Posts by Doctor Syntax

17% of Spotify employees face the music in latest cost-cutting shuffle

If they can lay off this percentage of the staff without doing harm to the business it makes you wonder why they were all there in the first place. The comment about doing work around the work might be a clue. It sounds like they were all doing busy work showing each other PowerPoints of their spreadsheets which analysed stuff to no possibly useful level of detail.

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Re: HP and Linux

"My Bother Laser has a manufacturer's driver, but it's 2 years old."

But does it work?

Re: Since then it has banked double-digit revenues.

I looked at one of those but bought a Brother multi-function laser instead. It was bigger but worth the space.

Re: "HP is squeezing more margin out of print customers"

Colour doesn't necessarily mean ink-jet. In fact it hasn't for me for quite a while. But sometimes print is needed and sometimes it needs to be in colour. One thing that's easily missed is that if you only need occasional prints laser excels at this even more than for a heavy printing load because you don't spend any of your toner on cleaning cycles let alone ditch half full cartridges because they're irredeemably blocked up.

And no, I don't want a trip into town every time I want to run off a couple of sheets of print. (Admittedly it would probably be quicker than waiting for an ink-jet to clean itself up.)

That quality was what the HP brand traded on for a long time. The fact that they're still in business underlines how long a brand can last in the general public's eyes. Maybe the continued life of the old stuff helps with that. There must be offices with HP lasers running smoothly although in their lifetimes a few generations of ink jets have been bought and died.

It once stood for Hewlett Packard and obviously once they'd gone a new backronym was needed.

EU lawmakers finalize cyber security rules that panicked open source devs

Re: Seems the CRA could benefit open source maintainers.

"I suspect that the possibility of non-EU vendors deciding not to continue to supply their products to EU states has crossed the minds of those behind this proposed legislation"

It would leave space for an EU industry to take up. On the other hand I doubt any of the usual suspects will be deterred.

"In order not to hamper innovation or research, free and open source software developed or supplied outside the course of a commercial activity should not be covered by this Regulation,"

As I recall the original objections the issue turned on the definition of "commercial" which threatened to catch a developer if, for instance, they were paid to give a talk somewhere. This needs to have been fixed.

World's largest nuclear fusion reactor comes online in Japan

Summary: there are no easy fixes.

Re: I worry the "clean" nature may be being overstated here

A few more facts needed. What's the comparable cost of a boiler of equivalent heat output? Does it also produce DHW or would there be extra costs to alter the plumbing to reinstate/install a hot water cylinder and header tank?

Re: Tilting at windmills

"We already have geothermal power in Cornwall and the government only had to chip in £22M unlike the £30Bn going into nuclear."

How do the figure match up on a per Kwh basis? that's what really matters.

Re: Tilting at windmills

"Perhaps if we had a grown-up system of PR for our voting in this country (like they do in functioning democracies), then we'd have fewer politicians chasing populist policies to win votes, and more serious government, rather than all the culture war bullshit which is starting to get really tired."

PR guarantees nothing. I had hopes for it in NI but look at Stormont now.

Re: Hope this goes well

It's also worth pointing out that the people making those luminous watches frequently got radiation poisoning and nasty cancers from working with the materials involved.

This was only one instance of pre-H&S days use of nasty materials - phosphorus in the manufacture of matches is one. Lead & arsenic in paints and, at least for arsenic, wallpaper, is another. Then there were the nasties in munitions etc etc.

Re: Hope this goes well

I don't know how it reads to me but the impression I got was along the lines of ploughing back the knowledge gained from decades of fission experience into designing minimisation and management of waste upfront plus the fact that the main waste component is tritium (a short half-life weak beta emitter).

'Return to Office' declared dead

Naturally. You couldn't expect a remote working team to deliver any really valuable product, could you? Nothing like, say a complete operating system with kernel and all the trimmings. And certainly not a kernel that you could use as the basis of smartphones. Nor three other kernels as well.

To do that sort of thing you have to work as a big co-located team. Anything else would be slow, bloated and shot through with bugs.

The employer should be providing the computer, if for no other reason than security, and printer if needed. And it's not difficult for them to order consumables for delivery by post.

Re: Loud minority

"According to the US BLS, office and administrative support occupations make up nearly 16 percent of U.S. employment as of May 2013."

I'm not familiar with the US but does this survey suggest that the remaining 84% all commute into cities? By cities I mean substantial conurbations where the commuting area exceeds 1,000 square miles?

Re: The flip side of the real estate commitments

In a large company "invaluable" is the greatest misnome possible. "Valueless" would only be a starting point.

No, let me rescind that. It was one of those that drove me out of employment once and for all and into freelance. It was invaluable. It just didn't feel like that whilst being endured.

Re: Stick

"they should have the right to personally sue the manager requiring them to return"

Follow the money. The company can pay more than the manager.

