Posts by Doctor Syntax

IBM asks contractors to take a pay cut

Re: or simply not pay contractors at all ..

"I have still not been paid for January and part of 2016."

Court judgement then if they still don't pay take your pick: apply for a winding up order or send in the bailiffs.

Re: You should never let a company cut your rate

"I find myself reluctant to just push off somewhere else where I'd have to start building the trust again."

It helps to work on multiple company projects and being able to liaise with staff in the others. That way you can collect a number of contacts who trust you before you even work for them.

Re: As a contractor...

"If they insist, I tend to insist on a contract extension at the same time."

You insist on a contract extension at a reduced rate?

Why?

Re: You should never let a company cut your rate

" if your job security is based on your skillset and ability to deliver (i.e. reputation). If you don't stand up for yourself, no-one else will."

And if your reputation is good enough you'll be able to walk into another job elsewhere.

Sysadmin finds insecure printer, remotely prints 'Fix Me!' notice

Re: "the printer was no longer visible"

"I think many things about Google but thinking them stupid isnt one."

So they'd never do anything stupid like have their streetview cars slurp any wifi access points they passed.

"Paper tape was only the teleprinters and where I was, this was only for BASIC. Compiling and running Fortran was only by submitting batch jobs on the aforementioned cards."

QUB had a home-grown system* which allowed FORTRAN to be compiled and then run from teletypes. I managed to crash the whole mainframe from a teletype.

*Including their main OS which turned out to have been somewhat larger than George when they finally adopted that.

Re: Hacking for fun and profit...

The security that is there, they complain about because it's "inconvenient".

It seems that the only way things will improve is by the sort of tactics in TFA bringing it homw to people that security isn't just something that's inconvenient.

"One of my first jobs we still had a paper tape reader."

The teletypes had PTRs on them. We also had a typewriter (possibly a Friden Flexowriter) that had paper tape. It had the oddity that normal was upper case, lower case was shift.

Re: B&B when contracting

A few years ago I used to see two or three unsecured access points from home. Occasionally I'd wonder why network performance seemed to have gone down & then discovered the laptop had latched onto one of them. Nowadays they're all secure but mostly showing the default SSID. I'm still wondering about the brief appearance a few months ago of an SSID that seemed to belong to a farm a good mile away across the valley.

Re: Its a fun pastime

"The best one I cam across was the wedding venue that had *everything* connected to the same LAN as the public WiFi. PoS printers, tills, HVAC controllers, back office PCs, you name it, it was on there."

I wouldn't have liked to pay by card there.

"I recall the old days at uni when documents would be sent to a print server - a desktop next to the printer which you would log into and release the print job, with the appropriate payment docked from your account."

Those weren't old days. Old days were when your print came out on 14" sprocket-feed paper and placed in a pigeon hole along with the cards you submitted the job on.

Re: 'PUB'lic Printer

stayed with friends a while ago who lived in a village in a house next door to a gastropub etc

Always a good idea to help out a gastropub landlord.

Re: The long arm of the Law

"Computer Misuse Act."

UK legislation. RTFA - location of printer: Dublin. Location of Dublin: not in UK.

Your job might be automated within 120 years, AI experts reckon

Re: Dark days to come

"The two questions are: 1) how long will it take"

Another 10 years, just like it's always been.

BA's 'global IT system failure' was due to 'power surge'

"We would never compromise the integrity and security of our IT systems."

If this is uncompromised integrity what would it look like if it had really been compromised?

Re: Really a power failure?

"I know that one is not supposed to attribute to malice anything which could equally be attributed to mere cock-up"

OTOH any senior manglement cost-cutting exercise is indistinguishable from malice.

Re: Paying for criticism

"this is a complex phycological issue"

They're using seaweed to predict the weather?

Re: Boots on the ground

"Once the dust settles I would see this as a victory for UK based IT workers"

And more than just UK-based but in.house.

Whether you're running a bank or an airline or anything else where the IT operation is essential to being able to function you have to regard IT as one of your core competences. Outsourcing it simply doesn't make sense.

Re: Heathrow and Gatwick?

"Unless, of course, the CIO has kept a copy of the email / memo / minutes in which the CFO refused the money to replace the batteries in a big UPS"

Just sack the lot of them and start over again.

It seems as if power failure has simply become the latest PR spokesnumpty's boiler plate to be used when even they realise "only a few customers were affected" isn't going to wash.

Or ... could it be ... all these "all the UK ran on renewables" and "solar accounted for more than nuclear" stunts were achieved by a bit of load-shedding?

Re: Operational Failover is incredibly complex

"assuming you've documented that process properly"

And you didn't go paperless so the whole documentation is on one of the servers that's not working.

Re: I have to agree

"Perhaps they where all on a jolly to Spain for the weekend and got stuck at the airport?"

And the BA employee with the only key to the genny shed in his pocket was on the same flight.

Re: Heads will roll

"One question though, their tech support was outsourced to India, but was the actual work outsourced to Capita by any chance??

Its strange BOTH are claiming power issues."

Also the Pension Regulator's site has been offline for some time: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40057025 Was that a Crapita business?

Re: Back-up, folks?

"There are (I would guess) a lot of extremely unhappy folk out there who will probably never grace BA with their custom ever again."

Yes but we didn't all make that decision this weekend.

Windows 10 love to see PC market grow again. Future iPhone to be clear. Elvis to re-appear

Re: Music to Microsoft's ears??

"Gamers"

That's wants vs needs.

Re: Please take mine

"Even with a laptop, having a desk to work on is optimal."

