It's getting difficult to keep typing with my fingers crossed. let's hope it works OK. If it does then it's time to reflect on how much more life it might have and prioritise observations.
Posts by Doctor Syntax
33015 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
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Hubble, Hubble, toil and trouble: NASA pores over moth-eaten manuals ahead of switch to backup hardware
Imagine a world where Apple shacked up with Xerox in the '80s: How might it look today?
The simpler alternative would have been for Xerox to realise that if they took the ideas they had in the Star, reimplemented the hardware using the new-fangled microprocessors and, by that means, brought the price down they could have owned the business market for years if not decades. Unfortunately that was never the Xerox way.
Report: 83% of UK software engineers suffer burnout, COVID-19 made it worse
Re: Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.
The date is set for the sprint to finish and higher up management expect you to meet it.
Perhaps manglement would understand a car analogy:
Your car is in for service and is to be collected at 4 pm. An hour after it goes in the garage rings up and says "We've discovered a problem with the brakes, The parts won't be here until tomorrow morning. You can have it working at midday tomorrow or collect it at four today as agreed but it won't be fit to drive. Which do you want?"
Re: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means
"If we managed R&D projects like we managed building motorways they'd be a disaster. They'd all under-deliver, late and over budget - just like software projects."
Cross Rail belongs to the same branch of engineering as motorways. Just saying.
NEC to move its IT into Azure and give staff – all 110,000 of ’em – a cloudy Windows desktop
NEC made the same promise in November 2020 – but for AWS engineers. ... NEC and Google also struck a deal in 2018 to “better serve Japanese enterprises”.
I'm reminded of an old saying: "once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is getting to be a habit". Or do they believe in "third time lucky"?
Google fined €500m for not paying French publishers after using their words on web
Re: Thick skin
"BTW. I imagine that Google's response other than sending a platoon of lawyers to France to argue compliance with EU copyright law will be to stop ever reporting news from French sources."
This seems to be the best option from Google's PoV, giving, as it does, the possibility of letting them pay to have sponsored snippets appear.
Western Approaches Museum: WRENs, wargames, and victory in the Atlantic
Re: Merchant Marine
It's only relatively recently that the UK got round to issuing campaign medals for the merchant seamen on the Russian convoys.
A classmate at school had lost his father in the Merchant Navy. Just because they weren't shooting anyone they seem to have been largely overlooked.
We're terrified of sharing information, but the benefits of talking about IT and infosec outweigh the negatives
Re: The sanctity of the confessional
The solution to this, as in the aviation industry* is a statutory inspectorate. It would need powers and resources for pre-emptive inspection and prosecution.
Unfortunately we have a govt. that keeps bleating about being the best in the world for whatever issue drifts across their minds on the day but usually mean by that an absence of "red tape" when, in fact, the said red tape holding in place the security of the supply chain would actually be more beneficial.
* Withou Boeing-style self-certification.
UK govt draws a blank over vaccine certification app – no really, the report is half-empty
REvil ransomware gang's websites vanish soon after Kaseya fiasco, Uncle Sam threatens retaliation
Euro space boffins hatch comms satellite hijack plan to save Earth from extinction
Re: Implausible
That's not what's being proposed although it was how I read the headline.
What is being proposed is something akin to what you suggest, except that the large mass is stuffed into it into the satellite chassis instead of the usual electronics. Presumably the idea of doing it this way is that the satellite itself has all the necessary bits to connect to the launch vehicle although a lot of expensive stuff that wouldn't be needed. Why not build a fleet of deflectors containing no more than is required to do the job designed to fit each generation of launch vehicles? It would cut out a lot of arguing and lead time if all that had to be done was commandeer the actual launches.
Windows 11 still doesn't understand our complex lives – and it hurts
Re: Am I the exception?
"well not yet quite for email, I have my suspicions that MSFT are working on that"
Judging by the rest of the comments you've now got a lot of people worried.
"From the support issues I've seen it is the users who get confused, not the system!"
It may or may not be the users who are getting confused but if they are it appears to be the system that's confusing them. The role of system designers and developers is to produce systems that deliver the services that users need in a form that users need them. If a system results in so much confusion then it's to those designers and developers that you should look to place the blame.
In fairness, simultaneous use of multiple IDs is rarely handled well by modern UI'd desktops and remote services. All systems assume you have one ID, and if you have the temerity to want more, then you must log out and log back in again, an idea unchanged since mainframes stalked the earth.
KDE has had a "Switch User" option on the Power/Session section of the menu for a long time. Opt for that and whatever's running stays running but you're presented with the login screen which you'd obviously need for the other ID* - there'd be something wrong if you could just waft over into a different ID without presenting any credentials. Log out of the other ID when you've finished and, again, you have to present credentials to get back to your original session but it's still there as you left it. I don't see anything wrong about having to provide ID & password, in fact I'd count it as a problem if you didn't.
* This is assuming you're not just wanting a terminal session for the other user in which case you can just su.
Linux Mint 20.2 is a bit more insistent about updating but not as annoying as Windows or Mac, team promises
Yes. /home needs to sit where it won't be reformatted if you reinstall - which you might do, even for a version upgrade. Likewise if you have other a large data requirement. The other requirement which you might have that needs to avoid reformatting is locally installed S/W, /usr/local and/or /opt. But, yes, /usr on the root partition might not be a problem these days.
The other thing to remember is that in the Unix/Linux world we tend to have swap on its own partition.
