Posts by Doctor Syntax

Choose Your Own Adventure with Microsoft 365

Surely line 30 should be asking "DO YOU STILL HAVE MONEY" and finding something else to plunder you with.

It's been a long time - does BBC BASIC have WHILE or REPEAT ... UNTIL loops?

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday borks dual-boot Linux-Windows PCs

It's default behaviour in recent versions of GRUB.

Check /etc/default/grub for a line "GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false". If it's there but commented out, uncomment it, otherwise add it. Then run update-grub.

I don't think it's related to this article.

Re: Or, the better fix

It's the one with Windows on it that you use to look into problems your benighted friends have with their Windows daily drivers.

I think what's changed was that back in XP days the updates actually installed.

Who regard themselves as the owners anyway. It's why I keep it turned off.

So there's a lot to be said for Windows patches failing.

Dragged out the only laptop that has W10 on it the other day. It hadn't been used since before June's patch Tuesday. Booted the Linux partition first. It had booted and checked for updates within about 3 minutes (it's old and slow) and finished all updates and autodeleted an old kernel in about 20 minutes. If it had been used daily, of course, it would have distributed the updates through the course of the 3 months.

Next try Windows. Unlike Linux, after 20 minutes it was still checking for updates - it have another 15 minutes to go. Downloaded updates and started to install the first one. After a few minutes it stopped and claimed a download error - this on an update that had already been labelled with download 100% complete. Click retry and it goes back into the 35 minutes of checking for updates, not retrying the broken install. I eventually left it to its own devices after the first update had failed again. Some time later I found it had gone to sleep. Woke it up again and it continued, retrying the checking. In the course of this some updates disappeared, apparently installed but then reappeared on rechecking. After about 5 hours I shutt down, still with no updates successfully installed. So little chance of it borking the Linux boot, even if I'd had secure boot enabled.

If this is typical of a consumer installation of Windows there much be millions of them out there unpatched because Microsoft don't care enough to make a bog-standard Windows instance reliably install its updates. It may well relate to the failed update of a few months ago, the one where Microsoft issued an update that wouldn't work with the default installation recovery partition size. I suppsoe I could fix it by booting a live Linux distro and using it to shrink the Linux partition that sits above the Windows partition but frankly, if Microsoft can't be arsed to do their job properly I can't be arsed to do it for them.

It's times like this I remember the first chapter of TMMM. That's where Brookes explains the difference between software written by a couple of blokes "in a remodelled garage" and a professional development team. The latter is what he terms a product - can be run by anyone, anywhere, reliably. Under Brookes's definition Windows fails to make the grade as a product. FOSS, written in the modern equivalent of the remodelled garage - laptops and a Github A/C - on the other hand...

HMD Skyline: The repairable Android that lets you go dumb in a smart way

"it's a fairly uncluttered version of Android 14 with little bloat. There are preinstalled launchers for Facebook, LinkedIn, FitBit, a handful other apps,"

From my PoV those count as bloat.

It would be useful if they knew how to - or cared to - write a website which is browser neutral. A whole-screen cookie preference chooser followed by a blank white screen is not a useful way to communicate to potential customers.

China's top Office clone copies Microsoft again – with an inconvenient outage

Re: Non-Microsoft?

Well.

Re: How Does Kingsoft Make Money?

Well, TFA does say it emulates Microsoft Office.

'Right to switch off' initiative aims to boost economy by beating burnout

Re: Have to wonder...

Think building a 737 with brain fog.

And probably American vs European time zones. "What? It's dinner time over there and it's only just after lunch here?"

Re: How about

Have I just strayed into the comments for a different article?

City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle

Re: Why do people work for councils?

Not even DWP?

Re: One question I've not seen answered...

And has such a persuasive sales team.

Re: Add to the mix, turkeys and Christmas

Another category: people who are not in the least affected one way or the other but still want to stick their oar in - usually, to mix maritime metaphors, acting as a sheet anchor.

I've worked as a freelance contractor to a sub-contractor on a number of public sector contracts. Delivered to spec and on time. I had no visibility as to budget but certainly heard no complaints. Modularity for the most part meant that new functionality was added easily and cost-effectively. (The exception was one where my client's IT director, decided to specify how the the database should be designed which made it a bit less easily extensible. They should have shifted it over to the 2nd version we did for later contracts.)

Of course you never see any headlines about that. And then, being public sector, everything had to be re tendered after a few years... Not one of the ones I was involved with but one of the clients lost their flagship contract and from one I heard there were some serious shenanigans involved in that.

Re: Interesting that there is an allegation of hiding the badness from the elected members.

I've often thought that the way to fix this would be to have the council manglement on a basic salary with a bonus to be voted on by the electorate for delivering, to the electorate's satisfaction, verious services or projects.

