Posts by Doctor Syntax

Before we put half a million broadband satellites in orbit, anyone want to consider environmental effects?

It doesn't clear in a 10 year period.

Google-commissioned report claims early adopters already enjoying fruits of gen-AI labor

Re: Google look into own product and say you should buy it

With the target that this is aimed it it's unlikely to proceed further then "you should buy it" before orders are signed.

Re: Everyone wants AI until they see the bill

It's the new shiny. Does it have to do something as well?

CrowdStrike president cheered after accepting 'Epic Fail' Pwnie award

"We all know it's a big PR stunt to accept it"

OTOH you've got to ask yourself if Musk would have done such a thing.

LLM-driven C-to-Rust. Not just a good idea, a genie eager to escape

Re: Hoare: Fortran->Memory Safe Algol

"That was OpenSSL, IIRC."

It was. But the point here is that unless you know why something is done in some particular way you can significantly screw up when you "fix" it.

"Also, how could a single guy change centrally important cryptographic code is a mystery to me."

But letting an LLM do it would be OK seems to be the current thinking.

There's one problem starting with code, source or compiled. It will tell you what the program will do, not what it's supposed to do.

Re: Hoare: Fortran->Memory Safe Algol

"Other Unix tools have been reported to be full of memory errors when they were first run under valgrind."

Like SSH's random number generator.

Former YouTube CEO, Susan Wojcicki, 56, succumbs to cancer

56! Not that much older than my kids.

Cigarette break burned out a huge chunk of Africa's internet

Re: Ahh a manager who is telling the truth

But the truth will out sooner or later.

Re: Own up to it

It does now.

Study backer: Catastrophic takes on Agile overemphasize new features

Re: Always a disaster soapbox

Oops. "Alack of testing was the problem here."

Code as documentation

"code is an unambiguous description of what the computer should do"

It's an unambiguous description of what the computer will do, not what it should do. They are not necessarily the same thing and it's from the gaps between that the bugs emerge and flourish.

I remember reading something a long time ago about comments in code that went along the lines of "journeymen programmers say what the code does, master craftsmen say why they did it this way, great programmers say why they didn't do it some other way.".

I always held that development was simply the process of launching a program into the maintenance cycle. Good documentation is going to be essential to the future maintainers. The code itself will never be enough.

Re: Air traffic control

The not owning ferries bit is, on its own, typical of criticising for the sake of criticising. Has nobody heard of leasing?

Re: Find another starting point

Congratulations. You've just described waterfall.

Re: Always a disaster soapbox

Wasn't one of the tents of Agile unit testing (or was that XP? all these methodologies merge into each other in my memory as time passes)? Alck of testing was he problem here.

Re: Agile would be great if not for all the people

"an improvement over waterfall"

What everyone forgets is that waterfall was originally the strawman in somebody's article to describe something else - probably a more iterative approach.

"Agile happened because projects got bigger than 3 people could handle and developers thought they were better than project managers"

Alternatively they discovered just how crap some project managers are. What provoked me into retiring was my last (as it turned out) client's PM. After spending the afternoon before he went on holiday havering as who was going to do what he changed his mind that evening and rung someone up to reverse his eventual (and to my mind correct) decision.

Ironically, before he was appointed the client tried to get me to turn permie to take the job. They didn't realise how close I was to their mandatory retirement age and I didn't tell them. I was more than 2 years over it when I quit.

I've mentioned before an old colleague who's previously worked at Shorts in Belfast. The designer required a square hole in wood to take a steel rod. There was no indication as to how it was to be made; presumably the hole was too long for chisels or their mechanised equivalents. My friend waited until the designer had left, drilled a hole with the diameter of the side of the square, took the rod and a large hammer...

On reflection I've remembered the box girder bridge saga. Along with those half joint bridges they were one of the go-to type of structure* of the UK motorway expansion. The consequence was the reduced lanes and speeds over the Tinsley viaduct on the M1 and a bridge across a river (possibly the Wye) on the M50 and the circuitous routes round the Warley interchange whilst they were being repaired. How could I have forgotten them?

Bridge engineers are not always a good exemplar of engineering excellence and hang the cost.

* I almost wrote mainstays which would have been unintentionally ironic.

Re: Catastrophic agility?

And what, might I ask, is wrong with studying botany? Or do you not wish to eat? If you do you might reflect that whether you're vegan or carnivore what your food depends on photosynthesis, as does the oxygen in the air that keeps you alive.

Microsoft really wants those old Exchange 2016 servers put out to pasture

There are also open standards for calendar and contact data exchange.

Re: Migration

"Easily solved but no accounting for users stupidity in the plan."

And by solving it easily for her you have encouraged her to keep doing that. You should have pointed out that deleted means deleted. Emphasise how much work it's going to take you and then restore them in batches over a few days.

"With Exchange Server MS really have messed up. ...

It does look like with the 2019 to SE roadmap, MS are again expecting customers to jump to its tune"

In what way does this count as messing up? Apart from the customers' PoV, of course.

"The problem (if you can call it that) is that there is so much choice"

That's also the problem with Microsoft. The article mentions 2016, 2019 and SE. The only problem with Microsoft is that they come in sequence, not in parallel and moving along the sequence costs you money each time.

"They'll do what they usually do and break the protocols in the clients"

Y'know, I was almost sure there was an internationally recognised protocol for email.

Delta: CrowdStrike's offer to help in Falcon meltdown was too little, too late

Re: Delta are as much to blame as M$ and Crowdstrike

"Crowdstrike couldn't update machines that weren't connected to the Internet, and they couldn't update machines or VMs that weren't running, and they couldn't update VM snapshots."

They couldn't update machines that were switched off either.

So?