Stuff has moved around a lot over the years. I can remember when everything was in /bin, /lib and so forth with /usr being for users' home directories plus a few things like /usr/spool. Then it got more and more crowded so /u was set up for users and that started to get crowded and it was split with a /u2 before /home was used. All these changes had a rationale, sometimes clearer than others. I still don't get the rationale for putting www and mysql data in /var. Yes I know it's supposed to be for changeable stuff but you're liable to find you have to reformat it to do a reinstall because, certainly with apt based systems, there's a install-related files in there and the installer seems to expect it to be clean. I tried not reformatting as an experiment and got errors so those files live in /srv now with links back to where they're expected.
"The upgrade notes also suggest running a utility called usrmerge, which simplifies the directory structure. This has been done since Linux 20."
This is something that's always been a bit variable across different Unix/Linus implementations. I'm a bit concerned about the logic of merging /sbin, though; IIRC the logic for this was that it contained stuff root might need in single user mode when /usr might not have been mounted.
South Korean uni installs lavatory that pays out when you spend a penny
BOFH: Where there is darkness, let there be a light
Re: All these comments
It's items purchased up to but not including the 31st. Obviously.
I have come across a church register entry for February 30th. I'm not sure if it was a leap year or not.
Medieval courts almost invariably gave dates relative to saints' days or, between Shrove Tuesday and Trinity Sunday, the various moveable feasts. In a run of several years i found two calendar dates given. One was Friday April 1st. April 1st was a Saturday that year. I'm still not sure whether it was an April Fool's joke delayed by over 9 centuries or the scribe just wasn't used to handling actual calendar dates.
Ah, I see you found my PowerShell script called 'SiteReview' – that does not mean what you think it means
Where's the boss? Ah right, thorough deep-dive audit. On the boardroom table. Gotcha
Re: Happened to me at my first job
It was fairly foolhardy of him with his job and maybe marriage on the line to say nothing of recriminations from the other party and whatever reaction her husband might have had. You might have just said you'd take it to a tribunal without naming your price and giving yourself a chance to see how high he was prepared to bid or, worse still for him, just taking it the tribunal anyway.
Biden order calls for net neutrality, antitrust action, ISP competition – and right to repair your own damn phone
Revealed: Perfect timings for creation of exemplary full English breakfast
That time a startup tried to hire me just to push clients' products in job interviews
Re: "Fronking "
These days?
It couldn't have been a PII gathering scam then but I came across one of those nearly 40 years ago.
One half of it was the sort of intelligence test I'd first encountered a few decades before at 11+ and that my son was now encountering for the same reason. The only difference was that now they had, or merely pretended they had, some sort of scanner to read and mark it. The guy came back looking puzzled and asked "Have you been practising taking intelligence tests?" and I was puzzled because I'd got one wrong.
The other half was a series of head-shrinker questions from which I learned one thing: it's harder to write those things in a context-free manner that its devisers thought.
One question was "Do you sometimes have feelings of panic?". We're sitting in a quiet office in a quiet side street in the centre of a peaceful town like Cambridge. I live and work in a different part of the UK with an on-going terrorist campaign. The job I do could make me a target. I sometimes have to have an armed police or even military escort. There was an attempt to bomb my place of work which was subsequently burned down, probably because a live incendiary device got taken in along with a number of imitations. Does the answer "Yes" mean the same thing for me as it does for you?
Suck on this: El Reg forces dog hair, biscuit crumbs, and disconcertingly sticky stains down two mini vacuums
Re: Why an app for the upright?
"I really don't get this obsession with connecting things to a phone 'app' these days."
I just set up a DSL router modem. One of the options for managing it is an app, apparently so it can be rebooted whilst the user is at work should the necessity arise. In order for this to work it has to be configured to allow management from the vendor's cloud. Really? Let the router be controllable from to WAN? That's one option to be left off - at least off was the default.
Re: destroyed another robot vacuum cleaner
Too much shit hitting the fan here recently. Pity it wasn't still in the feline shitbags. I've just got round to mowing the far end of the orchard.
Why is it that dog owners regularly scoop up their pet's excrement*, at least off their own premises, but cat owners just don't care. OK, I know, cats own people, not vice versa, nevertheless it's downright anti-social to support a cat but not to offer to clean up neighbour's gardens.
*Dog owners do exhibit some strange behaviours in rural situations. The heap will, if left to itself, be dealt with by the elements as it has been for millions of years and just like the leavings of the horses, stray sheep and, when the neighbours had a milking herd walked daily down the road, cattle. Wrapped in plastic and hung on an adjacent fence it just stays there, the worst of all options.
/rant
The human-devoid AI-powered Saildrone Surveyor ship just made it to Hawaii from SF
CentOS Stream: 'I was slow on the uptake, but I get what they are doing now,' says Rocky Linux founder
Re: Corporate rag?
AFAICS he was dead right. If White Box had still been on the go and Scientific Linux hadn't been winding down maintaining their own build in favour of CentOS the abrupt EoL wouldn't have mattered very much; Red Hat might not even have pulled the move at all. Now we're back to multiple RHEL equivalents anyone who wants to go down that path knows that they have some assurance that the rug can't be pulled out from under them that easily now.
Teradata customers express terror as field-based hardware support outsourced to IBM on both sides of the pond
BOFH: Here in my car I feel safest of all. I can listen to you ... It keeps me stable for days
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