* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32773 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

Page:

Ford, BMW, Honda to steer bidirectional EV charging standard

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: "because if you unplug your car, your house goes dark"

"you’re already paying for it" as a car, not as storage for the grid

"and like most cars it spends over half its working life parked at your house." to be used as a car when needed, not to keep the tarmac dry because it's been drained. Realistically, any Pennine village I drive through has cars parked on the road because rows and rows of industrial revolution period houses were built with little or no space between front door and footpath (footpath? luxury!). Such cars can't be connected to the house and I can't see the necessary public 2-way infrastructure being built by 3rd parties any time soon. there's enough problems getting enough public 1-way infrastructure built.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Not sure I'd do this

"on days you’re not travelling"

I suspect you meant was "days when you're not planning to travel". If you have an emergency and need, for example, to go to A & E the electricity company isn't going to reply that loan quickly enough.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Voila!

You just need a big fleet of EVs to store all that energy you get during the summer. That should tide you over until spring.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Voila!

"Solar + storage"

For a flat-dweller there's going to be no solar to store. Even a south-facing flat with permission to hang panels on the exterior wall (and there won't be many of those) it's not going to amount to much.

Capita class action: 2,000 folks affected by data theft sign up

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: C(r)apita....there I've fixed that for you.

Fly by nights? No such luck, they're always there.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Capita strongly rejects any suggestion that there is any valid basis for bringing claims against it as a result of the cyber incident."

Rice-Divies applies

Having slammed brakes on hiring, Google says it no longer needs quite so many recruiters

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Work From Where?

I wonder what happens to the offices, especially as one of the reasons for requiring them to come in was to justify the office space.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Google Bard

You could also ask on X instead.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Unsaid, maybe, is that they're continuing to automate filtering of applications. If that's the case good luck to them in continuing "to invest in top engineering and technical talent".

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Nooglers ?

Googly noobs?

Arm IPO kicks off today with CPU slinger valued at $54.5B

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

British chip designer to trade on Nasdaq only

So much for Singapore on Thames.

UK civil servants – hopefully including those spending billions on tech – to skill up in STEM

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: How about the ministers go next?

Certainly having law in the mix is sensible - legislators pass laws. Economics? You need some economics input and having N economists you can certainly rely on having at a minimum N + 1 opinions. Political science - maybe the fewer the better.

But as to getting numerate and scientifically literate people involved there's a problem. On the sort of sites they frequent - such as this - there's a default assumption of all politicians being corrupt. However useful someone from STEM thinks they may be if they did go into politics how likely are they to take that step when they know how their peers will regard them. The assumption becomes self-fulfilling and we should avoid it.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: How about the ministers go next?

His mobile app thingy should have been warning enough.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

How about the ministers go next?

Even better - how about a few ministers who already have a STEM background?

iPhone 12 deemed too hot to handle for France's radiation standards

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: I need to look at how the test is done

It sounds strange to me that the "close to the body" test gives lower readings that the "at a distance" test.

They have different limits.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Exactly. And if that's not good enough there's a new Ooh Shiny just out.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

I suppose they'll just send an update to lower the maximum power when operating in France. If the range becomes inadequate users will just have to buy a new shiny. It'll improve battery life - where did I hear that before?

Here's why cloud credentials are the hottest item on criminal marketplaces

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"And that's a terribly high number relative to what the industry should know at this point about safekeeping of secrets and passwords in particular,"

And there's the problem. Given that using somebody else's computer has been sold as a means of not needing to employ someone from "the industry" it's quite possible that these are set up by people lacking that knowledge.

Google outlines Outline SDK: Censorship, geo-block-beating tool to drop into apps

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

I wonder if they've built in something like the (anything but) privacy-sandbox and if they haven't done that yet how long will they wait?

Airbus takes its long, thin, plane on a ten-day test campaign

Doctor Syntax Silver badge
Joke

"4,741nm"

4.741 nanometres. That close? That's the problem with overloading TLAs.

