Posts by Doctor Syntax

Developer waits two years for management to define project

Re: Management...

"Management and sales are two sides of the same valueless coin."

Management can contrive to be two sides of the same valueless coin without the assistance of sales.

I had a client where two directors had been given overlapping areas of responsibility. I can only assume that when the business was set up both had to be given titles to satisfy their egos but nobody could think of sufficiently separated roles for them. This lead to frequent shouting matches in the open office. Essentially these were territorial disputes and I think the only reason they didn't go peeing against desks & machinery to mark their territories was that they didn't think of it.

One of these disputes was how the job batching was to work on a new system. Each was insisting on their pet criteria. We ignored them and built a batching system in which every parameter we could think of could be selected and thresholds set. Neither of them could complain they hadn't got what they wanted which ended that particular dispute. We included a screen for adjusting all this in the shop floor user interface on the basis that the guys doing the work would have a better idea of what was needed in reality and installed it with some reasonable looking initial settings. I don't think it was ever touched again.

Re: Management...

"70% of the time passes before any development is even planned."

OTOH any developer worth his salt should be able to work out what they need fairly quickly and get on with that. The last 30% of the time can then be spent on working out how to persuade them that that's what they said they wanted.

Java API judge tells Oracle to suck it up, quit whining about the jury

I commend Judge Alsup's patience. In his position I'd have been tempted to rule contempt of court and bang a few lawyers up for a few months. Or years. And any Oracle execs within range.

"So what is KDE, Gnome or Unity then?"

KDE, Gnome and Unity are GUIs. KDE is relatively OS agnostic given a suitable underlying windowing system. Gnome these days seems to be increasingly tied in to systemd plumbing (I hope KDE manages to avoid this). Not sure about Unity.

"the nit pickers"

Nit picking? Different code bases to implement the same set of APIs! Does this remind anyone of anything?

FFS, Twitter. It's not that hard

"get a great design team"

First define "great design team". Taking a UI for any application and letting "great designers" loose on it never seems to turn out well.

Did you know there's a mega cybercrime backlog in Ireland? Now you do

“The next five years will see An Garda Síochána become a 21st Century police and security service"

A good aspiration - but they should have been saying that about 20 years ago.

Let's play: 'IT values or hipster folk band?'

"shouldn't El Reg have three Qs?"

Three Vs: vultures, venom and very bad puns.

No 10's online EU vote signup crash 'inevitable' – GDS overseer

Welcome to the land of continual surprise. You get here by not making any attempt at a realistic estimate of demand. For extra guidance speak to the experts, HMG.

PC market sinking even faster than first thought, thanks to Windows 10

Re: 4 out of 7 teapots would agree

"What have you got against CAPS?"

His employers can't afford them. They're spending too much money replacing functional kit because 3 years. Maybe he should take up CV polishing so as to be ahead of the game.

Microsoft has created its own FreeBSD image. Repeat. Microsoft has created its own FreeBSD image

Re: MS Linux?

FreeBSD is not Linux. FreeBSD is a Unix variant. Linux was a Unix-like OS, now rather less Unix-like.

Re: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish...

"a BSD-derived TCP/IP stack first appeared in NT 3.5"

And W95.

Re: They've done what?!

"my brain combined them"

You need medication...

Re: Not sure if I should be happy

"It's probably mainly just para-virtualization drivers to cut down the virtualization overhead when running on that VM."

"Just" is no problem. It's the "probably mainly" that worries me. However I'm sure the FreeBSD team will be vigilant.

Re: this is not your father's Microsoft.

"I'll bet they were huge disks as well, possibly even 8 inchers..?"

Yep. I remember having to fold them up to get into the 3 1/2" drives.

Re: Just another good example...

"but BSD doesn't have this pesky GPL business so when they decide it's enough of this OSS lip service, MS can just close it up"

Yes, this licence stuff is confusing, isn't it?

Re: @Flocke

"Mostly they'll be from those who are firmly entrenched in the horrible mind-set of 'Anything Microsoft does is evil'."

