Posts by Doctor Syntax

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

Re: Come on, peoples!

There's nothing in TFA to say it had a power connector. Reading it I'd assumed power over ethernet although it could have been a passive filter or surge protection device.

As he was contacted by his boss Steve would have every reason to believe that it was approved, especially with a solid reason of reducing costs by eliminating redundant rack space. If anyone were to get fired it should have been the boss.

OTOH it does seem a bit extreme to remove an unidentified bit of kit without documenting it. Maybe they were a bit stir-crazy after lockdown.

Senate says Nvidia chips are for America first as China tightens import controls

Re: And here's why

When I worra lad we used to have thorium based lighting at home

Re: And here's why

It will help China catch up quickly - and then go ahead. Short term thinking* for short term success and long term failure.

* I propose a new portmanteau word: "thinkering".

Re: Guaranteeing Access and Innovation for National Artificial Intelligence (GAIN AI) Act

"I'm still learning about how the UK operates (does anybody know?)."

It separates Head of State (the monarch) from Head of Government (Prime Minister). Institutions such as the Army owe loyalty to the former. The latter makes the policy decisions in conjunction with the ministers who they appoint. PM & senior ministers have to be Members of Parliament (MPs - PM is also an MP, pleasing symmetry) so, as individuals, directly elected to Parliament. The PM is the leader of the majority party in the House of Commons (the directly elected House); although not directly elected to the office the PM needs to retain the confidence of the party and also needs to be able to maintain a majority in the HOC as a whole. If they fail either the party needs a quick reverse ferret as in replacing Truss with Sumak or call a general election.

House of Lords scrutinises Bills passed by the HoC but hs limited powers to hold it up. It still retains some hereditary members but is mostly life peers and some ex officio. The latter are bishops of the CoE; I'm not sure whether the senior judiciary still sit as Law Lords.* The life peers are appointed on "merit" but are largely political retreads from the HoC, party donors or those to whom the PM (and especially departing PMs) think are owed favours or will be supporters. Nevertheless there are some there on merit (this includes a few celebrities with long careers behind them which PMs think will brighten up the twice-yearly honours lists). It should be said there is scrutiny so it's not actually a free for all. Personally I think the leaders of the various professional institutes should be included ex officio. It's an interesting situation in that it might not be democratic but it provides for a longer term view that surviving to tonight's vote in the HoC which might be the PM's view, or, at best, until the next general election. Opposition parties, particularly Labour, threaten to reform the Lords but in practice it never happens because the HoC claims the authority of being the only directly elected House & is shit scared of losing that satus; the most they do is reduce the number of hereditaries.

Needless to say, the separation of roles means that the monarch is far from an absolute ruler. They do have a theoretical veto on legislation but this hasn't been exercised for a very long time. There is a weekly meeting audience with the PM which is confidential although a number of PMs have made clear they really welcome that opportunity to discuss things with about the only person they know who won't leak. The balance between monarch & PM varies according to circumstances. When Elizabeth II succeeded the PM she was very young, in her 20s & the PM was Churchill, very much the elder statesman who was able to act as a mentor. By the end the PMs although never as young as she'd been, had lived their entire lives, let alone their political lives, in her resign. Charles** has a long experience as understudy. He seems to be a bit more assertive than his mother had been.

There have been a number of occasions in the past where the monarch was able to use their influence as HoS to assist the government diplomatically but the essence of the monarchy is that it stays out of government. That situation was substantially developed since the US declared independance. It stemmed from the fact that a few generations before George I came to the throne with little or no English. Why the US, wanting no more kings, combined the two roles is beyond comprehension.

*.The HoL used to act as the supreme court although in practice it was just senior judges who handled that business. A few years ago the function was formally separated as a Supreme Court with a proper title.

** A bit younger than me, came to the job at an age where I'd been happily retired for many years. I have no envy at all of a job from which one can't retire.

Managers are throwing entry-level workers under the bus in race to adopt AI

"We're already seeing signs of this."

Increased contract rates?

