Posts by Doctor Syntax

Bad news, older tech workers: Job advert language works against you

Re: Anon CVs

Word of mouth recommendations come from people who already have the information you'd otherwise see on the CV. That's very different from a mere covering letter.

I find it difficult to understand exactly what you'd expect to see on a CV from someone with a couple of degrees and 20 years post-doc experience that wouldn't distinguish them in terms of age from someone who has 6 years work experience after leaving school at the earliest opportunity but would nevertheless enable you to decide which to follow up.

I wonder if a couple of the authors are reading and downvoting here without bothering to explain why this was thought to have been an acceptable procedure.

I suppose the longer version of that is that the existing staff are on final salary schemes. New staff will be recruited into defined contribution schemes with far fewer long term implications. That also applies to older recruits but it might be difficult to get away with making older staff redundant and then replacing them at the same seniority level.

Re: Examples?

That would be over-familiar; very bad form.

Re: Not New News

s/we don't believe in/we're crap at/

Re: Examples?

"What's ageist in that ?"

It probably discriminates in favour of older workers so not really a good control. Syill, probably close enough for economists.

Re: So?

"I really don't want to go on a recruitment merry-go-round only to then discover that the environment is just not for me."

It sounds as if this research put numerous people on a recruitment merry-go-round for jobs that didn't even exist, all to prove the bleedin' ovious. What did their Universities' ethics committees make of that one? Why does it remind me of that research project submitting bad pull requests to Linux?

New Outlook feature: It freezes up when dealing with tables in emails

What's needed isn't an email client that attempts to render HTML. What's needed is one that autoreplies with a message that the email has been delete, please resend in plain text.

No, scrub that as a client. What's needed is a server that bounces the message. Also one which bounces if the ReplyTo: is noreply or the message contains text to that effect.

Re: ...and on Mac, don't dare to use emojis

Good advice all round.

You can write a message for content and clarity.

"The fault lies with both the client systems and message designers"

Message designers? If you have a message designer you're 100% doing it wrong.

Re: Plain Text

And:

the flow

breaks up

Top-posting

HTML email. There's the problem right there.

Chromebooks are here to stay thanks to COVID, even though shipments crashed: IDC

Re: School's out for ever

Does the Debian version get upgraded when a new one is released? Or maybe they use Sid?

I thought the whole point of a Chromebook was lock in to Google services.

Oracle staff share news of sizable layoffs

I don't suppose the licence audit teams are going to be cut.

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

Re: “Drums”

If it was anything like the fixed disk installed in the QUB mainframe back about 1970 the exis would have to be aligned with the Earth's, IOW it had to be set up to allow for the sit's latitude. If it wasn't aligned precession would have ruined its bearings.

"trying to accelerate boot times"

I suspect the time loading from SSD into RAM is now a good bit shorter than the time taken to probe the hardware, find what's there and initialise it.

Re: One thing may be data files...

Boot a Linux system and it probes for peripherals. I assume that Windows does too and has done since the Plug and Pray came into use. If it finds something it loads the driver. If you initially boot your persistent memory device, use it, switch off and later restart having plugged in or unplugged something how does it cope with that? If persistent memory means, for example, it can be just switched off and on again it will continue without making the necessary driver adjustments.

I suppose you could have all the drivers loaded all the time but then there are probably many more times the drivers that need to be there and the kernel needs to manage all those. What worked on a Spectrum doesn't necessarily play well with modern hardware.

To make use of a very different memory model requires a different approach to software; I think we're all agreed on that. The question is, whose responsibility is it to develop that. Intel seems to have put the hardware together on the basis of "Build it and they will come.". They didn't. I'm sure that Intel will have contributed drivers to enable Optane to work in as a conventional filesystem device or as a cache but it doesn't appear that they have done the development work for the novel approach that would be needed to make it a persistent memory device.

