Posts by Doctor Syntax

The kids aren't all right: Fall in GCSE compsci students is bad news for employers and Britain's future growth plans

Re: Never been a better time or a lower bar for entry.

I don't thing that, despite a few name changes, those offices and the people who work in them have undergone an radical improvement for well over half a century.

Re: Drones

I suppose one solution would be separate schools, one sort to take the "fick and praaad of it" and one to take those who want to learn. Maybe it should be tried.

Re: What?

Creating a new folder and saving to that is left as an exercise for the manager's PA.

FTFY

One of the problems with maths - to some extent with all subjects but more, I think with maths than most - is that teachers (hopefully) have an aptitude for their subject and find it difficult to comprehend that those who don't are actually having trouble with the subject and aren't just being lazy or deliberately obstructive.

Re: Have they considered paying more for IT?

Because IT isn't management.

Re: Teaching principle versus implementation

As I've said here before, it's the lure of numbers. Given some aspect of a process that can be easily quantified manglement will latch onto it as something to optimise regardless of its relevance. That applies in any field.

Re: Blah blah offshoring

"Sell a product, not a service"

Not least because selling an IT service nowadays, at least whilst being your own boss, is regarded by HMRC as tax evasion.

Your hardware is end-of-life... and it's in space. Worry not, Anglo-Japanese sat to test new orbital cleanup method

Re: Err...

No, there's a lot more up than down.

Teenage Twitter hijacker gets three years in the clink over celeb Bitcoin scamming

Re: Ransomware re-teaching old lessons

"otherwise functioning companies going to the wall. Some of them very large companies."

That shouldn't be a necessary cost to get the message through but maybe it is. Some will take notice if it's made illegal. Some will take notice when the first one goes to the wall. Some will catch on later. And for some there will be no hope anyway.

On the subject of Microsoft, their mail software and online services, how is it that the one category of scam spam they regularly fail to stop is that which claims to be from themselves warning that some mail service will stop working if I don't click on some link? Two this morning, apparently almost identical apart from the headlines, following closely on a couple of others in the past few days. Announcements that I've won this or that, and other unbelievable offers regularly get trapped but any cams claiming to come from Microsoft sail straight through.

"The NetWalker and RagnarLocker crews are increasingly adopting this, although the former is under attack from US authorities."

Good. And let's hope it's a throw-away-the-key sentence.

FreeBSD 13.0 to ship without WireGuard support as dev steps in to fix 'grave issues' with initial implementation

Re: I was about to

Just trying to remember why K & R invented C... Oh, yes - amongst other things, to write an OS kernel.

Backblaze on the back foot after 'inadvertently' beaming customer data to Facebook

"what kind of data was inadvertently transmitted to Facebook."

Inadvertently? Negligently might be closer.

Outsourced techie gets 2-year sentence after trashing system of former client: 1,200 Office 365 accounts zapped

a $567,084 penalty – the same amount paid by his former client to clean up his mess.

To whom was the penalty to be paid? I'd have expected the unnamed outsourcing company to have been required to have made good the costs in the first instance so it should have been owing to them.

Thousands of taxpayers' personal details potentially exposed online through councils' debt-chasing texts

On reflection I think this comment I made the other day applies here:

It raises the usual questions about top management:

Do they believe what they say?

Do they believe we'll believe what they say?

Do they think we won't care even when we don't believe what they say?

Do they care whether we care when we don't believe what they say?

None of the alternatives show them up in a good light but I've never been able to determine which is the case given that the only external evidence is that they keep spouting bollocks that only an idiot would believe.

On further reflection I've realised that quotes like this aren't directed at anyone who knows the difference between a shift key, a shift lock key and a control. They're aimed at the execs of the councils involved and any stray councillors who take an interest, the sorts of people who'd be equally likely to spout such bollocks. To adapt the BBC's motto "Management shall spout bollocks unto management".

The most effective way of dealing with public bodies would be to ensure that it ended up as an adverse marking on the annual reports of those responsible. Even better if it could be arranged to show up for several years running.

