Posts by Doctor Syntax

Workers: Yes, RTO makes sense. No, we’re not going to do it

Re: "gives people the freedom¹ to live² happier³, more fulfilling lives²."

Your post is most informative. Informative about your management abilities. It tells us, for instance, that most of the staff you were employing weren't up to scratch anyway (at least in your judgement) - so why employ them? It tells us that you didn't have any idea what the developer you thought was good was actually producing.

I very much doubt you'll be better managing staff in the office than remotely but look on the bright side - your own managers probably haven't noticed.

What do think will happen if and when the job market picks up?

Ah, that'll be in a different quarter so doesn't affect today's decisions.

Re: "unbossing"

It certainly isn't new. My did resisted promotion to foreman and that was a long time ago. It's a completely unhinged notion that just because somebody's good at one thing they must be good at another. If you don't see the (lack of ) logic in promoting a bean counter to chemist why don't you see the same in promoting a chemist to manager?

"it said a lot about the state of our team"

It might have said they were all techies like you.

Re: Return To Oppression

Companies could save themselves a good deal of cost by getting rid of the managers who depend on a sea of occupied chairs. Just retain those who can manage remote working. It would save more if they could get rid of the big offices but in a lot of cases they're tied to them by contract or maybe eve own them and can't offload them.

Microsoft agrees to 11th hour Win 10 end of life concessions

And what will you replace it with? Something liable to suffer the same fate a few years down the line?

To avoid such events either stop drinking coffee or stop reading about Microsoft.

Re: This explains a lot.

"the extra year's support."

But was this the free support or the "pay now and pay twice and much next year" support?

TFA says it was "Luxembourg and Brussels-based consumer rights group Euroconsumers" who took the initiative, not the EU. To mirror this it would need to be a UK consumer rights group taking action.

LockBit's new variant is 'most dangerous yet,' hitting Windows, Linux and VMware ESXi

It just goes to show that although taking down the infrastructure is temporarily it's not substitute for taking down the people responsible. The solution to that would be to offer rewards for information leading to the prosecution of offenders. Information might include "So-and-So is asleep in room whatever of some hotel something in somewhere with an extradition treaty even if the last thing they remember is walking into a Moscow bar." Apart from delivering results it would leave then wondering how far they can trust those around them.

Prompt injection – and a $5 domain – trick Salesforce Agentforce into leaking sales

Re: Translating their attitude

My translation: We'll chase after the bad guys to secure things after the event.

UK to roll out mandatory digital ID for right to work by 2029

Re: What the House of Lords is for..

"the only way the government will get it passed will be to include it in the manifesto at the next general election & win."

In which case they'd have failed the target of having it up and running (an ambitious target to say the least) by the end of the current parliament.

Re: No thanks, fishing is not securing borders

"They work for us, we don’t work for them"

They don't agree. Never have.

"There would have to be solid, set in stone, immutable laws in place to protect the public from abuse of an ID before it could even become close to being palatable.

And that'll never happen"

Another reason why it won't happen. Somewhere along the line, either because it uses a US corporation's infrastructure or the contract's just handed to a US corporation in its entirety there'll be no way any such laws being enforceable because the USG will be able to ride roughshod over thm.

Re: This is a nonsense

"Nice guy, not a policitian"

I'm not convinced he was that brilliant a DPP either.

I look to the government ministers PPSs & my MP signing up to the pilot system right away. I also look forward to the pilot system being breached.

Digital ID is an enormous opportunity for the UK one of the usual suspects and also for whoever breaks into system first.

FTFH

Just using open source software isn't radical any more. Europe needs to dig deeper

"Also, the demand for digital sovereignty is on the rise in Europe, and all sensible answers to how that could be done are based on open source software. Well-known examples include Neonephos, Open Internet Stack, EuroStack, and IPCEI-CIS (Important Project of Common European Interest – Cloud Infrastructure and Services). "

All these examples seem to be organisations or initiatives - talking shops, not products.

"When it comes to open source, Europe needs to stop talking, and start acting."

Indeed.

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

Re: Maybe they wanted someone incompetent to "inspect"?

"The schedule went away on a handcart."

Along with the new boss?