You haven't seen the state of my disk.

The penguin's egg problem

"if you have 20 MS support staff on permanent contracts, you're never, ever going to switch your shop to Linux"

If you never switch your shop to Linux you're always going to have 20 MS support staff on permanent contracts.

Amazing, Grace.

"Still no Linux on the desktop this year?"

Get someone to help you install it. It's obviously too difficult for you to put a Cd or DVD in the drive.

Hereabouts it's been Linux on the desktop since they days of Dapper, deep in the mists of time.

Re: re: "some of them type faster with 2 thumbs than I do with ten."

You know the rules: pictures or it never happened.

Re: Please take mine

"Does your device get used for viewing movies more than 10% of the time?"

No, but my laptop, if you're including that in devices, is often displaying a document I'm working on and one of the documents I'm working from side by side.

"The firm doesn't say why 2019 will see a return to growth"

It'll be all those caps on the motherboards of old computers reaching EoL.

British prime minister slams Facebook and pals for votes

Re: Extremist Agenda

" relegating your own MPs to a US-style electoral college whose role is merely to crown you personally as Supreme Leader."

Please learn to distinguish between the roles of head of government and head of state. The PM is head of govt. POTUS is head of state. I'm not sure of the head of govt. role there - sometimes it's difficult to see if there is one but I assume it's also supposed to be POTUS.

As ever there's much to learn from Yes (Prime) Minister - in this case Hacker's explanation of why he feared MPs more than the electorate: "They can vote against me at 10 o'clock tonight.

"t is worth noting as well that Theresa May made no mention of the efforts underway in Europe by politicians that may actually have an impact "

No surprise there. That would have been praising the enemy. Europe is her real enemy. Terrorists, tech companies, Labour; they're just part of the scenery to be used or dispatched according to circumstances. But European law is what she needs to defeat in order to get her own way.

Sainsbury's IT glitch spoils bank holiday food orders

So - is Sainsbury's IT outsourced to Crapita?

Re: Round these parts ...

"Neither, we blame the weather."

And it looks as if we'll have to wait until Monday for traditional BBQ weather: rain.

'Major incident' at Capita data centre: Multiple services still knackered

Re: No thanks!

"thanks but no thanks."

You thanked a (presumably) cold-calling salesman?

Re: Probably got their own staff to install the back up generators

"Bets on diesel in the generators being a couple of years old?"

Or the wrong sort of diesel.

‪WannaCry‬pt ransomware note likely written by Google Translate-using Chinese speakers

ISTR that the Shadow Brokers stuff contained a facility for disguising language in comments etc to confuse this sort of analysis.

Re: More to the point

"a bit shakey on grammar"

And shaky on spelling.

The one with the 1955 pocket OED in the pocket.

Scientists are counting atoms to figure out when Mars last had volcanoes

Re: please do

"Some of them even have an even shorter spoiler before the abstract called a summary."

And an even shorter one called the title.

Ouch! Latest Qualcomm sueball comes from ... its own shareholders

Shareholders own the company. So who are they suing? Themselves or at best those shareholders who don't join the suit. Presumably if they win & profits go down further they'll sue themselves again.

If they don't like the CEO they have a simple remedy. Fire him.

Init freedom declared as systemd-free Devuan hits stable 1.0.0 status

Re: firewall-cmd (firewalld) is more of the same, an effort to standardize configuration

"Tea at 5 o'clock is also part of standard routine, why don't you include it in systemd too?"

Are you telling me it isn't?

Re: ARM, pretty please!

"I know it's a lot to ask for, but one can wish."

Didn't you even look? It's there for a whole series of SBCs and has been for some time.

Info commish: One year to go and businesses still not ready for GDPR

"Senior staff, heads of companies and the C-suite have to walk the talk. You can't put pressure on frontline staff to do training, without realising you may need to do training yourself."

But - but - surely rules like that only apply to the little people, not to us.

Capita payments service Pay360 goes TITSUP

Re: Major payment system that has a single datacenter dependency?

"For those small retailers who are being screwed, one can only hope they or crapita are insured against the lost revenue."

Being insured doesn't help much it your business has gone down the tubes by the time the claim goes through.

Microsoft court victory prompts call for data-grabbing regime

"The fact they didn't suggests to me that it might not have been fully legal in the first place."

It sounds as if either they didn't have a prima facie case or that they were worried about showing their hand. Or maybe they just weren't aware of what the proper route was and now don't want to lose face by backing down.

There's certainly no need to start thinking of new procedures if you can't take the trouble to use the existing ones.

Three Nigerians sentenced to 235 years in prison for online scamming

"The international police force said the reason the area is such a hive of online criminality is because of low employment prospects in the region for computer specialists."

It's possible that cause and effect might be t'other way about.

Google wants to track your phone and credit card through meatspace

"A brand that has invested in advertising is more likely to care about quality and more likely to fix problems, out of brand protection."

A brand that invests heavily in advertising may assume that that's all it needs to do. In fact it may not be able to invest in quality because all the money's gone on the adverts.

How do your data mining algorithms obtain figures on people who've gone elsewhere because of the ads? Occasionally there may be strong negative feedback - e.g. my complaint to the MD of the car sales firm - but mostly people will go quietly elsewhere. It will be an enormously difficult thing to measure.

NHS Digital stopped short of advising against paying off WannaCrypt

Re: Virtualisation Of OS

The problem isn't so much restoring a known good image as restoring data. In any case there'd be no point in restoring an OS image while a worm was working it's way round the network as it would promptly get reinfected.