Posts by Doctor Syntax

COVID-19 security tips: Ensure you sack your staff without leaving their IT access enabled, says Secureworks

Re: Macros

But is there an anti-malware team to check it. That's when you know the company is taking it seriously.

Re: Tip for those sacked

Two conflicting points of view, both excellent in their own way.

Some data is definitely hybrid. Any email from company to worker relevant to employment and copies of similar emails going the other way are both company and personal data. Depending on your relationship with your employer you may need your own copy. I'm sure it's a grey area of law. OTOH if the communication had been on paper there'd probably have been no question of the employee being forbidden to retain it.

Then there's general knowledge - all those accumulated little code snippets or scripts that an employer expects an experienced techie to have at his finger tips. Does it all have to be in the head or can some of it be preserved in some other form? And I'm sure every old-school salesman had his little black book or card index which went with him from employer to employer. In either case the employer can't expect the leaver to be brainwashed.

Re: Seems reasonable

"but are we paranoid enough?"

If you're not your manglement will discover that the hard way. They won't blame themselves. Oh, no.

Tip for those sacked

Hope for better times for everyone including your ex-employer and remain on good terms to be at the front of the queue when they get back on their feet.

Lift us up where we belong: UK's Network Rail puts elevators online

"real-time updates which can be plugged into the creations of any enterprising app or web developer by means of an application programming interface."

What could posssssibly go wrong?

LibreOffice rains on OpenOffice's 20th anniversary parade, tells rival project to 'do the right thing' and die

Re: "We were caught quite off guard"

"They should get over themselves, switch licences so that a merge is possible."

Easier said than done. They'd have to get agreement from all contributors.

Re: Possible solution to different licencing...

This can't be done for the same reason that OO can't take the MPL contributions. The MPL contains copyleft clauses similar to GPL, i.e. projects using such source, including any forks, must also be copyleft. The Apache licence is permissive and doesn't put any such constraints on code taken from it. It may seem unfair that LO could take the OO code freely and not give back but that's the difference between the two licences. Yes, it's ironic - or something - that the copyleft principle is intended to force code sharing whilst permissive licences simply facilitate it.

"LibreOffice (presumably purposely) doesn't have a mail client."

There was an article some time ago on the LO's blog site arguing for this but the decision seems to have been to stay neutral. A problem with TBird is that the later have gone in for a tabbed interface although the SeaMonkey derivative remains classic although the underpinnings are different AFAIK. Personally I wish the two projects would get together and produce an integrated offering.

Although I have LO as the main office suite I keep a copy of OO, if only for old times sake. I see no harm in OO continuing to exist if only to remind LO that an alternative exists should they lurch off in some odd direction which makes me wonder why LO are so concerned.

Intel celebrates security of Ice Lake Xeon processors, so far impervious to any threat due to their unavailability

Re: Special Instructions?

A hardware flaw may also affect your software solution.

Oracle starts to lose patience with Solaris holdouts

"Lifetime Support Policy"

Getting rid of the difficult bit in the title. Sir Humphrey would applaud.

Even 2020 cannot bring forth the Year of Linux on the Desktop

Good to hear that. As the 2nd para says, it would be a con of worms as I doubt Microsoft would have been able to resist throwing its weight about.

US Supreme Court Justice flames lower courts for giving 'sweeping immunity' to Facebook, YouTube, etc when it comes to harmful content

It can and probably will be cited in arguments in other cases and subsequently in the rulings of the courts in those cases.

Good news: Boffins have finally built room-temperature superconductors. Bad news: You'll need a laser, a diamond anvil, and a lot of pressure

Re: Re. Superconducting gunpowder

You only need newlines between paragraphs.

UK govt advert encouraging re-skilling for cyber jobs implodes spectacularly

Re: Perfectly factual advertisement, what's the fuss?

"Undoubtedly I could learn to be graceful and have the strength and dedication of a ballet dancer"

Good for you, I certainly couldn't. What I did do was make a few sideways changes, one out of my preferred branch of biology into another which claimed to offer a career and another out of that into IT when I decided it really didn't.

