Posts by Doctor Syntax

US floats framework for international crypto regulations that cement its power

Re: Crypto?

I thought it meant "hidden value". So well hidden as to be undiscoverable.

This is the military – you can't just delete your history like you're 15

They were largely Noah Webster's doing. Some of his offerings were even worse but didn't catch on.

Re: It's happened to me a few times...

Friend of management?

Re: It's happened to me a few times...

No mention of who the friend might have been?

"and the board are setting up a team specifically to audit managers who have the authority to both raise and approve payments."

Better late than never.

Judge rejects another Microsoft appeal against surplus license reseller suit

Re: "Helping our customers move to the cloud improves productivity and security..."

It helps secure Microsoft's income.

Tech professionals pour cold water on UK crypto hub plans

It's all rapidly looking like an idea whose time has gone.

Re: "The large majority of IT pros in the UK – about 77 per cent – were not confident ..."

And was this the case?

Systemd supremo Lennart Poettering leaves Red Hat for Microsoft

Oh, the irony in that penultimate sentence.

Those weren't really pets anyway. They were reliable long-lived work horses, reliably running businesses day in, day out, week in week out.

But the real problem with your comment is that the bulk of tit is the inversion the actuality. The virtue of Sysv init is its transparency. What it's doing is written down. It's written down where it matters. It's writen down unambiguously. It's written down in the init scripts. There can be no conflict between what might be written down in some ambiguous or out-dated document and what's running. If there's any perceived weirdness it's in the mind of the perceiver who can't grok shell scripts.

Re: Not an expert, but...

As long as it's just an intit system, takes care not to break stuff and is transparent about what it's doing.

Re: Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.

It doesn't serve the needs of this laptop. The arguments I seem to hear are that it's to serve the interests of admins who want to bring up servers quickly (presumably so quickly they aren't going to spend time doing memchecks?). That seems to be where I hear the defences coming from.

Re: Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.

"It also standardises the boot system, whereas if RH had gone for one and Debian for another it would have complicated things."

There was a widely accepted boot system, sufficiently widely accepted to be looked on as a de facto standard. It was RH that changed that with the introduction of systemd. Preference for a standardised boot system is an argument against Red Hat and systemd.

"I have a news flash: Linux went corporate 15 years ago and the image of the talented lone programmer contributing to the init system after putting their kids to bed just for the fun of it are long, long past."

Yes we know that. Some of us fought the battles to get Linux into corporate use.

And it wasn't just Solaris & HP-UX in the 1990s. There were a few others about as well; I used some of them back then. They also were corporate and they didn't have this mess.

The difference, I think, is an influx of admins who expect systems to be black boxes with a few things to click on, who don't have the skills to write a shell script if they need one, don't recognise they need one because they don't expect the system to handle anything that hasn't been pre-cooked and don't expect long uptimes (and hence the prattling about cattle not pets).

Re: People are awful

If I were to meet him (assuming I could find someone to pay for me to go on "the conference circuit") would that somehow undo the damage? The primary issue is not actually him, it's the utter mess that he's produced, or at least that's generally attributed to him and which, AFAIK, he hasn't denied responsibility for. There are others to share the blame of foisting this stuff on us in the way Jake has outlined above. Nevertheless the responsibility stops with him.

It matters not whether he's approachable or not. For all i know "he" could have been a group of people hiding behind a nom de plume and it wouldn't have made any difference. It is the technical differences that matter.

Re: Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.

Red Hat's focus is on servers.

I wonder if his team will actually survive. Even if it doesn't I don't hold out much hope for repairing the damage.

Or maybe some WONTFIXes now become WILLFIXes

Re: Motive found.

He should be right at home. he's spent long enough backstabbing Linux.

"parts of the Unix stack are badly in need of a refurb"

Yes, there's a lot of cruft to be cleaned off.

Re: one step forward

Make it more obfuscated? That will challenge even his talents.

Boris Johnson set to step down with tech legacy in tatters

Re: Direct your ire...

You have missed my more general point which, I think, raises a serious and significant issue.

You would like to see honest people with technical nous in government, as would most if not all of us here. But if the default attitude to anyone in politics is unthinkingly hostile how do you think that's going to happen. Who, as an honets techie, would take that step? The hostility is going to select for the thick-skinned, venal or power-hungry and block just the sort of candidates we'd prefer.

This is something that needs to be addressed and it's going to take a good deal more thought than simply picking a group and dismissing them as corrupt. It's also going to take more thought than simply dismissing the Tories as a party of corruption especially if that involves ignoring what seems to me to be an inherently corrupt association between the unions* and Labour and a number of well documented examples of corruption in local government.