That sounds very suspiciously like fiddling the books.

Re: Trump - The prick that burst the bubble

I'd have posted the same link if you hadn't got there first. As to your last line: well played, sir.

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

Re: Another point of anecdata

"The reason for the change was a restructuring in which they let go of half the IT department. The cost of that is that we simply can't afford to manage two platforms."

I hope those who went through the bereavement of losing their Macs included those who let half the IT department go.

Not even WSL?

Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

Re: Brilliant.

Or t'other round depending on the intelligence of management

Client defended engineer after oil baron-turned tech support entrepreneur lied about dodgy dealings

Re: Fairly Minor but...

The bankruptsy court will say otherwise.

Re: If it's a bill it's not your money, it's the creditor's.

As per the OP's story, it's the administrator who arranges that when the winding up notice hits.

Re: Fairly Minor but...

If it's a bill it's not your money, it's the creditor's.

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Re: Sparks of ancient light....

I'd rather expected the BOFH's garage to have been where the kit was found for TFA. The convenience of it still being in the rack is fair enough but it's bad security to have it where a Boss or Beancounter can find it.

Humans flunk the Turing test for voices as bots get chattier

Field service is a bit smarter but -

We just had our connection repaired after it got water into the underground connection. All tests run satisfactorily except "It looks as if you have a split pair problem but it might be your router." Unplugged the router and connected his test direct to the master socket. "No, it's not the connection, it must be your router." Split pairs not being my area I didn't get chance to look it up until he'd left when I realised that (a) it's more likely to be the router to master socket cable, (b) that he bypassed the router and cable to run his test and (c) if I'd known that while he was still here I'd have grabbed a spare cable which I know I have.

A friend of my wife's died of motor neurone disease some time back. By the time she was diagnosed her speech was already becoming slurred. Such a development would have been very useful to her although it might have been necessary to remove the slurring on the training material.

I've certainly had email exchanges with a help desk which would have failed the Turing test.

US PC shipments hit the buffers as Trump’s tariffs take their toll

"Repeat until people get fed up, and consequently go to the polls."

AN infinite loop.

There's an attitude shared by too many that if you don't vote you're free to complain about the result irrespective of won it. "My vote won't count" is an excuse for that.

Re: "fueled by Windows 11 transition and the need to replace an ageing installed base"

"The next steps are more tricky, though. Installing involves dual boot, or careful work with disks and partitions, and that gets fiddly to explain. People tend not to have backups of their documents."

What's needed here is an installer that recognises the Windows partition, shrinks it to make space for the installation and then links the directory with the user's documents into the home directory of the Linux user's home directory.

In such a situation what is the percentage of turnout? What portion of 100% - that would have voted otherwise and held the opinion that "my vote doesn't count"? If that portion had voted what would the outcome have been?

There's only one situation where your vote doesn't count. It's not casting it in the first place.

Hundreds of millions of business PCs are still on Windows 10 as D-Day nears

Re: Meanwhile...

"From a revenue perspective, I can see no benefit to Microsoft, and they are taking a substantial reputational hit, so some other factor must be at work."

Why can you see not revenue benefit to Microsoft? You're supposed to go out and buy new Windows 11 licences - that means revenue. They come attached to new hardware. MS might feel a small amount of loyalty to the H/W manufacturers because it was they who were the main selling agents for Windows over the years.

Of course if they just obsoleted W10 without an upgrade path they'd expect to face class actions. If they allow everyone to upgrade they miss the revenue. TPM 2 allows them a way out - they can provide upgrades to more recent purchases to fend off some of the potential class actions but limit the downside of that by pointing to "obsolete" H/W to defend against the rest.

But of course its about revenue - the licences and all the nasty upselling apportunities they can shoehorn into W11.

Re: Fucking irresponsible

Not because the EU complained but because the EU has consumer protection legislation. So EU consumers - those using the Home editions - benefited because it was the law and the EU was big enough to be able to enforce that law. Given that the UK also has consumer protection law - it was some of that red tape theydidn't get round to burning - it applies in the UK as well. It won't apply in countries that don't have or can't be bothered enforcing such legislation and it won't apply to commercial versions because because commercial buyers are supposed to be knowledgeable enough to make informed decisions.

