Posts by Doctor Syntax 42273 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Lots of staff usually means numerous people know how to connect to conference monitors. Such information may well be published somewhere for staff to use."
So the hack is a consequence of the collaboration, communication and cross-pollination etc. of working in the Office.
Ford management should be pleased with this evidence that it's all going so well.
I doubt that the occasional quick word - and, yes, I understand that from experience - is sufficient to to compensate for the losses of a badly organised open plan office. And that's before the entirely unnecessary not very quick words from a PM who has nothing better to do than wander up to break one's concentration, entirely, of course, lacking the awareness of that concentration or of the damage done.
I'd guess your employee who "disappeared" for a while while based at home might be as adept at not working whilst in the office.
"It seems there are a lot of entitled people around. They expect to be paid, but don't want to go to the office."
Let's dispose of the first bit; I'm long retired . I retired before working from home became a regular possibility. Some of that work was in laboratories so working at home would have been a non-starter. I have no direct interest in this.
But I spent a good deal of my working life commuting. I know the time wasted. The time I spent commuting from High Wycombe into London was equivalent to two full working days a week - for which I was NOT paid. I was not alone. I was in trains crowded - overcrowded - with others in the same uncomfortable predicament. Looking out the the windows I could see roads crowded with cars also taking commuters into work. It was a gross and unnecessary waste of huge portions of human lives and of physical resources. A society which has got itself into that situation needs to stop and think very hard about how to get out of it; it has a responsibility to itself and to the rest of humanity and the planet to do that.
I grew up in an industrial Pennine village when the mills were still working. Most people worked in the mills and there was a mill within walking distance of most people's homes, the exceptions being those living in the remoter farms who were probably not working in the mills in any case. It was a more humane way of life than commuting. Now we have the double whammy of the mills having almost entirely closed, so less work within walking distance and they have been treated as brownfield sites for housing so more people than previously now having to commute. It would have been quite feasible to have converted those mills to alternative forms of working. Put offices in them or whatever.
If companies want staff in offices disperse the offices into smaller units where people live. I return frequently to my daughter's experience - working for a company which is entirely based on remote working. It is feasible. We know from the experience of Covid that it is feasible for a good many jobs - not all but a good many. I repeat again, I have no personal sense of entitlement in this, just a sense from experience and observation that we have organised society very badly to have it depend on unnecessary commuting into huge conurbations to do work that could be dispersed. The entitled ones are those who demand that it be done this way.
"Have you ever actually been in an office with lots of staff?"
Yes, indeed. There was the desk reorganisation where a group with a very noisy dot-matrix printer was relocated right behind me.
And the time that some one very important in the business came on a visit say the portionless call centre and pronounced it good so all the desks in IT had their partitions and the shelves they supported removed over the weekend. My row of reference manuals which had been within arm's reach ended up permanently on a windowsill some distance away.
The people who come up with this garbage don't actually do any work in the sort of offices they want to see the people in. If they're in the building they have a private office and probably a good deal of time is spent meeting people away from the company's office. Not that there's anything wrong with either of those situations but it does mean that they don't have the experience of trying to work in the circumstances that they think are so productive.
Large amounts of money have already gone into it and people are queuing up to shove in more. Unless the ventures start to turn profits commensurate with all that money it will be lost. We're already at a point where the required returns appear infeasible without it enabling some huge economic advance that's within the capabilities of the planet's resources to sustain. Historically technological advances accompanies by investment booms have stimulated economic growth but (a) investors have still lost money (George Hudson's investors in railways for example) (b) it remains to be seen whether economic growth on the scale required is sustainable. (c) It remains to be seen if there are any economic advances at all to come out of this.
"not yet sounding the alarm, but was careful to add a note of caution."
Such financial commentators are probably realising they're treading a tightrope.by now. An over-strong remark could start the whole thing collapsing and they won't want to be named as the one responsible. On the other hand they could risk getting sued with recommending something they should have known was going to collapse causing some punter to get burnt.
