Posts by Doctor Syntax

iRobot may be iDead in iYear

"If it was a viable business"

Maybe last year it was but, from TFA: "...macroeconomic conditions, and tariff policies." Trumponomics might have rendered it less so.

Printers start speaking in tongues after Windows 11 update

Re: Throw in HP

But if the H/W is simply a loss-leader to sell the consumables then there's no mileage at all in killing it unless, of course, it's very old kit that isn't tied to vendor's ink.

The IT world moves fast, so why are admins slow to upgrade?

Re: "Technical Evangelist"

"A bit like an Early Adopter?"

More like somebody who pushes the Early Adopters out into no-man's-land.

Re: Bucket, Paint, Brush, Corner?

What's the total down-time due to migrations over that 15 year period?

Re: "why are admins slow to upgrade"

1.02? Make that 3.1.

Re: Bucket, Paint, Brush, Corner?

It's also a lot of work and not something a business would welcome to find imposed on it by a whim of a vendor's marketing departments every couple of years.

UK must pay cyber pros more than its Prime Minister, top civil servant says

Re: Typical of the Mentality

"Speaking as a civil servant, this was the case in decades long gone, yes."

But is the primacy of the general service grades also long gone? The assumption that a chap with no particular qualifications for any particular job, being equally (un)suited to all of them could do any of them while someone with specific knowledge is in flexible in terms of what they could do and therefore deserves less. And the assumption that "responsibility" lies only in the number of direct reports and not on the significance of what one does personally.

Re: Typical of the Mentality

"the civil service where salary is dependent on grade which is often dependent simply on time served"

ROFLMAO. Grades increasing with time served?

No way. You could be left stranded on top of a grade scale and watch inflation eating away at the value for years. When I handed in my notice I was offered the promotion I should have been at least considered for at least a couple of years previously if not more. No board, none of the usual procedures, here's the promotion we've been holding back on if you stay. OK, they didn't mention the holding back bit and denied it in response to my letter of refusal but that's what it amounted to. If the previous director had still been in post I might have tried negotiating back-dating without actually committing to rescinding my notice in case it might have worked but I reckoned it wasn't worth the effort as things were.

"the pension was fantastic"

Unless things have changed since my time that's true - its excellence would be a fantasy.

The way it worked is that it was contribution free but salary levels were set on that basis - what you would have been paid less the deductions that would have been taken.

It was a final salary scheme so, because the salary was lower than it would have been with a conributary scheme, the pension was also lower than it would have been if it were contributary.

A year's service accumulated 1/80th of final salary so someone joining from university at 21 and retiring at 60 would be a year's worth short of retiring on half pay. When I left I joined a pension scheme that accumulated 1/60th sp the equivalent 21 to 60 would be a year's worth of retiring on 2/3 pay with, of course, the pay at the level of a contributory scheme.

I think a few people in the service might be looking at pensions and thinking that at least they were index linked so would keep up with inflation which salaries were very often not: when HMG wished to save money or wanted pay restraint all round - which was a lot of the time - the only place they could really achieve such ends was by holding back on Civil Service pay settlements and not providing the promised promotions.

Microsoft quantum breakthrough claims labeled 'unreliable' and 'essentially fraudulent'

"has even more impressive results to share soon"

As soon as it opens the box to find out what they are.

This is the FBI, open up. China's Volt Typhoon is on your network

"We don't have any access to large critical infrastructure."

From their customers PoV they were probably exactly that themselves.

Choose your own Patch Tuesday adventure: Start with six zero-day fixes, or six critical flaws

Re: And Windows Update is still slow

That depends on whether RPM's delta package is similar to a ,deb.

A Deb package is basically a file and a set of instructions as to how to install it. It might be a single library, it might be an application. The instructions might be simply to copy it into place and remove the old one, they might include telling XDC about it so that it appears on menus and is associated with file types.

No doubt RPM is similar but if one library file replaces another the original, if in use, will only be unlinked and have its disk space returned to the free list when the process using it dies but new invocations will use the version. If it's a service the service may be restarted, possibly with user veto, to pick up the new version*. For a new kernel the user will be advised to restart but that's just so the new kernel can be used, there is no work to be done in the course of the reboot other than what's normally done. I'm sure that the RPM world, like the Deb, leaves at least the previous version in place with the option to reboot that if there was a problem. Occasionally the update removes a dependency on an existing file in which case, if there are no other dependencies, the user will be adviced to use an automatic removal run to do that.

