Posts by Doctor Syntax

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

Re: Wait. Backups ned to be restorable?

Presumably there was a separate migration to a new system so the backup would be belt-and-braces for an extreme situation. If there were suitable drives almost anywhere on the planet this could be acceptable.

Re: One step too few

If you use the services of a DR company the greatest need is to check restore on their H/W. The experience of your first test - or rehearsal if you prefer - can be quite informative. The first time I tried it we ran out of time just about at the point where we had a file system system we could log onto as /etc had been backed up after a lot of stuff it would have been less urgent to restore. Things were changed round so that next time we were in a position to start restoring the database fairly quickly.

I was told this story yesterday.

Once upon a time we had a county Council*. They used to use snow ploughs to clear rural roads* in winter. Because some of the roads are steep and snow ploughs are less likely to get stuck coming down hill they decided to park one at a convenient spot at the top of a hill. When the sown came some poor council worker fought his way through the drifts to the top of the hill. And found the snow plough''s diesel had been stolen.

* This now seems like a fairy story, hence my use of the traditional opening..

Reg reader rages over Virgin Media's email password policy

Re: Another issue with VM's password policies is...

"these characters have to be from the password you set when you first opened an account"

This looks as if it might the source of Nick's problem: his adversary has that password. Did Nick take over an existing installation? It might be that the previous customer is continuing to use the Virgin email address and is using the access the original password gives him to counter Nick's attempts to change the current password.

It would be a reasonable protection against a random stranger closing the account.

The official communication address for a company is the company secretary at the registered address. Send a letter, preferably recorded delivery telling them you no longer wish to use the account from a given date and will no longer be responsible for paying its bills. Whether they then close it is up to them.

Re: Rainbow tables anyone?

The cracker has to get the hash to do this. That might be the case if the site leaks but in that case you'd have to change it anyway. The bigger risk in that case would be if you've used the same password elsewhere so remember - don't do that.

Re: Re-enabling paste

That's odd. They give PayPal as an example and I can't remember ever having a problem pasting there.

I agree but you only have to do it once and the longer you leave it the bigger the job gets.

However, there's no problem in running an ISP and non-ISP address side-by-side so get your independent address first and then take as long as you need to register your change of address with whoever needs you want to know your new address.

For extra advantage register your own domain which allows you to switch the MSP if need be. Since ditching my ISP (Nildram which was fine until a series of take-overs left it in Dido-land) I've switched not only ISP twice more but also switched domain registrar/MSP (ending up with Mythic Beasts and see no reason to swap again).

Re: Smug mode off

What part of an ISP provided email address making it harder to ditch your ISP did you not understand?

Re: Virgin, bringing you the barely-adequate security from 2002

It makes you wonder what their internal security might be like as well.

Simple solution. Don't use an ISP-provided email service. If you do you're not only lumbered with crap like this if the ISP doesn't care, it also makes it harder to ditch your ISP.

Only 29% of techies truly want to stay in current job

Re: You want our labour?

" hell, shovelling shit on a farm gets better hours and wages"

And a front loader to drive.

Re: "Tough" conversations.

"Or that having your current engineering staff decimated is not an opportunity for HR bods to earn bonuses"

But think of the bonuses to be earned by recruiting the replacements. It really might be an opportunity, not a problem.

"Apparently people just don't want to work anymore."

Given the set-up you described it sound more likely to be the other way around. They do want to work but have cottoned on to the fact that that might not be possible in your mega-corp and making the move on their own terms.

Re: I'm thinking about a lot more than this

"(unless there were doughnuts)"

What - aren't decent biccies good enough?

But, yes, this is it exactly. And what's more the good customers IME are the ones who learn about you by word of mouth. Get a good reputation & you don't have any of the circus which seems to be a feature of recruitment these days.

Re: I'm thinking about a lot more than this

"If you want to change career, you need your own money to study and hope there is a job opening."

IT isn't an end in itself. Unless you've worked for a vendor you'll almost certainly have been working in IT supporting business in some other industry or industries. Take a step back. What knowledge have you picked up about those? Could you use that to get a non-IT, or some form of half IT and half non-IT role in one of those industries?

FWIW this is pretty much the inverse of the way I changed job mid-career. I started off in science with some IT training during post-grad and then, as IT crept into my Civil Service lab, became the IT go-to guy there which then enabled me to step into IT for the second half of my career. I see no reason why it couldn't work the other way around.

The time to worry is when you find 1 & 2 are both true. It suggests management is recruiting people in its own image so what does that make you?

New Windows 11 build boasts inbox updates and UI tweaks

Re: "The idea, it seems, has never really gone away"

You're not really familiar with Linux are you?