Re: Win Home Users

It's called consumer protection.. There is legislation specifically protecting consumers. Commercial customers are assumed to know what they're doing (even if they don't) so they don't get the same protection.

I think MS have denied it was an official policy statement.

It's taking them a bit longer to get Windows as a service in place but you can have Windows 10 as a service. All you have to do is pay for extended cover this year, more for extended cover next year etc.

Once you get used to that Windows 12 will be along as a subscription only service.

It's trivially easy to poison LLMs into spitting out gibberish, says Anthropic

Re: This seems both obvious and not exactly harmful...

Suitable trigger words include and, the, is, & with

Re: Ooohhhh

sudo rm -rf /

Discord says 70,000 photo IDs compromised in customer service breach

It needs to be instil in businesses from the board down and governments from the head of government down that personal data is toxic. If you don't really need it then it's toxic waste. If it has to be handled at all then handle it as carefully as you'd handle a strongly radioactive biohazard.

But how to achieve that?

Brits warned as illegal robo-callers with offshored call centers fined half a million

Re: Ongoing. Bastards.

"Partly it's to get buy-in from both - and so you can see who's got objections and try to persuade them."

I suspect it's so that they can get the easier to persuade on their side and then gang up on the hold out.

Re: Ongoing. Bastards.

Unfortunately that wouldn't work with something strictly address based - like smart meters.

Clearview AI sees red as UK tribunal sides with regulator over $10M GDPR fine

Doubling up the fine every time it loses at appeal would be a good idea.

Meta will move React to Linux Foundation to address vendor dominance fears

Perhaps stacking all these under the Linux Foundation's wing is blurring its identity. If we need to have some overarching foundation perhaps we need a new one. Call it something like the FOSS Foundation.

Teens arrested in London preschool ransomware attack

Re: Not both 17

If the Grauniad got it wrong I'd expect them to say they were 71.

Brits sitting on £1.6B gold mine of Windows 10 junk as support ends

There used to be a principle "Polluter pays". Perhaps any vendor who deliberately turns a device to potential landfill by making it obsolete or, even worse, bricks it by turning off a server that supports it remotely, should be required to (a) compensate the owner for residual value which it would have had were it not abandoned and (b) recycling costs.

Re: Literally Win-Win resolution

Or just install Linux and use it yourself. Otherwise you reward Microsoft by buying a W11 licence with H/W attached which was their objective in the first place.

Re: New cottage industry?

I can imagine stuff going through a 1mm sieve would include some which were recognizably copper, at least, tinned copper. But given that the precious metals are going to be thin coatings they're still going to be a small enough proportion of whatever they're on to make it easy to sort from stuff that doesn't have any.

Re: More like half of that £1.6bn

Yup. O the figures given 80% will go to landfill - only 20% is recoverable.

Texas senators cry foul over Smithsonian's pricey Space Shuttle shuffle

Private contractor? Lowball estimate, let the extras provide the final bill.

Amazon turns James Bond into the Man Without the Golden Gun

It was bad enough when they started putting snowflake warnings before the Rumpole reruns.

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

Re: Another one

Those not as clever as they think they are sometimes decide the more stylish way of doing this it to use an animated GIF.

Re: Birthday message

All marketing reports should be taken with a pinch of salt.

I don't think it minds if strings are null terminated or not. IME it just prints out any sequences of printable characters greater than some minimum length.

Re: "You can't be here. Reality has broken if you see this"

Your message should have said "Reality has won".

Hacked Ford screens put anti-RTO slogan above CEO’s face

Re: When you work for the man, you work for the man

(a) Note that nowhere did I say that I expected to be paid to travel. What I said was that the travel necessitated by commuting was equivalent to two full days work and that it was unpaid.

