* Posts by Primus Secundus Tertius

1534 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2010

Nancy Pelosi ties Chinese cyber-attacks to need for Taiwan visit

Primus Secundus Tertius

Historical approach

One solution might be for Japan to re-occupy Taiwan. That could then be extended to the mainland in the name of One China. A Co-Prosperity Sphere, they used to call it.

New Outlook feature: It freezes up when dealing with tables in emails

Primus Secundus Tertius

Tables and mazes

I would expect a table with simple rows and columns to be handled easily. But accountants make things more difficult, when some table boxes are split and others are merged. I have every sympathy with any program trying to deal with some of the stuff I have seen.

Microsoft warns Windows 10 patch broke printing for some

Primus Secundus Tertius

Good old XP

My printer/scanner is attached to a machine running Windows XP. So it does not have these update problems.

Your job was probably outsourced for exactly the reason you suspected

Primus Secundus Tertius

Talk to the coders

In London for a US company, I once had to maintain some software originally outsourced to India. As I found one problem after another, I felt the coders in India had never talked it over with the designers in the US. It always used to be expensive to make phone calls in or out of India; but I suspect also that management in India was reluctant to admit that there really were problems and queries.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Realistic rates

"My eyes are dim, I cannot see

I have not brought my specs with me".

Primus Secundus Tertius

Phonics is readily defensible in educational terms, as against other schemes based on recognising words rather than alphabetical details.

Tavis Ormandy ports WordPerfect for UNIX to Linux

Primus Secundus Tertius

MS Word has the option to show/hide formatting symbols. I use it regularly to bash documents into shape, especially OCR documents from magazines and newspapers where section breaks and column breaks have to be removed, and multiple or absent spaces must be corrected.

Hush now: Baby talk has common features across languages and societies

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Tap, tap

Old Shakey had a cat named Hamlet. Its most famous line is, "Miaou, miaou miaou". Most human actors get it wrong.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Tap, tap

@F & N

My mother was very deaf. Her cat knew that to get her attention it had to tap or scratch her. It was astonished when one day it realised that I could hear. They certainly think about the world around them, but not in words.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Woof!

Everyone knows that cats and dogs can and could understand human speech. In my ancient Rome, it was rumoured that cats wrote an obscure form of poetry which they passed off as the work of someone named Virgil.

First-ever James Webb Space Telescope image revealed

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: "The better alternative is to keep the politicians away from this stuff"

@DJV

If we are not ruled by politicians, the alternatives may be a lot worse. People in England were glad when the Cromwell era ended.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Frustrating...

@Freezus

I dream of a supercar.

Gear 1: road travel.

Gear 2: airborne.

Gear 3: around the solar system.

Gear 4; around the galaxy.

Gear 5: to the limits of the universe.

Plus reverse gears to get out of difficult situations.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Larger still

I saw somewhere that the age of that galactic cluster is 4.6 billion years. About the age of the solar system, give or take a hundred million or two.

So there may easily be life there now. As for the epoch when that light began its journey to us there is still plenty of time from the big bang some 13 billion years back.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Larger still

If alien life has the physics, they might contact us. Or not, if they think we are just boring. We need to keep a look out for galactic strangers, to be on the safe side.

Microsoft rolls back default macro blocks in Office without telling anyone

Primus Secundus Tertius

Maybe the reason for this reverse-ferret is to enable some future "enhancement" from Microsoft.

UK, South Korea strike data-sharing pact

Primus Secundus Tertius

How does it help? Perhaps you want to use a UK credit card while you are out there. Perhaps, even if still at home, you want to buy something from there.

Intel to sell Massachusetts R&D site, once home to its only New England fab

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Another End of an Era moment

No, I was not thinking of VAX Fortran, though I am interested in your point.

The library I am thinking of was first developed by SUN. Its intention was to take data from VAX machines and make it run on the SUN. When it was ported to other systems, it could export data on magnetic tape or through those new-fangled internet sockets in a common format, which was essentially SUN format. I had programs running on PC/Linux systems, old SUN workstations, and a MIPS machine.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Another End of an Era moment

Intel use IEEE formats for floating point and double precision arithmetic. DEC had developed their own formats before those standards emerged.

There was a library, but I forget its name, for converting data between SUN, VAX, and intel formats. It handled byte ordering for integers and floats, as well as converting floating bit patterns. Text data, one byte at a time, needed no special treatment.

