Posts by Doctor Syntax

Where's the boss? Ah right, thorough deep-dive audit. On the boardroom table. Gotcha

Re: Boring Bankers... Not

"the boardroom table"

Always a safer bet than the copying machine...

Re: Ethics

Administered by the prefix.

Re: Happened to me at my first job

It was fairly foolhardy of him with his job and maybe marriage on the line to say nothing of recriminations from the other party and whatever reaction her husband might have had. You might have just said you'd take it to a tribunal without naming your price and giving yourself a chance to see how high he was prepared to bid or, worse still for him, just taking it the tribunal anyway.

Re: "WE ARE NOT HAVING AN AFFAIRE"

A fairly new member of staff was being observant. At close of play he pointed out a girl from the office and a bloke from IIRC, the factory walking across the car park.

"Have you noticed they always leave together every night?"

"Yes. Well they are married."

The shared surname should have been a clue.

Revealed: Perfect timings for creation of exemplary full English breakfast

The consequence of living in N Ireland for nearly two decades but I'd include soda and potato farls. The full UK breakfast?

CentOS Stream: 'I was slow on the uptake, but I get what they are doing now,' says Rocky Linux founder

Re: "Kurtzer said that Microsoft, which issues the certificates, had delayed things"

It's something that needs to be handed over to an independent foundation ASAP.

Re: Corporate rag?

AFAICS he was dead right. If White Box had still been on the go and Scientific Linux hadn't been winding down maintaining their own build in favour of CentOS the abrupt EoL wouldn't have mattered very much; Red Hat might not even have pulled the move at all. Now we're back to multiple RHEL equivalents anyone who wants to go down that path knows that they have some assurance that the rug can't be pulled out from under them that easily now.

Teradata customers express terror as field-based hardware support outsourced to IBM on both sides of the pond

Nobody ever told them never to give the customer reason to review the market?

BOFH: Here in my car I feel safest of all. I can listen to you ... It keeps me stable for days

Re: Box Tickers Anonymous United .......

Are you sure it was just to prove a point? I'm fairly sure a good few of them would have meant it.

Suck on this: El Reg forces dog hair, biscuit crumbs, and disconcertingly sticky stains down two mini vacuums

Re: Why an app for the upright?

Only if there isn't a suitable UI built into the device itself.

Are they any good with stair carpets?

Security warning deluge from 'npm audit' is driving developers to distraction

Re: This is strangely redolent..

Just this. As an innocent bystander there's nothing in this report that would encourage me to ditch NoScript, nor to stop me ignoring sites that simply fail to display anything with with NoScript in operation.

Dell bigwig: Expect another 6 months of supply woes. Oh, hello Windows 11

Re: Down and dirty

"Food is made from dirt."

To be pedantic, it's grown in soil or fed from stuff that's grown in soil. Only a small proportion of it is actually derived from a component of the soil (apart from the water which was only passing through). I've never understood why the uppermost geological layer gets called dirt.

Re: #MeToo

Not XP which started the phone home moves?

That statement struck an entirely false note with me. Glass, when it's not recycled, is made from sand - silicon dioxide, not neat silicon. I doubt the the glass-making industry and wafer producing industries have many steps in common other than sourcing sand. Is he telling us there's a world shortage of sand?

Kaseya delays SaaS restore to Sunday, CEO says ‘this sucks’ but decision was his alone

“exponentially more secure”

In that context what does "exponentially" mean and what is it more secure than?

Jackie 'You have no authority here' Weaver: We need more 50-somethings in UK tech

I'm in that generation - no villa although I did discover that one of my user managers eventually settled somewhere in the general direction of Provence.

Re: Promotion

Interesting. In my case it was the opposite. No promotion to PSO without "responsibility" which meant managerial responsibility for which there was little scope. Giving evidence that might help convict someone of murder or clear them of the charge wasn't "responsibility".

As it was a specialised skill set with little scope outside they thought they could get away with it. Because I had the opportunity to diversify into IT I managed to escape. The effect of someone contriving that was electric if not unprecedented. The response to my resignation was an almost immediate offer of PSO with no board or any other formalities despite having been yet again refused in the previous year. I'd hoped it would at least have made things easier for others but I later heard it didn't.

Re: Promotion

The other consequence of truncated technical pay scales is that it's assumed that the reward for succeeding in IT (or whatever it might be) will be to be promoted to a managerial scale. This ignores the fact that management is - properly - a skill in it's own right and quite a rare one at that. It makes as much sense as promoting an IT specialist to chemical engineer or vice versa. This is why we have so many abysmal managers that manglement is the most apt term for them.