The career of a teacher is probably longer than that of an active dancer. If they all went into teaching there'd be more teachers than dancers.

Re: Those raising issue at the outrage.

"Indeed, you can take a pension early from that job."

I wonder how much actual pension they can have built up before they need to retire. I doubt there are enough teaching and choreography jobs to move into.

"Skilled technical specialists don't get paid more, the computer software used to decide the pay rate for a job seems to mark specialist skills down - that's not just in IT, that's across all specialisms."

Unsurprisingly nothing seems to have changed since the 1980s. Promotion from SSO to PSO depended on responsibility but that was defined as management responsibility. The fact that in my speciality there was the individual responsibility for giving evidence that might put someone away for life didn't count.

I bailed, went into IT and the money started going up and up. I think it came as a slight shock to my former employers but from what I heard, not enough to do anything useful. However, entirely coincidentally, I was offered the promotion to PSO without any of the normal procedures as soon as I handed in my notice.

Re: Perfectly factual advertisement, what's the fuss?

It's not an art form I follow but I wouldn't be surprised to discover that ballet also had intellectual demands.

I'm in favour of big changes of career. It gets you out of a rut and there's nothing that says you can only be good at one thing.

Re: Cyber gets the budget

Yup. The agency that put the ad together flubbed that one as well.

Mind you, they succeeded in one respect: this is an ad which I've actually seen, even if not in the intended context.

It would be as well to remember that the campaign will have been put together by an agency dominated by arts types who probably know no more about law than about IT (and probably not more about dance either).

It does occur to me that the working life of most ballet dancers is probably short. What do they do when the body can't cope any more?

Open Invention Network adds Microsoft's exFAT to Linux System Definition, Satan spotted throwing snowballs

This sort of thing is getting me worried these stories about a Linux kernel in Windows might be true. Worried because there's less likely to be enthusiasm for existing developers to do stuff for Microsoft, Linus gets pushed out and then Microsoft themselves start shoving dubious stuff in there. EEE accomplished.

Yahoo! Groups! to! shut! down! completely! on! December! 15!... Tens! mourn!

"Then again, we're getting on fine without Alta Vista."

I'm not sure about "fine" when you look at some of the alternatives.

UK taxman waves through £168.8m Fujitsu contract because no one else can hold up 30-year-old infrastructure

The advantages of outsourcing. Instead of being stuck with your own employees you can pick and choose from all the usual suspects a huge selection of candidates and galaxy of talent. Until you can't.

Re: VME

Maybe not in this case.Tax is one of the things that gets tinkered with on a regular basis.

It's likely to be a result of careful design a long time ago rather the frAgile development doing what's easy or absolutely necessary this sprint and leaving the difficult stuff like flexibility till later. And later. And really a lot later. Either that or the bits that threw in obstacles were hammered out of the way in the course of successive budgets - that's the Chancellor's budgets, the ones he reads to Parliament.

Britannia should rule the (cyber) waves, minister tells Singapore event in bid to drum up Commonwealth support

Re: Another Loon Living in the Past. Britain Has Joined the Ranks of the Former Great Nations

Ah, but Brexit will restore all that. It will wind the world back to the time before Suez when we still had most of the empire and a navy that ruled the waves. Even before Covid. Brexit solves all problems.

Business as usual

Homegrown Unbeatable BRItish Solution

HUBRIS.

Arm has 11 months to hire 490 UK techies. Good thing there isn't a pandemic on. Or, say, Brexit

Re: Void Brexit Woes

OP's handle seems appropriate for that.

IT Marie Kondo asks: Does this noisy PC spark joy? Alas, no. So under the desk it goes

Re: Location location location

"The EM suite was in the basement for stability"

Ours was on the first floor. However it had its own separate floor slab on its own columns - sort of like a 6 legged table. I'm not sure that actually helped but as it was almost entirely devoted to looking for gun-shot residues with XRF I didn't have occasion to use it.

Global Privacy Control emerges as latest attempt to let netizens choose whether they want to be tracked online

"its backers believe this time will be different."

Really?

