Posts by Doctor Syntax

Dell: 60% of our people won't be going back into an office regularly after COVID-19

Re: I would hate to own commercial real estate

Time to look at how best to convert it to residential.

What a time for a TITSUP*: Santander down and out on pre-Bank Holiday payday

Somebody's bonus depended on getting some change in before month end?

IBM ordered to pay £22k to whistleblower and told by judges: Teach your managers what discrimination means

Re: £22K? Is that all?

"Yeah, her slate will never be wiped clean. This will follow her at IBM for the term of her employment."

By court order the judgement is added to her file. Any future manager will have to take account of it because any future tribunal will. And better not lose it from the file because a tribunal will take a dim view of that.

Techie studied ancient ways of iSeries machine, saved day when user unleashed eldritch powers, got £50 gift voucher

Re: You get told "We're not renewing your contract anymore"

That's the nature of contract work. Leave on good terms, keep in touch. Sometimes there are more contracts down the line.

Re: That whooshing deadline sound...

"Inevitably, the systems were so flaky"

The worst one I inherited included some jobs that used tcl/expect to run vi to write and run scripts on the fly. Distinctly "if it ain't broke" territory. Fortunately it stayed unbroke.

Re: However, he also got a reputation...

"That worked very well up until my particular section of IT ended up under Marketing, the Head got my number and I ended up getting a call a scant two weeks later while I was on holiday to try and clear up one of their messes."

There are times when the pain of changing a number is worth it. Or have separate work and life numbers and leave the life number at home when you're on holiday.

"However, he also got a reputation as being the chap to go to when everything went wrong"

Letting one of the less destructive ones go -> might be a good idea.

Don't be seen as too infallible.

Here's some words we never expected to write: Oracle said to offer $10bn cash, $10bn shares for TikTok US – plus profit share promise

"HP'd probably mess it up so badly"

They'd still claim they'd be cheated, sue and try to get whoever they could from the vendors jailed for wire fraud. Maybe the CEO who baled out thought they were going to bid.

I can't see that amount being justified by the IP nor any tangible assets they may have for a US operation. It can only be justified by the user base and the prospects for growing it further. But there's no guarantee that a use base can be retained let alone grown as MySpace demonstrated years ago. Somehow I can't see Oracle managing anything in a manner that keeps the user base regarding it as cool.

All of which prompts the thought of where do Social Networks go in the future? There seems to be a generational issue. A new cohort of prospective users is likely to reject the network their elders are using simply because that's what their elders are using, even if that means their elder siblings. Could the future be the ability to pop up new ones every few years? Could social network servers become commodity software? I rather suspect you could even cobble up something to get a new network off the ground out of a selection of NextCloud modules and some UI bells and whistles. SNaaS? SNSPs?

If HP come in with a better offer don't take it!!!!

Google wants to listen in to whatever you get up to in hotel rooms

Alexa, charge this room to Jeff Bezos.

Re: Let's turn this around..

"a Trump speech"

Even better, a Trump speech intercut with one of John Prescotts.

Re: Reminds me of the time

A ton of polystyrene packaging beads.

Re: GDPR

Streetview Wifi pre-dated GDPR.

Re: Not a bad idea

" If I found one in my room, I'd probably switch it off"

The dummy switch is there specifically to provide reassurance to guests.

Re: Presumably these things need power...

Replace the screwdriver with a pin. The wire cutters are only used to trim the pin to make it inconspicuous. That's the pin you've driven through the cable to short it out internally.

Re: Concierge

"personal relationships with many of the people who run those recommendations."

Strictly business.

Re: GDPR

More than that. To avoid violating GDPR they'll have to make its use opt-in.

Ex-Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain loses US appeal bid against fraud convictions and 5-year prison sentence

Re: This is still HP's fault

I'd go even further. The value of something in the open market is the price someone is willing to pay and someone else to accept. HP made an offer at a given price which was accepted therefore that was its value at the time. Not more. No less. That.

Especially as the UK case is a civil one to be decide on the lesser standard of balance of probability.

TikTok CEO quits after less than three months in the job

Re: What would be really funny

Or charging a huge per CPU and/or per connection licence fee for the software.

Jump or pushed?

Let's just suppose for a moment that he was appointed on the basis that having a USian as CEO might make things easier with the Tweeter-in-Chief. That's not working so if that was the thinking he's now superfluous to requirements.

Palantir: Never made a profit, we do something with family-separating ICE, we just lost $580m – please join our IPO

If you're paid money that doesn't officially exist from budgets that don't officially exist, sometimes by organisations that don't officially exist then obviously our profit can't officially exist either.

Forget your space-age IT security systems. It might just take a $1m bribe and a willing employee to be pwned

Re: The Independent Takes a Stumble Under Pressure

Could it be something to do with the fire and they haven't got their replacement up and running yet?

https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/27/telstra_london_hosting_centre_fire/

Re: Old and romantic notions

"services that clients did not care to have public, else why would the business's data be worth the threat of disclosure."

