* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32780 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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Ofcom proposes Wi-Fi and cellphones share upper 6GHz band

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"On 6GHz, the issue at the moment is that everyone wants a slice of it, and it doesn't matter what China does if everyone else decides to use 6GHz for something else. "

My guess: US will make allocations completely contrary to the Chinese - it will save the effort of explicitly banning the Chinese kit.

Make sure that off-the-shelf AI model is legit – it could be a poisoned dependency

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In order to be really newsworthy they'd have to have created a clean LLM.

EU gives its blessing to reopen data pipelines to the US

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Re: "limits to the access US intelligence agencies have to EU citizen's data"

"what's Plan B ?"

I think this is Plan C already. And Max Schrems will already have his counter Plan C to hand already and I doubt he'll wait for the US to not keep its word.

Microsoft's Azure West Europe region blew away in freak summer storm

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So the fiber went fubar.

Starlink satellites leak astronomy-disturbing EM radiation, say boffins

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If they haven't done so already no doubt spooks round the world are now looking to see if any useful data is leaking out.

Musk sues law firm for overcharging Twitter when Twitter was suing Musk

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Re: Elon Musk is suing the lawyers who were representing Twitter when it sued him

"he can perhaps sue the lawyers who agreed to represent him to sue the previous lawyers."

And then sue the lawyers who take on that case.

One thing about the US legal system - there are so many lawyers it'll take him a long time to get round the whole lot so that he has them all suing each other for him and has to start another round.

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Re: When is This Guy Going to Get Britney Speared?

But life would be so dull - for the rest of us.

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Re: I'm convinced

"If nothing else, it might make his future lawyer's fees even higher."

He has a plan to deal with that.

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Re: Earned Their Pay

"rather than having what they dug up during discovery become public record"

I'm sure they'll enter that into their defence.

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And how is he paying the lawyers who are suing the lawyers for him? Upfront?

Oracle pours fuel all over Red Hat source code drama

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"We leave it as an exercise for the reader to puzzle out the rationale for Oracle's failed $10 billion lawsuit against Google over Android's use of copyrighted Java APIs."

Probably something along the lines of "my enemy's enemy is my friend".

Red Hat's open source rot took root when IBM walked in

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"If you're running a mission critical workload without some sort of support, you're an idiot. If you're smart enough not to need support, then you're a Debian guy and you don't need Red Hat."

These are the extremes. There's also a variety of other situations such as you have a mission critical workload for which RHEL is worth the money but some ancillary uses such as testing and training which production environment compatibility is needed, a clones is fine but RHEL prices can't be justified or it's used in production but the profit margins won't support buying RHEL. The first of these alternatives is one where the RHEL customer is going to review the market and the second one where they will never sell anything anyway unless they drastically cut prices.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

But the licence also says additional restrictions should not be added and may be removed. Those contractual shenanigans look awfully like an implied additional restriction.

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Re: Well said

From a personal point of view it probably makes sense. IBM may have dispensed with their services by next year.

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Red Hat has contributed a great deal over the years. That's why seeing it following what looks like the IBM path of circling the drain so unfortunate.

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There's a school of thought that the whole SCO affair was an attempt to get IBM to buy them and IBM didn't want to play.

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"They built their product upon the work of many thousands of others, which they did not have to pay for."

To be fair they did provide some of that work themselves. Some of it good, some of it involved pottering about.

But all under GPL which they're now trying to side-step.

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Pint

Re: Don't underestimate the ability....

"never underestimate their ability to disorganize you"

Nice one --->

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Re: not paying Red Hat for RHEL, but getting the majority of the value of RHEL for free.

And the contributions, like all others, will be under GPL2.

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Re: Great liberators ??

"shirt term share value"

A typo I'm sure but you've coined a handy new expression - short term value means losing your shirt in the long term.

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Re: Well said

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"

I think those days disappeared a long time ago.

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Re: Great liberators ??

