Posts by Doctor Syntax

NASA pushes decision on bringing crew back in Starliner to the end of August

Re: Get Suited

"Coca Cola distribute cans with ring-pulls that are incredibly reliable, neither bursting open in transit or being frustrating to open by the consumer."

It's the contents that are the problem.

Re: Get Suited

"without it we would still be living in the agrarian paradise of the 17th century"

Make that the 14th.

Re: Why the delay?

"extraction from this particular mire is non-trivial"

1. Boeing prepare, at their own cost, a second capsule to standards in which two senior Boeing bigwigs, say chairman & head of space division are prepared to travel.

2. Second capsule is sent up crewed by the bigwigs "as a safety demonstration".

3. On arrival bigwigs are told it's the original crew members who get to go back on the second capsule. They can either go in the original or have Boeing prepare and launch a third at their own cost to get them back. Or just hang on for a free trip to the South Pacific.

4. Boeing treat it as a learning opportunity about the true savings of cutting corners versus getting it right first time.

Re: Pretty soon you'll be able to pick up a shitty adapter at the local convenience store

Ken's 2nd post suggests it was.

Re: Pretty soon you'll be able to pick up a shitty adapter at the local convenience store

You need to take into account Poe's law,

Client tells techie: You're not leaving the country until this printer is working

Not quite kidnapped by the Mafia

I had a contract to write some custom reporting S/W for the vendor of a process control system to be installed on-site. My client as in Crawley but the site was near Naples. The S/W was completed ahead of time and the installation was quick as well. However, running the reports kept resulting in system crashes and files containing what appeared to be segments of memory appearing in /lost+found. I couldn't get away until they had a clear run. Not only was I running short of Lira, on the Thursday I got a call from an agency to visit a prospective client on Monday with a view to starting a new contract on Tuesday. Fortunately we had a clear run on the Friday and I got out PDQ except that storms at Gatwick, where my car was, meant an unscheduled stop to hang about in Paris CDG and a diversion to LHR.

I heard afterwards that it was a faulty memory module; presumably the extra code tipped the system into using enough extra memory to reach that module - either that or they'd had previous problems they were keeping quiet about.

Disney claims agreeing to Disney+ terms waives man's right to sue over wife's death

"you don't have the unwaivable right to a civil court trial"

What? Do you want the lawyers to starve and their children go without shoes?

Re: Kind of a self-answering question ?

If they're solely relying on the T&Cs Disney would appear to be accepting that they're in the loop.

It may, of course, be that the report is incomplete and the lawyers are arguing that (a) it's the site tenant who's solely responsible and (b) if we, Disney, are then he agreed to our T&Cs.

Re: Kind of a self-answering question ?

If there isn't one it would be up to the court to decide. It would very likely be presented with evidence on the matter by expert witnesses. Possibly the judge might make a ruling or at least offer guidance to the jury. Alternatively the jury would be asked to decide if, by allergen-free, a reasonable person might assume that they would not suffer a potentially lethal allergic reaction on eating the comestible in question.

That's the way criminal law establishes such things. It enables the law to keep up with developments which may not have been known or taken as worthy of consideration when the relevant statutes were drawn up, at least in English law and in those jurisdictions that are derived from it.

Never mind the civil case, where's the criminal case, something along the lines of corporate manslaughter by neglicence?

Twitter must pay over half a million to unfairly dismissed Irish exec

Re: Either a liar or blind to the hypocrisy

"She's either a horrible liar or completely blind to the hypocrisy of that."

She was giving evidence of her opinion that she's paid by the company to hold.

Re: Reg trolling

No, no. Musk doesn't do 180° turns because he's always right. The rest of the world does 180° turns around him.

Re: It's one thing winning the judgement...

I'm sure X has half a million's worth of assets in Ireland which can be garnished.

Re: Of the remaining 35 employees, she said: "We accepted their resignations."

I wouldn't be surprised if, after the amount this is going to cost them, they will shortly be "accepting her resignation" too.

I wouldn't rule out the latter part of your statement, given rule by Musk, but not for that reason. The entire hardcore idea was Musk's. All she's done is give evidence following based on Musk's diktat.

I take it that you're unaware that GP practicess are, in fact, independent businesses providing services to the NHS?

"Musk is catching up fast"

Yup, he really puts in the hardcore hours.

Re: Not here!

I think that, in terms of there being different rules, Musk tripped up at "rules", or at least rules that weren't his own.

Re: Interesting.

"It's why good HR people are a very necessary evil"

But where do you find one?

I wonder if there are any world records concerning the number of suits lost by a single company.

Gartner mages: Payback from office AI expected in around two years

So not in two years, then?

Google's ex-CEO U-turns after saying staff 'going home early' killed winning

Re: WFH increases my productivity

"Anyone who thinks working from home makes you unproductive is an idiot."

Anybody who things working from home is unproductive should pay for the commuting time - and fares - if they want staff in the office. They'd soon work out which is more productive.

Re: Schmidt is reported as saying,

Maybe his memory is going, and he's not even that old.

Re: Yep yep, the priviledged attitude

They probably don't have long commutes into offices, not multiple layers of manglement above them.

