Posts by Doctor Syntax

Back to the office with you: 'Perhaps 5 days is too much family time' – Workday CEO

Re: We've ALL saved on clothes NOT being worn out,

A proportion of the population are working on that right now. They call it ignoring hoaxes, standing up for their rights etc.

Re: HS2

"says the UK governement"

Who are also worried shitless about the collapse in urban real estate values prices, business rate income and city-centre service businesses.

Re: He's right

Unsustainable? The present (apart from the current unpleasantness) model of the huge agglomeration of work places drawing in commuters from a thousand square miles or so is utterly unsustainable. This might be enough to start it toppling.

The ultimate solution could be WAT ("at" and "from" are two quite different propositions). It could be some form of dispersed office system - multiple small offices housing a few employees living locally. It could be rent-a-desk in local shared office spaces. It could, and probably will, be a mixture.

Whatever it is the big city has reached its unsustainable limits. Its end must be in sight.

GUI vs CLI

Hmmm. I've just been working through a history mini-project having stumbled across the fact that the records in a published set of documents aren't entirely in order. The working set of applications: Okular to read the publication where the dates are given with respect to saints' days; browser to check the saints' days in Wikipedia where necessary, LO Calc to record page numbers against the dates looked up from the calendar; terminal open at command line to run cal to get the calendar. Three GUI & one CLI. It's not one or the other, it's just the best tool for the job.

And now I've done that I can get back to the real project, extracting selected items and being able to get them in the correct chronological order for which the tool set is remarkable similar.

Re: mmfh

But not necessarily from work.

"Young and inexperienced people do not seem to function well with WFH"

In the next few years we're going to see graduates who have passed part of their education, either school or university/college remotely. It'll be interesting to see if this makes a difference.

Two clichés, one headline: 'No good deed goes unpunished' and 'It's always DNS'

Re: Change management matters

"Change management is there for a reason"

In this particular case it looks like the reason was sheer officiousness.

Facebook tells Portuguese court that a biz called Oink And Stuff makes profile-harvesting browser extensions

There's a fairly obvious way to avoid getting your Facebook profile harvested.

Signal boost: Secure chat app is wobbly at the moment. Not surprising after gaining 30m+ users in a week, though

Re: Also Frank Colon 780th Military Brigade, Fort Meade

Well, we all know what emerges from the colon.

Re: Have WhatsApp halted the "privacy" change?

It probably translates as "get used to the idea". I suppose one problem for them will be that those who've already left won't bother going back for a few months and once the delay's over there'll be a whole new wave.

Hollywood drone pilot admits he crashed gizmo into cop chopper, triggering emergency landing

Re: Damage to main rotor

Don't forget the possibility of being swallowed by the engine air intake.

It seems unusually lenient for endangering an aircraft. Good of the cops to get a warrant to access the camera although the cynic in me wonders if it was done after the event and necessary to present the evidence in court.

Xiaomi hit by US sanctions: Can't list on stock exchanges and investors can't invest

Re: Doesn't really make sense

"exploited to create a backdoor at some point in the future."

As opposed to actually having had deliberate back doors surreptitiously inserted at some point in the supply chain in the past.

Re: Doesn't really make sense

"Ironically they’re ignoring the fact that this treatment of China will haunt them when that does happen."

Politicians' view of the future does not extend beyond the next electoral cycle.

NASA pulls the plug on InSight's mole after Martian surface bests boffins

Re: But whose to say this isnt a house made out of steel?

As I understand it. not bedrock but unusually compacted sand.

The Novell NetWare box keeps rebooting over and over again yet no one has touched it? We're going on a stakeout

Re: A better solution

The upside of working near a hospital: during a period of rolling power cuts (rather like the miners' strikes but this was NI politics) the hospital power was exempted and because we shared a supply so were we.

Re: And your backdoor

Terrible interruption to smooth uninterrupted power.

Re: More Mystery Reboots

"Any theories from the wiser heads of the RegHive?"

See the other responses re older mobiles having noisy conversations with base stations. Maybe that particular server had faulty RF protection on the input or maybe poor shielding on the cable.

Re: It was my boss' coat.

With the emphasis on "terminal".

"council rules stated only Unix was allowed for networks

...

NetWare 3.x was a relatively robust beast"

"Relatively robust" In that context? Really?

Re: Hands up who thought it would be the cleaner again

After the spolier in the first sentence?

Infosys follows flag-waving US hiring spree with quieter Canadian and Mexican hiring spree

BINGO!

"solutioning ourselves"

Dissolving?

Did anyone tell Logitech about lockdown? Biz launches pricey video chat kit for office conference rooms and 'huddle spaces'

Re: What's the point ?

"Watching the bland faces of uninteresting people for 20 to 45 minutes at a time while they strive to say something relevant is, in the end, a very painful experience."

It's been like that for years. They're called meetings.

Vatican absolved of one financial sin after revelation of data discrepancies

Not necessarily

GIGO

Pirate Bay co-founder criticises Parler for its lack of resilience

Re: Maybe a site of links needs a far simpler setup?

