Posts by Doctor Syntax

Trump admin says tech companies are abusing H-1B visas, slaps $100k a year to allow entry

Re: For $100k

"The person would still be allowed to visit the US for meetings and for projects"

In theory, yes. In practice they may be detained and chained up for a photo-shoot.

Re: No problem

Absolutely. The quote "I think it'll hit the outsourcers more than probably those firms" is the exact opposite of what I'd expect.

We all know what the the offshored service to be like.

Give it a few weeks for the TACO to arrive.

Zuck has the power! Meta applies to sell excess electricity

Re: All this power, what are we building with it?

The value of a process should be measured by its outputs. If you have to measure inputs, whether it's bums on seats in the office or gigawatts into data centres, it's a clear indication that you don't have a grasp on what's being achieved.

Slack threatened to delete nonprofit coding club’s data if it didn’t pay $50k in a week

Re: Slack should ..

There are people who will do this sort of thing very professionally. e.g. https://www.mythic-beasts.com/apps/overview

Not quite a tenner a month but long enough established to be well trusted.

"Lessons will not be lost on the young people I think."

Just what I was thinking. Lessons learned when young should help them in their careers. Who knows, some of them may be making purchasing decisions in the future.

Alleged Scattered Spider teen cuffed after extortion Bitcoin used to buy games, meals

There may well have been a bit more in the detecting side of it but as a story the mainstream media will understand buying pizza is the way to explain it.

Nevertheless, having blagged their way through the weakest link and amassed a lot of money they do tend to thnk they're an awful lot smarted than they really are. Basically they're just hi-tech versions of the teenage robber who threw his jacket away when he escaped with his library card in the pocket or the one who threw away his cap with his name written inside - both real cases from the old days in Belfast.

"agents later seized about $36 million in cryptocurrency from wallet(s) on that server."

That shouldn't worry Jubair. He's not going to get a chance to spend it anyway.

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

Re: Temp Users Are Skum

About 3 days into my IT career I was parachuted into a client site where one of the two company bods had just left to go freelance. They knew what rate we were being body-shopped at. Very shortly the other one left as well & I quickly became team leader on the site. It took a long time to rebuild* the finances after a long time as SSO in the Civil Service to be able to make a move like that.

" Build might be more accurate.

Re: "Surely an IT manager should know the difference between Word and Excel?"

the reason for moving from one building to another was quoted as "better snacks"

What's wrong with that? It's obviously one of the better reasons.

Re: "Surely an IT manager should know the difference between Word and Excel?"

The real clue is probably "Manager".

Re: Labor Hire Company?

The technical term in freelancing is "pimp" although I've also heard of them referred to as "agents".

Re: Even worse...

There's an alternative view that it's with the existence of OLE that the problems start.

I hope he was professional to the last and fully wrote up the ticket so that anyone who needed to would be able to be aware of the correct solution in case of a recurrence of the problem.

Microsoft insists Copilot+ PCs are 'empowering the future' – reality disagrees

Re: C suite AI deployment roadmap

You may be overestimating the C suite. It's probably

1) Get AI

3) Profit

Re: True "AI" story.

Measurement can be very difficult. A lot of that effort goes into understanding what it is you should be measuring, why and then doing it properly. It's so much easier to just measure something easy and obvious without understnding what it tells you.

Re: True "AI" story.

"1 week to not do something that takes 30 minutes."

And probably not even worth doing.

"Businesses didn't care about exclusive features such as Recall."

They should care very much about Recall, just not in the way Microsoft wants them to.

Re: True "AI" story.

I suppose the companies are staffed/started by those whom they let go.

Court lets NSF keep swinging axe at $1B in research grants

It's going to take the US a long time to recover. America's being made a great third world failed state.

One token to pwn them all: Entra ID bug could have granted access to every tenant

undocumented impersonation tokens called "Actor tokens"

Remind me again how one of Linux's weaknesses is that it doesn't have something something Active Directory something something logins something something company wide something 1000s of users something.

Charities warn Ofcom too soft on Online Safety Act violators

Will the stakeholders include those who have given personal data to the age verifiers and may have concerns abut security? As the likes of Kidron have this extended to more sources of information such as Wikipedia* it's likely to become an issue for all of us.

* If the kids are using it to research their English history homework they're likely to come across a lot of distressing material.

British spreadsheet wizard will take mad skillz to Vegas after taking national Excel crown

One day he'll discover RDBMS and may never recover.

Microsoft boasts about humongous datacenter on abandoned Foxconn site in Wisconsin

"Foxconn initially promised 30,000 jobs, then reduced that number to 13,000, and ultimately delivered just 281."

How many does it take to run a data centre?

"Foxconn abandoned the project ... Badger State locals wondering if they were going to get hosed again,"

And once the AI bubble bursts it may well happen again.

Re: Wisconsin - used to be known for dairy and nice people

They'll need batteries to keep the power on at nights. I hope they weren't planning to get them from Georgia.

