Posts by Doctor Syntax

Sysadmin's £100,000 revenge after sudden sacking

Never close the door.

How to do it properly. I was offered early retirement from $BigCo for lacking both personal qualities of which one was a minimum requirement to deal with management: the ability to suspend disbelief and the ability to conceal disgust. Anyway, good terms were agreed - finish at end of year, several months away and best possible terms under IR regulations so no hard feelings either way.

Of course under these circumstances one gets lumbered with the odd project nobody wants, in my case one which had come down from national management. I would do phase one & my line manager would then take over for phase two.

So at the year end I started off for what turned out to be 10 years freelance. This got off to a good start because a few weeks into the year when I'd just got the first short contract finished when they rung up. Line manager was leaving, would I come back on contract & do phase two? After phase two there was a follow-up to start on the no-longer-project-but-new-business-as-usual work until some victim could be found to off-load it onto.

So, because everything was done in a friendly fashion I got 6 months freelance work & $BigCo got its work done.

"I didn't get my final invoice paid"

I always tried to get in a clause to say that IP only belonged to the clients when all invoices had been paid. Never had to use it.

Per-core licences coming to Windows Server and System Center 2016

Re: Excellent!

"a broken hybrid environment the users hate - and that now it would cost too much to reverse it even though they desperately want to!"

It's surprising how often this canard keeps flying.

Re: Excellent!

"No-one wants to pay the ever increasing and restrictive licensing fees but maybe the management are a bit more clueful than you when it come to considering TCO, ROI, Change management, risk management, staff specialisation etc"

I think that all too often what management are more clueful about is taking each quarter as it comes and stuff the long term thinking.

Big names settle out of court with CryptoPeak in HTTPS patent spat

Re: East texas - patent troll heaven.

"As for *this* patent, anyone that signed off and settled should have the right to sue the troll back to oblivion if *any* of the others fights it and wins."

I'd guess the terms of settlement preclude that.

Re: Paying the Danegeld...

Did they sue Newegg? I suspect by now most trolls won't, at least not until they've picked the low-hanging fruit. Maybe other victims should watch and learn.

If it still works six months from now, count yourself lucky

"Computer components don't fail."

PSU electrolytics do. And batteries which you have to count as components in some cases due to their being glued in.

Microsoft encrypts explanation of borked Windows 10 encryption

Simple explanation

They put the query through to the hell-desk.

New edition of Windows 10 turns security nightmares into reality

Re: There is another option

"Well, software has a rather larger state space than a toaster, so good luck with that."

One option would be to stop cramming junk in. Make the state space smaller, spend more time testing.

Mozilla: Five... Four... Three... Two... One... Thunderbirds are – gone

Libremail?

If anybody's still following this thread, and bearing in mind the thought that several of have about T'bird linking up with LibreOffice this page is rather encouraging: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Ideas_for_the_integration_of_Thunderbird_with_LibreOffice

Re: Nylas N1

Let's take a look. The site has a documentation tab so let's look at the user documents. WHAT???!!!!

There isn't any. Just developer documentation. Yet another O/S project that's not interested in users.

Re: A Really Good Email Cluent

'Isn't that in the account settings, "Manage identities?". If you have an alias set for an account there, TB will automatically use the matching reply-to when you respond. If you don't set it, you get the core email address for the account. I use it for generic incoming addresses like "info@".'

Yup. That works for me. Plus if you have the identities set up you get a drop down list to select the identity to use when sending a new email.

'I prefer clunky and brutally functional over flashy and useless any day.'

Agree again. Actually I prefer non-flashy and functional over flashy and functional.

"S/MIME and PGP don't exist in your universe?"

And you're telling me the mail protocols make provision for a PKI? And do it all invisibly so that Joe Soap would be sending & receiving encrypted & signed emails without even being aware of the fact? Until then encrypted email is more of a monoverse than a universe.

If you've got PGP & nobody you know doesn't & doesn't know how to set it up then it's no use to you. It has to be the built-in default to be anything more than a fringe interest.

Re: It focuses on one thing - mail

I use it for email, newsgroups & RSS. Useful integration. Actually I use Seamonkey so I have even more integration but I suppose this move would put paid to that.

Re: Barbie says: Leadership is hard!

"Perhaps Google is doing some strong-arming, who knows. Google just doesn't play well with TB, which sharper tongues find unsurprising."

AIUI Google isn't the sugar-daddy any more. Could TB be competing with someone else's product?

" With the right tweaks over time and encryption baked in... there is an opportunity to alter the basics of email with a user base that has the potential to make things stick."

It would need a new RFC to extend the protocol if you want end-to-end encryption. You'd also need to bring servers or some other means of providing a PK framework and other clients into the fold. I don't see how a new T-bird could achieve that on its own. I'm not saying it's a bad idea; far from it because it's something we need.

Re: telnet pop3.superfrog.com 110

"I prefer this newfangled "mutt" email program I found..."

