Posts by Doctor Syntax

Copilot invades Microsoft 365 Personal and Family for an extra three bucks a month

Re: Proof that marketeers have heads full of air

There's probably nobody there who remembers Clippy and how much it was hated.

Re: And this will be appearing when my kids are doing their school homework?

Report the school for child abuse.

You might need a wooden stake.

Re: Path to profitability

I regularly get docx files of posters to open in LO, turn into a PDF & then into a JPEG. They pose no problem except that she usually seems to add sufficient newlines to run over the page... The odd thing about this is that although they come from a Windows user she actually uses LO to create them. Maybe LO just creates better docx files. And can't LO on Windows create its own PDFs?

Brit government contractor CloudKubed enters administration

To be fair there probably wouldn't have been many other companies that could handle "Landing Zone Accelerator Delivery Enablement Management Services"

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

Re: Not "Fixing", Exactly

This is apt to be the situation. There was the KCL episode a few years ago in the aftermath of which, having lost a lot of data on their managed systems, IT told the rest of the college that they should be keeping data on the college's system, not on their own departmental, personal or whatever system.

"You're not Ron..."

No, Ron was my Dad.

"Sometimes it is easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission,"

The technical term is fait accompli which translates as "the only way to get things done".

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

The bit where he said that connecting a multi-continent team remotely from whatever continent they were on just worked.

But "trying to solve stuff on an email thread is even less efficient than a Zoom/Teams/etc call." - you're getting into ROFLMAO territory. You do realise, don't you, that solving stuff on email threads in public is the exact way the Linux kernel development works? You can go and read the entire archive. And other FOSS projects. An entire operating system has been built the way you say doesn't work. And there's a strong argument that it's a better one then that built by people working in an office.

It is suggested by the employers pushing RTO mandates.

Re: Common Sense

To a large extent it's not the office (although a dark dingy cave might be than some open plan offices). It's getting there. The commuting radii of big cities should be regarded as unsustainable. That needs to be addressed and working at home is one means of doing so.

It's not unknown for cities to make themselves irrelevant. At one period of the middle ages, for instance, cities and towns such as York and Beverley were important textile manufacturing centres. They were undercut by the domestic industry that built up in the West Riding. Although they didn't disappear entirely they went through a period of contraction and downgrading of the urban organisation because nobody had the money to subsidise public services in the way they used to.

You don't thing the rest of his comment is worth answering?

Or are you still working on it?

Re: Wrong - digital businesses will be digital

"MBAs can't get a job"

I read that in another place, Harvard MBAs unemployed. There's hope yet.

"Most of us have to work for a living anyway, so better try to make the most out of it."

AN hour and a half's commute each way wasn't making the best of it when I was in that situation.

Re: Just a thought

We also need to admit that there are employers in India who think that there's not problem with a 90 hour working week.

Re: Just a thought

"They are also fluent English speakers."

Having lived there from the mid-60s to the mid-80s I can assure you that there were some (my late FiL for one) for whom you'd have to stretch the concept of fluent spoken English.

Re: Just a thought

Although I had my company registered at home my accountant's office was the address for a lot of legal entities. And there are a few countries who have cottoned onto the idea of being very hospitable to "digital nomads".

Re: Just a thought

If you can do your job effectively without going into the office … so can someone in Bangalore.

Some of us had to train, on a six-monthly basis, the staff the client's client's outsourcer rotated into the UK form Bangalore or some place like it.

What do you mean, "most employable". Employees are completely interchangeable so it doesn't matter who quits wo long as the headcount goes down.

"explain how a team of field engineers would work from home"

The key word here id from. The answer is because they work at customer sites. Our Leitz microscope service engineer would visit our customer site in Belfast from his home in Glasgow. Why would he need to travel via Luton (for those not in the UK Belfast is in N Ireland, a short air or ferry crossing across the Irish Sea from Glasgow which is in Scotland and both are a good distance from Luton which is in the S of England).

The same applies to field sales. Their salesman covering Belfast was also based in Glasgow.

Re: I'm surprised some companies don't want to embrace WFH...

Even worse for them - they might not even be needed.

That's middle management. At the very top is probably the fear that shareholders might start asking why they;re renting expensive empty offices. Or sharholders who also own offices they don't want to see lose tenants.

Re: I'm surprised some companies don't want to embrace WFH...

"Pull down the office blocks, put in some public transport infrastructure (great time to cut and cover metro tunnels) and build mixed-use residential, leisure and shops in their place."

Stop it, you're making sense! Although I'm sure there are good residential conversions of existing buildings. We've energumens that it can't be done because of problems with services etc. And yet I've seen reports of Canary Wharf buildings being touted for conversion to biomedical labs which I'd expect to demand much more in the way of services.

Re: And what triggers that?

Not everyone as posts on here demonstrate. But most of those with painful commutes who don't miss office society.

You misunderstand.

It is now possible to assemble teams of specialists across the world and put together a bigger pool of talent than could be achieved by depending on just those who live in commuting distance of some city or can be persuaded to move there.

