Posts by Doctor Syntax

BOFH: HR's AI hiring tool is perfectly unbiased – as long as you're us

Re: New Employees....

Don't give pimps agencies the benefit of the doubt. Advertise for CVs to be submitted direct from the applicants. As an extra safeguard specify what you want in terms of a CV with specific subheadings. The pimps are unlikely to be prepared to redo a stack of CVs from their prepared format (into which they will already have disorganised the candidates own carefully prepared CVs and may stand a good chance of defeating generative AI. Applicants who are really interested in the job will self-select by being prepared to rewrite to the specification and also demonstrate that they can follow a spec. It will be rough on those who don't get the job to have put in the extra work for nothing but at least they'll know they were considered and not buried in the blizzard of agency submissions.

"OK. So ... I'll be in my office if you need me," the Boss says, wandering off quickly.

I think he's starting to realise the explanations aren't always kosher. His days must be numbered.

Judge orders Feds rehire workers falsely fired for lousy performance

That seems to be the Supreme Court. Even so they need to have some legal knowledge. Political appointments are certainly a weakness but at least they're not directly elected which obviously requires no knowledge or competence beyond fooling most enough of the people for some of the time.

Re: Hmm

"What's the judge going to do? Arrest him?"

Assuming you mean Charles Ezell then possibly, or maybe someone else lower in the food chain. Failure to rehire them would be contempt of court and the judge has means to deal with that. I can see why Ezell didn't want to appear - he has to either take the blame or drop DOGE in it. It's a tough position but then it's what he's paid for.

Re: Hmm

"No chance, they won’t rehire them until the Supreme Court confirms the decision."

Unless and until a higher court reverses it Alsup's ruling is the one that stands. Failing to follow it would be contempt of court so he could indeed order the arrest of whoever he feels is responsible.

Re: Hmm

"then I expect more will need to be done. For those fired inappropriately."

And what should be done to those firing inappropriately? Should they be fired themselves for incompetence?

I wonder to what extent those coming up for re-election might be starting to wonder what state the economy will be in by then and starting to think that blind support might not make them re-electable.

It raises the question of whether an act carried out by him, allegedly as President, which isn't actually within presidential power is really carried out carried out as President in which case the immunity couldn't apply.

"In addition, SCOTUS gave the president almost infinite leverage to break the law, which he may well interpret as allowing him to ignore court judgements."

In fact, it appears that the US has a constitutional crisis.

Just as well he's not elected because AFAICS having all officials elected is a weakness of the US situation. Judges are appointed on their basis of knowledge of the law and competence, not mass appeal. There need to be a few competent people around.

If you like you could wander into his court and tell him what you think of him. You'd discover something else about a judge's powers.

It goes a step further. In effect Trump is admitting his henchmen told the OPM to fire them which is very likely a further constitutional breach.

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

Re: Pies aren't mice either

That puts the lid on it.

Re: Bright and warm days

This always puzzles me. Given that hands are opaque how are they not shielding the mice from stray sunlight? I suppose they're holding them wrong.

Re: A case of mistaken identity

Are you sure that's your coat?

France offers US scientists a safe haven from Trump's war on woke

Re: The UK should be paying attention

I see your research into exactly what disciplines hasn't progressed very far. Unless you consider the sort of epidemics vaccination helps control, environment and even astrophysics* as "gender studies".

* Maybe you're thinking about on-binary stars?

Re: les queer studies?

And the US would certainly not be put out be losing experts in epidemiology, infectious diseases and immunology, not even with a measles epidemic at large. Not when cod-ler oil is such an effective treatment.

Re: les queer studies?

The interests of those interested in moving are elaborated in another place as “health (LGBT+ medicine, epidemiology, infectious diseases, inequalities, immunology, etc.), environment and climate change (natural disaster management, greenhouse gases, social impact, artificial intelligence), humanities and social sciences (communication, psychology, history, cultural heritage), astrophysics.”

Possibly one of those might fit in with your epithet but a good deal of it is straightforward science. However given the fact that the US govt's health secretary is suggesting cod-liver oil as the way to deal with a serious measles outbreak in Texas maybe it stretches to cover epidemiology, infectious diseases and immunology out of that list.

