Posts by Doctor Syntax

Experimental WebAssembly port of LibreOffice released

Re: Got curious. Clicked the link.

"Yes, I know what the error message means."

Cannibalism?

Food for thought on the return to the office

Re: Working from home is great...

Cooing? If that's all they're doing think yourself lucky. They're apt to arrive at first light and start stamping on our roof which isn't thin, blue Welsh slate but sandstone slates the best part of an inch thick. It's amazing how birds which are light enough to fly make a din suggestive of wearing hob-nail boots.

Re: Union?

We, the employees, united in giving the union the push; employers are not the only ones who can be self-serving.

Looking after my own interests vis-a-vis the complacent employers was solved by giving them the push. It came as a surprise to them that someone they'd assumed would be safely trapped in a specialised corner of science had alternative skills that were marketable elsewhere. It was amazing how a much over-due promotion was offered immediately, outside the annual review cycle without the formality of a board. I was tempted to try to negotiate it back-dated a couple of years without actually committing to stay but instead took pleasure in explaining exactly why I was turning them down. I still have their replay protesting that it wasn't like that at all. Liars. I suspect that if I'd accepted and turned down the external offer there'd have been a board after all and all sorts of other complications.

Re: The Great DeResignation

I had a lad in my team who ended up spending the night in a telephone box on some station out in Essex.

Not so much Heathrow as the central London terminal* that used to be near Gloucester Rd Underground station. Some of us had been to a British Ecological Society conference in London and rolled up there to find bad weather had stopped all the flights to Belfast until morning. The cross section of society we met there was most of the rest of the QUB Botany department who'd been at some other conference.

*This was before Central Line had been extended out to Heathrow. You checked in there & were taken out West by bus.

Re: Union?

In my one and only experience of a union (I don't count the PCG as I regarded it as an industry business association I discovered that it was to maintain the earnings of members of unions for other parts of the Civil Service, not the scientists, and possibly the permanent union officials. Despite sending someone along to face the flack they faced with resignation of most of their members there. Someone challenged that they publish his letter of resignation in their newsletter (a newsletter I never recall even seeing) which they ducked on the grounds that they didn't publish letters from non-members.

No. Never came across a union that had any intentions of doing me anything worth-while.

Re: The Great DeResignation

Back in the '80s I worked for a body shop that had most of its employees out on customer sites (I ended up on site after about 2 days in the office & apart from reviews was never in HQ for the rest of my 2 years.

Once a month they arranged a get-together in a pub in central London. The hazard of that was dozing off on the train home & overshooting the station. Not great getting off the train at Princes Risborough & then discovering after it left that that was the last train of the day in either direction.

Re: Fresh milk!

What a peculiar problem. Tea should not be polluted with milk.

Amazon, Visa strike global truce on credit card charges

Re: Still Avoiding Them

"See within."

Is he hiding from the police?

Re: Innovative payment experiences

"The traditional method is for banks to figure out patterns to your purchase activities, and stop any that are sufficiently shady. "

You mean like HSBC blocking the card every time I tried to buy dial-up access from a hotel phone line because it was in a not-spot and I needed to review another client's logs? Every week for a four week contract. Even after they'd been told.

Yup, works really well, right up to the time when you need to make a change to your spending requirements.

UK starts to ponder how Huawei ban would work

"which is recognised as being among the most secure and trusted in the world."

HMG probably doesn't want secure and trusted. They want something with back doors for them.

Should we expect to keep communication private in the digital age?

I repeat my comment I made on Monday's article. We shouldn't expect it, we should require it.

As regards a company mailbox the employee might well not expect confidentiality on traffic there. The company, however, will need security against third parties.

We take it for granted that snail mail in a sealed envelope will be delivered unopened other than with the sanction of a court warrant. There is nothing new about the idea of secure communication. It's insecure communication that's a novelty. Mass surveillance comes under the heading of just because you can do something it doesn't necessarily make it a good idea.

Interpol: Policing model needs to change with cybercrime

Re: Really?

Or, to put it another way, no shit, Sherlock.

File suffixes: Who needs them? Well, this guy did

Re: Users!

"and for some reason a lot of them used MS Word 'open' file dialogue to browse/search for files"

Perhaps the reason would be to look for the file they wanted to open in Word.

