Posts by Doctor Syntax

Oracle Ads have had it: $2B operation shuts down after dwindling to $300M

Re: The sad part...

If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing again.

Re: The alternative has always been out there.

"How much time did you spend, dear reader, learning an IT skill that lost its market value sooner and faster than you expected?"

A fair amount here and there. Ditto for skills that paid off. As a freelancer making speculative (to some degree) investments like that is part of the business - not that HMRC understand that.

"a whole team of data science experts"

Is that a euphemism?

BOFH: An 'AI PC' for an Acutely Ignorant user

THHH surgical team has a surgeon and a copilot. If that's where Microsoft got the name someone in there might deserve more credit than I originally allowed. It still seems like and absurdly high-tech rubber duck.

The offers are coming thick and fast, the urgency likely being driven by the desire to make a sale before there's any real indication about what an AI PC actually is.

... when I rage about it later.

Vendors trying to make an urgent sale? I'm surprised the BOFH would rage about an opportunity like that.

Tesla shareholders agree to pay Musk staggering sum of $48B

Re: Pay the workers better?

Spot the unevidenced assumption.

Re: He doesn't deserve the payment

ANd that assumes he did the solving as opposed of getting in the way of those doing the actual solving.

If I was an institutional investor I'd have been out already.

X marks the spot where Twitter's severance math doesn't add up

If he wants a check cut out a piece of fabric and send it. Houndstooth seems reasonable but if he wants a bigger one, try a piece of tartan.

Re: Details

I can't think what the W might possibly stand for.

Wells Fargo fires employees accused of faking keyboard activity to pretend to work

Re: such as so-called mouse jigglers, which can be found for as cheap as $5

Those who don't watch the Simpsons (yes, really) appreciate Werdsmith's explanation.

Re: Whatever happened to measuring output?

"Please review this document and highlight any problems"

Does the document have any intrinsic value or does it just exist to be passed round for comment and to give management something to do reading it (or to give its original author something to do writing it).

Re: Two monitors much code

I suppose things may be much the same today except that Teams replaces the spreadsheet.

It says a lot about the nature of "output" in Wells Fargo that these cannot easily be determined.

Re: "got the boot after being probed."

It's as well to remember that the only skill needed to get to the top of a hierarchical organisation is climbing hierarchical organisations. The existence of any other abilities such as intelligence should not be assumed.

Re: Whatever happened to measuring output?

"Can Wells Fargo really not tell when staff aren't producing the output that they're employed for?"

Obviously not. It calls into question the value of whatever's been produced by those who were doing whatever they were employed for.

World's first RISC-V laptop with Ubuntu preloaded touts AI smarts and octa-core chip

I was wondering much the same thing. Where does Ubuntu stand these days between its derivatives such as Mint and Zorin on the one side and Debian, Suse etc on the other?

Re: You don't need that much oomph in *every* laptop to be useful

You don't need AI, I don't need AI but I'm not sure I'd care to generalise to that extent.

Hardware vendors certainly think they need it to restart a sales boom.

US Space Force wanted $77M to reinforce GPS – and Congress shot it down

Set up a small demonstration

Invite the committee on a jolly somewhere. Spoof their navigation to deliver them somewhere less salubrious than they were hoping for.

We need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this network

Re: Never volunteer ...

"I'm here to tell you that they are not really a problem"

If they had been you wouldn't.

Re: "This being 20 years ago now"

"the attendees at most tech shows couldn't give a rat's about such aesthetics"

There would be one group who would - top manglement bragging to top manglement of other corporations how great their stand looked.

Microsoft bigwig says the Feds catching Chinese spies in Exchange Online is the cloud working as intended

Quite frankly, we're still not sure what Jedi-mind trick Smith thought he was pulling with that statement.

Why the surprise? Surely you read your own articles as much as I do and even as a non-Microsoft user I've read enough to realise that this is the Microsoft approach to QA. He just let it slip out.

The sequence was probably something like this:

1: Testin/QA miss the occasional corner case that slips out into the wild.

2. Users find the bug with sufficient publicity the Microsoft notice it.

3. Microsoft decides that users are more effective at catching bugs than Testing/QA

4. Microsoft realises that users are actually paying them rather then being paid

5. Microsoft acts accordingly

Student's flimsy bin bags blamed for latest NHS data breach

Re: Inexcusable

Having encountered a good few doctors in their larval stage when I was a student myself I've always found it hard to treat the final product as anything other than any other sort of graduate I might encounter.

Re: Inexcusable

As we don't know the underlying situation I'd be reluctant to accept some of the assumptions here. As a student the case notes might be part of an exercise taken home to work write up there. Cross cut shreds wouldn't be much use there and suitable shredders aren't going to be part of student digs furnishings. It's the thought that they should be disposed on in this way that's worrying.

TFA did specifically say training was given. Experience is a dear teacher but there are those who will learn at no other. I hope we can take it that this student has finally learned.

There's a good chance that this will have a bigger influence that the training on information governance and the information pack did. The worrying thing is whether the medical training was retained any better.

Microsoft's Recall should be celebrated as the savior of SMEs and scourge of CEOs

Re: Recall. No-one told me.

It took a while but I finally got it. Nice one.

