Posts by Doctor Syntax

HP to discontinue online-only e-series LaserJet amid user gripes

And do they think this will be enough to restore their reputation?

Users rage as Microsoft announces retirement of Office 365 connectors within Teams

Re: A shower of shite

II think their term is "mugs".

Re: Where's the Plan B for companies

Having their own Plan A (as opposed to Microsoft's) would be a start.

Re: "Office 365 connectors within Teams will be cut"

Best to treat them as fast prototypes/demonstrators. Set up sonething quick and very dirty with only about 60% of functionality needed. "This is very rough and ready but is it the sort of thing you were looking for? We could put something together properly in about $ESTIMATE".

Especially if you don't take account of their past form.

Raspberry Pi OS airs out some fresh options for the summer

Re: Sunshine

Joke alert? It's no joke.

Microsoft China staff can't log on with an Android, so Redmond buys them iThings

Re: "golden cryptographic key"

Limited use. When its cert expires they'll forget to renew it.

UK minister recalls two planning decisions which blocked datacenter investment

Re: Slow electrons

Or put the end points near the data centre. Why try to squeeze the whole country into London?

Eldorado ransomware-as-a-service gang targets Linux, Windows systems

Re: How does this malware gain a foothold on ones Linux computer?

It's a bit vague. Presumably it relies on a leaked UserID/password combination. Maybe the malware author has limited Unix/Linux knowledge.

Brit council gives Oracle another £10M for professional services amid ERP fallout

All the supplier is interested in nudging them about would be more and bigger payments.

"Why in heaven's name is there not a standard solution that any and every council in England and Wales can't just adopt?"

Because it's more profitable to pick them off one at a time.

Getting together to commission a development of a common system would probably be outside their remit and possibly, in consequence, illegal. I wonder if getting together to develop a common, properly tested specification would be OK Probably not feasible as councils of different political persuations would spend their time falling out with each other.

I always prefer glass half empty. The reasoning is that if it's half empty it has been full and I've already drunk half of it and once I've drunk the other half it might get refilled. OTOH half full might be as good as it's going to get.

Depending on your point of view - money pit or cash cow.

Breaking the rules is in Big Tech's blood – now it's time to break the habit

Re: killing music...

There's a view that music has been moribund if not dead for years and it's not piracy or streaming wot dunnit.

Microsoft forgets about SwiftKey's support site

Who needs certificates when you can have <breathless voice> AI?

Latest Ghostscript vulnerability haunts experts as the next big breach enabler

Fixed in 10.0.0~dfsg-11+deb12u4

A quick check shows Debian ghostscript is now up to 10.0.0 so unless there's been a regression this is well behind us.

Algorithmic wage discrimination: Not just for gig workers

Re: Home health sickness

I trust you're being ironic as we seem to be affording not doing it which must be a great deal more expensive overall.

Re: Get the strength of the Union around you !

Ostensibly IR35 was somehow supposed to eliminate this situation. There's no way it could ever have done so, being simply a means of increasing taxation of real independent contractors who the IR didn't really recognise as being businesses. This was an easy sell to the new New Labour government as independent contracts were by nature resistant to the lure of the usual trade unions. Ironically, it prompted us to form our own trade association which was never likely to become part of the Labour movement. At the same time it did nothing to serve the lot of those who were expelled from regular employment into pseudo-independent gig workers.

What's sorely needed now is a more clear cut differentiation between independent contractors and casual employees whereby the former are treated as businesses and the latter have full employee rights.

Re: Home health sickness

And yet, being able to support patients in their own homes in this way is critical for hospitals to be able to discharge them and make way for new patients. It really needs to be brought under the wing of the NHS with appropriate budget, of course.

Re: Independent contractors set their own pay rate

The reality is more along the lines of negotiate.

However, there is possibly an opening here for a rival "algorithmic" service which will negotiate on behalf of the gig workers. It would depend on most if not all of them in an area subscribing to it, put in counter offers to the job offering service, starting with one too high to be accepted and then reducing to a point at which it's accepted and then offering it to whoever has set their minimum price at or closest below that level.

Paessler pulls subscription licensing switcheroo on PRTG Network Monitor

Re: "3,000 of the 10,000 largest VMware customers"

"Short term gain is foolish"

Short term gain means bonuses for senior manglement and a great addition to their CV. The CV will then enable them to move on to another victiim employer to pull the same trick there. Their replacements will have to deal with the consequences and probably discover it's too late to reverse it by switching back to the original terms.

Innocent techie jailed for taking hours to fix storage

Re: I Had Forgotten

"get a McDonalds"

Inhuman punishment.

Re: I Had Forgotten

"a full breakfast if the police canteen ran to it"

I can't image a police canteen that would be unable to deal with that.

Re: I call BS; could never happen in UK (or ...)

"gaoled" if you would be so kind.

I think the only time I've seen "gaol" used extensively in the UK has been on witness summons to the "Court of Oyer and Termner and General Gaol Delivery".

Re: H&S Rules! @Paul

"Insurance companies nowadays look for as many reasons not to pay out as they can."

This has always been the case.

Labour wins race to lead UK, but few would envy the load in its tech in-tray

I wouldn't envy the load in its economic in-tray either. We have two self-inflicted wounds - the long legacy of Brownomics that stopped productivity growth dead and Brexit. Trussonomics can be discounted as a short-lived blip. Covid and Ukraine are a problem shared with other governments but those two are our own.

Europol says mobile roaming tech is making its job too hard

"In addition, an optimal solution should not impede secure communications disproportionately"

Whne working out what might be disproportionate it should be presumed that most communications will be innocent as this is, indeed, the case.

