Posts by Doctor Syntax

A memo from the distant future... June 2022: The boss decides working from home isn't the new normal after all

Re: More Middle Manager insecurity

Middle managers are there to act as a brake so that things can't run out of control.

FTFY

Re: More Middle Manager insecurity

In addition to realising they don't need big head offices businesses might also realise they don't need all those middle managers. Need to slim down the business for the New Normal? Keep the ones who do the work, get rid of the unproductive middle.

Re: New Normal?

"team building"

Ah, yes, those and other "motivational" events. I found them thoroughly demotivating, culminating in an episode that lead to enforced early retirement escape into freelance. I also found myself remembering those jobs a decade or more earlier where I ended up in circumstances that needed an armed escort and wondered what sort of screaming fit those team building wonk conducting the course would have had if they'd had to do that without going on a team building event with their new colleagues.

It's worth standing back and reflecting if an entire operating system - not just a kernel but all the additional layers up to and including applications - can be built by globally dispersed teams with just the leading lights getting together at annual conferences.

On a smaller scale I worked for a body shop that had staff scattered in ones and twos, maybe threes, in locations across London but arranged an after ours get-together once a month by putting a suitable sum behind the bar in a central London pub.

It's not sustainable concentrating employment into cities so large that the employees end up scattered across a few thousand square miles of countryside and it's certainly not sane to tell those employees that they should be walking or cycling to work.

It's time businesses and the government woke up to the fact that big businesses have so many employees that they end up living in idely dispersed areas and looking to other solutions than the big Head Office.

Look to a number of smaller offices dispersed closer to where people live and let them commute into their closest one. That could well end up with a "team" spread between multiple offices but with individual members working next to members of other "teams"; it might even turn out better for cohesiveness of the business as a while.

Government's role in this would be recognising that a considerable part of the country's environmental problems stem from a decades long planning policy that separates work places from living places. This mess has been planned - not deliberately but nevertheless planned. They need to look at how they plan to get out of it.

Google isn't even trying to not be creepy: 'Continuous Match Mode' in Assistant will listen to everything until it's disabled

Re: GDPR

so by GDPR law I have to be proactively offered an opt-in or -out

FTFY

IR35 tax reforms for UK freelancers glide through committee stage: D-Day set for 6 April 2021

"The reforms to the IR35 rules make large and medium-sized businesses responsible for determining the employment status of contractors for tax purposes, rather than the contractors themselves doing this."

It should be a fairly simple test: In the great COVID-19 debacle 2020 did you furlough them with the rest of your employees, make them redundant or push them off the sledge because they weren't employees at all and you owed them nothing?

ServiceNow slammed for 'tone deaf' letter telling customers contracts can't be tweaked as COVID-19 batters businesses

"ServiceNow contracts are non-cancellable"

And customers were prepared to sign them?

I suppose they could be shown to make savings for several quarters - longer than management was prepared to look ahead.

Health Sec Hancock says UK will use Apple-Google API for virus contact-tracing app after all (even though Apple were right rotters)

Re: distance and signal strength

"At the mandated 2m distance the round-trip delay would be about 7ns."

Surely that's the one-way trip. At any events the radio transmission time is going to be swamped by the variability in the time taken by the electronics to respond. It'd probably end up being 2 +/- 100 metres

"Why don't Google and Apple co-operate and develop the app and roll it out as a critical public safety update across the globe?"

ISTR more or less the same question being asked and answered in a different thread. Google and Apple don't want the task and/or responsibility for who should be declared infected. It's up to the local health authority to have control of that.

Re: NHSX devs apparently superior to Google devs

"This is all a game of probabilities after all."

Amen to that.

Social distancing, 1 vs 2 metres, indoors vs outdoors, R values, opening this sort of establishment before that; it's all a matter of estimating and managing probabilities. I think SAGE have probably managed to get this though to the politicians. Whether either of them gets it through to the general media is a little more doubtful. Whether the media would make an attempt to get it through to the public - no chance.

Re: "we discovered a technical barrier that every other country [...] is also now hitting."

"It staggers me how utterly stupid many of today's journalists are"

The present doesn't have a monopoly. About 40 years ago the RUC carried out an excavation where a body was supposed to have been buried. It was next to the practice tee at a golf course and although there was no body it turned out to be a golf ball mine and several golf-playing police officers took away their haul in clear polythene bags. The press, kept at a considerable distance, reported samples being taken for analysis in white plastic bags.

"none of them are working sufficiently well enough to actually be reliable to determine whether any of us should self isolate for two weeks.”

So use them to determine who should be tested.

Nothing fills you with confidence in an IT contractor more than hearing its staff personal records were stolen by ransomware hackers. Right, Cognizant?

How much of that personal data was needed? That's actually needed as opposed to "needed" because someone wanted it.