Re: Please click the link to read

It gets worse.

[e-mail] replies to reports with a number of links, mostly to various NCSC sites but also including Action Fraud and usually buried well down the bottom of the reply - too far down to even see without scrolling on my browser. But earlier this month they started including a prominently placed link to a 3rd party survey. Really?

I'd like to think it was really to some site designed to discourage clicking on stray links but more likely they actually thought a 3rd party to a survey didn't look at all suspicious.

How many of these councils have reported themselves to the ICO? And have Telesolutions who take all matters of data protection extremely seriously done so?

"We take security and all matters of data protection extremely seriously. After identifying a potential vulnerability with one of our systems,"

Identifying such a noob vulnerability after the event once it's been pointed out and then describing it as "potential" says a great deal about what they mean by "extremely".

SK Hynix boss predicts CPUs and RAM will merge, chipmakers will hold hands to make it happen

Re: Transputer come to mind?

My thought exactly. My reactions was simply "Again?".

TikTok no worse than Facebook for privacy, says Citizen Lab (although Chinese TikTok is a horror)

"TikTok is likely no more of a threat to users than Facebook"

More or less.

Sloppy data compliance sees Japanese government cut out its own use of LINE messaging app

Re: BBM plus BBME

"Have any gov out there forgot why we haven’t got the BBM any more.Because it was to secure and impossible to snoop."

Use Signal.

The messaging app, not the toothpaste.

Chairman, CEO of Nominet ousted as member rebellion drives .uk registry back to non-commercial roots

Having jumped before he was pushed what severance package did Haworth negotiate in the hours before the EGM?

Re: Mark Wood, clinging on with his fingernails

Given that the members are registrars, very much part of that critical infrastructure, they know at least as much as Mr Wood about operating it. Directors approved of by those members should be relied on to run it properly unless events prove otherwise. The fact that the members, given their background, did not approve of the existing directors should tell any government watching the situation closely all they need to know.

Re: Strange outburst from Godaddy blaming everybody but themselves

You seem to have a faulty shift key. Every time you hit it it mostly inserts an @.

Re: It isn't over

The proposal passed by members was to remove 5 directors, not 5 board members.

The "Board" is more fully known as "The Board of Directors". "Board Members" and "Directors" are the same thing.

Re: Nominet Mistepped every way possible.

"This needs to be studied by future campaign managers as how not to do things"

People like this, so convinced of their own position, aren't going to study how anyone else did things.

Re: Very well done...

"a giant bronze one, as at the start of the old Rank films."

Except it was a prop (made out of hardboard I think) and certainly not the one Jimmy Blades played for the sound track. It would have been appropriate for Nominet management, however.

Apple stung for $308m in battle over patent used in FairPlay DRM software

A useful guide in such situations: "code or it didn't happen".

Richard Stallman says he has returned to the Free Software Foundation board of directors and won't be resigning again

"mischaracterized or misunderstood by the mob"

Characteristic behaviour of mobs.

I'm glad they realised they didn't need to make a video to make an announcement.

I'm not glad that they originally thought they did.

Crafty: Cricut caught out by user revolt, but will cloud stop play?

"it didn't occur to anybody that whilst it might achieve that, it was far more likely to incur massive reputational damage"

Beancounters are beancounters. If it ain't beans it don't count.

Re: Problem is that your hardware is bound to their software

A slightly different option - they can make one free release of S/W to be run locally reproducing the existing feature set. They can then operate a subscription model for releases to add extra features or provide any extra services. That should please customers who cease to be dependent on Cricut for anything further. Assuming they can make a sufficiently attractive offer for subscriptions they may make more money that way but in any case they'll have freed themselves from the ongoing cloud costs.

In the meantime their customers may have learned a useful lesson: if what you paid for upfront depends on a "free" cloud service to keep running then either its a badly thought out business model or a scam and, from the customers' point of view the outcome will be the same.

What could be worse than killing a golden goose? Killing someone else's golden goose

Re: At JGH re: checks...

"You should probably check"

Spell-check.

Re: One place I workded...

A person, not the software.

SAP exec reminds the world that Microsoft is a customer

"the DOS inventor"

Are Seattle Computer Products still around?

City of London Police warn against using ‘open science’ site Sci-Hub

Let's not forget JStor. Back in the day a friend produced a very cheap (I'm not sure how it was produced but certainly not letter-press) archaeological magazine/journal. I wrote a few articles for it. I find that JStor have picked up copies, scanned then and now have them pay-walled. They weren't even the publishers. They certainly don't have my permission and my friend died tragically young, before the web let alone JStor was even thought of so they couldn't have had his either.

Re: "data and research ... is ... more strategically valuable ... than copyright-busting"

Years ago I was in a society that published an archaeological journal. In its area it was the main journal in its area. It was where the local professionals would expect to publish. This was back in the days when the author's manuscript had to be type-set, no getting the author to provide a formatted publication-ready MS.

We produced an annual volume with several excavation reports and other significant articles. We did this without the aid of any large publisher and all for an affordable annual subscription out of which we also ran monthly meetings for most of the year. Nowadays the production costs are even less. It's become a racket.

Fire takes out Japanese chip plant, owner Renesas warns of more silicon shortages

Once upon a time we used to hear of contracts requiring second sourcing. I wonder what happened to that.

Re: Their chips are down

And a clockwork motor to start it?

Ministry of Defence tells contractors not to answer certain UK census questions over security fears

Re: Census 2021 -cash for stats is ridiculous. Gov have EVERYTHING already. The list incomplete

Gov have access to:

Online acitivity via ISP.

Location via mobile phone provider.

Let's start with one of my sisters in law. No internet. No mobile phone.

You were saying?

Re: threats of £1,000 fines being handed to people who don't complete the national survey

"one lucky voter wins a million quid"

And the rest get a politician.

Re: Important census-related questions for the commentariat

This morning it was working well. It clearly wasn't put together by the usual crowd. The only annoying thing was that with the longer pages trying to navigate down a list of radio buttons to the Save and Continue button by down arrows flipped the selection down to the next box.

Re: Without being too picky...

"Cameron and Blair were indistinguishable."

I remain convinced that the reason Cameron was selected was because he was the nearest thing to Blair that they had available.

Re: Census data

I've got one like that. A childless couple took in the husband's nephew. In a society of small farms and no welfare society except the parish poor relief or, later, the workhouse, a family depended on the next generation to take over the load. Sometimes it was a middle or younger son. The deal seems to have been that that son would be the one who inherited the farm; older son(s) would marry and be set up with their own farm. I've even seen a will which mentioned an indenture which seemed likely to have been a formal agreement on those lines. It can show up as a late marriage. That happened with my 5x great-grandfather's family where one son remained unmarried until the father died (and then married very soon after) although even younger sons had married. Sometimes it went wrong. Same 5x ggfather's only younger brother was clearly the intended as the successor but died a few months before 6x ggfather. The vicar's Latin inscription in the burial register showed that even he was upset by the turn of events.

Re: Census data

"and then post incorrect information onto Ancestory and FindMyPast, poisoning the record!"

Any tree posted on any of such sites, but especially the old Mormon IGI should be treated with the deepest suspicion.

Re: Back in the old days

Their own.

Microsoft nudges Windows 10 21H1 toward commercial customers

Re: Windows IS a virus

I read that ad Debloader and thought that a script that replaced W10 with something that loaded its S/W via .deb files would do the job nicely.

From Maidenhead to Morocco: In a change to the scheduled programming, we bring you The On Call of Dreams

One of the Yes, Minister programmes has a complete set of explanations as to why none of these can be bribery. "Special commission" etc.

Re: Foreign travel

"That doesn't quite count as foreign travel."

I think Norwich does. Not the place which is fine, it's the long drag across from the A1.