Posts by Doctor Syntax

Unit4 software's budget bungle leaves schools counting the cost

Re: How many leavers.

All the more reason to do the job professionally.

Re: "the new ERP software – which replaced an SAP system"

"why do you replace it with something else before TESTING the something else to make sure it works ?"

Project running late, no time for testing.

Broadcom terminates VMware's free ESXi hypervisor

I assume the idea is to milk the revenue from big installations while cutting the costs of dealing with those installations which have not yet had the chance to become big. To cut those costs they'll be releasing a lot of sales staff onto the job market with their lists of potential long term big virtualisation customers. Short-termism at its finest.

Infosys subsidiary named as source of Bank of America data leak

Re: System approach is necessary

All that goes out of the window when it's outsourced. Likewise if the system is attacked. This was both.

Two years isn't much protection when pension plans are involved.

Outsourcing is great shorthand for "Increasing the attack surface".

Meta says risk of account theft after phone number recycling isn't its problem to solve

Let's conduct a thought experiment.

Your phone number has been changed. How do you go about changing contact details if they want to send an SMS to the old one to verify you?

Another:

Your phone has been stolen. How do you persuade them to block it's number for verification if they want to send an SMS to it to verify it's you calling?

Re: How *is* this Meta's problem?

"Surely it is up to individual users to update their details properly when they change numbers?"

In order to do that you have to be in control of the old number - which will be used to verify you - while already knowing the new one. This isn't necessarily going to happen. OTOH it is going to happen if someone has stolen your own phone and is transferring your number to theirs.

Re: My guess

"If the EU really pick this up, the outcome going to impact everyone who uses a phone number as part of their security"

Or more precisely, their insecurity.

Re: Well if Meta are going to get roasted for this one

It's rather worse for nothing on two accounts. As I've written here before, if this is being relied on then whoever has your phone or your phone number is you, even if it's not you. That opens the door to a variety of mechanisms for fraud. Secondly, it's an indication of sloppy thinking around security which should start you wondering what other sloppy thinking is going on.

Venus has a quasi-moon and it's just been named 'Zoozve' for a sweet reason

Re: Zoozve orbit

It sounds chaotic to me.

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

Re: What's the first word you think of when someone says "Amazon"?

I'm old. I think "Dillons". Then I remember that last time I looked it had become a Waterstones.

Elon Musk can't wriggle out of SEC Twitter fraud inquiry

Re: Delay, Delay and Deny

Pissing off a judge whilst doing so is not a good tactic. He's failed to obey a subpoena. The word translates to "under pain", i.e. fail and you get punished. If you read the judgement linked in the article she fids for the SEC but in the final paragraph she's pretty terse - in the vernacular it translates to "Get your shit together PDQ or else I'll get it together for you."

Re: The Farce is strong in this one...

He's actually being investigated for not speaking, not announcing he was going to buy Twitter whilst actually starting to accumulate shares.

Re: SEC politically motivated “investigation”

AIUI the issue of this investigation is that he bought shares and then announced his intention to buy the company. That meant that as the share price then rose it made the shares he'd previously bought more valuable or, to look at it another way, he'd bought them for less - and the sellers got less for them - than if he'd announced that was what he was going to do.

And he hasn't been sanctioned yet if at all. At this stage he's just being investigated.

Until the arrest for contempt of court.

it's just the 5th embarrassing one that is a problem.

Cloudflare defeats another patent troll with crowd-sourced prior-art army

Re: More companies should do this

Even easier to fix. Make the patent office responsible for both party's costs if the patent is invalidated in court. At the slightest hint of a challenge they're almost certain to find a reason to invalidate it before the costs mount up.

"Lawyers for Sable Networks didn't respond to questions for this story."

Too busy counting their fees. They wouldn't have lost.

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

Re: Remember 'The Last One'?

His man argument seems to be that we need fewer but better.

Learning to think would be better than learning to code.

Angry mob trashes and sets fire to Waymo self-driving car

Humans vs Waymo

There have, however, been 20 "contact incidents" – half of which involved human drivers hitting Waymo cars.

Currently drawing at 10 all.

'Crash test dummy' smashed VIP demo by offering a helping hand

It sounds like a case of adding more people to a late project making it later.

Closure of Windows 10 upgrade path still catching users by surprise

Re: Please accept this wooden horse

"Moving to a subscription license for Windows would be a step too far even for MS."

Don't be too sure. The frog may not have been boiled yet but it's getting pretty warm.

Re: That means no re-installs?

"I have never found any use for it."

That's not the point. The point is that Microsoft have found a use for it.

Designed? This is Microsoft.

And a brand new user handle. Interesting.

Mozilla CEO quits, pushes pivot to data privacy champion... but what about Firefox?

It's a total ignorance of the principle behind the concepts of interface and implementation in computing. You keep the interface constant so that consumers of the service it provides, be they human or other software, are unaffected by the implementation behind it. When this basic principle is ignored, forgotten or maybe not even learned one has to wonder about the quality of the product as a whole.

I hate the whole "hamburger" menu idea period, but it's even worse on the desktop.

If you right click on the background of the tab bar you can select Menu bar. That puts things back where they should be. I haven't worked out if there's a way to get rid of the hamburger but at least it's redundant.

