Posts by Doctor Syntax

State of Maine orders review of $54.6m Workday project as it alleges delivery failure and threatens cancellation

Re: Been there

It might be worse than that. If the previous system was payroll only there might be manual records to take on-board.

Browser tracking protections won't stop tracking, warns DuckDuckGo

"There is no way to get it to search for the exact search terms I've entered. Put 'em in quotes. Prefix with plus signs. Add exclusions for the incorrect hits with minus signs. Nothing helps."

This seems to be universal nowadays. Given that steering search engines was perfectly possible in the 1968s it's obvious that this steady decline is deliberate. Quantity over quality.

Re: DDG

Thanks for that. Another off the list of possibles.

As I do not want or trust FB not to fingerprint my browser

Suggested imrovement.

"hird-party marketing firms have increased in the use of CNAME DNS records to borrow subdomains from publishers"

And then somebody will get access to a borrowed subdomain and use it in a scam. Then the lender will act all agrieved.

Wi-Fi devices set to become object sensors by 2024 under planned 802.11bf standard

"preferably before launch"

Why break the habits of a life time?

Microsoft's 0.5 release of Project Reunion dev kit has production support – just don't be touching UWP

"Our team is SUPER EXCITED"

As bad as that?

Arm pulls the sheets off its latest Armv9 architecture with added AI support, Realms software isolation

RISCY

Does this still count as RISC or has that line been dropped long ago?

Cryptic US Strategic Command tweet reveals dangers of working from home with kids in the way

Go on, admit it. It was sent from the phone in your back pocket when you sat down.

Under threat of judicial review, UK.gov agrees to consultation before extending Palantir's NHS role beyond pandemic

What's needed isn't an inquiry into one particular contract. There need to be two, one into the role of AI in public decision making wide enough to cover its role in campaigning for votes and the other into recent history in contract awarding. And forget "citizen juries", they need judicial authority to summon witnesses.

You put Marmite where? Google unveils its latest AI wizardry: A cake made of Maltesers and the pungent black tar

Re: OK, so it's not exactly Marmite but ...

Sounds OK.

Re: Sir WIlliam Ramsay Hazlemere Buckinghamshire

"Those who went to Ramsay should recall the hone econmics"

Did they have a knife problem? Just as well my children went to Lady Verney & John Hempden.

Re: I admit...

"Marmite, beer, same thing, sort of, no?"

Separated at birth.

Re: school meals

I liked school dinners. Maybe that was because we had good catering staff. It was the occasional halls of residence dinners that I had problem with: rabbit bone stew and epoxy cauliflower cheese were the offenders.

Island in the Stream: AlmaLinux project issues first stable release of CentOS replacement

"Will Red Hat be upset at the appearance of binary-compatible community builds of RHEL?"

Whether they're upset or not they shouldn't be surprised. They shouldn't be but they probably will despite it's being the obvious consequence.

And that's yet another UK education body under attack from ransomware: Servers, email, phones yanked offline

The institution itself claimed it was "at least" the fourth multi-academy trust targeted just this month alone.

So that's all right then, we're not the only ones.

And the others didn't serve as a warning?

Money can buy you insurance against network break-ins but investing in infosec hygiene wouldn't go amiss, says new NCSC chief

"yet forgetting who actually has to do the work on anything that is digital."

It's the cloud that does it innit?

Re: Won't work

"What else is there to cover?"

Loss of reputation.

After you've had your customers' personal data cast abroad over the interwebs you'll have seen the last of a good number of them. You may think you're sorting things out for them by letting Experian slurp more of their data for 6 months but it's unlikely they'll think that solves the problem and it's what they think that matters in the long run.

UK's Home Office dangles £32m for application support on comms-snooping network

I expect the contract, when written, will require security clearance for everyone working on it. Whether they're looking for a contractor with previous intelligence work or not at present they're going to find someone with that background is going to have the staff to meet the requirement a good deal more easily than a company that hasn't.

Scottish National Party members found among list of names signed up to rival Alba Party after website whoopsie

How about the Sottish People's Back?

"the nature of the error will cause disbelief in infosec circles."

They've all seen it before. They'll all expect to see it again. No surprise.

UK terror law reviewer calls for expanded police powers to imprison people who refuse to hand over passwords

I've spent a few evenings and weekends working on "high pressure terrorist investigations" without such aids. Terrorists attempt to overthrow the rule of law and its safeguards for the innocent. If, as a state, you decide to ditch those safeguards yourself you've gone a long way to admitting that they've beaten you.

Re: but they don't

Only a subset of them. I don't remember any IRA, INLA, UVF or the like going on deliberate suicide missions.

Re: Do I go down for that

Your string of random bits might not be any good. It might have holes in it. Just to make sure replace every zero with a one. And you won't be asked for the key.

Vegas, baby! A Register reader gambles his software will beat the manual system

The "time and attendance" mentioned in the 3rd paragraph of the story. Or did the article get updated before I read it?

AKA "Clocking on" for this side of the pond.

Sadly, the catastrophic impact with Apophis asteroid isn't going to happen in 2068

Re: placing it even closer than some satellites in geosynchronous orbits

Not clearly written. I suppose what was meant was that it would pass under those satellites on the same side of the Earth but not the others.

Re: placing it even closer than some satellites in geosynchronous orbits

Smithereens are more likely to burn up in the atmosphere and being dispersed to some extent some would miss entirely.

Yes, there's nothing quite like braving the M4 into London on the eve of a bank holiday just to eject a non-bootable floppy

Re: Take a different tack and consult the BOFHs excuse calender.

