Posts by Doctor Syntax

Meta proposes doing away with leap seconds

Re: Expected more

The cumulative effect of them eventually stopping would reverse this. To avoid it you'd have to keep them going perpetually.

Upgrading what might be the world's oldest running Linux install

Re: Triggers Broom

Arkwright? Trigger? Sounds more like Jason than Theseus.

Re: Well well well

The upgrade to Jessie must have been interesting, given that Jessie was the first with systemd

Dammit - horses!

This must surely be one of the paramount examples of a "server as a pet", as contrasted with the devops style of systems management: "servers as cattle".

Them's not pets, them's work hoses.

Re: Triggers Broom

On tin but clearly not original tin.

One thing that surprised me - and himself - in his account was that he spent 5 hours remotely rebuilding his rescue system, an ancient 2Gb USB device. I think I'd have just built a new one, posted it off to the colo and asked them to plug it in. (OTOH would I be happy with a colo that just plugged in a USB drive they were sent?)

Re: Triggers Broom

The linked account (well worth the read, BTW) doesn't suggest that it's virtualised but it does say "Obviously it’s had several new hardware platforms too." so, yes, definitely Trigger's broom.

Fedora sours on Creative Commons 'No Rights Reserved' license

I'd guess some or maybe many were licenced as CC0 in good faith in the belief that it was the least encumbered licence available. The first step should be for the Document Foundation (LibreOffice) and distros to ask those authors who can be traced to relicense or add a patent waiver. That should identify the scale of remediation needed.

Given the number in LO perhaps el Reg could ask the Document Foundation for their comments and report back.

Windows Start Menu not starting? You're not alone

Re: Start menu? Who needs it?

"Just tested, Synpatics. I get everything bar the link to the synatics app that is installed on this laptop"

But what were you actually looking for?

Re: Surprised? Nah!

"MS wants to get rid of the start menu stuff. Search is for everything in their mind"

Like a kind of reinvented command line,

I think I'll just stick with something where start menus, searches and command lines all work.

Your job was probably outsourced for exactly the reason you suspected

Re: Outsourcing problems are generally in house

"what is often missed is that the terms of a contract is the maximum you will receive, not the minimum"

And still less than the minimum of that's actually needed.

That's specification. (US will also assume (a) everyone lives in cities and (b) all postal codes are purely numeric. I've also come across an assumption on a German site that all street addresses have a number.)

Re: Welcome to

And on the product miles needed to import.

Re: Execs greed

Contractual matters are subject to civil law. Unless it constitutes fraud it won't come under criminal law at all. But if the contract doesn't allow it then it would appear to ba a breach of contract and the client should decide how to deal with it. Letting it slide might be one way. Not a good way unless "good" includes covering the our-sourcing protagonist's blushes.

Re: NERD HOLDS COMPANY HOSTAGE.... TIME TO OUTSOURCE

"So now you either go broke or YOU MOVE to where you can get steel."

What do you do when you find that the steel and/or fabrication you've found abroad doesn't meet spec and parts fail?

Re: NERD HOLDS COMPANY HOSTAGE.... TIME TO OUTSOURCE

"AI will be able to."

Only 5 years away. Fully autonomous road vehicles will follow as soon as the AI has written the code for them.

This was a known problem with consultancies back in the '80s if not earlier.

Years ago the IR, as it then was, had this one sussed. To combat it they had a specimen contract for services on their site which included provision for a "key man" clause. Such a clause specified that a named person from the supplier was to have a given role in the performance of the services and could not be replaced without the client's agreement. I think I may even have a copy of it somewhere.

It stayed on for some time after IR35 was introduced but then disappeared to be replaced IIRC by some very vague guidance about how to contract for services. The fact that it could have been presented to a tribunal as proof that the IR did not consider naming an individual as being inconsistent with a contract for services might have been entirely coincidental, of course.

Taken as included.

Re: Realistic rates

"But we know that bean-counters have no column for quality in their spreadsheet."

Add in a few columns for remediation, support, training & so on that are the otherwise hidden costs of poor quality. Then work out RoI after a few years and base the bonuses on that. It means that collecting bonuses means a long term commitment and a vested interest in quality..

A bit of a whoosh there, Terry. In the post which I was querying it's synthetic phonetics, not measurement which was being characterised as an arcane skill to be taught, and hence learned, as a base skill before reading.

