Posts by Doctor Syntax

BOFH: HR tries to think appy thoughts

Re: Once again, the BOFH wins hands down

"having to go into a trash bin to get their phones back."

The BOFH will have rung the skip company to get it taken for emptying in land-fill.

As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them

If they think the visa charges are bad just wait until they see the salaries. Or are we going to have a two tier salary situation where they get paid more than the British scientists?

Arm says it isn’t worried by tariffs, but won't give guidance for FY'26

Re: Because users are fighting to pay more for AI...

"You are all being conned."

Not all of us.

‘Infuriated’, ‘disappointed' ... Ex-VMware customers explain why they migrated to Nutanix

"Ironically, shortly after the migration was complete, he got a call from a VMware account manager who introduced themselves as his new point of contact - unaware that Johnston had already planned to end Golding's relationship with the Broadcom business unit."

Ironically? In Johnston's place "happily" might have been the least of it. It would have been a call I'd really have enjoyed. Draw it out nicely. Explain what I'd need from VMware. Reject each of his offerings with lengthy explanations. And even if he did come up with some offer, drop the bombshell that he was too late. Finally explain how easy it was to complete the transfer.

Life doesn't present too many opportunities like that.

Update turns Google Gemini into a prude, breaking apps for trauma survivors

"Google just cut it all off. They just pushed a model update that's cut off its willingness to talk about any of this kind of work despite it having an explicit settings panel to enable this and a warning system to allow it. And now it's affecting other users whose apps relied on it, and now it won't even chat [about] mental health support."

How many times do we have to say this? It's somebody else's computer that you don't control.

ESA feeling weightless and unwanted amid proposed NASA cuts

Re: There are other partners

"And, over time, so will the US."

By 2050 the US will look back at the 2030s as the great rebuilding. If they're lucky.

PowerSchool paid thieves to delete stolen student, teacher data. Looks like crooks lied

Too many amateurs in the business. Originally they were business-like and you got what you paid for. Being dishonest about it just gives the business a bad name and puts customers off altogether. If this keeps up it will be the death of the industry if people can't trust crooks to deliver.

After that 2024 Windows fiasco, CrowdStrike has a plan – job cuts, leaning on AI

Automating test and release is a good idea - they should have done that already after last year's unpleasantness - but not by using AI.

Sudo-rs make me a sandwich, hold the buffer overflows

"Sudo is a command-line utility on Unix-like systems that allows authorized users to run commands with elevated privileges, typically as root" without the safeguard of an additional password. It fails Saltzer and Schroeder's separation of privilege criterion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltzer_and_Schroeder's_design_principles

Microsoft updates the Windows 11 Start Menu

Re: Ha, ha, ha! I moved to Linux Last Weekend.

But whose email address is it really?

Re: Settings

"Unfortunately StackOverflow, SuperUser and StackEchange (all owned by the same company) now require you to enable cookies and JavaScript to view their webpage as of two days ago."

I have a second browser set up to forget all cookies etc. on exit. Happily click the "accept" button thinking "and much good may it do you".

Re: Settings

"Unfortunately StackOverflow, SuperUser and StackEchange (all owned by the same company) now require you to enable cookies and JavaScript to view their webpage as of two days ago."

Not a problem. I have a second browser set up to forget cookies etc. on exit.

Re: Hey, Clippy

Dead but not buried. Or maybe the other way around.

Re: "Make Start Menu great again"...

But wait until you get to the new KDE settings as on Debian testing.. They've rearranged to top-level menu.

Re: Settings

Maybe it could be used to teach the developers where to put the settings.

90-second Newark blackout exposes parlous state of US air traffic control

From the linked report:

The Department of Transportation will announce a plan Thursday to transform the air traffic control system, remodeling an outdated system that contributed to days of delays at Newark, Duffy, the transportation secretary, told Fox News on Monday.

...

Duffy has since pledged to implement a new, “state-of-the-art” system at air traffic control facilities across the country that would be the “envy of the world” – but said it might take three to four years.

“We are going to radically transform the way air traffic control looks,” Duffy told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham.

President Donald Trump has “bought into the plan,” he said

In normal times that might be good news. Now it might be a case of the most terrifying words in the English languge being "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

Suffering those systems as a result of a 90 second glitch (and note that they wouldn't have known it was going to be "only" 90 seconds) was probably the result of already being at the limit due to accumulated stress. They have my sympathy and, from me, no suggestion at all that they "weren't cut out for the job".

