Posts by Doctor Syntax

Google "bronze age collapse"

Disappointing - it's all about the Eastern Mediterranean are and a little about Central Europe. Nothing further west into Ireland, for instance.

Re: Yep.

"a minor is not legally allowed to enter into a contract"

All that means is that they're not legally entering into contracts. If the sign-on simply requires them to state they're of age to bypass parental consent then they can get access, it's just that there's no actual contract involved.

"Why isn't the Post Office and Fujitsu boards, past and present, already doing time?"

That is a depressingly easy one to answer.

The enquiry was set up in such a way that any criminal prosecutions are delayed until it's completed and the PO has succeeded in dragging it out indefinitely. Witnesses' appearances have been put off because documents were unavailable or because new documents were found at the last minute and time had to be allowed to examine them. Many of these last minute documents have turned out to have been duplicates of those already in evidence. It's a great pity that these tactics weren't treated as contempt of court early on.

AFAICS the only action needed is to get a full list of all the convictions where Horizon was invlovled, including those where there was a plea, take it to the court of appeal and say "We believe all these convictions were unsafe and should be overturned". Faffing about with special legislation seems to be more a case of political theatre than anything else. Trying to look for and exclude possible real frauds is pointless as the evidence is tainted.

Re: Start Menu vs Super Key

Be careful - you'll have the usual suspects foaming at the mouth about using the command line.

Re: Hash

One too many people certainly did.

Re: Proprietary

You haven't read many of my posts, have you?

Re: Does old Cory know what he's talking about?

Microsoft of Google. What a choice.

Re: Eternal Growth

Rapidly growing companies may not turn a profit for years but are valued for their potential when they stop growing. I'd expect anyone with a handle of Big_Boomer to have reached a point in life where continuing profits are very desirable as they pay the pension. The problem shareholders are the activists who want to take a short-term, damaging profit and get out.

Re: It's everywhere

On the whole things get better if there's a profit in it for someone and stay better only if the profits continue to grow or if regulation keeps them better. The nature of things is that growth can't be indefinite so at some point profits will only continue to grow by cutting costs and letting standards slip. That's were regulation comes in to protect things. A saner world, which would need much less regulation, would be one where companies could be valued by their prospects for growth or their ability to earn steady profits and expected to move from one to the other.

Re: It's everywhere

"Fish have returned to rivers that were basically open sewers less than 40 years ago."

It will need some pressure to maintain that and stop enshittification literally returning.

Re: Deliberation

I can't remember Altavista being that bad at all.

Re: Root Cause

"How to fix it? Dunno."

Better education about the fact that exponential growth and the early stages of sigmoidal growth are indistinguishable but the first is a construct of pure mathematics and the second is all that reality can provide. Learn to be content when you reach the top of the S.

Re: Bog Zech?????

"All too often, once they taste the power that they have they devolve into an organization whose main aim is to increase the power and wealth of their leaders, while demanding ever larger pay packets for ever less work for their dues-paying members"

I think they come to regard the second part as optional if not an encumbrance to pursuing the first. That at least was my experience.

Re: " the future of work after miscreants use AI to publish garbage"

"But the greatest hazard we face is decline of human capacities to recognise garbage as garbage as reliance on the unreliable becomes automatic."

AFAIKS social media have already made great strides in achieving this before LLMs came into the picture.

Re: .woosh

The packets would get sent but never received.

Re: Is it naive to suggest ...

Navigating the dronw could get tricky.

Re: Any mention of GPS spoofing .....

But how do you know they're genuine OS maps?

Re: If the didn't insist on sticking with a monolithic kernel they wouldn't have these arguments...

Having a lot of stuff in modules, loaded as needed, achieves a lot of what you're thinking of. But even with a microkernel you still need the bits to talk with each other and present an agreed interface to userland - even if your drivers are in userland. AFAIKS this is what the argument is about here and presumably microkernels have the same scope for arguments.

Re: Here’s a bigger issue….

"What if this “emperor” jackass gets run over by a truck one day? What then?"

AFAIK that's all agreed, Greg steps up.

In the meantime, if you think he's a jackass, try to outsmart him. Fork your own kernel and see how many contributors you can get.