Posts by Doctor Syntax

Wing launches drone deliveries in the US where people actually live

Can I add that this comment is in no way associated with yesterday's experience with an Amazon locker with a no-longer pristine opening mechanism and a help number that doesn't go through to the agent queue but a recorded message telling me to key 1 to get an SMS to get connected to an agent or to use their app if I'd installed it on my phone - or maybe, if I'd listened that long, they mught have told me to go to their site on my computer which was several miles away at home. Silly me expecting a help number to go through to a help line.

Re: Pointless

"Completely and utterly pointless waste of capital and resources. Especially in areas with good road networks."

You raise a serious point but not the one you intended. Could this, in fact, be less polluting than road delivery?

Re: so what?

Another site that attempts to deliver nothing unless it's allowed to use javascript. If I were a potential customer I'd take that as indicative of the whole business's capability of delivering. If you're willing to use what is, in effect, your shop front to demonstrate how your developers fail to cope with anything but the happy path then we have to assume that that will also apply to the service itself.

"make sure everyone has a good first experience with drone delivery,"

Then after a few months wear and tear and all the edge cases the frAgile development didn't cover will start to take their toll.

Beijing bails out bankrupt Chinese chipmaker Tsinghua Unigroup

Even so, given the current state of the semiconductor supply chains it seems to need a special talent to go bankrupt.

Bank had no firewall license, intrusion or phishing protection – guess the rest

Re: Maybe they should have outsourced their IT...

"massive talent pool of IT in India"

It sounds as if the Hyderabad police have more of it than the bank.

Re: the Andra Pradesh Mahesh Co-Operative Urban Bank

Why the downvotes other than "loose" instead of "lose"? It's the account holders who were the victims. They weren't in a position to know their bank was so lax.

Unfortunate.

"The unfortunate institution"

It's not the bank that's unfortunate, it's their customers. The bank got exactly what it deserved, the customers didn't.

Mailchimp: Crook stole cryptocurrency clients' mailing-list subscriber info

Professiona spammers again

For avoidance of doubt,that's Mailchimp. Your semi-professional spammer bank, retailer or whatever, will happily send them PII of their customers and insist that they're doing nothing wrong under GDPR.

The metaverse of fantasy worlds is itself still a fantasy

"hype, and corporate fears over being left out, are the only elements of the metaverse that have actually emerged. At the same time, Forrester also warned businesses to be ready just in case this thing takes off"

We're just quietly sitting here. On this fence.

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Re: Never risk it

"I was to disable every account he had, change any shared passwords (ie, admin account passwords) and make sure that he no access to any systems whatsoever."

Did you create your own precautionary extra account whilst you were about it?

Re: The Boot can be on the other foot...

I was think more along the lines of just acting as a consultant to the outsourcers

The company doesn't see JimC on site (assuming the outsourcing is done on-site) nor as a name on any roster list. If anything they just see the name of JimC's consulting company - which shouldn't look anything like JimC - as providing consulting services to the outsourcers but it shouldn't really be any of their business. The costs just go on the bill with the outsourcer's mark-up and everybody's happy.

Re: Not asking for a handover

The nature of freelancing is more complex than this although it's too often lost sight of, including by HMRC. Basically the engaging company is trying to balance a variable (holiday, sick leave, parental leave, training etc) staff availability against a variable workload. This can be done by recruiting more permanent staff that would be required to ensure the mismatched peaks and troughs are covered. However this also risks having under-employed staff from time to time and also risks the costs associated with making staff redundant. OTOH not having sufficient staff at the time of peak demand risks missed business opportunities. The role of contract businesses - emphasise businesses - is to ease that balancing by taking some of that risk themselves*. For a price, of course.

It's provision of services on the basis of T&Cs very different to those of employees which is the USP of a freelancer vs a permanent member of staff** for any given role. Although there may be a 24 month contract in place it will almost certainly make provision for early termination and this should be allowed for as a possibility. It's one of the things built into the rates as is time spent on the bench - the standard greeting of the agent is "Are you available?" and if the answer is "Yes" that availability is a cost to the freelancer.***

So no, don't assume two years means two years. Don't go round blacklisting companies. Don't prosecute them. You'll only damage your own professional reputation. If you're freelance it's part of the business you chose and whatever you do don't build financial expectations on it without a fall-back fund. And don't go freelance without understanding this. If they've made a mistake getting rid of their skills base regard it as an enhanced business opportunity.