Most responsible businesses do take security of their clients' seriously. At least they do after they've been breached. That's why abstracting data before encrypting it has become a standard part of ransomware.

Engineer admits he wiped 456 Cisco WebEx VMs from AWS after leaving the biz, derailed 16,000 Teams accounts

Re: unamerican

"Maybe his new employer sees him as honest because he didn't sell the access to the Russians"

Not that we know of.

"Their incompetence does not make him less guilty."

I totally agree but nevertheless it also makes them guilty of negligence. They have a duty of care to their customers and that duty includes removing the access credentials of leavers ASAP.

Teen charged after allegedly taking food delivery biz for a ride: $10k of 'fraudulent refunds for stuff not delivered'

"May we suggest it order some business intelligence software?"

Some criminal intelligence wouldn't have gone amiss if he thought they wouldn't notice eventually. Either that or it's a regular scam and he was the unlucky one.

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

I think you wandered in here from some other thread. Please reply to that one instead.

Re: As always, it's easy to sneer

"I use the Mac mail client ...So if I wanted to start doing Linux kernel stuff"

If you wanted to do Linux kernel stuff and equipped yourself accordingly would you really need to use a Mac mail client?

Re: Hmm

ANSI standard.

Re: "plain old ASCII text is a barrier to communications"

All with a strong flavour of NIH

Re: Hmm

"we need to manage it to the standards that enterprises are used to"

No problem with the existing setup. The S in ASCII is for Standard.

Re: Plain text is king

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." also applies to women

Re: Keep stupid out

"It's always bunch of teenagers who *believe* they know everything."

Not just teenagers unfortunately.

@A/C

You'll find a shift key or two somewhere on your keyboard. Just don't overuse it.

Re: Faintly ironic

Even more ironic in that it was MS in the person of Gates who resisted the WWW until it was top big for even them to ignore.

Re: And he also couldn’t do it from Apple Mail.

"But that was then..."

Exactly. It's developers who grew up in the last 5 to 10 years who are the problem.

Re: "plain old ASCII text is a barrier to communications"

Is it that there are too many management types coming into the set-up?

Re: "they don't know how to send a plain-text email"

"The risk is that if she leaves, others may follow and soon there aren't enough people to maintain the beast."

I don't see any suggestion in the article that she's a maintainer. She's MS's representative on the Linux Foundation. Her leaving would not decrease the maintainers in any way. Neither would others in similar positions leaving.

It's possible that top-level politics is inhibiting people taking on maintainer roles.

“moving from a more text-based, email-based, or not even moving from, but having a text-based, email-based patch system that can then also be represented in a way that developers who have grown up in the last five or ten years are more familiar with."

Developers who have grown up in the last five or ten years need to become familiar with text-based email. They'll then find it a lot easier to deal with text-based source code editors and text-based compilers.

The truth is, honest people need willpower to cheat, while cheaters need it to be honest

Can we make it compulsory to use it to screen candidates for public office?

Start Me Up: 25 years ago this week, Windows 95 launched and, for a brief moment, Microsoft was almost cool

Re: One of the most important bits missing from the article...

It was another import from elsewhere. I think the copyright declarations cited UCB.

'There is no way we can keep coding local': GitPod's cloud development platform released into sunlight of open source

Solution

in

search

of

problem.

Be very afraid! British Army might scrap battle tanks for keyboard warriors – report

Presenteeism. The cyberwarriors sit in the office where MoD managers can keep their eye on them. Who knows what tank crews are doing out there? Playing cards & sleeping on the job most likely. An uneven contest.

This PDP-11/70 was due to predict an election outcome – but no one could predict it falling over

Re: The elevator did it

Looking back on it it seems we trusted to luck that the speaker polarities matched. I suppose the advantage of a portable would have been that you could just turn it round if they didn't.

Xi Jinping again urges China to home-grow more ‘core’ tech, faster

Perhaps he should have ended by thanking Trump for his encouragement.

The Viking Snowden: Denmark spy chief 'relieved of duty' after whistleblower reveals illegal snooping on citizens

"In the Land of the Free, if he had contacted the Intelligence Oversight Committee, he would have been quietly disappeared, and his information not acted on."

In Yes Minister terms that sentence manages to combine two examples of getting rid of the difficult bit in the title.

North Korean hackers pwned cryptocurrency sysadmin with GDPR-themed LinkedIn lure, says F-Secure

Re: Really?

And they use the same PC for mail, or at least a PC on the same network, as the stuff they're administering.

Malware is a fact of life. Computers as production machines are a fact of life. Letting one get through to the other doesn't have to be.

If you think Mozilla pushed a broken Firefox Android build, good news: It didn't. Bad news: It's working as intended

I wonder if the removal of add-ons is related to this https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addons/

I find it an alarming account of Mozilla development. At one level is could be read as the consequence of abandoning the discipline of making architectural changes with major release numbers with minor numbers for more incremental changes. On another level it's maybe a description of the corner they'd painted themselves into which forced them to abandon that.