* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32773 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

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Re: On the other hand...

All the best bugs lie in wait to ambush you later.

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"Wheel have to guess which one..."

And which software product...

Music bosses go after Twitter's unlicensed soundtrack to the tune of $250M

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Just send an invoice and we'll process it as normal.

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

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Re: Everyone is missing the point

"Its very dystopian how much power they have to ruin your life."

They have the power you give them. That, if you wish, can be none. Your choice.

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Re: Keys not yours

I won't be buying any even if they do drop it.

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Re: no backup strategy, SMH stupidity

Luddite!

Microsoft remembers it was going to bring Windows 11 to HoloLens

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Re: "increased engineering velocity"

I was wondering what the units were, and the direction, given that velocity is a vector.

I suppose Microsoft's engineers are cringing at this; occasionally one has to feel sorry for them.

UK smart meter rollout years late and less than two thirds complete

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Re: Boiled down to it's cynical bottom line ...

"privatised utilities are a money grubbing exercise for private investors"

It's entirely possible you might be one of those via any non-state pension you might have.

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Keep booking appointments until they catch on. If the bean counters find their spam is costing them real money they'll stop. Eventually.

US government extends software security deadline because vendors aren't ready

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Re: Missing the Basics

A slight rewording should improve that by placing the responsibility where it belongs:

"Task PO.2.3 Upper management or authorizing official commit to secure development, and convey that commitment to all with development-related roles and responsibilities."

US senators and spies spar over Section 702 warrantless surveillance

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I suppose the usual compromise will be reached. The lawmakers will tell the agencies not to do it and the agencies will do it anyway.

NASA to tear the wings off plane in the name of sustainability

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Re: Not this again

"landing the aircraft is the key part"

Being able to use it again after you've landed it is the actual key part.

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Re: Interesting design

"the road runner won, Wile E Coyote ran out of power and lost ..."

OTOH if only someone could extend that moment where the character is suspended in mid air before falling then we'd have a very efficient flight system.

Out with the old, in with the new – Accenture declares AI is 'mature and delivers value'

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Last time I looked Accenture were administering one of my pensions. "Our AI advised us to invest the scheme funds in crypto-currency and NFT futures" is not something I want to hear.

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Re: Translation

"you would not believe"

Most here certainly wouldn't.

The fact that this sort of business continues to be profitable is bad news because it means that decision makers who really ought to know better obviously do.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

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Re: Suspired

Suspire is to breathe gently.

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I particularly liked "the concrete melts into the abstract ". Unfortunately I only got part way through the original article as it became clear he hadn't taken his own advice.

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"I'm an oldie and we're stuck in our ways."

And why not? They're the best ways in which to be stuck.

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Unhappy

There were strips appropriate to just about anything. Sadly missed.

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"suspired"

Damned autocorrect! surprised

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Re: 38 percent of graybeards

No, they were the ones who still hadn't worked out it was a load of bollocks to be ignored.

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Re: business bullshit makes them feel "less involved."

If the underlings have any experience and wit they'll have asked for "x" and "y" to be explained in plain words. I think in my day I was regarded as a bit of a trouble-maker.

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""The survey quizzed 1,016 employees in the UK aged 18 to 76""

It gets worse: "defining the younger generation as those born between 1981 and 2012". These born in 2012 aren't even teenagers, let alone 18. Child labour?

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"Surprisingly, 69 percent of younglings say their colleagues speak in too much jargon at work, while only 38 percent of graybeards have the same misgivings."

Not too surprising. It just means that some of us have heard it all before, several times around, learned to separate the wheat from the chaff and decode the former. The young are fortunate not to have endured that. Yet.

At its best a jargon is a specialised vocabulary which enables one to say in a few words what would require many less specialised words to explain fully. It depends on the listener or reader sharing that vocabulary.

At its worst jargon is a specialised vocabulary taking many words to say that which needs no explanation and could be said in fewer, less specialised words.

Then there are those who have heard the words of the first, have no understanding of their meaning but trot them out any way, hoping to sound as if they're in the set that does understand them* and mixing them with words of the second.

* E.g. Amber Rudd with "hashtags".

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"Google a word during a meeting in an attempt to understand what on earth manglement is talking about"

If it's manglement talking a good approximation would be to start by assuming it has no meaning until you can work it out in context but don't be suspired if you end the meeting without working it out. Retaliate by coining your own term, using it and seeing how the others pick it up and reuse it.