We need a Library of Congress – but for the digital world

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: The Library of Congress already has this in hand

Apols for my mistake. Thanks for the correction.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: The Library of Congress already has this in hand

The UK "copyright libraries" are: the British Library, the Bodleian (Oxford Uni), Cambridge University, Trinity College Dublin, University of Wales, and the University of Scotland. The British Library insists on receiving a copy of all published books etc. The other libraries have the option of insisting on a copy.

With modern printing facilities, it is easy to order a few extra copies at a sensible price: there is no need to carry a huge stock or to have a huge initial print run.

UK govt promises to sink billions into electronic health records for England

Primus Secundus Tertius

What kind of digital

Sometimes I wonder whether these 'digitised' records are merely scanned images of doctors' handwriting, that well-known encryption system. Not that our arts graduate government would know the difference between a scanned image and an OCR image.

Old-school editor Vim hits version 9 with faster scripting language

Primus Secundus Tertius

Others preferred

Personally, I prefer Geany or Scite, which resemble word processors rather than traditional programmers' editors.

Running DOS on 64-bit Windows and Linux: Just because you can

Primus Secundus Tertius

Lenovo T60

I have recently been running the new FreeDos release, 1.3, on live hardware: a Lenovo T60 laptop, vintage 2006. Under that FreeDos I have run Wordstar 3.3, MS Word 5.5, and WordPerfect 5.1. MS Word could run in a Windows emulation mode which made it much easier to use than Wordperfect. The menu system in Wordstar reminded me of the Locoscript software I used in the 1980s; it seems to me that Locoscript 'borrowed' the user interface from Wordstar.

But I still prefer modern versions of Word: yes, with the ribbon.

AI's most convincing conversations are not what they seem

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: 180 Turing

I have wondered, when in touch with so-called help desks, whether the response is from a man or a machine.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Sentience? Meh...

Yes, humans can use intelligence without using words. For example, when playing ball games or riding a bicycle. Cats and dogs can play ball games, and some dogs have been seen to ride bicycles. I have seen dogs with traffic sense: running between cars without getting run over and thereby causing chaos.

Open source 'Office' options keep Microsoft running faster than ever

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Office schmoffice...

Maybe that works if you speak Network Standard US English (their equivalent of the now forgotten trad BBC English). But not in the Rest Of The World.

How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus

Primus Secundus Tertius

I once transferred an accounting spreadsheet from OpenOffice Calc to MS Excel. Then I had that same problem with the unchanging totals. The transfer had copied the cell values but not the cell formulae.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Excel is not amused.

Spreadsheets for data entry ought to be, but sometimes are not, set up to validate fields to check for that.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Two spaces after a full stop was standard practice in the days of typewriters and monospaced fonts. Even now, if one creates a document in Courier font. Which one might do if sending out paper copies which later will be OCRed. Courier comes through OCR fairly reliably.

'Red-rated' legacy IT gets refresh in UK as US battles theirs with bills

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: "Digital Boot Camps"

To be effective, the lessons would have to be framed in Latin or Ancient Greek.

Meteoroid hits main mirror on James Webb Space Telescope

Primus Secundus Tertius

Starships doomed

This incident demonstrates that one cannot expect to send starships through the galaxy at speeds near or above light. A collision at that speed would release the energy of an atomic bomb. E=mc^2, as any fule kno.

Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Measurement creep

"Calculators often lie..."

I have a test for calculators, spreadsheets, etc.

x = 355/113 - PI() = 2.667E-07 on my calculator. So the six most significant digits have been lost.

Then 1/x = 3749531.309, which is seriously wrong.

Excel yields 3748629.088.

An old Quattro Pro also yields 3748629.088

Windows 7 calculator: 3748629.093

An online 30-digit calculator yields 3748629.093

Japan's asteroid probe reportedly found 20 amino acids

Primus Secundus Tertius

Which amino acids?

The 20 or so amino acids used by life on Earth are just a fraction of the possible amino acids, most of which are not used. E.g. we use only alpha-amino acids, with the amino (NH2) group attached to the same carbon atom as the carboxyl (COOH) group. Then there is the question, are the ones found 'left-handed' or 'right-handed' stereoisomers?

Version 251 of systemd coming soon to a Linux distro near you

Primus Secundus Tertius

They call it progress

So Linux is as impenetrable to the average nerd at home as is Microsoft Windows. Professionalism, one might say; other remarks are not fit for a civilised general readership.

Elon Musk 'violated' Twitter NDA over bot-check sample size

Primus Secundus Tertius

@sebacoustic

You are right that the standard deviation is ~sqrt(5) or 2.2 approx. But this means any one sample may show between 1 and 9 robots, i.e. a divergence of up to 2 standard deviations. A sample size of about 1,000 is needed for a sensible result.