For instance if the business is providing company credit cards why should they need employees' credit card details? I'd like to think that at some point the penny will drop and these businesses will realise that all that "valuable data" they've been hoarding is really toxic waste.

By emptying offices, coronavirus has hastened the paperless office

How much printing is being done in the home offices?

In our home printing has dropped sharply. SWMBO runs a pachhwork course. I used to print out all her handouts to take to class. Now the handouts are prepared as PDFs and emailed out so now the attendees are printing them out at home. They have to print them as they include the templates.

Re: One might wonder

As another reply said, if there wasn't a demand for the wood something else would probably be grown there instead so it's not an even choice. Where commercial tree planting is concerned in respect of the carbon cycle the tree has to be considered as storage in its own right and as a mechanism for sequestering carbon for transfer to other storage.

No surprise: Britain ditches central database model for virus contact-tracing apps in favour of Apple-Google API

Re: Had to happen

"Why did they have to be so obstinate and waste so much time?"

It's the mentality that keeps showing up when governments throw monay about shouting "This will make the UK the leader in ....". It always ends up in failure. Basically it's people who don't know the details and reality of what it would take to do it (and this is a government particularly light in seating the details). They just need to promote something (largely themselves) and their Dunning Krugger abilities make them think they can achieve it.

Re: If it has cost £108M that is more than the vaccine development program!

I wonder how many people complaining about the calibre of MPs have considered putting themselves forward? And why those who haven't haven't.

Re: Had to happen

"even she's probably going to be an improvement."

Which just goes to show how bad it was.

How do you run a military court over Zoom? With 28 bullet points and a ceremonial laptop flunkey, of course!

My one and only experience of a court martial was that it was a strange mixture of formal and informal. After the morning's session the court adjourned for lunch - not quite an officer's mess AFAICR* - but somewhat formal and I was invited along. I, as a witness, found myself sitting next to the judge. That never happened in a civil court.

* Which isn't very much given the events of the previous evening. Top tip: be very careful when drinking with army sergeants. Especially MPs. And very especially SIB, the military equivalent of CID.

Winter is coming, and with it the UK's COVID-19 contact-tracing app – though health minister says it's not a priority

"It was an expectations-management answer."

And that answer itself is a straight answer. From a politician, no less.

Hey is trying a new take on email – but maker complains of 'outrageous' demands after Apple rejects iOS app

As per my reply above. I had someone trying to send me a photo for use in an article I was writing but the email appeared to be blank with no attachments. HTML had successfully hidden it from plain text view.

Re: or Pine

Not just corporate users. I sometimes get emails from my history group members which contain invisible photographs. I have to switch to View Message body as Original HTML.

Maybe I need an add-on that bounces all HTML messages. Cut out the corporate crap and teach the Mac users to send plain text emails.

Re: Email already passé?

Stuff that matters goes to one of my real email addresses. There's intermediate stuff which goes to Hotmail.

Re: Email already passé?

"including name, address, telephone or fax number and some pre-defined text"

And quite often the pre-defined text includes an instruction not to read this email is it wasn't intended for you, placed, of course, at the end where you only see it after you've read the entire message.

Re: reply later

This is true but it's still a drag and drop if the client doesn't also support adding something like a right click option or a "File this in pending" option. Personally I'd like to see clients not only providing this but also not allowing a message to stay in the inbox after it's been read. Provide at least some form of filing even if it's only "All emails from year yyyy". And delete all messages from Trash after a few days.

Re: RE: quxinot

As opposed to "mbox".

Re: I had a similar reaction. Too cute, too much $$

"getting the ball rolling again on developing new email innovations"

Mandate a phase -n of PGP. By default the MX record also points to the public key server with an option to have a separate public key server. User can keep their private key(s) on their mail clients.

Oh, no, that wouldn't work. The webmail services wouldn't be able to read their customers' users' mail. I suppose they'd offer to hold the keys for them.

Ah lovely, here's something you can do with those Raspberry Pis, NUC PCs in the bottom of the drawer: Run Ubuntu Appliances on them

Re: Sounds like a solution looking for a problem to solve

"will only be of interest to a hand-full of geeks"

Maybe.

"with time on their hands"

The purpose seems to be to simplify installation and hence save time.

So really for geeks with a job to do but no time to spare.

It sounds a bit like Turnkey Linux but with less choice, both in terms of platforms and applications.

Looking for a home off-world? Take your pick: Astroboffins estimate there are nearly 6bn Earth-likes in the Milky Way

"literally teaming"

Oops!

As for literally teeming, would the literature be science fiction?

Re: Nice science but...

"rocky planet with the possibility of liquid water"

Maybe add "has a magnetic field" to the list of requirements.

NY Attorney General warns Apple, Google to police COVID-19 tracing apps in their souks – or she will herself

"It alerts people who may have cases."

But doesn't offer to test them. Go away and hide for a couple of weeks. You may well have nothing wrong but go and hide anyway.