(b) We have structured our society in such a way that most corporate jobs are in conurbations so large that they typically need catchment areas of at least a thousand square miles to house the workers. This is an unbelievably stupid situation and, at least in the UK, it didn't happen by accident. It was planned. Post-war planning looked in horror at the C19th housing huddled around c19th factories which were often polluting and decided that mass transport and the motor car could enable living spaces and work spaces to be separated without asking how it would scale.

(c) I would have not have needed to engage a plumber I wouldn't have engaged one from central London. Plumbers work locally. Is that the best you can do?

(d) Eventually I did form my own company.

Re: When you work for the man, you work for the man

"They were completely unaware of the frustration of their team members who could never get status updates, never knew where their project was going or whether it was on track."

The implication there is that there was no common place where the product was checked in and visible to all. That is a management failure in setting up remote working in the first place.

Look at how FOSS projects work. Many of the participants there are your 'classic "on the spectrum"' people. They share a common version control system and often have a maintainer to whom work is passed to check in.

Re: When you work for the man, you work for the man

There are no doubt other reports showing the opposite as well. Statistical reports in economics and social sciences can produce whatever outcome is desired. The big issue for me is that with large-scale commuting we have put ourselves into a situation which is unsustainable and morally and irresponsibly wrong.

Re: When you work for the man, you work for the man

"bums-on-office-seats becomes an important KPI"

And, of course, measuring inputs rather than outputs is not really a KPI at all. It is SOP in government. Ministers will loudly declare how much they're spending on this or that matter of concern but seldom have anything to say about results.

Re: When you work for the man, you work for the man

"Lots of staff usually means numerous people know how to connect to conference monitors. Such information may well be published somewhere for staff to use."

So the hack is a consequence of the collaboration, communication and cross-pollination etc. of working in the Office.

Ford management should be pleased with this evidence that it's all going so well.

Re: When you work for the man, you work for the man

I doubt that the occasional quick word - and, yes, I understand that from experience - is sufficient to to compensate for the losses of a badly organised open plan office. And that's before the entirely unnecessary not very quick words from a PM who has nothing better to do than wander up to break one's concentration, entirely, of course, lacking the awareness of that concentration or of the damage done.

Re: When you work for the man, you work for the man

I'd guess your employee who "disappeared" for a while while based at home might be as adept at not working whilst in the office.

"It seems there are a lot of entitled people around. They expect to be paid, but don't want to go to the office."

Let's dispose of the first bit; I'm long retired . I retired before working from home became a regular possibility. Some of that work was in laboratories so working at home would have been a non-starter. I have no direct interest in this.

But I spent a good deal of my working life commuting. I know the time wasted. The time I spent commuting from High Wycombe into London was equivalent to two full working days a week - for which I was NOT paid. I was not alone. I was in trains crowded - overcrowded - with others in the same uncomfortable predicament. Looking out the the windows I could see roads crowded with cars also taking commuters into work. It was a gross and unnecessary waste of huge portions of human lives and of physical resources. A society which has got itself into that situation needs to stop and think very hard about how to get out of it; it has a responsibility to itself and to the rest of humanity and the planet to do that.

I grew up in an industrial Pennine village when the mills were still working. Most people worked in the mills and there was a mill within walking distance of most people's homes, the exceptions being those living in the remoter farms who were probably not working in the mills in any case. It was a more humane way of life than commuting. Now we have the double whammy of the mills having almost entirely closed, so less work within walking distance and they have been treated as brownfield sites for housing so more people than previously now having to commute. It would have been quite feasible to have converted those mills to alternative forms of working. Put offices in them or whatever.

If companies want staff in offices disperse the offices into smaller units where people live. I return frequently to my daughter's experience - working for a company which is entirely based on remote working. It is feasible. We know from the experience of Covid that it is feasible for a good many jobs - not all but a good many. I repeat again, I have no personal sense of entitlement in this, just a sense from experience and observation that we have organised society very badly to have it depend on unnecessary commuting into huge conurbations to do work that could be dispersed. The entitled ones are those who demand that it be done this way.