Posts by Doctor Syntax

When red flags are just office decoration: Edinburgh Uni's Oracle IT disaster

Re: So easy

It's one thing we can thank "education, education, education" Blair for. He wanted half the population trained to degree level without ever troubling himself to ask if half the jobs in the country were at graduate level.

Re: So easy

"As much as we malign managers in the comments section, management is a skill."

The reason we malign them is that relatively few have the skill. Promoting people to management on account of having some other skill makes no more sense them promoting someone to head chemist because they're an outstanding mechanical engineer. But it happens because company (it goes far wider than public sector) career structures allow only limited promotion in non-managerial specialities and they need to make those promotions for staff retention.

Re: So easy

It's irritating for manglement who would, if they weren't manglers, realise that it's the irritant in the oyster that produces the pearl.

"some users, who tried to provide constructive input and feedback, felt that they were considered disruptive by leadership and not listened to."

Manglement at its finest.

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

Re: Only in heaven....

"Of course the client might have been a (minor) deity or, not uncommon in this game, at least thought of themselves as such."

More likely the opposite, I'd have thought. Policies exist to further the business's objectives. If a policy is getting in the way of that it sounds as if the original policy maker has long gone and been replaced by a weight to keep the chair from escaping with no understanding of why the policy exists.

I've always thought that policies should be written with a rationale so they can not be over-ridden by idiots ("This is a legal requirement") or reviewed when no longer appropriate ("This was a legal requirement but the law has changed").

Ford pulls the plug on EV strategy as losses pile up

Re: Platform

" Mass adoption is still dependent on further battery energy density improvements that will reduce size, weight and cost."

And charging infrastructure.

"I think the Japanese manufacturers in general have been holding out for solid state batteries."

This will be a surprise to my daughter who's had her Nissan Leaf for a few years now.

"Early in the dawn of personal motor cars for the masses, there were still plenty of trips that couldn't be made. You took a train (or even a stagecoach) as there were no places to refuel."

But we're not there any more.* The alternative to an inadequate personal EV would be a personal car..** Also in the early days the motorist embarking on a longer journey might have started out with a few cans of extra fuel. You can't carry a can of electricity.

The infrastructure needs to be addressed. Anyone on a long journey would have to be able to expect to pull into a motorway services and find a fast charger available. That would mean a considerable proportion of parking spaces would have to be fast chargers and the supply to the services would have to be able to support those chargers being in use.

So far the UK government's targets have been vestigial and missed.

* We never were there in terms of stage coaches. When the first railway service between Liverpool and Manchester opened several stage coach services went out of business in the first week.

** Yes, yes, we've heard it: "You rent an ICE car for those journeys." It doesn't work on two grounds. The first is that ICE vehicles are supposed to be phased out so long term there wouldn't be any to rent. The second is that at least since I retired I make most of my journeys within a fraction of EV range from home but half of my mileage on those few long trips. Do I want to hve to hire another vehicle for half my annual mileage? Pre-retirement the ratio might not have been quite as tilted but enogh to present a serious consideration.

Re: Once upon a time....

"A very limited level 2 charging point (3kWish) at a train station where you catch a train to get to work would be sufficient to replenish a battery over the course of a working day."

For the one driver who gets to it first. Not for the rest of the drivers who may have been hoping, or even depending on getting it. For EVs to take off the charging infrastructure away from home needs to be much better. PHEVs really ought to be a stepping stone to getting enough demand for charging whilst giving the drivers confidence they're not going to get stuck without a charge on a long journey. Remember that the long journey might not just be driving from home to destination today; it might also include driving back tomorrow and if there's no vacant charging point at the destination that might have to be on one charge.

Raspberry Pi Pico cracks BitLocker in under a minute

Re: Less than a minute?

No solder required, at least not at the time. He made a board with a set of spring-loaded contacts spaced for a set of pads on the back of the motherboard. That plugs into the Pi. He has to take the back of the laptop off and move a cover out of the way but then just needs to press the Pi/contacts assembly against the pads while it boots.

Alaska Airlines' door-dropping flight was missing bolts

It lends a whole new meaning to "Departure gate".

Re: Major major cock-up

"As for the rivet holes, these should have been picked up during manufacture and fixed at the time:"

Possibly this is related to recent reports about rivet holes being drilled in the wrong place by Spirit and retrospective checks and remedial action being taken after the planes had entered service.

How Neuraspace aims to clean up orbital clutter with AI

"We can either ignore the problem and hope it resolves itself or accept there is an issue and learn to deal with it."

It certainly won't get better if it's ignored. Just the opposite - collisions will generate more debris, smaller, but still big enough to cause damage.

Attempts to demolish guardrails in AI image generators blamed for lewd Taylor Swift deepfakes

Spot the weasel word

"We are continuing to investigate these images and have strengthened our existing safety systems to further prevent our services from being misused to help generate images like them"

It's "help", if course. Spokespeak translation: We didn't actually generate the images, all we did was help.

AI models just love escalating conflict to all-out nuclear war

Re: Unsurprising....

"I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder."

But who's going to tell them? Well, I suppose anyone. The better question is "Who's going to make them do that?". If we had a good answer to that we'd be well on the way to getting out of the woods.

EU repair rights bill tells manufacturers to fix up or ship out

Re: I haven't read

Unless it contains custom components a competitor who wants to copy a device will copy it anyway. Schematics are only a convenience.

Aircraft rivet hole issues cause delays to Boeing 737 Max deliveries

Re: Boeing should

I see a few folks irony bypasses there.

Re: Err... not so fast

And the directors, otherwise they'd just appoint more of the same.