Portable Large Language Models – not the iPhone 15 – are the future of the smartphone

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Hype Curve 2.0

A better search engine would be one that isn't smart and always trying to double guess the user. Just stick go back to basics such as respecting key words such as "and", "or" and "not", and understanding that when a series of words are in quotes only hits which fully match the phrase are needed.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Sure, it's possible, but why would you want it?

You and I might not want it but HMG would love it. Who needs to weaken encryption when you can get the subject's own device to analyse what they're up to?

Guess what? Ask clouds to behave like old-school vendors, they will – and you lose

Doctor Syntax Silver badge
Mushroom

"that might not be the worst thing to happen to organizations seeking to tap into the value of multi-cloud"

Of course not. There's earthquake, fire, flood, famine, nuclear war....

Dutch consumer groups sue Google over its entire business model

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Waiting for that crippling fine

You must consent

The "must" is a problem under GDPR. Consenting to data collection beyond what's needed to deliver the service should not be a condition of provided the service.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Waiting for that crippling fine

Don't forget informed.

Scientists trace tiny moonquakes to Apollo 17 lander – left over from 1972

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"a worldwide standard that's grounded in reality."

Both are grounded in reality - it's just a matter of different, arbitrarily chosen reality.

Lightning struck: Apple switches to USB-C for iPhone 15 lineup

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Roadside Assistance via satellite

"Beam me up, Scotty"?

Billions of 'custobots' are coming online. Marketers may need to learn SEO for AI

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Yeah, me niether

"what a celebrity is paid to recommend is not one of the factors that enters into my purchasing decision"

It might be a factor in my purchasing decision. It would indicate the price was too high.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

They may be immune to marketing's appeal to emotions but if they insinuate their way into devices in the manner of HP's ink handling they might find they're not immune to a 2lb hammer (metric versions also available).

X marks the spot where free speech clashes with Californian transparency

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

I wonder if the US is approaching the point where it has to face up to what's missing in its Constitution: the fact that freedom needs to be balanced with responsibility.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Nope

"Personally, I'm of the opinion that fictional entities, which exist only on paper, like Twitter or any other corporation, have no legal rights period."

Any entity to which the legislative process grants legal rights has legal rights. I doubt any court dealing with a case involving those legal rights would take any note whatsoever of your opinion. You're free to hold it, of course, but you'd be unwise to rely on it in any legal process.

Arm's lawyers want to check assembly expert's book for trademark missteps

Doctor Syntax Silver badge
Coat

Re: Disrepute

"can a small Arm shareholder start sending letters to the CEO"

A small Arm shareholder should be firing letters at him.

OK, OK

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Plus ca change....

AFAIK it was the IBM AT that introduced serial on a 9-pin D. Just for fun the board was laid out as if the D pin numbering was the same as a DIL header

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Check the power supply

"she had then gone outside for a cigarette"

The perils of smoking.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Check the power supply

"I forget which"

Not remembering might be the key to working it out. Which would have involved most booze?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Silly Mistakes

Ours developed an impedance (that's what the Northern Powergrid bloke said - personally I'd calculated it as resistance) of several ohms on the neutral. Once discovered a hole appeared in the road PDQ.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: I I be a-goin there, I be-n't start from here

I always thought amps were "drawn" rather than pushed

If you push hard enough it'll draw the amps or die in the attempt. Usually it's die.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Check the power supply

Perhaps it was before the days of no smoking at work and nobody noticed the extra smoke from the monitors.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: But surely

Maybe not. Maybe it's terminal.

Local governments aren't businesses – so why are they force-fed business software?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Local governments are never that model enterprise. In fact, they rarely resemble each other. They have to provide a huge range of services without much control over revenue, their metrics of success are as varied as the communities they serve, and they have the huge pudding of legal responsibilities that comes from spending public money."