US offers Julian Assange time in Australian prison instead of American supermax if he loses London extradition fight

Re: Out of the loop here

"the Swedish sex case which is now shown to be a scam to get him to America"

Alleged by him, certainly.

Shown? By whom?

In conversation with Gene Hoffman, co-creator of the web's first ad blocker

Re: Okay, now I get cryptocurrency

"perhaps because they still don't quite believe that there is a different world outside their borders"

Now, now, you're exaggerating. Even the most parochial seem aware of Mexico and I think quite a few know about Canada.

NASA readies commands to switch on Hubble's back-up hardware

There are two pretty hard verbs in that statement.

Re: Duh! - 'over engineering'

The duplicate hardware has been exposed to the space environment for an equally long time so there's no guarantee that it's in any better condition nor how long it's going to remain working if it is. It will be a sad day if it does prove to be the end. Fingers crossed.

ICO survey on data flouters: 50% say they receive more unwanted calls than before pandemic

Re: No answer

This policy gets torpedoed by the likes of GPs or the local hospital ringing back on unexpected numbers. And, worse, the hospital ringing back with a customer satisfaction survey - at least they've had better things to do in the last year and a half.

OpenUK's latest report paints a rosy picture of open source adoption

Re: Wilted roses

I've just posted extracts from a report of 2017. That puts corporate contributions at at least 85%. As you say, it's growing but a bit of Googling shows that earlier (2008, I think) it was already at 70%.

Re: Wilted roses

It's worth adding these two paragraphs from the 2017 report from linuxfoundation.org on Linux Kernel development, the latest I could find. They cover the period of kernel development cycles 4.8 to 4.13

The top 10 contributors, including the groups “unknown” and “none,” make up just over 54 percent of the total contributions to the kernel; that is up slightly from the previous version of this report. It is worth noting that, even if one assumes that all of the “unknown” contributors are working on their own time, well over 85 percent of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work.

Interestingly, the volume of contributions from unpaid developers has been in slow decline for many years. It was 14.6 percent in the 2012 version of this report, but is 8.2 percent this time around. There are many possible reasons for this decline, but, arguably, the most plausible of those is quite simple: kernel developers are in short supply, so anybody who demonstrates an ability to get code into the mainline tends not to have trouble finding job offers. Indeed, the bigger problem can be fending those offers off. As a result, volunteer developers tend not to stay that way for long.

The top contributor was Intel with 13.1% of changes. The next was the entire body of contributors with no affiliation at 8.2%. Red Hat was 3rd with 7.2% IBM was 6th with 4.1% - if those were taken together to reflect the subsequent merger they'd be the 2nd largest. Looking down the list there are, as expected, other S/W businesses - including Oracle with 1.7% but a lot are actually hardware manufacturers.

The foundation also produced a report on 2020 contributors to FOSS in general. The most (just) common motivation given was "I use this piece of FOSS and needed the specific features/fixes I added".

Re: Wilted roses

"The truth is that simply put contributors to open source projects are not being compensated."

Do you really think that all those developers working for Intel, Google Red Hat/IBM etc whose contributions make up the bulk of Linux aren't being paid? Truth? Really?

And that word "compensation"? That's the sort of PR-speak that tells us that the modest sums being given to CEOs and the like is compensation for their distasteful labours. Most people are paid to do a job.

If you mean "compensated" in the wider sense then those who have some particular need that isn't being met by existing software, or at least by anything they can afford, get together to produce their own solution, then they are being compensated. They're being compensated by getting what they wanted in the first place.

Not a baaa-d idea: Embracing the eunuch lifestyle slows ageing – for sheep anyway

Re: Clarkson's Farm

This does not, however, extend their lives. It just leads to a quick trip to the - err - knacker's yard.

Hoe yes he did: IT pro record-botherer balances garden tool on his head for 2.5 hours

How about a "watching paint dry" record.

Gov.UK vows to chop red tape in the digital sector. What could possibly go wrong?

“reduce red tape ...to come up with new ideas, grow their firms and create new jobs and prosperity.”

Hoover up all user information ahd sell it to the highest all bidders. "What could possibly go wrong?" Indeed!

Kepler spots four rogue Earth-mass exoplanets floating in space, unbound to any star

An incoming bunch of ice and dust is bad enough but a whole planet...

Australian geoboffins have zoomed in and enhanced CSI-style soil analysis: Bung it in a machine, find the crime scene

On the basis of pollen analysis etc. of a sample from a body I could easily identify the ecological situation where the body had been hidden. After an hour or more's flying over S Armagh by chopper I still couldn't spot a single such location.

This stuff isn't as easy as people like to make out.