I'd guess he's thinking about pre-assembled modules that can be linked together simply enough for a robot to do the job and even remove, eject and replace faulty ones. What happens when the robot's processor encounters a bit of stray solar or cosmic radiation is a different matter. But the logistics take second place to the inanity of expecting to get rid of heat on a gigawatt scale.
"a UK telecoms company sacked its team of cheap-but-useless Indian software developers"
Managers liking the sound of their own voices certainly rings true but sacking a team of cheap-but-useless Indians without replacing them with cheaper and more useless just goes to show what strange things happened during Covid.
"Someone from management would at least say goodbye"
One of a client's salesmen (desk at the opposite end of the open plan office) asked me for a report from the system. An hour or so later I'd got it ready and went over to his desk with it. He wasn't there. I was told "he no longer works here." I suppose somebody in management said goodbye.
"What this is about is reducing the time infantry/artillery/armour troops need to spend on unrelated stuff so they can increase training time in their core competencies."
Quite true. There's no point worrying about the boots on the ground blabbing about their little bit of the battle when Hegseth is busy texting the entire battle plan to whoever wants to know
"This is not a card but a new digital identity" (from the explanation on the petition site)
A digital identity. What's that when it's at home?
If evidence were needed that this was a sudden brain-fart blurted out without thinking it's in that statement. They'll work out later what a digital identity might be.
"I know of a medieval French chapel (Catholic). It was once disassembled stone-by-stone and moved to Long Island, New York."
The London Bridge before the current one* was also disassembled and shipped to the US. It would have been bigger but not as old. Contrary to some stories, however appealing they might be, the buyer didn't think he'd bought Tower Bridge.
* Circumlocution to avoid calling it "old" as it wasn't Old London Bridge which was medieval.
"This should be cause for a big re-think. But that won't happen."
It might not happen to those in the supply chain. But as the M&Ss of this world who've been hit review their operations (as they should) or those not yet hit look around, they're the ones likely to be making the big re-think.
Why should Red Hat (or anyone else for that matter) store private information on Github rather than setting up their own, private repository? The answer, of course, is convenience. Let somebody else do it. In Red Hat's case they could scarcely claim they lack the skills. But it enlarges the attack surface. Maybe someone else in the Red Hat supply chain also had access to it and maybe somebody else had access to them.
It's yet another supply chain attack and if companies don't know by now that long supply chains are vulnerable - especially to social engineering attacks on their staff - we can be sure the attackers do.
Branch staff have been disempowered. If you have a problem it's best to try to sort it out face-to-face than on the phone or online. The situation is that I now have to travel some distance to be told they can't help. They enshitify the branches so that there's no point in visiting them and then use the lack of footfall to close them down.
Branches were more than sales points. They were where service was delivered, the service for which customers used the banks.
My problem with Lloyds was that they simply wanted a fee for what used to be just part of the service. The result was that they lost an account which was probably more valuable to them overall than the fee they tried - and failed to grab from me. Had they succeeded that would have been credited to the branch; the loss of business was probably not debited against them.
If they can't attribute the cost of customer churn where it belongs then they can't really get a true picture of what the branches' profit and loss. We see "challenger" banks being set up that are remote only. They're not really challenging the big banks, they're just emulating them. The bank that reverses this policy, established more branches and set one up near me gets my business. If that's not real sales I don't know what is.
They're frequently told by the usual suspects here that it's either extremely confusing or downright impossible. The real sticking point for consumers and SMBs is that it requires installation of an OS and it needs to be done in such a way that their old data remains available to them. For IT departments that install their own Windows builds on new PCs that excuse doesn't hold up.
ISVs that will only develop for a single OS remain a problem and will continue to be so without Linux reaching a sufficient user base to (a) make it viable or (b) worry their competitors may jump first.
"Recently it has been replaced by some abomination that has nothing of interest to the average Reg reader. Full of flashy graphics and no substance."
Horizon?
OT: The Beeb is currently running programmes reflecting 200 years of railways. There was a recent one by Michael Portillo (of course) as part of that. After watching it I was amazed to find that it had only been an hour long. By current Beeb standards it would have taken at least two hours to present that much material. It was just like the old days.
