again

"Don't do that again" I was told, very clearly.

It's things like that that tell you that you need a better employer.

There's only one answer to the boss like that: "OK, in future I'll call you first".

The only one I regret is the one who didn't make it.

Re: Feeding the Beast

You cannot imagine how sad it makes me having a 33ASR explains. But I suppose we have a younger generation to educate.

It was an unbelievable feeling sitting at one of those and realising I had the whole of a 1904 at my command (I don't think it was supposed to be the whole of it but when it proved possible to crash it it really was). How I sit with this laptop on my knee with equally unbelievable times more power, memory and storage. Particularly storage bearing in mind that the fixed disk needed a building of its own and had to be properly aligned with the Earth's axis to prevent precession ruining it and individual allocations were 100k words.

Re: You lucky, lucky

Yes, I'll put mine on too, if I have to go out. It's a bit brass monkeys here.

Microsoft moved the goalposts once. Will Windows 12 bring another shift?

Re: Reasons not to upgrade to Windows 12

You might not but Microsoft does: money.

Providing users rent it by the month I doubt Microsoft will care what Windows 12 runs on. Unless Congress strong-arm Trump there's going to be a weak H/W market in the US for the next few years and that means sales on a new version tied to H/W sales is going to suffer.

Cynical? Moi?

Pentagon declares war on 'outdated' software buying, opens fire on open source

"opens fire on open source"

So Big Tech is getting back a little of what it lost in tariffs.

Microsoft burnishes green cred by paying Swedes to burn biomass and bury CO₂

Any archaeologist can tell you that charcoal is stable enough to last indefinitely. Reducing wood to charcoal and then storing would be an effective means of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. To put it on an ongoing basis the wood could be renewed and the age-old means of that would be coppicing. English woodlands were managed in that way for centuries. The coppice stools regenerate when cut and continue to harvest carbon. If you see a piece of woodland named copse or Spring Wood, Spring Grove or the like it was managed this way.

The only unusual thing here would be storing the charcoal rather than burning it and is likely to be more effective as long term storage than trying to contain it as a gas. It's not very efficient,of course, to it would need a means of using the flammable gasses released and the waste heat but it would be effective at removing CO2 from the atmosphere permanently and rather less weird than some of the other schemes.

"Microsoft uses a reduction-first strategy to lower emissions"

So quit the AI junk.

Computacenter IT guy let girlfriend into Deutsche Bank server rooms, says fired whistleblower

Re: Bizarre story

They should be unhappy at the report because of its content, not its existence. Giving him cause to sue wasn't exactly the sweeping under the carpet they must have intended.

Re: It sounds like he's got a case

Always start high so as to be able to negotiate down. Also, it gets more headlines, exactly what his employers and the bank were trying to avoid.

Will they never learn?

Don't shoot the messenger.

Especially one who knows where the bodies are buried.

Curl project founder snaps over deluge of time-sucking AI slop bug reports

Re: It's the bug bounty

Not necessarily with every report. Just a deposit on joining HackerOne, refunded after a genuine report. If, subsequently, slop reports are sent a new, double deposit will be required to be refunded after 2 genuine reports, otherwise the submitter is banned. Double up again as necessary.

Trump's wind farm funding freeze is so much hot air, say states as they blow sueball to Washington

"shocked, if Big Tech's renewable energy ambitions aren't known in the White House"

Their money's put him where he wanted to be and now they don't matter any more. The damage tariffs are wreaking elsewhere on their interests shows that.

Citrix finds new use for virtualization: Avoiding PC price hikes caused by tariffs

"a Linux-based OS that allows a PC to boot straight into a hosted virtual desktop"

On what is the virtual desktop hosted? It's going to be real H/W so unless it's already onshore that's going to be tariffed or in Canada. Why not cut out stick with the middle man and run the desktop directly on Linux?

Culture comes first in cybersecurity. That puts cybersecurity on the front line in the culture wars

Re: Define nation!

"Wessex hasn't been a thing since King Alfred."

It was still a kingdom at the time of the accession of his grandson Athelstan. Here in Northumbria we had a bit of trouble with him. He was the first to claim himself as King of England although Northumbria was still disputed but the York Vikings in the mid C10th.

But, yes, "nation" was the wrong word. "Government" would have been more apt.

Re: "Cost and Consequence"

"That they have not found the cross over animal to certainly claim it was natural"

1. The cross-over animal would hardly be carrying a label to identify itself as such.

2. It was probably long dead before the outbreak in humans, especially if it ended up in a market.

3. Disregarding the above, the chances of happening on it are vanishingly small being the ratio between the number of animals examined by virologists to the number of animals alive at the time.

Re: "Cost and Consequence"

"why did they let ... create covid that kill all those ...people around the world?"

Would you care to provide some evidence for the premise of your version that might be persuasive to the biologists who use this platform? In your own words, please, not a list of links to some conspiracy sites nor a load of LLM hallucinations.

Re: Cloud Act?

To what extent would we want alternatives to major cloud providers? As things stand there must be few clients who are not rounding errors in the bottom line of their US service providers.

As far as stuff like OneBox or whatever it's called is concerned, NextC|loud with the desktop client installed does the job fine, is based on open standards and provides for calendar sync and a number of collaboration tools. There are plenty of EU & UK suppliers who will run it for you if you don't want to run it in-house.

Likewise there are EU and UK suppliers who will host email.

For "major" read "many".

The bits needed to make up Microsoft <365 of the Google equivalent are there.but there is scope for some integration work, the sort of thing that the Microsoft ID handles. There's also scope for a ChromeOS equivalent which will integrate with the users' choice of service provider including an in-house server if preferred. It's those areas where I would see the efforts of a "Collective" being best applied.

