Posts by Doctor Syntax

Europe's tough new rules for Big Tech start today. Is anyone ready?

Given the whining this produced from big tech ISTM that they are indeed expecting expert scrutiny.

Zoom CEO reportedly tells staff: Workers can't build trust or collaborate... on Zoom

Re: I suggest the author is missing the point

Would he be prepare to put his the company's money where his mouth is? Pay commuting time as company time, pay commuting costs and pay for relocation for those who have moved out of commuting range?

Their problem. They have a choice of two problems to solve: that one and getting no rent.

"Unfortunately it would also mean that the owners of these buildings would have to invest into remodelling for residential use, only to see a lot less income (it might even be below of what they can get from tax write-offs), and then there often also are zoning laws which prohibit using commercial real estate for residential purposes."

The income from residential would still be more than the zero from an empty property. Tax write-offs only become worth while it you have income on which you're paying tax.

The local authorities are already complaining that lack of people going in to work means the small businesses which used to provide services for those people are closing down, they're losing the income from those property taxes and the whole place is starting to look run down. If they're against re-zoning they need to start joining the dots.

Re: Context is everything

"the next job required a 15 minute walk and two changes (the middle bus being a city-to-city express)"

I once looked at the timings for a 3 stage commute like that. It meant leaving home at about 6:25 am to get to the client site a tad after 9:00 am. The first step took 10 minutes longer than it used to do because the bus has been re-routed to amalgamate 2 routes. There was then a 40 minute wait to change buses. The other change had a 4 minute gap, easily eroded by the vagaries of an over-crowded motorway and weather conditions delaying the "express". Miss that 3rd bus and it was another 15 minute delay. The direct route was about 25 miles, 40 - 45min by car. I never got round to working out how long the return would have taken.

Re: Context is everything

sod the rest of the world or anyone who actually produces something tangible ie the stuff <s?without which there would be no need for IT at all</s> which, without IT wouldn't be produced at all.

FTFY

I used to reckon that I had a better grasp than at least some of the management about the implications of their ideas on various parts of the business because IT was threaded through multiple departments. e.g. Marketing want to sell direct rather than through distributors - have they told accounts who'll have to handle more and smaller payments and looked at the implications for staffing and costs?

I suppose it depends on your nationality.

Re: Context is everything

with a couple of "office" days a week, and employees encouraged to be in the office more often than not on those days.

The employees have discovered that work without commuting is possible. They're now going to regard those office days as punishment. It would be interesting if those in favour of the office would tell us how long their commute is and what the conditions are like. I've long believed that those who think public transport is a good way to commute live close to a bus or train route that also passes close to their place of work with no need to change.

"do something profitable with the money instead"

Or give it back to the investors if there isn't anything more profitable on the horizon.

Feel free to join it.

Why do I read this and keep thinking "Ratner"?

Intel seems to think Wi-Fi 7 is too cool for old-school Windows 10

Remind me - wasn't Windows 10 supposed to be the last version ever and from then on it would be updates all the way?

Neighbors angry as another North Korean 'satellite' launch attempt fails

Siege mentality.

Two teens were among those behind the Lapsus$ cyber-crime spree, jury finds

Re: Hold on...

Didn't the reports at the time say that their MO was social engineering. If that was the case then it must show an abbility to understand other people's minds in a way which doesn't fit with what I understand autism to be. I suppose that now I've written that somebody will be along to explain that autism is something else entirely but it's looking as if it's whatever the defence lawyers want it to be.

Xebian is the Marie Kondo of Linux distros – it's here to declutter

Re: defaults to a very simple disk layout

A manual option, yes. But if we assume the uninformed first time user then it would be better to make it the default. This isn't a Windows install - Linux can and should do better.

Once is enough. In fact there's a good argument that once is more than enough.

Re: minimal partitioning

There's no reason to only have two partitions nor to have a home partition as an alternative to swap. I would use considerably more but /home in addition to root and swap would be a better default. Personally I'd add partitions for /opt and /usr/local. Depending on what it was to be used for I might also add one for /srv.

"It defaults to a very simple disk layout with a root partition and a swap partition and nothing else."

