* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32773 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

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Re: So whose bright idea was it in the first place?

"My concern would be why is this some sort of bespoke project rather than just what everyone else uses for the bog-standard business practices (ERP, HR and bank reconciliation?"

HR and payroll should be common with other businesses. Rented property management will have commercial packages available, even specialist social housing packages have been developed for housing associations. But managing electoral registers or bin collections isn't something that a regular business requirement.

"Gosh, if only there were other places who needed those!)."

There are. Other councils. That's why it makes sense to sponsor a modular local government administration system; modular because the various functions are distributed differently between different tiers in different parts of the country.

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Re: So whose bright idea was it in the first place?

"Delivery is quicker, but commonly the wrong thing gets delivered."

https://miro.medium.com/max/2800/0*K9vXpKMfe6hNQQnw.png

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Re: Why?

The only Oracle reaction would be "This will make money for us".

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Re: So, continuing the follow-up of the disaster

High pay is essential for a successful consultation.

The people at the bottom of the pile usually have a good idea of what's wrong and what needs to be done. But those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing will disregard such information - it can't be worth much because it comes from someone on a much lower pay scale.

Successful consultants aren't blinkered by this attitude. They ask those in a position to know best and present it to management with a high price tag on it. Because it cost a lot it must be worth a lot.

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, openSUSE to get better installation

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Re: Non-issue

And also providing there was nothing on the machine that you wanted to keep when you clicked "Use entire disk".

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"Installation remains a pain point for many Linux distros"

I think the pain point is largely that it asks the installer to make choices about partitioning. This is not an issue for an OS that just tramples anything on the boot drive even if the partitioning it sets up becomes a problem for later updates.

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Re: Not mentioned....but should be......

Likewise in Debian land, run any updates due on the current version, switch the distro name in /etc/apt, run another upgrade and reboot. I'd hope that this is now expected across Linux distros. Perhaps, to appease the "Oh, it's the command line" mouth-foamers perhaps there should be a GUI version (maybe there is somewhere but as CLI is often the far slicker way to do things I stick to that).

However there's always the need to install on new H/W or to replace Windows. And on the matter of Windows, which Liam raised in the article, I think there's a need for an installer that starts out from a PoV of "Oh dear, I see you've got Windows. Let's make space, install something better but let you keep your old data available." and automate that. If, as I suggested earlier, it could use Wine or virtualisation to run any installed Windows applications that weren't going to be replaced with Linux ones, so much the better.

Having said that SWMBO's laptop threw a H/W wobbly so I dragged out an old one of mine, W7 vintage, only to discover that the resident version of Debian was so old that its repositories were "archived" as were at least the next two succeeding ones. So that did involve a reinstall of Devuan.

Prompt engineering is a task best left to AI models

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So we need to models to produce prompts which themselves have to be prompted. It's prompts all the way down. Or is it models?

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

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Re: What the hell?

"a lot of skills/staff were lost"

No problem. Any manager or politician will tell you you can just order up some more when you need them.

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" Instead, it dropped into the ocean and sank."

Could have been worse. Could have fallen back on top of them.

Europe's data protection laws cut data storage by making information-wrangling pricier

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Re: Sounds good but ...

Criminal legislation tells you what not to do. What's needed is legislation that tells you what to do when you get something wrong, irrespective of whether it was deliberately, negligently or anywhere in between. Lack of that allows the gross foot-dragging we're seeing in operation there.

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Re: Law of unintended consequences

"Are you the same Dr Syntax that has collaborated with Elemental?"

You need to consult mine onlie begetter Thomas Rowlandson.

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Re: Handling extra costs

"but the good guys - still the majority hopefully"

I know you're thinking about businesses as a whole but you have to extend this to the people who work there. How far back do you have to go through el Reg articles to find a report of someone, possibly in public service roles who turned out not to be one of the good guys? If you collected this toxic waste on the basis that it's of value to the shareholders you'd better contain it very safely. If you don't then your shareholders should expect to be heavily penalised for your failure. At the very least they'll expect you to have insured against it and in turn your insurers will be weighting up the risk and charging you for it. Non-compliance shouldn't be a free ride.

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Re: Cloud Multipass proposal

"all the data they need for their advertising business"

There's another thing. If anyone wants me to view their advertising I'm prepared to do this provided I'm paid for my time which I price fairly high. There is, of course, very little likelihood that I'll but what they're advertising and a very considerable likelihood that I'd avoid it.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

Although it might appear unrelated I'd like to think that the Post Office scandal would be the trigger for something like a Cyber Harms Act.

The principle would be that any harm a mistake by an online system should be made good by the system operator in full and that would include ongoing harm during any delays, interest and any legal costs incurred by the victim in demanding satisfaction. In the event of bankruptcy the victims would be first in line with the possibility of chasing directors' personal wealth.

