Posts by Doctor Syntax

'Return to Office' declared dead

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.

Re: A future who me?

It could happen. They deliberately switched off the lights and then accidentally tripped over the lead powering the CCTV pulling out the plu. But I don't believe it.

Re: A future who me?

I'm also an old person who remembers lighting as being a major source of energy consumption but also realises the consumption served a purpose. That last bit is an important principle to grasp for those who wish to save energy. The smart way to do it is to work out how to serve the same purpose more efficiently.

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.

Re: Pretty much the point really.

The libraries serve natural people who will have opinions which the management might reasonably take into account. Nor is it simply users and managers opinions. They will no doubt be a diverse lot and for many the views Hansson expressed may represent a real threat. It's also reasonable for the managers to take that into account.

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.

Small but mighty, 9Front's 'Humanbiologics' is here for the truly curious

Re: Applications

That rabbit hole occupied a few well-spent hours. Thanks, Liam.

Re: Boat/Car?

I remember taking a trip (?voyage) in a DUKW much earlier than that - probably with the original khaki paint. It was probably from Scarborough or Brid.

Re: Applications

A Cunning Plan 9?

BTW is there any history available about the naming - apart from it being the name of allegedly the worst SciFi movie ever made? Is it a coincidence that the Roman numeral version of 9 is ix?

Re: As I wrote about something else a month or so ago ...

\it depends on what you mean by "everyone". Back in the '80s ad '90s a lot of small businesses ran on the likes of NCR Towers, MIPS and later SCO on various PC-based servers. The users were connected by dumb terminals or terminal emulation on PCs and completely unaware of what lay beneath as all they saw were their task-specific applications and some sort of menu. It put a multiuser system within reach of everyone who was a small business owner. That may not be literally "everyone" but then not everyone uses MacOS either.

Thirty-nine weeks: That's how long you'll be waiting for an AI server from Dell

Alternative view - the iffy supply chain did its job.

And yet whole warehouses are supposed to be full of stuff that can't be shifted because nobody's buying. Maybe they're so full it take 39 weeks to find the right SKU.

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Re: The RJ family...

"My pet hate: black-on-black design, of anything - computers, cars, kitchen stoves, hifi, you name it."

Not the only bad combo. I've just encountered a local conservation group with their website footer in light green on slightly less light green. Miniscule sans serif text, of course.

Re: The RJ family...

You'll typically find BOFH & PFY retiring to the remote mission control down the road doing just this.

Re: speaking of usb

"(wtf called ? circular mouse & kyb plugs)"

The big ones - c 1cm dia - were DIN, the smaller generally called PS2 because they were either introduced by IBM for PS2s or at least they came into use about that time.

To be fair, it's probably easier than plugging it into a USB A socket.

Re: The RJ family...

"But then maybe, after all, it has kept a good few of us in a job over the years..."

And anything that does that can't be all that bad.

Re: bullshit detected

"you just need to use your hammer some more"

You may need to use a chisel instead. Chisels make good wedges to take up the slack.

Idiots, of course, don't know it's bad management so the behaviour persists.

Cinnamon and KDE sync version numbers in desktop sibling rivalry

I'll just wait for KDE 6 to turn up in Devuan.

Health crusaders prep legal challenge over NHS mega contract with Palantir

"it agreed to engage citizens about Palantir's role in the NHS via patient juries"

How are the juries selected and by whom?

The AI everything show continues at AWS: Generate SQL from text, vector search, and more

Re: ChatGPT 3.5 reveals training data...

They say training data is only 1% of the outputs they've got. However it raises the question of whether other prompts would extract more and more of the training data. It seems to knock on the head any copyright defence that they're not really storing the training data.

Re: A little knowledge

You should have told them to add some useful indexes. Either that or run UPDATE STATISTICS.