Why do they all do this? A separate Home partition should really be included as a default. With that you can wipe the rest,install something else and not lose your data. OK, you could backup home before wiping and restore afterwards - right up until that bowel loosening moment when you realise you've been a tad over-anxious to get on with the install.

Why these cloud-connected 3D printers started making junk all by themselves

Re: Cloud connected? FFS why?

"Because print jobs can take a long, long time to complete and it can be useful to monitor them from wherever you are and, yes, even schedule a new print job: you have an idea, start a small job there and then, piece is ready to use when you get back that evening."

That's the utility. You have to consider the cost of providing that. The cost is the risk that the increased complexity brings. Anything from a screw up like this via malware being introduced to the printer through that carefully crafted hole in the firewall that allows the printer to become a staging post to attack the rest of your network* to Bambu going TITSUP** and no more printing.

* Did you remmber to put the printer on its own VLAN?

** Terminal Inability To Service Users' Printers

Re: Sounds like this cloud thing was programmed as if it was a local server

But this wasn't your local HP printer, it was a Bambu printer controlled by the cloud and that seems to be where the error was. You're correct about rubbish being rubbish but the more complex you make things by going outside the local setup the more things are available to go wrong. If there wasn't a solid reason for it to be done this way then it looks as if an unnecessary risk was introduced.

Rocky Linux backer CIQ rejects lawsuit's claims it was founded on stolen IP

Re: How is this possible ?

On the whole I agree but there's a nagging doubt as to who signed on behalf of Sylabs.

China cooks covert chips, recruits global geeks to dodge US restrictions

Re: Unexpected consequence ?

Unexpected? Who didn't see this coming? Other than successive US governments.

Blazar Token creator accused of using investor funds for renovating bathroom

Gamekeeper turned poacher.

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

Re: MS asked the EU to standardize

Proprietary? Shame on you sir. Microsoft would have you know it's an open standard, the best openness money can buy.

I regard email as a transmission method to deliver mail ultimately to my own computer, not somebody else's.

And ain't we all a lot of miseryguts here!

Re: long-form writers...

Ah, yes. Should have said I use a Lazarus/Pascal program to process the data first. I copy a paragraph's worth of text from Okular, paste it in, the program reassembles it and a quick inspection lets me spot and correct a few typos at that stage.

Re: long-form writers...

Our local history group publishes using local printers. PDF is the format.

Re: "it is increasingly difficult to develop entirely new features"

Oh, and did someone say "cloud collaboration?"

Yes. I think it must have been https://www.collaboraoffice.com/

Re: MS asked the EU to standardize

Do you mean DOC or DOCX?

I've found Word struggling to open DOC files created with a different version. In particular I've seen it hang (i.e. Big Red Switch time) the entire box when trying to open a file containing macros with any other version than the exact one that created it - a version which, unfortunately, I didn't have. IIRC LO couldn't open it either but at least it didn't hang. Other than that I've not seen LO fail to open a DOC.

I haven't seen LO fail to open a DOCX file but I certainly wouldn't put it past Microsoft to use wriggle room in the spec. (go and read about their shenanigans with ISO committees in getting their "standard" passed) to break compatibility.

As a matter of interest, if you take a file that LO can't open can it be opened by an earlier version of Word or have they really gone back to their old tricks of making files non-backward compatible because there may be a few of their customers who still haven't been strong-armed into Microsoft 358½?

Re: long-form writers...

"I find LO is better for proofing"

I dump the OCR as plain text and fix a lot of the errors with vi, especially mangled punctuation and the multiple spaces you get on OCRing justified pages.

Re: long-form writers...

I wonder if these long book layouts would be better handled in Scribus. It's one of the things near the top of my get-to-grips-with list. One of the issues with word processors is that a change which affects a page break will start a chain which may fizzle out after a page or two or turn into an avalanche. How would Scribus handle that?

"getting worse not better over time, though."

That applies to just about the whole world and everything in it.

Re: long-form writers...

I have edited some books with c100 pages but I think a 600 page document would best be split for editing purposes and reassembled.

"the best webmail tool around"

Damning with faint praise.

'Millions' of spammy emails with no opt-out? That'll cost you $650K, Experian

Re: CAN-SPAM Act?? hahahahahahaha what a JOKE !