Re: Competition time!

That would depend on who did it first.

Re: Competition time!

"It removes the opportunity for fuck ups."

It removes one opportunity and introduces a whole lot more. It depending on your point of view, of course; if you're maliciously inclined it's just an opportunity.to make use of.

"There are plenty of other cases too, such as layered formats such as .tar.gz or formats that package multiple elements in a single .zip. Using magic all you see is the outer container."

This can be dealt with.

.odt, for instance, is such a format. A few bytes into the file are the strings 'mimetypeapplication/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text' and 'content.xml'. Likewise a .deb starts with the string '!<arch>' and then continues a little further in with strings indicating the contents.

The system is capable of using this.

Re: Still humans in the mix here not just machines

Get well soon.

It should be safe enough for the OS to look at a few bytes to look at the magic number or other diagnostics.

"MS's bone headed idea of hiding the extension but still using it to decide what to run if double clicked."

I'd used KDE's Create New facility to create a LibreOffice text file but not noticed when I renamed it that I'd overwritten the whole of 'LibreOffice Writer.odt' instead of just the first part, leaving it without the extension. LO opened it OK and saved it, the GUI showed the correct icon. Nothing I used needed to see the extension to know what it was. I didn't notice at all until someone I'd emailed it to replied to say she couldn't open it with LO in Windows.

Re: Still humans in the mix here not just machines

"That's literally what the `file` command does."

Yes, but you're talking about a real operating system there.

Three major browsers are about to hit version 100. Will websites cope?

And the developers of every website that gets broken deserve it. Likewise the browser devs for any condemnation that users might heap on them.

Alarm raised after Microsoft wins data-encoding patent

Re: Why the hell isn't the existing code prior art?

And if you've got more money to spend than Microsoft you might be able to prove it.

EU digital sovereignty: Cloud players unconvinced

Re: Talk about a day late and a dollar short - Elvis has left the country.....

I doubt it's that unlikely that any attempts to work round the issue will get past the EU courts as the stumbling block in the US remains. However, unless the court specifically says it's never going to work they'll just kick the can down the road by bringing out a new scheme to replace the old, more or less like investigative powers in the UK.

Facebook is one bad Chrome extension away from another Cambridge Analytica scandal

Re: I wonder what would happen if...

"Would FB implode like a balloon suddenly developing a black hole inside, or would it explode like the Big Bang?"

I've no idea but I'm not going to stop you if you want to try. It's the only way to find out.

Journalist won't be prosecuted for pressing 'view source'

Deep ignorance is a great asset. If you don't know your bullshit is wrong it's a lot easier to say it without any trace of cognitive dissonance. e.g. "We have the hashtags".

Re: There’s more than what meets the eye

"I would not jump to the conclusion that the man is stupid."

Never attribute to conspiracy that which can be explained by cock-up. Probability favours the latter as conspiracy needs talent to carry it off.

Being stupid is one thing. Being told you've been stupid is another. But going on to continue saying what you've been told is stupid is something else entirely.

Google's Chrome OS Flex could revive old PCs, Macs

"Presumably though, Google hopes that once businesses are paying for Google IDs so their staff can use Chrome OS Flex, they'll decide to save costs by eliminating other web apps."

If you want something that boots into a browser as a thin client why not just use the OS of your choice configured to boot into a browser and have your own choice of web service without having a Google ID if Google isn't your choice? You could even run your own service (e.g.NextCloud) to keep your data under your own control.

Re: four gigabytes

"This Linux user would maintain that (a) 4GB is not little, and (b) a 64-bit system ought to be capable of a RAM upgrade to more than 4GB. Otherwise, what was its point?"

This Linux user has an MSI nettop that is 64-bit, cannot theoretically be upgraded beyond 4Gb thanks to an Atom processor and cannot practically be upgraded beyond 3Gb thanks to 1Gb soldered in memory. What's its point? It's small and light and just fine to take into libraries or archives to transcribe documents.

Re: quite useful

A standard Linux distro will also run locally without needing an internet connection if that's not available.

Notepad Dark Mode and Android apps arrive on Windows 11

What is this obsession with dark mode on this, that & the other. Even OS News has got into it. Maybe it's time to give UI designers VT100s to let them see what we've been getting away from all these days.