When I bought my current laptop I had the option of configuring it with an Optane or SSD. I looked at that, thought I'd vaguely heard of Optane but didn't really know what it was I was being offered or how I might be able to use it and it seemed expensive for the the size. So I plumped for a 2Tb hard drive for /home & /srv and an SSD big enough to hold the rest at least a couple of times over.

Optane didn't have the price per Gb to make it a mainstream storage device nor the software support to make it a mainstream persistent memory device. The former was probably an insuperable problem. The latter might have been a possibility but it would have needed at least a proof of concept OS to take advantage of it and enough time for that to be built on.

It probably was a good idea. It just wasn't useful enough. To make it useful it would have needed a big change in OS design. Without that the niche didn't really exist.

The thing about files is that the provide pieces of storage with a purpose.

This collection of bytes is a cat picture, that is a letter and the one over there is a spreadsheet. I want to delete the cat picture and email the letter (or vice versa). Even as regards programs, this is the desktop manager and is in use pretty well all the time. That' one is dia and I only use it every few weeks or even months when I need to edit a diagram. By allocating names to them we're able to manage them.

Files are an essential part of managing data. Even without secondary storage we had files. They were boxes of cards or (probably) card images on tape.

Sage accused of misselling perpetual licenses it knew would soon be obsolete

Don't forget that these are the folks who'll push all sorts of crazy cost-cutting ideas.

Having said that I've mentioned here before the client's accountants who, having been provided with and completed user acceptance testing of a nice Y2K compatible version of their S/W running on brand new H/W insisted on not taking the risk(!) of moving from their old, non-Y2K capable version until they'd finished closing out 1999 in mid-January 2000.

Take the refund. Take the free year's subscription. Spend the year looking at migrating to a package from some other vendor.

Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols closes hailing frequencies

Science fiction I can take or leave - well, leave, really. But to have sung with Ellington - that is special.

Lapping the computer room in record time until the inevitable happens

Re: Not just IT

"we were able to feign ignorance over the loss of the roller shutter."

Until now.

Homes in London under threat as datacenters pull in all the power

Re: Not near wind farms

"The one thing holding it back? Initial cost."

If the politicians could just take some time from slugging it out with each other to look at what's important they might get round to some form of tax incentives - positive and negative to push people into it.

Re: Not near wind farms

Sometimes you just have to move to where the work is. I've done that a few times, It was pure good luck I ended up back where I started.

Re: Not near wind farms

The off-shore ones are more reliable. They also have a good connection to the grid so that a data centre close to the landfall is going to have a reliable supply even if the wind isn't blowing much off-shore.

The problem seems to be power distribution capacity rather then generation. Given that it's easier to move data than power we should see data centres clustered round power stations. That would include the landing points of the off-shore wind farms.

It's not too difficult to envisage trade-offs - housing developers buying a data centre's power allocation when it moves.

It's on: Twitter vs Elon Musk trial to start October 17

"But I get the feeling an amount of irreparable harm has already been done to both parties"

Who are the actual parties? Musk, yes. Twitter the business? No. The other party is the Twitter shareholders. Whether irreparable harm has been done to them depends on the court's decision and the court is likely to protect them if it sees them as victims. Irreparable harm to Twitter the business? Very likely but it's just the football.

Re: I don’t have a dog in this fight

"Then every other private and public company board is going to panic and move their registration from Delaware."

Not really. In terms of corporate governance there's Musk and there's the rest.

Re: I don’t have a dog in this fight

If you translate that to English you get "We have no evidence to support ..."

I thinkt that could be translated further still: "Our fees are being paid.".

I can't think of many things that he could do to aggravate the judge more. However, this is Musk. Although presumably there'd be some administrative hurdles to jump. Would these include shareholder agreement. It might also prompt Twitter to ask the court to take control of his shares pending a decision.

Bill Gates venture backs effort to bring aircon startup to market

Re: Smoothing of use rather than cost??

