Posts by Doctor Syntax 42030 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
The leaders in making a gov.-wide switch here are Denmark. Trump wants to take Greenland from them because he fancies it. A bit like Putin wanting to take Ukraine because he fancies it. One of Trump's weapons would be turning off their Microsoft services.
What we have here isn't a government looking at the choice of MS services or FOSS. They're looking at a choice of paper, typewriters and postage stamps or FOSS.
"This would require competence and intelligence from politicians, which is too great an ask by some margin."
Given TFA gives numerous examples of change being driven by politicians of all levels maybe it's not as big ask as you think. Even those who are not technically competent must have gained some glimmer of understanding that they are a bit exposed to risk and are likely to be asking their advisors. If their advisers are earning their money they'll be researching their answers if they don't already have them to hand.
Oddly enough, having been forced to move to an "open standard" they changed the UI, forcing their users to relearn. LO's UI was rather close to the previous MS Office's. Now, of course, the having to relearn the UI is the argument for adopting LO. I wonder why MS changed the UI - but it's worth remembering that all MS's corporate users had to relearn the product and .... the sky did not fall in.
"Then, 5 years after, they also announced the were back to Microsoft due to all the headaches about file format et all ..."
From TFA (you did read it, didn't you?):
"Oddly, this move came after Munich's city leaders were pleased to announce in 2016 that Microsoft was moving its German headquarters to town. Funny that, eh?"
To a large extent TFA looks at things from a European viewpoint. The European - or any non-US - viewpoint has to look at geo-political risks of being dependent on US corporations. If you're top management here you should be asking your senior IT management what they'll do if the services of those US corporations become unavailable. If you're in that senior IT management do you have an answer ready? Do you think something along the lines of what you (and others) have posted will be good enough? Will management be looking for somebody more on the ball to replace you?
And I've posted more or less this here several times:
If the whimsical POTUS has a whim that your customer, your company, your country or your continent are to be sanctioned than those big US corps will quit you.
I've also posted here a few times:
If you're in IT management and you're not analysing your risks and making contingency plans you're not earning your salary.
1: My mail addresses are in my own domain. The registrar of the domain can be changed if required. Not only can be, but has been in the past.
2: Communication between client and server is an open standard.
3: That means the operator of the mail server can be changed if required. Not only can be but has been in the past.
In the unlikely event of MS taking over MB I can be gone PDQ.
Separating domain and MSP from ISP makes it easy to move ISP when I need to. It's called planning ahead, the sort of thing that business managements are paid to do.
MB make no secret of what they run - Debian/Exim.
Senior management should mean being able to consult* the experts you employ and getting considered, independent advice from them. All too often it means either the ability to get rid of the experts because they're expensive or else disregarding them because they're paid a comparative pittance so that's what their advice is worth.
* It should also mean being alert to what's going on in the wider world so as to know when you need to consult them.
Perhaps I should clarify that I do use a commercial provider, for myself and for a local organisation. They're Mythic Beasts who definitely seem to be in their right senses. In fact I rely on multiple email addresses to avoid spam. There are a few businesses that seem not to understand spam can lose customers. I either tend to shut off their specific email address except when it's needed (hello, insurance companies) or tailor filters to bounce specific villains (e.g. a dentist sent me stuff to be signed by Docusign so now my medical address has a filter to bounce them).
The question is, who in their right senses would trust their non-US business email to one of the US gargantuans?
"I'm Irish now"
In which case I commend you Frank Mitchell's book "The Irish Landscape"*. He traces the huge rise in the Irish population (graph on p205 or thereabouts) and finds it difficult to find any other cause than the cultivation of the potato as a staple.
* Actually I commend it to anyone interested in Ireland. He was one of the pioneers in the discipline which took me to Belfast almost 60 years ago.
You're stating known odds and outcomes. Businesses, thinking themselves to be smart, are risking unknown odds and consequences but the evidence seems to be that the odds are getting shorter and the consequences higher. Without being told it's as if you discover the hard way that only 2-5 pay £100 while 1 & 6 lose £1,000.
"Nobody in their right minds runs a mailserver."
Really? The people who run mine definitely seem to be. OTOH there's a good argument for saying that nobody in their right mind would let a large US corporation run their mailserver, not if they're paying attention to what's happening.
"A failure to properly anticipate the security risks has led to a dependency on scale that leaves us with all our eggs in someone else's basket."