Maybe. Or possibly from the mind-set of 'We've seen some doozies from them where their own name's on the product. How much care will they take when it isn't?'.

DevOps is for all, says DevOps pundit-in-chief. He doesn't have it in for the BOFH, honest

Re: missed the point of BOFH

It's not even the people. The BOFH is angry as a matter of principle.

Oooooklahoma! Where the cops can stop and empty your bank cards – on just a hunch

Re: Don't get too excited

"Don't blame me, I'm voting for Gary Johnson."

At least you get a vote. The rest of us don't but we still get the fall-out.

Microsoft's BITS file transfer tool fooled into malware distribution

Re: BITS is not "fooled"

"Honestly, a couple of weeks of setup and testing, and then 20-minute rebuild times across any number of devices you like."

The sad thing is that these instructions are passed on as a recommended SOP without any sense that this should not be an acceptable state of affairs.

'MongoDB ate my containers!'

"So is an ACID db with caching."

And 100,000 queries a day isn't even web scale.

Non-ACID databases aren't ACID. There's a surprise.

Post-Safe Harbor: Adobe fined for shipping personal info to the US 'without any legal basis'

Re: Commons passes snoopers' charter

@streaky

Remember that we only have this bill because previous attempts have run foul of the courts. I can see no reason to believe that this won't go the same way. It would be nice to think that they won't then try again.

Commons passes snoopers' charter

By the time most readers get round to reading this article the article reporting the fact that the HoC has passed the snooper's charter will have slid off the end of News Bytes where it was posted. I don't know why this stupid appendage was added to el Reg. I suppose it might be a useful means of keeping PR companies happy by posting their press releases without interfering with the main work of the site but better judgement is needed to ensure real news doesn't go down this fast track to oblivion.

Even if the Privacy Figleaf is approved it won't cover the embarrassing bits of data transfer once one of its users gets hauled up in front of the ECJ.

England just not windy enough for wind farms, admits renewables boss

Re: Create Gas then

"a newish microgeneration plant on the Wharfe"

Unfortunately this sort of thing isn't helped by Yorkshire Water demanding an extraction fee even though the water extracted is promptly returned back to the river.

Re: Fundimental Lack of Understanding

"The amount of ignorance regarding solar and wind here, by technology people no less! is astounding."

Yes, there are still people believing that solar generates power at night and wind generates power on still days.

Re: Errata

"it has the potential to be a bit of a local envoriomental disaster area"

You didn't bother to quote what you were referring to but your "it" seems to be the Severn barrage. You're wrong, it wouldn't be just a local environmental disaster. The role of the Severn estuary in feeding migrating birds would make it a disaster on a continental scale..

Re: Errata

"the birds would need to move on the other"

Translation: it would be an environmental disaster on a continental scale. But never, mind, it's green power.

"Why just downpipes?"

I wonder if you could extract power from all those whooshes.

Re: Epic FAIL

"But you could charge your batteries from them during the day then run a 12v lighting system when needed"

OK, that's the lights sorted. How do you power the washing machine in the middle of a cycle or the oven partway through cooking a meal when the smart meter disconnects you?

Re: Knuckling under

'The correct response to these statistics is, "we have to use less energy" or "we have to make wind power more effective", not "burn, baby, burn".'

Or "we have to bottle up the wind so as to have some when it's not blowing"?

Re: Silly Article

"changing subsidy rules"

Subsidies: pretending someone doesn't have to pay for things, therefore hiding the real costs.

Re: Nuclear

Build nuclear now years ago.

The reason why we've been unnecessarily shoving valuable fossil hydrocarbons up power station chimneys for most of my adult life has been down to self-styled environmentalists objecting to nuclear power. We've missed out on decades of the investment needed to develop a mature technology with maximal safety and minimal environmental impact. When all else fails we'll end up with a desperate dash in which cost and any other concerns are disregarded because it's all been left too late.

Re: Tidal?

"environmental impacts on wildlife"

ISTR reading about tests at Strangford quite some time ago which concluded that this wasn't really a problem. It's a good test site given that there's the QUB marine station immediately adjacent, that the turbines occupied a reasonable percentage of the opening and that the tidal flows are very strong with the entire tidal volume of the Lough rushing in and out through a very narrow opening.

