Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: More info

Thanks for that. An excellent read.

Re: Happened to me at my first job

That's assuming it got to tribunal. It'd almost certainly be settled out of court and out of the papers by the company for more than that but that way the manager gets screwed, for want of a better word.

Re: Boring Bankers... Not

"the boardroom table"

Always a safer bet than the copying machine...

Re: Ethics

Administered by the prefix.

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.

Re: "WE ARE NOT HAVING AN AFFAIRE"

A fairly new member of staff was being observant. At close of play he pointed out a girl from the office and a bloke from IIRC, the factory walking across the car park.

"Have you noticed they always leave together every night?"

"Yes. Well they are married."

The shared surname should have been a clue.

" tattie scones, but these are surely so similar to soda and potato farls"

To potato farls, possibly. Not to soda bread.

Re: "Fronking "

If the laws at the time included GDPR either they told you what happened to the data or they weren't following the laws.

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?

I suppose that one could be gamed. Send one of your employees to an interview at a rival to point them in a direction you know will fail.

Only if the interviewees don't realise what's happening.

And forget filling with water to use as a mop, it needs a quicklime dispenser.

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: That's it?? Where's the rest of the review?!

"it's a somewhat entertaining piece"

Of course. Which site did you think you were reading?

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

Re: Why an app for the upright?

Only if there isn't a suitable UI built into the device itself.

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.

Re: #MeToo

Not XP which started the phone home moves?

That statement struck an entirely false note with me. Glass, when it's not recycled, is made from sand - silicon dioxide, not neat silicon. I doubt the the glass-making industry and wafer producing industries have many steps in common other than sourcing sand. Is he telling us there's a world shortage of sand?

Re: Promotion

Interesting. In my case it was the opposite. No promotion to PSO without "responsibility" which meant managerial responsibility for which there was little scope. Giving evidence that might help convict someone of murder or clear them of the charge wasn't "responsibility".

As it was a specialised skill set with little scope outside they thought they could get away with it. Because I had the opportunity to diversify into IT I managed to escape. The effect of someone contriving that was electric if not unprecedented. The response to my resignation was an almost immediate offer of PSO with no board or any other formalities despite having been yet again refused in the previous year. I'd hoped it would at least have made things easier for others but I later heard it didn't.

Re: Duh! - 'over engineering'

The duplicate hardware has been exposed to the space environment for an equally long time so there's no guarantee that it's in any better condition nor how long it's going to remain working if it is. It will be a sad day if it does prove to be the end. Fingers crossed.

Re: Wilted roses

It's worth adding these two paragraphs from the 2017 report from linuxfoundation.org on Linux Kernel development, the latest I could find. They cover the period of kernel development cycles 4.8 to 4.13

The top 10 contributors, including the groups “unknown” and “none,” make up just over 54 percent of the total contributions to the kernel; that is up slightly from the previous version of this report. It is worth noting that, even if one assumes that all of the “unknown” contributors are working on their own time, well over 85 percent of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work.

Interestingly, the volume of contributions from unpaid developers has been in slow decline for many years. It was 14.6 percent in the 2012 version of this report, but is 8.2 percent this time around. There are many possible reasons for this decline, but, arguably, the most plausible of those is quite simple: kernel developers are in short supply, so anybody who demonstrates an ability to get code into the mainline tends not to have trouble finding job offers. Indeed, the bigger problem can be fending those offers off. As a result, volunteer developers tend not to stay that way for long.

The top contributor was Intel with 13.1% of changes. The next was the entire body of contributors with no affiliation at 8.2%. Red Hat was 3rd with 7.2% IBM was 6th with 4.1% - if those were taken together to reflect the subsequent merger they'd be the 2nd largest. Looking down the list there are, as expected, other S/W businesses - including Oracle with 1.7% but a lot are actually hardware manufacturers.

The foundation also produced a report on 2020 contributors to FOSS in general. The most (just) common motivation given was "I use this piece of FOSS and needed the specific features/fixes I added".

Re: Wilted roses

"The truth is that simply put contributors to open source projects are not being compensated."

Do you really think that all those developers working for Intel, Google Red Hat/IBM etc whose contributions make up the bulk of Linux aren't being paid? Truth? Really?

And that word "compensation"? That's the sort of PR-speak that tells us that the modest sums being given to CEOs and the like is compensation for their distasteful labours. Most people are paid to do a job.

If you mean "compensated" in the wider sense then those who have some particular need that isn't being met by existing software, or at least by anything they can afford, get together to produce their own solution, then they are being compensated. They're being compensated by getting what they wanted in the first place.