Re: What happened to ask the user?

In SMEs or at least on the S end of that spectrum, they probably did.

Re: Nope

Maybe it was posted by an AI A/C

Re: Nope

"and customers don't take their custom somewhere else"

This is something that the deployers of this crap almost certainly don't measure.

"and soon there'll be nowhere else to go"

This is worrying. However sooner or later somebody might decide that winning the race to the bottom hasn't brought competitive advantage and start a race to the top. Imagine, for instance, how quickly a bank might conquer the banking marke by starting to open branches in towns and villages, staffed by helpful and empowered staff.

Re: As usual . . .

"and/or the lack of imagination"

A long time ago, back in the days when S/W was written without the assistance of CoPilot or ever StackOverflow we used to do this thing called error handling. Very old-fashioned, I know, but it involved thinking "what errors might be thrown up by this piece of code hitting a problem". It required using a degree of imagination and then adding code to handle the errors we could imagine happening. Those of us old enough to have done that are actually using that imagination and what we can see are a huge stack of likely bad consequences arising from nobody responsible (responsible? Ha!) for this idea having stopped to do that old-fashioned thing.

Those consequences include all manner of complications relating to legislation such as GDPR and also the neat packaging of all sorts of information for exfiltration by the bad guys.

To put it simply, this has FAIL written all over it.

Re: Ignorance Management

There's also stuff that's written down in formal documentation with the invisible partition between "stuff we actually do do this way" and "stuff we really don't do this way".

Re: Captured without context

"most business processes routinely include steps which involve playing Solitaire."

We can automate that for you.

Re: Nope

Let me guess - you've never worked on order fulfilment, ERP or logistics systems.

Re: Nope

Without knowing the "why" it would be difficult to correctly automate the process. Take, for instance, a situation where the business is down to the last few items of some product. Orders come in from two customers. Whoever's doing the stock allocation chooses one customer rather than the other.

Why? Is it random? Is it based on knowledge that one might have a more urgent need? Is it that one is a faster payer than the other? Does the business have more sales to one rather than the other. Is one customer a good mate?

Without knowing why the system has gained no information to enable it to make a similar trade-off in the future in the way the business might approve.

A more useful approach would be software that analyses demand and lead times to avoid that stock level issue entirely but that would be ordinary statistical analysis that needs no fancy clothes.

UK Labour Party promises end to datacenter planning 'barriers'

Doesn't the M25 count as sterile?

Well, nice to think that somebody thinks about these things.

Other ideas Labour put forward include a "national data library" to centralize existing government research programs to facilitate academic access to public sector data.

And did they specify what safeguards would be applied to all the personal data therein?

Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy'

Re: "42% less Unix philosophy"

It's not the sort of character trait that engenders trust and yet systemd required an enormous amount of trust.

Yes, I'm a curmudgeon and refute your comparison.

Maybe there is a better solution than Sys V but I found Upstart already a step in the wrong direction because it made a start-up problem impossible to diagnose. Possibly there was somewhere where some debugging could have been inserted but if so it was sufficiently obfuscated that I never found it. Clarity is a virtue to be valued.

By moving to Devuan or one of the other non-systemd Linices and if that really does become infeasible, move to a BSD.

With sudo you don't need to give anyone root password because their own password suffices if they're in the sudoers file. That means hat if their password has been obtained by somebody else - possibly because they reused it elsewhere - then there's no additional layer of protection. None. Whatever access they have through sudo is now open to that third person.

The only reason you should have to give out the root password is that you need to give someone access that can only be done by root. The original solution was that if someone's job was printer administration that was done by user lpadmin and they'd su to lpadmin using lpadmin's password, not root's. And you still needed a separate password to become root.

It was a poor solution to an already solved problem.

Re: I only just got the hang of the sudoers file format

But does this have an equivalent? Or maybe it just users the suders file before deprecating it a few releases in the future.

"Let's throw out the concept of SUID on the dump of UNIX' bad ideas."

For once I agree with him. Just use su.

Oracle Java police start knocking on Fortune 200's doors for first time

But are they licenced on the basis of the number of seats or the total number of employees, irrespective of whether the one is substantially less than the other?

"they say that they will only support their own product running on Oracle Java"

In that case it's time to review the market.

Elon Musk ends OpenAI lawsuit without explaining why

Re: The dog ate the contract.

It's not surprising he shied away from having a written contract. He's learned that they're bad news; he can't back out of them easily.

Microsoft sued by ParTec in Texas over AI supercomputer patents

Re: Patents !

This might infringe mine entitled "Techniques for building a computing machine out of bits"

Snowflake customers not using MFA are not unique – over 165 of them have been compromised

Sigh. I suppose they use email addresses as user IDs which just opens the floodgates to that.

The best rules for acceptable user IDs would be:

1. '@' and the sequence 'at' not allowed

2. Should not end with a sequence recognisable as a TLD name.

Kyndryl and Apollo Global linked to bid for DXC Technology

Re: Scott McNealy

An earlier one from the '80s described as "based on the principle that two stones tied together will float".

Molten lunar regolith heats up space colonization dreams

Re: Details.

I suppose you start off with a small one and use that to make enough material for a slightly bigger one and so on.