* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32768 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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That Pulse Secure VPN you're using to protect your data? Better get it patched – or it's going to be ransomware time

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Re: Yeah but...

If the users don't patch when they're informed then such a term would be essential. After all those users are responsible. Even the one in the twitter thread, assuming they're still with the same MSP.

The Pulse Secure response can be summarised as "You can lead a horse to whater but some of them are mules." That's the problem.

Tragedy: CES squeeze forces frequent flier hotshots into economy hell

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Re: While they sit in their seats

"humble BOFHs"

Humble? Humble? No such thing.

Having trouble finding a job in your 40s? Study shows some bosses like job applicants... up until they see dates of birth

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Apart from being an issue for individuals this is a huge economic cost for the country. Freelance has been the way round this in the past. IR35 is just another of the levers governments are using to destroy the economy.

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"part of their service is to reformat all of the CVs"

You really need to trust the agency hen. From the applicants' PoV they don't trust agencies doing that.

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"I do wonder how much of a part the agency plays in this."

I remember seeing a contract ad that specified someone with experience of the client's in-house bespoke system. The system which I started writing about 20 years earlier. The system I spent the next 10 years on and off - but mostly on - managing, migrating and enhancing. I suspect they were actually looking for me. Never heard anything more about it.

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Re: There comes a time

"anyone in the IT world who is over 50 (and possibly 40) should think about a second career"

IT was my second career. And after half a working lifetime in the scientific grades of the Civil Service I certainly needed the money.

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Re: The reasoning behind this

in most companies chieftains only care about how many people they lead, because "more people = more important".

This is an artefact of promotion policies. The policies are laid down by management types and that, by and large, is a criterion for managers. Obviously managers don't want a criterion such as "able to do the job well".

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Re: driving down costs

In that case he should be moving up the ranks PDQ. That assumes the employer recognises that there are such things and ranks and that they're important.

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Re: Cost and Abusability

"Young workers are just willing to completely exploit themselves"

They also haven't had their manglement bull-shit filters trained so they're not going to laugh or worse at intelligence-insulting motivational* seminars.

* Motivation as in "I'm motivated to get out of this place for good".

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Re: What jobs did they try to get?

"they may not be able to find a postdoc position that's suited to them"

From the University's PoV they may not want to risk taking on someone who might promptly quit because the right post-doc job came along. The real problem, of course, is that research offers too many short-term jobs as opposed to permanent ones.

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Re: HR is the problem

What makes that a little difficult is that the pimp takes the tailored CV & submits it for something entirely different instead of asking for a new one.

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Re: What jobs did they try to get?

I switched into IT in my 40s but that was a long time ago and having exactly the background, tech & otherwise that my employers thought they needed. ("Thought they needed" because they then moved me into a contract were the "otherwise" wasn't relevant.)

Pair charged with murder, manslaughter after IBM Aspera boffin killed in New Year's Eve laptop theft struggle

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“I don’t understand how my brother got wrapped up in this. Probably hanging around the wrong people.”

It sounds as if he is the wrong people.

I spy, with my little satellite AI, something beginning with 'North American image-analysis code embargo'

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Remind me again why RISC V upped sticks and relocated outside the US.

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Re: Not just satellite imagery

Assuming you're not in the US this just reduces your competition when it comes to selling to the rest of the world.

Reusing software 'interfaces' is fine, Google tells Supreme Court, pleads: Think of the devs

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If Oracle win I hope IBM lawyers turn up on their doorstep the next morning with a bill for use of SQL.

Xerox grabs $24bn from banking titans to fund hostile takeover of HP Ink

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" if all parties concerned ... crashed and burned."

I'd guess that one of those parties - most likely the banks that are coming up with $24bn - put themselves in front of the queue and ensure they get the cash from selling off the remnants. And likely nist that when the remnants are sold off they get first option at financing the sell-off.

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If I read this right they're saying savings and growth of $3 to $3.5bn at a cost of only $24bn in debt. How could anybody resist?

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Re: Translation

That would be headcount reductions equal to the current total headcount of both companies.

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Re: Enought already

"There are already too many large companies with too much power trying to gain even more power."

That's only part of the problem. If you have the two boards get together and do a straight merger - so many shares in the new entity pro-rata the shares in the old ones you have the problem you state. When you have something like this you have the additional situation that the new entity is saddled with stupid amounts of debt and likely going down the tubes as a consequence so the competition is reduced by two instead of one.

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" if all parties concerned ... crashed and burned."

