Posts by Doctor Syntax

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

Re: Never for rudeness, but..

MAK - Monitor Adjustment Knob.

Re: Never for rudeness, but..

I was once recalled to the surgery. The GP had discovered that his shiny electronic sphygmomanometer calibration was faulty and had to recheck his patients with the mercury version. A digital display always looks so authoritative but usually there's no easy way to link it back to a physical standard. A weight on a balance or, as in this case, graduations on a glass tube make the physical reality clear.

Re: What the ever-loving **** ?

"CEO hears of these escapades"

You made sure of that?

Re: Not rude, but bizarre

We had a liaison officer whose way of saying it was time to get on with something else was "10 o'clock and not a nappy done."

Re: Boat?

"HMS Ark Royal?"

You're getting carried away.

Re: Boat?

"Don't think I've got the idea of this game"

You need to understand the difference between a ship and a boat - and then work out which of HM's naval vessels are which.

Re: Boat?

I think you might be destroying the allusion.

Re: What the ever-loving **** ?

Newbie at going home time - thinking he's unearthed such a situation: "Have you noticed how those two always leave together?"

Everyone else: "Well they are married."

Re: What the ever-loving **** ?

It depends on whether the boss survived long enough to be around next day.

Microsoft cash to help reignite Three Mile Island atomic plant

Re: This will be fascinating to watch

"we are not seeing DevOps fiddling with a nuclear power plant as some commentards imply"

Quite. This icon seems a better explanation of some of the comments --->

Re: Not the only plant in consideration

"I don't want cancer when I visit Mackinac Island"

Also, avoid being downwind of coal-fired power-stations.

There’s no way Qualcomm is buying Intel as is

Re: Hmm...

Also, on the other side of the rumour, stock price increases and they can sell less for more. Double dipping.

Europe's largest city council: Oracle ERP allocated £2B in transactions to wrong year

Re: ITIL + Shitshow

UK dammi!!!

My tryping is getting worse and worst. Completely offal.

Re: ITIL + Shitshow

This is not UK govt, this is local govt. UJ govt has its own shitshows.

Re: Not fit for purpose

You might want that but ti expect it indicates the same level of optimism and the council did in going down that route in the first place.

Cybercrooks strut away with haute couture Harvey Nichols data

So the data was Harvey Nicked?

Full marks for saying "the inconvenience" as opposed to the usual "any inconvenience" which is a short step, if that, away from victim blaming..

They use Microsoft cloudy stuff?

Green recycling goals? Pending EU directive could hammer used mobile market

Apple should be pleased. Fewer 2nd hand phones into the EU should mean a better market for new ones.

With billions in UK govt IT contracts about to expire, get the next vendors to act right

It doesn't need a revolving door. Just a spouse working on the contract letting who finally recuses themself when the final decision is to be made.

Broadcom CEO predicts hyperscalers poised to build million-accelerator clusters

You're describing what is, essentially, a positive feedback loop. Positive feedback is very unstable. It needs no more than a push to turn things in the opposite direct nd such pushes are not predictable.

Are those predictions realistic? How close is this bubble to bursting point?

1 in 10 orgs dumping their security vendors after CrowdStrike outage

"This time it ended relatively harmlessly"

How relative is "relatively"? I doubt those who missed hospital appointments, flights or whatever think it ended in any way harmlessly. It's not Cloudsrike and Microsoft's customers who count here, it's their customers and, no doubt, innocent bystanders as well.

IBM quietly axing thousands of jobs, source says

Will the last one to leave please turn out the lights.

Putin really wants Trump back in the White House

Re: Eric Hoffer had Donald Trump COMPLETELY figured out YEARS AGO---

This best educated bit. From what I read from the outside education in the US seems to be bi-modal. On the one hand world-class universities and, presumably, the schools needed to feed them. On the other schools teaching creationism. So what is the mean* level of education? I get the impression that the US is two countries and one of them looks very like a failed state.

* Insofar as that applies to a bi-modal distribution.

Re: Make (some of North) America Grate Again

I'm sure he raised a stink.

Thousands of orgs at risk of knowledge base data leaks via ServiceNow misconfigurations

It seems a bit odd that a company whose speciality is enabling businesses to share knowledge hasn't managed to share the knowledge of how to set up its product securely. Or maybe no - cobbler's children & all that.

ERP modernization? Admins have heard of it

Re: Can I be first

Yes you can because you got there before me. It runs the business. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The future of software? Imagine a bot, stamping on a human face – forever

It was always my view that as the Civil Service was the largest employer of scientists in the UK, at least back in my day, a bit of over-production of graduates was enough for them to justify keeping the salaries down. They got very worried when scientists started emigrating. It would upset the market they'd constructed.

Re: "AI" can't think – but it's coming for your jobs anyway

At least it didn't simply reproduce the FOSS library code which slightly surprised me.

Ultimately, training a LLM to do that sort of thing would need more than feeding it training code. It would also need to understand the RFCs and that's a completely different task. Unfortunately the library failed on that one: if you're using one of the MAC/timestamp formats and take a random or arbitrary string instead of a MAC address (frequently done for security purposes) you should set the least significant bit and last time I looked it doesn't. I suppose I should flag that up..

Re: Yes, but...

And if you were very lucky you didn't have to tear up what you'd written to fit it in. I had that about a fortnight before go-live. It converted a simple product list into one where the BoM had to be taken into account with some hastily written recursive code. At the end it worked but I wasn't convinced I understood it in detail once I'd finished and any changes were strictly forbidden.

