Posts by Doctor Syntax

Trump tariffs to make prices great – a gain

Re: High wages can be lowered

"This isn't about doing some dishonest property deal, your actions threaten people all over the planet."

And Chapter 11 doesn't work at national level.

Signalgate solved? Report claims journalist’s phone number accidentally saved under name of Trump official

Re: Cockamamie

I don't think the problem is the app, it's the choice of platform, the phone. And the choice of platform comes down to the users. It's always the weakest link you have to worry about.

Re: An authentic failure

All too complicated for those involved.

"What else do you expect when you have a convicted felon at the head of a country ?"

A kleptocracy.

Re: Cockamamie

"Waltz built the entire [National Security Council] communications process on Signal,"

Apparently the NSA approved Signal as a secure communications channel to use on phones based on its technical merits. The problem wasn't building the communications process on Signal, it was basing it on phones. What the NSA should have done, if they wanted security, was to confiscate the phones.

Re: Cockamamie

"To be fair, it sound's about right "

I'm sure we all assumed it would be incompetence, all this does is tell us just what where it lay. I suppose Hughes is now going to be fall guy for Waltz.

Please sir, may we have some Moore? Doesn't look that way

Re: fairly obvious

Because there are limits almost every curve that starts off looking like it's exponential turns out to be sigmoidal.

UK's attempt to keep details of Apple 'backdoor' case secret… denied

But if they have nothing to hide they shouldn't have anything to fear about it all being in the open. That's what they keep telling us.

EU may target US tech giants in tariff response

"The fact that Microsoft primarily sells software and services rather than hardware did not shield it from losing $165 billion in market value last week."

Windows is bundled with H/W so tariffs on H/W are also on the bundled S/W and the latter is also the mechanism for signing up more punters to Microsoft services. Like any other US business it's also going to cost them on the imports they need to build all those data centres. Maybe the back-pedalling on data centre leases wasn't just lack of confidence in AI, it was also anticipation that they were going to cost more to build.

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Actually we don't. It's other air heaters who do that. They have to look after each other's interests.

Re: Not an Age Thing

Do HR do anything in recruiting these days other than get AI to sift the CVs?

I suppose I've retired twice on account of manglement.

The first was one of those occasional [de]motivations courses to which corporates fall prey but on steroids. AFAICS it was essentially run to motivate two very senior manglers by spending their days having their egos stroked by pontificating from a large platform to a large hall of underlings, the whole being MCed by a TV presenter who had the grace to appear slightly embarrassed by his part in the proceedings. I'm afraid I doubly failed, first to suspend disbelief and secondly to conceal disgust and it was the latter that didn't get unnoticed. I was offered a good retirement package and went on to spend another decade freelancing.

The second was on my last, quite long-running freelance gig. They offered me the permie job of development manage or some such title, probably not realising how close I was to their mandatory retirement age, not that I was interested anyway. Eventually they recruited someone chronically unable to make a decision. The last straw came for me when he spent the day before he was going to go on holiday vacillating about allocating tasks. By the end of the afternoon he'd finally come to a set of decisions - until a message in the evening that he'd changed his mind again and reallocated stuff. I decided that this was something up with which I could no longer put. I phoned in next day off sick with stress and announced that once my work on the main project was finished I'd be retiring and closing my business. As so often seems to be the case in these stories, I believe he left not long after and the business itself went a while after that.

Re: he had been passed to us because he wasn't very good

The the dot com boom went boom so there was now no business producing a regular income and no dot com shiny either?

Re: Failure of management

I remember one mangler I used to describe as going into cannon mode. He always wanted to fire someone.

Re: "Why had it taken management so long"

Assuming it was the case (and it was the time when IBM was a force to be reckoned with) the situation described in TMMM sounds ideal. Management and engineering had parallel ladders. Someone could be promoted into management but if it turned out it wasn't for them they could move back into engineering without it being a demotion because there was an equivalent engineering grade. The problem arises when management is et above all the the other areas so is the only way to promote someone. It makes as much sense promoting someone from, say accounts, to be a manager as promoting them to be a chemist.

Re: Inverse problem, kinda ...

Had a contract to set up S/W on my client's client site. My client specified suit. It was the middle of a heat wave (yes, in England; it happens). So there I am on the client's client site in a suit getting baggier by the second talking to client's client's manager overdressed in T-shirt, shorts & sandals. Just as well most of my time I could get into the machine room. It would have been a happier gig if my client's team had been able to provide better written S/W.

Re: Why did it take two hours?

Aidan set him the task. I'm guessing he already had the spec.

There's the opposite of this. We had some young lady briefly attached to our team. She was some sort of high-flier being rotated from team to team. Pleasant enough person for a high flier but with no skills relevant to us. I had to invent some sort of task for her. Fortunately she moved on after a few weeks to fly higher elsewhere - I think possibly because her husband relocated elsewhere but frankly I never found out why she was even employed in the business for the few months she was there.

Legal clock ticking for Microsoft over alleged software license abuses

Re: Looks like...

Some more wining and dining will probably be offered.

Asian tech players react to US tariffs with delays, doubts, deal-making

“network asset discovery and massive port scanning” targeting “Information Systems of Competition”

That's just the usual LLMs.

No joke: Microsoft foolishly published inaccurate price list on April 1st

Re: E&OE

"Cav emp" would also be appropriate although these days it takes a multi-page licence to say that.

"a few lucky folk may have dodged a five percent Copilot price hike"

I'm having difficulty in understanding this one. In what way would it be lucky to have paid any money for it? Or even have it fr free?