And "simplified menus"? Either the menu was fine as was or should have been fixed long ago. Get it right once and then stop tinkering. It just goes to show these jobs shouldn't even exist - idle hands and all that.

Re: Phone apps on a desktop?

Possibly useful for app developers?

UK regulator 'broke international law', says Facebook

"Facebook, not being a nation"

Quite, but who's going to tell them?

Dido Harding's appointment to English public health body ruled unlawful

Re: Guilty of not doing a equality report

"So during a pandemic and a crumbling health care system the government appointed someone in haste and are now getting into trouble for not doing a proper equality report."

Appointing someone in haste in an emergency is reasonable (even if it has to be on the basis of "someone we know") with one proviso: the someone appointed in haste should be competent to do the job.

Bingham most certainly was.

Harding most certainly wasn't.

If "equality report" means evidence of an effective process, however rapid, to establish competence before making the appointment then that's fair enough. It's essentially saying the job wasn't done right. The really alarming thing is that whoever made the decision to appoint Harding probably didn't even realise how bad a decision it was - they just looked at the job she'd done previously and not how well she did it.

Expect sales reps' calls if IT wants to ditch Oracle

If pitching to a migration from Oracle the best opening to the C-suite would be "Do you want to buy Larry Ellison another yacht or do you want to buy your own?"

20 years of .NET: Reflecting on Microsoft's not-Java

"So MAUI is a wrapper around existing UI stacks."

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/927/

IBM HR chief insists 'no systemic age discrimination'

"However, IBM has wielded its confidentiality provision in its arbitration agreement aggressively to block these employees at every turn from using this highly relevant and damning evidence in each other’s cases."

Isn't it illegal in the US to have contractual agreements override statute law?

Reality check: We should not expect our communications to remain private

No, we should not expect out communications to remain private. We should require it.

Canalys: Foldable shipments could 'exceed 30 million by 2024'

Headline says "could". First paragraph says "will". These words do not mean the same thing.

IBM looked to reinvigorate its 'dated maternal workforce'

"Perhaps management ought to start by figuring out what their company should be and then decide how to staff it."

Don't they even teach them that in MBA school?

Re: Millenials

I came into IT in mid career. I started off in science. As a scientist I see the dangers of extrapolating from a sample of 1.

A New York Times report on the filing quotes IBM spokesperson Adam Pratt as stating "IBM never engaged in systemic age discrimination," and explaining that employees were let go "because of shifts in business conditions and demand for certain skills, not because of their age."

Nominative determinism?

IT technician jailed for wiping school's and pupils' devices

Or recovery software. Unless it got overwritten the data should still be there.

Beware the big bang in the network room

Re: Maintenence window, gosh how quaint

Seeing the prospect of being caught between management and customer in that situation was part of the reason for leaving one job. It had been sold as a replacement for the existing customer's system. Having seen that and knowing the database design of our I could see it wouldn't be the drop-in replacement they seemed to be expecting.

Re: Had he never seen Star Trek?

Hofstadter's law. It always takes longer than you think even when you allow for Hofstadter's law.

"Whisky helps."

It usually does. Can you remember what the problem was?

Real-time software? How about real-time patching?

Re: Site Acceptance Test

"The other stories were about missing seeing somewhere nice..."

Plenty of nice bits in N Ireland.

BOFH: The Geek's Countergambit – outwitted at an electronics store

Re: Electronics shop

The local Maplin had at least one employee who knew his stuff and a few who didn't. The local Tandy, IIRC, was a bit desperate. The Tandy in Lisburn, long ago, was very good.

Make assistive driving safe: Eliminate pedestrians

Re: Here is an interesting to make traffic better in general:

My local town (which I try to avoid as much as possible) pedestrianised the main street. From my PoV it makes it even less pleasant. It has now got beyond buskers. Last time I was there there a DJ had set up sharing his choice of hideous racket with half the town centre.

Re: Changes to the Highway Code

When I learnt to ride a bike the Highway Code said to ride just far enough out into the road to avoid drain covers. 1 1/2 feet would have been the maximum, not the minimum.

"Towns aren't planned"

Two words: Milton Keynes.