Posts by Doctor Syntax

Cloud security unicorn cuts 20% of staff after raising $1.3b

With 2 CEOs to feed it might not last that long.

Re: If cloud security was any good

"I'm being flippant."

Are you sure about that?

Lacework? Never heard of them but looking forward to their future appearances here which can't be very far away once they start shedding those who do the real work.

And which of their CEOs is the redundant one?

UK monopoly watchdog investigates Google's online advertising business

"because millions of people across the UK use websites that rely on advertising revenue to offer high quality, free content."

More millions also use websites that rely on advertising revenue just for income but without the high quality aspect of the content. The content which they leave to the users to provide.

SEC probes Musk for not properly disclosing Twitter stake

"Musk sold a chunk of his shares in Tesla worth $8.4 billion"

Was this another transaction he should have filed with the SEC and if so did he?

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Re: Leave it to the professionals

"Later I left the company because I didn’t get along with the manager. He was fired from the company 2 days after I left."

You must have been covering his mistakes very effectively until then.

Re: Fixing the wrong problem

Always the best indication that there's something to learn there.

But you got paid for the second.

Re: nice story

But they're out of sight and out of earshot so less likely to grab attention. It amounts to the same thing where policy is concerned.

Re: nice story

Even without considering global warning there was every reason not to burn coal or other fossil hydrocarbons unnecessarily. They hae uses other than fuelling static energy plants which are not so easily substituted so conservation of finite supplies was always good sense.

Re: nice story

"As for radioactivity - well Carbon has several common isotopes anc the process of burning will often result in some localised concentrates forming.!

Carbon has one common isotope, 12, one fairly uncommon isotope, 13, and one more uncommon isotope, 14. It's only the last which is radioactive (weak beta) with a half-life of 5,000 plus years. C14 is produced at a fairly, but not entirely constant, rate in the upper atmosphere by the action of cosmic rays on nitrogen so its level in the atmosphere and hence in living things is fairly constant. Coal has not been a living thing for millions of years old and any remaining C14 would be well below the limits of practical detection.

Re: nice story

"Some places in the world have a background even more intense than that of Pripyat if you aren't digging trenches."

I was surprised to find that when my daughter was buying a house here in the Pennines that the building society required a radon check. I was even more surprised to find that we're entirely radon free here - it's not as if we're sitting on top of granite. And on the subject of granite, the carbon dating lab in Belfast used distilled rather than deionised water to get rid of the radon in the public water supply from the Mournes.

Re: nice story

Accuracy.

Re: nice story

"Now, I feel nuclear power is really unsafe"

Maybe you felt that at the start and it's why you couldn't fathom the answer. (The rest of us couldn't fathom it because it turned on management doing something right.)

Re: Don’t know about you

"And occasionally, they'd get confused and all end up in a pile against the wall"

There's a story that one of the automated transit carriages at some airport (?Gatwick) went missing with a load of passengers and was discovered repeatedly going through it's automated carriage wash.

Re: Einstein was right.

Or navies have more admirals than ships?

Re: Dogs

See today's Dilbert. Especially the punch-line.

Re: "but I would not report the damage back to my head office"h

"He’d used it at his previous place and was a huge fan. "

I've come across that one before. At one point I and a BA put forward a case for adding warehouse management to our existing order-processing/stock management system. It wouldn't have been a big addition given what was already there. It was turned down. Presumably TPTB decided warehouse management wasn't needed. They also decided the business analyst wasn't needed.

A few years passed and a new warehouse manager was appointed. He must have his favourite warehouse management system bought for him to run on the VMS box (something they hadn't foreseen was coming down the tracks). There was all sorts of sales weaselling going on about how it would be compatible with our Informix on Unix system . It had all the promise of conflicting versions of stock levels on the two systems.

At that point manglement decided they didn't need me either so I didn't have to cope with the mess. It was some time into my post-retirement freelancing career that I cam across a similar - and possibly the same package on SCO and discovered what the weasels had latched onto to twist into their not entirely outright lie.

Re: "but I would not report the damage back to my head office"h

"There was a character in one of our live datasets that their system didn’t like."

Let me guess: £

Re: Next time

Leave out "Simulation".

