* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32754 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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Working from home never looked better: Leopard stalks around Infosys and TCS campuses

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The leopard was coming to complain about it.

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Or to put it another way: "It was fast. He wouldn't have felt any pain. He didn't know a thing about it."

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If it was wandering about outside it must have been slacking and not putting in its 70 hour week.

Could immutability be a Leap too far for openSUSE users?

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If you alienate existing users to achieve something you think is important then either it really isn't important to them or you've done an inadequate job of explaining why it really is important to them.

Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered

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"countless millions of pounds"

If it had worked properly they'd have been counted.

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Re: As a Non Legal Opinion

That long running enquiry is a problem in itself as it's furth postponing the actions that were already well overdue when it started.

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Re: As a Non Legal Opinion

"Any and all convictions surrounding accounting fraud and based upon the Horizon evidence are unsound and should be revoked. There's no need for new legislation or other grandstanding. If the Post Office wishes to pursue a re-trial of a genuine fraud case, they are entitled to do so based upon sound evidence."

They should all have been quashed, including those that had guilty pleas as soon as the problems were identified as it was manifestly obvious they they were all unsafe. As to trying to prosecute any possible genuine frauds - no chance of that as they would be unlikely to be able to produce untainted evidence.

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Re: As an ex-Sr. Director of a software company...I'm apalled!

"the company handed a massive fine that will be paid DIRECTLY to the subpostmasters!"

No. A fine AND compensation to the subpostmasters.

And the directors jailed should be those in post at the relevant times. All the relevant times.

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Re: Fushitesu

CW first reported in 2009. Remind me who was in government then. It continued after the next year. Remind me who was in government then.

Party politics doesn't fit very well here. It's very likely a case of anyone in government who had an inkling not daring to ask questions and the long it went on the more frightening it would be to get them answered. The current government is more unlucky than culpable - they're the ones in office when the music finally stopped.

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Re: Compensation?

"Did anyone benefit financially from the errors in Horizon or the unauthorized activities of Fujitsu employees accessing terminals remotely?"

Very likely the Post Office. If the net result was the SPMs paying the PO to rebalance their accounts that must have been where it ended up. But exactly what was it Fujitsu were doing? Presumably trying to cover up some of the failings.

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

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As "get stuffed" trumps wankword bullshit, they fell into line

I had the opposite. New Unix boxes replacing two where the application wasn't Y2K compatible.* The pair were replaced by shiny new, acceptance tested and everything. All ready to cut over in the week before Christmas and the New Year. The users - finance - suddenly said no, they weren't taking the risk (hah!) of doing that before they'd closed the year off which would take them until mid-January. We had the vendors dialling in on at least a daily basis fixing errors until we could make the move.

* Actually the version on the old production box was but that on the even older hot standby wasn't. That's the hot standby which wasn't' really that hot as the overnight update had been failing, by running out of time and unnoticed, possibly for a year or more.

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Re: Part of the problem....

OTOH sometimes you have to test to be sure - but you only need to test a representative sample if there are multiple similar systems.

It was a few years earlier then Y2K but Sun was reported to find a problem one year turnover which is rather odd given the way Unix kept time.

About the year after that a routine in a system I was looking after started screwing up in January. A boss-written page and a half of C I couldn't understand (not surprising as it was wrong) could no longer decide whether it was being run on a Friday. I replaced it with a one-liner.

Sometime the unexpected happens so testing wasn't wrong.

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Pint

"I don't think I've ever driven so slowly"

Probably still a lot of drunks about that morning. Can't be too careful.

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It's nice of US senator John Cornyn to tell us he lacks the capacity for logical thought needed to connect all the work done before 2000 with the fact that nothing bad happened at 2000.

Microsoft touts migration to Windows 11 as painless, though wallets may disagree

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ROM

"simply fire up your new computer"

Way back in the day ROM was the acronym for two different phrases. One, of course, was "Read-Only Memory".

The other was "Requires Only Money".

UK public sector could save £20B by swerving mega-projects and more, claims chief auditor

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Re: Erm

"Given that the explicit intent is to avoid paying tax, the person doing so is definitionally not being a good person."

Back in the days when I was a civil servant and doing a certain amount of travelling it seemed that every expense claim violated some or other restriction that the IR had thrown up. If I'd had a witness summons to attend court as a private individual I'd have claimed my expenses from the court. As I was attending as part of my employment it seemed I was expected to subsidise my job. Was whoever was behind that being a good person?