China hits back at America with retaliatory tariffs, export controls on rare earth minerals

To continue with the car theme. There seems to be a further complaint that too many foreign cars are being imported into the US. Perhaps the US manufacturers are not only failing to produce the sort of cars that sell in other countries, there're also failing to supply some of the sorts of car that would sell in their own country.

Re: What a s**ts**w !!

When Harris was asked what she would change in her govt during the election cycle and she responded “Nothing”, I thought, oh s**t , are we totally and properly screwed !!

So Trump arrived, changed lots and now you really are screwed. Did you want people to invest in the US? The one thing that puts off potential investors is instability. Offering to change nothing was the sensible answer.

Re: Thanks How much

Ultimately stuff which is made cheap, imported and sold dear isn't going to suffer. They can cut down their profit a bit or maybe cut down on advertising to get some of it back. Raw materials are a different matter, particularly if they're going into products intended for export because then the US is effectively levying tariffs against its own exports. And the suppliers are likely to tell the customers to pay up in advance in a currency they can trust.

Re: How much

He really does. Go bankrupt, leave the creditors holding the shitty end of the stick. Handling the country's finances that way isn't going to work.

At least he'd solve his immigration problem There'd be no point going there.

Re: Medium rare?

Basically, it's another instance of the US buying from China something it could produce itself but can't be arsed, largely, I suppose because they wouldn't start getting an ROI by the end of next quarter, and then whining about it being so unfair that they have to pay for it.

Introducing Windows on arm. And by arm, we mean wrist

Re: Big hand, Little hand

Same thing in numbers is also OK. Maybe there should be a separate category: "Gadgets you can wear on our wrist that aren't a watch" with a subcategory of "Have an actually useful function".

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Re: Normal for Norfolk*

I suppose the McDonald Islands is due to the sales of McDonald's in the US means there must be excessive imports coming from there.

More seriously, I wonder if the source of some of the oddities isn't due to careless data input (Norfolk Island coming from a drop-down list?) but deliberate false declaration as some sort of duty fiddle.

They could import the electricity. Do they have any neighbours who could supply it?

Re: Trump is easy to model

" He can (and almost certainly has) turn his shareholdings into actual cash by using those shares as collateral for loans from banks."

How many shares would a bank accept as collateral before it became too much of a risk? They couldn't liquidate them without reducing their value.

Re: Tuition

"I would never advocate pulling up the ladder behind me. But turns out that's what my generation did. Nasty bastards."

I think the ladder pulling was a multi-genrational thing. Labour in the 70s, pulled up the grammar school ladder behind them.

Blair, deciding that half the population needed degrees (where were all the degree-needing jobs to come from) expanded the universities but needed student loans to pay for it, hence another ladder pulled up. It was obvious, at least to me, at the time that they were taxing the future in so many ways.

Re: Trump is easy to model

"It does amuse me when prominent Democrats and Dem supporters attack Trump's immigration policies with things like 'who will pick the crops' and 'who will clean the toilets'."

That one's easy. The MAGA voters, of course.

Re: I feel liberated already...

That requires thinking and thinking's hard work, so tariffs it is.

Re: I feel liberated already...

"There are commentards (I think we know who they are) who have a hatelist whereby every time they see a post by another commentard against whom they have a grudge, they downvote regardless of content or common sense."

Basically, you point out something that was so wrong they can't refute it. If they have a personality that doesn't allow them to move on all they can do is downvote everything else you said. Everyone of their downvotes tells you you were right on some post. As I've said before, cherish your downvotes.

Heard and McDonald Islands

Maybe he's trying to beat them into economic submission so he can take them over as a substitute for Greenland is that doesn't come off. After all they have penguins so they must be somewhere near Greenland in the Arctic.

US DoE wants developers to fast-track AI datacenters on its land

"US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright claimed it was vital for America to be the leader in AI, and likened it to the Second World War race to build the atomic bomb."

The atomic bomb had a clear single objective and its success was readily determinable: deterrence. AI?

Home Office haunted by 25-year-old asylum system

AFAICS the HO is one of two who are particularly outstanding in that field. HOCRE was OK in my day but their chief talent seems to have been house-training Home Secs, John Reid having been an exception.

My typing wasn't fit for purpose either. It should have been 20.

NASA doubles odds of Moon hitting near-Earth asteroid

Although it's unlikely to send it towards the Earth on that orbit immediately the encounter would perturb its orbit. What might happen after that remains to be seen.

Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud

Re: Some things never change

No, you put the screen on it. And the keyboard. And the mouse.

But why are you willing to pay $349 for something which cost a fraction of that to make in order to have that taken off your hands?

Re: high-fidelity Microsoft Teams meetings

"If you are lucky, it’s rebooted itself over the weekend"

Have a dual boot PC so with any luck on Monday it will already have booted into Linux.

Re: So, we have finally come full circle

"Which never failed."

I crashed a 1904 from a TTY.

Re: OK, not exactly the same

Friends don't let friends use Windows.

Re: But but but...

"users are prone to buggering about with them"

And not just users.

Re: Since the 90s!

And "client" doesn't mean the device.

Re: Surface Hub reboot?

A 3270 terminal had a monitor and keyboard. Luxury!

Trump fires NSA boss, deputy

Trump loyalist is the sole qualification for the job. TFA describes Haugh as "non-partisan"; that's why he got fired.

Re: NSA

I'm sure they'll do as they say. It just won't become available.