Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Worse yet, the device communicates via cleartext, so attackers would be able to falsify readings, disable alarms, or perform any other originally supported operation."
This gains it the highest approval rating from both our house-trained Home Secs (I'm counting the one currently installed in number 10).
@Jonathan 27
Back in the '80s when we first used RCS I checked after a few months & discovered we'd been releasing changes on average of every 2 weeks for our in-house application system so I'm not impressed by your idea of every 2 months as continuous release*. This was for adding functionality for business reasons (mostly requests from the beancounters which was handy because it kept them from complaining that we were a cost centre). OTOH we did expect a much slower rate of churn on the underlying platform, OS & RDBMS.
*We also had the same team as developers, DBAdmin & Unix Admin so I'm not impressed with the idea of DevOps as the latest shiny. Everything old is new again.
"Monitor status of safety systems, yes. Change them remotely, no."
Basic rule: just because you can do something doesn't mean it's a good idea. And the converse also applies: just because it's not a good idea it doesn't mean you can't do it.
"I remember a time when HP test gear was comparable to tektronix."
That sells HP short. HP of old made a lot more than test gear. I don't recall Tektronix making spectrophotometers, for instance.
All of which goes to show that the wrecking of HP was even worse than you thought.
" we are the best programmers and therefore we know best. Nothing you old people know is relevant to us anymore." From the comments it looks like they have continued on with their cavalier attitude.
That attitude is reminiscent of something else that keeps cropping up here. Maybe someone else needs to reflect on the reasons for Firefox's decline.
"Remember that outside of IT a large percentage of the population works in retail, marketing, or sales, and even tradespeople are generally aware that their own employers and their own jobs depend on advertising."
I think we're into irregular verb country here:
I send out valuable marketing messages
You nag
He, she or it spams.
I wonder just how many people in the advertising industry itself use adblockers because other peoples' ads are so annoying. Not their own, of course - a serious lack of self-awareness would see to that.
"Putting you in a vice: break your machine or get pwned."
Simple solution there. Split feature updates and security updates. Unless you were actually relying on a bug which is patched in the security update you can apply the security update irrespective of it being out of band without breaking functionality. (Assuming the update itself isn't broken.)
"not only was Mr Bastard real, but he was clearly old enough to have been able to change his name and had *chosen* not to."
A quick trawl through the birth registrations for several years from 1900 shows that there were almost invariably a few born each quarter with that surname. Presumably these were mostly not some quirk of recording illegitimate children. Fairly often, however, the mother's maiden surname was given as Bastard so they may well have been genuine bastards.
"Regarding screens, Microsoft's Surface line has the best screen aspect for reading A-series documents: its 3:2 display ratio (i.e., 1.5:1), is as near as dagnabbit the A-series 1.414 : 1 plus a tiny bit for a menu bar.
Hopefully, other manufacturers will follow suit: 16:9 is only good for movies."
That's the trouble with toys where it's assumed you'll only have one thing displayed, it will be A-seriesish in proportion & it will be at full screen. Have you considered that other people have use cases involving multiple documents open at once, perhaps a reference document and a text editor? Or involving images which are much wider than the sort of text you use? In those situations 16:9 is minimal.
"Foyles' quixotic system of trading"
Paying was only half of it. The other half was the way books were displayed. The common habit of grouping books by subject wasn't for Foyles. They shelved their books by publisher.
If, by chance, all the good books on CodeMangle-- were published by, say Wiley, this was fine. If every publisher had a book out on it you'd wander all over the shop trying to compare them. And if nobody had one out you'd wander all over the shop simply to discover that.
At one time the bus-stop outside bore an advert reading "Foyled again? Try Dillons."
"This is why HR in many companies insist on a structured hiring and firing process, with retention of notes, emails, etc. that are related to the decisions...
Simply put, HR policies are a pain in the ass, but they are they to protect the company's reputation and keep it out of the courtroom."
In other words, whatever you do, make sure the paper trail looks OK.
I don't know if geographers have changed since the long-ago days when I was a palaeoecologist. If they haven't then the likely outcome will be that they'll reinvent whatever field they're asked to advise on, inventing new names for everything.
Now I've written that, I wonder if a lot of them go into marketing. Cloud? DevOps?
"They need to get a grip on their misplaced anger."
So if your company has seriously mucked things up for a customer the customer should just shrug it off? They have no entitlement to be angry at your company, the one that's got things wrong? Why?
It may well be that anger is misplaced in that front line support isn't responsible for you company's lack of a proper escalation process, bad product quality, documentation or whatever it is that gave rise to the anger which may very well be justified. Front line support is, unfortunately, the only face your company presents to the user once the shiny suited salesman has disappeared.
But no company should regard anger directed at it as being misplaced unless they're very sure that it wasn't their own inadequacies that caused it. And they are, very often the cause in one way or another.
Got into work one morning There were half a dozen agency staff who'd turned up to do data entry. On what? Sales had set up a new contract but the business process required didn't fit with anything presently in place and nobody thought to enquire what might be needed. Most unusually I hadn't caught wind of this one, otherwise I'd have had the rabbit ready to pull out of the hat.
I quickly set up a database table and data entry form (on the development server - not letting a load of strangers have logins on the production box). While the new arrivals got on with key pounding I spent the rest of the morning working out how to feed the data into the appropriate bits of the production database so product shipment could start in the afternoon.
All the personnel from the other teams got taken to London for lunch in the BT Tower revolving restaurant. But not the one who stopped the whole thing becoming a fiasco.
"If it were costing my employer money"
This is not necessarily a simple issue. In the example in TFA it might be Wayne's perceived value to the customer that keeps the customer from going elsewhere. Even if it were nominally costing the employer money in the greater scheme of things it might be making money. If Wayne's job title was sales, business development or the like the only worrying thing would be that it wasn't Wayne paying the bill.
systemd'oh! DNS lib underscore bug bites everyone's favorite init tool, blanks Netflix
"Then I see that systemd started life as an init replacement, with good aims, and then rapidly realized that to achieve its design goals big chunks of the rest of Linux needed to be rewritten."
If, when you attempt to fix something you find that everything around it then breaks and you fix that & more stuff breaks, that's nature's way of telling you your original fix was broken.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
