Posts by Doctor Syntax

Study finds a quarter of bosses hoped RTO would make employees quit

Re: One thing I will call out as BS

If companies who made better choices are able to poach the best staff from those who made worse choices then the latter are liable to go broke sooner or later and the inflexible landlords are going to lose their tenants anyway.

I suppose some property owners are going to let their tenants quit if they want to, repurpose* part of their buildings into something more sustainable such as mixed residential/business**. Those who aren't are going to find their more flexible competitors got there before them so they're picking up the crumbs.

* Yes, an upfront cost but needed to retain some value in the property.

** This may be an issue with planners. OTOH the planners have actually planned an unsustainable commute-based economy. By definition if it's unsustainable it can't be sustained and will collapse. Those authorities which catch on quicker will make the necessary adjustments. Those who don't will find themselves running the sort of derelict areas found in ex-industrial areas.

Re: And the interesting thing is...

So the shareholders who don't also have property shares are being ripped off by those who do.

A lot of us are retired.

But if you want some more anecdotal evidence about the still working - my daughter whose previous job was working from home* made an incomprehensible (to me) move to an office-based job, with a commute I'd have baulked at, just before COVID. That company, of course, changed to W@H for the duration. As soon as ROT came along she quit in favour of a job at a business which is virtually 100% W@H.

* Partly at home and partly visiting research collaborators which is why I make the distinction between "from" and "at". The office, about 150 miles away was only visited very occasionally.

Re: Who

"When I had a manufacturing company"

Past tense noted.

Re: Who

"Companies can't cater to employee needs on an individual basis."

Who said anything about an individual basis? If a lot (?most) employees prefer W@H and are more productive doing that it's not doing things on an individual basis to not mandate return to office.

Re: Who

And only then in the short term.

Re: Who

"Notice what happens to companies when founders magic goes."

"Hi Leo!" again!

Re: And the interesting thing is...

"Promotions rarely happen because management dare not promote them out of their current role because they're too damn good doing it."

And they have no mechanism for promoting them in it.

Re: And the interesting thing is...

"That meant he kept his job, at least for the four years it then took for the company to go bust."

In four years he didn't find an aopportunity to jump ship to somewhere better run? That's a hell of a risk just for the opportunity to say "told you so".

Re: And the interesting thing is...

"The reason was the real estate."

And they probably think they're getting better value from office plus staff when office plus staff are in the same location as when they're not. The question should be "are they getting the same value from staff?". If so the way to get value from the office is to off-load it if they can. Your partner's daughter should consider getting out if her employer's manglement doesn't realise they've fallen for the sunk cost fallacy.

Re: And the interesting thing is...

"the best people quit"

And they'll have no means of measuring that because they probably didn't even know who they were.

Re: And the interesting thing is...

"Most companies don't own their own buildings, and they have to pay the same lease cost whether or not someone is sitting in a seat."

True, but when they see the smpty seats they can't fool themselves they're wasting money. If they bring everyone back they can.

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

If this is an inordinate proportion of breaches of individual accounts rather than a breach of the platform itself it raises the question of what's special about this platform. Is it something used as shadow IT by managers renting time on their company credit card?

Legendary Glastonbury farm using bovine excreta power plant adds graphene boffinry

Re: Shit at Glastonbury

In sieges it was usually lead for musket balls that they ran out of and resorted to stripping the roof to cast more. Or maybe they regarded teh roof as a strategic reserve and didn't worry about a separate stockpile.

"They're not removing much methane from the atmosphere - the methane produced from the cow shit is a tiny proportion compared to what the cows fart out every day in the fields."

And that's something their bovine ancestors were doing for millions of years before anyone came along to domesticate them. It will eventually be oxidised back to carbon dioxide and water just as has always happened. Also the carbon dioxide produced simply replaces that which was removed by photosynthesis by the fodder plants which the cows ate. It's a closed loop of a year or so's duration.

What is different between now and the time of the cows' wild ancestors is the release, as carbon dioxide, of other carbon which was sequestered by photosynthesis hundreds of millions of years ago.

Re: "What nobody wants is to have/do/want less and be content"

"the bequests of even highly commercially successful people indicate how little they owned but were apparently quite content"

But would you be content today with the same standard of living?