Microsoft moved the goalposts once. Will Windows 12 bring another shift?

My instant reaction to hearing Microsoft claim something to be advantageous is to add "for you, not for me" to the message and act accordingly.

Re: How to opt out of the enhancements

They appear to find it perfectly feasible. I'm following the new version, Excalibur, on a second laptop. Stacks of new stuff still coming in (the Debian soft freeze only held it back for a few days) and very little of it Devuan specific.

Re: Reasons not to upgrade to Windows 12

To some extent it's the stock market's fault. They can't be satisfied with a nice little earner, they demand growth. The nice little earner for S/W ought to be get the product complete, shake out the bugs. Don't faff with it to add more so the cost of development can be cut to minimal maintenance and just take the licence fees from new H/W.

But, no. The user base has to be forced to fork out more and more. If that doesn't happen the share price falls below its original unwarranted level and bonuses, tied to further unreasonable growth, are missed and the sharks move in.

Re: Reasons not to upgrade to Windows 12

You might not but Microsoft does: money.

Providing users rent it by the month I doubt Microsoft will care what Windows 12 runs on. Unless Congress strong-arm Trump there's going to be a weak H/W market in the US for the next few years and that means sales on a new version tied to H/W sales is going to suffer.

Cynical? Moi?

Human error and power glitches to blame for most outages

No mention of CrowdStrike?

Teens maintained a mainframe and it went about as well as you'd imagine

Re: Good, but don't do that again

In the N Ireland Civil Service this was known as the Spring Sales and was, I understand, mostly money kept by DooE against the possibility of a bad winter needing a lot of snow clearance and road gritting. I was able to use some to get in consumables for the next year - microscope slides, cover-slips, methylumbenlliferyl phosphate...

Re: Good, but don't do that again

"It got approved in the next go-round."

It dad to wait until then?

Re: fax Feeding the Beast

"you can use toilet paper!"

Maybe that was for the original being scanned.

Re: Feeding the Beast

They needed maintenance? Anything less than a sledge hammer or connecting the data cable to mains ought to have been survivable.

Re: Feeding the Beast

This one had something home-grown called Qubos with a home-grown multi-user access layer (?MCS) on top.

Re: Good, but don't do that again

"Don't do that again" I was told, very clearly.

It's things like that that tell you that you need a better employer.

Pentagon declares war on 'outdated' software buying, opens fire on open source

"opens fire on open source"

So Big Tech is getting back a little of what it lost in tariffs.

Microsoft burnishes green cred by paying Swedes to burn biomass and bury CO₂

Any archaeologist can tell you that charcoal is stable enough to last indefinitely. Reducing wood to charcoal and then storing would be an effective means of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. To put it on an ongoing basis the wood could be renewed and the age-old means of that would be coppicing. English woodlands were managed in that way for centuries. The coppice stools regenerate when cut and continue to harvest carbon. If you see a piece of woodland named copse or Spring Wood, Spring Grove or the like it was managed this way.

The only unusual thing here would be storing the charcoal rather than burning it and is likely to be more effective as long term storage than trying to contain it as a gas. It's not very efficient,of course, to it would need a means of using the flammable gasses released and the waste heat but it would be effective at removing CO2 from the atmosphere permanently and rather less weird than some of the other schemes.

"Microsoft uses a reduction-first strategy to lower emissions"

So quit the AI junk.

Computacenter IT guy let girlfriend into Deutsche Bank server rooms, says fired whistleblower

Re: Bizarre story

They should be unhappy at the report because of its content, not its existence. Giving him cause to sue wasn't exactly the sweeping under the carpet they must have intended.

Re: It sounds like he's got a case

Always start high so as to be able to negotiate down. Also, it gets more headlines, exactly what his employers and the bank were trying to avoid.

Will they never learn?

Don't shoot the messenger.

Especially one who knows where the bodies are buried.

Curl project founder snaps over deluge of time-sucking AI slop bug reports

Re: It's the bug bounty

Not necessarily with every report. Just a deposit on joining HackerOne, refunded after a genuine report. If, subsequently, slop reports are sent a new, double deposit will be required to be refunded after 2 genuine reports, otherwise the submitter is banned. Double up again as necessary.

Trump's wind farm funding freeze is so much hot air, say states as they blow sueball to Washington

"shocked, if Big Tech's renewable energy ambitions aren't known in the White House"

Their money's put him where he wanted to be and now they don't matter any more. The damage tariffs are wreaking elsewhere on their interests shows that.