I note that Microsoft do filter out a fair bit of spam* to Hotmail etc addresses. Maybe they should bill the sending email providers for this and let those providers pass the charge onto their customers. It would mean billing themselves a good deal of the time which might complicate the matter.

* Curiously they seem to go through phases of failing to filter all the Account termination notices allegedly coming from themselves.

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

Re: reshuffle

Any good email client does this based on the Message-ID and In-Reply-To lines of the header. Email service providers are apt to break that.

One correspondent's emails have recently had the Message-IDs appear with a comment after them to say that it was added by BT Internet. This confuses the client which wasn't expecting it. Someone hasn't read the RFCs, assuming they didn't know they existed. The contents of the line should be ID and nothing else:

The "Message-ID:" field contains a single unique message identifier.

and although there seems to be some debate about this it's generally accepted that if the client hasn't provided a Message-ID it's a good idea to add one so they shouldn't need to draw attention to the fact that they have done:

The following changes to a message being processed MAY be applied when necessary by an originating SMTP server, or one used as the target of SMTP as an initial posting (message submission) protocol:

o Addition of a message-id field when none appears

Also the Hotmail/Live/Outlook/${Whatever Microsoft brands it as this week} will replace a client-provided Message-ID with their own. The above RFC continues:

The less information the server has about the client, the less likely these changes are to be correct and the more caution and conservatism should be applied when considering whether or not to perform fixes and how.

To be fair to Microsoft (a phrase for which I don't find frequent use) they are in something of a cleft stick here as they may find it difficult to trust the client to generate a unique ID but there's no way for the client to know what the server munged the original into. It certainly breaks threading. Perhaps the best solution would be for a client to BCC a copy to itself and use that, when received, in place of its own copy.

Re: Wrapping at column 78

"Actually I think there were machines which would sort punchcards based on columns 72-80."

They would sort them into 10 bins depending on the content of a single column. Repeated runs, changing the column would get them back into order eventually. That's the word - eventually.

Re: Hmmmm...

"context is king"

Yes. And top-posting is a great destroyer of context.

"despite 35+ years in the industry"

In your 35+ did it never occur to you that top posted email thread were harder to follow than, say, elReg threads in which bottom posting is virtually universal (although I have committed a top-posted example below, just to make the point)?

And we all know that managerial and marketing types are singularly inept at any form of technology. Give them something and they break it, email being an example.

Space junk targeted for cleanup mission was hit by different space junk, making more space junk

It looks like something more than ClearSpace-1 is needed: an orbiting dustpan and brush.

Re: Space trash

"Humanity, as a whole, has a tendancy of not caring if it doesn't seem to matter. The only problem with that attitude, is that we often cannot see how it matters before it is too late, or at least much more expensive to correct."

It applies to more than rubbish. It's called "the tragedy of the commons".

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

Everyone looking after data needs to realise one thing: the entire worth of a business will reside in its data. If it's lost the business will be extremely lucky to get back on its feet again. If it's gone it's gone.

Anyone entrusted with the task - and that includes everyone from tape jockeys to CEOs making strategic decisions and beancounters controlling the budgets, businesses looking after their own data to businesses looking after other peoples' data - should be paranoid about it.

Re: Where are the backups?

"now understand the backup you don't directly control and can test, and do test, is no backup at all."

Understand also that if it's not physically protected and maintained read-only until such time as it's been superseded by another backup it's also not a backup. That includes being kept read-only even while and after being restored. If it isn't read-only it's a copy but it isn't a backup.

Re: All Eggs in One Basket

"Efficiency is not the same as security..."

Even worse is mistaking convenience for efficiency.

Re: And Then ?

"Unfortunately? Try negligently."

I'd say stupidly.

Re: Offline backups??

"So they had multiple backup systems, but all of them were online?"

In realiy that makes them multiple copies but not backups as they have now discovered.

Re: Where are the backups?

A backup is a copy that's held off-line and transferred off-site or to some physically protected storage ASAP. It's there as a last resort to protect against as many possible failures as possible, If it remains online it's a copy but it isn't a backup. Once taken it should be write-protected so that even if connected to a compromised system it won't itself get compromised.