Re: Next time

"I've baked things that never quite caught fire but were reduced to a black lump and an offensive smell."

But enough of your kitchen disasters.

Re: Fixing the wrong problem

From this I learned that it is worth walking round the techies at the beginning and getting their view of the problems. A common comment was "We've told management what the problem is, but they don't believe us"

Of course. Price determines value. Techies'* comments are priced according to techie salary scales which are well below those of manglement who are receiving the reports.

Any consultant worth his salt knows to identify and ask those who know. They can then add value by boosting the price to something that can't be ignored.

* Or any of the coal-face workers.

Re: nice story

"Have fun checking the truth in my words - they are real."

Your words are real. Their arrangement leaves a lot to be desired.

Re: nice story

" There was so much anti-nuclear brainwashing by the so-called "Greens", so many newsfeed propagating the propaganda, so few educational efforts that now France has to reopen coal power stations which are an ecological disaster to compensate."

There is absolutely no excuse for the amount of fossil fuels we've shoved up power-station chimneys during the whole of my adult life. None. The technology was there to use and to develop during that time. With a sensible approach to deployment we'd have had reactors a few generations more advanced than we have now.

Re: Next time

A good boss indeed. An even better one might have kept the questions until he got to HR.

Experts: AI inventors' designs should be protected in law

The mathematical processing that AI caries out may be obscure but it is essentially some sort of mathematical processing. Mathematical facts can't be patented so why do they think the output of some AI can be?

BOFH: Where do you think you are going with that toner cartridge?

Re: Stack of money

"so probably the most expensive door stop ever"

Maybe not. Feynman tells of the solid gold doorstop on the room that contained the sub-critical plutonium sphere.

Re: We had a copier engineer once...

something wrong here. I'm not convinced a customer disservice drone would understand any of the terms "PATT tester", 5kv" or "insulation test".

Re: Too Often...

"What was wrong with just storing it ?!

Or selling it. That takes care of the potential return shipping cost. The purchase cost would have to have been written off anyway so it can be offered cheaply as it's then all profit. The original vendor, faced with the cut-price competition, will be less inclined to accept orders for unlikely looking quantities without checking.

Re: Too Often...

There are some things you can't get too big a stock of.

Re: Too Often...

Don't throw it away. Just make the department who ordered it responsible for storing it. It can become a landmark: "Down there on the right. You can't miss them, they have a five foot stack of US Letter paper.".

Re: Printer Maintenance Contracts

That's a problem for another month's quota. Or even another salesman if the first one's moved on to another job.

Spam is back with a vengeance. Luckily we can't read any of it

Re: Put a cost on outgoing email

Even better - a charge against incoming email payable to the recipient but based on the number of outgoing emails by the sender.

"no one uses a real email address any more"

I do and it's occasionally used to take discussions off-group. It helps, of course, that using my own domain it's a dedicated address I can kill and replace immediately if it's abused. But, as I've said, experience shows it's not a concern although this might be a sort of reverse network effect; as long as most people don't use real ones real ones don't get skimmed.

The filter I'd like to see would be one at MSP level bouncing messages with reason We do not accept emails with noreply in the From: or Reply to: address. That, of course, assumes that businesses check their bounced messages.

It would also need a black list for other addresses that prove to be no-reads when emailed.

Hich is fine if it hasn't misclassified a genuine email.

Re: A little Spam is useful

My biggest problem is marketing departments of big organisations sending me emails that I don't want. Worse, they're the sorts of emails that train their customers to click on links.

The latest really bad one was from the RHS of all people - click on this link to vote for resolutions at the AGM. Undoubtedly this, if clicked, is going to require the member to log in provide their log in credentials to a fake site. Of course it also has plenty of other links to train members to click on malware delivery sites.

OK, the RHS is one thing but the most prolific offenders are banks and building societies who have most to lose by training their customers to fall for scams.

Re: "Pole Emploi"

Have the phone number of the French equivalent of the ICO handy.

"Two shitty groups of people kicking each other - works for me."

One thing that annoys me is the emails from different Indians, sometimes even on the same day, with identical texts offering web or mobile development services, SEO or whatever. It looks as if some spammer is conning people, who probably can't afford it and certainly don't know better, that there's money to be made in leads generation and is selling them a service: email address, text and probably the actual spamming as a package. And probably a list of real development companies who are probably fed up with the victims contacting them to try to sell leads.

