Posts by Doctor Syntax

Survey: Tech workers are terrified they will be sacked for being too old

Re: Bah!

"They seem to think that something changed in the way computers work sometime around 1986."

1986? When they were 14 (rolling date).

Re: Wrinklies

"Transistors envisaged in 1930s"

The semi-conductor diode: C19th

Re: any grad born after '66

They want cheap "yes men".

Don't forget the "yes" part. They don't want people who've been round the block a few times and really aren't going to be impressed by any manglement bullshit.

Microsoft exec says ARM-powered Windows laptops have multi-day battery life

Re: Microsoft FAIL

"If the whole world was in agreement, why did RT get any traction at all?"

Shiny.

Re: Please explain

"Microsoft is giving up on smartphones, but loves the idea of ARM-powered laptops running Windows 10."

It also loved the idea of smartphones and of ARM-powered Surfaces.

The problem with BigCos (Microsoft is far from alone in this) is that if something doesn't take off quickly enough (and "enough" seems to shrink these days) or its champion leaves the business then the product gets dumped along with all the customers and secondary vendors that had bought into it. Ironically this should make potential customers more wary so that it becomes harder to get something to take off. In reality Barnum applies.

Let's dig into how open source could KO the Silicon Valley chat silos

Re: >open ecosystems cost money to run and in turn charge their customers.

"Closed providers build proprietary protocols over an open port....

These days, phones bypass the corporate firewalls so we could use any protocol we fancy."

And so we do things the convenient way. Once again convenience tramples security. More and more stuff gets done in the browser - more and more ways to deliver malware.

Re: Why people herd themselves towards closed ecosystems

"a lot of these closed ecosystems are short-term fads so their longevity isn't an issue."

It depends what's in them. If it's every idle thought that wafted through idle heads then no problem. If it's somebody's only collection of photographs of their deceased parents (yes, I know) then it's a bigger problem. If it's a long piece of collective research then it's real pissing-off time.

Anyone remember geocities?

There may be merit in paying for what you get.

You can't find tech staff – wah, wah, wah. Start with your ridiculous job spec

Re: Training spend

"PHB's see all training as a cost, and lump it all together."

Not entirely. Management training is fine. It might be completely irrelevant to the tech job but it becomes compulsory. If someone's handling their tech job well they must be promoted to management so they can be replaced by someone who can't do the job as well. The fact that the tech abilities are at best orthogonal to management abilities is irrelevant.

Re: Not knowing how to look can make it hard to find

"a woman then about 50, applied for a job with an electronic publisher. The latter asked her what her SAT scores were."

ISO 9000 strikes again, no doubt.

Re: Not knowing how to look can make it hard to find

"I spent around 17 years contracting"

I didn't spend quite that long freelance - I retired instead - but I did find that a lot of work came from existing contacts, word of mouth and repeat business. It bypassed all the HR crap.

Re: Don't worry your PHB's

"Mine went this time last year."

This is the time to g freelance. You can then charge an appropriate fee for sorting out the problems they brought on themselves. For IR35 reasons, of course, it might be better to sort out problems that other people brought on themselves in like manner.

"In order to hit a roughly competitive pay grade (the public sector tends to pay a bit less, but to get it in the same ballpark) HR will hack technical job descriptions to make them look like management posts."

I had roughly this sort of experience. In order to make a competitive offer (e.g. they couldn't match the company care) they nominated the post as management. Fair enough, it involved systems management. One of the amusing aspects was that a little later the grade was given company cars. However HR eventually started having problems with the notion that what was essentially a technical post didn't have much people management content.

Then you get the idiots who say "must have 10 years experience in docker"

I suspect that this might stem from their ISO 9000 implementation specifying such nonsense. Whoever wrote the quality manual is patting themselves on the back saying "we only employ the highest quality staff" when it translates to "we only employ liars".

I do, however, habitually suspect ISO 9000 as being responsible for a lot of bad management.

EU: No encryption backdoors but, eh, let's help each other crack that crypto, oui? Ja?

"Much more sensible than installing backdoors."

It sounds more like looking for backdoors that weren't intended, keeping the information from the vendor but then sharing the information out among themselves so that it'll leak out further still. Remind me again, how did we come to have Wannacry?

How does this differ from black hat hacking?

"There is also the question of whether law-enforcement agencies will be happy to share their knowledge."

This will be got round by sharing it without intending to. And not necessarily with each other.

Samsung to let proper Linux distros run on Galaxy smartmobes

Re: > Hoo boy, another attempt to make a PC out of a cellphone?

"Or maybe the chance to strip out the snooping software and just run a few trusted applications?"

That's the question. It's one thing being able to move over into "real" Linux when you want an app that's not on Android. Can you also do that when you don't want an app that is on Android?

I think you mean "GNU/Linux".

I'm not sure that many distros are exclusively GNU these days.