Don't forget elm.

Re: Escape from Lemming Mode

"LibreMail?"

Let's hope so.

Microsoft's full-fat E5 Office 365 plan with phone extras goes live

"There are additional security features. E5 "Advanced Security" includes Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for Exchange Online, with behavioral malware analysis and blocking and tracing of malicious links in emails. ATP is also available as an add-on for other plans."

This wonderful offer brought to you by the company whose Hotmail/Live/Outlook/NameOfTheWeek service leaks spam pretending to be from themselves. This really is something they should be on top of if for no other reason that they're tolerating infringement of their own trademarks.

Booming Ballmer bellows 'bulls**t' over Microsoft's cloud revenue run rate

Re: Hang on, is Ballmer starting to have a vision ?

"And by keeping his shares he's also keeping his money very much where his mouth is."

Or vice versa.

Music publisher BMG vs US cable giant Cox: Here's why it matters

"but the post didn't come up to allow me to edit it."

Sometimes that happens. Annoying, isn't it?

The whole system seems remarkably ill-thought out. The plaintiffs may well have good cause but if anything spawns notifications at that rate is completely automatic and Cox's point that they're simply allegations is a reasonable point. Far better to have taken a sample and been able to show that they've been carefully checked and are verifiable. If Cox then refuses, take those to court and ask for the remainder to be taken into consideration.

Brit hardware hacker turns Raspberry Pi Zeros into selfie slayers

Re: I want one to block facebook and whatsapp

"the HR bloke being one of the most irritating and least useful."

By definition.

Google to end updates, security bug fixes for Chrome on 32-bit Linux

Re: It's not 32-bit that's the issue

"I've been running 64-bit Linux desktops for 10 years now, so the death of 32-bit can't come soon enough."

Non sequitur.

Re: Don't people ever write portable code?

"Compiling for 32 bit isn't a problem. Doubling the amount of time they have to devote to testing is."

To quote the post you were replying to:

"We can have entire operating systems (NetBSD) that can be compiled on any architecture, for any architecture, with every single piece of the OS compiling and running just fine on a plethora of CPUs"

NetBSD can do this and, I'm sure, test. Maybe they use these new-fangles computers to automate testing.

"Does anyone outside of the control space use 32 bit x86 Linux for serious computing *in the past decade?"

Yes. I have some non-free 32-bit S/W I use frequently, maybe not quite daily but often enough. Ay a pinch I could convert.

There's a fundamental problem with the human mind, an overwhelming tendency to generalise:

I don't use 32-bit Linux therefore nobody does.

I don't use the desktop to store WIP therefore nobody does (UX-designers I'm looking at you).

I can't make Linux or Libreoffice work for me therefore nobody does (more likely they couldn't 15 years ago & haven't tried since).

And on it goes.

Entropy drought hits Raspberry Pi harvests, weakens SSH security

Re: Another Debian fail?

"This is exactly the same problem that Debian had almost eight years ago"

No it isn't. It may have the same effect but the events that lie behind it are different.

European Patent Office fires up lawyers over claims of cosy love-in with Microsoft

Re: Disgusting

"however it does sound as though the PACE mechanism is available to all at no extra charge"

I don't think they've worked out what would happen if everyone wanted to use it. Queue jumping only works if a few people do it and even then it only works for the jumpers.

Same old same old

"As a European public organisation the EPO fully respects freedom of the press as a core value of an open society"

Or "your privacy".

Or "your phone call is important to us"

Don't they realise we all cottoned on to that years ago? Now it's a flag drawing attention to what they're trying to hide.

Bringing discipline to development, without causing pain

Re: meaningless buzzword soup

"Okay, so it's not just me that found this article pretty much meaningless?"

No. I bailed out at "There’s no I in ‘team’". No but there is in intelligence, ingenuity, genius, innovation...

What a bollocks-fest.

Sysadmin's former boss claims five years FREE support or off to court

Re: That subpeona is a double edged sword.

"Testimony can be compelled for civil cases but then you end up with a hostile witness."

It also helps to look at the testimony before deciding to call the witness. IFAICR my evidence went against the party that decided they needed me.

@Gumby

You do realise, don't you, that there are different jurisdictions and they have different rules?

If some aspect of your job makes you a witness to something that ends up in court you could end up being summoned. For most people this is an unlikely event does affect forensic scientists. After I quit that job the summonses went on for a year or so including one for a civil case stemming from a fatal accident I investigated years before I quit. And then a year or too ago an old colleague emailed me to tell me of an arrest in a case which would have been over 20 years old at that time; fortunately nothing came of that one.

UK will pay EU £180m in fines due to botched CAP IT system – NAO

Re: It sickens me

"They will spend £1000`s"

Amateurs. The professionals do it on a grand scale hosting cycle races & then find they can't afford grass cutting, libraries or road gritting.

