Posts by Doctor Syntax

First they came for Notepad. Now they're coming for Task Manager

The principle of interfaces when they came into computer science was that the interface, by remaining unchanged* enabled the developer to improve the the implementation behind it whilst not requiring the user of the interface to change in step. What does the I in GUI stand for? That's right - interface. So why is that simple principle not being followed?

What really gets up my nose about this is that Microsoft imposes non-optional GUI changes on its victims supporters who then argue that Microsoft can't be ditched for anything else because of the training costs it would involve. Stockholm Syndrome?

* Of course a new facility could require the interface to be augmented but it shouldn't be broken.

Web daddy Tim Berners-Lee on privacy, data sharing, and the web's future

Re: "bank transactions go to your Solid pod"

Once the bank has taken a look at it in your Pod that portion of your data's also in the bank and you still don't have control of it there.

Re: Solid?

"we can't even expect this from the industry leaders, let alone the criminals."

But you repeat yourself.

Re: Optimism.... I'd forgotten what it looks like.

The WWW is not the internet and vice versa

Fujitsu wants technology to shape a better future – its technology, of course

Yes, this futurism stuff is a matter of gazing at the distant Horizon.

Let's not let that one drop until some of those really responsible find themselves gazing at it from the dock.

COVID-19 was a generational opportunity for change at work – and corporate blew it

"Weirdly, it's considerably more cost-effective to create one shared workspace that's properly equipped and comfortable than to find some way to create and furnish home offices for each person individually."

But where do you create it? Somewhere convenient to where a number of employees live and maybe another one elsewhere for another group? Or in some city centre only reached by a long and unpleasant commute for all of them?

Re: A different point of view...

"Oh, you're doing x ?, do you know you can do it this way?", "You're working on an issue that affects Y? I saw something similar last week and resolved it this way..." "I'm trying to figure out how to do Z. Oh I spoke with someone yesterday, there's an issue with it"

The key is communicating, not communicating face-to-face. I think one of the significant factors in those who find that working at home works is having a good communication infrastructure. That may be no more than email. You can hold a productive conversation over email. I recall one such conversation between myself in Yorkshire and a collaborator in California - I was eating my lunch at the same time (and probably keeping an eye on Bargain Hunt).

Re: On the flip-side...

Gone are the days when problems would get solved because you happened to take a coffee break at the same time as a colleague etc

Yes, you could never develop anything really complex, such as an OS kernel, without having all the team in one building, sharing coffee breaks, looking over each others' shoulders and so on.

Re: Strawman

Learning to live with Covid is a matter of learning to minimise the damage. Commuting into offices is not going to do that.

I've found that a couple of local utilities had call centre staff working at home.

Party on Semiconductor Street as worldwide 2021 revenues top record half a trillion dollars

Let's do a thought experiment.

The industry is working along those lines. You're a decision maker at a vendor. You realise that there's a whole lot of potential new customers out there that your company can supply by not artificially restricting output. What do you do?

UK government backs away from proposals to remove individuals' rights to challenge AI decision making

Re: Right to challenge decisions

Where a human makes a decision there is the ultimate resort of asking how the decision was made. In the case of "computer says no" that does not exist if the program does not have a means of explaining and justifying the decision.

Meta Platforms demands staffers provide proof of COVID-19 booster vaccine before returning to office

Re: Good.

99% survival of 100 infected people is 1 dead. 99% survival of 1 million is 10,000 dead. So far in the UK alone we have >150,000 dead.

If the unvaxed are able to continue working from home it might result in a worse take-up.

UK regulators to scrutinise cloud resilience in response to financial services sector's reliance on the fluffy stuff

Banks and other financial services are among the stampede of businesses betting the farm on the cloud computing in the hope it can offer "modernisation", flexibility, and reduced cost.

It's always a concern to see modernisation as an end in itself rather than a means to some other, more practical ends.

While they're looking at this perhaps BofE could also consider data sovereignty.

Canon: Chip supplies are so bad that our ink cartridges will look as though they're fakes

You should have passed it on to a Linux user. I still have an old 2030 in operation via a JetDirect box.

"There is no negative impact on print quality when using consumables without electronic components"

That quote was from Canon, not HP. By all means use it - but attribute it correctly for maximum impact.

hackers can exploit a "vulnerability where the supply chip meets the printer"

Easily fixed. No chip, no interface for chip, no vulnerability.