Re: Stick

Been there. Done that.

Useless. It's that simple.

Re: Stick

"high pay is usually associated with a high level of responsibility."

I used to be a forensic scientist. I got stuck on top of the scale at SSO when the career grade, whatever that meant, was supposed to be one step up at PSO. My daily work was to examine evidence which might help convict someone of offences up to and including murder or exonerate them and, if the former, go to court to give that evidence. The official reason for not promoting me or anyone else in the same boat was that we didn't have any responsibility. Responsibility was having enough direct reports and, unlike pen-pushers up the road in Stormont, we only had a few lab techs. The real reason was because they thought they could get away with it. The UK over-produced scientists and you were considered lucky to get a job at all and would just suck it up. Immediately I handed in my notice I was offered PSO, completely out of the normal annual cycle and without even the formality of a board.

"You can be the most highly qualified engineer in your team with the most experience working at a blue chip company, but if all you do on that team is compile the CHM help files, then you're not going to be paid well...because you aren't responsible for anything."

The most highly qualified engineer doing nothing more than compiling CHM files? That doesn't sound likely. IME IT has the responsibility for keeping multiple parts of the business running. If a system goes down everyone else can sit there twiddling their thumbs. If the new functionality isn't ready in time marketing's next great thing can't be launched. That's responsibility.

Re: Stick

Good luck with getting the Civil Service unions to do anything on your behelf unless you're equivalent to general service grades.

Re: Unions don’t fight for you

My experience of being in a union was in the mid-80s. I can only respond to what they didn't do for/did do to me.

I rather think the unions were probably behind IR35 as well so I'll add that indirect experience of the 1990s et seq

A trade association, i.e. the PCG was an entirely different matter.

Re: Stick

"There is a general problem with the IT, somehow the workers have strong dislike for unions."

Maybe it's not just IT but other technical professions. My one-time membership of a union was in the Civil Service. We discovered that we were being used as cannon fodder not on our own behalf, but on behalf of the better paid, less appropriately qualified general service grades. One us challenged the union to print his resignation letter in their magazine; they chickened out with the excuse that they didn't publish letters from non-members.

The practical solution to the problem was to quit the job, not just the union.

TL;DR the only onel ooking after my interests was me.

Re: There it is

One of the stupidest - but fortunately shortest - gigs I ever had was to commute weekly from England to N Ireland to sit in front of a screen in the client's office logged into a server somewhere in England working on my client's purely English public sector requirement. An additional irony was that the somewhat ambiguous specification was written by someone based in the square I used to walk through as part of my London commuting days and a good deal of the time was spend trying to get clarification.

Forget the possibility of connecting to the server directly from home; if they'd given me a copy of the database schema and the requirement I could have written the whole thing on my own kit and emailed the result.

On the bright side it was a time when my MiL was still alive so I could stay with her instead of forking out for an hotel and I got to visit a few old friends.

Re: There it is

"Unless, of course, its a billionaire getting the haircut when it suddenly becomes an everyone problem."

Sigh. Read this carefully:

It is your pension.

And again.

It is your pension.

Look at any area of investment and think that to some extent it's probably your pension. Pension funds are the biggest investors so it's almost certainly the case that if you have any sort of private or occupational pension this will be the case. The biggest billionaires are the pension funds; collectively all of us.

Now do you understand why it "becomes everyone's problem"?

Re: There it is

"pushed our pension pots into them"

Including, very likely, some of the A/C's pension. It's a condemnation of the education system that so many people don't grasp such basics of their everyday lives.

"drive workers to quit in order to avoid layoffs and severance pay"

This, of course, will enable them to shed the staff they would be better off keeping. It's very unlikely that those doing this will realise that that's happening so will plough right on ahead.

Re: Stick

OTOH if I weren't retired there's now no way you could pay me enough to commute into London for more than one day. Not one day a week, just one day. The amount would have to be enough that I wouldn't have to commute again. It's not that I don't like London, it's just that I've already done my bit of commuting there.

Re: There it is

However difficult it may be, property owners and cities are going to have to get their heads round the idea that some office property is going to be converted into residential. The number of jobs in the cities can then be balanced against the number or people living there.

More subtly, employers should be looking at the possibility of replacing the city-centre ant-nests with smaller suburban workplaces for those who can't actually work from home for one reason or another.

I'm seeing places here in the old West Riding mill villages opening up as rent-a-desk work spaces. There's one unoccupied mill scheduled to be replaced by houses. If the council and owner had any wit (a very improbably situation for the council) they'd replace the plans to reinstitute it as small workplace units, especially as public transport is pathetic and commuting by EV is going to be problematic for the many houses with no off-road parking.