Re: Firefox could so easily win…

"I think your first four points are excellent. "

Add point 5. It's not as bad as some but it might make the same attempts to look as if it belongs on the desktop that Seamonkey and LibreOffice do.

"I'm a developer, BUT... I'm not obsessed with security and privacy"

Please tell us who you work for.

Re: Article raises questions and makes bold statements

It's one of those irregular verbs:

I have an opinion

You are undecided

He/she/it rants

Re: Options.

"But you could build that into the Firefox browser too"

That's where it started, Netscape Communicator. Two functions (more really, when you consider what TB does) via two interfaces to one executable. It included the original social media, IRC and Usenet. Then, in their infinite wisdom, or whatever it was, they split them. The original still lives on at https://www.seamonkey-project.org/ Unfortunately this scores even worse in terms of site non-recognition although el Reg comes down on the good guy's side of the line.

It would make a great deal of sense if they were put back together as the min product with, as you suggest, some of the more recent protocols such as Mastodon added in. Failing that I wish the Document Foundation would take TB or SM under its wing, maybe Firefox as well. It would surely promote it better and add the one function it doesn't have in the office suite line-up.

When red flags are just office decoration: Edinburgh Uni's Oracle IT disaster

Re: It will sadly never stop

"And, although not putting people in prison in this case, we see this across all companies and it needs to stop."

Putting a few of the actual people responsible in prison may be what it needs to make it stop.

Re: I saw it up close

"- I cannot say this loudly enough, as I see it time and again, if the UAT is overrunning, DELAY YOUR GO-LIVE. Don't stop testing and go-live anyway hoping it will all be OK. It won't. Someone has to fix all the testing issues you're now going to spot for the first time in Production, and while they do, someone else else isn't getting paid, with major impacts on their company, staff, livelihoods, etc.

- Do not build immovable go-live dates into your programme, even if it's a response to missing a previous one. It's all very well to have a budget envelope and a hard stop to aim for, but what happens when you get there and it's not ready?"

It's quite clear that Horizon faile by disregarding these two points.

Re: Management and Jargon

If the people who need to read it are managers then it's been written in the correct language.

Sam Altman's chip ambitions may be loonier than feared

I expect he was very demanding as a toddler.

Search chatbots? Pah, this startup's trying on Yahoo's old outfit of web directories

Re: "Google maintains its results are still better than other search engines"

Google's metric seems to be simply the numbers of hits. "Nothing found" might be the true result but by Google's metric it's not an acceptable one.

"For years, the fields of information science, information retrieval, and human-computer interaction have studied how people make use of search systems and have investigated ways to improve search interfaces. The integration of generative AI chat components is a major development that may profoundly change the way users interact with search systems."

The people being studied can only make use of what's there and can't make use of what's not there. If what's there doesn't offer decent filtering facilities which respect logical operators such research can't show people making use of them. If the research shows that what people are using tries and fails to double guess what they want then obviously it will point to using AI to make even worse guesses.

Meet VexTrio, a network of 70K hijacked websites crooks use to sling malware, fraud

Re: WordPress

As long as there are no penalties for running an unpatched site or server that gets hijacked it's going to continue.

Joint European Torus experiments end on a 69 megajoules high

"The Joint European Torus (JET) has bowed out with a final hurrah"

At least it didn't go out with a bang.

Re: Is the promise of carbon-free energy production the only way to get money to study fusion?

Using the heat of the Earth's interior is looking a bit shaky in Iceland at the moment with fissures and laval flows getting rather close to itheir big geothermal plant.

Billions lost to fraud and error during UK's pandemic spending spree

Re: Well

"But when the race is to be first"

In the circumstances, not even a race to be first but a race to get something done that needed to be done ASAP.

Curious tale of broken VPNs, the Year 2038, and certs that expired 100 years ago

Raspberry Pi, which doesn't have an onboard battery clock, failed to set the time on boot and didn't trusti the repository to download a better client because the certificate start date was apparently in the future.

Having - cough - clocked the problem it was easy enough to set the time by hand, of course.

Re: Subtitle

"It's always DNS"

Except when it's the UPS.

Re: Time Consequences

30 minutes? Luxury!

BOFH: Hearken! The Shiny Button software speaks of Strategic Realignment

"This is not messy clutter. It's a carefully curated collection of working papers. It's on this desk because this is a desk where work is done so working papers are needed. I'm surprised and disappointed that a discerning manager didn't recognise that."

Re: "Oh, it's ah ... Neo ... um, Enterprise ... uh ... Executive ... uhm ..."

Back to the intestinal biome again.

Re: once more confusing the words "open" and "empty."

Stealing is unnecessary, please feel free to use it. And if the victims complain about you being negative you can also use my one about it being the grit in the oyster that produces the pearl.

Re: Resource re-alignment?

"Then there's a round of musical office chairs as the most motivated middle managers are whittled down for allowing the most talented employees to leave."

If senior management even recognised who was the most talented of their employees it would only be because they were the most expensive - assuming they were paid more than the rest wich isn't likely.

AI PC hype bubble swells, but software support lags marketing

Re: Who are they?

In answer to your two questions:

1. They're anyone who can read the news, regurgitate it and persuade someone to pay good money for the resul.

2. See 1.

Re: Nerves of steel

Also there'll likely be some nearly new, non-AI H/W on the 2nd -hand market fairly soon.