Kinder, gentler Oracle says it's changed, and now wants you to succeed

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"Just who the heck are these people who buy new services?"

Senior manglement, of course. Well isolated from both reality and the people who know what reality is.

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Re: Yeah, right.

And who is doing that? Apart from Microsoft themselves, of course.

Yeah, Rishi, it's AI that'll make Britain great again

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Re: "it's AI that'll make Britain great again"

Brexit, which he supported, hasn't. Now needs to try something else.

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Re: Ha

Good questions.

It's entirely possible, of course, that the answers might actually be "yes" but they have absolutely no idea how to go about it. The worrying thing is that it's a long time since we've seen anyone at the top of either main party who had any clue. Success in politics goes to those who pander best to their grass-roots members' factionalisms with unrealistic promises.

Multi-tasking blunder leaves UK tax digitization plans 3 years late, 5 times over budget

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From the brief account in the article it's difficult to see how one might be done without the other as the two appear to complement each other. Which does the NAO suggest should be done first?

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Re: The civil service went to a brewery but left thirsty and sober despite wanting to party

Engineers? What engineers?

A toast to being in the right place at the right time

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Re: What to do in case of a real fire...or other alarm

I worked in a building with walls which were almost entirely glass. Another company's call centre in the building would occasionally get bomb threats (I doubt any caller even knew where the call centre was to the nearest hundred miles). Our exit was at the back of the building and the assembly point was on the grass at the front next to the ring road necessitating walking round the end of the building, and quite close to it. I made clear to facilities that in the event of a bomb scare, no matter how un-scary, my route away from the building would be as straight and perpendicular to it as possible and my destination as far away as possible in that direction. I had seen bombed buildings - including a former place of work.

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Re: He's toast

The thing to remember about theatre, security or otherwise, is that it's only intended to look convincing from the audience's PoV.

Microsoft’s Azure mishap betrays an industry blind to a big problem

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Re: rm -r *

"echo *" still worked for a short time though

echo is a shell built-in. If yiu have a shell you should have echo.

In my case it was mv rather than rm but when you can no longer reach mv it doesn't make too much difference. A live distro would have fixed it but this was back in SCO days so no live distros about.

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

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Re: Performance isn't free...

If something needs specific libraries or whatever, install it in /opt. I have Seamonkey, LibreOffice, VirtualBox, stuff from Brother, Informix and others all packaged that way. It was an accepted and successful way of doing things long before Snap & friends arrived.

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Re: Performance isn't free...

I'd be more curious about ways in which it benefits desktop users.

As far as I'm concerned systemd resembled Snap & the rest in that they attempt to solve non-existent problems.

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Straw man alert

"You can still do it that way today, as in this example of how to install Node.js v8.1.1 to your Linux desktop." with a link to a build from git-hub repositories The alternative is simply:

apt install nodejs

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May I refer the honourable gentleman to the analysis of my LibreOffice installation in /opt https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/06/07/red_hat_drops_libreoffice/#c_4676282

This is an application for which the download site provides 1 DEB and 1 RPM archive* for amd64 Linux for each version**. The vast majority of the file it contains are what might be summed up as "resources" almost certainly cross-platform.

There are 10 times as many html help files that would need translation for language as .so files that might conceivably need adapting to compile on a particular Linux distro.

There are about half as many again XML & XSLT files as .so and .jar combined.

Anyone who's been using Linux for such a long time must surely be familiar with the notion of installing applications along with a selection of libraries and resources in /opt. It's the problem that Snap, Flatpak & the rest of them set out to solve. It was solved long ago without the extra baggage that those bring along. In terms of baggage I find it particularly ironical that some time ago I decided to have a look at Flatpak and tried to install it on whatever vintage of Debian I was running at the time. It failed to install because some dependency wasn't satisfied by the Debian's version of some library, a notable failure of the KISS principle.

* A tgz archive that expands to 42 individual .deb files, In addition there is language pack, a further archive bundling 3 .debs(including dicitonary and readme files) and a help pack containing a further .deb

** Currently 7.5.4 and 7.4.7. The two files per version is the same as are provided for Mac (Intel & Apple silicon) and for Windows (32 & 64 bit).