An example would be my daughter's company. They are biomedical specialists with a world-wide remote-working team and world-wide clients. There is, reputedly, a branch office here in the UK, possibly little more than a mailbox. She's never seen it, doesn't need to. This is her third work-from-home job in the field. The second was supposed to have been office based but Covid came along just as she was about to start. By the time they decided on RTO she'd realised it was a bad commute and left.

Re: Dementor

"you can do team-building exercises"

Shudder.

Re: re: Not once a month. Never again.

We are dealing with a real genius. He might mandate returning to the office at the same time as selling it.

"instead of the carefully prepared arguments the only option is take it or leave it then many of those people will balance the cramped train ride with the arseache of finding a new job, moving house, school, friends"

The difference here is that you should no longer be comparing office job here with office job there but office job with working at home. In that case the only thing lost is the cramped train ride; house, friends, school remain the same. The choice then is take it or take it - for the boss.

Re: I'm surprised some companies don't want to embrace WFH...

"unless they're getting large tax breaks for dragging people to a down-town area"

The tax breaks should come from not dragging people to a down-town area. For that to happen there's a need to work out what to do with the down-town areas when people aren't being dragged in to work there.

Enzo Biochem settles lawsuit over 2023 ransomware attack for $7.5M

Why should a testing company need patient name name and address? A concatenation of customer (i.e. that lab's customer) number and the customer's patient number should be enough

UK government tech procurement lacks understanding, says watchdog

Re: A helpful suggestion:

I doubt the author of the report would find anything novel here. IT procurement senior manglement, OTOH, might think their performance was in line with public procurement norms.

Re: Qualifications?

From the disciplines you list: I think a procurement team might well need a lawyer. Conracts are not written in C.

"Current government processes from business case development to contract award do not work well for digital programs. Departments can present investment cases without a detailed assessment of technical feasibility"

That doesn't just apply to digital programmes. It's been a characteristic of UK and doubtless many other governments for years.

AI datacenters putting zero emissions promises out of reach

"Building nuclear power plants is the clear solution."

Agreed - along with other options. Nevertheless reducing wasteful consumption is still a good idea.

I'm not sure how one makes savings in energy consumption other than a project here and another there, trimming fractions of a percent off the total global demand. Stopping a full 1% or so being added is, in those terms, a major win.

Debian 12.9 arrives, quickly followed by MX Linux 23.5

Re: Saner Ubuntu?

"The server is now also Mint + Mate "

Why not just Mint?

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Whacko

It's Jimmy Edwards.

As to your main point, yes, but although he might have taught his court a lesson the knowledge died with them, a millennium ago.

Re: Age verification

"I don't know how to fix that."

Glue remover.

UK businesses eye AI as the cheaper, non-whining alternative to actual staff

Re: @Doctor Syntax

ISTM that these days there are quite a lot of products where the H/W is a set of odd pits and pieces that don't really do much without the control logic in S/W (in which I'll include firmware), starting with microcoded CPUs.

Everything is the fault of "Boomers" - force them to sell their homes

As a pre-boomer I upport this one. Load of entitled kids. Things were OK until they came along.

Megan, AI recruiting agent, is on the job, giving bosses fewer reasons to hire in HR

"we let her use the tooling that we built for her however she feels is necessary"

That's a dangerous level of anthropomorphising.

Re: Well....

"Yet I'm seeing the same jobs advertised again and again for months."

You're seeing the same job adverts but are they really vacancies or pimps agencies trawling for candidates who, in all probability, will be put forward for the wrong vacancies.

Re: I, for one, don't have to welcome your new HR overlords

No doubt the one who gave you the heads up also knew you were the right person to fill it. Word of mouth - the best way all round for recruitment.

I'm sure the companies that use it will get the recruits they deserve.

SpaceX launches 2 lunar landers on path to the Moon

Navigational error?

I thought the Moon was a waste of time and they were just going straight to Mars. Isn't that what the Dear Leader said not long ago?

Enterprises in for a shock when they realize power and cooling demands of AI

This is a use of the word "performance" with which I was unfamiliar. I'd have thought energy consumption was a problem. Maybe this is an overloading of the TLA to mean Key Problem Indicator.

Or is it all about bragging rights: "Mine's bigger than yours."?

Microsoft, PC makers cut prices of Copilot+ gear in Europe, analyst stats confirm

Re: All those TOPS

"Far from being a killer application, Recall "

It's turning out to be a killer application. It's killing the market. A new twist on an old concept but we live in interesting times.

Re: .. the prospect of tariffs on technology made in China

He'll blame it on somebody else. If all else fails, his new best buddy Musk who, unthinkingly, is lining himself up to be fall guy for whatever goes wrong.

Re: .. the prospect of tariffs on technology made in China

"Genuinely thought this was a joke"

It is. It's a joke on those who believe it.

Re: re : " Do businesses even want to change PCs "

The kerching they're hoping for is the kerching from sales of new H/W because as things stand it's new H/W that sells new licences.

Now it is possible that they might achieve a kerching by bringing out a "new" version which doesn't have the H/W requirements but only as new licence, not as a free upgrade from W10. Likewise there's the kerching already offered in the form of paid-for extended support of W10. Universal free upgrades from W10 have no kerching (the H/W-limited free upgrade blocked the possibility of class actions from recent buyers).