Re: Maybe they wanted someone incompetent to "inspect"?

"there was a shareholder lawsuit"

Did they sue the management or themselves?

I'd guess a client manager who wanted to either shave costs or catch up on behind-schedule delivery from the manufacturer demanding the short cut but keeping it hidden and a senior manager who knew the consequences dosing the screaming.

Metal can on a single die was not unknown. A long time ago the circuit board from an IRA remote controlled bomb had one of those. All the text had been scraped off all the ICs but someone took the top off the can and brought it over for me to check under a microscope. There was the ID, plainly readable and I remembered seeing it advertised in Wireless World. And given that the 8 pin package clearly wasn't an op-amp it must be a 555 so the rest of the board was fairly easily worked out.

Is GitHub a social network that endangers children? Australia wants to know

Like I said, if they don't want to follow the laws of a country they don't have to do business there. And it's is most certainly not up to US businesses to dictate what governments countries should vote in.

From the perspective of a citizen fo a non-US country a better government would be one prepared to dump US companies as critical service suppliers and insist that if they want to do business in the country they should have a legal presence there and trade through that.

Too many US companies seem to have decided that the United fruit Company was a good model to follow.

American companies don't have to. If they don't like the laws of some country they don't have to do business there.

If they want to do business in a country then they must follow its laws, idiotic or otherwise. That's the way things work, the alternative is anarchy. Are you advocating anarchy?

Hosting images is fair enough - it includes GUI elements and comes under the heading of code.

But "GitHub Pages service allows users to create websites based on their repos" - Mission creep?

Re: I mean, obviously

Whoosh/

Brits warned as illegal robo-callers with offshored call centers fined half a million

"We urge the public to take note of our tips to spot these robo calls so they can tell us when they've received one,"

How? There seem to be a series of different reporting sites with different criteria, none of which seem to deal with attempted fraud. The site for reporting scam calls is only interested if the caller has been defrauded, otherwise it just redirects to a page of advice.

Marketi survey call reporting is, I believe, managed by the marketing industry and they seem to give themselves a free pass even for TPS registered lines.

ICO need to knock heads together and arrange a single portal, hand out the reports to the appropriate organisations and ensure that between them those organisations handle all situations.

Open source to closed doors: RubyGems control fight erupts

Re: What a suprise.

The licencing seems to be interesting. It's dual GPL2 & BSD. The GPL2 secures the Spinel fork. BSD alone would enable Shopify or whoever to make their own private changes but would the historic GPL licence require release of the amended source if someone got stroppy?

But if the maintainers are gone it looks as if the original project will be well and truly forked and that maybe its new proprietors didn't understand how FOSS works.

EU starting registration of fingerprints and faces for short-stay foreigners

Re: Fingerprints eh

Add to that processing pineapples.

Oracle saddles up with $18B debt amid AI infrastructure gamble

For what they're doing I think I'd want a short-duration at an interest rate that would nevertheless repay the loan a few times over before it matured. That way I might stand a chance of getting my money back before the bubble bursts and the whole thing collapses in a heap.

I wonder what interest rates they got.

Zorin OS 18 beta makes Linux look like anything but Linux

Re: Can we go back to simple, flat, user interfaces ?

"The application lives in a container."

If you mean a container in the Docker sense - why? Why not the good, old-fashioned directory tree that lives in /opt? It's a long-solved problem that suffers from being re-solved in increasingly complex ways.

Re: Meh

That's when they see it run an update in less than hours and without a reboot.

Re: Sausage

"I don't eat anything that doesn't want to be eaten"

Nevertheless most animals that ever lived got eaten, whether or not they wanted to, the exceptions being those that decayed. Much the same goes for plants but they didn't even get to have an opinion. (I'm also a biologist but more specifically a botanical palaeoecologist.)

Please think about the objective here - giving Windows users an easy route off. They are not renouncing the world and all its sins to go and wear a hair shirt, they are wanting to make the best use of the hardware they have to run a maintained OS to accomplish their existing tasks in a way they know best. You and I are familiar with other ways to accomplish those tasks, they are not and easy steps are needed; the more and easier that can be provided the better.

To put it bluntly, the Zorin approach can work where yours wouldn't.