Something arcane is exotic, specialised, used only in limited circumstances and needed by few people. That is the exact opposite of a base skill except as a base for something at least equally arcane. It's being presented here as a base for teaching reading. I hope reading is still far from an arcane skill in schools.

Which is why I regard the statement that "Synthetic phonics is an arcane base skill that should be learned before reading" both alarming and mystifying. It seems to me that educational theorists have gone deep down some rabbit-hole and left behind a world where we can sit down with our pre-school children and Ladybird 1a, 1b, 2a etc and just teach them to read.

"Funny how we never outsource senior management jobs..."

No need to. Those can always be done badly in-house.

"Synthetic phonics is an arcane base skill that should be learned before reading"

As a by-stander in all this I find the above somewhere between mystifying and alarming. If it's an arcane skill why is it taught/learned at all?

However this exchange does at least underline my original statement: measurement is is hard.

Re: Welcome to

Don't get mad, get even.

Re: Execs greed

"Predominantly, irrespective of culture, people at the lower levels of organisations are hard working, ethical and honest."

But not necessarily adequately trained.

I've told this before. I did contract work that involved liaising with one of the Usual Suspects who was very keen on all the parties working on their contracts exchanging data in XML. The Usual Suspect had an ongoing contract with an Indian S/W house. They did development in the UK but with staff shipped in on, I suspect, 6 month visas from India.

My first contact was having to explain to their developer why you couldn't just have a name such as O'Neill in the middle of an element in XML and how you had to handle that apostrophe (these day's I'd have to go and look it up myself but this was a long time ago).

The problem was fixed but then every now and again an incoming document would be checked at as not well-formed XML and there would be a naked apostrophe, presumably the consequence of someone either removing code they didn't understand or adding a new bit of code and not knowing to check.

Clearly inexperienced staff were being set on the job without ever being trained on the minutiae of the XML at the core of their client's projects. In effect my client, another subcontractor, was having to may my fees to train their staff for them.

OTOH it was a relief when we ducked one of the English bullshitters they'd contracted and we could talk to the more experienced, higher level Indian staff.

Re: We outsourced to India

"Doesn't sound like the problem originated in India."

But it developed there and as we know all problems originate with manglement.

Re: Realistic rates

VW?

For the OP's case the measures would appear to be how much of it doesn't have to be rewritten and what's the overall cost when it's ready to ship, including both the out-sourcing bill and the rewrite costs. If they have the resources they could do a comparison - cost and total elapsed time of out-sourcing plus in-house, in-house cost split out from that and cost anfd in-house time of writing from scratch with a separate in-house team.

Couldn't connect to West Europe SQL Databases last week? Blame operator error

"the company is to take a long, hard look at service resiliency."

Surely it's been looking already. Oh, sorry, I read that as "for" not "at".

Browsers could face two regimes in Europe as UK law set to diverge from EU

Re: FUD?

If a site has a journey my journey is via the Back button.

Browsers could face two regimes in Europe the UK. Or are we ceasing to regard N Ireland as being part of the UK?

If this law passes - and, sadly, you may be correct to say "after" - UK law may not be considered adequate for protection of data transfers from the EU. That decision will be entirely that of the EU irrespective of the Department of Culture media's hopes in para 17 of its impact statement (see my comment above).

If the adequacy ruling is lost it doesn't matter whether some company continues to follow GDPR or not, at best it will have to jump through extra hoops AKA (standard clauses) to try to prove to EU regulators that it's compliant and even them might find that someone like Max Schrems takes action in the courts to show that the clauses don't mean anything.

Re: Quo Bono?

Gullible and stupid people

They were voting for "we'll take back control" and thought that "we" included themselves.

"Likewise, in theory when the EU parliament makes a regulation (as opposed to a directive) then it automatically takes effect across the entire EU.

In actual fact, most countries have their own parliaments and their own courts who feel that they, and not the EU council run their countries, and they don't implement things that don't meet the requirement of their laws."

Let me draw your attention to the fact that the Idiot Tendency in UK politics were concerned by the fact that Parliament and courts really were constrained by the EU council and didn't like it. Hence we've now got to where we are now - a government operating without adult supervision coming out with just such a mess.

I haven't looked at the Slovenia situation but I'd expect that the EU is - I recall reading about the EU leaning on Poland for political interference with the courts. The ultimate sanction would, I suppose, be suspension of those countries from the EU as punishment.

