Posts by Doctor Syntax

NASA's Perseverance rover in brick form: China set vs unofficial Lego fan design

I'll just leave this one here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-56523779

Re: No, sorry.

"A bit like being pregnant, you either are or you are not."

"Unsure" is also an option.

Microsoft pivots on Pivot, admits that yanking touch control from WinUI 3 toolset 'was obviously poor judgment'

There's an old saying that it's easier to ask forgiveness afterwards than for permission beforehand. It looks as if far too many big corporations are following this. What they've not worked out that this is almost inevitably used in terms of rolling out some extra item that was bogged down in bureaucracy, not breaking what was already there.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson reluctant to reveal his involvement in the OneWeb deal

Re: Meh

"The result you see before you."

There's none so blind as those who will not see.

Re: Clueless @(original) AC

What sense of embarrassment? He was born without it.

Re: When is he going to build a bridge

In one respect Covid is doing a good job for HMG by keeping Brexit off the front pages. E.g. how's gaining sovereignty over fishing grounds working out?

Re: When is he going to build a bridge

"and you can't immediately arrange a royal wedding"

Even if you can, it's a high risk operation these days.

Re: When is he going to build a bridge

"Why would anyone want to go to Northern Ireland?"

Well, we would have gone last year had it been feasible, My brother-in-law there died and there was no way of going to the funeral and, without being there, very few ways of helping his widow. If things really do make it feasible this year we'll go. At least the previous two years we (and our daughter) took our grandchildren for holidays so they at least had a chance to meet their great-uncle.

Re: When is he going to build a bridge

The real joke in all this is even considering Campbeltown peninsular to the north coast option. Avoid the ferry to Larne, take the ferry to Campbeltown and then the bridge.

Seriously, if they want to improve links with NI the first step is to improve the A75 to dual carriageway (I assume a full motorway would be out of the question) and without all those roundabouts on the Dumfries by-pass.

Re: Clueless

"especially the ERG who seem to be posh UKIP."

I assume the coronavirus research group who are now stirring things on the back benches are largely the same lot. At least he's discovering that what goes round comes round.

Is the NAO paying attention?

When the CEO thinks it inappropriate to tell the shareholders about his involvement in a major spending decision it's time to call in the auditors.

Re: Cheaper Skynet?

A rounding error.

Re: When is he going to build a bridge

I'm looking forward to him opening the NI Bridge, preferably from a pier built over the Beaufort Trench. Bridge opening and rocket launch combined.

Re: IT in Spaaaaaaace?

I think the established quote is "Pigs in Spaaaaace", and, given Miss Piggy's hairstyle, strangely appropriate.

Re: IT in Spaaaaaaace?

I suppose HMG doesn't want any closer scrutiny than that.

Oracle sorely wanted case alleging improper inflation of cloud sales to disappear. But the judge said no

So shareholders at time T are aggrieved at behaviour of management appointed, at least notionally, by shareholders at T - 1 and demand compensation from shareholders at T + 1. If it succeeds the shareholders at time T + 1, who had no responsibility are still being harmed by the old management. What should they do? Sue the shareholders at time T + 2.

In what way, is that reasonable behaviour? By all means sue the management but a company is the collective property of its shareholders. Suits by shareholders are, at best, suits against themselves and at worst suits against another set of shareholders. They really should be deemed contrary to public policy.

'Agile' F-35 fighter software dev techniques failed to speed up supersonic jet deliveries

Re: Agile as a brick

A full working product beats regular drops.

Web application are also real time (for some value of time). Badly done there's a possibility of insecurities which could kill the business that uses them.

Re: At some point, somewhere along the line there would have been a standup that went...

You've reminded me that Agile has a different meaning for "stand-up". For everyone else it means comedians.

But then, they seem to have different meanings for a lot of things.

Re: UnAgile

Not having documentation has interesting possibilities:

"I'm not paying for that."

"Why not?"

"Show me where it meets the spec."

"But we haven't got a spec."

"Exactly. So it doesn't meet it. I'm not paying."

Re: Figures

Your "Agile" sounds very much like software development but without the buzz words.

Re: How about we just admit that "fast" isn't the end-all.

"If you have the luxury of a huge discovery phase, and/or your requirements are already painfully clear, then you will need Agile much less."

Take out the "and from "and/or" because if your requirements are clear then why would you need a huge discovery phase? So now we have "if you have the luxury of a huge discovery phase you need Agile much less" and you have "If your requirements are painfully clear you need Agile much less". That leads me to the situation that you need Agile if you have unclear requirements and not enough time to find out what they are. Those are projects that are doomed from the start so it's not going to help anyway. So we're left with the situation that a project that's feasible doesn't need Agile.

In that case they'd use the whole lot up on training flights (see a comment above re Watchkeeper).

Re: Basics

The flight computer was only one computing element. NASA had a few mainframes on the job as well. And flight-time computing was only a fraction of the total engineering effort.

"The whole waterfall image also present a false image of one slow thing after another."

AIUI the whole waterfall idea was invented as a straw man and didn't represent the way most people did things anyway, at least not until manglements read it and thought it was an instruction manual.