"Don't get it."

Read the first post in this thread and EricM's reply. Remember that EricM is just one of a large number of RHEL users who took a similar approach. Then try again to get it.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Red Hat was, and is, leaving a lot of money on the table."

But is it? Consider some of the possible scanarios for different customers if the clones closed down.

1. RHEL user for both production and test, training etc - let's call these non-production uses ancillary - no additional money made.

2. RHEL user for production, clone for ancillaries but would be able to afford to convert the latter to RHEL licences - money on table here.

3. RHEL user for production, clone for ancillaries but converting latter to full licences would not be financially affordable , will manage to struggle along with late version clone/CENTOS-stream or some other distro - no additional money to be made.

4. As 3 but decides to use another distro for future projects - no short term gain, likely long term loss as current production purpose reaches EoL.

5. As 4 but decides to actively migrate existing production usage so as not to split work between two distros - complete medium to long term loss

6. As 5 but reluctantly needs to buy extra licence for ancillaries during migration - short term gain followed by loss in medium rather than longer term.

7. Running entirely on clones, could afford to buy licences - money left on table.

8. Running entirely on clones, licences would be unaffordable - no money left on table irrespective of what course of action they take.

9. Not currently RHEL users but were considering it until now - loss of future sales prospects

Those in scenarios 3 - 6 currently using some S/W or H/W product currently RHEL users are likely to be speaking to the vendors of those products in the near future if they aren't already and said vendors likely to be considering their positions already.

So in some scenarios there will have been money left on the table which they could pick up. In others there's no prospect of that happening and in others there's money to be lost in the longer term, especially as 3s slip into 4 or 5.

Whether this is a real money earner in the long term depends on the balance between the scenarios.

My guess would be that there are bonuses to be made in the next quarter or so as the immediate gains are made after which it will be time for the execs to emulate the rest of their customers and move on.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

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Get a whole lot of them so you can link them in series back to the generator. It's the only way to be sure a noisy, distorting oxygen atom can't creep into the supply.

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Saw the headline, not in the least surprised on finding out who the company was.

Sarah Silverman, novelists sue OpenAI for scraping their books to train ChatGPT

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"Only takes minutes if the info is already included in the LLM."

Also only takes a few minutes if it just makes stuff up hallucinates it if it doesn't have it already.

It sounds like this is information that should have been assembled and kept up to date anyway. The value of the LLM would appear to be compelling whoever it might be to do what they should be doing anyway.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

"Can they show that they've suffered pecuniary damage from the alleged copying? If so, it can't be very much."

It will take an author quite a long time to write a book. If, after scraping a lot of novels, an LLM can knock one out in minutes then they stand to lose future income.

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This is also true of me, not only in regard of this particular group of people but also of others who are supposed to be famous. I don't, of course, count this ignorance as having missed anything of significance to me.

BT CEO Jansen confirms he's quitting within 12 months

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"Jansen is also the architect of planned upheaval at BT, much of which will happen after he's gone"

Upheavals cutting various numbers of staff have been BAU at BT for decades, e.g. a decision that they didn't nee to run a mobile phone system. Surely this couldn't have anything to do with the fact that customer numbers keep falling, could it?

Turning a computer off, then on again, never goes wrong. Right?

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Re: Service != Server

"There was some further whining "

I think at that point I might have implemented your "or" branch without further ado.

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Re: Sausage Factory

With all chambers loaded.

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Re: PC Engineers...

Remember it's a server which will be running some application serving multiple users. There'd probably be a lot of data in un-flushed buffers. It will have left user data in an inconsistent state. The OS itself would likely boot up but not the application service on top of it.

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

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Re: I've heard of more than one case

Summer grade diesel still in the tanks in the winter. It contains wax that solidifies in the cold.

I suffered that one, not in a data centre but a signal failure on a miserable wintery evening's commute.

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Re: Lightning strike borks power conditioner

No plan survives contact with reality.