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Re: Law of unintended consequences

So you're saying the data subjects should bear the cost of the businesses careless losses of hoarded data?

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Don't forget the cost of not complying. The more data is held the more there is to lose in the case of a leak.

We should be well past the stage where the cost to the leaker is a year or five years or whatever of "monitoring" by some business which is itself a data hoarder. If the leaked data enables bank fraud the leaker should pay the losses. If every data subject has to spend hours or days rearranging their affairs they should be paid a fairly generous sum for their time doing that. If someone loses their house or their livelihood as a result of the leak that should also be made good. At present these costs are likely to fall on the data subject. They should fall on the leaker, together with any legal costs the data subject incurs in claiming them. In principle companies should be looking at the prospect of being wiped out by a leak. In practice they'd probably insure but the insurers would undoubtedly take a close look at the risks they were insuring and charge accordingly.

TL;DR PII should be regarded as potentially toxic waste. The more you hold the more you have to spend onf containment.

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Re: Cloud Multipass proposal

user-chosen *special provider* storages. Typically those would be Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft

I wouldn't trust any of them to be the digital me that this implies, no more than would I trust anyone else who offered themselves to play the same role.

London's famous BT Tower will become a hotel after £275M sale

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"used for corporate hospitality events for some years afterwards."

Also to celebrate allegedly successful sales projects - but only if you were on the manglement side. If you had to make it work when told about it the morning it was going live you were too late, the places had already been booked.

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Metres are straight, meters are round.

Oracle faces continued legal battle over alleged NetSuite software misrepresentations

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What a precedent this could set. Salesmen being held to their promises. Big vendors to deliver working software. It could be the end of civilisation as we know it.

Persistent memory to replace DRAM, but it could take a decade

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Re: Its gonna be hard to supplant DRAM

"People are often dazzled by the new shiny, but end of the day it takes something truly special for them to write the proverbial Big Check."

It depends. Down at our level, that's mostly true. At board level big shiny and expensive golf days, etc. win out.

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Works for USB

ChatGPT starts spouting nonsense in 'unexpected responses' shocker

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Somebody let manglement speak get into the training material.

The successor to Research Unix was Plan 9 from Bell Labs

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It's all in TMMM

It seems to have been the classic second system effect. Multics, of course, was the one you build to throw away,

Seriously, I think the reason Unix succeeded was that it was built simple so everything could be layered on top. The Unix design was and is flexible. By building stuff in that had previously been layered on top it would have become less flexible. Assumptions become limitations.

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"it makes Wayland look like it was invented by Microsoft."

It wasn't?

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"Eighth Edition Unix didn't have much industry impact, and little if anything drew significantly upon the Ninth and Tenth Editions!

The initial industry interest - and wider interest in general - grew out of the releases, primarily into academia, of the early versions. When AT&T were allowed to sell it as a product they set up a separate division that went its own way with System III (Was there a System I or II? I never encountered anything between &th ed & III myself) and later In FOSS parlance they forked it.

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Re: little to no _technical_ resemblance between them

" Likely some BSD + GNU would have replaced the commercial expensive Unixes for servers, routers, eink ereaders etc if Linux had never existed."

Alternatively SCO could have realised that it was competing with free but not, as yet, as good. If they had aimed for a mass market - cut the price for single use, provided a free student edition or whatever it's just possible we might all, and I'm not confining this to Linux, users, have been using Unix on the desktop now. Linux would have got the chance to become as good.

They released a developer's disk that was actually free, but I don't think it was available for long and was only licenced form 6 months' use. In practice that wasn't enforced so it was useful for anyone freelance supporting the paid for deployments. With a bit of prompting they got involved in the long running court case with Linux, took their eye off the ball and lost the SMB server market they'd dominated.

LockBit leaks expose nearly 200 affiliates and bespoke data-stealing malware

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Re: Warning

I was thinking the same thing. Why not set up some sort of honey trap to draw them further in. But then I wondered - maybe they've already been doing that for some time.

Microsoft retires Azure IoT Central retirement announcement

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You can't simply "present" an announcement in error. You have to write it first and that surely involves a bit of intention.

Orgs are having a major identity crisis while crims reap the rewards

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It requires a bit of thinking about what's an identity in terms of system access.

Phone numbers and email addresses are simply hopeful but uncertain means of communicating with a person. There's no guarantee that the person in control of either is the person you think it is. Phones can be lost or stolen, numbers swapped to other SIMs and the phone might also be the endpoint for email. Using either for TFA is less of a security feature than your bank or mine assumes.

Personal emails are re-used for all sorts of site that demand email as an identifier as well as means of communication. People being people they'll also reuse the password. The only place an email address makes sense as a login ID is the email account; even then it's best to have a number of addresses each feeding the mailbox which is the actual login ID.