Faraday plots a 64-core Arm chip with Intel inside

Re: Not news

You didn't consider BT deciding it didn't need a mobile business?

Whether to move off Oracle is the $100M+ question for Europe's largest public body

Re: Are there other choices?

Automating the existing mess is never likely to produce anything other than a mess on steroids as a result.

I've found myself on the committee of a local organisation. I'm told the previous treasurer, an accountant, of course, used Excel ad a word processor.

"I'm starting to wonder if there is a single project that has ever gone live without catastrophic issues."

I've been involved in one or two, even involving Capita. You never hear about them. Good news is no news (and vice versa of course).

But when things go wrong they go very wrong.

"Any decision to move away from Oracle would be a personal embarrassment for founder and CTO Larry Ellison, who in 2021 named Birmingham City Council as a successful contract win over SAP."

If he's not already embarrassed by this fiasco he certainly ought to be. But he probably isn't.

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

Re: Fuses?

I suppose if the aircraft was a Boeing that might be quite realistic.

Re: Fuses?

Not unless the aircraft being simulated had a bug red stop button in the cockpit. I suppose a big red button to stop turbulence in the real aircraft would be quite popular.

He had to wrestle with the controls.

Dell said to be preparing broad Return To Office order this Monday

Re: What Manager Ever Learns Lessons?

"Name one ?"

The second one in the next to next to last paragraph in TFA

Re: What Manager Ever Learns Lessons?

"Name one ?"

The first one in the next to next to last paragraph in TFA

Re: "if they want to keep their tax breaks"

OTOH two can play that game. Find a city where the lease is nearly up or at a break point. Walk away, closing the office completely. No taxes being paid, not even broken ones. No footfall for shops and cafes. Make sure other cities know what happened.

Is it just the US where this tax-break thing happens?

"Offices are too small"

So if everyone decides to come in on the same days and lots of them stand about doing nothing for lack of desks I wonder if manglement will achieve a degree of enlightenment. I suppose not. Manglement doesn't do enlightenment.

JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant meets irresistible outcry

Re: Mostly moaning morons

"Deactivated plugins don't even run."

You know that for sure?

Re: Bad expectations (was: Bad code)

"CoPilot is an absolute God-send for writing tests and documentation"

And while it's doing that what is it doing with the code you're asking it to document?

Bad grammer is married to bad granddad.

Re: It’s not just C-Suite

"Especially sites which require 10 to 20 "Legitimate Interest" areas of data processing to be unchecked individually, in order to opt out of tracking. Or worse, sites that list 200 or more advertising partners, and having to uncheck every one individually."

Looking at it another way, it's good of these sites to make it clear that you will want to leave now and never go near them again.

Re: It’s not just C-Suite

"I'm convinced that the framers envisaged a default of no tracking with options to allow it if acceptable, with clearly explained consequences."

This should have been how it was framed. No doubt there was a lot of lobbying to make it as it is now. It's time the EU held a review with the specific objective of deciding whether to make on-consent the default.

Re: As many comments in the Jetbrains discussion said - this smells like a marketing ploy

It's the old story - what they'd like and what they need are two different things.

"On-prem is far superior."

I've also yelled at on-prem on occasion.

Re: Not knowing what words mean

My analogy would be an old and old-type fabric surveyors tape, stretched in places.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Re: Not Putting the Cart Before the Horse

Pulling rather than pushing is a better option, The impending disaster is more readily perceived in time from that perspective and if it isn't it improves the gene pool.

Re: Questionable resolution

But what fixes the tech's hernia after replacing heavy kit at the top of the rack?

Re: What percentage?

OTOH it it's still sort of working and there are a number of users still poinding away on it a reboot will require a longish warning period to get them logging off including the trip with a 4x2 cluebat to deal with one of them. Even then the server process might need a staged shut-down. Don't just hit the power switch and hope everything will be OK when it comes back. Even if it cleared the original fault you now have more problems than you started with.

Re: Sort-of Recommendation

But whatever you do, don't lose the token from the token ring. You'll end up crawling all over the floor looking for it.

Windows 10 users report app gremlins after Microsoft update

If they can be isolated easily, that's OK. But if new work instructions have to be loaded or results extricated then it could get a little more tricky.

Amazon extends the life of its servers to six years, expects $900m benefit in 90 days

If it ain't broke...

Interpol's latest cybercrime intervention dismantles ransomware, banking malware servers

"more than 1,300 malicious servers"

Assuming the culprits don't run on prem these must have been hosted somewhere. I wonder what mileage there might be in prosecuting or victims suing the hosting companies as accessories. A bit of KYC in the hosting business might go a long way in dealing with this.

Return-to-office mandates boost company profits? Nope

Re: No WFH - WTF

And smart money in property investment would be looking at just such opportunities while converting those city centre dinosaurs to housing. At some point things must rebalance with those who want to live and work in city centres and those who want to live and work outside city centres can all be satisfied.

Re: No WFH - WTF

Why are you making an issue of his relative (from my PoV) youth?

I believe there's a push in Docklands to repurpose for biosciences. Lab work is harder to do at home.

"While certainly middle managers were used as pawns for this, the real reason for return to office is commercial property"

The two issues aren't mutually exclusive.

Re: if you, as a "middle manager"

When I was freelance I regarded the shit-fall as something happening over there in the client's hierarchy. SEP.

Fujitsu finance chief says sorry for IT giant's role in Post Office Horizon scandal

Expert witness saying that in their view the previous evidence was unreliable. If there was no opposition I doubt the court would take very long to deal with it.