"the only alternative ... is to issue a European Investigation Order but responses for these can take up to 120 days"

So the appropriate solution is to straighten out existing procedures.

Japan's digital minister declares victory against floppy disks

Re: Icon

"We have a Victorian bellows-style camera as an icon for speed cameras"

Which "we" is that? I've never seen that in the UK.

There are still a few professional photographers using bellows cameras for large formats (the sort of people who consider Hasselblads to be a miniature format). A non-collapsible full plate camera would be a bit of a pain to carry about.

Re: The next....

"Oak gall inks would probably last a bit longer"

They can fade quite badly. Indian ink (carbon black) lasts far better.. I know of a C18th document with both on it and the blue-blakc (oak gall) has faded to a light brown while the black ink is fine. The paper is also discolouring to a light brown but as the two have not yet converged the faded ink can still be read.

Re: Though given the latest 'who needs save? It's all in the cloud automatically'

That's the symbol for an Oracle audit.

Has he removed just as a requirement or gone all out and removed it as an option? If not it might hang on a good while longer.

Many years ago we ran a service which required data with floppy as one of the options - I can't remember exactly but it might have been the only option. It kept everyone on the team who needed them well supplied with floppies. Somehow, back then we weren't unduly worried about the personal information on them although, in practice, as it was a matter of public appointment s it wasn't really confidential anyway

That's nature's way of telling you it's time to find a better company.

Re: The next....

"Files in these formats can be simply copied to what ever is the data storage medium du jour."

That seems like an awful faff. Vellum doesn't need to be copied and has proven itself to be a very long lasting medium. OTOH the mylar drafting film we used to draw pollen diagrams on is probably equally long lasting and maybe more durable still. Cut into A4 and whatever's needed could be printed on it. The only worrying thing would the how long the ink would stick.

Seriously, long term digital storage is an unproven matter. Not only does the medium have to survive and remain current,* so does the file format. It's possible to visualise someone copying hundreds of files every 10 years or so for 300 years and then it being discovered that the format has been out of use for so long that there's no software to make sense of it. "Yes, we still have the PDF documentation available but it's a PDF document..."

* Domesday book from 1086 is still extant** - the Beeb's Domesday videodisc project of 1986 not so much.

** It still has a format problem in that C11th script isn't that easy to read.

Db2 is a story worth telling, even if IBM won't

Probably everyone in IBM who knew about it was over 40 so they're no longer there.

Linux Mint 22 beta sprinkles Cinnamon desktop on Ubuntu

That's shuffler's latest incarnation. No, it doesn't. For now I'm using PDF Juggler.

I see it not so much "accessories must diverge from their upstream GNOME bases" as upstream GNOME diverging from everything else. Maybe some of the old apps will be forked to remain at Gtk3. The UI of pdf shuffler or whatever it's called now isn't just looking out of place on my KDE Devuan, it's disappeared entirely. Fortunately I found a Java equivalent; it also looks a bit out of place but it works.

Amazon puts down its Astro robotic business watchdog

Owners of the soon to be bricked bot are encouraged to take advantage of Amazon's recycling program not rely on IoT things in future.

Not that many will take the hint, I suppose.

Ransomware scum who hit Indonesian government apologizes, hands over encryption key

"Politicians and the public alike appear on the hunt for a scapegoat"

A scapegoat is one thing, the source of the problem is another. In this case I'd guess the source is the corporate culture of the government machine as a whole.

Tech luminaries warn United Nations its Digital Compact risks doing more harm than good

Re: That horse has already bolted

Despite your long explanation the only person forcing you to use Facebook is yourself.

I can communicate with friends and family by phone, email, occasionally text and - wow this is old-fashioned - meeting them IRL Facebook is entirely unnecessary.

RIP: WordPerfect co-founder Bruce Bastian dies at 76

Re: WordPerfect had me stumble on the first step and never recovered

"WordPerfect left you with an empty screen after launching"

So does vi. RTFM is the way to go.

Did I miss the article or did el Reg miss the death of Lynn Conway, also last month? Without Lynn Conway & Carver Mead literally writing the text book on VLSI the computing revolution might have been set back quite a bit.

That's an interesting thought. If the word processor and spreadsheet vendors had said Windows wasn't fast enough, they'd stick to DOS would Windows have caught on, Microsoft released the APIs or would they still have won the day with Windows & Office? The latter might not have been a foregone conclusion.

Traeger security bugs bad news for grillers with neighborly beef

Maybe the recommended was to chill.

Wifi controlled barbecue problem?

First world problem. You get what you pay for, it's just that it isn't always what you thought it would be.

VMware license changes mean bare metal can make a comeback through 'devirtualization', says Gartner

"the trough of disillusionment – the point at which a tech has failed to deliver on its promise."

The more sceptical of us get there directly without climbing the hump of whatever Gartner say we should have included. Is this quantum tunnelling?

BT bets big on AI with ServiceNow to cut legacy baggage

Re: HR without the himan?

Human Remains of course.

Oak Ridge boffins twist exotic metal into eco-friendly, solid-state cooler

Re: I remember that

The freezing microtome stage used water to remove the heat from the warm side. Any refrigerating system is simply a means of transferring heat from one place to another so the heat has to be removed somehow, even if it's just be air cooling. It's not at all clear from the article how this Oak Ridge method does that. From TFA it seems to be just a heat sponge that's going to have to be wrung out somewhere and with no moving parts it sounds as if it that would be the same place it got it from in which case the cooling would only be temporary heat removal.

Solid stae cooling? Peltier effect. Used it more than 50 years ago in a freezing microtome*.

* A microtome is laboratory equipment to cut thin sections of a specimen for microscopy. The specimen might need support to stop it collapsing. For small fragments of wood ice is a suitable support.