Re: what does it change?

"If you're told you've been in contact with an infected person, you're supposed to isolate yourself for two weeks so you don't pass the disease on. Regardless of whether you have symptoms. That's what it does (supposedly), and if it worked it's very relevant."

The first thing we need to know about whether it's relevant is the number of false positives that will be generated.

Without testing it's quite possible that either:

- Large numbers of people will be self-isolating needlessly

- The system rapidly loses public trust and is ignored

or

- In order to avoid the above the threshold is set so high that it generates large numbers of false negatives instead.

"This week saw the the Norwegian coronavirus-tracing app pulled and all the information gathered deleted after its data regulator, Datatilsynet, found it was not adequately protecting personal records."

No fear of that happening in the UK. Not because it'll have better protection, of course, just that nobody in charge cares. After all things can't go wrong twice, can they? Well, certainly not three times.

No Wiggle room: Two weeks after angry bike shop customers report mystery orders on their accounts, firm confirms payment cards delinked

Re: There is no breach

"There's just idiots with money who reuse their password."

Are you sure about that? If was just a matter of reused IDs and passwords it seems unlikely that there'd be a sudden spate of logins. It's not as if Wiggle even make it hard to guess user IDs - a quick look at their login screen indicates that they're email addresses.

HPE pushes white label kit for 5G edge computing to tempt all the telcos still crying over WhatsApp and pals

"The only real way to reduce that latency is to perform the computational legwork as close to the source as possible."

On your own computers rather than somebody else's?

Splunk to junk masters and slaves once a committee figures out replacements

Re: Proximity and stuff

"There exist audio recording from freed slaves"

There also exist documents from feudal times in England. It doesn't make feudalism "recent". And properly curated those audio recordings will still exist in several hundred years time.

Re: None of this is truly inclusive

And it's not a thought exclusive to non-native speakers. For avoidance of doubt "native" refers to those born into an Anglophone culture and has no racial connotations. Also for avoidance of doubt "speakers" refers to users of a language, not to electro-mechanical acoustic devices. One has to be so careful these days to avoid being misunderstood. For avoidance of doubt "one" in the last sentence was being used as a pronoun, not as a numeral. For avoidance of doubt "sentence" in this post was being used as a grammatical construct, not as the pronouncement of a court on evil-doers, no matter how tempting the latter might be.

Re: Grounds for firing?

OpenOffice > LiIbreOffice

OwnCloud > NextlLoud

Not for the same reasons but both are projects which were forked and, I think, for the most part the developer and then the user communities moved over.

Re: Where will this end....

You're forgetting that ageism is not only allowed but mandatory as old people are always $DISCRIMINATORY_TERMist. That's just the way things are, no stereotyping involved.

Re: Give 'em an inch ...

Inch? Isn't that imperialist?

Re: When STONITH falls

"You were doing so well until you missed the real nub of the issue namely, the deliberate use of a word with negative connotations to describe - in a handwaving manner - people of colour,"

Now here's another of the techniques used by the dedicated umbrage seekers: changing the choice of demonised word. Is it "black" or "colour" or something else that's offensive today - and perhaps all this week? By this means anyone who's done their base to adopt what they thought was the correct term can be wrong-footed in an attempt to make them feel guilty. But if you're correct here has MOBO changed to MOPOCO?

Re: Unpopular opinion here

"they are small drips that add up"

They are indeed. When I was young a drip was a term of disparagement.

Re: Whitespace

Now there's an idea - fork the project to change the name but leave all the technical terminology intact.

Re: Ok....but whitespace?

The excessive amount of whitespace on gov.uk websites certainly has negative connotations for me.

Re: Grounds for firing?

"Are we going to have people rejected from open source projects because they felt that censoring said doubleplusungood words is rather daft, but the Thought Police whose function has by then been enshrined in the Code of Conduct lacks any sense of humour or capacity for rational thought?"

People can be rejected from the open source project but the nature of open source means that they can choose to take the source with them and fork the project. That would quickly clarify who was doing the work and who was playing games.

Re: Where will this end....

"People are actively seeking other words to sanitize, as you would know if you had both read and comprehended the article."

As someone who is naturally lazy I can't fail to be amazed at the amount of mental energy devoted to this but I can't help thinking it would be better directed to something more productive.

Re: Where will this end....

"The only things reported here have been whitelist/blacklist and master/slave."

Go back and read the article again, several others were mentioned.

For avoidance of doubt the word "Go" in the previous sentence refers to the verb and not the programming language.

Re: When STONITH falls

The whole problem seems to stem from those who can't deal with words with more than one meaning. How do they cope with the word "set"?

Or several of the words in the previous two sentences including: "stem", "word" and "cope"?

Let's remind ourselves of who else changes well-established terms: Marketing.

Re: When STONITH falls

In US terms maybe checksum error might be suggestive of a bounced cheque and disparaging of the impecunious.