Later, in my final years as a permie I kept getting tax forms to fill in, being assured that if I updated their information I might be able to pay less tax. I always ended up paying more. Three years into being freelance they decided to hold some sort of investigation. By now i had an accountant and turned the whole thing over to him - at the cost of extra accountancy fees of course. The outcome was that the last three years were perfectly correct but because an investigation extends over six years it went back into the permie period. The outcome of that was that I was owed a considerable rebate because, based on those forms, I'd been substantially over-taxed. If they hadn't made the mistake (from thair PoV) of launching the investigation this would never have come to light. Were those responsible for those permie taxes being good people?

The IR and their successors HMRC have made the tax system adversarial. They will attempt to maximise an individual's tax beyond what is due. Any morality has been removed by them. You shouldn't look at it as a matter of good and evil. It's simply a matter of individuals looking after their own rights when confronted by a sate that just doesn't care.

I have a cousin-in-law who used to work for the IR. He took very early retirement due to ill-health which he said was due to the stress of what he was required to do.

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Re: The phrase is "bacon slicing"

"It's coming up to 50 years since Fred Brooks wrote TMMM and we haven't learned a damned thing."

It depends on who "we" is.

One of the problems he wrestled with was how do you organise the efforts of the many but take advantage of the overall vision of a single individual. ISTM that the FOSS community has worked out one solution: the maintainer. The maintainer provides the overall vision and decides whether a contribution meets the standards, should be sent back for rework or even whether it fits in with the whole at all. In effect the role combines QC with that of architect, shaping development in the long term.

It might need some modification in a commercial environment in that there would also need to be more planning as to what needs to be developed but I wonder if any development teams have adopted the overall principle.

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Re: Erm

"Avoidance is using laws in a way that they were not intended to be used, hence is using a loophole."

It's one of those irregular verbs, isn't it?

I am using an exception in the way the government intended.

You are using the exception in circumstances which need some clarification.

He is avoiding tax by using a loophole.

The legislation is what the Act or Regulation actually says, not an unstated intention.

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Re: A plan to

One of the many threads in recent days had a link to the report quoting actual code. Definitely QED.

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Re: Erm

The biggest source of avoidance - and loophole is probably the wrong word for it - is the entire way that international taxation works. For multi-national corporations there's a world-wide competitive market in corporation tax.

A country with a relatively small real economy can offer a better price in the form of lower corporation tax if, by doing so, it can get a few large multi-nationals to be head-quartered there for tax purposes. By their size, even at a lower tax rate, they will contribute sufficient to the smaller economy and, as a bonus, local businesses are also enjoying the lower tax which can help them be more competitive selling abroad.

In short, if you're a multi-national you can arranged to be taxed in Ireland on profits made on the business conducted in the UK. It's perfectly legal, it's not a result of some quirk of UK tax legislation but of the freedom to do that and the disparity in tax rates. Sorting it out would require international agreements and those smaller nations who benefit are in no hurry to agree.

Not that I'm explaining this to you, Codejunky, as I'm sure you're as well aware of that as I, but there's always an element of the commentariat which isn't.

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Re: Erm

"Naïve or just an apologist? Hard to tell."

Neither. He's just stating the fact, which is that it's a legal definition. There was a legal judgement long ago which stated that no man was obliged to organise his affairs to maximise the tax he had to pay. That you aren't aware of that does not make Codejunky either an apologist or naive.

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Re: A plan to

"how about involving people who know the technology"

But where are these people? Certainly not in ministerial office and probably fairly fe in ministerial offices. Long term dependence on outsourcing is liable to end up in a lack of the knowledge to manage the outsourcing effectively.

Microsoft prices new Copilots for individuals and small biz vastly higher than M365 alone

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$20/month/user

Are we sure this isn't the payment to keep it turned off?

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Re: ID 10 T Input

AI hallucination has upended the usual situation. It's now huge amounts of real stuff in, garbage out.

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Re: Hourly rate

"So even if co-pilot did work, theres no way it could answer questions about you because it doesnt know you."

You know all that telemetry you've been sending to Microsoft these last several years?

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Re: Of course not, only idiots wuld believe in co-pilot or any other AI

It's only death and taxes that are non-optional.