Re: Delta are as much to blame as M$ and Crowdstrike

Yes, it's amazing that we still have people coming here and sounding out about staging without having read exactly how this happened. I'm sure a few admins who thought they had a staging setup got a nasty shock when they found it didn't help them.

"Delta has long regarded CrowdStrike and Microsoft as reliable technology providers."

There's the problem. When it comes to software don't regard anyone as being more reliable than their last update. It's always possible the next one will bork you.

HP Inc loves China – but wants to reduce the risks it presents

Re: "we continue to grow in China and with China"

Government thinking was more likely "exporting production keeps inflation down so we can go into the next election with really low interest rates and voters like that".

Hello? Are you talking on a Cisco SPA300 or SPA500 IP phone? Now's the time to junk 'em

Re: what's the point of the support contract?

To make money for Cisco, of course and to tick the box that says "Must have support contract".

BOFH: The true gravity of the Boss and the 3-coffee problem

Re: Tier 4

"If the DSO has an infinite sample rate"

Then it becomes analogue.

Re: The benefits of caffeine

I once got dumped in one of those courses where HR send staff to get their intelligences insulted (The staff's intelligences, that is; HR would lap it up and come back for more). The presenter was obviously pre-loaded with caffeine or something stronger - one bad sign was that instead of the usual "talk to your neighbour and introduce them" gimmick he made it two neighbours. I made my excuses and left PDQ.

So long as it doesn't block the pipes.

A 3-coffe problem? No shit, Sherlock.

US 'laptop farm' man accused of outsourcing his IT jobs to North Korea to fund weapons programs

Re: They will sell us the rope with which we will hang them

The software being "designed in Russia and Belarus" bit in the quoted article links to another Telegraph article which goes on at length about submarines but makes no reference to software at all, let alone where it was "designed".

Re: We're not worthy

Not really. If, as TFA suggests, all the incomes were being routed through one identity it would raise a flag sooner or later.

Under-fire Elon Musk urged to get a grip on X and reality – or resign

Re: I Feel Sorry For GB

"you're making us all look bad"

Looking bad is the default setting for A/Cs, otherwise why would the be anonymous. Exceptions for those sailing a bit close to the wind with confidential information or company policy, of course.

Re: So what?

"the advertising brokers who are using their monopoly position"

Brokers are businesses. Conventionally run businesses (Musk might not understand that concept) are aware that they are dependent on their customers continuing to do business with them. I rather think they can get away with pulling wool over their customers' eye in regard to online advertising in general but they wouldn't be able to disguise from their customers what would happen if they placed advertising on X.

Unconventionally run businesses might not be so aware. That doesn't stop reality being real.

There's usually a lot of truth in old sayings so here's one to consider: "He who pays the piper calls the tune."

Re: 200m

"because the legacy media doesn't tell both sides of the story"

Do you mean they should include utter bollocks alongside what actual reportage can find out.

Re: Pedo Guy to the rescue!

But if they're smart they'll want to be paid upfront.

Shuttle Columbia's near-miss: Why we should always expect the unexpected in space

Re: Understatement there.

Good try but the wrong actor.

Anaconda puts the squeeze on data scientists now deemed to be terms-of-service violators

What happens in a few years time when the source of post-docs from academic sites has dried up to be replaced by those who'd used alternatives? Presumably by the time that hits growth the CEO will have moved on, having burnished his CV with the huge increase in revenue he'd achieved.

Report: Tech misconceptions plague the IT world

This magnet thing is, in fact harmless. In its day it was a piece of sound advice, On the whole it's better that it grabbed such firm hold of users' consciousness back then than if it hadn't.

Re: Say what?

People born in the latter half of the 80s fall into the cohort. To have been in the world of the 8-bit kit you had to be older than that. But, yes, the difference is between those who started out from an urge to tinker (possibly disguised as "if I can get this working it will be a great tool in the lab") and those who bought a life-style accessory.

"you'd expect this cohort would be more tech-savvy"

I'm not sure why that would be. Software abstracts away the hardware and even its own lower layers. Back in the '70s & '80s we were much closer to the nuts & blots, just as early motorists had to adjust the ignition timing and change gear without synchromesh. Nowadays only the petrolheads know much about how their cars work so why should a generation brought up on smartphones and tablets be expected to know what lies behind the carefully insulated surface?

"According to Kaspersky, 21 percent of Brits believe a magnet can erase a smartphone."

Magnets erased floppy disks. That became well known. Floppy disks were where data was stored so that translated into "magnets erase data". That was a very important piece of advice. How many users need to track all the developments of storage or have the inclination to do so?

At the time that it mattered that generalisation came to be so strongly recognised that it persisted through the age when it might have been true into an age when it wasn't. It's better that that happened than that it didn't.

Survey finds that four in five enterprise endpoints could run Windows 11

Re: Five out of five could run...

Does yur ERP run on a server with PC end-points? What are the servers? In my pre-retirement days those servers were Unix boxes - why would we run them with a jumped-up single user O/S? What do the end-points run - browsers? If so do you realise that browsers run on Linux and BSD as well as Windows? What H/W does your CNC interface to? Does it run W11? Knowing industrial ket, does it even run on on W10?

Re: Five out of five could run...

Thank you for telling us you've no experience running Linux. If only we could work out which of the numerous A/Cs you are. If only elReg would issue you all with serial numbers.

Move from non W11-capable H/W involves purchase of new H/W & staff having to use new interface with or without retraining. It's the sort of point at which options might well be reviewed. The question then becomes what H/W do you purchase, what interface do you run and what it the relative value of the result. If a purely commercial solution is mandated, does the Mac provide sufficient long-term value over W11? (If it isn't, of course, keep the H/W and switch to Linux or BSD is also an option.)

What if they decided to bypass Windows altogether and go to Macs?