* This, in my view, is what makes them businesses and what HMRC & IR35 overlook. They are taking on business risks, they're businesses and should be taxed as businesses even if they only have one principal.

** This is no excuse for trying to run a business with free-lance staff only. A business needs employees to provide continuity.

*** These are two of several factors the permie might fail to take into account when looking at freelance rates. The freelancer should not so fail.

Re: Fired...

One morning I was asked to provide a report by one of the sales staff - who I always regarded as a reasonable bloke. When I went looking for him a couple of hours later to give him the report I was told "He no longer works here."

BOM

Now I'm going to get nightmares tonight.

If products X & Y & Z were sold together as product A they had a different price than the total of prices when told separately. What's more X had a serial number which would become the serial number of A when it was sold as part of A. There could also be product B which was X & Y but not Z but also inherited the X serial number so A could be B & Z.

Products with serial numbers had a table individual rows for each item and stock levels were the counts of those which were unsold. Other products just had a stock level on the main product table maintained by dead reckoning and reset at stock takes.

The subtleties of this were only communicated to me shortly before go-live when I though the code was finished. The resulting hastily constructed recursive BOM with two limbs for the different cases worked but was clearly categorised as DO NOT TOUCH, even after I left and after I came back. Fortunately the whole pile of bits approach became redundant and could be removed from the codebase.

Re: Unhelpful comments

ISTR Z80 had a block to block copy. Set the first address to zero and then copy a block of n - 1 to the block starting at the second address.

Re: Unhelpful comments

It's even more useful if you're not aiming for Edinburgh.

Re: Extra credit

https://dilbert.com/strip/2004-02-07 seems to fit the bill and provide good advice for the trainer.

Another https://dilbert.com/strip/2004-02-22

Re: Assembler, machine-code and PAPER

Agreed but...when you have code in front of you and the top-down design is plastered on a wall somewhere else an explanation of where this fits into the grand design is worth its weight in bytes.

Re: Not asking for a handover

"A series of frantic phone calls to the former contractors elicited precisely no co-operation at any level, or for any price."

Unless the contractors were already in contract elsewhere that's not very professional. The professional approach is "Don't get mad, get even. But payment upfront this time."

Failing with stack problems seems to me to be an excellent demonstration of recursion concepts, namely the assumption that there really is room for all those turtles.

Re: Comments are bugs, too

Bug database? Collection of post-its, each one thrown away when complete.

Re: Comments are bugs, too

Your original cards might have been on the limits of readability before they went into storage - that's why there were card duplicators. Providing they'd been run through the interpretor you could always go through a card at a time and look for comments by Mk 1 eyeball.

Re: Unhelpful comments

I recall once coming across something along the lines of "Journeymen programmers say what the program does. Good programmers say why it does it. Great programmers say why it doesn't do it some other way."

Re: Extra credit

The alternative, I've discovered, is not to train them but let another of the client's suppliers train them instead. Or, as it turned out, the other supplier's contractor. It became obvious that the data we received had similar mistakes in it every few months as a new lot were rotated in on their 6 month visas and decided to rework their predecessor's code that they didn't understand.

Re: Long - but a good read

With evidence of the forgery the easier and better fix might have been to replace the GBG.

Re: Comments are bugs, too

"delta the non-comment changes to the latest version"

With boxes of cards?

Re: Comments are bugs, too

"The amount of time I used to spend believing the comments, rather than the code."

You need to allow for the possibility that the comment tells what the code should have been but isn't.

China moves to protect offshore tech company listings

"For its part, China worries that if it allows local tech companies to list in the US – especially companies that hold data describing Chinese citizens – doing so creates a privacy risk."

A reasonable worry.

Microsoft debuts System Center 2022

Re: I wonder...

Manager5...

Adverts?

The time you solved that months-long problem in 3 seconds

Re: @Def -- Fuck that

"Customer Service? Maybe you've heard of it"

Typical customer service does not consist of fixing your problem in 3 seconds. In some cases the description fails at fixing the problem.

Re: Somewhere in the metaverse

Forensic proof would be analysing them to check.

It still sounds like something that could have been sorted over the phone with one, possibly major, proviso - that there was someone at the client end who could be relied on to make the change without breaking things. A remote dial-in might also have been a possibility.

But a more honest solution would have been to have recommended some training courses* for the IT department - which would probably have pleased them - or spent the seek providing some training.

* Advanced, of course because this was a problem needing advanced knowledge.