"C-Suites are measured by their KPIs, which is either shareholder value, or whatever it is that contributes to that value — typically cost reduction, or revenue increase within that particular financial quarter, but usually both."

When a metric becomes a target it ceases to become a useful metric.

Re: Marketing-led

"it also means we're all already being bombarded by huge amounts of this type of marketing, all across the Internet"

Only if you don't use an ad-blocker. otherwise, nothing new there.

Re: Yes, but...

That's the most useful sort of contribution of all. It tells you who to listen to.

Lebanon now hit with deadly walkie-talkie blasts as Israel declares ‘new phase’ of war

Re: If I were a world leader or in the administration thereof. . .

That assumes the Hungarian operation made anything other than this set of pagers and perhaps fake Icom radios.

Re: If an Icom IC-V82

"whatever is needed to respond to a modulated signal."

Nothing new about that. Back in the 70s or 80s the IRA was using a circuit with a tone detection IC in quite a small package to trigger land mines. I don't know if it was ever deployed. They'd scratched the ID off the top of the can it was packaged in but once the top of the can had been sliced off it turned out that the part number was etched on the die and it was easily recognised as a part advertised in Wireless World.

Microsoft unveils Office LTSC 2024 for users that remain stubbornly offline

Re: Ob: LibreOffice

I do interact with people who use Word. Documents laid out with tabs and such like nonsense. No wonder they don't render properly. There's every chance they wouldn't render properly in a different version of Word. Or on a different version of WIndows. Or with different fonts available. Or, who knows, with different video H/W?

And anyone who thinks it's acceptable to use Word as a form to be filled in is probably ... let's think of a suitable epithet ... a Windows user who doesn't know any better.

Microsoft's Cloud obsession seems to be a curse. I got an email today from someone preparing a talk for tomorrow night saying

I have the same problem putting my power point onto a memory stick - all seems to be linked to files going automatically to Cloud. This means that I will have to use my own laptop. [i.e. as opposed to the one in the meeting room].

I'm not sure what he means but the worst case scenario could be that, deprived of an internet connection, his laptop might not work either.

Open source orgs strengthen alliance against patent trolls

Simple solution: if a patent office lets through an invalid patent it should be responsible for the whole of both sides' legal costs. It's then up to the office to decide whether the best solution is to simply pay or to limit its risk by more thorough examination and also to adjust its prices in accordance. My guess would be that an equilibrium would be reached where the price would pay for examination sufficient to chuck out the most obvious, reduce trollage by making the costs more expensive and ensuring that patents that were actually granted would be worth the cost.

Amazon CEO wants his staff back in the office full time

Re: Simple solution

Unfortunately half votes don't work. I'd charge for driving home as well. Actually IME the drive home represented actual value added. Several times once the inhibition of what was on the screen was removed and the conscious mind was occupied by driving, the subconscious would suddenly pop up the solution to the current problem.

Re: Simple solution

Unfortunately half votes don't work. I'd charge for driving home as well. Actually IME the drive home would have been worth paying for. Several times once the inhibition of what was on the screen was removed and the conscious mind was occupied by driving, the subconscious would suddenly pop up the solution to the current problem.

Re: flatten the hierarchy

Alternatively translates as micromangers not having enough time to get on reports' (direct or otherwise) backs.

Re: Here we go

"It's suited the vocally anti-social to work from home"

Does not compute. Working from home might suit those who might be classified as anti-social because they don't want to get involved in group communications. But the vocally anti-social? How would it suit them not to have anybody to shout at?

Re: Here we go

"I'd be willing to bet Amazon are sitting on a bunch of metrics"

I''d be willing to bet that such metrics don't show the amount of unpaid time staff spend on commuting. It's very easy to show productivity when you only include part of the time that those doing the producing are actually contributing to your company.

"I used to be happy that I knew with almost certainty that if I wanted to talk to somebody I could go to their desk and they'd be there"

Yes, and they were completely pissed off with your interruptions.

Re: WFH is a laugh

"You do the company’s time."

Good idea. Make commuting company's time.

"It lets them look after the kids and the dog, go shopping when they want, get up late and not shave, finish that bit of DIY they never had time to do."

Given that commuting takes time (at its worst, in my case, the equivalent of 2 full workdays a week) it's no wonder they value having their life back.

I think the unions have missed a trick here. Having demonstrated the feasibility of remote working for many roles commuting should be paid time for those where remote working was feasible was feasible if they're then forced back to the office.

Likewise governments with a green agenda should also be looking at this. Commuting long distances into big cities isn't really sustainable and imposing it should be subject to a tax.

The case for handcrafted software in a mass-produced world

It could be a case of being careful what you ask for. Demand software with guarantees and you get no software.

What about the data?

It's easy for programmers to think that the value of IT is in the code. The real value to a business is in the data; that comprises all the work in progress, on order, accounts and information held for regularity reasons. Without it the business can't function and can't meet tax or other requirements for keeping records. Backward compatibility is about far more than running your new code on older H/W.

It's all very well having an LLM tweak code or rewrite it based on analysing the code to work out what it does. But it also needs to analyse the existing data to work out what that tells the business which might not be explicit in the code.

Re: Use an LLM to translate from C to some Oberon dialect, say

I'm reminded of a tool I used long ago to covert C programs using the old Informix ALL-2 library to use embedded SQL. It ended up with a lot of if statements whcih essentially tested nothing.

S&P 500's AI FOMO fizzles: Less than half mentioned it in Q2 earnings

Does "holding steady" mean the same companies as last time or is it new hopefuls being on about the same level is the disillusioned?