Posts by Doctor Syntax

BT CEO orders staff: Back to the office or risk 'disciplinary action'

Re: Great advert for their own product

The accountant was probably trying to show him how much money they could save by offloading some of that property.

Re: Agreed

"WFH really is a cultural problem"

It's a cultural issue, certainly. The issue is, does your company culture support it or not. Let me demonstrate:

My daughter had a job for a few years where the HQ was about 150 miles (Cambridge area) or more away but par of the reason she got the job was that it entailed frequent site visits around the M62 corridor, the rest of the time working from home. She could visit the office once ever few weeks.

The next job was office based but started just before the pandemic. A similar sort of line (clinical trials) but this company demanded presenteeism most days. Interestingly the collaborating sites were mostly out of the UK so remote collaboration was essential. Needless to say, once the pandemic struck they went to remote working. A few months ago the company decided they needed to go back to being on site. She handed in her notice. (It was a difficult commute & I was surprised she even took the job in the first place!)

Hew new job is entirely WFH. It seems to be the way this international company operates. She didn't even know where the company's UK address was until I researched it. Interviewing and even onboarding was done remotely.

So there we have a spectrum ranging from working entirely remotely to working very largely from the office. The choice doesn't even correlate well with the nature of collaboration involved. What other factor can be involved other than company culture?

" If you need to interact with a lot of people (and that can include technical roles) then it's a lot harder to do the job completely from home."

Does this mean it would be hard verging on impossible to develop something as complex as an entire OS working completely from home?

"hey are going through a spat of Voluntary Redundancies"

BT is permanently going through a spat of redundancies, voluntary or otherwise.

Internet Society recommends development of Solar-System-scale routing framework

Solar system routing? I thought Copernicus had that sorted years ago.

Excel's comedy of errors needs a new script, not new scripting

Re: Who is to blame?

Back in the day we were analyst/programmers. That meant that we actually talked to users, possibly at their desks to observe processes,* to find out what they did and coded up a solution. Of course that sort of thing was liable to make several layers of manglement unhappy because it didn't need their high-ceremony processes. As a result it seems to have got stamped on rather heavily.

*Remote working wouldn't have made that easy.

EU puts smart device manufacturers on the hook for cyber security

Re: Offline

"If my Magic Doohickey synchronises with my Phone using some discoverable server in a vendor specific cloud, there is no easy answer when the discoverable server stops existing."

Here are a few:

1. Require it to be able to synchronise with your iPhone over your WiFi. It means you can't contact it remotely unless you open your network for incoming connections from your phone. But it's a non-bricking fall-back.

2. Have a manual mode as fall-back.

3. Make it clear to purchasers before buying that you have not made any provision for ongoing operation of the service, that you cannot guarantee to keep operating the service and that if the service lapses the product is bricked. And see how many sales you get then.

TL;DR design your device to fall-back sensibly or tell the customer very clearly they're about to buy a pig in a poke.

Re: "Expected product lifetime ... or five years"

If only marketing departments would start recruiting reasonable persons.

Re: I can understand...

" Companies will work around it, or avoid it altogether."

To be effective and prevent work-rounds it needs to make the entire marketing chain - yes, eBay, that means you - responsible.

Avoiding a well regulated market if you want to ship shoddy goods is quite acceptable to the market. If the manufacturers have a problem with that there's no point coming to me for sympathy. Innovation is no excuse for cutting corners or making customers act as QA.

Re: I can understand...

"Products will be launched where early fixes and revisions are tolerated, and maybe taken to Europe a few years later."

Excellent - up to a point. That means the EU gets good products and elsewhere gets the crap. Up to a point because here in the UK we no longer get that protection.

Microsoft Outlook sends users back to 1930 with (very) mini-Millennium-Bug glitch

Re: Y2K & Date Windowing - THIS IS NOT A BUG

If the current year is meant then a day and month should be sufficient. If provision is made to enter a 2 digit year then the sensible default is to that closest to the current year which is what the user is most likely to expect.

Historical dates are a nightmare. E.g. the archivist classified something as "Early C14th" but looking at it I suspect it could be before another dated in the 1290s and none of the witnesses who are found in other, dated, documents are exclusively C14th.

Re: Y2K & Date Windowing - THIS IS NOT A BUG

I've used LibreOffice entering dates - as 4 digits - back to the C12th. I have no problem with using 4 digit formats. But if the year is set to 2 digits the default should be what a user might find most reasonable and I doubt a date almost a century ago compared to one a few years ahead is not likely to be considered reasonable.

