Posts by Doctor Syntax

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

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.

""We found in large scale programmes that, before things start for real, [there is] insufficient thinking, analysis, architecture and design. Often this is actually skipped over,"

But why expect governments to do IT differently to the way they do everything else?

It might be argued that when governments have to face unexpected events - pandemics, wars or the like they have to make decisions on the fly. But even in those cases the decisions would be easier and more effective if there had been some preparation made to deal with such events.

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.

Re: re: countries that haven't ventured an opinion on the invasion and shelling of civilians

"At least there's an argument that Ukraine being part of NATO threatens Russian security. It is on their border."

Is there? If had to explain this once in another thread. Perhaps you didn't understand it.

NATO was set up as a mutual defence pact to deter war by making invasion of a NATO country counter-productive.

Putin has demonstrated what can happen to a country that's not a member of NATO.

In consequence it looks like Finland which has a long border with Russia but currently isn't a member will become one.

I don't recall NATO being involved in Iraq. I do remember Iraq invading Kuwait.

Linux distros patch 'Dirty Pipe' make-me-root kernel bug

Re: Linux Bias?

"This is a dangerous vuln that's out in the wild on millions of devices. The fact there's a new kernel doesn't mean Android devices will get updated to it."

That will be the kernel update that arrived last night on my laptop.

As to Android - I'd like to know a bit more about how to exploit it. I might be able to wrest control of my phone from Google.

PsiQuantum envisions a datacenter-sized quantum computer

If it's photonics there'll be mirrors. Best not to install smoke detectors.

Cloudflare, Akamai: Why we're not pulling out of Russia

I suppose that if there were regime change in Russia which was more hostile to housing cybercrime operations there might be less of a market for them elsewhere.

UN mulls Russia's pitch for cybercrime treaty

"It seems Russia's aim is to keep the international community busy and distracted negotiating a new cybercrime convention as a way to stall practical global cybercrime cooperation just at the time it's needed most,"

Exactly the conclusion I'd come to by the time I got half way down the page. It looks as if they've been taking the UK's iterations on investigative powers as a model.

Capgemini wins £30m deal to work on UK customs

Thanks for your explanation. So yet another consequence of a project (Brexit) undertaken without a feasibility study.

Re: Capgemini....

But a twice the number you first thought of is a good starting point.

One of the most telling aspects of this is that it wasn't designed to be integrated with the rest of the systems from the start.

IT blamed after HR forgets to install sockets in new office

Re: Business as usual

"Just give it to them straight,"

And keep a written record that you did.

Re: Business as usual

"For example, the did not understand the difference between 'delegation of authority' and 'abrogation of responsibility'."

They probably did.

"Under no circumstances should I ... become a 'self-employed consultant' as I am just not that sort of person."

Actually this works out quite well. You'd find that as a manager you took due note of your staff and as staff you had a manager who had your best interests at heart. You'd also find decisions being made rapidly. You might have had to slap yourself on the wrist for not carrying out annual reviews.

Seriously, a lot of the crap just disappears.

Re: I want to believe, but...

"there were no toilets in his design. He passed."

In that case where did he pass it?

As to miss-placed pillars, we had a lab designed by a crayon wielder architect who wanted the trendy look of windows extending right to the corners so it looked as if the roof was being held up by magic. My boss's corner office windows were largely blocked by the internal pillar just inside them. They were on the original plans. No amount of complaining would get them changed.

Re: I want to believe, but...

"The CEO, who is ultimately responsible for employing all these people and overseeing their work but didn't bother to learn about any of this until he happened to encounter a former employee outside the office."

The article says "president". I'm not sure I grok all these top titles which seem to work such as a company can have a president and a chairman and maybe a few others but I'm pretty sure a resident and a CEO are different beasts.

Re: I want to believe, but...

"It just doesn't seem plausible."

Not all connections are hierarchical. If it had been golf rather than hiking you'd probably have accepted it without a second thought.

Re: Business as usual

"management books I've read all say something similar:"

Very few managers have read them. Reading is such a waste of time....

Re: Watch Your Backs

"recorded it formally as my saying that I didn't believe in managing"

As a micro-manager it probably looked that way to her.

Re: Responsibility

You forget one of the maxims of IT, especially when dealing with HR: the ultimate sanction of IT is to give the user eactly what they asked for or, in this case, didn't.

Re: The first casualty of war is the truth.

"Dictators and HR"

"And" not needed. The one is a subset of the other.

Customer service chatbot sector forecast to be worth $7bn this year

Re: "LiveStory"

I'll believe they've got this right if they can produce a deep-fake of my grandmother (d1960) which can explain the family story of her being sent to New York to try to break up her courtship with my grandfather: what ship she sailed on and who she stayed with. I won't be holding my breath.

Re: Chatbots are pointless

"I bet that the $7bn figure was plucked from the a$$ of some marketing droid with no information to back it up."

Close. It's from Gartner.

Re: Alternate Reality?

More likely the other 2,000 people in the queue before you are there because they have also found the website to be useless for their query. The only people who don't know this are managing customer disservice. They think their website does everything the customer should need. They think the reason the telephone queues are so long is that people don't know about the website. If they actually cared they might analyse the queries coming in through the phone to find out whether they could be answered by the site as it stands, what needs to be done to improve in and how to then staff their phones at a level which doesn't result in them claiming they're dealing with the same unusual level of enquires they've had for the last several years.

Internet backbone Cogent cuts Russia connectivity

Re: unwarranted and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine,

The purpose of NATO was to deter war by providing a sufficiently strong defence as to make invading a member counter-productive. Putin has demonstrated very effectively what can happen to a country that does not have that protection. He seems to be prompting Finland to seek it.

DBAs massively over-provision Oracle to protect themselves: Microsoft

Re: github?

They own Github so why wouldn't they treat it as their publishing arm? It probably has the effect of drawing its existence to the attention of some managerial types who wouldn't otherwise have heard of it. You can just imagine some CFO telling his IT bods "I've just come across this Github thing. Maybe you should look into it."

Enterprise IT finds itself in a war zone – with no script

"Of these aspects, the lack of leadership is the most pressing. That's not the sector's fault: effective embargoes need coherent and unambiguous governmental and regulatory guidance, neither of which are visible."

Formally that second sentence might be true. In reality, however, the industry could, and arguabley should, be telling the government and regulatory bodies of what's needed. The lack of leadership isn't as implied, all on the governmental side.

Re: The West will have this chance only once...

"5-10 years from now, China will have those keys."

Given that western countries have spent the last few decades steadily pushing their more and more of their supply chains to China, whose fault is that?