Posts by Doctor Syntax

Boeing's new captain promises U-turn after Q3 nosedive

Re: "...after Q3 nosedive..."

I suppose the reverse of a stock buy-back, a rights issue, would be a tad embarrassing.

A U-turn after a nose-dive? He needs to be flying a Sopwith Camel.

Woman stuck upside down under rock for hours after trying to retrieve dropped phone

Re: The important question is...

Heels over head.

Re: And she was barefoot ?

"what the blazes was she doing hiking in those shoes?"

We know that. She was falling into holes.

NHS would be hit by 'significant' costs if UK loses EU data status, warn Lords

Re: The reality of Brexit...

"And now they would vote to remain."

Except its not an option. We cant remain, it would be rejoin

That was a typo on the A/Cs part because the poll was about rejoining.

and thats much less appealing.

Not unappealing enough for your liking, I suppose because the headline on the linked article was that the poll came out with a majority for rejoining.

Re: The reality of Brexit...

"So why dont they like you?"

Take a look in the mirror.

IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4, argues APNIC's chief scientist

Different solutions fit different use cases. Who knew?

Sorry, but the ROI on enterprise AI is abysmal

"The reason for this, Appen argues, is lack of high-quality training data, labeled by humans."

Whistling in the dark.

Fake reviewers face the wrath of Khan

No mention of arranging a bad review of a competitor's product?

Lab-grown human brain cells drive virtual butterfly in simulation

If they're using Python surely they should be aiming for a virtual snake, not a butterfly.

Tech firms to pay millions in SEC penalties for misleading SolarWinds disclosures

"It is incumbent upon [companies] to not further victimize their shareholders or other members of the investing public by providing misleading disclosures about the cybersecurity incidents they have encountered,"

Wouldn't paying a penalty without saying why come under that heading?

Musk's $1M election lottery raises serious legal concerns, says Pennsylvania governor

What is the governor's business? Head of (State) government or head of state? Are the two differentiated in the US? The UK situation would be that it would be dubious for the monarch, head of state, to comment publicly but it would be for the PM, head of government.

So how about both - or is it all three - elaborate?

"If he had concerns about legality, he should be talking to the DA quietly behind closed doors."

I suppose if he'd done that and it got leaked you'd be complaining about things not being done in the open.

That bears a vague resemblance to the days when anyone could join the Labour party for a few quid and vote for the next leader, thus enabling it to be sabotaged for years buy voting in Corbin.

US moves ahead with crackdown on data brokers selling to six 'countries of concern'

How about something a bit more general: crackdown on data brokers selling?

Telcos find cloud migrations, security, are a pain in the IaaS

Summary: orders are being signed off by those who are out of touch with what's really happening.

Intern allegedly messed with ByteDance's LLM training cluster

"But the AI told me to do it."

Big browsers are about to throw a wrench in your ad-free paradise

Re: Google kills the Interwebs

Note to Google/Mozilla. I do react to them. The more intrusive the ad the less likely I am to buy the product. I have changed some vendors in the past for being too pushy, or being engaging as the marketroids like to put it.

I never ceased to be amazed at how keen businesses are to piss off potential customers.

Firefox-derived SeaMonkey for one.

All this would matter less if it weren't for the fact that web developers - ore, more likely, the developers of the frameworks they use have forgotten the KISS principle. In search of bells and whistles the idea of a universal platform and applications has been lost. Many sites (and it bugs me no end that my own NextCloud server is one of them) will only work with a limited number of browsers.

SCC, one of Europe's largest resellers, orders staff back to their desks for three days a week

Re: Shiver!

I think you've just touched his innermost fantasy.

Re: WFH... not for every manager

"The problem is that if your manager is not one of these people who can work from home, then you are doomed."

To echo your first paragraph, not every manager is suitable.

"I can measure productivity simply by checking tasks and responses are coming in on time."

And quality of the responses, no doubt.

How all of it suddenly fails in an open plan office when somebody gets a dot-matrix printer installed on the desk behind you. Obviously a long time ago, but it happened.

"This also applies to staff that specifically baked work-from-home clauses into their employment contracts."

I think the words he's looking for are "constructive" and "dismissal". It'll be interesting to see how that works out.