Microsoft patches PrintNightmare – even on Windows 7 – but the terror isn't over

Re: If I could upvote this a 1000 times I would.

T is for trusted and I've still not worked out who's supposed to be trusting it, the users of Microsoft.

Re: Why?

The accepting a few days of downtime might be more difficult. It's more likely a case of being forced into experiencing than finding it acceptable.

Re: "Unmanageable"

Linux may only be 20 years old but it can still run the latest version, and many older ones, of a database product I used on Unix V7 in the early '80s.

Re: It is about time

"Notably the much mocked Cyber Essentials scheme configuration guide would block all of these problems if implemented"

Why isn't this stuff the default rather than something that has to be implemented?

Biden to sign exec order calling for right-to-repair rules for farmers, maybe rest of us

It's surprising what governments can come up with when they do stuff instead of just being shrill. I wish we had some of that over here.

Age discrimination case against IBM leaks emails, docs via bad redaction

Re: Claw Back the Criminals' Compensation

"stubbornly refuse to update their skillet"

Canteen staff?

Re: I wonder how many email system old-hands were in the discard bucket?

"Keep calling the personnel department the personnel department,"

I knew someone who kept calling it "Human Remains" for more or less the same reason.

Kaspersky Password Manager's random password generator was about as random as your wall clock

Re: If you value your security get a hardware random number generator -- or two

But who certifies the certifiers?

Laptop option on the way for ortholinear keyboard hipsters in form of MNT Reform add-on

"If the keys were in a standard layout, just ortholinear then maybe"

I have a miniature one of those on a remote for an OSMC box. It's a pain although admittedly it doesn't help that numbers and punctuation are shift characters indicated by being printed in minute dark blue characters on a black background.

It sounds like somebody's PET idea.

Chinese chip designers hope to topple Arm's Cortex-A76 with XiangShan RISC-V design

"if ARM decide to launch a massive sueball"

At who and on what basis? It's not an ARM lookalike in detail and RISC as a concept has been around for a good while.

Pentagon scraps $10bn JEDI winner-takes-all cloud contract

It could give them an opportunity to carve off a couple of small bits for the losers, rather like leaving an unloved child a shilling in the will. It stops them complaining they were overlooked.

The wheels come off Formula 1's notification service as fans plied with attacker's messages

Combine the two and work out what the result would have been.

"Or perhaps the announcement that Nigel Mansell or Nelson Piquet were once again on pole."

Announce that Verstappen had been disqualified and Norris's 5 second penalty had been cancelled. That really would have caused uproar.

Sing a song of Office, a pocketful of why: ARM64 version running in a Pi

Fear of a generation coming along who've played with Linux on Pis and will prefer to keep using it on the big stuff when they get older. They need to get them while they're young.

Things that needn't be said: Don't plonk a massive Starlink dish on the hood of your car

Could have been worse...

... if Darwin had got to him before the Highway Patrol.

Arm chief hits out at 'ill-informed speculation' over proposed Nvidia buyout

Either he has a remarkably effective crystal ball to see into the future or he's just as ill-informed about what will happen then as the rest of us.

Audacity is a poster child for what can be achieved with open-source software

Nobody is kidnapping devs off the street and sending them into the salt mines.

At one extreme is a group of people, maybe starting with one individual, who have a need for a particular piece of software which isn't met by anything or, at least anything they can afford and decide to cooperate to write their own. By cooperating they can produce something better than each doing their thing. They are not being paid* - that comes from their day jobs - but nevertheless they're getting something for it: they're getting the application they wanted for themselves and are prepared to share it.

At the other extreme are developers working for hardware makers such as Intel. They're producing the sort of drivers and other support software that turns the company's products from inert tim or silicon into working systems that customers are willing to buy. I've no idea what they're paid but I assume it isn't just pizza and Coke as long as they're in the office. Some of them may also be in the first group in their spare time.

Somewhere in the middle there are businesses that happen to need something in the same way that the individuals in the first group but not as a product but as something to support their operation and see the benefit of cooperating to produce it although in other respects they may be in competition. Again, nobody's suggesting that the employees who work on it aren't being paid proper salaries.

Try exercising your favourite search engine to find who develops Linux; there are a number of annual reports. The many individual contributors (and that includes those whose affiliations aren't known but some of whom might be contributing on behalf of an employer) collectively are about the same order of magnitude as several of the corporate contributors.

* This dreadful word "compensated" really doesn't fit. It's just puffed up language in this usage. It really means something other than a salary or wage despite being used that way. Used in this way it's the typical PR-speak used to make it seem that highly paid execs are being compensated for the hardship of their distasteful labours.