Re: Raging handover

Your expectations were correct. And pretty indicative of the situation. All I can say is I went to bed, woke up in the morning finding myself still sitting up in bed - I passed out without even getting as far as lying down. Felt fine. Had breakfast. Still fine. Gone taken out to wait in some large hall for proceedings to begin. Still fine. Thought I'd better read through my file. Looked down and waaaaay - the whole thing started to spin.

Got through it OK and discovered one thing that makes courts martial different. I got invited to lunch in the officers' mess & found myself sitting next to the Judge Advocate to whom I'd just given evidence. That never happened at Crumin Rd.

But I'll admit my typing is getting very erratic these days. It must be age.

Re: Fuck that

I would say that "client management" is part of my job description.

But how does that relate here? Is it something the client's staff should have known about? Have the wrong staff been recruited? Do they need a more knowledgeable and senior member of staff? Do the existing staff need training? Did they demand someone on site rather than being satisfied with telephone support? There would be ways in which to spend a few extra ours or even a full day with the client providing value on these lines rather than spending a week pretending it was a big job just to save someone's face.

Re: Fuck that

Even glyphosate isn't easy against knotweed. You can't just spay it, you have to pour it into the hollow stems so it's a matter of mowing them down, disposing of the mowings to make sure they don't root, then treating each stem separately and redoing it every time a new lot springs up from the unkilled roots. And less fun than 3KV.

Re: Fuck that

https://www.knotweedservices.co.uk/japanese-knotweed-electrical-removal/

Re: Fuck that

They sound like the best sort. Good displacement activity, especially losing the notes, to keep them from meddling.

The month I worked for DEADHEAD: Yes, that was their job title

Re: I know who DEADHEAD is....

You'd need much more data to distinguish her from the numerous others who are dim and over-promoted with stupid job titles. It covers most of HMG give are take the fact that their job titles are traditional.

Re: I'm disappointed

What makes you think we didn't?

Re: junk-food punnet of chips and gravy with cheese

"I have never had fish and chips in newspaper and I'm 40+ years old"

Kids today!

Re: Sometimes...

The question to ask - as innocently as possible - is "What are the corporate and personal consequences of making an erroneous declaration, however unintentional?".

UK suit over reselling surplus Microsoft licenses rolls on

Re: Sheesh People

Pretty much a dead heat.

Re: Ireland

That would depend on how they are dealt with in the current UK-EU tariff arrangements.

More charged in UK Lapsus$ investigation

Re: I shudder

This appears to have been social engineering.

Chinese distro Deepin hits 20.5, complete with browser called Browser

"it's the prettiest Linux around"

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. With controls in the title bar it wouldn't find favour in mine. The title bar of the window in which I'm typing this has the article title, "The Register Forums" and browser name occupying a significant par of the bar. No room for controls, it's called the title bar for a reason.

"the distro has its own browser, called just Browser"

Fair enough. I have several digging implements in my garage. I just cll them spades.

National Security Agency employee indicted for 'leaking top secret info'

Re: Thing about the NSA

My experience didn't entirely match. Some of it did. When the lab was rebuilt after a fire it was decreed offices for anyone less than Director had to have lino - until it was discovered after the first office was fitted out that way that lino was dearer than the alternative non-woven floor covering that looked like carpet. Then nobody below PSO could have an office at all until it was pointed out that we had reports to write and quite often held rather confidential case discussions so we were able to put "writing rooms" on the plan.

On the other hand salaries were held below general service grades and promotion was withheld (until I put my notice in when a much too late offer arrived PDQ) on the grounds that we didn't have management responsibility, i.e. enough junior staff; the responsibility of the job itself was ignored. As the major employer of scientists in the UK they could control salaries in general.

Pension? Well, for a final salary scheme the low salary has its own consequences. Apart from that, a year's service accumulated 1/80th of a year credit which mean that a new graduate, joining at 21, retiring at 60, would be a year short of half pay. I went to industry where the rate was 1/60th so the same graduate would end up a year short of two thirds pay. And as a final twist the scheme was non-contributory but the salaries were adjusted down to take account of what the contributory scheme would have paid after contributions - that meant that the final salary was this discounted value.

The Civil Service might be great for somebody in the higher ranks with a degree irrelevant to the job. If you're a specialist in the scientific branch it's crap and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Bain Capital plots to buy Toshiba with help from largest shareholder

"at this time, we have not made any decision regarding the tender offer for the common stock of Toshiba Corporation."

To quote Yes, Minister: "You do mean you."

Re: Hold on a minute

Billions. These people don't get out of bed in the morning for mere millions.