Re: les queer studies?

Obv. Russian troll.

Re: The UK should be paying attention

UK universities are already cutting posts and in some cases entire departments.

Apple's alleged UK encryption battle sparks political and privacy backlash

"a behind-closed-doors High Court hearing"

You know what they keep saying: "If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear."

SUSE doubles down on AI and Multi-Linux Support to prove it's still in the game

Doubling down on AI makes me wonder whether it still is in the game.

AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing

"Yes, it can be helpful when used carefully as a tool"

Exactly what is that use for which it could be a helpful tool?

Dems ask federal agencies for reassurance DOGE isn't feeding data into AI willy-nilly

"Willy-nilly" suggests they're doing it accidentally and I'm sure they wouldn't do that.

OpenAI asks Uncle Sam to let it scrape everything, stop other countries complaining

Re: Hi ! We want to steal everything...

"USA can't make laws abroad."

Yes, but who's going to tell them?

Re: Hi ! We want to steal everything...

My running an adblocker is to the benefit of the advertisers (not the advertising industry) because if I don't get their ads pushed in my face I won't get pissed off by them and if they're selling something I want I won't actively avoid them.

UK must pay cyber pros more than its Prime Minister, top civil servant says

Re: A Problem of Their Own Making?

"all those procurements for the NHS, MoD, police, councils, the lot; they all go wrong because someone other than an engineer is in charge"

Depending on what's being procured I'd have thought that in the case of the NHS a medic might be more appropriate.

Another version:

The legacy system is the one that enables the business to run itself to make the money to pay you to write some flashy graphical system that will generate reports to go into a spreadsheet to go into powerpoints for all the senior manglement to show each other how good a job they're doing. The senior manglement are also being paid by the money the legacy system makes.

Re: Typical of the Mentality

"US investing is all about hoarding manpower so that nobody else can have it."

That seems to go in cycles. The current phase, with all the DtO stuff, etc. seems to be "we don't want to pay them".

Re: Typical of the Mentality

"Speaking as a civil servant, this was the case in decades long gone, yes."

But is the primacy of the general service grades also long gone? The assumption that a chap with no particular qualifications for any particular job, being equally (un)suited to all of them could do any of them while someone with specific knowledge is in flexible in terms of what they could do and therefore deserves less. And the assumption that "responsibility" lies only in the number of direct reports and not on the significance of what one does personally.

Re: Typical of the Mentality

"the civil service where salary is dependent on grade which is often dependent simply on time served"

ROFLMAO. Grades increasing with time served?

No way. You could be left stranded on top of a grade scale and watch inflation eating away at the value for years. When I handed in my notice I was offered the promotion I should have been at least considered for at least a couple of years previously if not more. No board, none of the usual procedures, here's the promotion we've been holding back on if you stay. OK, they didn't mention the holding back bit and denied it in response to my letter of refusal but that's what it amounted to. If the previous director had still been in post I might have tried negotiating back-dating without actually committing to rescinding my notice in case it might have worked but I reckoned it wasn't worth the effort as things were.

"the pension was fantastic"

Unless things have changed since my time that's true - its excellence would be a fantasy.

The way it worked is that it was contribution free but salary levels were set on that basis - what you would have been paid less the deductions that would have been taken.

It was a final salary scheme so, because the salary was lower than it would have been with a conributary scheme, the pension was also lower than it would have been if it were contributary.

A year's service accumulated 1/80th of final salary so someone joining from university at 21 and retiring at 60 would be a year's worth short of retiring on half pay. When I left I joined a pension scheme that accumulated 1/60th sp the equivalent 21 to 60 would be a year's worth of retiring on 2/3 pay with, of course, the pay at the level of a contributory scheme.

I think a few people in the service might be looking at pensions and thinking that at least they were index linked so would keep up with inflation which salaries were very often not: when HMG wished to save money or wanted pay restraint all round - which was a lot of the time - the only place they could really achieve such ends was by holding back on Civil Service pay settlements and not providing the promised promotions.

iRobot may be iDead in iYear

"If it was a viable business"

Maybe last year it was but, from TFA: "...macroeconomic conditions, and tariff policies." Trumponomics might have rendered it less so.