"report in anther place"

Dammit. That's the sort of typo you make when you're a botanist, particularly when you have a speciality in pollen analysis.

Re: Maybe a site of links needs a far simpler setup?

According to a report in anther place one of his current ventures turned them down citing human rights.

Quixotic Californian crusade to officially recognize the hellabyte and hellagram is going hella nowhere

The general purpose unit of quantity would be a hella-valot

"going hella nowhere"

In a handcart, of course.

Attack of the cryptidiots: One wants Bitcoin-flush hard drive he threw out in 2013 back, the other lost USB stick password

Re: Best practices

2a Take a backup of the data before you break it up.

Re: Hurrah for screen readers!

As "tit" is a term for idiot in RightPondLand it would still make sense.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says Trump ban means the service has failed

"Do the world a favor and turn your servers off."

After all, the world has demonstrated that it isn't ready for those healthy conversations.

Re: I'm not a twitter user

"The problem is that problematic users feel able to speak without fear of consequences."

Perhaps this detachment from reality is what lead them to the physical action - no fear of consequences. In the real world, of course, there are consequences.

Re: I'm not a twitter user

We know nothing about their take on social conversations. All we know about is their reaction to conversations which were anti-social to the point of incitement to violence. At that point the criminal law becomes a consideration.

Re: Promote healthy conversation?

The woke cancel culture is pretty well the same thing, inciting a crowd to howl down a street-corner speaker they don't like, even if the speaker has simply failed to catch up with the latest twists of snowflake vocabulary.

Let's put the blame on the common thread: group-think.

Re: Screwed the pooch and knows it

"Social media have shot themselves in the foot by colluding to ban Trump, en mass the way they have."

A set of closely linked events, some illegal, raised public revulsion. Associated businesses made decisions on some any or all of various considerations arising from it: PR, risk of criminal liability and moral grounds. AFAICS it's reasonable to expect each to make similar decisions independently when presented with the same situation. If you think collusion is involved where none is needed you should provide evidence; without that you're in conspiracy theory territory.

Four women seek release from forced arbitration to sue Infosys for widespread gender discrimination

"failing to 'diffuse the conflict.'"

They thought she should have spread it a bit wider than just her and him?

Airbnb, or not to be, if you're headed to Washington DC: Biz cancels bookings over fears of inauguration insurrection

I suppose Trump will claim Biden was less popular because there were fewer people in the crowd and his was the biggest ever.

We didn't collude with Twitter to throw Parler off our servers, says AWS in court filing

Re: What about places that hinders me to enter if I don't abide to their rules?

"the politicians should advise and pass legislation"

I'm not sure if US has specific statute law about conspiracy to commit acts of violence but Common Law will usually do that itself - and the US inherited that from us.

That should be all AWS or any other service provider should need to compel them to throw off any customer who seems to be allowing that to happen, otherwise they'd be apt to find themselves in the dock with the customer and the users responsible.

Dropbox basically decimates workforce, COO logs off: Cloud biz promises to be 'more efficient and nimble'

Re: Is it just me.....

"the inconsistent interface"

If they have to make work by faffing with the UI they have too many staff.

Pandemic? Check. World in peril? Check. CES is on? Check. So of course Bluetooth Smart Masks are now a thing

"all without getting in a tangle of devices"

It'll still tangle with your glasses when you take it off.

Backers of Planet Computers' Astro Slide 5G phone furious after shock specs downgrade

Re: Another story from Douglas Adams?

Not too much scope for phone anitizers these days. Everyone has their own phone and if you can find a phone box these days it's probably listed and serving as a village book exchange. Maybe the phone sanitzers could switch to books.

The CIA's 'entire' collection of UFO records has been made available for you to sigh at

The problem with UFOs isn't the unidentified bit. It's attempts at identification by those who've never heard of Occam.

Trump tries one more time to limit H-1B work visas with new minimum salary requirements

Re: We beat you to it!

"the profound ancient wisdom of our elected members"

Ah, yes. Members. It's good to be reminded of its multiple meanings.

Re: Good idea

"You are a startup, you need an expert "

Wrong order. Should be:

1. Be an expert

2. Set up your startup based on what you know

Privacy pilfering project punished by FTC purge penalty: AI upstart told to delete data and algorithms

Re: Inconsistent decision is concerning

Let's get this clear. They were wrong to be permissive and now they're wrong not to be permissive.

Under that pile of spare keys and obsolete cables is an IoT device: Samsung pushes useful retirement project for older phones

Re: Until some passing low-life sees it & thinks "hey, a free phone", that is.

There have been videos of people stealing security cameras.

Salesforce relieves Republican National Committee of its tools citing 'risk of politically incited violence' across the US

Re: Remainers

It's as well when making these comparisons to remember the murder of Jo Cox. It wasn't Remain who deployed threats and violence.

Re: Liberty speech

"There is something dreadfully wrong when Twitter and Facebook become the final arbiter."

There's something dreadfully wrong if they have to become the final arbiters.