* Who,in my limited dealings with them as a former member, regard their rank and file as no more than sources of income and cannon fodder.

Re: Direct your ire...

"future action"

Sir, I admire your optimism.

Re: 37 Billions

"It wasn't reasonable to pay Deloittes £1K/day for outsourced and mostly clueless call centre droids who had nothing to do. It wasn't reasonable to pay £6K+/day for senior Deloittes staff who have no medical expertise and knew fuck all about pandemics or public health."

Nor to be apparently unaware that the experise already existed at local level.

Re: Slimming the government

"So does that mean the civil servants in those departments will just sit around waiting for new ministers"

More likely they'll heave a sigh of relief and get a few things done without ministerial interference and changes of mind.

Re: Slimming the government

True, and I'd rather have Jim Hacker.

"some people finding him amusing"

And some people - like the ERG - finding him useful.

Re: Direct your ire...

Looking at some of the contenders who've been listed there do seem to be a few with real-world experience there. Whether they survive the Westminster back-stabbing is a differen matter.

But it's going to be difficult to recruit anyone of competence when the reaction of so many is to simply brand them as corrupt without even looking at all closely. Would you or any of the other commentards here step up to that? I wouldn't although I'm a bit long in the tooth for that anyway.

Re: Direct your ire...

I also have taken part in such projects. I've also seen at least one institutionally incompetent department (and it was incompentent over 50 years ago when I encountered it a s a member of the public). But the critical phrase in what you point out is "well-defined requirements".

Re: Direct your ire...

"For all the armchair experts who will loudly tell you they knew it would all go wrong"

Slight problem with the tenses here. All along there have been plenty of people saying it will go wrong. Foresight, not hindsight. If the bystanders could see that why couldn't the participants? Wilful ignorance seems likely.

Re: 37 Billions

Manners!

Baroness Harding if you're going to be polite - or wish to point out the ridiculous.

Probably not. She'll want something newer. Whether BoJo will now be able to find someone to fix it it a different matter.

Re: Sub-sea nukes

Good citation.

IOW renewables ≊ Gas and >> Coal which is not something I'd have expected a couple of decades ago.

Somehow today's Dilbert has some resonance: https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-07-07

Will he take the wallpaper with him when he leaves?

WCL bags UK government framework for 'everything ICT'

"At all times choice, service, quality and cost is paramount"

As in quick, good, cheap; choose any two.

Microsoft cloud exec accused of verbal attack on staff exits

Other news from Microsoft is that Poeterring has joined them. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Systemd-Creator-Microsoft

Vendors are hiking prices up to 30 percent and claiming 'it's inflation'

Re: It's shit like this...

"Oven ready deals" aplenty

You just have to work out who's the goose that's been cooked.

Re: It's shit like this...

"dump the lot as a big flat file"

There'll be a nice contract market for anyone with data transformation skills. And one for fitting out data centres PDQ.

Re: Ask for explanations is the best you can do ?

It might fall on deaf ears because they know what they're going to charge you per bit to migrate your data out.

"If you receive such demands, Rosenberger's advice is to make your vendor explain exactly why they've hiked prices."

"There's the vice and there are your balls in it. Pay up."

Pentester says he broke into datacenter via hidden route running behind toilets

Simple

A piece of piss really.

Re: False floors too

"I dread to think how many bodies you were hiding down there."

No room for them - too many cables. That's why the BOFH favours carpet, quicklime and a shallow grave in dense woodland.

Re: Caught with their trousers down!

So did he.

Marriott Hotels admits to third data breach in 4 years

Re: clients

Richi. There's a Freudian slip.

And the providers of that "protection" seem to be the credit reference agencies who already hold so much data about you that they're already proven targets.

Re: clients

The truth of that is that you never get rid of the geld. It was Richi Sunak's lot that were collecting it recently - who'll be in charge when you read this is anyone's guess.

Re: Motivation

Due dilligence needs to be a lot more dilligent.

Re: "A deliberate and considered lack of competant action": fire and forget

He sounds like an excellent fit with the rest of BT muppets top management.

Near-undetectable malware linked to Russia's Cozy Bear

Re: insistently dumb

Every week I hear of users who _demand_ to open any email and attachment they receive.

Sign this:

"I request permission to open any email attachment I choose. I acknowledge that I have been warned about the risks this brings to the business which pays my salary and confirm that I understand that warning and those risks. If this request is granted this document becomes my unconditional resignation effective immediately an attachment I open causes damege.

Signed ........................"

Re: Cunning ?

Your average HR bod is about the same risk to their employer as your average sales and marketing bof.

"Hacker was a very average minister" - Yes Minister Diaries.