The problems of M&S and a good many others seems to be not just a reliance on their suppliers but the suppliers' suppliers. Hence the term supply chain. It's time to reflect on the saying about the strength of chains.
The hungry forties also affected England. Two of my great grandfather's four brothers emigrated in the 1840s, a third in the early 50s and probably the last one did two as I can't find him after 1851. This was a common situation. The population of both countries had spiked to what was, for the time, an unsustainable level. (The fact that we might be in a similar global situation is worth considering.)
Google search very seldom returned a null result, it would almost always find something matching some word in the search term however irrelevant. Not returning null for something about which it doesn't have data would be an essential Google requirement. It's not surprising that a Google LLM would give fictitious results.
Did SatNav "learn" to give us directions are do they just follow some graph theory problem, the sort of things mathematicians have been working on since Euler, if not before? Intelligence would not have to be arm-wrestled away from taking a busy motorway nor would its preferred route to get to the motorway be joining a notoriously overcrowded A road via a junction with appalling sight-lines.
Actually, SatNav has to do three quite complicated things of which the routing is only one. It also has to handle voice recognition and speech synthesis. I'm not sure either of the latter is handled intelligently.
For instance I set a country house hotel as a destination without adding "Hotel". Voice recognition completely failed when I gave the command to go there with "Hotel" added. Intelligence would have recognised the likely destination and asked for confirmation. Nor would intelligence offer to navigate to the centre of the city when given then name of a a small village as a destination.
Speech synthesis seems to handle place names better than road names. For instance "Denby Dale" is pronounced sensibly as a place name. "Denby Dale Road" is pronounced "Den bid ale road". I get the impression that the phrase is being concatenated into a stream of sounds and then fixed rules being applied to split up the stream. Intelligence would not do that.
"Cyber resilience generally refers to reaching a point where an organization can confidently and effectively detect, neutralize, and recover quickly from any kind of cyber attack. "
It's one thing an organisation being able to do that is it's attacked but what about an attack on an nth party in the supply chain? If that party's taken out in an attack can the organisation function without it? If it can why is that in the supply chain?
Here's a slightly heretical viewpoint. If you're writing custom software for some aspect of a business's operations there shouldn't be a separate application manual. There should be a business manual for taking a sales order, terminating a tenancy or whatever. It should detail the steps taken to do that, manual, conversations with customer or whatever as well as entering the data. That is the responsibility of the department concerned but you can guarantee that if you provide a free standing application manual the department will seize on it. Offer to help them write the fill manual. Preferably starting before you write any code for what I hope will be obvious reasons.
documentation written *solely* for an audience who is new, not just to the program in question, but to computers in general
A variation on this is the manual which starts with how to install it - which might, in fact be how to compile from source and install it.
No, I do not need to know how to install it. I'm sitting in front of it. it was installed as part of the distro, or, in a business environment, as part of the build, or it's on the computer of somebody who asked me to help. I want something that tells me what it does and how to do it. If it needs installation instructions refer me to the Appendix which is where you could have put it. I don't want to lose the will to live thumbing through instructions to do something that's already been done.
TMMM starts with differentiating between the professionally produced product and two people working out of "a remodelled garage" if I remember the phrase correctly, the difference being about an order of magnitude. Nowadays, however a lot of FOSS does indeed come into his category of a product. I mentally categorise things into product or project and all too often the home page of the latter used to consist mostly of the release history or a "News" link that pointed to that. Now, of course, even if it has an address for a home page it points directly to Git(hub|lab).
4. What it doesn't do.
Eventually you get used to reading descriptions etc. & taking notice of what's not there. Remember that humongous T&C, EULA, privacy policy or whatever about Windows telemetry? It gave a few examples of what might be taken but there was no statement as to what wouldn't.
"If you're talking about the saying: "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different outcome", that's fucking terrible definition of insanity."
I believe it was Einstein who said it. I think it would be his comment on quantummechanics in general and the uncertainly principle in particular.
I have a friend who's been wheelchair-bound for a few years to who I frequently transport. One public building we visit has a long sig-zag ramp to bypass its main steps but a tiny lift. Worse than being tiny its upper floor doors are at right angles to the ground floor door so the wheelchair has to be turned round inside the lift or she wouldn't be able to get out. Fortunately her new powered chair can more or less spin on its own axis.