This might have been reasonably considered Good Practice back in 1999 but I can't imagine anyone being able to put forward a cogent argument for its being that almost a quarter of a century later.

Re: Not a glitch

FWIW LibreOffice and OpenOffice Calc are bug-for-bug compatible with Excel in this respect. It's noticeable that the formatting dialog gives 1999 as an example. It's time they caught up on that and I'm disappointed they don't use a sliding window.

the millennium bug was mostly "an overblown scam to suck money into the tech industry"

It's not so long ago that I posted this here, as I have done a few times before but obviously it needs to be repeated:

I had a client who had a non-Y2K compatible version of their accounts S/W. Their old alleged hot standby server (also previously commented on) wouldn't run the newer version so both servers were replaced and UAT completed to the accountants' satisfaction. We planned to cut over between Christmas & New Year. The accountants chickened out and wouldn't let us until they'd closed out 1999 accounts in mid January. It was a torrid couple of weeks with the vendors dialling in (a modem on a serial port!) several times each week to fix the data.

Yes, Y2K really was a genuine problem.

Also politicians saying the experts were wrong & we didn't need lockdowns.

Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic

I couldn't tell how this one was going. I thought it was going to be static from the carpets. Then the cleaners unplugging the system. You don't expect these stories to work out well.

Re: NLQ

"Ahh back in the mists of time when HP printers were good"

And they're probably still working.

Former Reg vulture takes on Nominet – by running for board seat

No comment

A candidate not available for comment? That's a comment in itself.

Google faces fines of up to $25.4b in UK and EU ad tech case

Re: "could face claims of up to €25 billion"

The headline says "fines" but the article says "damages". As it's a civil suit being launched on behalf of publishers the latter makes more sense. Personally I have no objection to ad-merchants slogging it out between themselves indefinitely. My lack of sympathy is equally distributed.

Draft EU AI Act regulations could have a chilling effect on open source software

"Firstly you can put a condition in the license that states that use of the open source component in any commercial application is at the company's own risk, and that the authors of the component do not accept any responsibility for legal problems that this might cause the company."

Something along these lines is fairly standard.

Shape-shifting cryptominer savages Linux endpoints and IoT

Why continue stuffing crypto-mining junk? It was yesterday's fad.

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

Re: Great Britain to distinguish the island from Brittany

I know Ptolemy is regarded as having done a good job regarding details of rivers etc but his was a distant view. The Romans who were actually occupying part of the island were in no doubt that there was only one island called Britannia. Their only distinction was between two provinces within the island.

I doubt Ptolemy was ever consulted about what Wikipedia refers to as the "shared etymology" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittany). cf Bretagne vs Grand Bretagne.

Re: Titles not necessarily constant

Oops. Edward VIII

Re: Titles not necessarily constant

"Is Charles the King of Northern Ireland?"

The title is King of the United Kingsdon of Great Britain* and Northern Ireland.

* Great Britain to distinguish the island from Brittany to where a lot of Britons emigrated after the Anglo-Saxons arrived in what was to become England.

Re: Titles not necessarily constant

Parliament wasn't quite the same thing in middle ages as it is now so you could extend that beyond Charles I. Richard II might be considered an example of that.

But you quote the OP saying "or exiling" and that includes James II as well as Edward VII and even Charles II temporarily.

"to usurp"

Wrong verb.

Re: ta ta Liz

I'd expect her usage to have been cleared in advance.

"Her husband, the late Prince Philip, was less tech savvy. In an infamous case, his personal account on Prestel etc."

I'm not sure about that. It would have taken a degree of tech savvy to have used a Prestel account but even more to the point I think he organised a conference promoting technology many decades ago.

Re: God save our bikkie tin, don’t let the ants get in….

She was working up until two days before her death at 96. Only ill her final illness prevented her holding a meeting the following day. Charles is about 5 years younger than myself. He's stepping up to the next role. I'd already been retired for years at his age.

Rich or not it isn't a fate I'd wish on my worst enemy but I'm grateful that they both accepted it. It means succession to head of state is pre-determined, doesn't involve vote grubbing (whoever you vote for you always get a politician) and is beyond the disgraceful events we saw recently in the US.

Re: no driving licence

Likewise, on the basis of riding motor bikes my dad had a licence for pretty well anything that could go on the road. After a very brief go with my first car on a straight but admittedly narrow bit of quiet road it was decided he'd stick to bikes.

