Posts by Doctor Syntax

Boris Johnson set to step down with tech legacy in tatters

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?

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.

Re: Three strikes

New directors? No;make three strikes mean out. There needs to be a mechanism to compulorily wind up companies who fail so repeatedly.

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.

Health trusts swapped patient data for shares in an AI firm. They may have lost millions

Re: Absolute v Proportional

Maybe, as per The Producers, they have several hundred percent.

Europe passes sweeping antitrust laws targeting America's Big Tech

Re: They are not equal...

Which just goes to show the risks of using other peoples' computers to perform critical tasks.

UK tribunal: App Store class action seeking up to $1.8b can continue

Despite the headline I assume the UK tribunal is working in £££ and that the actual $$$ value will depend on the rate of exchange at the time.

FedEx signals 'zero mainframe, zero datacenter' operations by 2024

"For those greedy shareholders"

Don't forget you may be one of those shareholders via your pension fund. Pension funds are collectively one of the biggest groups of shareholders. It does worry me, however, when a pension fund buys an entire company.

Re: "where it hopes to save an estimated $400 million annually"

Success at delivering parcels depends entirely on having the right systems to control it. Whether they reslise it or not or whether they like it or not they are an IT business.

Amazon are also in the parcel delivery business wnd realised they were an IT business. That's something FedEx seem not to have noticed.

Gtk 5 might drop X11 support, says GNOME dev

Re: In other news

Except for the occasional GTK-based application that does odd things with scroll bars and just looks out of place in various ways.

"Although the X window system is nearly 40, it still works"

So don't break it, which is the opposite of the Gnome developers.

Re: Wayland is missing one critical feature needed by content creators

"it appears to cut across many of Waylands founding assumptions about information hiding and security"

Assumptions; never a good thing. Make an early design decision to do something specific and you find you've exluded the possibility of doing several other things.

Tuxedo Pulse G2: Linux in your lap

PC Specialist will supply laptops without OS to install your own choice of distro. The base units seem to be maufactured by Clevo but can be configured with a variety of options.

"you may have removed or modified the pre-loaded OS and can't return the machine anyway."

Make a restore image before blowing away Windows.

Will cloud giants really drive colos off a financial cliff?

The thing about bets - you win some, you lose some.

Past performance is no indicator of future returns. Etc.

$185m anti-malware patent dispute: Norton and Columbia University fight on

"The Register contacted Columbia's attorneys as well those for Norton. Both have yet to respond."

Maybe you're lucky - if the responded they might have sent a bill.

Everyone back to the office! Why? Because the decision has been made

Re: that jerk with the annoying voice and that other bastard who sniffs all day.

Brown as PM had an economic meltdown which he inherited from the policies of the chancelor of the previous PM, that chancellor being himself.

People who regularly talk to AI chatbots often start to believe they're sentient, says CEO

Re: Contrast

Where did you find service desk operators with as much as "little"?

Getting that syncing feeling after an Exchange restore

Re: Adages...

Actually you don't even test that the write heads work, just that the backup drive accepts data.

Re: That syncing feeling ...

Always back up the original before syncing.

Re: re: "Schrodingers backup..."

Signetics - now I remember them.

Re: “Write only memory”

"You also had a single pixel monitor and it didn’t matter if it was lit or not."

Or even plugged in and switched on.

Long time retired so all I have to worry about are my own files. And, yes, in the last few weeks I have had to reclaim some from the Nextcloud server which is, effectively, the backup for my laptop. And this very day I was checking & decided it needs more disk but that can wait for a couple of weeks.

In the past distant past we had DR contracts with provision for rehearsals which included full backup restores.

It doesn't happen often, but when it does...

I think Q4 of the OP's list is better. "Have you tried?" can be answered by "Yes" even if it failed. It can be answered by "Yes" untruthfully even if no attempt was made. Asking for evidence it succeeded can only be ansered satisfactorily if the backup can be restored.

We need a Library of Congress – but for the digital world

Re: The Library of Congress already has this in hand

When I arrived in QUB in 67 they'd just had a new library. In fact they also had a new science library which is the one I was familiar with There were legends about the internals of the old one. A year or so later a graduate from Trinity arrived and was very sniffy about Queens having a new library with lots of empty shelves, clearly not having worked out that the reason you build a new, bigger library, is to give yourself more shelf space.

Re: We need a Library of Congress – but for the digital world

To be fair, the publishers of Oracle database have objections to everything except money.

For economically significant commercial software a compulsory escrow system would be a good idea, however.

Re: The Library of Congress already has this in hand

"With modern printing facilities, it is easy to order a few extra copies at a sensible price: there is no need to carry a huge stock or to have a huge initial print run."

Maybe you haven't been involved in small scale publishing.

We typically have a print run of 100* which means that the deposit libraries would take up 6% of it. I looked into using print-on-demand services to put our back catalogue back into print. The price we'd have had to sell at would have been at least half as much again as the original prices which had produced a small surplus. We now have several of them downloadable as PDF instead.

I wonder why UK copyright still specifies TCD. I'd have expected it to have been changed to QUB a century ago although the old library would have run out of storage space long before the 1960s.

* The exception was one which had a much larger than normal print run and sold badly. I think it might have been the reason the treasurer subsequently limited to 100. Depositing half a dozen copies would be no problem but it might alert TPTB to our existence.

Re: The Library of Congress already has this in hand

In the UK the libraries of deposit are the British Library & the Bodleian in Oxford (not sure if Cambridge also gets a copy). I believe TCD library serves that purpose in Ireland.

The libraries might serve a useful purpose for proving publication but it seems unlikely that ant oher proof would be ignored in court. My local history group has published a number of books with a small print run and we certainly couldn't afford to spare a couple of copies; we're out of print too quickly without that.

2050 carbon emission goals need nuclear to succeed, says International Energy Agency

Re: Stating the obvious

It's very simple. BoJo won an election*. There were sufficient people who did not, at least at that time, find him embarassing and voted for the party of which he was (and, at time of writing, still is) leader and hence prospective PM. They found him acceptable.

OK, I'm making an assumption here: that the intersect of people who found him embarassing and people who voted for him is a small one. The intersect of people who voted for him but currently find him an embarassment might well be larger.

OTOH many of those who did not vote for him found him an embarassment then and still do now. Unfortunately there were insufficient of us to keep him out but we do not find him acceptable.

* Technically his party won the election but the UK system is that the leader of the party which wins most seats has first dibs at forming a government. The leadership of the parties appears to be a substantial factor in determining the way votes go.