Reading TFA - tabs in the file manager, a tabbed terminal emulator - Windows sounds to be getting more like KDE everyday. After all, it caught up with multiple workspaces some time ago. It does need a much better start menu, however.

OTOH, because Linux has such a diversity of user types it has DEs offering a very different user experience - Gnome for one and I believe even Unity (the Ubuntu app-oriented DE) is being kept alive as a community project. There are a few DEs even more minimalist than Gnome and, of course, there's always the option of a straight terminal based set-up.

Now explain to me how the one and only, what Redmond decrees, one size fits all approach of Windows caters to this diversity of Windows users you told us about.

Ukraine invasion: We should consider internet sanctions, says ICANN ex-CEO

Re: Hurts everyone equally - good and bad

"This is not far from just shutting off the electricity. It hurts Russian military forces, but it also hurts Ukrainian civilians who need all the help they can get"

Were we reading the same article? Or even the same sub-title? I actually went back to check what I'd read before. ASFAICS it says exactly the opposite.

Re: Now that I can get behind

Nobody elected SWIFT to be a world ruler either. It isn't. (OK, there's an argument the banks are.) But they're following the actual elected leaders of many world governments.

There's no reason why internet governance bodies shouldn't do the same without being accused of usurping power. In fact, it could be argued that declining to follow suit is such a usurpation.

Standardizing limits to license hikes for minor software tweaks

How many thousands of percents will the limit have to be before Orrible signs up to it?

Fujitsu: Dumping older workers will wipe out quarter of forecast profit

Re: Skills and experience

H/W's not my bag but I had a whipper-snapper look at the not very complex database schema I'd produced and complain it had too many tables. I'd just come off a contract on an ERP system which had, IIRC, several hundred.

The galling thing is that in a way he was right. The next iteration was much simpler after I'd manage to dump some of the IT director's ideas.

Re: I once took the golden parachute in my early 50s

Karma.

Re: I once took the golden parachute in my early 50s

I once worked with someone who claimed to have been made redundant or retired from 3 different companies - by the same CEO. The claim was shortly after the retirement when he was back at his desk freelance.

"What does that mean in English?"

I don't see that as needing to be translatable into English. I see it as sales people getting a dose of what they've been dishing out all these years.

Re: Disgusting..

The age distribution that matters for interface design is that of the users. That depends on what the interface accesses and the audience for it might not match the country's demographics. If you're producing an application for pensioners to manage their pension payments it wouldn't matter whether the country's demographic peaked at 20 or 70.

Re: Disgusting..

"microscopic text"

Can we include the Post Comment box of elReg in this?

Re: Disgusting..

But what's the freelance scene like in Japan?

I'm sure quite a few of the over 50s will be the sole prop for some bit of the business, rather like the random guy in Nebraska here https://xkcd.com/2347/

If so I'm sure they'd be happy to take the redundancy and, for a good enough contract, come back to keep things running.

Brave takes the spring out of creepy bounce tracking

Rather than delete the cookies replacing them with junk would be better. Even if your browser and mine deletes cookies most people's won't so their cookies will still be seen and have value*. Poison the cookie well and let it be known it's poisoned and all cookies are devalued.

* As priced up by those selling the data and perceived by those buying it.

Re: Carbon tax

make ad companies (as opposed to the user) liable for the extra "carbon"

The ad companies would just pass it on to their customers, the advertisers.

Cow-counting app abused by China 'to spy on US states'

Re: highly sophisticated attack ;-)

What? You mean hard-coded credentials can't be kept secret?

Re: With Russia going rogue

Russia/Putin has gone rogue a few times in the past. It's worth thinking about what's different this time - the push-back must have come as a surprise to him. I wonder if one factor* has been that everyone has become thoroughly pissed off with the intrusions from the Russian outfits that they have become less tolerant. Another may be that Covid has prompted Western governments and industry to look more closely at their supply chains. It may well be that the West will start wondering about how to spring some sort of surprise on China.

* There will have been others, one being that invading Ukraine is particularly egregious.

Rate of autonomous vehicle safety improvement slowing – research

Re: Accident avoidence is the problem

"Instead the vehicle should disengage autopilot and execute its emergency braking."

So you're barrelling along in the fast lane when somebody changes lane into the gap between you and the car in front. Naturally there's a long train of cars behind. So, because the vehicle is suddenly presented with an object just in front of it it should execute emergency braking and let the cars behind pile into it

Fortunately my wife's car which is equipped with forward-looking cameras for such a situation only throws up a warning and doesn't brake but I've seen it complain twice where emergency braking would have caused an accident and she's complained about other situations when she's been driving. The vehicle doesn't really have situational awareness and doesn't know there's no need to brake let alone that braking would be the worst thing to do.

