Posts by Doctor Syntax

BOFH: These office thefts really take the biscuit

Re: When I were a young lad...

That would be alleged chicken soup but the tea is invariably worse.

Re: MAYBE THERE NEVER WERE ANY BISCUITS!!!

There are not enough teabags in the world to fill the potholes in Kirklees.

"Can't eat dark chocolate"

Not downvoted as one shouldn't be cruel to the afflicted.

Re: cookie != biscuit

"it's more like a small stottie"

Now you'll really confuse them.

Re: When I were a young lad...

"However, the touch screen control had over 4 pages of options, each page having about 6 items and some with variations on them."

I am not in the least surprised. Coffee is far too complex.

Re: Slimy layer

And more acceptable.

You mean Wheelbarrow Wheel?

Re: MAYBE THERE NEVER WERE ANY BISCUITS!!!

A factory that supplied teabags worth nicking? It's usually better to bring your own.

I've always found Jaffa cakes as too weird to consider edible. It's that slimy layer between the cake and the chocolate.

‘IT manager’ needed tech support because they had never heard of a command line

Jack had the professionalism to bring it to a successful conclusion.

Re: Why do people put up with the abuse?

It must have been a good firm to work for if it had an MD to whom tickets could be escalated.

Re: Some truth, some obvious lies

"supposedly originating at Harvard Business School, that a good manager could manage anything: the students needed to learn how to manage"

The first words spoken to any new students on a management course should be "Respect can only be earned." It wouldn't be a bad idea to repeat them at the end of the course. In reality I suppose it's an unknown fact to those running the courses.

"hiring delivery managers (God knows what they're delivering"

I was sent on one of those intelligence insulting courses attended by various victims from different parts of a large telecoms company. Our local director was one of the big bods running the show and one of the ways he distinguished himself was by demonstrating he knew nothing about the Iron Triangle - couldn't see why you couldn't have all three.

Anyway, typical introduce yourself start. I went first and explained what my job was. Succeeding victims said progressively less untill it came to a complete wanker who simply announced loudly "I deliver". I don't know how I resisted an audible murmor of "Oh, a van driver.".

Re: WTF?!

s/ECHO/echo/

Odd to have used the pedant icon and not to have understood the word "immediately".

Re: Thus it is

Necessary but not deemed so when appointments are being made.

Re: I've seen that type of manager before

It's called the Peter Principle. No, it's not named after Mandelson.

Similar experience. Offered the long withheld promotion with none of the usual formalities. If the previous director had been in place I might have tried my hand at negotiating for it to have been back-dated a couple of years without actually withdrawing my notice. It would have increased my eventual pension by 10%.

Fire up the gas turbines, says US Interior Secretary: We gotta win the AI arms race

"responsible for safeguarding the US' natural resources"

I don't think safguarding anything has a place in the current madhouse.

Re: Bubbles popping

But this is different. It's AI. It's also not tulips, nor the South Seas company so nothing can go wrong.

Bring back your old Mac: 5 ways to refresh the OS on elderly Apples

Re: An alternative.

One of the odd things about the way commercial websites are built is that having JavaScript off prevents some of them running but in other cases prevents something such as a paywall from getting in the way.

Inventor who encouraged Elon Musk to make Optimus says most humanoid robots today are 'terrifying'

Re: You are looking in the wrong direction

"Robots will not be replacing cheap labour this decade and probably not next decade either"

It would be feasible if they're cheap labour dressed up as robots.

"recently predicted robot revenue could surpass $5 trillion by 2050"

That's a safely remote target. Long before 2050 everyone will have forgotten he said it.

All your vulns are belong to us! CISA wants to maintain gov control of CVE program

How to make your country less trusted than it already is.

Boffins invent DNA tape that could pack 375 petabytes into an LTO cart

I'm sure they can already do that. They're not going to digest all the rest of the goodies and leave that behind.

I'm out, says OpenSUSE: We're dropping bcachefs support from next kernel version

Re: There is a slight problem with this

MS and Google would very likely fire a developer who didn't abide by check-in rules. Linus can't do that because he doesn't employ them so all he can do is not accept their patches. On the whole his approach works pretty well: it doesn't deliver overwight "Do you feel lucky?" updates on a monthly basis.

US House Appropriations Committee saves NASA budget, Prez holds the veto pen

What if the $85m runs out before they get it there? Does some lucky town find its main street permanently occupied by a Shuttle?

1,200 undergrads hung out to dry after jailbreak attack on laundry machines

Think of the benefits. In a few years these students will be going out into jobs where they'll be able to bring an understanding of the problems of making machines internet connected, smarter than they need to be etc. and an appreciating of IT security. A valuable education.

Hack to school: Parents told to keep their little script kiddies in line

It's the ones who think its dull and reach out beyond it that you need to recruit.

"Policies on photography would be independent of that, since they may have any number of other things they could use to take pictures."

Ah, yes, policies. I went with a client's manager to the office of their client, one of the usual suspects in the outsourcing world. When we got there we were told any phones with cameras had to be left at reception. Policy.

They didn't mention regular cameras so my client kept his in his pocket.

Think of the children

For once it's the right approach to overall security.

Google lands £400M MoD contract for secure UK cloud services

"The aim is to strengthen secure communication links between the UK and US, adding to the security partnership the two nations share."