Re: Easy Money for Oracle - same old BS gov't IT project

"Few software companies or consultants will stand up to them"

It's very likely the salesmen. There's a commission to earn, a target to meet and a bonus at the end of the month/quarter/year.

I've managed to walk away from one employer whose salesman assured a customer that the product would be a straightforward replacement for the existing S/W. I knew what the two databases were like & could see the one was going to work very differently from the other. I had enough trouble trying to graft some very basic security into ours in terms of restricting visibility according to user roles. I had no desire to be the man in the middle between the salesman and the customer on that one.

And if they ever get it up and running, the audits will start.

Top companies ground Microsoft Copilot over data governance concerns

Re: Customer service?

I've come across customer disservice agents who I suspect may have been human who could also be replaced by bots without it being noticed.

Re: Large companies should be able to produce their own software.

"...and can even sell it to others.

The moment you get your software from a third party..."

Those to whom you're selling will then be getting software from a third party.

Re: Customer service?

And once the customer has gone elsewhere it will be a long time, if ever, that they then discover the problem has been fixed.

Plane tracker app FlightAware admits user data exposed for years

"Why are they storing passwords?"

To check on login. But it should be stored as a hash. It's possible that whoever announced what was leaked didn't know the difference between plain text and a hash. Most likely, of course, is that it's stored in plain text.

Re: Just why …

Demanding stuff like that and then losing control at scale is something that should attract mandatory fines and damages (with the latter taking priority) sufficient to wipe out the company. Shareholders can sue the manglement - but not, as seems to be normal practice, themselves, to try to get some money back.

Re: Equifax

Frying pan and fire?

Open source biz promises to slash bills with observability-as-a-service in the cloud

Re: Please, Sir …

It's obviously something that somebody somewhere things can bring in money. Being vague makes it easier to claim success and deny failure to deliver.

UK competition regulator's cloud probe remedies have global implications

""The CMA acknowledges that ..."

How kind of AWS to tell CMA what it (the CMA) believes.

Oreon Lime is AlmaLinux with a desktop twist

Re: Who Knows Best????

"the big enterprise distros -- SLE, RHEL, Ubuntu LTS versions -- come only with GNOME and nothing but GNOME"

By and large they're aiming at the server market. If they even run a desktop at all it will be for management. A derivative aimed at the desktop only offering GNOME does look a bit odd.

Rocket Factory Augsburg engine test ends in explosion at SaxaVord spaceport

Re: Saxa Vord distillery

Making rocket fuel.

Elon Musk's X Corp faces $61M lawsuit over unpaid tech tabs

Scale, dear boy, scale.

Iran named as source of Trump campaign phish, leaks

Re: Global Election Interference

"their elections"

What elections? Theatre, yes; elections, no.

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

Re: Safety isn't a bad thing

It's a matter of having appropriate rules. e.g. the comment about most archaeologists wearing floppy hats as opposed to hard-hats on sites that don't require it. On most archaeological sites the major risk in the long term would be skin cancer (assuming one can find enough sun to be exposed to).

"Unfortunately folk - especially those whose approach to H&S is box-ticking rather than critical thinking - are too focused on hi-vis"

They probably think that the term "hi-vis" ends at the "s" without going on to think what would actually stand out in the particular circumstances.

Re: Hard Hats and Hi-Viz...

Or somewhere for companies to dump their jonbsworths into.

Re: On-site security

Even so, he was accompanied by someone from the site in a Hi-Vis jacket. This would make it less likely that he was a prowler unless he was thought to be holding his site-contact hostage.

Overr-reation by a jobsworth is the more likely explanation.

Re: Bob was innocent

Yes -it was clearly his responsibility to provide him with a jacket before they left the office.

Re: Putting your foot in it

A few days ago I mentioned installing S/W in a factory. I was told before flying out that I would need a white coat - no problem, I had an old lab coat somewhere - & metal toe-capped shoes. A pair of suitable Doc Martens were obtained for the latter. They did sterling service as gardening shoes until comparatively recently but were invariable referred to as the ice-cream factory shoes.

Sorry, Moxie. Blaming Agile for software stagnation puts the wrong villain in the wrong play

Maybe what drives product design these days is marketing and for marketing putting a new skin on things counts as innovation.

Or C) there's a problem but nobody cares enough to solve it.

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

I fear that somewhere in Boeing's thinking is "It's only 2. Nothing as bad as the 737s."

Re: Whatever the risk

"they'll be left with one crew launch provider."

In reality, isn't this the case anyway?

"Starliner can return automated"

But can it? That's one of the problems. The other is the threat is presents if it's undocked and they can't get rid of it. I suppose there's a third - if it doesn't have enough thruster capacity to follow the correct unmanned return, where is it going to hit?

Re: Only

...and this is Boeing...

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?