Nvidia GeForced out of China as Beijing demands tech titans embrace homegrown silicon

Point proven, really. Give them an obvious trap and watch them herd into it like lemmings.

The Trumpistas are out in force here. Lots of downvotes, no counterarguments.

BOFH: HR discovers the limits of vertical mobility

Re: "There's always next week..." the Boss says, unexpectedly.

I think he's becoming house-trained.

Re: The last line....

I'm not quite sure about that. Having read the first paragraph didn't think it would be equipment that failed to survive relocation. The body count isn't what it used to be.

Workday U-turns on rehiring pledge as activist investors take $2B stake

It's just that it's a shame that maximising investment is done by finding enough idiots to go "Ooh, job cuts. Must buy their shares."

Undecided

https://www.lyricsbox.com/phineas-newborn-jr.-undecided-lyrics-9z65n7b.html

In an earlier statement, a Workday spokesperson said: "We appreciate Elliott's support"

Presumably the statement was written by Elliot.

Two Scattered Spider teens charged over attack on London’s transport network

Re: Neglect

Not surprising. Committing further offences on bail isn't a good way to stay on bail.

If he gets the chance Flowers would probably be better off pleading guilty to the US offences in the UK rather than risk extradition.

French jet left circling while Corsican controller caught Zs

Re: "Pay attention. Get off the iPad"

Having spent decades living on an oblate spheroid I've never found anything 11 miles apart to have converged.

Re: "Pay attention. Get off the iPad"

Not gold-plated?

Re: "Pay attention. Get off the iPad"

The report has some interesting non-Euclidean geometry:

"the two planes were flying parallel to each other 8 miles apart, and were on paths on which they could have converged 11 miles apart,"

The Notepad that knew too much: Humble text editor gets unnecessary AI infusion

I'm not sure what the objection is in paint but I have opacity sliders on a layer by layer basis in Pinta and Gimp and they're useful in both. Has Microsoft confused everyone by doing something useful?

Tariff threat plays havoc with US PC market, economy not helping

Re: Old hardware works perfect fine

Welcome aboard.

Cybercriminals pwn 850k+ Americans' healthcare data

I suppose they all assumed it could never happen to them.

How and why Linux has thrived after three decades in Kernelland

Re: It's quite well known that Linus Torvalds himself doesn't enjoy public speaking.

And it would have been a monster created in their image that raided corporate and home user pockets alike.

Its merit is that it isn't the product of people like them.

Which kept SCO busy while MS ate the small server market.

Re: Licenses

You seem to assume that those using the BSD licence do so in ignorance of what it means. Either that you fail to comprehend their intentions.

I think it wasn't the lawsuit itself that helped Linux, it was the fact that it was the only thing SCO tried. Under the previous owners SCO had become a mature server. A lot of small businesses ran on it. As a desktop OS it was far, far too expensive. It's true that for a short while there was a developer offer which was free and came with the usual Unix developer tools but I don't think it was offered for long and, although there was no mechanism to restrict it, it was only supposed to have a short licence period.

If SCO had set out to attract the student/enthusiast/developer population by making it affordable they'd have beaten Linux as it then was on quality. It's even possible that a more competitive price might have kept Microsoft out of the server market. No wonder Microsoft egged them on in a fight with an opponent they couldn't beat; it was a diversion that allowed MS to take over as the small business server OS.

Insight Partners confirms ransomware hit, more than 12,000 caught in data dragnet

"sophisticated social engineering attack."

Sophisticated seems to have become a synonym for successful.

Key KDE developer Jonathan Riddell quits

There are two separate issues here. One is the "freelancer doesn't pay this that or the other" issue which is what I was addressing. The disguised employee argument seems to assume that taking repeat business is an unbusinesslike thing to do..

US tech giants pledge $42 billion in UK investment as Trump tours Blighty

Re: Hole

"The UK committed economic suicide at Brexit."

That was phase 2. Phase 1 was Brownomics - get the future to pay for Blair's electoral bribes.

Expand Universities beyond reasonable sizes, paid for by student debt and making a degree the entry level for jobs which were by no stretch of the imagination graduate jobs.

Tax future pensions now by cancelling tax relief on dividends in the funds' holdings.

Set the Bank to tie interest rates to a measure of inflation that excluded housing costs resulting in cheap loans being ploughed into inflating house prices leading into a financial crash, a legacy of housing the kids can't afford to buy and a stagnant economy.

Re: Hole

Not necessarily. They can see what the successor would be. Remember the US couldn't get rid of Nixon until they got rid of Agnew first.

It is. It's the chumps who're paying.

Vibe coding platform Replit's latest update is infuriating customers with surprise cost overruns

"I spent $1k this week alone"

And how much value did you get? Big clue, value isn't what you paid, that's just the price.

Microsoft thinks cloud PCs might be overkill, starts streaming just apps under Windows 365

Re: Oh?

If the hat fits, wear it.

Both.