Posts by Mephistro 2329 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2007
"Which languages do you know in which third person plural is gendered?"
Spanish*, and most latin-derived languages. But the real issue here is, as you said, lack of context.
I don't envy the job of the boffins that have to fix this. Just thinking about this for ten minutes makes my BRAIN HURT!
8^)
I've suffered several cases of clients that think "They Know Better" and wouldn't pay any attention to any explanation I could provide, and they would also fight every method I suggested to fix the issue*. Like it or not, there's people out there who don't want to learn.
And let's not forget the ones that are too stupid to learn any user-level IT. I've suffered a few of those as well.
Note *:This makes me wonder why the eff these customers don't just fix the issue themselves instead of wasting their money hiring an IT guy.**
Note **: Anecdotally, I've seen often customers in these categories trying to fix their computers by themselves, with predictably comical results.
Disclaimer: Replying to myself.
Related anecdote:
A few months ago I was charged with the job of making a big photocopier 'safe' due to GDPR worries. The administrator's manual had two parts.
The first one consisted mainly in a rewording of the device's "on screen menu " options. E.G., the "Manage IP settings" in the menu got explained to us mere mortalsadministrators as "Here you can change the IP settings."(Gee! Who would have thought!), and showing a helpful screen capture of the options. No mention of accepted input formats, notation, or even troubleshooting, No workflows -apart from the most basic ones, no examples. It wasn't even accurate, as the printer had undergone several firmware updates. Technical forums were full of comments by very frustrated users.
The second part included the workings of the drivers and the configuration utility that accompanied them. The machine was made in 2009 and the last manual version was from that same year, although the drivers had gone through so many updates that the contents of the administrator's manual and reality had diverged big time, in most possible ways, over that period.
I literally "cut my own throat" here, seriously. The alternative would have been to tell my -loyal, nice, - customer to either replace the very expensive copier purchased just 9 years ago and still physically in mint condition or paying me a third of the cost of a new unit for my work. :^(
I still find hard to believe that I managed to fix that shebang!
On the other hand I had the moral satisfaction of telling the customer to please never ever buy another product from the -big name- company that had made the photocopier.
I'm not a photocopier specialist and can't know for sure, but I'm afraid that I'll find this same crap in lots of other 'copier brands and models. Sigh.
Sorry for the steam venting. :^)
And also the issue of writing manuals/documentation, a job position that nowadays seems reserved for interns and low wage employees with absolute zero knowledge of the system, or squeezed by the manglement till their last drop of blood, or even been taken behind the shed and quietly executed with a flamethrower, and their functions transferred to some forum in the Internets, usually run by a combination of volunteers and people who writes funny. The execs are happy with their bonuses, their perceived savings, the lower headcount, the squeezing of IT workers till the last drop of blood, and their replacing with interns.
Ahhh, so much fun!
And there are also those who want to be informed of the options and make their own informed decision. And don't forget that one of the options is to swap the battery for a new one!!!
And regarding the OP comment "...or one that renders Y frames per second of your favorite video game?...":
Or one that is able to retouch photos, access a banking app or read mail* before the heat death of the Universe.
Note*: among many other similar activities.
... I was told by one of the execs to familiarize myself with a PC running THEOS/OASIS that was to be installed the next day at a customer's. I proceeded to test the software by inputting some fake data, generating queries and reports and all that carp.
When I finished doing this, I decided to wipe all the data I created by using an "Initialize" option in the menu. To my indescribable horror, it wiped out all the data, the software and most of the OS.
After twenty minutes of panic, cold sweats and frantic reading of the manuals, I found there was an option to undo the last initialization.
Lesson learned: RTFM before playing with a system you aren't familiar with! 8^)
... that were slaves, and other ancestors that were slave masters.
And bad things in history won't be prevented from happening again just by censoring the words that describe them. It's probably the other way round!
And applying one of these words to elements of software or hardware is just a convenient way to describe the relationship between said elements. You can't offend an effing hard disk drive!
Politically correct language has morphed into a tool for some fuckwits to gain an illusion of popularity or power, at the cost of breaking language, one of the most important tools we humans have.
This is criminally stupid.
I was thinking of RAID boxes with their own SATA controller for for its own disks and an external SATA link with the host system. For that specific use case it would make sense, I think. I've never worked with such systems, but I remember reading about them and they sounded nice and not as expensive as SAS.
Other four guys and me were "hired" as IT "interns" in a medium sized company. The company's owner wanted to start an IT dept. and develop it's own software on the cheap. We were given access to a Pick multi-user system that used serial VT-100 compatible terminals, and left alone with it for a week, to 'learn the ropes' including both the OS and the programming language (Something called "DataBasic", which was, in short, a dialect of BASIC with some embedded SQL-like capacities).
The first thing that happened was that the intern sitting in the console nearest to the server thought it would be funny to disconnect the serial cables of other users at random intervals. It took the rest of us two frustrating hours or so to discover the trick, using a communications log file kept by the server.