I'd guess that one of those parties - most likely the banks that are coming up with $33bn - put themselves in front of the queue and ensure they get the cash from selling off the remnants. And likely nist that when the remnants are sold off they get first option at financing the sell-off.

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If I read this right they're saying savings and growth of $3 to $3.5bn at a cost of only $33bn in debt. How could anybody resist?

Smart speaker maker Sonos takes heat for deliberately bricking older kit with 'Trade Up' plan

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Re: What great value does Sonos-phone-home add?

"Alexa/Google Home integration - probably doesn't need explanation."

No. Just needs justification.

From your explanation getting the merest squeak out of your speakers requires internet connectivity to work, which is fine until it doesn't, and Sonos' service to remain in place, which s fine until they go bust or someone like Icahn't buys them and shuts them down or a software update bricks them.

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Re: Netgear has come up with a similar daft idea

Is that why carrying a mobile phone or a laptop to different countries bricks it?

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Re: Plastic blister packs

"a little secure box by the till?"

Agreed but the security on that box needs to be cashier-proof as well, unfortunately.

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Re: "To dissuade pickpocketing"

A particular problem is packaging a pair of scissors in such a way that you need scissors to unpack them.

Bruce Perens quits Open Source Initiative amid row over new data-sharing crypto license: 'We've gone the wrong way with licensing'

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If I were $PARTY2 I'd want to be included in those disclaimers as well.

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Re: Am I missing something ?

"use this software any way you like"

Remember that statute law will always override contract law. "Any way you like" will still get you into trouble if what you like happens to be a transgression of the law of the land. It ought to be the latter that provides protection for customers, at least in a consumer environment.

In a B2B transaction where there is less protection afforded by statute the customers should check the T&Cs, if necessary, run them past their lawyers, and then make a risk assessment before going ahead.

Trying to extend licence law into areas where there are (or should be) existing protections, at least for consumers is scope creep for an organisation such as OSI. Admittedly I'm looking at this from a European PoV; things may be fuzzier in the US and maybe also in the UK in the future.

Linux in 2020: 27.8 million lines of code in the kernel, 1.3 million in systemd

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Re: I've had .....

"I think he really is an Employee of MicroSoft in disguise ... or a total asshat "

Are those mutually exclusive?

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"Distros have adopted it because it solves a problem for them."

That's more or less what manufacturers say about soldered in batteries, RAM and storage.

Autonomy did count some hardware sales as marketing costs, ex-finance bod tells High Court

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Re: Costing HP a lot of money this.

"at least 35ml of Magenta"

Do they have to buy that from HP Inc or can they get it from Xerox?

A Notepad nightmare leaves sysadmin with something totally unprintable

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"I knew which way up to push a floppy into a PC slot."

And as not many people these days have seen a floppy the modern equivalent is plugging in a USB drive in less than three tries.

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Re: three decades

It caused me a small problem with my carbon dating program. The results were always rounded. This was fine until one ended up rounded to 0.

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"What's wrong with octal?"

It's two short of a dekatron.

IT exec sets up fake biz, uses it to bill his bosses $6m for phantom gear, gets caught by Microsoft Word metadata

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Re: idiot

"invoices for equipment that didn't exist"

Consumables would have been better or something even less tangible such as services.

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Re: idiot

The non-smart criminals you get to hear about are a self-selecting set.

It's always DNS, especially when you're on holiday with nothing but a phone on GPRS

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One of the advantages of being freelance is that you're the one who gets to make such decisions. I wouldn't say my contracts depended on it but it made life easier. One of the high points was sitting a a pub table after a day of meetings checking the logs from the previous overnight batch when one of the visiting USians shouted to the other "Look here, he's DBAing his box on his phone".

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NT on the laptop? That means that the Nokia 9000 or later would have been available - they were introduced about the same time. Waaay better way to dial in than lugging a lappy around.

Train-knackering software design blunder discovered after lightning sparked Thameslink megadelay

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Re: and basically impossible to test for.

"WAD has become WBAD"

Or the differentce between "just works" and "only just works".

Snakes on a wane: Python 2 development is finally frozen in time, version 3 slithers on

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"But the Python 2.7.18 code base has officially been frozen."

Also known as "stable".

We live so fast I can't even finish this sent...

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Do annual changes of colour really rate as high-speed change? Surely it should be several times a second at least.