"domestically built unmanned aircraft"

Much better suited to future UK armed forces staffing levels. There'll be enough Air Commodores to fly the RAF versions and enough Admirals to fly the Naval ones. Finding enough ground staff for servicing might by tricky.

BOFH: Bullying? Not on my watch! (It's a Rolex)

Re: Hummmm sounds familiar...

I doubt it would have been valid with the signature on one side and and an unsigned change of terms on the other. Nevertheless I had a long experience of checking typed up statements before signing on every page to make sure that what came back from typing was more than just an approximation I'd sent. Doubly so if a statement was sent back subsequently because "we had to have it on different forms" or "we had to take out references to so and so because they're not before the court" - both acceptable reasons but I suspect it was one such that introduced what turned out to be a career-ending omission for someone.

Re: Contracts? Must be nice.

"If there was any real proof of what Sir Bastard actually DID"

I think you'd find it was the BOFH who held the proof and that it was completely in his favour - or favor for you left-pondians.

Re: Hummmm sounds familiar...

The counter to that would be to point out that nobody in their right mind who'd read and understood would sign them. Are they implying that you're not in your right mind in which case here's and incoming write for libel/slander (delete as appropriate).

Diary of a report writer and his big break into bad business

Formats and reflow!

I've just finished what started off as a query on our history group website and turned into a 13 page article. It's amazing how most images start in the bottom half of a page. A few changes of text edge them closer and closer to the bottom of a page until one then falls off, leaving a big gap and cascading the consequences until the last image on the last page falls off onto a new page all of its own separated from the paragraph that describes ant and absolutely has to be on the same page.

Yes, there's nothing quite like braving the M4 into London on the eve of a bank holiday just to eject a non-bootable floppy

Re: The answer was "jelly"

Jelly? Chocolate!

Re: HR's Disappearing Data

A suitable answer to the "No I in Team" crap:

"Yes, but there is in intelligence, brilliant, profit, achievement - tell me when you want me to stop - genius, contribute ...."

Probably the best way of dealing with that would be to have the engineer ask fro Mr **** on arrival and have him show him the ****ing robot. Then remove the poster.

Which continent?

Microsoft 365 tries again at filtering swearing, bad behavior: Classifiers for seven languages offered

The headline & first line of the article makes it clear that this is yet another attempt at this, even for Microsoft. Slow learners.

Shedding the 'bleeding edge' label: If Fedora is only going to be for personal use, that doesn't work for Red Hat

"Although Red Hat sponsors it, Red Hat doesn't own it in a meaningful way. The community makes decisions about what's going to happen."

A few weeks ago the Centos community thought exactly the same thing.

Ruby off the Rails: Code library yanked over license blunder, sparks chaos for half a million projects

Re: This is where GPL is bollocks

If your tens of thousands of lines link to the library and it's GPL vX.0 then. yes. If you keep that little program using the GPL library and just pass stuff to it in some way, then no.

It's not bollocks. It was designed to work that way. You want to work some other way; FSF might equally regard your way as bollocks. They're two different ways of looking at the world, both valid. Trying to use somebody else's code in a way they specifically don't allow you to - that's bollocks.

Re: surely not

"Found it in the unlicense statement."

Here: https://unlicense.org/

Re: surely not

"The law was originally created to allow authors to revoke overbroad copyright assignments to publishers."

I wonder if this has ever been invoked.

Clothes retailer Fatface: Someone's broken in and accessed your personal data, including partial card payment details... Don't tell anyone

At some point? Long overdue.

That they're spending too much on security and customer relations.

Defence Industrial Strategy suggests the UK is ready to start taking its homegrown infosec industry seriously

While the IDR was full of "Global Britain" bombast even as it slashed military budgets, headcounts, and equipment programmes

Sir Humphrey lives - "Getting rid of the difficult bit in the title"

The silicon supply chain crunch is worrying. Now comes a critical concern: A coffee shortage

Does this mean you'll no longer be able to smell Banbury from 10 miles away up the M40?

"Time to become more self-sufficient, people!"

Surely self-sufficiency would mean that you grew your own beans.

Everything you need to know about the HPE v Mike Lynch High Court case

Re: Not the end

"no class action has been taken by HPE shareholder's against the company and/or all those involved."

Perhaps they realised there'd be nobody to pay any damages except themselves.

Did the carousel arrangements apply anywhere other than in the US - where Brent Hogenson, has been given immunity for any part he may have played in them?

BP Chargemaster's Pulse rebrand let crims send IcedID banking trojan from formerly legit mailboxes

Re: "Please look at the file attached. It must be interesting."

"Their marketing team should be flogged for that."

Only as a preliminary to more severe punishment.

Re: where did they get list of targets from?

I wouldn't assume that the server in question was ever a BP asset. It could have belonged to some service company sending emails on BP's behalf.

Re: Inevitable?

"It's worth noting though that spoofing of the arbitrarily rewritable FROM field is much more common, extremely easy, and seems to be very effective."

Effective not least because so many businesses get marketing firms to send emails "from" them so even those who do check the actual origins of emails are likely to accept them.

Please stop leaking your own personal data online, Indonesia's COVID-19 taskforce tells citizens

Put the QR code on the back of the certificate - it it's really needed at all.