That day, when leaving, I grabbed one of the system's manuals and took it home with me. Thanks to said manual I learned that the system allowed sending messages from one terminal to another, that said messages could use extended attributes (text colour, text width, any ASCII characters, etc.) and that such messages could be automated using the DataBasic language.
So the next day I made a very short and simple program that at intervals would send to the fucker practical joker's terminal one of the following:
- A backspace once per minute.
- A carriage return once every three minutes.
- A clear screen once every five minutes.
- A disconnect control sequence every 10 minutes.
The first three sequences weren't recorded in any log, but I added some randomness to the fourth, as not to make the trick too obvious. I also sent all the messages using black text on a black background, so the victim couldn't see the messages.
The poor sod spent all the day swearing aloud while trying to troubleshoot his "technical issues" and later staring suspiciously at us for growing periods of time. 8^)
Miraculously, the next day, the issue "vanished by itself", which left the joker even more baffled.
Needles to say, the guy never tried one of his jokes on us again!.
I was one of the down-voters, and I've already corrected that. In my defense I'll say that the last time I watched the film was ~15 years ago. Time for a rerun, I guess.
And regarding "The crowd 'round here just gets burning mad.":
Yeah, but I reckon that's quite a normal reaction to things like this. I'm afraid we don't yet know all the consequences of this, and none of said consequences will be good.
If G-Aphabet-etc. keeps doing this kind of shit, how long until European regulators start treating it as a criminal racket? It would make lots of sense. And, even if that's not the case, G 'absorbing' the fines will surely promote changes in the law to raise the fines -to stratospheric levels- for repeat offenders.
They may get away with it for a while, but in the end the future doesn't look too rosy for G.
Good... good...
“artificial-intelligence-enabled global surveillance” for missile targeting and tracking
Someone should inform these muppets of that "minor incident"* where errors/design blunders in automated systems almost caused a nuclear war, where it not for the intervention of humans. AIs are just a kind of automated systems we can't fully understand or debug. What could possibly go wrong?
*note: Actually, one of many such incidents.
I strongly doubt that the Chinese Government needs any external help to stain its own reputation. It's one of those "marvellous places" where you can be imprisoned for publicly disagreeing with "the State"*, FFS!
*note: e.g. Ai Wei Wei, or many other people in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_dissidents
Hugs, winks and pats in the back? I'd expect much more from professionals charging 1200 USD per a day's work. At the very least, a happy ending should be guaranteed!
And for this price, they should have a good backup plan in place for "those days of the lunar month"!
"...selling lookalike political audiences to advertisers during the regulated period [...] users should be given a way to opt out of being included in such groups."
In my opinion, it should be exclusively "opt in". Social media firms could still milk the -too high- percentage of their users who love to be mislead and misinformed! 8^(
As other fellow commentards have already pointed out, a better education with special emphasis in critical thinking and a healthy degree of distrust of media sources and social media would get rid of most of these issues. Sadly, it'll probably never happen, as governments want their subjects docile. 8^(
"Well thank you to the four selfish types who wish to deny me an easy road to..."
Now it's FIVE selfish types, counting myself!
Reason: A monopolistic OS that is very insecure and very difficult/impossible to make secure by design!!!...
... hoisted upon us by Google with the invaluable support of people like you, who "Want Something That Just Works" at any cost. Even if that something often doesn't work!!!
Edit: SIX selfish types now! 8^)
"...the Justice Department is not a fan of the common man having access to encryption."
How the fuck do these morons expect to keep the "common man" safe in the Internets without allowing "him" to use encryption?
Blowing and sucking the straw simultaneously is logically and physically impossible!
... while I was having my breakfast -espresso coffee + pincho de tortilla - at a local bar, a guy dressed in a blue jumpsuit entered the place carrying an orange plastic case. He looked around and left the case in an empty corner of the bar. The barman, who knew him, asked what was in the orange case, and the guy explained it was a radioactive source used for inspecting pipes. He wasn't allowed to leave it alone in his van, so he had to carry it everywhere.
For a few seconds, the only sound in the place was that of chairs inching away from the aforementioned corner. 8^)
Smart vacuum cleaner? That's good, but not good enough. Right now I'm developing an interface for automatic milking machines that will blow your... minds!.
It even includes a security mechanism that stops the process after five litres have been extracted!.
Yes, I remember reading about that in the Spanish version of the French science magazine La Recherche, three decades or so ago.
One of the experiments consisted in placing a human with a pendulum inside a weak DC circuit. Whenever the polarity was inverted, the pendulum inverted the direction of it's movement, i.e. from clockwise to counter-clockwise or vice versa. The phenomenon was attributed to ferromagnetic nodules in vertebrates' articulations, and the experiments suggested that they had enough sensibility to detect very small variations in intensity.
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