Re: "Cost and Consequence"

"Gramps, why did they let Robert Kennedy kill all those little children with measles?"

Robert Kennedy is a believer in eugenics. If the kids aren't strong enough to survive a bout of measles than that's just nature's way of improving the species would be his view. Unfortunately, in practice the selection filter is parents stupid enough to believe him. He also puts out that vitamin A is a good cure so now there are kids turning up for treatment with vitamin A poisoning from over-enthusiastic "treatment".

"Let's hope they choose wisely."

It would make a nice change.

"US companies can voluntarily abide by EU norms through contractual agreement, so the EU is happy – no, that's the wrong word"

It certainly is. Gullible? Credulous? Cowed. maybe? Schizophrenic is probably the best description. One part of the EU wants to protect users, the other doesn't want to rock the boat with US trade. Now the boat has been rocked perhaps it's time for the user protection to come to the fore. In post-Brexit Britain I'm not sure there's anyone in HMG who cares about user protection so it'll be readily ditched in order to kiss Trump's arse.

Commodore OS 3 is the loudest Linux yet

Re: 37.85G ISO

And then to the next aisle for the toilet fittings including bidets and that strange Japanese contraption that includes an automated path lab.

Re: 37.85G ISO

The SLS system would have included the userland as well. As another Devuan user, I wonder how many floppies it would take for systemd and its tentacles.

Signal chat app clone used by Signalgate's Waltz was apparently an insecure mess

Re: A quote from Forrest Gump comes to mind.

He's obviously worked out that there was something a bit wrong with his use of Signal but just not what it was so insteado fthat he's used something a bit different.

British govt agents step in as Harrods becomes third mega retailer under cyberattack

Re: We all know why it keeps happening

We need two things. One is a directors' responsibility added in company law. The other is an arrangement similar to aircraft reporting where the incident is analysed: what happened, how it was recovered, how the system could have been better arranged to minimise the attackers' access and what could have been done to prevent access in the first place with the results circulated to CISOs so that the lessons could be applied widely.

Re: screw M&S

No doubt it worked with the developer's browser & that was good enough.

Re: We can't continue to regard these simply as "IT Problems"

Damn autocorrect - misogyny.

Re: M&S Store shopping - no stock at the best of times

"my first job some 30 years ago"

So you're still young.

Re: M&S Store shopping - no stock at the best of times

Shortened, if need be. These days there's probably not enough hem left to lengthen them.

Re: We can't continue to regard these simply as "IT Problems"

It was your second sentence which was the problem. Following up a reasonable complaint about misandry with monogeny isn't good, even if it was an attempt at irony.

Re: We can't continue to regard these simply as "IT Problems"

"he's"

Maybe I'm jumping to a conclusion here but the poster's handle was JulieM.

Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme

Re: That UK Gov Manadate thing

Mine, Kirklees, are pretty precarious financially. Reform taking that over could be .... interesting.

Altman's eyeball-scanning biometric blockchain orbs officially come to America

One man, a visitor to the RSA Conference happening just down the road, said he'd heard about it at the show and "free money is free money."

He may have known enough to give a genuine scan and completely false information to go with it - preferably Sam Alman as his name.

Trump promises protection for TikTok, for which he has a ‘warm spot in my heart’

Re: Ignorant estate agent made president, result for everything is what you'd expect

A conversation with the late John Prescott could have been amusing. Not interesting, but amusing.

“I think his people have done an incredible job...They’re unbelievable at computers."

Literally.

"flubbed some tech investment figures"

s/lu/i/

India’s chipmaking ambitions hurt by Zoho’s no-go and Adani unease

"The regulator also ordered Meta to start obeying the law within 180 days."

180 days? How about now, given that they should have been obeying it all along?

Example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c30q54l9dneo

Microsoft tries to knife passwords once and for all – at least for consumers

Very simple. My password is not on my computer, just its hash. My password manager is on my computer, it's encrypted, needs a password (strictly speaking a passphrase) to open and is synched to a NextCloud server on my own hardware. That's two passwords which I keep in my head. I will not use those elsewhere. There are no other dependencies, especially no third parties. I am not beholden to Microsoft or Apple for access to my PC.

Re: Maintaining passkeys

'Twas not I but repeat after me:

It's somebody else's computer that you do not control.

It's somebody else's computer that you do not control.

It's somebody else's computer that you do not control.

It's somebody else's computer that you do not control.

It's somebody else's computer that you do not control.

It's somebody else's computer that you do not control.

A password manager is fine. But keep it where you can lay your hands on it.

UK's smaller broadband operators face tough road ahead, consolidation possible

Re: choose between three or even four providers.

"But most customers (ie consumers) ... just look at bandwidth & price"

And how many of them bother to check real bandwidth? If the do,for most people who don't know how to connect to a router with an RJ45 cable that means they'll be measuring the speed of their WiFi.

Re: skipping streets

"Openretch are an archaic shower that long ago should have been broken up / made a non profit "

If they were a non-profit where would they get the capital to build anything, even a cable past the end of your street?

Oh, right. The taxpayer. Good luck with that.

Meta blames Trump tariffs for ballooning AI infra bills

Maybe not Musk, but the rest of them will be looking at their rising costs, shrinking sales market and falling stock market.

Re: why not just build a foundry in the USA and sell chips?

"avoid tariffs by building the stuff in the USA"

And, as Nvidia found, face export bans instead.

20% discount offer on Windows 365 expires around same time as Windows 10 support

Re: We users may hate Windows 365

It makes sense until you realise that your entire business is leased from Microsoft on a computer they control and you are only given the illusion of controlling.