NYC cops say they can't reveal figures on cash seized from people – the database is too shoddy

Re: Contempt of court?

if the police claim not to know how much money they took, they can't be even forced to "give it back"

OTOH they can't prove they didn't take anything that was claimed. Consider a the possibility of a class action on behalf of all the citizens of New your who each had $1m improperly seized from them...

Oh, it's been repaired. That was quick.

Yet another reason I will never visit the US.

Re: I smell rampant mendacity...

"they thought they needed a z10 to record the (evidently) colossal volumes of loot they were planning to blag"

Well, they had all this seized money and it seemed a shame to spend it on something.

You're doing open source wrong, Microsoft tsk-tsk-tsks at Google: Chrome security fixes made public too early

Re: Does Microsoft's approach not imply...

"What MS are complaining about is a natural facet of the open source development and release process, namely the (public) master source code repository will be updated before a (public) build containing the fixes is made available."

The developer will have built an executable before updating the main git repository. That could be released as the production version but on the whole most people might not be comfortable with that. They could, however, have a staging repository which is, in effect, their main one, build the release version from that, release it and then bring the public repository into line.

"Well, you read the article and were moved to comment, so er, I guess you do AC."

Moved to comment, yes? But read the article? Maybe. Read and understood? Maybe not.

Raspberry Pi burning up? Microsoft's recipe can save it and AI

A new application: frying quails' eggs in high end restaurants. As a bonus the temperature can be controlled by the software.

Please replace the sword, says owner of now-hollow stone

According to the legend, the wizard Merlin embedded a sword into a stone, swearing that whoever pulled it out again would become king of all England Britain.

First annual review of Privacy Shield gives it a resounding... 'adequate'

the European Commission has ruled that it provides an "adequate" level of protection for personal data.

Let's just see what the ECJ says, shall we?

So the 'Year of Linux' never happened. When is it Chrome OS's turn?

Re: Linux on the desktop

"And forget about scanning."

I'm glad you never told me that before. Because I never knew you couldn't use Linux with scanners I've been doing it for years. Am I going to have to stop?

Re: Games

"People won't use Linux if there are no games for it and manufacturers wont create games for Linux until there is a mass market for it."

I don't give a damn whether there are games for it or not. I doubt I'm unique. You might not buy it if there are no games. For other's it's not a factor and for enterprise markets it could be a positive advantage.

Re: Data Slurpage

"Ubuntu, which is bad for data slurping too"

???

Re: 'But the public didn't bite '

"Some of us actually need to exchange files with people who use MS Office; LibreOffice is NOT capable of doing 100% accurate round trips."

Don't you mean MS Office is NOT capable of doing 100% accurate round trips? Office users don't actually notice that the problem might lie with their software. They've been habituated to the need to keep updating Office because their old version wouldn't read, let alone round trip, a file written by a newer version.

Re: 'But the public didn't bite '

"but just annoying complexity for the average punter."

In the meantime relatives with old XP boxes or W7 that got hit with ransomware seem quite happy with Zorin. I doubt anyone is ever going to sell a laptop with it installed but just burning a DVD of the latest version, sticking it in the drive, boot and install isn't exactly taxing and avoids the nightmare of having to keep supporting them on Windows.

Re: Lost all faith

"For many it's a choice between Windows, which they understand, or everything else, which confuses them."

Given that many now have experience with non-Windows devices and must have gone through multiple cycles of Windows and Office interface changes that shouldn't really be a problem. Frankly, it's Windows that I find confusing.

Re: The year of Linux desktop was a running joke.

"Personally I just don't like the interfaces"

Of what? I've kept a pretty consistent user interface on KDE for many years*. What's more it's also pretty consistent with what MS used to have back in the days of W95 to W2K apart from the obvious gain of multiple workspaces. This is a major difference from the UI havoc that MS have wrought on both the OS and their applications.

* Plasma 5, however, is a bit of a problem. Every theme designer seems to have been swept up in the tide of flat, ugly, unfriendliness that's infected the rest of the desktop world. So far I've only been able to partly ameliorate it on SWMBO's new laptop.

Re: No ...

" LibreOffice is fine. It writes basic .doc files perfectly well, however, once you switch on revision control and start passing the document through five different offices in three different countries/languages, all of whom are using MS Office, it is completely unworkable."

So, your point is that MS Office is crap because it messes up documents in good, solid ISO-standard format from LibreOffice? Non-portability was always an MS feature. It locked users into the old continuous upgrade path.

Re: No ...

"Basically, Munich found that using Linux not only caused all sorts of headaches"...for their new pro-Microsoft mayor.

DNA as storage? Old and boring. Boffins now chaining monomers

Whilst this is as wildly impractical as using DNA for data storage* it's worth pointing out that RAM, from magnetic core days onwards has generally had destructive reads. Reading has to be combined with rewriting.