* Over the course of many years I've only seen one instance where the service was at such a low level that other services depended on it, would also need to be restarted and that a reboot was used to do that.

"but the attack requires the target to download and open a malicious file through social engineering."

That's so often the case. And yet we have banks and other businesses that should know better training their customers to be phished when they should be doing the opposite.

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

That he already had the tablet for its own use case.

Actually, as a premise for an article on the differences between the two it was fine.

Re: Raspberry Pi and iPad

Casts mind back to the days of the 1907 that occupied a large building, punched cards, a fixed disk so big and heavy that i needed its own, additional and its bearings had to be aligned with the Earth's axis to avoid precession destroying them and from which we had a 100k-word allowance. AND FOR A FEW OF US UPPER_CASE ONLY TELETYPE ACCESS.

|Rotten old capitalism seems to have given us these advances, iPad, Pi and cellular all, despite Ztec's ravings below.

Re: Let's be honest

None commercial apps also need to work and they do.

Given that this is a Microsoft product, is it tied down to the point where you can't do that? Is there the equivalent of a boot menu that recognises external bootable media?

"lack of support doesn't mean a thing just stops working"

Indeed, depending on the nature of the "support" lack of it may mean the lack of a monthly lottery of it stopping working.

a 16" monster

That's not a monster, it's a toy. 17½" is the smallest adequate and, sadly, the largest practical.

"Small computers rule and the 13 inch air is too big."

Ah, what it is to be young and have as yet unimpeded eye-sight (or possibly to not want more than one thing visible on-screen at the same time).

Re: If you want a general purpose computer ...

"It is, and you'd be surprised how many people go for what they are familiar with even if told otherwise.."

Microsoft products are, of course, a counter-example to this. The vendor changes things and users just go along with it because they perceive they have no other choice.

Re: If you want a general purpose computer ...

"Does it run the software I need?"

Remove the definite article from that sentence and try it again.

CISA pen-tester says 100-strong red team binned after DOGE canceled contract

Re: Stolen Elections

"things are likely to look very different - and a lot more expensive"

The mugs faithful will keep on believing him when he keeps on blaming Biden, China, Eaurope, Canada, Denmark,* Zelensky ....

* Yes, of course we know Denmark's part of Europe but do he, Vance and the MAGAites?

Re: Yawn

Suddenly what might have been for larfs turns out to be for real.

Microsoft will kill Remote Desktop soon, insists you'll love replacement

And yet, you all put up with it.

Re: Remote Desktop

"I'll disable it anyway."

You can try....

Eight days later, Microsoft Outlook users still struggle on iOS devices

Re: Clarifying opening line

"It's the Apple's native iOS Mail app connecting to outlook that's the issue"

Does this mean Microsoft has reached Extinguish for the iOS Mail client?

Traffic lights

And why must they be in a vertical line - there are so many other options.

Europe's largest council kept auditors in the dark on Oracle rollout fiasco for 10 months

"no vendor to blame if Open source and DIY systems are used by councils themselves"

OK, so they have Oracle to blame instead. How far has thet got them? When you worry about who's going to be there to be blamed you're planning for failure.

Allstate Insurance sued for delivering personal info on a platter, in plaintext, to anyone who went looking for it

Too long ago for AI,

ASML will open Beijing facility despite US sanctions on China

The inevitable result would be that he would have to sanction every semi-conductor company that does business with them which is probably all those not already sanctioned. That would effectively stop the US manufacturing or importing any semiconductors.

Good luck with trying to sanction ASML (and presumably all its customers).

$16B health dept managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn’t gone well

Re: I can see why an `excel spreadsheet is a bad idea for this kind of thing…

Spreadsheets or ERP, the ones you hear about are the ones that go wrong.

Re: If it aint broke

AIUI the problem with Horizon was that the different sides of the ledgers were updated by separate transactions via an unreliable communication link. This is why you use database applications that wrap the whole business transaction into a single database transaction and that transation is either committed in its entirety or rolled back.

"At best the users are going to be highly suspicious of the outcomes, at worst they're right to be."

Alternatively the worst they can do is trust them.