Re: I disagree

It sounds a bit like Dublin. Belfast drivers always said Dubliners were terrible drivers. On the few occasions I went to Dublin I always felt more comfortable there. I got the impression that drivers knew what was behind them, something Belfast drivers never seemed to manage.

Re: I disagree

"Don't even ask about third world cities!"

Or rural areas.

Re: Wish you were wrong. But I don't think you are

"Maybe a human can shepard them to the expressway on-ramp and to the terminal at the end of the trip? I have no idea whether the economics work."

I suppose they'll work if the human is satisfied with just being paid for the shepherding bit and not for the journey in between. Maybe there's a possibility of a Working From Cab gig to supplement the otherwise constrained income.

Re: Ah, the old moving goalposts

"Forget the fact that the old meat sacks are causing more harm behind the wheel"

I think you're forgetting that when it gets too hard for the machine it's the old meat sacks that have to engage their greater parallel processing power to dig the machine out of the problem it's got itself into. So exactly who or what is it that's causing more harm?

Re: @Filippo

"I expect it makes sense for haulage to get the truck and goods over long distances"

And unload itself at the other end.

You may not have noticed the essence of this report. That the vehicles can't get along without having to hand over to what you call a bag of mostly water but which, in fact, provides parallel processing abilities way in front of whatever amounts of silicon they can contrive to put into the vehicle.

UK govt signs IT contracts 'without understanding' the needs

The thing the office doesn't seem to understand is that the details of the requirements are moving targets as laws and regulations change

I think you'll find that the NAO understands that very well. If there's one department in Whitehall (actually Buckingham Palace Rd IIRC) that aren't idiots it's the NAO. It must be very frustrating for them.

requirements are never analyzed to death before a project is launched, only enough design details and issue identification to get a handle on the scope of the project.

Thy name is "Fragile".

Re: Stupid educated people in government

"I don't believe that there's much correlation between the qualifications of the high-paid-help and their ability to make questionable decisions about the direction of engineering projects."

The one skill you can rely on finding in people who successfully climb corporate ladders is corporate ladder climbing. Anything else is a bonus. As corporate ladder climbing is usually their full-time occupation there's seldom room for anything else.

Re: Stupid educated people in government

He actually said "I dont need to know what you do here, I'm here to manage"

As was pointed out in a previous thread this can work out providing he really is a manager, takes care to appoint the best people he can who actually know the engineering or whatever it is, listens to what they say and makes it possible for them to get on with it. But these are rare beasts.

Re: Doesn't matter anyway...

Close enough.

Re: "signing contracts [..] before it has a good understanding of the requirements"

This is more or less Sir Humphrey's explanation. The public is assured by the fact that the government is spending large sums of money on something. As I recall it applied to both Trident and the NHS.

Re: Only one person can save us

Check her wonkypedia page. She's now a security consultant. Either that or an editor with a sense of humour has been at work on it.

Re: Do they ever learn?

“Blackadder, here’s a map of the known world (hands over blank parchment)… fill it in as you go along”

This extends all the way down to small software houses. Having just arrived in one I was given the job of looking after a system they'd put together for one client which they were now trying to sell to a few more. For two of the customers it was something new, for the third they'd been told it would drop in in place of what they already had. I already had problems such as trying to pick it apart and reassemble it in such a way that users in one part of the business didn't have access to every other users' part of the database. I quickly found out I had another: that it was in no way going to be a drop in replacement - the data model was too different.

So I asked management what the spec was for what I was to produce. I was told that whatever I produced would be the spec.

Fortunately, shortly after as I was leaving Embankment station I bumped into someone from my previous employer's customer and more or less offered a job there and then (the ensuing interview was one question "Are you still interested?").

Quite. There's a headline on BBC News saying the Home Office needs to get a grip. There's only one ting they've had a grip on for years and that's successive Home Secs. And much good has it done either.

Re: No shit, Sherlock?!

Also, the management consultant is reassuringly expensive and the local advice is somebody who's on a salary less then the PHB. Advice must be worth what you pay for it, otherwise why pay so much.

Alphabet still can't kill off Google+ insecurity lawsuit

Re: I'll call them a Waaambulance.

They own the company. They're suing it. They're suing themselves. They'll just get their own money back less what they paid the lawyers. They'll be paying both sides' lawyers even if costs aren't awarded.

Russia mulls making software piracy legal and patent licensing compulsory

Maybe swap the first two round.