Re: PSA: Zorin OS DOES NOT SUPPORT 32 Bit Machines

The solution to that might be a local distro. In terms of 3rd world support the point needs to be made in discussions such as this: https://lwn.net/Articles/1035727/ although maybe there'll be a supply of 64-bit H/W that won't run W10.

Re: Sausage

"Why not just have the sausage?"

You can have your sausage but it will cost you a few hundred for a new plate from which to eat it. Sausage 11 is incompatible with your sausage 10 plate and sausage 10 is widely advertised as becoming toxic after October. Alternatively you can have this which won't taste too different from the sausage you're used to, is just as good or, in the view of many, better, and you can eat it from any old plate you choose.

Does that answer your question?

SAP's 'simplified' licensing leaves users more confused

"They just want to run the business ERP system."

That's what legacy systems are all about. They run the business that makes the money that pays for any new shiny. Messing with them is not a good idea.

Tree-hugging hippie datacenter runs entirely on green hydrogen and wastes zero water

For local storage compression rather than liquefaction would be OK (still uses energy) but pumped water storage might be a problem. For a static location do lithium batteries have an advantage over lead-acid?

The hydrogen is being used as an energy store to buffer the delivery from renewables. Genuine question - how does the overall efficiency of this stack up against other storage technologies?

Google is very sorry for pulling down COVID misinfo and pledges never to use outside fact-checkers

Re: xTube?

I wonder if Tylenol will sue.

AI hype train may jump the tracks over $2T infrastructure bill, warns Bain

Sanity check

"the sector as a whole will have to be making $2 trillion in annual sales "

Isn't the world population about 8 billion? Are they going to be buying $250 worth a head pa, man, woman* and child?

* Or any other self-identification

Cybercriminals cash out with casino giant's employee data

I think "limited" or "only a few" is best interpreted as "not more than all".

Campaigners urge UK PM Starmer to dump digital ID wheeze before it's announced

"They also point out that Labour said it was not planning a digital identity scheme in advance of last year's general election."

On the other hand I don't suppose they said that they planned not to. There's a huge gap between the two.

OpenSSF warns that open source infrastructure doesn't run on thoughts and prayers

Re: Added value

There are, of course, companies that will provide paid support for FOSS. Of course if the original developer were to flounce off they'd be stuck if they couldn't get the source....

Boffins fool a self-driving car by putting mirrors on traffic cones

Re: Just Stop It

"it might educate human drivers to keep their distance from the car in front."

The phantom braking I've experience is either triggered by cars in the opposite lane coming towards me on a bend or by cars driving across the front as I'm trickling up to a stop line on a roundabout or whatever. I've not experienced the braking in a situation where it was correct.

Re: Mirror, mirror ...

"The trouble with driving in bus lanes at times when they are allowed for cars, is that councils often use them as traps to raise money from unwary motorists."

IME there are usually enough parked cars out of bus lane hours for them to be useless for driving.

India’s IT minister moves to Zoho’s spreadsheet and word processor, urges 1.4 billion people to do likewise

"Swadeshi is a word from Sanskrit and Bengali that describes self-sufficiency."

A useful word to have. Perhaps we should adopt it.

UK justice minister pressed as court system bug raises fears of hidden case files

Manual systems have also been known to not produce all the statements in court.

Re: Who's doing the "pressing"?

There's probably an element here of the Opposition being "only the opposition in exile. The Civil Service is the opposition in residence."

MX Linux 25 reaches beta testing – complete with systemd

Re: Puzzled Old F**t Here

"RedHat (retail) and Fedora have served me pretty well for twenty five years!!"

Before Linux various flavours of Unix served me very well since the early '80s. What appealed was the simplicity. If something had to be set up to be run by init it could be tested and developed just using the shell. I distrust something that pretends to be simple by being complex and opaque.

I had enough problems with Upstart, an earlier effort along the same lines when trying to diagnose a problem connecting a TV to a MythTV box. I turned out that the TV was lying about its screen resolution but there seemed to be no break-in points to add debugging.

If everything works for you, fine. If it doesn't and here's nothing to let you debug it you're stuffed. A binary choice between works out of the box and doesn't isn't acceptable.