Microsoft admits GitHub hosted malware that infected almost a million devices

Re: What devices?

"Why is this not mentioned in this Reg article?"

Superfluous?

The NHS security culture problem is a crisis years in the making

Re: Procured kit needs regulating too.

It's a cleft stick. What if one of the "security updates" introduces a loss of some functionality on which the application depends - or an outright BSoD? Is a big general purpose OS the best solution to running the S/W side of an instrument?

"95% of clinicians don't give a hoot about security. They just want the computers/systems to work."

Security is a long term requirement of just working. It needs to be well thought out and implemented to stop it being a short term anti-pattern.

Recent example: I receive an email from a local hospital trust about an out-patient appointment. This includes a link to an external provider and an access code to download a PDF of the appointment letter. About the only difference between the security of just attaching the letter was that the 3rd party provider's site asked for my DoB but that's hardly a top secret anyway - after all the trust had provided it to the 3rd party to check. Just another security theatre anti-pattern adding a minimal amount of security and the added attack surface of a 3rd party.

I think this was a subsequent onea although possibly another head on the original hydra.

Any security measures in the NHS are going to have to fight the NHS's ambitions to share data with .... well, who?

A while ago there there was some initiative to gather patient data into some sort of arrangement to be shared with researchers. With a scientific background and a clinical trials specialist in the family I wasn't against this but wanted more details before allowing my own data to be included. The first round of questions only brought forward answers that were so woolly as to raise more questions. The second round of questions were never answered.

Junior techie rushed off for fun weekend after making a terminal mistake that crashed a client

There are a number of - shall we say unintended uses of admin privilege? - in that category. With luck exposure to one provides immunity to all. At least until the next time.

Re: Kept his job?!

He had just learned a lesson at considerable expense to the company. Why double down on that expense by dismissing a now wiser employee?

Vodafone: Be in the office 8 days a month or lose bonuses

Re: "expensive coffees and pastries near by"

Years ago local TV was reporting some bod from Sheffield council bragging about bringing some big business project into the city. A few days later another bod from the same council was complaining about the difficulties of managing traffic in the city. Joined up thinking?

"Someone needs to rent all those expensive office building and buy expensive coffees and pastries near by. Then you have the related businesses such as cleaners, caterers, office supplies etc..."

If those have to be supported by long commutes then they are unsustainable. TPTB need to realise that and the sooner the better. Those with net zero policies who actually mean them need to look at that aspect.

Re: It will ultimately limit their recruitment

As long as there are enough applicants they won't notice.

Why should they if employees are fungible? After all MBAs are.

Another comms company that tells the world its comms arrangements aren't good enoug to support remote working.

Noted.

How NOT to f-up your security incident response

the subsequent forensic report stem from "a big issue of confirmation bias, ...The report reads like they formed a theory about what happened, and then spent a bunch of time going and searching for evidence that supported their conclusions."

The correct approach in forensic science is form a theory and then look for evidence to disprove it. The harder you look and fail the more likely the theory is to be correct.

eBPF. It doesn't stand for anything. But it might mean bank

"eBPF allows the safe injection of custom code into the kernel"

Just wait till Poettering discovers it.

Re: Cost Savings

The order is: make it work; make it work correctly; make it work fast.

If you *think* you see an opportunity for optimisation in the first two steps, just make a note of it and carry on. As soon as it is working 'correctly enough" to be functional, run it through the profiler. Then, and only then, locate the hot spots - both time and memory consumption, often intertwined- and improve those. Re-profile to find the next hot spots.

And there's the net through which other issues might slip - if it looks good enough it probably passes "correctly" and we end up with stuff that doesn't scale. I remember an incident that resulted in a weekly job starting to fall over as the business grew. Fortunately the application code was available. It took an hour or so to go through it to discover that in a deeply nested loop the application was causing the database engine to allocate memory that was never freed, at least until the application exited which it did when the engine crashed which it did when the OS refused to give it more space. It probably looked to be working "correctly", whatever that might mean, but it didn't run at scale.

OK, a programming error causing a memory leak isn't new although causing a leak in a different process is a little more exotic. But aren't free after use (and use after free) best dealt with by getting it right in the first place rather than hoping to pick them up in a second pass?

Re: Cost Savings

Waffle party?

Is that an address to the staff by senior manglement?