* Yes, life has been using it for this for a very long time. And, although life is good at replicating and reading data the mechanism for adding new content relies on making errors in replication and then throwing most of the results out as useless.

Re: Eh?

"DNA is already storage!"

And also a polymer.

IRS tax bods tell Americans to chill out about Equifax

Re: Still haven't figured out the profile on people who were affected

"I think it is virtually certain someone has stolen my personal information including SSN from somewhere already"

I get the impression from the reports that you can almost be pwned just by walking past a hotel of one of the large chains.

Watchdog slams HMRC, Amazon over 'dismal' response to UK biz hurt by online VAT fraud

Re: Simplify taxes and make fair

the owner gets the benefit of the money he paid to buy it and the work of others he put in or paid someone else to do to improve and/or maintain it via rent

FTFY

Re: "Fulfilment centres" physically based in the UK

"And as far as VAT numbers are concerned - what about the small-time sellers who fall below the VAT threshold?"

If I, as an individual, not a trader, have something I no longer need but has value I could sell it on eBay or I could sell it at the local auction house. In the latter case the auction house charges buyer and seller a commission and, because they're VAT-registered, charges VAT on that commission. If I were a trader selling through the auction house I'd have to treat the sale price as being VAT inclusive and deduct the VAT element from what I keep (allowing for the fact that I'd got the VAT on commission to partly offset this) but that's my responsibility as a trader. The auction house doesn't have any authority to determine which of these applies and, therefore, can't get involved further. I can't see why eBay should be expected to do something the local auction house doesn't; after all they have less contact with sellers than the auction house who have the seller roll up at the door with the actual goods.

The point raised about VAT invoices is an interesting one I'd never thought about concerning real auction houses. As a buyer there I've no idea who the seller is; if I were a VAT registered trader buying something for my business how would I go about getting a VAT invoice for anything more than the commission?

Linux kernel community tries to castrate GPL copyright troll

Re: Non-GPL feature

"Thought not."

Right, so why should anyone bother answering you?

Re: After reading this I am still confused.

"What have the paying out companies done wrong?"

Failed to provide copies of the source for the binaries, either with those binaries or on request from recipients.

"Why is he able to claim all this?"

A very good question. Apparently German law allows him to act unilaterally.

Re: I'm confused

"I could do what I want. I would have assumed that those writing code for Linux would have had some similar agreement but maybe not."

There are a few differences.

First, whatever any one individual writes is merged with the contributions of many other people in a collaborative effort. Why should you then act unilaterally, possible contrary to what your numerous collaborators want?

Secondly, the purpose of the GPL is to encourage sharing of source code, not to collect fees from users. This is why organisations such as the SFC mentioned in the article aim for compliance, not penalties.

Thirdly people contributing to Free Software projects are not doing so with the intention of profiting from licensing of copyright. They may contribute in order to sell support (e.g. Red Hat) or to have the software support sale of other products (e.g.Intel).

Clearly it's a weakness of the project that the acceptance of contributions is not made conditional on the contributors not taking unilateral actions of this sort.

Re: WTF? How is this bad??

"Patrick should be getting a medal from the open source community for his enforcement action."

Why? He's not feeding their share back to them.

Europol cops lean on phone networks, ISPs to dump CGNAT walls that 'hide' cyber-crooks

What would this unique IP address be linked to? The phone number? Unless there's also a record of the IMEI a phone number or anything linked to it doesn't even identify a phone, let alone who's holding it. It identifies a SIM.

Ex-TalkTalk chief grilled by MPs on suitability to chair NHS Improvement

Can someone find her a whelk stall, although that might be beyond her capabilities.

The Google Home Mini: Great, right up until you want to smash it in fury

Re: Oh, I don't know...

"Excepting that it'll be rolling across a kerb and dropping down; trolley jacks / petrol tanks are expensive."

It's not your car you move with the trolley jack, its those blocking you in. Extra points if you leave them somewhere that will need another trolley jack to get them out of.

Re: The big problem

"I get the weather forecast whenever I want by tapping the Yahoo Weather icon on my phone or iPad."

Or the barometer?

Re: "whatever you want to use?"

Just wait until it actually starts replying "No".

And then tries to parse its own paradox and catches fire.

NHS: Remember those patient records we didn't deliver? Well, we found another 162,000

Re: wiping

"it's taken by phlebotomists, so it must be phleb they're taking"

I hope not. The "tom" is a bit of a clue that your phleb is being cut (The word atom was invented to name something that couldn't be cut any further) and a quick trip to whackypedia tells me that the phleb bit means blood vessels. I rather hope they don't take those.

Re: Phlebotomy

" now it turns out that as long as the skin is visibly clean, disinfecting it doesn't make any difference"

There must be a lot less bacteria about in the environment since I did a microbiology course good-Lord-is-it-that-long ago.