Detecting a cartridge that's run out of ink? Easy. Just look at the output.

Data centre outfit Interxion hit with outage at central London facility

"the electronic switchgear designed to change the power over to an on-site generator also failed"

It's always DNS - except when it's UPS.

Another day, another ERP project behind schedule: This time it's Norfolk County Council and an Oracle system

Re: Not a rhetorical question

You'd need an Oracle to tell you that.

Signal CEO Moxie Marlinspike resigns, leaves WhatsApp co-founder to run things until a successor is named

Re: invites all sorts of government investigative and regulatory meddling

Could you explain in a little more detail how any app promising anonymity, privacy etc. is going to do so without attracting the ire of the Pritti Patels of this world? It's the confidential communication that really gets their attention.

Re: Bloat?

Given that Signal is open source I wonder how much of it Threema uses.

Mobile networks really hate Apple's Private Relay: Some folks find iOS privacy feature blocked on their iPhones

Re: Cry me a river (of fake tears)

"he advertiser doesn't know who is watching their ad"

And they don't know what that person's attitude to ads might be. Suckers.

There is an alternative for any network bright enough to use it: be the one provider who doesn't block it. No need to raise prices to increase revenue, the extra customers will provide it.

Perseverance on the rocks: Pebbles clog up the rover's Martian sample collection

Pebbles or pebble sized? Pebbles suggests well water-worn material to me.

JavaScript dev deliberately screws up own popular npm packages to make a point of some sort

Re: Software license is the answer

If the code is used without modifications neither permissive nor copyleft licences are going to make much difference. If it is modified then if it's copyleft the distributor has to make the changes available to the recipient but it still doesn't bring payment.

If someone has developed a package and posts it on Github or anywhere else there's nothing that requires them to make any further changes to it. If a corporate user wants something added then either they do it themselves - forking it if necessary - or offer to pay someone such as the original developer to make the changes. Either way the developer shouldn't feel pressured to simply keep on maintaining it let alone make changes without payment.

These situations seem to arise from someone feeling obligated to continue to maintain something without payment and consequently an expectation by others that they will. That doesn't have to happen.

A fifth of England's NHS trusts are mostly paper-based as they grapple with COVID backlog, warn MPs

Re: thanks for posting this

I once, as part of a contract, did some work on an NHS project. It was clear that the data they held was properly structured. It was all to be passed to my client as flat records with several of the fields out of order concatenated into a single field which we then had to rearrange back into order. I pointed out to them that because some of their fields sometimes contained spaces we couldn't take spaces as implied record separators. After a bit of humming and harring they conceded the point. Getting the data in a sensible format seemed out of the question but they would add a flag to hint how it should be rearranged. The flag ended up with 4 values one of which, used in exceptional cases, indicated we didn't need to rearrange it because they hadn't deranged it.

The project covered England and Wales. Part of the fun depended on deciding which national body contained the definitive version at any one time.

Re: NHS Efficiency

"BTW, what's a cockwomble?"

If you need to ask...

Maybe you're new here.

UK government tool to monitor its legacy application estate is… LATE

There's more to IT than PCs. More even than Pis. Or Macs.

Re: re: O M G !

She'll ensure you have the correct hashtags.

You'll only discover later by just how much you couldn't afford her.

Re: Depends on what you want

NHS Digital doesn't even seem to have any understanding of the words "alpha" and "beta" as they refer to software, at least as far as web sites go, although this seems to extend to other gov.uk sites as well (looking at DVLA).

It seems to have worked for Amber Rudd as well. I see she's just got a non-exec directorship of Centrica. And - please do not read the following whilst eating, drinking or operating machinery - her wokypedia entry describes her as a cyber-security consultant.

It's a very long time since I was in any branch of the Civil Service but at the time I was introducing some IT to the lab. Slightly more recently (it's all a long time ago now) I was working for something with a strong resemblance to the Civil Service in many ways. In either role I'd have been very reluctant to let the sticky fingers of the central organisation near what I was doing - I preferred to keep things working and not have my time wasted by ill-conceived efforts to "help".

The technical term is "failing upwards".

Re: Words Fail Me

Define "they".

"They" as an office (i.e. your local JobCentre) might have an inventory but "they" as a department (ministry) might not have an inventory of what the offices have, nor might it be easy to get one as some offices might not have an inventory.