Australian supercomputer 'Taingiwilta' comes online this year with [REDACTED] inside

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Re: So, publishing is more attractive, but you can't

It sounds as if she took the job and at the end of the first week they broke it to her that if she leaves she-ll be charged under the equivalent of the Official Secrets Act. Retirement might be a problem.

Vietnam to collect biometrics - even DNA - for new ID cards

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Re: Coming to a govt building near you

And people will still shout 'if you've nothing to hide...'

They should, of course, read the small print they clicked through when signing up for their online bank account, online retail accounts, social media accounts or whatever. They'll find that those accounts all require them to keep their access details confidential - in other words, hidden. Yes, they have stuff they're contractually obliged to hide.

Cops turn LockBit ransomware gang's countdown timers against them

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I was thinking more along the lines of "They don't like it up 'em, Mr Mainwaring, they don't like it up 'em".

Insider steals 79,000 email addresses at work to promote own business

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I think in your place I might have contact RM first. They're clearly the one's ultimately responsible for letting an employee walk off with the data. Assuming it was post GDPR they should also have reported themselves to the ICO.

Then I'd have told the new company that they had to report themselves to the ICO within the statutory72 hours.

And made clear that I'd report them both myself before the 72 hours were up so if they wanted to get in first to look good they'd better move.

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Apparently they "apologized sincerely" and the police confirmed that all data had been deleted.

To whom? Not, I'll be bound, to the 79,000 whose email addresses were nicked and, presumably, spammed.

So the only penalty was that they lost their job but as they had started a new business it may well have been that they had quit anyway. The best that can be hoped for is that, having proved themselves untrustworthy to do business with and probably pissed off 79,000 potential customer with spam the business fails.

Superapp Gojek fine-tunes each new error message for a week. What? Why?

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Facepalm

I wonder how often the same amount of effort devoted to extra coding or maybe a redesign could avoid having to display an erro message at all.

A visa to fill Australia's empty tech jobs is getting more expensive, but maybe better value

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"80 percent of applications arriving in an unfit state to be assessed"

Maybe that's part of the assessment.

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Re: Seems perfectly elementary to me :|

The window with the skip under it.

City of London ditches Oracle for SAP in search of ERP enlightenment

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Re: Stitch up

I wonder if putting "Must actually work" in the requirements might be considered illegal.

Chunks of deorbiting ESA satellite are expected to reach the ground

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Those one in 100 billion chances happen all the time.

British businesses told: Compliance with EU AI law will satisfy UK guidance

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Re: Hold your horses!

"There are already American websites that block people in the EU or the UK."

If it's not from the US it must be from some tinpot little commie place.

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Re: Hold your horses!

"We do need better options to vote for."

We most certainly do.

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Re: Hold your horses!

"Should the EU decide its a good idea to limit the power of a kettle"

Spot the straw man.

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Re: Hold your horses!

"Hardly post-Brexit UK being the master of its own destiny, rather just waiting and hoping that EU countries fumble the ball."

As carried out by the world leading ball fumblers.

Having written that it's just occurred to me that that might have been behind the whole thing. They're always going on about Britain being world leaders in whatever they realised that this was something in which they could really remonstrate they were world leaders.

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Re: Hold your horses!

"trumpet about how light touch the UK is (as if that were a good thing)"

Yes, that was the point of Brexit. More trumpeting than a brass band (apart from the fact the brass bands use cornets rather than trumpets).

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

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Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

"Now, can you repeat what I told you about this last week?" If they can have them make the effort to repeat it as exactly as possible. If they can't, you have the excuse to give them the explanation and make them repeat it back to you and to make it clear that you'll ask them to repeat it next time. The effort they have to make will help them to retain it.

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Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

I receive contact messages from a website emailed to me by the admin of the site's server. As the reply-to address is that given by the enquirer I can just reply. At the weekend I had a reply bounded with a message which said, translated into English, you'll have to play guessing games to try to work out what went wrong. The guesses are either that outlook.com is not a domain they recognise, they'll only accept emails that reply to an address previously used for an outgoing email or that the different from/reply-to addresses confuse it in which case it's either going to be even more puzzled by an email from my own domain or there's nothing much I can do about it.. Either way my view is that if the enquirer wants to use an Ionos hosted email system it's her problem.

Dell staff not alone in being squeezed to reduce remote work

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That's an ex[expectation that needs to go. Huge cities as centres of employment dependent on long commutes are unsustainable dinosaurs. They need to be dealt with by converting some of the property to housing so those who want to live and work in a city can do so and, instead of building more homes on former business premises (AKA brownfield sites) in the surrounding areas, refurbish or rebuild those sites as business premises reachable without long commutes. It's not likely to happen without costs but, because of the unsustainably, given that it's a case of when, not if, those costs are going to have to be incurred sometime. It's arguable that it's the role of government to take the lead in that.

How to weaponize LLMs to auto-hijack websites

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Maybe it tells us something about how the LLMs get their training material.

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