Sysadmin's favorite collection of infallible utilities failed … foully

You'd think defrag.exe would say "Hang on , this aint FAT , dont know what to do with it"

Take a deep breath, stand back and realise this is Microsoft we're talking about. Microsoft with the Microsoft world view: "Everything is assumed to be ours.". Yes, NT was NTFS was also Microsoft's but defrag.exe was written before that existed. In the view of its authors, therefore, all disks were FAT and there was no point in even thinking they might not be, let alone testing for it.

40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

Re: Answered your own question

Two answers to the first. Delphi replaced it and C and derivatives took over the programming world.

As to the second, Delphi cost more but it did include the right to redistribute. I lost track of Delphi after 7 but as far as I can make out Delphi the Microsoft IDE replaced Borland's own. It also got more and more ambitious and expensive.

I had a longish gig using Delphi (it helped that I'd used UCSD Pascal earlier). I like the RAD way of doing things. It forces the developer to start with the UI. I've seen too many examples where the developer seems to have looked on the requirement as a series of technical tasks, got those working separately and then jumbled them into a UI of sorts.

From Joaquin Phoenix to Rowan Atkinson, we enjoyed your Musk movie casting calls

"Although Musk: The Movie remains on the drawing board"

Never mind the movie, what about the game franchise?

I don't know about casting current actors to play Musk or Zuckerberg but either would do nicely plaing James II & VII http://www.combermere-restoration.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/James_II_when_Duke_of_York_-_Lely_c._1665.jpg

Regulator says stranger entered hospital, treated a patient, took a document ... then vanished

What we get told is the result of the ICO investigation. What then happens in the body being reported on isn't part of that. There may indeed have been disciplinary action, we don't know.

Re: Pardon?

"and of course the consent(s) in place, preferably buried deep into all the paperwork "

That doesn't constitute the specific informed consent required in civilised jurisdictions.

Law secretly drafted by ChatGPT makes it onto the books

Re: No problem

Nevertheless the MPs almost always vote along party lines.

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

Re: Delusional narcissist

"who believes the universe is 6000 years old, created on 23 Oct 4004 BC at 9:00 AM Garden of Eden time!

I wish Alan Harper had issued a contradictory ex cathedra statement when he held Ussher's old gig. He was previously a geographer turned archaeologist so hugely better qualified than Ussher. Of course with the wild men on either side in N Ireland who might have objected it could have been high risk.

Google submits complaints about Microsoft licensing to UK competition regulator

"We believe that the market is, with one notable exception, operating competitively and delivering good outcomes for UK customers in terms of quality, price and innovation Technical barriers - which are to a certain extent a natural consequence of pro-competitive product differentiation between vendors - can generally be overcome, and egress fees and CSDs are natural features of price competition. We are confident that the evidence the CMA gathers will show that these three theories of harm are unfounded."

Translation: We do all this stuff as well.

No new top boss at NSA until it answers questions about buying up location, browsing data

Re: Private sector

Was that after he'd been on the disinformation training course?

Wrong target

His target shouldn't be government agencies purchasing from data brokers what non-government agencies can buy. It should be that entire trade in data. If having the data in agencies' hands is harmful to data subjects then it must also be harmful whoever else has it and if it's in the market place the agencies will gain access one way or another.

He should be targeting the harvesting of the data in the first place and its subsequent trading.

Duke Uni libraries decamp from 37Signals' Basecamp over CTO's blogs

"their slogan about unlocking people's potential is really, really, really on-point"

Don't confuse slogans with intent, let alone accomplishment.

HPE says impact of AI on enterprise not 'overstated.' It must be hoping so

the hackneyed phrase

He's spouting PR stuff. It'll all be hackneyed. "$THING native" is another classic.

Scores of US credit unions offline after ransomware infects backend cloud outfit

It's called "getting rid of the difficult bit in the title".

"a sophisticated ransomware attack"

Translation: One that was too clever for us. How clever should we have been?

Electric vehicles earn shocking report card for reliability

Re: Redmond Law

Yes, but once you get past version 3 everything successive version is a public beta for version + 1 which will be wonderful.

That wasn't a free economy.

"My carbon footprint during transit is already 0 and all I did was was buy a 200 euro folding bike and get it serviced for $30 euros a year."

Let me guess. You're young, fit, have a good enough sense of balance to be able to ride a bike*, live somewhere reasonably flat, don't have a long commute (or if you commute by public transport live and work close to the same route) and don't have any obligations for transporting other people.

* Not everybody has.

Re: We need the technological progress...

If this is how you spend your holidays I'll take your word for it that that happens. However we could start by looking at a daily occurrence for many people: commuting for work. Let's get it into the heads of TPTB that this is unsustainable.

UEFI flaws allow bootkits to pwn potentially hundreds of devices using images

If an attacker can get a file into the EFI partition then you've got more problems than dodgy image processing by UEFI.