Alternatively "they" as a department might have an inventory but "they" as the Cabinet Office or whoever it is who's doing this might not - in fact obviously doesn't.

Then we come to define "inventory" and its relationship to reality...

When ERP projects go awry: Surrey County Council incurs £3.2m additional costs in delayed Unit4 project

Re: This Must Never Happen Again

"this is yet another failure that is in part due IT pushing their preferred solution to IT's specification"

I don't see anything in the article to suggest that the council even has an IT department let alone one pushing their preferred solution to their specification. A lack of such could well be a reason for failure.

In practice they probably have quite a lot of processes and stock to manage in terms of providing services such as road maintenance or whatever.

Re: This Must Never Happen Again

Very likely also (D) the "business users" aren't actually the business users, they're manglement at some higher level who think have no experience of what the current system does day to day, how it's actually used and how the new system needs to work and be used day to day.

"Surrey County Council is not the only public authority to hit difficulties implementing Unit4...But council ERP problems are not unique to Unit4..."

It would be interesting to compare the IT staffing levels of these councils with those whose projects don't make such good Register copy.

Spruce up your CV or just bin it? Survey finds recruiters are considering alternatives

And even if the candidate has learned programming at University any expertise with technology released since graduation (and some earlier than that) is likely to have been acquired via self-tuition.

"We discard something like 50% of applicants based solely on the contents of their CV"

I wonder how many of those CVs may have been rewritten by agencies or had originally been sent to the agency for some other job, emphasising a different part of the candidate's skill set.

To err is human. To really screw things up requires a wayward screwdriver

"that fabric coated rubber stuff "

We had that in one house. That was the medium grade cabling. The bad was lead-sheathed paper insulated with the paper turning brittle.

Re: caught in his trousers

I'd have thought moving the disks whilst still spinning was bad enough.

Re: is there a reason

Just normal usage.

Accidentally leaving the socket on the wheel nut is a great way to produce a rattle from within the hubcap and a swift return of the car to the offending mechanic.

GCHQ was rebuked for ignoring spy law safeguards as pandemic hit Britain

No penalties so above the law?

Worst of CES Awards: The least private, least secure, least repairable, and least sustainable

Re: Yup...bad things in the list....but it's actually worse than that!

Your number 3 is similar to my extra one - except that it was along the lines of a government agency could be forcing the operators to force logs (if the weren't keeping them already) and to hand them over. The rest is pretty well what I said.

Not a good idea. But then neither is depending on something easily stolen or lost - a phone - as the key to your life. Paranoia it the minimum standard for personal security.

"I'm still looking for a generic IoT product that isn't solving a problem that is already solved in older and arguably better ways"

And not just IoT products. This and the Moxie Marlinspike article listed above reminded me of an article which came to my attention a few days ago: https://trendoceans.com/a-simple-solution-to-the-private-key-loss-conundrum/

Basically it saves you having to remember your private key by going to an online random password generator which you seed from a piece of arbitrary text of your own choosing and a date. This gives, according to the article, 10 15 character passwords (I tried it and got 20 20 character passwords) from which you select 32 characters and from that generate a 256 bit key. The article provides a shell script for this. Repeat the process to regenerate the key as needed. It struck me that:

1. You now have to use a server whose operators may well be of the utmost probity - I'm sure they are - but who you have to take on trust as you don't know them.

2. You not only have to trust the current operators but any successors whom even the current operators may not know.

3. You have to trust the security of the server and everything linking you to it.

4. You have to hope that the server is still running for as long as you need the key.

5. You have to trust the reliability of the server, namely that it will give the same result each time. Note that the results it gave me a few minutes ago don't match the description in the article although it may be that the article accesses it via curl and I used a browser.

6. In place of not losing the key you've got to not lose the script the article describes or at least you've got to remember the URL and which characters the script picks out from the returned block of text.

7. You've got to remember your seed text and date.

I suppose you could keep all the bits you need to remember in your local Keepass database but then I suppose you could do the same for the private key you're in danger of forgetting.

And have I missed anything out from that list? (I've already thought of one extra.)

Re: unintelligible random sound from person in bed

"the problem pretty much starts with a lack of clear thinking at the design stage"

They're designed to make money. Nothing unclear about that.

Re: NFT?

Having read it I endorse that recommendation.