Moved into new (to us) building in the autumn. Returned from Christmas hols to find a lightening strike had taken out the thyristors in the UPS. The main building power was OK and so was all the equipment. We ran without the benefit of the interrupted UPS for many months. It's not always DNS; sometimes it's the UPS.

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Re: If this is the same Mediterranean hotel chain I'm thinking of...

So the disaster can be recovered but only if two weeks have been spent preparing for it.

Seriously - you could only call the exercise a failure if you didn't learn to have regular checks made on the generator fuel. DR exercises are to be learned so that when the D happens for real so does the R.

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Whe he turned up on site he Diss appeared.

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Flame

You've just reminded me there's a weather vane on the house.

Let's have a chat about Java licensing, says unsolicited Oracle email

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Re: We "WERE" getting compliance emails from oracle wanting to talk about license changes

My response was that the users in my company that are using adobe creative suite

"who are still using" might have been a bit more pointed.

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Re: Audit? We don't want no audit.

"EULAs aren't worth the pixels they're displayed on"

For consumer products, terms that purport to waive statutory rights can have no force in any jurisdiction that protects cunsumer rights. For commercial products you might find courts consider the customers to be big boys who can change their own nappies now.

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Re: Obviously, I would know my compliance position

And how could he know anything about licencing compliance when the Oracle inspector had yet to decide on what grounds it wasn't compliant?

"He probably wouldn't mind companies asking Palisade for assistance before responding to that mail from Oracle."

I think he might have been encouraging companies to phone Oracle and then they'd be more likely to ask Palisade for assistance.

BOFH: Lies, damned lies, and standards

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Re: Association of Servicepeople for Software and Hardware Over the Lifetime of Equipment.

"At my first job after Uni at what was then the Inland Revenue there was an idea to have specialist teams to deal with Appeals, Reviews, and the Self Employed. It actually happened but they did alter the order of the categories."

Reviews, Appeals & The Self-employed?

Now that you've all tried it ... ChatGPT web traffic falls 10%

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Re: It will pick up soon enough

"Using the model opens them to the risk that they actually see the kind of stuff that we, who have either used it for our own curiosity ... have already seen, which indicate that accuracy from a model like this is just a game of chance"

Very likely people like ourselves will have tried it on areas where they already have considerable knowledge and are able to recognise when it spouts garbage. People using it to find out things they don't know will just accept the output because it's the internet innit. (They'll also accept the complete bollocks that it was trained on, of course, because it's the internet innit.)

Two new Linux desktops – one with deep roots – come to Debian

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Re: Debian?? Really??

".I know there are IBM and RedHat haters out there.."

I think you're missing the point. The objections are that what's happening are, in the long term, damaging to Red Hat, Fedora and Linux as a whole - although Bob has a point in that RH has promoted some awful stuff.

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Re: Beautiful? Really?

Not used KDE lately Bob? Running KDE here & it looks pretty much the same as it's done for years.

Startup that charged $1.20 a day for coworking space in nightclubs folds

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Re: Friyey could have used JobCenters

Staff still on the wrong side of the counters? 'Twas ever so.

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"but the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship that guided us will continue to thrive,"

Translation - if any VCs are about we have plenty of other ways to burn their cash.

From cage fight to page fight: Twitter threatens to sue Meta after Threads app launch

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Re: what's the biggest different in data privacy/security between UK and EU?

"The EU actually bothers to enforce the rules."

The EU will continue to have rules.

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"Anyone who signed an agreement in exchange for severance may owe Twitter ongoing obligations, if that is enforceable."

If it is enforceable at all it would assume the severance was paid.

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Re: Twitter's biggest Trade Secret

"The thing that made Twitter worthwhile was that for a long time everyone was there."

Not everyone. Maybe everyone you knew.

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Re: Whoever wins ...

The unpleasantness seems to leak out to affect us all.

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