Actually, it's more complicated than that. If you're dealing with highly commercially successful people they'd have a few apprentices and/or journeymen doing some of he commercial work and a domestic servant or too doing the domestic work. The wills wouldn't necessarily reflect their standard of living.

You won't be seeing the wills of those people (except for those few of the apprentices or journeymen who went on to be masters themselves). You also wont be seeing the wills of those born into such families that might well have lead to expectations of commercial success but whose lives were cut short by the diseases which are either readily treated today or which we now avoid, partly due to greater knowledge and partly due to some of the extra household equipment that we now possess.

Early MySQL engineer questions whether Oracle is unintentionally killing off the open source database

Do people still use MySQL rather than MariaDB?

Apple built custom servers and OS for its AI cloud

Re: I sat through the keynote...

"several of the male presenters seemed to be sharing the exact same pair of shoes"

IOW it bored you.

Support, don't micromanage, say researchers who find WFH intensified 'anxiety' in some

Short summary:

Bad managers manage W@H badly, good managers manage W@H well.

Re: "WFH has less distractions / interruptions"

"only the odd mountain goat for company"

I suppose a lot depends on how odd the mountain goat might be.

Disenchanted Windows user? Pop open a fresh can of Linux Lite

Re: Oh PLEASE. Not another Version of Linux.

They're not new distros release every month. Read the article & you'll realise it's a new version of one of the relatively small handful of suitable for immigrants distros, any one of which you could reasonably choose. And any one of those only releases a new version every quarter or less. Anyone accepting of the monthly incoming and potentially bricking shit-shower of the alternative with their uninstallable KBwhatevers can't reasonably claim it to be confusing.

I don't know about XFCE but one of the things about KDE is the possibility of theming it combined with the huge number of people who have generated artwork to look like any version of Windows you prefer. And you still have a distinctly non-Windows, performant OS under it.

Re: Try dual boot

"With almost all Linux distros, you can have the install process shrink your Windows partition and make space to install the Linux distro, altering the startup process to allow you to select at boot time whether you want to boot to Linux or boot to Windows."

If I were setting that up fore someone else that's what I'd do. It also has the advantage that you can mount the Windows partition to have access to any data on it. I hesitate to suggest that someone with o experience of installing and OS in case they made the wrong choice and trashed a Windows partition they still needed to use or had un-backed up data. (Although one always backs up ones data, don't one?)

Re: I Wish I Could

How to tell us you've no experience of using Linux without telling us you've not experience of running Linux.

Re: Screwing the Pooch

I should have mentioned that apart from anything else, trying to revert to an earlier version of S/W might run into the issue of changes in data format between the one you've just used and the one you want to revert to.

Re: Been here before.

Ungoogled-chromuim might have been a better choice if they could build it without having to drag in a lot of later then distro versions of dependencies.

Re: Been here before.

"Seamonkey is also based on ancient Firefox"

And on the even more ancient idea of combining browser and PIM into one. As the PIM half (like Thunderbird) uses the rendering engine to build is own UI I can't see the logic of splitting them in the first place.

Re: Screwing the Pooch

"In this one. APT/deb aren't the be-all and end-all. There's no undo function. There's no easy clean way to revert to an old version"

I can't, off-hand, think of an occasion where I've needed to do that in a Debian/Devuan repository-installed application.

For out-of-distro applications the neatest thing is to have then install in /opt with their own little directory tree. Those don't show up as extra mounted file-systems and you can remove the n application's tree cleanly without touching anything else. By comparison even Appimiage is an unnecessary overhead.

Keeping a separate /home partition is, of course good advice and also a separate /srv partition for applications that store data outside of /home. This introduces a problem with Debian/Devuan (and possibly others) which default to keeping web server and mariadb data in /var (and possibly other applications as well. Having experienced grief with trying to preserve /var in a reinstall I now set these up with the data in /srv and links back to /var

"The office suite is LibreOffice, but surprisingly, the stable version 7.6, not the newer version 24.2 found in upstream Ubuntu."

I'd have thought that word "stable" makes it unsurprising.