Citrix finds new use for virtualization: Avoiding PC price hikes caused by tariffs

"a Linux-based OS that allows a PC to boot straight into a hosted virtual desktop"

On what is the virtual desktop hosted? It's going to be real H/W so unless it's already onshore that's going to be tariffed or in Canada. Why not cut out stick with the middle man and run the desktop directly on Linux?

Culture comes first in cybersecurity. That puts cybersecurity on the front line in the culture wars

Re: Define nation!

"Wessex hasn't been a thing since King Alfred."

It was still a kingdom at the time of the accession of his grandson Athelstan. Here in Northumbria we had a bit of trouble with him. He was the first to claim himself as King of England although Northumbria was still disputed but the York Vikings in the mid C10th.

But, yes, "nation" was the wrong word. "Government" would have been more apt.

Re: "Cost and Consequence"

"That they have not found the cross over animal to certainly claim it was natural"

1. The cross-over animal would hardly be carrying a label to identify itself as such.

2. It was probably long dead before the outbreak in humans, especially if it ended up in a market.

3. Disregarding the above, the chances of happening on it are vanishingly small being the ratio between the number of animals examined by virologists to the number of animals alive at the time.

Re: "Cost and Consequence"

"why did they let ... create covid that kill all those ...people around the world?"

Would you care to provide some evidence for the premise of your version that might be persuasive to the biologists who use this platform? In your own words, please, not a list of links to some conspiracy sites nor a load of LLM hallucinations.

Re: Cloud Act?

To what extent would we want alternatives to major cloud providers? As things stand there must be few clients who are not rounding errors in the bottom line of their US service providers.

As far as stuff like OneBox or whatever it's called is concerned, NextC|loud with the desktop client installed does the job fine, is based on open standards and provides for calendar sync and a number of collaboration tools. There are plenty of EU & UK suppliers who will run it for you if you don't want to run it in-house.

Likewise there are EU and UK suppliers who will host email.

For "major" read "many".

The bits needed to make up Microsoft <365 of the Google equivalent are there.but there is scope for some integration work, the sort of thing that the Microsoft ID handles. There's also scope for a ChromeOS equivalent which will integrate with the users' choice of service provider including an in-house server if preferred. It's those areas where I would see the efforts of a "Collective" being best applied.

Re: "Cost and Consequence"

"Gramps, why did they let Robert Kennedy kill all those little children with measles?"

Robert Kennedy is a believer in eugenics. If the kids aren't strong enough to survive a bout of measles than that's just nature's way of improving the species would be his view. Unfortunately, in practice the selection filter is parents stupid enough to believe him. He also puts out that vitamin A is a good cure so now there are kids turning up for treatment with vitamin A poisoning from over-enthusiastic "treatment".

"Let's hope they choose wisely."

It would make a nice change.

"US companies can voluntarily abide by EU norms through contractual agreement, so the EU is happy – no, that's the wrong word"

It certainly is. Gullible? Credulous? Cowed. maybe? Schizophrenic is probably the best description. One part of the EU wants to protect users, the other doesn't want to rock the boat with US trade. Now the boat has been rocked perhaps it's time for the user protection to come to the fore. In post-Brexit Britain I'm not sure there's anyone in HMG who cares about user protection so it'll be readily ditched in order to kiss Trump's arse.

Commodore OS 3 is the loudest Linux yet

Re: 37.85G ISO

And then to the next aisle for the toilet fittings including bidets and that strange Japanese contraption that includes an automated path lab.

Re: 37.85G ISO

The SLS system would have included the userland as well. As another Devuan user, I wonder how many floppies it would take for systemd and its tentacles.

Signal chat app clone used by Signalgate's Waltz was apparently an insecure mess

Re: A quote from Forrest Gump comes to mind.

He's obviously worked out that there was something a bit wrong with his use of Signal but just not what it was so insteado fthat he's used something a bit different.

British govt agents step in as Harrods becomes third mega retailer under cyberattack

Re: We all know why it keeps happening

We need two things. One is a directors' responsibility added in company law. The other is an arrangement similar to aircraft reporting where the incident is analysed: what happened, how it was recovered, how the system could have been better arranged to minimise the attackers' access and what could have been done to prevent access in the first place with the results circulated to CISOs so that the lessons could be applied widely.

Re: screw M&S

No doubt it worked with the developer's browser & that was good enough.