Posts by Doctor Syntax

Microsoft CEO Nadella's compensation drops... to $48M

How about payment by results: $4m for each botch-free Patch Tuesday?

Look ma, no fans: Mini PC boasts slimline solid-state active cooling system

Flanders & Swan said it first

"tiny membranes that vibrate at ultrasonic frequency"

"The human ear can't here as high as that/But you've got to please the passing bat"

Biotech exec sentenced to eight years for COVID-19 testing finger-stick fraud

Re: You would have thought there would be some regulatory oversight

"Why did insurance companies accept claims of the allergy-COVID bundles if they were that much more expensive?"

Higher premiums?

Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it

Re: So, shoot the messenger is still well and alive

"OBD Reader"

That and a bit of Googling revealed that the engine fault light on a Subaru was due to the fact that going downhill a switch was wrongly indicating the gear box was in neutral and the ECU was complaining it couldn't control engine speed.

First Brexit, now X-it: Musk 'considering' pulling platform from EU over probe

Re: If/when no more X in the EU ... how should Thierry Breton ... "tweet" / communicate?

Hey, you read the article instead of going straight to the comments. That's cheating.

Re: Hmm

"A lot of people seem to feel it's not worth the risk."

A lot of people are just terrible at evaluating risk.

Re: Why bother?

It's all reminiscent of Bilko: The Empty Store episode.

Sorry kids, Infosys and Wipro have cancelled graduate recruitment

Does this mean that this year the work is going to be done with slightly more experienced staff and clients will see a return on the investment they made in training up last years' new recruits?

UK tribunal agrees with Clearview AI – Brit data regulator has no jurisdiction

Did nobody here read the report? They rely on the law enforcement exception for law enforcement that is part of GDPR. Whether they are correct in doing so might, i suppose, be challenged if it gets appealed.

Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts

Re: Electricity for heat pumps

"development work in China"

But not here. Why not? Because of all the can-kicking. I doubt we'll see any sensible thought about power requirements until the lights start going out. Then everything will be done in a panic so there'll be no sensible thought about the ways and means.

Re: Electricity for heat pumps

"They're going to be very very well paid for it, certainly more than any other economic return they could get for that land"

And once we're dependent on it they'll be even better paid.

Re: Electricity for heat pumps

You're probably being optimistic and it still leaves the UK dependent on another country's generation, their priorities and with their decisions as to pricing. Cloud for power.

Sony, Honda tease EV that aims to be a lounge on wheels

Re: And a snip at $$$$$$

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-67005620

That never happened with my old MGB.

“mobility with intelligence" for those without it.

"a unique and endearing presence for users,” sounds like something out of a spam email.

Buyer's remorse haunts 3 in 5 business software purchases

There's always budget to cope with the critical failures. Just have your proposal ready for when the need for a critical fix becomes a failure. Note that I didn't suggest that you ensure the failure, just that you anticipate it, OK?

Add one for Birmingham.

Governments resent their dependence on Big Tech

Dependence was their own decision although lack of decision might be more accurate. Decision by default, shall we say?

X marks the bot: Musk thinks spammers won't pay $1 a year

Re: Thanks for the belly laugh, I needed that

"I'm not really sure why Ireland isn't as popular,"

Probably because either CxOs don't realise it's not the UK (except for tax purposes) or they realise if it went wrong and had to be scrapped it would be hard to stop the reputational damage overflowing into the UK.

Atlassian users complain of cloud migration dead ends, especially in UK

“developer experience”

Any time I see "experience" in marketing blurb I mentally add "bad" in front of it.

Thousands of Teslas recalled over brake fluid bug

I was thinking of micro-organisms. Two countries separated by a common language.

Re: We really do need a new name

The crumple zone should stop it recoiling.

UK government slammed for Palantir 'free trial period' deal in Ukraine housing scheme

Somebody should really be looking at how they keeps getting their feet under the table like this.

Excel Hell II: If the sickness can't be fixed, it must be contained

Re: You should be ashamed of this article

I've said this already a few times in this thread. You don't have to treat everything as a big project. Deal with things at the right scale with the right tools and the right people.

If HMRC hadn't bolloxed up the freelancing profession the appropriate route here and in very many other cases would have been to engage a freelancer to set something up.

Re: You should be ashamed of this article

"Someone screwed up with how they merged two datasets, this has absolutely NOTHING to do with the software they were using."

If the spreadsheet had named and/or typed columns it could have warned of a mismatch. Mishandling of data in one way or another is s common post-mortem finding of spreadsheet-based disasters. The situation is common enough by now that spreadsheet wuthors should be aware of it and look at the possibility of adding typing and constraints as an option. That wouldn't, of course, prevent users failing to apply them but users can't be blamed for the option not being there.

Re: A Poor Craftsman Blames His Tools

"If I just pound hard enough, I can get this square peg to fit, damnit!"

Many years ago a friend had worked at Shorts in Belfast (the aircraft manufacturers). Someone asked him to create a square hole throgh a piece of wood - I suppose it was far too long for chisels or morticing machines. After whoever it was had gone he drilled a round pilot hole, then took a square section bar and hammered it through. The square section bar and hammer were the right tools for the job.

Having to apply a fudge like that is simply a restatement of what's wrong with it in the first place.