Cisco slashes thousands of staff, 7% of entire workforce, pivots into AI

"It has bolstered the software and securities operations via acquisition."

I wonder if manglement realise that the major part of the assets they're gaining like that are people and their knowledge. By the time they've hollowed out those companies staffs they'll be back to square one with innovation taking place elsewhere.

AI stole my job and my work, and the boss didn't know – or care

Re: All really rather tragic.

It will probably manage with just the abstract and possibly the discussion. Nature will (or used to, it's a long time since I worked in an organisation that took it) provide a puff-piece of its own for whatever might seem important in the current issue so there's allso be that to digest. So the annoying thing is that the AI will probably have sufficient material to provide its own pastiche.

Indian telcos to cut off scammy, spammy, telemarketers for two whole years

Re: Sender = Phoenix?

As I keep saying, make the calls chargeable against the telco who would be entitled to pass it on to the caller plus a handling charge. Policing it all, including the phoenix company stuff, then becomes a credit control issue for the telcos - and an incentive for them to clean up their customer base. The prospect of having to do that would almost certainly enable them to suddenly discover that can deal with the problem without requiring any such legislation.

Re: Oh boy howdy, a blockchain!

NTBS: Need to be special.

Enzo Biochem ordered to cough up $4.5 million over lousy security that led to ransomware disaster

OK, that's the small change taken care of. Now fork out for realistic compensation to those whoe information was nicked. $2 per head isn't anywhere near realistic.

Texas sues GM for selling driver data to analytics, insurance companies

How about requiring them to compensate all the drivers whose data they sold for every penny they got from the sale plus interest. And the end purchasers to compensate them for every penny of the gains they made from the data, plus interest.

UK's 'electricity superhighway' gets green light just in time for AI to gobble it all up

"cheap, reliable, and clean power...t a 170 megawatt natural gas generator"

Does this come under the heading of two out of three ain't bad? And that's assuming it satisfies "cheap".

Intel, already adrift, now Armless too

"shed thousands of staff, deals with the fallout of faulty Raptor Lake products, and works to deliver a new wave of manufacturing processes and products"

The first of those is going to make the rest of them more difficult because they all need people. So maybe it's raising money to buy another business with the products it needs.

Feds bust minor league Radar/Dispossessor ransomware gang

Shoes. Does anything merit such cruel and unusual punishment?

"they do not appear to be a particularly impactful or active ransomware group, so why go after them,"

What a numpty line of thinking. They're criminals disrupting and robbing legitimate businesses, that's why.

Elon Musk claims live Trump interview on X derailed by DDoS

Re: A request

You're forgetting that he uses bankruptcy as a business process. I don't think Musk has quite got that sorted yet.

Re: Shelf life

Probably the time taken to appeal through all the various layers.

Re: Shelf life

If they're smart enough to quit X for Thrreads maybe a lot of them are also too smart to fall for that.

Re: A request

And maybe that should just be "florid", not "Florida".

Re: Testing

Which one would have required paying someone not demanding it up-front.

Re: Elon wants to follow Kamala

"not in the best of mental health"

That didn't stop him last time.

Orion SA says scammers conned company out of $60 million

Just as likely is an impersonation of some senior member of staff telling some junior member to transfer money because of some big deal. There was a report somewhere (not, I think, here) of Ferrari dodging an extremely good fake at very high level (boss to one step down) because he said he'd have to verify, what was the book they'd been discussing the other day? I think that was improvised but it does need to be laid down that very firmly and from the very top that any instruction to transfer large amounts of money outside of standard business procedures need to be verified by some back channel if the instruction is not given face to face, no matter how senior the "instructor" is and how junior the instructee. And that "because I say so" should never be accepted as verification.

The primary requirement is a belief that "It couldn't happen to us". So no confirmation or anything.

CrowdStrike president cheered after accepting 'Epic Fail' Pwnie award

Which mistake? The dodgy client S/W, the process that generated the duff file, the release process that failed to detect the duffness - or the managerial failure that allowed all that to happen.

Re: "Michael Sentonas hopes trophy will remind staff that failure is unacceptable"

It's a bit like the budget to fix things when there was no budget to stop them going wrong in the first place.

Re: "Michael Sentonas hopes trophy will remind staff that failure is unacceptable"

And how and why those choices were made, or failed to be made, is the real root cause that their root cause analysis didn't reach.

Re: This workplace has been incident free for X days

We had a MOTD reminding users to log out when they finished work, ending "This includes you $NAME_OF_LAST_OFFENDER". It worked very well; so much so we had to remove it after it was left pointing to the same person for too long once we stopped finding abandoned logins.

With an added Oxford comma.

Re: It has still not been adequately explained

"How this could crash every Windows machine that was updated with those changes, but they didn't catch in testing."

Your question assumes testing existed.

"root cause analysis"

It didn't really find the root cause. The root cause is the answer to the question "How did we let this happen?".

Please name the guilty.

It's all drying up: Microsoft to erase 3D Paint from digital store

"Paint 3D is to be ditched once and for all in the not-too-distant-future."

Will they use a paint stripper or just sand it down?