Microsoft says its Copilot AI agents set to tackle employee tasks in November

Ask it how much popcorn to order.

Linux admin asked savvy scientist for IT help and the boffin blew it

Re: 90% of network issues

Yup, DNS is responsible for the other 90%.

Re: Token ring cabling in ethernet

"Stupidity clearly isn't the sole preserve of the aged."

Far from it. You've got to be reasonably smart to survive to become aged.

"generally cumbersome "official IBM" cables and connectors"

More or less cumbersome than the original iron rod hose-pipe Ethernet?

Re: All you needed was the T-connector and a piece of cable long enough to reach to the next box.

I did use a lab. network that was made up of 75 Ohm Coax, TV connectors & all. It consisted of a lot of little boxes with a Z80 in them, each with a D25 for RS232, daisy chained. I think it must have had a box at the other end to break it out into more D25s because at that time all you got on the back of your Unix box was serial terminal connections. Yes, it worked.

OTOH it was always easy to fit another box into the middle of the net. All you needed was the T-connector and a piece of cable long enough to reach to the next box.

Obligatory https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EDcrHchrT0k/WvIV4FCzQ1I/AAAAAAAAemo/yIZMt7Ttnxw7lScA5MqWZh-P0spfvjo5wCLcBGAs/s640/Dilbert-ethernet-ring.png

Developer pockets $2M in savings from going cloud-free

IT people have experienced those examples. You can recognise them. They're the ones burying their heads in their hands when the decision makers meet the salesmen.

What always surprises me is that the manglement are so often snake -oil merchants themselves so why can't they recognise the same thing when they see it?

Re: Yawn

"But they do sacrifice a degree of agility. If their customer base was to triple over the next three weeks, could they source, configure, and install enough hardware to cope with the additional load?

...

Comic Relief, who provisioned serverless infrastructure that facilitated the processing of tens of millions of pounds in donations from hundreds of thousands of members of the public, for less than £100"

Comic Relief hold an annual events on dates decided well in advance. If they depend on agility to plan for that they're doing it wrong.

I have, in the past, worked with marketing who probably did hope for something like a tripling of turnover in three weeks. Having failed to work out that their campaign had a small flaw they were disappointed. (It was intended to let them sell direct instead of through distributors; the customers needed to arrange an installion, however, and the installers were also the distributors.)

AI 'bubble' will burst 99 percent of players, says Baidu CEO

What they haven't realised about slang is that its dynamic. As soon as they suppress one term another will be along to replace it.

"any fees incurred by those whose balances became negative will be waived"

And the big purchases - cars, houses - that fell through because the transaction failed?

"when you talk to a chatbot, a frontier model-based chatbot, you can basically trust the answer,"

You'll have to - there'll be nobody left on the hell-desk to ask.

Chinese chipmaker Loongson now just three to five years off the pace on the desktop

They're talking about desktop so it just spends a smaller %age of its time waiting for the user to press the next key. Not a big issue.

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Re: Can't recall the mechanism

There's a reason why HMRC prefer this. When a company is wound up the available cash has to be distributed between all the creditors according to the debts so that if there isn't enough you only get your pro rata x pence in the pound. But some creditors are more even than others and HMRC is more even than most (I can't remember off-hand where they stand in relation to payroll).

If they HMRC initiate wind-up they'll get their full due or as much of it as there's money to support. Only then do you and the others get a share-out. If a trade creditor initiates wind-up they either need to be sure there really is enough money there or else they've effectively written off the debt and are being vindictive (or public spirited depending on your PoV).

Re: How to go to jail in 1 easy step.

"I'd be leaving any place that did this"

Whether it was "the place" that did it would depend on the status of Iain's colleague. If he wasn't part of the management and hadn't done it with the connivance of the management then it's not really the business that had done it.

"and if they're lucky then on my way out I may not tell their client what actually happened and agree to swear to that under oath"

Given that it was hearsay it would be you who'd be lucky, or at least wise, not to do so.

Re: Important word

OTOH the judge won't want the case to go to a superior court where he'd be overruled.

AWS boss: Don't want to come back to the office? Go work somewhere else

Re: Choices

"Sure, but those pastures have to actually exist."