Lynch lied about Autonomy's accounts, rages HPE to the High Court

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Re: Fraud

"they probably could have acquired SuSe instead of MicroFocus snapping it up and had the foundations of their own operating system and container support."

They already had their own OS - HPUX.

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Re: Due dilligence

"So this case is sounding more like trying to take Camelot to court because the Lucky Dip lottery ticket you purchased didn't win a prize."

The best one-line summary of the case to date. Nice one.

Say GDP-aaaR: UK's Information Commissioner pours £275k fine into London pharmacy's teaspoon

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"What is hard about this?"

Nothing, apart from the fact it isn't a tax, it's just that whatever you need to do to comply with the law wherever you trade is a standard cost of doing business..

So why do US businesses come here winging about having to obey the laws of the countries they want to do business in? Is it just the general view that US law should apply everywhere?

El Reg presents: Your one-step guide on where not to store electronic mail

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It's a long time since I suffered Outlook so my experience may not only be imperfectly remembered but thing may have changed. However AFAICR it shares a basic problem with the email client I've used at home for years: an ill-thought out UI. Ill thought-out, that is, in terms of what the user might reasonably want to do with an incoming email.

In the physical world reading a message from an in-tray involves physically removing it. Having read it the recipient can do one or more of several things: reply, forward it, bin it or in extreme cases shred it, put it to one side to be dealt with later* and file it.

With email there are options to reply, forward a copy and delete. Reading doesn't even remove it from the in-tray.

The only readily available options for disposing of the item are either to leave it in the in-try resulting in a bulging in-tray (guilty as charged m'lud) or delete it, the latter leading to stories like this. Neither is appropriate.

A start at a better UI would be to remove the item from the in-tray. The user can dispose of it by moving it to a delete bin (to be emptied later according to time or volume rules), shredded (deleted immediately and irrevocably) or moving to a pending tray. If the user does nothing it will go into a filing folder.

Being computerised there are filing options that can be automated. Threads of liked messages can have their own folder. Emails to and from specified domains can have a folder specified; this would be useful for clients, suppliers, the bank etc. Specific addresses or groups of addresses in the address book can have a folder specified. Ad hoc folders can be specified so there can be a hierarchy with, for instance, individual thread folders grouped in an ad hoc project folder or specific client folders grouped in an overall Clients folder. Sent mails, including those which forward a message, would also go into the filing area. There could, maybe, be two holding folders, read and sent for anything not yet dealt with under rules.

To some extent I can do this with filters on the Thunderbird/Seamonkey client but there are a few of annoyances, the first being that it isn't the default action for disposing of a read email.

* It could be left in the in-tray or added to a pending tray.

Two missing digits? How about two missing employees in today's story of Y2K

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Re: real issues

Hmmm.

I wonder if the original £sd calculation was done by a single procedure and it was just replaced by another in '71. Non-decimal calculations aren't always straight-forward as legitimate inputs might well violate expectations. It wouldn't be unusual to see prices quotes as, for instance, 30s so I can imagine a routine having to accept that.

It makes handling historic data - err - fun, especially as I've seen amounts quoted along such lines as "and three parts of a penny". What parts? Land measurements are also interesting. Fortunately I haven't yet had to deal with weights. Fortunately because you can't rely on a stone being 14lbs.

Remembering Y2K call-outs and the joy of the hourly contractor rate

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I was perfectly happy having nobody to charge call-out rates to (I did spend the next few weeks wrangling things for a client whose beancounters insisted on on using their old, definitely non-Y2K compliant box because they wouldn't risk(!!!) a cut-over to the fully tested new one until they'd completed their year end).

In consequence we saw in the new year, as ever, at my cousin's house, with a view for miles - including what must have about a hundred simultaneous firework displays, near and far. I still can't understand why my daughter and her future husband just stayed indoors in a pub down in the village.

Y2K? It was all just a big bun-fight, according to one Reg reader

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Re: But were they ...

All the components were of current specification.

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Re: you mean by hand?

Allegedly (it was well before my time there the Botany prof in QUB got a VW Microbus past the relevant committee by listing amongst several bits of microscopy apparatus. Also allegedly, and again before my time, it was written off by someone taking the right turn into the road where the greenhouses were a bit too fast. By the time I got there the departmental vehicle was an ancient Mini Countryman. One of my jobs was to drive it and help a PhD student with her field work. Life hs never been the same since.

Today's budget for application improvements is brought to you by the letters "Y", "K" and the number "2"

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Re: Creativity

"that's almost unheard of"

That's because people know better than to blab.

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