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

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Re: So ? Is AI the new "cloud computing"?

"Have a Friday pint, becasue it is, well, Friday"

Other days of the week are also available.

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Surely you're both old enough to know better.

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Re: So ? Is AI the new "cloud computing"?

"an AI that understands what they are doing"

That statement - and AI - fails at the word "understands".

It understands nothing. It's a pastiche generator.

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Re: AI Infused

Maybe AI is a brand of one of those fruit teas my daughter is keen on.

Scientists claim >99 percent identification rate of ChatGPT content

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Re: But for how long?

Just bear with me while I click my mouse to find out.

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None of this should be surprising. Computers have been used in textual analysis since the days of punched cards. They were quickly into the "Who really wrote Shakespeare?" game - I remember reading about it in the New Scientist when I was at school and that's a very long time ago. With more and more CPU cycles and more and more storage available one would expect them to get better.

Just consider the last sentence of my first paragraph. I could have written it in passive voice - "it would be expected that...". Having chosen the active voice I could have chosen a different pronoun: "I", "we" or "you". I didn't have to be as emphatic with "more and more". I could have used "might" or "could" rather than "would", "anticipate" rather then "expect". I could have written "improve" rather than "get better" etc. Without trying too hard about alternatives I can think of almost 200 ways I could have written that one sentence*. If you (note different pronoun) were to look over my writing it would (switch to passive voice) be possible to build up a list of probabilities for my choices. Repeating that for different authors would produce different choice profiles and hence different voices.

On the other hand an automated pastiche generator producing text with no intrinsic meaning, no variation of emphasis to convey, no concept of elegant variation and no instinct for deliberate repetition for emphasis is going to deploy the relatively few phrases that come at the top of its statistical heap from the training material. In terms of the multivariate statistics I dabbled with (and dabbled is a very deliberate choice of word) about 50 years ago it will occupy a very confined part of the multi-dimensional space such statistics define and that, I think, is why this paper (and Turnitin referred to in the article) are claiming such high discrimination. It has one voice . A bot writes like a bot and, with maybe one exception, humans don't even want to do that.

* I didn't write the sentence intending to analyse it like that. I wrote it without any changes although I had changed words in the previous two. It was only looking at it after I'd written it that I realised the possibilities it held for taking the rest of the post along the route I did although the direction was intended. That's something a bot couldn't do.

Sysadmin and IT ops jobs to slump, says IDC

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Re: Advanced Cull Call Us

Temporarily is right. There'll be money to be made when the mess has to be sorted out.

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Re: Phew.

Nostalgically - back in the day, at least for a small business unit, we would provide application code and administer the system as a single team. It had distinct advantages as each aspect of the role informed the other; if you'd written it you knew what do do from the administration PoV and if you wrote with the need to administer it in mind. In at least one, later, disassociated rolw I felt liike screaming at the admins for completely underestimating what was intended to be done via the user interface.

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a high percentage of "Systems Administrator" roles have been replaced by DevOps / SRE"

I think it's not so much "replaced by" as "renamed as". It's just what we did years ago updated to current ways of doing things. The roles remain, the nuts and bolts change.

Salesforce lures staff with $10 donation to charity for each day they're in the office

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Even better, you could attend several virtual events a day and have the company make several donations.

10 years after Snowden's first leak, what have we learned?

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There's no point in laws saying what agencies can and can't do if there is no punishment for transgression. Agents should be personally liable for breaches they may make. Having spent about 14 years in a job where I had such liability I don't see anything unusual about the idea. Snowden shouldn't be pursued for his disclosures if those wrongs he pointed out went and continue to go unpunished.

Search engines don't always help chatbots generate accurate answers

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Web search engines, including those on trading site, universally fail to perform as well as at least one I used back in the '80s. They simply OR all the search terms together, even if terms are entered in an attempt to exclude*. At best they may use the combination of terms to partially order the results. To use the results of the search engine the chatbot would need to parse the query properly and then use the parsed query to filter the results of the search engine. It is, of course, the search engines that should be doing that parsing and filtering.

* eBay's search used to respect minus signs so that "car - Honda" would return cars of any make except Honda. Then they changed it so it would return all makes of car including Honda plus Honda motorcycles and any other Honda non-car products. Now it seems to return only Hondas and even provides check-boxes for Honda models.

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