Re: Sure, you could add AI...

This assumes, of course, that there's in-house IT to ask. Very likely it's all been outsourced into oblivion or it's unnecessary because e everyone has Excel.

Re: Application abuse

CSV has the advantage of being plain text, human readable if need be. It doesn't have to be fed into a spreadsheet - it can be manipulated with any text processing S/W.

Re: Is it 'Excel is dead' time again?

Far from it. It's Excel is unfortunately still alive time again.

Re: I don't why she swallowed a fly

Analyst/programmer was also a job title. I think it's what's needed now. But the CIO wants to be seen in charge of big projects - those are what justify the big salary and having a few A/Ps who can work individually with user departments doesn't fit into that world view. But the A/P can do a lot to solve the coal-face problems that can contribute a lot to the business, perhaps as much as or even more than the big shiny project. In fact you can see they CIOs aren't going to let that happen.

Re: I don't why she swallowed a fly

"How about at adding some kind of iterative process allowing them to specify the schema by answering business questions? This allows them to bring their knowledge of the situation to the table rather than hoping ML will spot random anomalies. AI could certainly help suggest questions and drive a graph that would lead to the right kind of schema."

An approach might be to have a user enter some specimen data into a tabular interface. The system would then attempt to interpret the data and ask questions for clarification (is this a date? No What is it then?Name of a gene Should it be treated as text?Yes). Also check whether the data is entered column-wise or row-wise.

However a good start might simply be to require that every column (or row if appropriate) has a title and that on attempting to merge enforce a check that the titles match.

Windows 10's latest update issue isn't a bug but a feature – to test your patience

Re: Twas ever thus...

"It permanently broke the Windows Update system."

That's unusual. Normally it's already broken straight out of the box.

Re: Twas ever thus...

That's the Stockholm Syndrome working at top efficiency.

Re: One wonders ...

"Bill has such a nice barbeque for top-tier clients"

WHich Bill are you thinking of? It can't be Bill Gates because he left the building long ago.

We're not in e-Kansas anymore: State courts reel from 'unauthorized incursion'

"Somewhat less cynically, I take it you've never been paid by the word? "

My experience was only to use the words I could stand over in court. All of them but no more.

What's the difference between "an abundance of caution" and just being cautious?

So this one time, at Bandcamp, half the staff were laid off

It depends on those fired having the wit to see it but the company has just created the staffing for the competitor that knows most about their business, knows where their strengths and weaknesses are and has all the contacts needed to hit the ground running.

Birmingham set to miss deadline to make Oracle disaster 'safe and compliant'

Re: Why was the contract originally signed?

There is indeed a penalty. It falls on the local tax-payers.

Re: I'm confused by this

"It sounds more like they gave up on SAP very much too early, to save money one could guess."

That was my point. They may well have been constrained to give up SAP - budget, end of contract or whatever. If, at that stage they were still unable to reconcile the results of running Oracle in parallel they were well stuffed.

Re: I'm confused by this

The time overrun might be the problem here. There'd be a cost to just keeping the SAP system going. Worse still, if the new system was going to have to handle some new requirements those might have had to have been added to the SAP if it were to be kept going for an extended parallel run. It's not difficult to see how, once they'd run over time, they could get to the position where they might not be able to keep SAP running.

If he's the auditor his core concern is to find the costs, not deal with the overrun. That' should be somebody else's job.

Re: Tunnel, lights visible at end, may not be oncoming train

"Would be interesting to calculate a liability per job figure"

They'll probably use a spreadsheet and we can see where that will get them.

Tesla goons will buy anything – including these $150 beers

Don't even go near the Tesla brain-computer interface.

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

Re: IBM, too, maybe...

I remember once seeing a picture of a skip lorry where the skip had decided it was tired and didn't want to get up.

If you're brave enough to move fully-laden datacenter racks, here's the robot for you

"Waiting for a puny human to do the job isn't feasible, Jtec suggests."

So wait for a non-puny human instead.

As it prepares to abandon its on-prem server products, Atlassian is content. Users? Not so much

I'm not entirely sure you're right. It's more a case of knowing a lot about IT and using it to screw customers.

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

Re: These things happen everywhere

This may come as a surprise to some people, but IT needs to get closer to users. There are situations where big complex systems need complex analysis and testing (Horizon!) but there are others where, with an appropriate set of RAD tools or the like, something can be put together professionally but without the high ceremony methodology. Maybe we lack CIOs who rate serving the business some above running big-budget projects.

Re: This is why I have a job

It wasn't enterprise management scale.

Re: "The NHS suffers from a chronic shortage of anesthetists"

Irrespective of the party governments, when they get scared by inflation, try to suppress wage increases. The only wages they can directly affect are those in the public sector so the public sector, all of it, gets hammered whoever is in power.

530K people's info feared stolen from cloud PC gaming biz Shadow

CEO Eric Sele declined to say how many people's personal information was accessed in the leak

declined to answer specific questions about the security breach, including if customers' remote Windows instances and storage were compromised.

"we will not comment further."

"Transparency with our community is a key principle at Shadow"

I suppose charity demands that I assume something went wrong in translation from the French, otherwise it would appear that this is an even greater than normal load of bollocks parroted in the wake of a breach.