"The more appliances such as these aircons, electric cars, domestic heat pumps etc can adapt to consume 'cheap' electricity, the smoother the consumption curve will be, until you will basically have a flat demand, and no 'cheap rate' electricity - at least not in the sense we now know it where night-time electricity is cheaper because of reduced demand. Instead what will probably happen is that the cost of electricity will depend almost totally on available supply rather than demand"

It's the other way round. Some uses are elective and some aren't. By reducing the price when non-elective use is lowest steers the elective demand to those times. It's the variable pricing that would smooth the demand, not the smoothed demand that would kill the variable pricing.

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

Re: Good on you for following through with plod

"one has to ask about the met's motivation"

That's been asked for quite a long time.

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

Re: freestanding!

Other Bobs are available.

Re: Before computers we used to make stuff that worked

"the ignition system that was right behind the front grille"

I believe the car was designed with the ignition facing inwards. Late in development the engine was turned round, hence the grille-facing ignition and the noisy gearbox. I suppose the original version had problems routing the exhaust. It would also have had problems with frozen carburettors in winter.

Re: Edison

Invention is for schmucks, just get be a lawyer.

FTFY

Re: Before computers we used to make stuff that worked

"I'm hoping something similar will happen with digital stuff."

It won't Making cheap expensive stuff that wears out is far more profitable.

My dad worked for David Brown Tractors. The farmers couldn't wear them out. DBT were taken over and closed down years ago.

Re: Tune in, turn on, then say goodbye

"if potential customers stop buying subscription-based stuff"

Marketing have put in an awful lot of work to ensure they don't.

Re: Physical media is still the best

"I'm not paranoid. I'm experienced."

They really are out to get you so it's the only wa to be.

Re: re: streaming services and content

Mythbox FTW.

Re: re: streaming services and content

The "g" stands for "group", not "guy".

Re: re: streaming services and content

Belfast had a dental supplier who branched out into video rental. It seemed an odd pairing. He said there was far more money tied up in the video side.

In case you're curious I used to buy plaster of Paris there.

Re: Dubbed Content

"It might make sense for some people in specific situations, but for the average Joe (and myself), buying is much more advantageous."

The "some people" are the vendors. They matter Average Joes don't.

Re: Dubbed Content

That still falls short of the Clangers approach - don't speak it, just play it on a Swanee whistle.

Re: Dubbed Content

Scotland must have been worse off. We usually timed holidays to miss the 12th and travelling through Scotland, at least on the return, the shops would already have been full of "Back to School" promotions.

Re: You know you're old when...

Milk in tea is optional undesirable.

BOFH: Selling the boss on a crypto startup

Dammit. My fingers seem to want to refuse to type the book's annoying "schema are"! If that's what the downvote was for, you were quite correct.

Decentralized IPFS networks forming the 'hotbed of phishing'

Re: Bit rich to blame ipfs

A big problem here is that marketing departments persist in training customers to be phished by repeatedly sending out emails indistinguishable from phishing. The emails purport to come from the company but actually come from a spamming digital marketing company and invite the recipient to click on links. The worst of all are those (banks I'm looking at you) who include links that require a log on. They may claim to have undertaken anti-phishing training but to send out such emails they must regard responding to such emails as normal and their resistance to them is likely to be weak. And, of course, their victims customers are being trained to be phished.

The most useful thing the Online Safety Bill could do would be to include a clause punishing such behaviour with a mandatory 1% global turnover fine. Preferably doubling it for each successive batch sent.

This is what to expect when a managed service provider gets popped

"The reason is quite simple: for proper IT organisation you need expertise at multiple levels and money."

This is a managed service provider. Providing multiple levels of expertise is their job. It's not some small fashion retailer down the street, this is what they do for other people for a living. The entire business is paid to provide expertise.

FWIW my last gig before I retired was at a digital print service provider. Not quite the same as this but providing a secure IT-based service was their job. A separation between the office and the production system was absolutely fundamental to the way they worked. That was the best part of a couple of decades ago; it could be done then and its should be done now.

I do wonder, however, if a managed service provider could be vulnerable via one of their customers. If so then segmentation between customers should be standard.