I think that last remark has just enlightened me as to why the UK has opted for what would otherwise be regarded as a punishment - a government run by public schoolboys.

Re: Finally

"I bet it's Nadine"

It does indeed emanate from the Department of Culture media.

Re: Quo Bono?

"Lose the adequacy agreement and the UK loses access to easy data exchange with the EU"

In this respect it's interesting to look at the impact assessment (you can find in linked on https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3322/publications )

From that:

"17. EU Adequacy decisions are adopted through a unilateral, autonomous EU process controlled and managed by the European Commission. As the UK diverges from EU GDPR, the risk that the EU revokes its Adequacy decision increases. EU Adequacy decisions do not require an ‘adequate’ country to have the same rules, and the Government’s view is that reform of UK legislation on personal data is compatible with the EU maintaining free flow of personal data from Europe."

My emphasis; Rice-Davies applies. But it's not HMG that makes the adequacy statement, it's the EU.

It gets wilder in para 18 which estimates the potential costs:

"we estimate the impact of Adequacy with the EU being discontinued on top of these measures to be between £190 and £460 million in one-off SCC costs and an annual cost of between £210 and £410 million in lost export revenue when taking a micro approach to modelling. The analysis does not attempt to assign probabilities but simply estimates the impact in the event of loss of Adequacy. The trade impacts are the direct reduction in UK-EU trade and the impact may be larger when accounting for interactions with onward supply chains with trade with third countries."

It continues with the remarkable statement:

"As there is uncertainty in both the likelihood and timing of any decision, the impact is not included in the net present value or other measures in the summary of the IA."

In other words we think we're OK (17) so we'll just ignore it (18).

Re: Finally

Become?

Re: And nothing of value was achieved …

"Since most sites want to drop cookies associated with advertising and tracking"

Why should sites be wanting to do this instead of just doing it?

If they're in the EU they do have laws campatible with GDPR. They have GDPR.

A character catastrophe for a joker working his last day

Re: Nothing so severe

Maybe classical music would have been more effective, especially modern classical.

Re: get-aduser | set-aduser

"The passwords had to all be reset again to something unique to the user (DoB and NI number I recall) so that it could be communicated widely. There was then the 2 day password retention rule that prevented anyone changing their password for a couple of days afterwards."

Errr. The passwords were set to something that was, at least in theory, knowable by others and then prevented a change by the user? Surely the requirement should have been to enforce a change on next login.

A "Senior management keep out" notice on the door of the plant room might have been even better.

Re: Not final day antics ....

"supported a PDP11/73 that was holding up a garage"

It conjures up a sort of inverted pyramid/Atlas image.

Infosec not your job but your responsibility? How to be smarter than the average bear

"This basic equation, the cost to the attacker versus the value of what they might get, is the cheapest yet most effective infosec aid on the market."

Also include the elapsed time taken to attack vs the time the information is likely to remain valuable.

Honor moving team out of India for 'obvious reasons,' says CEO

If the reasons are obvious then obviously you don't need to say what they are. Or am I needlessly stating the obvious?

DARPA seeks portable muon-making machine to see through almost anything

"DARPA is on the lookout for folks with experience providing Petawatt-level laser facilities, muon target design, and HPC systems to run simulations, among other esoteric skills."

And the best they can offer such rare birds is a 2 year gig with a possible 2 year extension?

Given the nature of post-doc employment this will actually look good.

My smartphone has wiped my microSD card again: Is it a conspiracy?

Re: The Bit-Theory

In SQL that's True, false, null.

That's your fault for taking it into a hostile environment.

I've been fired, says engineer who claimed Google chatbot was sentient

"How do you explain that then!"

Sheer luck.

Is the AI missing him? It seems like a good test.

How to get Linux onto a non-approved laptop

Re: Old linux person here....do not understand......

I've also done something like that. I reckon that if there's a H/W problem it helps to have the original OS in place so I'd already made a recovery image. It was an interesting experience restoring that after the Linux functionality had been moved over to a new laptop. It wouldn't restore unless secure boot was turned off. Despite having updated itself several times it still, on the rare occasions I boot it, complains that the OneDrive S/W that came with the machine isn't the right version for the machine - although this may be because it was an ex-demo purchase when Staples were closing down.