Re: Tidal?

"Just wondered why it's not even mentioned in the piece."

I think it's much less developed. It's a more hostile environment to place free-standing turbines. If you've got a bit of land in an exposed situation you could plant readily available wind turbines there and collect a nice subsidy for delivering an erratic supply of power. Submerged turbines in tidal races are only just getting towards production. The alternative of building tidal reservoirs is apt to cause real environmental problems because promising sites tend to be wild-life friendly places, something the pseudo-environmentalists are apt to overlook.

The other explanation might be that wind turbines and solar are easy to see so the p-es are reminded what they're getting for their our money.

Why everyone* hates Salesforce's Marc Benioff

"Personally, I thought it was the looms they destroyed, and I suspect most other people do too. If the author had said "cropping frames" instead of "looms", I would have been lost and possibly even forced to read in to the link..."

It's a significant difference.

Textile production in the West Riding had been based on the domestic system where spinning and weaving had been carried out by what were essentially family businesses with finishing processes carried out by specialists (one of these processes, fulling, had long been mechanised). Spinning seems to have been the choke point in this process.

In the late C18th new water powered machinery became available for spinning which in turn allowed weaving to become a full-time occupation. There was a gradual move to the factory system. Productivity and employment were rising. Manual cloth dressing would have become the choke point had this not been mechanised by cropping frames.

Without updating this step in the whole production system then at best the industry and the consequent employment would have had its growth limited; at worst, an more probably, it would have gone elsewhere. In short the few Luddites, who had been an elite, were endangering the employment of the many.

I'm not sure that this accords with what the rant opinion piece was getting at because AFAICS the "scold in San Fransisco" is closer to the cloth dresser than those who object.

"the Luddites who sought to destroy looms in the 1810s."

Can't you even read the material you link to or do you not understand the difference between a cropping frame and a loom?

Don't go chasing waterfalls, please stick... Hang on. They're back

Re: Agile has limits

"Write the tests first, write the docs second (should be easy *IF* you have a design)"

So write the design zeroth.

Re: Waterfall is not the only alternate method

"Waterfall is always put up as a strawman."

For a very good reason: that's what it was invented for. http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Process/waterfall.pdf

PHBs looked at it and thought it was a good idea.

Re: cambam boards [sic]

Isn't that the stuff you nail to a wooden framework and then skim over with finishing plaster?

Digital ad biz is fraudulent by design, complain big brands

Re: The World Federation of Advertisers

"Now we know we aren't the only victims - the companies with products to sell are being taken for a ride as well."

Have you only just realised that?

Meanwhile the rest of us are shunning the mess that is online advertising while the WFA continues rearranging the deckchairs...

Freeze, lastholes: USB-C and Thunderbolt are the ultimate physical ports

I'm sure much the same thing was said about the 15-pin connectors for Ethernet.

Do you have a 'co-working mindset' and 'ephemerally involve others' in work?

“spontaneously and ephemerally involve others in your work.”

I thought they were building that into the OS now.

MPs pass new UK spy law

Why...

....is this hidden in these stupid fast-disappearing news bytes?

Do any of the readership actually think this innovation is worth having?

"it's off to the House of Lords next"

Then, assuming it gets Royal Assent, it'll be off the ECHR which also can't be scheduled yet. After that, in the absence of an unlikely outbreak of sanity in Whitehall, we go for another iteration of the loop.

Or, in event of a Brexit, the City will start screaming and lobbying as they realise that they can't meet EU requirements about personal data transfer.

Re: Time for ....

Could you argue your case with a little more detail?

Our CompSci exam was full of 'typos', admits Scottish exam board

Re: Brilliant...

"most Indians I've dealt with have a much better grasp of English."

You clearly haven't dealt with all the "UK companies" specialising in digital marketing who send spam from addresses registered on APNIC.

Bloke flogs $40 B&W printer on Craigslist, gets $12,000 legal bill

"claiming he had conspired with the presiding judge"

And he's not inside for contempt of court?