OpenVMS on x86-64 reaches production status with v9.2

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: I wonder how many people still remember how to use it?

What choked off a VAX I worked on was the Common Data Dictionary, that somehow got larger every time we did something I have now forgotten involving Datatrieve, DEC's query language for various types of files and for their relational database.

Various types of files: serial, sequential, indexed sequential. And various types of text: implicit CRLF, explicit CRLF, and indexed text accessible by a line number part of each record.

But at least it was all ASCII, this was before the days of UTF-8, UTF-7, UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE.

UK watchdogs ask how they can better regulate algorithms

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: OMG

Solar power is in short supply every night. There again, do politicians understand that?

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: "but there's also a problematic side to algorithms"

Algorithms are just a small part of the problem when considering programs which are data-driven. Who is going to review gigabytes of training data? Another algorithm? Or Britain's arts graduate civil servants?

Uni team demo algorithm to shield conversations from eavesdropping AI

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: How does it work?

Indeed, any reasonable British accent will defeat these American speech "recognition" programs. That is my experience, anyway.

How to democratize ML? More public data, says MLCommons

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Heavenly Help or a Diabolical Plot via AIdDevelopments?

I am not sure that I understand Mr Mars correctly. Is he talking about a Turing test for machines, so they will know whether they are speaking to another machine or to a mere human?

COVID-19 contact tracing apps were suggested as saviors. They sometimes delivered

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Turn Bluetooth off...

We (in the UK) got through the first wave of covid without wearing masks. But later, we were all forced to wear masks, and phase 2 came back very powerfully.

So wearing masks spreads covid.

HCL and HP named in unflattering audit of India’s biometric ID system

Primus Secundus Tertius

Cases elsewhere

"…475,000 Aadhaars with the same biometric data used to describe different people."

The Onion, a satirical American publication, once reported on the doctor who used the same magnetic resonance scan for all her pregnant patients.

Google talks up its 540-billion-parameter text-generating AI system

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Able to explain jokes?

Can it explain itself, then?

UK spy boss warns China hopes Russia will help it take over tech standards

Primus Secundus Tertius

Use your intelligence?

"intelligence is only worth collecting if we use it".

Plausible, but dogmatic. Depends what you mean by 'use'.

Microsoft backtracks on lack of easy Windows browser choice

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: There are *many* other, and better OS options

I don't use Windows to do my work, I use apps. Principally MS Office, including Word, Excel, and OneNote. But not PowerPoint, an utter waste of space. On my "other computers" I use Libre Office, but LO does not have anything comparable to OneNote. I occasionally use Access, much better than the database software in LO.

OneNote is superb for the first version of new documents, for which I am not always certain at the beginning how they will work out.

Supercomputer to train 176-billion-parameter open-source AI language model

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: A 176-billion-parameter NLP

I once constructed a list of the words I use, to support a spellcheck program. I was using about 5,000 root words; with plurals, verb forms,etc, that became about 20,000 words.

Select 5 from 20,000 and that is a lot of short sentences, most of which are impossible. The fun starts if you want to guess what the possible ones might mean, for purposes such as translation, indexing and filing, and customer service.

I suspect the current brute force approach is running out of steam. For example, machine translations are less worse than they were, but still not up to a standard anyone would pay for.

Android's Messages, Dialer apps quietly sent text, call info to Google

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: That rogue programmer again

I always thought the VW scandal began in a genuine way. Code was put there for debugging purposes and was never intended to run in a milestone test or final delivery.

But mistakes happen, and so a milestone test passed brilliantly, to the astonishment and delight of VW management. When the techies said, "Er, there's a problem here", the management answer was, "You are not going to be difficult about this, are you?".

Equinix cuts $705m check for Chilean, Peruvian datacenters

Primus Secundus Tertius

Ambiguous

I saw the headline and wondered. Did they mean a verification, or a bill of exchange payable on demand. At least a British spelling would be unambiguous.

Unable to write 'Amusing Weekly Column'. Abort, Retry, Fail?

Primus Secundus Tertius

Impossible messages

For six months the website of The Spectator has refused to speak to me. Their help department is utterly useless. Their latest gem: "Please login with a new account and new email address". I have been telling them for six months that I cannot get their front page or login screen.

Saving a loved one from a document disaster

Primus Secundus Tertius

Rather computers than cars

Just imagine what our roads would be like if people had he same problems with their cars as with their computers. But for some reason that does not seem to happen. It is not as if cars are idiot-resistant, far from it.