Make more effective, at least in one direction. Strengthening security is a different matter.

Huntress's 'hilarious' attacker surveillance splits infosec community

Re: Can an AI company claim the moral high ground?

Yes to both parts. The first part should enable them to provide evidence at the trial that should be the outcome of the second.

Intel talent bleed continues as Xeon chip architect heads for the escape hatch

Re: Chipchicken? Chickenzilla?

Here in the north of England fish and chip shops offered the fragments of batter strained from the fish firer as a free extra. They were called bits. "Do you want it wi' bits?" was the question. Following that I suggest the name "Bitzilla".

Nano11 cuts Windows 11 down to size, grabbing just 2.8 GB of disk space

This evening's clouds are a lot less full of water than they were this morning but it's going to take a lot more to refill the reservoirs.

Re: What does Windows 11 normally weigh in at ?

"we ran the whole company on one 10 MB disk in the PDP-11"

We used a 10Mb disk for the OS but needed another 40Mb for the data.

Senator blasts Microsoft for 'dangerous, insecure software' that helped pwn US hospitals

Re: "needlessly exposes its customers to ransomware and other cyber threats."

"Senator Wyden will surely praise them for the great results that Micros~1 will publish any moment now."

He sounds like the sort of man who will have read TMMM so he won't be expecting any results any time soon.

KDE Linux and FreeBSD hit alpha and – surprise – fan fave Pop_OS nearly at beta

Re: It's bold, it's innovative, and ...

"KDE has nothing to lose. There are no allies or affiliates to annoy or estrange.

More of this sort of thing, please."

I agree it's a good thing to do. But it seems they're trying to do two things at once. One is produce a KDE showcase, the other is to try out all sorts of more or less experimental system architecture stuff. Both are laudable things but the latter isn't yet mainstream. As a regular KDE user I'd be very reluctant to switch to this as a daily driver; if the underpinnings were more mainstream I might. In that respect I find it difficult to see it as something to offer as a Windows replacement.

OTOH I can see how it would be a Windows replacement for all the wrong reasons. If its far enough off the beaten track it could be set up as a vendor's OEM installation maintained by the vendor's OEM systems and if the vendor then declares EOL there's then no chance of doing an apt distupgrade; it's upgrade by land-fill time.

Re: It's bold, it's innovative, and ...

"I take it from that that the doctor WANTS an easier to use and polished Linux system, but systemd ain't the thing to achieve that."

Exactly. That's why I use Devuan. What plain old, boring Debian would have been if they hadn't drunk the Kool-Aid.

VMware to lose 35 percent of workloads in three years – some to its friends at ‘proper clouds’

Re: The solution is not more vendor lock-in

I was going to make the same point. It is truly amazing how organisations will lock themselves into situations which are not only expensive but where the expense is out of their control rather than make an investment in retraining. They need to take a fresh look at capex vs opex issues. Vendors have successfully trained customers to me capex-averse and are now exploiting the situation.

Experts scrutinized Ofcom's Online Safety Act governance. They're concerned

Saxton and da Souza are both missing the point. Outside their limited remits the internet has become the communications medium on which the modern world depends. Their bans and introduction of "friction" are impractical for the world at large and would be immensely damaging for any country that introduced them unilaterally.

OpenAI reportedly on the hook for $300B Oracle Cloud bill

Re: Why Oracle?

The amounts are so big they have to be spread out so everyone gets a slice of the losses risk.

Re: Looks like the crux is going to happen

"And reality always wins."

I think it cheats. It's the only explanation.

NASA finds best evidence of life on Mars so far

Re: as we don't know it

The simple molecules - the components of RNA, amino acids etc. are known to have been formed by abiotic processes. The nature of life is that assembling them into reliably working enzymes requires protein synthesis directed by RNA and catalysed by enzymes including those that attach specific amino acids to specific t-RNAs. Reliably coping RNA* requires more enzymes. Just working out how that archetypal chicken and egg situation might have come about from the abiotic mix might reasonably lead you to think that it was impossible were it not for the fact that it happened. That it might happen twice seems overwhelmingly unlikely let alone that it would happen twice in neighbouring planets. I can't help feeling that exo-biology is an example of extreme example of observer bias.

One difference between early life and now would be that DNA would have come along later. The business end is handled by RNAs.

Microserfs ordered back to the office, given 10 days to appeal

Re: Work from home bans = idiot management

Hot-desking was invented to stop people complaining that open plan was the worst way to organise an office.

Re: Bullshit created by people like Alan Sugar

"Granted he's made his money but a lot of his products were failures"

I can't actually remember looking at any of them and thinking "I'd like to buy that".

Re: "How we work has forever changed"

This is not marketing bullshit, this is HR bullshit.

Which gives me an idea. As a few have said it does rather show up the products that are supposed to support remote working in a bad light. Would it be possible to stir up a row between marketing and HR?

Re: "How we work has forever changed"

More likely denying that productivity is heading south otherwise they might be expected to do something about it.

Re: "How we work has forever changed"

The question would have to be asked with well-simulated or even genuine puzzlement without a hint that it was even recognised as an intended joke; it was a serious comment that wasn't understood.

AI can't be woke and regulators should be asleep, Senator Cruz says

"President Trump has restored a spirit of confidence in our innovation enterprise with the Golden Age vision"

Golden Age vision? Surely that was his hair getting in front of his eyes.