Re: The same old sh1t eh?

"otherwise your simply coding"

I take it you mean "you're" otherwise it doesn't make sense. Do you write specifications?

IT pros are a bunch of wedding and funeral-dodging sickos

Re: Curious answers

I think all except the last were how the respondents saw themselves.

Report: VW execs 'knew' about fuel economy issues last year

"Former CEO Martin Winterkorn reluctantly quit as chief exec"

Nothing like as reluctantly as some.

Microsoft whips out PowerApps – now your Pointy Haired Boss can write software, too!

Re: Back in the day we called it 4GLs

Actually both the examples I gave in another post were coded in 4GL. But that wasn't the problem - exactly the same mistakes could have been made in C. The problem was failing to understand how to use the database engine (which was, of course, written in C). An efficient language is no obstacle to writing inefficient code.

"The problem is that when the PHBs start churning out a few of these easily they will start to question why it takes you so long to get an application delivered."

That's easy to deal with. Ask for a demo & then feed it some input it wasn't designed for to see how it copes.

Re: Non-optimal solutions

"Mind you developers can be very inefficient too."

Mmmm. I remember the program that was going to take over 24 hours to load a day's data into the replenishment system. And that was the second effort of that vendor's I had to debug for them. The first just asked the database engine to spawn more & more objects without freeing any or re-using them until it burst.

Re: Done before, failed before

"Access is (was) supposed to be a straightforward way to build apps for data without needing to know code"

But as it was built on an RDBMS unless its users needed to know how to design a database. If they couldn't get that right no amount of code knowledge avoidance was going to help.

LHC records biggest bang ever with 1 Peta-electron-volt jolt

Re: Lead nuclear mass - @tirk

"the Wikipedia article seems to suggest only protons are involved"

It's only the protons that are charged so it's those on which the accelerator works. The neutrons are just along for the ride.

A car analogy - it's only the tyre contact patch that touches the road so it's that that gets accelerated and the rest of the car is just along for the ride.

Google cloud outage caused by failure that saw admins run it manually ... and fail

Re: Oops!

"See: the design of pretty much every internet protocol since the beforetime."

And they used to say "the internet routes round damage".

Court: Swedish ISPs can't be forced to block Sweden's Pirate Bay

Those TPP type rules that allow businesses to sue govts: I wonder if they'd allow a site such as Pirate Bay to sue a govt. that imposed blocking.

Research: Microsoft the fastest growing maker of tablet OSs ... by 2019

Re: 2019.... bye bye Microsoft! LOL

"99% of the computers used at home are just for tasks that an iPad or Android tablet can do."

Citation? Or was this one of the 80% of statistics on the internet that are made up on the spot.

Re: 5 years is a long time

"http://www.pcworld.com/article/230151/idc_windows_phones_to_overtake_iphone_ios_by_2015.html"

I wonder why they didn't remind us of their previous predictions.

When these firms trot out their press releases I wish the media would ask them for their previous predictions for now. And if they don't provide them, just dig out a few from the archives.

Sneaky Microsoft renamed its data slurper before sticking it back in Windows 10

Re: Anyone got a VM config guide for isolating Windows?

There is, of course, something more effective than any PIM, calendar or diary. SWMBO.

Re: Tinfoil hats

"And whats more, is that the data the OS collects is because it requires it for services to work as has been stated my many others and not just in this forum."

Sigh.

Some people simply don't seem to realise that what's documented by omission is as important as what's documented explicitly. Consequently quite amazing stuff can be hidden in plain view.

Go back and read those T&Cs again.

It looks friendly and reasonable. It adopts the tone of voice that the nice policeman uses when he's trying to talk the loony off the bridge. It seems persuasive. When it talks about collecting login IDs and details of transactions that seems reasonable. And so it is if you start off assuming that they're talking about login IDs for Microsoft services and transactions with Microsoft. But nowhere does it say that such a limitation applies. Do you really believe that there isn't as much as a space, let alone a comma or full stop in those documents that hasn't been carefully considered for its legal implications. Learning to read specs & contracts & notice what's missing really should be a skill everyone in IT learns.

And, of course, once they've got you persuaded then they drop in all the other stuff they've absolutely no business in finding out. What is essential to providing Microsoft services about their knowing your gender, the sports you follow or all the other crap that gets listed there?

Are they collecting this stuff now? Maybe, maybe not, but if the don't collect it now they've given themselves carte blanche in their T&Cs to turn on such collection any time they wish and through the unavaiodable updates have provided themselves the means to do so.

Re: Ditch your Windows or shut up

"Delphi"

Lazarus.

Re: Anyone got a VM config guide for isolating Windows?

"appointments"

That's the problem right there. As far as possible you turn up when you feel like it and don't turn up at all when you don't want to. As for the rest there's either a mechanism (e.g. 2nd Tuesday in the month) or a scribbled note on the kitchen calendar.