Re: King Andrew in the hot seat

"6. Master Archie Mountbatten-Windsor

7. Miss Lilibet Mountbatten-Windsor"

Now prince and Prince and Princess respectively as grandchildren of a reigning monarch.

Re: She was a good one

Lord Chancellors are appointed by governments. The UK constitution functions by keeping Parliament, the judiciary and the armed forces owing separate allegiance to the state in the form of the monarch.

Re: She was a good one

"his mother deliberately kept him away from any meaningful exercise of royal powers even in her old age"

The reality is that he and the other senior members of the family stepped in to substitute for her on more and more occasions in recent years. And short of an actual regency there's no scope for anyone other than the monarch exercising royal powers in any way, meaningful or otherwise.

BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM

Re: Watch for hidden acronyms.

Citation from the Uxbridge Dictionary?

Re: When M doesn't mean what you think it means

"years were counted from the date a new sovereign accessed his throne"

That was certainly how a lot of legal documents were dated so you need to know on what date in the year the accession fell. An entire published volume of the Wakefield Manorial Rolls has a classic off-by-one error, presumably by misinterpreting that.

Re: Intelligence?

It's an abbreviation. The full version is RH.

Re: When M doesn't mean what you think it means

"That works until you run into someone who uses M to mean thousand."

Have you met our new Secretary of State for business, energy and industrial strategy?

It seems the entire article's an RFC.

Dump these small-biz routers, says Cisco, because we won't patch their flawed VPN

Re: I was all set to be mad

"other vendors who take the small business market seriously."

Or for granted.

Using the datacenter as a dining room destroyed the platters that matter

I may have mentioned this before. Our resident electronics engineer looked after silent alarms for the police - prerecorded messages broadcast on a police wavelength. Most area were on the new UHF systems but there was at leas one on the old VHF and the TX's for that were valve based. He showed me one that had just been returned with a mummified mouse curled up under a valve base.

Re: Nice temperature for beer

"Explains why we'd see very little of him between morning and evening."

And maybe the sudden retirement and ill-health.

Re: Smaller buddies

It might have been an occupational hazard of being a junior doctor. It was of some other professions. De-fleaing oneself was an essential skill in forensic science.

Re: Wine cellar

Was this in the days when bubble memory was a promising technology?

Dead people could be designated authors of Atlassian Confluence docs and that can't be changed

Re: If you ignore a problem long enough

"Where I work, your user ID is based on your initials."

Obligatory Dilbert https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-08-19

Open source databases: What are they and why do they matter?

Re: MariaDb and BSL

NextCloud only recommends SQLite for testing and minimal instances. I suppose this does count as minimal but I take that as "not really for production".

But I'm developing a desktop application for my own use and inclined to SQLite for that.

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Re: Marketing and corporate greed

The mysterious thing is that no matter how disliked the product they still sell.

Or maybe it's not so mysterious. They have effective monopolies. If the user is in their walled garden then they have no option. That in turn explains why there is so much diversity in the FOSS world. There is no walled garden.. There are options and we take advantage of them.

"Why does carmakers produce new models more or less every year. Most likely because they have to look new."

Yes, but as Boris notes - they leave the major controls alone.

Torvalds does the kernel, not the UI nor even the rest of userland*. So there's one thing you clearly didn't know.

And do you know why there are so many Linux desktop environments?

Because the layering of the underlying software makes it possible, because there is no marketing involved so if someone sufficiently talented doesn't like what they're offered they can roll their own and because there are people with different use cases and preferences to keep them all in use.

* Look this term up if it puzzles you.

Re: Too many or too few desktop UIs

"The average user (whether an individual buying for themselves, or management in a business) has no clue about improvements under the hood and will buy on the basis of visible features and bling."

Nobody knows whether there are changes under the hood or not. A change of UI can hide the possibility that there are few or none. But although the first impression might be "Modern" or "Ooo, shiny" the reality soon sets in if usability is compromised or it turns out that resources dedicated to the surface glitz might have been better spent on the quality and functionality of what's actually under the hood.

Re: Agree and Disagree

"One of the things I wish the open source world would do more of is just throw things at the wall to see what sticks."

They've done a fair amount of that and do you know what happens? For the most part users stick with what works for them. For a few that may be exploring the latest shiny. For the rest of us it's KDE, XFCE or whatever. It's particularly noticeable that when Gnome decided to make big changes between versions 2 & 2 the response was not just one but two new projects, Cinnamon and Mate to preserve the original UI. There should be some lessons in that.