Windows 12 fan fiction shows how Microsoft might ladle AI into the OS

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Re: Good guys

Once Windows has become the thin client to your rented space on the Microsoft server farm removing the telemetry will just stop it working altogether. Telemetry will be all that's there.

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Re: Windows 13

Windows 365 is more likely. It'll cost you £How much??!! per month.

It's the logical progression of the last few years.

John Deere tractors get connectivity boost with Starlink deal

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Is this to the benefit of the farmers or to John Deere?

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

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"It's not plug and go."

Are the buyers being told that before they fork out the cash?

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Re: Sounds like Tesla drivers should always carry a can of petrol with them in Winter

According to that link over one in 30 petrol-powered cars catch fire. Really?

How Sinclair's QL computer outshined Apple's Macintosh against all odds

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Re: Love/Hate

"those infernal pieces of sh!t,... the Microdrives"

Fitting something so far from wat was already a standard storage technology was one example of what I think of as the 90% approach ot the UK PC vendors at the time. It's not a variation on the 80/20 rule, it's that they included 90% of what was needed to make the kit worth buying.

Why? Was it really cheaper to design and build the drive and its media rather than just buy in something that already existed?

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Re: outSHONE

Those irregular verbs are a bitch.

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

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Re: Errors that *should* never occur

She also complained loudly about my lecturing her as if she was five years old about the amount of time and money my staff had wasted cleaning

"It'll have to be charged to your budget" might have been more effective.

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Re: Errors that *should* never occur

"But at least with a diaper I know where the problem is!"

In the brickwork. e.g. https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/835775

Microsoft braces for automatic AI takeover with Copilot at Windows startup

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Re: Death to Copilot

It looks as if they never learned from the Clippy experience. But then they never did learn from anything.

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Re: Windows Share

You might get less downvotes if you were to cite sources for sweeping generalisations.

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

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"the museum's ICL 2966 mainframe"

Somehow to someone who started with 1900 series the thought of 2900 series as museum fodder sounds bizarre.

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Re: Hmmm..

Looking back to those days, certainly the Spectrum was worth buying as a present for my son and arguably launched him on his career as it did with many. On the other hand buying my own PC of any sort was long delayed in the gap between those with 90% of what was needed to be worth buying and those too expensive to be worth buying. It was a long time before slowly rising income and falling prices met.

OpenAI tweaks its fine print, removes explicit ban on 'military and warfare' use

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"the generation of malware", "military and warfare" applications, "multi-level marketing", "plagiarism", "astroturfing"

Of course. Banning the entirety of your market is just plain daft.

KDE 6 hits RC-1 while KDE 5 brings fresh spin on OpenBSD

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How many releases before it appears in Debian-land? And in Devuan a bit later than that. Not to worry, I can wait.

AI and robots join forces to cook up proteins faster

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In biochemistry cooked proteins are bad news.

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

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Re: Thanks

Just bypass the CP/M & floppy era. Go straight for the 68k, hard-drive and Unix tower. That was the real alternative reality.

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Re: Two head scratchers...

A quick visit to Foyles on Charing Cross Road would usually turn up something interesting. Once you could actually find where they had hidden the books

Do you remember the poster on the bus-stop outside Foyles?

"Foyled again? Try Dillons."

Happy days.

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Re: At one point...

BT had a lot to get rid of.

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ISTR my sone said his eventually melted.

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Not on the Spectrum but I built a microspectrophotometer controlled by a Z80. Another lab apparently built one controlled by a PET. Microsoft (Or was it two words or one word camel case back then?) had a FORTRAN compiler for CP/M and UCSD p-Stytem also ran on it. Given the layout of memory on the kit we had there was only the lower 48k available plus a bit of high memory sitting above the BIOS & video - or possibly squeezed in between.

Without bloat it's surprising what you could do with 8 bits.

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Re: "their substantial egos"

"What he didn't appreciate was there were journalists in the audience"

Knowing your audience is important.

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Re: "their substantial egos"

"even if what the customers wanted was nothing special"

In his porition you'd have thought he'd have known that they wanted to think it was special. The mistake was telling them it wasn't.

'Technical glitch' in payroll software sparks riots in Papua New Guinea

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"Infosys last Thursday announced the acquisition of semiconductor design and embedded services provider InSemi."

Welcome to your new 70 hour weeks. That should boost productivity.

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