"There are more Microsoft-like Linux productivity suites with a Ribbon UI."

There are also Windows versions of them. Even friends who use Windows are using these rather than pay for Office.

"There are some unwelcome GNOME accessories with their weird CSD button-bar, such as the Evince document viewer."

Perhaps KDE would really be a better choice of dektop for an emigrant from Windows distro.

...and by Windows.

Or, if you have space on your computer, try installing one of the options under VirtualBox. There are a number of options recommended for people in your position - Mint, Zorin, Lite ... Liam has covered all of them in various articles.

You'll have seen references to Red Hat, Suse and others which are enterprise versions and you can safely ignore them. Many are primarily intended to run servers even if they can be desktopped.

HP BIOS update renders some ProBook laptops expensive paperweights

Especially if the update was forced by HP via Microsoft.

Re: Class action lawsuit time

If there's a small claims route available that might be a better option. Otherwise there's liable to be a big settlement, most going to the lawyers and pennies to the claimants. Consequent damages - loss of income etc might exceed the limits, however.

Re: HP knows that most will not bother ...

Does your jurisdiction have a small claims court/route/whatever? In general such a process enables your to (a) put in the claim yourself (b) obliges both sides to pay for any legal representation they make themselves so the other side can't threaten to bankrupt you with expensive lawyers.

Re: What happened?

Her and her successors.

Tesla chair begs investors to bless Musk's billions or face an Elon exodus

Re: board chair Robyn Denholm

Yes, it's shoo-in, shoe-out where the shoe is really a boot, of course.

The board were making a deal* with other peoples' money. A company is owned by its shareholders, therefore it was their money, not the board's. If, now, the shareholders vote to reinstate the deal it will be their decision as to what to do with their money. They have that right,** the board didn't.

* For some versions of "making" and "deal". The "a" seems OK.

** And, of course, the right not to do s

Re: Incentive

You could shorten that to when he starts a sentence with "".

Re: RE: "I have a funny feeling that Tesla might actually do better in his absence"

On the whole, however, they seem to be doing OK. From a shareholder's PoV making profits is better than making news.

Uber ex-CSO Joe Sullivan: We need security leaders running to work, not giving up

Re: CISO at the edge

"Those above don't want to pay"

They also don't want any security processes to apply to themselves/

OpenAI to buy electricity from CEO Sam Altman's nuclear fusion side hustle

Re: Affordable fusion power

We've been harvesting energy from the sun for a very long time indeed. It's called growing food. One of the things about solar energy is that there's a strictly limited amount available at any one time and it has to be shared out. Currently we're seeing plans for solar farms, some fortunately being turned down by planners, presumably on the basis that we need electrical energy more than we need food.

Re: I would love for Helion to succeed

"if Altman gets megarich off AI and plows more money into fusion"

But in order to get megarich he's going to need the cheap energy from the fusion reactor. To make this work he's rally going to need a complete virtual fusion reactor to spring into existence long enough for him to get rich - and who wants to be around when it springs out of existence again. Yes, I have just been re-reading In search of Schroedinger's Cat

I didn't touch a thing – just some cables and a monitor – and my computer broke

Re: Blonde moments

And Big Red Switches are usually things that bring the server room to an eerie silence so you're also programmed to avoid pressing those even when you see them.

Re: Crows

Agreed. ANd your handle seems particularly appropriate when dealing with crows.

Re: Don't forget

say with complete sincerity "No. I'm sorry, I haven't the foggiest."

Shout out "Does anyone know who this is - they seem to have lost their memory?"

Re: Yeah, sure. Nothing changed. Pinky promise.

You seem to have described most of the senior management of the Post Office.

Re: Yeah, sure. Nothing changed. Pinky promise.

"Fill out a web form, apparently... which can only be filled out while on the company network with a company laptop."

Top quality BOFH work.

Re: refused to take responsibility [Ones' Complement]

AT a guess a tech at the conference would have plenty of packing up work to do after it finished.

Re: Yeah, sure. Nothing changed. Pinky promise.

"I later found out they'd dropped it down the stairs and were hoping the company would give them a bigger one when replacing it."

Replace with a smaller one.