Printers start speaking in tongues after Windows 11 update

Re: Throw in HP

But if the H/W is simply a loss-leader to sell the consumables then there's no mileage at all in killing it unless, of course, it's very old kit that isn't tied to vendor's ink.

The IT world moves fast, so why are admins slow to upgrade?

Re: "Technical Evangelist"

"A bit like an Early Adopter?"

More like somebody who pushes the Early Adopters out into no-man's-land.

Re: Bucket, Paint, Brush, Corner?

What's the total down-time due to migrations over that 15 year period?

Microsoft quantum breakthrough claims labeled 'unreliable' and 'essentially fraudulent'

"has even more impressive results to share soon"

As soon as it opens the box to find out what they are.

This is the FBI, open up. China's Volt Typhoon is on your network

"We don't have any access to large critical infrastructure."

From their customers PoV they were probably exactly that themselves.

Choose your own Patch Tuesday adventure: Start with six zero-day fixes, or six critical flaws

Re: And Windows Update is still slow

That depends on whether RPM's delta package is similar to a ,deb.

A Deb package is basically a file and a set of instructions as to how to install it. It might be a single library, it might be an application. The instructions might be simply to copy it into place and remove the old one, they might include telling XDC about it so that it appears on menus and is associated with file types.

No doubt RPM is similar but if one library file replaces another the original, if in use, will only be unlinked and have its disk space returned to the free list when the process using it dies but new invocations will use the version. If it's a service the service may be restarted, possibly with user veto, to pick up the new version*. For a new kernel the user will be advised to restart but that's just so the new kernel can be used, there is no work to be done in the course of the reboot other than what's normally done. I'm sure that the RPM world, like the Deb, leaves at least the previous version in place with the option to reboot that if there was a problem. Occasionally the update removes a dependency on an existing file in which case, if there are no other dependencies, the user will be adviced to use an automatic removal run to do that.

* Over the course of many years I've only seen one instance where the service was at such a low level that other services depended on it, would also need to be restarted and that a reboot was used to do that.

"but the attack requires the target to download and open a malicious file through social engineering."

That's so often the case. And yet we have banks and other businesses that should know better training their customers to be phished when they should be doing the opposite.

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

That he already had the tablet for its own use case.

Actually, as a premise for an article on the differences between the two it was fine.

Re: Raspberry Pi and iPad

Casts mind back to the days of the 1907 that occupied a large building, punched cards, a fixed disk so big and heavy that i needed its own, additional and its bearings had to be aligned with the Earth's axis to avoid precession destroying them and from which we had a 100k-word allowance. AND FOR A FEW OF US UPPER_CASE ONLY TELETYPE ACCESS.

|Rotten old capitalism seems to have given us these advances, iPad, Pi and cellular all, despite Ztec's ravings below.

Re: Let's be honest

None commercial apps also need to work and they do.

Given that this is a Microsoft product, is it tied down to the point where you can't do that? Is there the equivalent of a boot menu that recognises external bootable media?

"lack of support doesn't mean a thing just stops working"

Indeed, depending on the nature of the "support" lack of it may mean the lack of a monthly lottery of it stopping working.

a 16" monster

That's not a monster, it's a toy. 17½" is the smallest adequate and, sadly, the largest practical.

"Small computers rule and the 13 inch air is too big."

Ah, what it is to be young and have as yet unimpeded eye-sight (or possibly to not want more than one thing visible on-screen at the same time).

Re: If you want a general purpose computer ...

"It is, and you'd be surprised how many people go for what they are familiar with even if told otherwise.."

Microsoft products are, of course, a counter-example to this. The vendor changes things and users just go along with it because they perceive they have no other choice.

Re: If you want a general purpose computer ...

"Does it run the software I need?"

Remove the definite article from that sentence and try it again.

CISA pen-tester says 100-strong red team binned after DOGE canceled contract

Re: Stolen Elections

"things are likely to look very different - and a lot more expensive"

The mugs faithful will keep on believing him when he keeps on blaming Biden, China, Eaurope, Canada, Denmark,* Zelensky ....

* Yes, of course we know Denmark's part of Europe but do he, Vance and the MAGAites?

Re: Yawn

Suddenly what might have been for larfs turns out to be for real.