I've now varied my usual "Prospective Supplier Questionnaire" for them. This starts by asking very reasonable questions which should make them realise how unconvincing they look - things like their register company name, domain and company web site. Assuming they're suckered in to try to answer it goes on to leave them in no doubt they've been sold a crock. The latest version points out explicitly that the only money in leads generation is selling people like them leads generation spamming services and the money's made from them. Where I get multiple messages together it goes to all addresses, non-blind to give them a chance of getting together to deal with the scum if that's possible.

There's very little genuine email comes via my ancient Hotmail address but a decade or more ago it was used on Usenet so it gets a good deal of this sort of crap but Hotmail is pretty good at dumping it. I see it's there when I occasionally look to check if any genuine mail has been dumped there. For a while I felt these spammers, shaing such interests would be interested in meeting each other so I'd reply to spammer 1 with a message along the lines of "This sounds interesting but I haven't time to deal with this now. Please contact my colleague spammer2.".

I'm thinking of reviving this. Some genealogical newsgroups keep getting spam from pimping services. Next time I get a Hotmail spam which looks as if it has a booby trapped spreadsheet or whatever I may give them the address of one of the pimps and hope the latter get taken down.

Oddly enough the address I've used on Usenet for the last many years never gets spam. Nobody must be skimming Usenet addresses these days.

Re: Snail mail can be just as bad

After my mother died we rented out this house for a while before moving in. One of the tenants was training to be a CofE priest. We kept getting alumnus type bumf from his college for a long time and kept sending it back as not known at this address. I assume Crockford's directory is still on the go so they really should have no excuse for not finding his current address.

Eventually I rung them up saying there would be a £10 handling charge in future and I would go to the small claims court if it wasn't paid. It stopped.

What I'd like to know now is how QUB alumnus office have got our current address to send out stuff to both me and SWMBO.

"The content that they had identified as spam was, of course, their original email that I had automatically quoted underneath: i.e. the press release they had written and sent to me in the first place."

If only they filtered their out-bound mail for spam.

Ransomware encrypts files, demands three good deeds to restore data

Re: I couldn't have said it better myself...

Or installing a better OS.

Version 251 of systemd coming soon to a Linux distro near you

Package manger changes

"What is disappearing is their role as the tool that allow end-users to customise and update their OS. Instead, they are becoming the tools that vendors use to build the distributions."

Somehow I doubt that will appeal to the market. What happens when a significant vulnerability is found in some library. Do we wait until RedHat or whoever roll out the next ISO to install and reboot, just like a Windows update?

Jake,

I think the marketing weasels got you. It was presented as "only an init replacement". Do you really think it wasn't always intended to be the thin end of the wedge.

Re: Software Junk

Neither is their home page. The "latest commit" throws a server-side error!

Zuckerberg sued for alleged role in Cambridge Analytica data-slurp scandal

It could be a matter of "EU, look over here, don't look over there at all the Security Letters & other stuff.".

Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL

Re: Back in the '80s...

He probably wasn't offering volume discounts.

Re: Just a quick question.

I got caught with that one once. On joining the company I got given responsibility for a product which had been a director's first venture into C from Cobol which wasn't a good start. What made it worse was that the implementation wasn't fit to be sold as it stood. It had been developed in conjunction with a client who was obviously happy to let any one in any part of the organisation see the entire data set, not just the parts applicable to their job.

In trying to straighten that out I ran into the director's abuse of the C pre-processor to create macros that were a bit Cobolish - let's call them Cobollocks. That would have been OK if I hadn't needed to change some instances; in the end I ran the whole lot through cpp and made that my starting point.

Then, while I was starting to unpick the rest of the spaghetti in order to partition user access, sales promised a new customer that it would be more or less a drop-in for their existing application. Looking at that application I could see that our database design wasn't that close a match to the way it did things. Fortunately I managed to escape after a few weeks.

Re: Just a quick question.

Did the translation costs outweigh the expected profits? One thing you can rely on would be the salesdroid not figuring that into the cost.