Selling hardware on a pay-per-use or subscription model is a 'lie' created by marketing bods

"Buy in the stuff that's ancillary to your core business"

This assumes you're capable of working out what's core and what's ancillary. Do you need IT to run production? To take orders? To move product off the shelves? Is IT core or just ancillary?

Emigrated to Oz.

"Kill All Beancounters then?"

Just can them.

Re: Depends?

Oh, I get the point, OK. But if ERP, on-prem or in cloud, is at the core of what the business does there needs to be some expertise in-house or maybe on-call. Maybe the OP performs the latter function as I did for a small engineers' supplier. The same applies to any sort of business which depends on IT.

Re: Cashflow & tax rules

Best of luck with it. And if in doubt, let them eat the students.

Re: Sod IT

I suppose if you only need Photoshop occasionally the pay as you go option works out cheaper. But so does Krita.

Re: Depends?

So they get rid of that employee when they go to ...S. Now they have nobody who knows what to do when something goes wrong.

Re: Cashflow & tax rules

"So I looked at AutoCad"

What was the eventual verdict?

A 73bn-kg, skyscraper-size chocolate creme egg spinning fast enough to eventually explode – it's asteroid Bennu

Re: Interesting thought

The description suggests that it's spinning and the outer crust is sufficiently consolidated to hold the core in place against centrifugal force. If it were disrupted centrifugal force would disperse the core so what we'd get would be a fraction of it in separate chunks. The question then arises as to how big those chunks might be. Would they burn up on the atmosphere?

As per earlier comment, this is a sample of one. Is it a common structure? How do you identify others without going to visit them?

Re: Interesting thought

The alternative is that the fragments re-coalesce to form new asteroids.

However, this is a sample of one...

From the Department of WCGW: An app-controlled polycarbonate lock with no manual override/physical key

"two words you dread the most"

"Staffing review" (Particularly dreadful for LinkedInners I'd have thought).

"Unannounced audit"

"Brake failure"

"Engine failure"

Polycarbonate proving difficult? This https://www.theplasticshop.co.uk/plastic_technical_data_sheets/chemical_resistance_guide_polycarbonate_sheet.pdf has a useful looking table of possible solvents and non-solvents although all the possibles seem even less attractive than the problem.

Somehow the whole story reminds me of a reported episode from student days when a particularly obnoxious denizen of halls was pounced on by several others after a party and treated with contact adhesive (who had that handy, I wonder; was there really glue-sniffing going on in those far-off days?). Subsequently taken to the local hospital and greeted by the doctor with "Christ, is this some new perversion?".

Want to set up a successful bug bounty? Make sure you write it for the flaw finders and not the lawyers

"Vote fraud existed long before electronic voting came on the scene."

Automation makes everything so much easier.

Why is IoT locked in 'proof-of-concept hell'? Stakeholders don't talk to each other, and return on investment is hazy

Dammit, so's a g!

Is it because so many IoT ideas are misspelled? "di" is missin.

Crown Prosecution Service solicitor accused of targeting judge ex-wife's lover through work computer systems

"It appears that cases may be on the increase this year, perhaps thanks to COVID-19 forcing most of the UK to stay at home."

Given increasing delays in the courts any cases arising out of WFH aren't going to surface in the courts for some time. Getting cases to court is a process subject to Hofstadter's law.

BOFH: Rome, I have been thy soldier 40 years... give me a staff of honour for mine age

Re: Uh...

Mission Control is firmly set in the building and the company isn't going to migrate to the cloud - not until BOFH is in control of the cloud. It might change if a more convenient place can be found for Mission Control and the DC - say the back room of a pub.

"I feel like I've wasted my life."

Not entirely. George must have picked up the tip about open windows somewhere. Or was it the other way around?

IBM to spin out Managed Infrastructure Services biz – yes, the one that was subject to all those redundancies

"It will leverage its unrivaled expertise..."

I thought the unrivalled expertise had already been levered out as being too expensive.

Britain should have binned Huawei 5G kit years ago to cuddle up with Trump, says Parliamentary committee

Re: HuaWei - a Trade War not a Security war

"Why would the UK accept anything emanating from USA politicians"

Because beggars can't be choosers and that's the situation we'll be in come 2021.