They do. Some businesses have managers, not manglers.

Re: Cloud

To be fair he's part of AWS so it's his job to have his head in the cloud. As to whether that's where it actually is is a different matter.

Re: Just do it

Your employer sounds a bit like my daughter's - they have an HQ in Dublin and, reputedly, a UK office whose reality she's not actually confirmed.

Slightly different story but she'd left a working from home job just before Covid for one with a stupid commute (why???!!!) which obviously turned into a work at home job for the duration. After the duration they wanted to go back to their old ways but she'd realised by then what she'd let herself in for with that job.

Re: Inverted subtitle logic?

"they tried to call it eWorking when anything even vaguely related to a computer got called e-something"

Perhaps it could be retrindified by calling it iWorking.

Re: Inverted subtitle logic?

"a huge hit to the ego"

Not just huge hit to the ego, also some very difficult questions from investors enquiring about the cost of it all. In fact some of the public pronouncements such as the one at the centre of this article may be aimed at them as much as at employees, maybe even more so.

Re: It may be a security issue.

So he has to stick to simple stuff? It wouldn't be possible for people like him to cooperate, globally to produce something as complex as a computer operating system? And if they did it would be an impossibly buggy monstrosity, completely different to the product of teams working together in an office? OK, got that.

Re: It may be a security issue.

"Ultimately, it is their company, not yours."

There is, however, a matter of public interest here*. We have spent decades building a system in which businesses are compressed into cities and require workers to commute into them. The commuting radius of a large city may cover a few thousand square miles. Those commutes have an environmental cost. In practice the city governments who are trying to meet those costs do so by trying to beat up the commuters. In the UK wie have the Low Emission Zones - London is on and Sheffield has joined in. As it happens it was two news reports from Sheffield that put me onto this many years ago. One was from someone whose job was to bring businesses into the city, jubilant at signing up another big employer. The second was someone responsible for roads complaining about the ever increasing traffic. Clearly they'd not got together to look at what mattered to Sheffield as a whole.

I've heard the arguments that congregating businesses into cities boosts efficiency by improving communications. That argument stretches back into the medieval (I have a recently purchased history book right beside me making that argument amongst others). It wasn't an absolute argument then - the weavers of York and Beverley ran into problems when the West Riding weavers became a serious collective competitor - and I suspect it's not an absolute argument now. Now we have tools that can enable dispersed work forces to collaborate. As I've said before, if it's possible to build an entire OS by dispersed work what serious argument can there be that something less complicated needs to bring everyone together under one office roof?

Working at home obviously doesn't suite every role. Factory work is obviously one for which it doesn't work and, as a sometime lab. scientist, I know lab. work is another. I've read that some landlords of buildings that were, until recently, tenanted by financial businesses are now trying to attract bioscience businesses; they at least have worked out where office work is likely to head in the long run.

But returning to the public interest - what should be the public response, or at least the response of governments which are supposed to look to the public good? They should be adopting policies that discourage the centripetal forces that make businesses congregate in this way. Raising taxes on arrangements that require commuting would be one way. Encouraging the conversion of city centre property to residential would be another so that as to minimise the loss of property values that have been one argument against WFH and also enabling commuting free options for city centre work.

Another would be to look again at history - those rural West Riding weavers eventually ended up working in mills but still close to home as they had no option but to walk work. Currently there are a couple of mill sites quite near which have been, as so often happens, been granted planning permission for housing as brownfield sites. With the closure of almost all the mills this has become commuter country, ill-served by public transport,** dependent on commuting by car and at the same time with much old housing unable to provide home EV| charging to support future commuting needs. Planning policy needs to be reversed so those brownfield sites can become workplaces again, either for single businesses or shared between multiple businesses.

* As a retiree that happens to be my sole interest now.

** Even if it were returned to the levels of the 1950s it s wouldn't suffice, we are between several conurbations so that huv-and-spoke public transport wouldn't work. This village and many others like it are, in their own right, hubs with multiple spokes.

Re: Alternate world line

I long ago came to the conclusion that either mangelers (as opposed to the rarer managers) either don't care about demotivation of staff or don't have the faintest idea of what demotivates them. What they care about is motivating themselves by showing off, threatening, etc.