It didn't worry you that the "any disk at hand" might have a boot sector virus?

Re: Teachers

Board room. Everything worked including the projector. The PC and its keyboard and mouse were locked in a cupboard.

Re: Too Many...

There was often a third issue: 'I haven't got a paperclip'.

That's the paper-less office for you.

The HP tape drive needed a half straightened paperclip. When it forgot how to load tapes it had to be reset by using one as a jumper between two holes on the PCB next to the tape spool.

I've power-cycled it twice, but no effect." Tech - "Please reboot your computer..."

Your fault for using a term they didn't understand: "power-cycled".

Your users were lucky in that they were dealing with a business that would - eventually - escalate the problem. All too often that's an unknown concept.

Re: Wasting their time

The classic of getting one to set a boot password without making a note of it was pretty good.

Red Hat pulls Free Software Foundation funding over Richard Stallman's return

Re: Let's Cancel IBM

The temp will need to demand a float. None of the rest are going to process expense claims.

Re: Why, Stallman?

An odd thing to say. On the whole resignations are not planned before the situation (usually a new job) that occasions them.

Make that all the BSDs.

Re: Bloody Wokesters

Yes, but they have some spare time.

Re: Redhat

Ageism is not just allowed but compulsory.

Diary of a report writer and his big break into bad business

Re: Never mind the content, check the font size

I don't think I could have sat in a meeting like that and said so little.

Re: I hate Adobe, but...

But tell that to the paperless office freaks who turn up here from time to time & tell us nobody needs a printer.

Re: A (La)TeX user writes:

Way, way back in the days of Windows 3 HP had New Era which sat above Windows and added a lot of features that found their way into W95. One feature which didn't do that was a text editor with a spill chucker.

Re: Many Years Ago...

I remember having an argument with a manager about a gerund.

Re: Many Years Ago...

Boss management is an essential skill.

Re: I hate Adobe, but...

Our tame proof reader sent back a printed-out copy of the article I mentioned above with corrections in red ink. Like me, she prefers to work on a hard copy version and it also means comments don't mess with layout.

Re: A (La)TeX user writes:

"do you honestly know anyone who would put their hand up and admit they dont know how to use Word properly?"

Haven't used it for years. OO and then LO.

Re: Paragraph and Page styles

"I turned on the formatting code option and the screen filled with dots and <CR> symbols. It turned out that the secretaries placed text on screen using the spacebar and <enter> (aka 'carriage return'). "

Because, of course, they'd trained on typewriters and that's how it works there.

I usually end up overriding styles for particular headings and paragraphs to make small spacing adjustments to control pagination. The hardest ones were republishing out-of-print books where there were loads of spaces to "wrap" text round images and create tables without actually using tables plus the notionally identical font metrics aren't quite the ones the original version used. And no, I'm not going to leave the Comic Sans in there.

Salesforce to face trial after software used by Backpage 'to track sex traffickers, pimps, johns on social media'

Re: And who's next, the power company?

The prosecutions you mention aren't something I've been aware of until now. However, if previous ones have been as misguided as you say then I hope that Salesforce raise these issues as part of their defence. It shouldn't be necessary - as you say, unless there's a chain proving guilty knowledge on Salesforce's part they're simply selling a neutral product, although I'm not sure that matters much in US courts.

Perhaps, however, these people should go after Google. A quick check on soc.genealogy.medieval shows that there are still pimp postings on Usenet there and they always seem to come from gmail.

Semi-autonomous cars sales move up a gear with 3.5 million units leaving forecourts

"But to improve here, autonomous vehocles don't need to be better than the best driver at their most attentive, they just need to be better than the average driver at their average level of attentiveness."

A couple of points here. To overcome distrust, let alone meet the hype they do need to be better than the best driver at their most attentive. And if you work out the number of vehicle miles per accident, at least per fatal accident, it will be a very challenging task to meet the average.

" Considering the awful driving I've witnessed driving in half a dozen different countries, and also considering how many people drive tired, drunk, while calling, or when trying to deal with screaming kids, jumping pets or their favourite scalding caffeinated beverage.... well, the bar to clear isn't really that high."

The bar you seem to be setting here is the worst driving you've seen, not the average.

Everything you need to know about the HPE v Mike Lynch High Court case

Re: Why so pro-Autonomy?

There are two ways of valuing something. One is to add up the sum of the bits,which is the valuation being disputed now, and the other is what a willing buyer is prepared to pay for it which seems to have been the basis on which the deal was done.

The second valuation is essentially what the buyer thinks it's worth to themselves. One view of that would be what it could be made to earn for them when fitted into their wider operation. AFAICR there were arguments bandied about which spoke of "synergy" and the like.

If that were the case then (a) the previous management were wrong in that judgement or (b) the subsequent management are wrong and that if they'd got on with the job they could have realised that value. The realisable value could, of course, have lain in the middle and both HP managements were in error - never something to be discounted in an HP that no longer contains an H or a P.

An alternative view of what it was worth to them was that it was looked on as a trophy in a willy waving contest between HP management and Oracle (whether Oracle regarded themselves as being in such a contest is neither here nor there, it was sufficient that HP did) and they made what they thought was needed to win the bidding.

The fact that the KPMG report was ignored suggests it was the second valuation that was adopted and, for whatever reason HP have now suffered a severe attack of buyer's remorse.

Finally, don't forget that a lot of sentiment here is based on the huge respect in which HP was once held and disgust at successive managements who have brought it so low.