I wonder. The legal responsibilities are defined. Admittedly we have a strange way of slicing up the responsibilities between tiers in different ways in different parts of the UK and the devolved governments will have come up with their own ideas for additional responsibilities. Nevertheless the statutory duties have to be performed at some level.

It ought to be possible to write a function to implement each of those responsibilities. The different structures could just mean that the top tier here runs the function that's handled by the bottom tier there. Providing that the software is structured so that the total functionality can be allocated as required it ought not to be a problem provided it's designed that way.

It should be possible to have one or preferably two companies providing a modular applications suite for the core local government functions and central government mandate that they use one of them.

I'm sure one of the problems is individuals building their own little empires - Bob always handles street repairs but Alice is responsible for utility permits to dig up dig up roads except for gas because Fred's department inherited that from the municipal gasworks. It may well be that the a lot of the customisation requirements arise from just that sort of internal slicing. A mandated application suite might sort out a lot of that - optimise the responsibilities to fit properly structured software rather than pay to have the software customised to fit the egos of the departmental viceroys.

And handling those one-off huge capital projects? Well, do they expose taxpayers' money to excessive risks? Are they really things local government should be doing? That's a matter for which software support is a secondary consideration.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: It was only after the implementation began that they revealed that they couldn't.

"The problem here, in turn, is that the customer is unlikely to be proficient at defining requirements, while the people who are actually good at that are (1) not proficient in the customer's domain, and, worse, (2) on the side of the seller."

One solution might be a rather old-fashioned one: stage the contract with different deliverables, the first being to analyse the customer's needs. There's a risk of the specification being gold-plated but the advantage being that if the specification turns out to be inadequate the supplier will only have themselves to blame.

Cloud is here to stay, but customers are starting to question the cost

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Over-provisioning of resources and idle or underutilized resources affected half of all respondents, with lack of skills or not having the right capabilities to manage resources blamed."

I'm reminded of the mustard manufacturer who said his profits come from the mustard diners left on the side of their plates.

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Confused

Scrap Microsoft instead, because the printers say so.

22 million Brits suffer broadband outage blues and are paying a premium for it

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"BT building their own factories to make the stuff, that same old 1960s public sector attitufde of make rather than buy, really going to go well wasn't it?"

If some utterly new technology is invented and you want to deploy it who is going to make the hardware? It's new. Are you going to wait around for somebody else to start making it so you can buy it or are you going to get off your backside and do it yourself?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Although I admit and agree there are users left in the shit, even quite close or even inside major urban areas"

And a far better use of money is upgrading those rather than upgrading the bulk of the network which is already delivering better performance than those users get.

BMW deems drivers worthy of warmth, ends heated car seat subscription

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Škoda, from what I’ve heard, still have old-fashioned physical knobs and buttons for the crucial stuff like AC"

If VW have gone touch screen maybe Škoda have done so as well. My Škoda gripe - plastic button on handbrake failed - obvious internal stresses because the bits don't really fit back together. Cost of replacement button? No such thing - it's acomplet handbrake level assembly at £86 or nothing. You could buy a few days of BMW heating subscription for that. I suppose the newer ones have gone over to electric handbrakes like all the others. I don't think there's a new car I'd be prepared to spend money on these days.

UK rejoins the EU's €100B Horizon sci-tech funding program

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

't'wasnt us, it was covid'

Covid was a life-saver for Brexiteers.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Indeed

Take a couple of minutes to think about this. First what does "ousted" mean? Blair decided to quit of his own acord as far as I'm aware. Should there have been an election then? You also end up with the situation where the PM is a liability to the country as a whole but the party in power doesn't want an election do they keep the figurehead in place. Is that a good outcome of your idea?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Re: Indeed

It's not clear if you think Horizon is a reason for being behind the curve or simple an inadequate mitigation. Whatever - it's clear that not being in it for two and a hlaf years has been bad for British science as a whole.

TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

I was going to say "Is that how long the fad's going to last?".

Page: