Posts by Doctor Syntax

Dev creeped out after he fired up Ubuntu VM on Azure, was immediately approached by Canonical sales rep

Ah yes, The Cloud. Somebody else's computer. Their rules but your choice.

Nominet vows to freeze wages and prices, boost donations, and be more open. For many members, it’s too little, too late

It seems that they need far more than simply replacing the board. They need to change the articles of association to limit the ability to do anything outside run a registry without a vote by the majority of the membership, not just the turnout. They also need to ensure that the board publishes a full account of what it does.

A quick search shows that a Nominet Charitable Trust is a registered charity but I can find no such registration for this alleged non-profit itself. If it's really a non-profit then maybe the entire outfit should be registered so that the whole of its activities come under the scrutiny of the Charity Commissioners.

Euro privacy watchdog calls for end of targeted advertising plus a squeeze on the processing of personal info

Re: Show me as many ads for cheap women's clothing as you like!

How many cheap women do you have to buy clothes for?

After first trying to use federal COVID-19 relief aid, State of Iowa comes up with funds to pay for Workday project

It all raises the question of whether they'd allocated money to pay for it when they signed the contract and if they had what happened to the money that the Covid grant was supposed to replace.

Many people find HR quite atrocious too.

What the heck is FinOps? It's controlling cloud spend – and new report says it ain't easy

Re: on-demand pricing is bullshit

Where does the data live and what happens to it if you have a run of bad months of cash-flow (say in a pandemic) and can't meet the bills?

Facebook and Google’s Australian pay-for-news nightmare finds a European admirer

I certainly wouldn't follow a link to our local newspaper's site. Unless they've changed they have an opt out to over 100 other sites, their site is crap and any other stories they offer usually turn out to be from some of their other "local" titles. I would probably still be reading the print edition if they'd put more effort into getting it delivered but that stopped years ago. It wouldn't surprise me, BTW, if they and Rupert's Oz organs used an image from Streetview whenever they need a picture of somewhere an incident happened.

Re: We are the Google Warriors!

Please tell me you didn't need it.

Waaay too technical.

Re: All has changed

But didn't Germany try the same tactic until the newspapers realised that they were losing traffic because Google stopped indexing them?

No phish for the likes of you, thank you very much! Google finds email villains are picky about demographics, country

Google...

...they should know. After all, most of the spam comes from gmail addresses.

Re: I don't find Google blocks too well

But there's not a lot of point in sending emails from Microsoft telling you they're going to close your account to a gmail address.

Harmed by a decision made by a poorly trained AI? You should be able to sue for damages, says law prof

Does an ML system get trained once and then continue operating on the basis of that one training set? If you think of human medics, as an example, they will be trained once, albeit over a period of years but once in practice they will continue learning by experience.

Re: Running short on software patent infringements?

I doubt a sample should be statistically representative but it would need to represent the range of what it might encounter.

Re: Theory and Reality

"It's very much an issue for the developer to deal with, because it is they that should carry liability when their creation starts causing harm."

I mostly agree but it shouldn't really be on the developer but on whoever's responsible for deploying it. It's up to them to determine whether it's fit for purpose. The developer might not even be aware of the purpose to which it was put, nor would they necessarily endorse it for that purpose if they were.

Faced with the sack, Nominet CEO half-apologizes for taking the 'wrong tone,' asks angry members to hear him out

What regulation applies to them apart from Companies House?. Are they under Ofcom and if not why not? As a non-profit are they under the Charities Commission? If they can win the vote then they would probably be clear as far Companies House are concerned but otherwise if one of the others has authority then they should be taking an interest. Maybe the Ministry of Fun, AKA the Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport should also be taking an interest.

Re: What a load of 'blocks

"Should have all resigned quite some time ago."

Should hang on for the vote.

Wrong tone

Translation: I've discovered the limits of what I can get away with.

Re: Not exactly rocket surgery

In other words he needs a big pay packet to retain him. An easy problem to solve unless you're the only person thinking he needs to be retained.

Web prank horror: Man shot dead while pretending to rob someone at knife-point for a YouTube video

Re: Pretty much had to happen some day

I think the reality, were it not a prank, would have been either he fired or got stabbed with no intermediate options.

Re: On the contrary

Her parents think the council should do something to prevent this happening. They did. They built railings. Sometimes I despair.

Re: Think of it as evolution in action

I'd like to think so but PT Barnum's dictum applies.

"not recognising that they are criminals, or recognising and not caring"

And that not recognising or caring is what makes them Darwin award candidates.

Re: Born idiots. All of 'em.

And yet the guy who did the same at Doncaster airport got all sorts of public sympathy and eventually, IIRC, got off or maybe had his sentenced reduced.

Choc horror: The UK's Information Commisioner probes its own mammoth £6,248 Hotel Chocolat spend

That's easy:

Closed

Closed

Closed

...

How do we combat mass global misinformation? How about making the internet a little harder to use

Re: Trust nothing, check your data, use various sources.

"I was lucky enough to be deliberately taught critical thinking during History GCSE"

Which is why I think the Yes (Prime) Minister Diaries should be set books in English. Amusing enough to catch interest (unlike the Jane Austin etc on which I failed English Litt) and enough to provoke a critical look at "authority".

Re: Wikipedia is far from perfect...

It's not unknown for the Wayback machine to tell you that the page isn't indexed, it's still online. Not necessarily if it's a real 404, but how many of those do yu see these days? All too often it's a chatty little page that says what you're looking for isn't there, tell the referring page about it. Or else it's a cybersquatter's parking page.

UK college courses show decade-long surging interest in computer science – just as new intake was locked down

Re: Basically schools need to be fixed in so many ways...

"(perhaps even Raspberry Pi)."

Better be careful there. Pi OS (the Raspbian replacement) has quietly added a Microsoft repository which phones home. Fortunately Devuan for the Pi doesn't.

A couple of weeks ago the Beeb news site had a story of somebody with a biomedical degree volunteering at the Manchester vaccination centre in his spare time from his regular job - delivering pizzas. It appears nothing much has changed in the British biological job market in more than 50 years apart from the choice of non-graduate jobs.

Microsoft suspends donations to politicians who backed attempt to overturn US presidential election

Re: Democrats need to do a full voter rights act

AFAICS the issues with counting votes also contributed. Paper ballots, hand counted, cuts out a lot of scope for dispute. It used to be the case that bank clerks, used to counting notes, could do it quite quickly. Maybe there aren't as many of those nowadays; a by-product of the cashless society.

DBA heroes don't always wear capes. Sometimes they just have a bunch of forgotten permissions

Re: They think they are gods..

I had a short contract as a DBA to cover somebody's 2 week holiday plus a week overlap either side. Most of that seemed to be occupied with the paperwork to get permission to add another chunk to the Informix database and to get the sysadmin team - who were separate and whom I never even saw - to allocate an LVM volume for it. This was in the same industry where, in a much large operation, my team handled everything - Unix and database administration, development and support. The contract clients are no longer in business.

All very well, but when all else fails fait accompli remains the most powerful tool in the box.

The Linux box that runs the exec carpark gate is down! A chance for PostgreSQL Man to show his quality

Re: Told off for it

" At least you get some satisfaction that it wasn't your fault when the car park gate tries to slice the execu-barge in twain."

You could get more if it was your fault, sufficiently well hidden, of course.

Re: Ah, the joys of leaving

"ah, but I dont need to pay this. You see, I never processed your resignation letter"

What he did or didn't do with it would have been his problem. Your resignation had been presented to an appropriate representative of your employer (assuming he was that appropriate representative). Anything further would be between him and the rest of the company.

Re: Execu-barge

They're put in because they're required to enforce 20 mph areas. The possibility that they might cause damage leading to an accident outside the area isn't a concern because obviously the cause can't be traced back. The road safety industry is very good at denying its the consequences of its actions. It's currently working hard at denying that "smart" motorways* are dangerous.

At the same time they ignore dangerous features: I know of one stretch of road which has notices up along the lines of X casualties in 5 years (not very specific as to which 5 years as the notice has been there for at least 10). That stretch of road has 4 junctions with extremely poor sight lines including an oblique cross-roads with another A road which very clearly needs a roundabout. The only remedial action has been to reconfigure the major crossroads to make it even more dangerous and to provide onesmall, inconspicuous convex mirror.

*Probably somebody thought it smart to add an extra lane without having all the hassle and cost of widening the wayleave.

Re: The Joys of Departure

More than likely there'd be times when yu were nominated by whoever actually dealt with it in the past.

Re: I don't support the barrier sorry

"It was your assumptions that got your PC into this mess. Don't make them.

Re: Execu-barge

Back in the day my boss had a VW Karman Ghia. It turned out it didn't laugh at speed bumps. We met in the ferry car park at Stranraer. He hadn't seen a set of them in time on the way into the town and said he bounced off the roof.

Re: Had a call...

Minimum 2 hours.

Re: Had a call...

"Had a phone call the night before the last day offering me a new job at 50% more dosh, start immediately."

What a pity it wasn't in writing, then you could have waved it in their faces.

No, the soon-to-be-ex-employee worth his BOFH certification will taken out the repository first, along with its backups. If a jbo's worth doing it's worth doing right.

Re: Execu-barge

A long time ago I had an MGB, an early one before they installed a suspension that made them look as if they were on stilts. Driving over a "sleeping policeman" (speed hump) outside North Queen St police station in Belfast it grounded amid ships. I had to get out to get more clearance to push it forwards.

I've never liked speed humps. I'm sure the accumulated wear & tear on suspension components must contribute to accidents but, as they're not happening at the actual places they were caused, they reasons go undetected. Rumble strips are a different matter; if yu take them fast enough the suspension filters them out.

Re: Execu-barge

Hoist by his own bollard!

Re: Had a call...

"No."

Quite right. You had no right to do that. The security company should have known that.

NASA offers foodies, boffins $500,000 to find ways for astronauts to make their own dinners on the Moon, Mars

They should concentrate on making weeds (no, not that sort; those plant ecologists call "ruderals") palatable. Why? Because IME they always grow better than whatever it is I'm trying to grow.

War on Section 230 begins in earnest as Dem senators look to limit legal immunity for social networks, websites etc

"That should help cap the frivolous notices"

And extend the harm done by posts where the takedown was serious.

My bad! So you're saying that redacting an on-screen PDF with Tipp-Ex won't work?

Re: The Weekly Cultural Moment

Don't forget the gevinegar.

Vote machine biz Smartmatic sues Fox News and Trump chums for $2.7bn over bogus claims of rigged 2020 election

Re: “We are proud of our 2020 election coverage ..."

"And fined them $2.7bn"

Why would a judge fine them? This is a civil suit, he would be asked to award damages.

"as well with subsequent bankruptcy."

In his case it's just SoP.

Brit IBM veteran wins unfair dismissal case after 2018's Global Technology Services redundancy bloodbath

Re: Older vs Younger

"Well younger people are going to find it easier to find alternative employment."

But they're not going to start looking until they've been there long enough for disillusion to set in.