Re: if programmed correctly, mean that a straightforward update will do the trick
Even better if the customer could be heavily charged for this change of course!
3751 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
You've misunderstood my exasperation about the state of most scheduling systems.
For example where an event starts at 22:00 one day and finishes at 04:00 the following day, the duration is normally considered to be 6 hours, and therefore billable as such. However when an event such as this occurs over the clock change over period the actual duration can be 5 hours (spring) or 7 hours (autumn). Calculating the correct time duration is one thing given the start and end date/times, setting the correct end point as a result of a desired number of hours (for example 6 hours of care) is another.
Luckily nothing I ever had to include in the system crossed time zones, just daylight saving time transitions. As long as event started and finished within the same time zone it would have worked. Where it would (probably) have failed is where the time zone changed between the start and finish times.
Ah yes "focused inbox" or the "randomly hide important emails for no even remotely logical or discernable reason" option. I wonder if it's possible to disable this option (Group Policy) however the retarded thing is set by default therefore I suspect that Microsoft's marketing droids will have blocked any attempt at sense. Again.
That's OK if you don't care about time scheduling. About 25 years ago I was writing scheduling software that had to take into account daylight savings time changes and accurately account for the hours in the schedule. It did this through asking the Operating System the real time (UTC) for the given time and using this to work out the duration of scheduled events. I suspect that it would probably fuck up royally with different time zones but it worked very well for what it was needed for (and no competitor systems could cope at all, many required tedious manual adjustments twice a year).
It would be OK if the shoddy US developers noticed that the rest of the world used a different size.
It was only a couple of years ago that Microsoft word stopped fucking up the margin sizes in documents by insisting on storing them in antiquated obsolete measure units and doing a conversion time. It was annoying AF setting a margin or spacing to something like 0.15cm only to find it changing to 0.14 or 0.16 when checking back on it. Something like that anyway...
A rather impressively large number of naval military ships were reconditioned spoils of war. After they were checked for improvements worthy of copying, captured ships were typically just patched up and given a new flag. I understand that some ships were lucky(?) enough to change nations quite a large number of times!
I'd be happy if the incompetent US coders actually understood that most of the world is NOT North American and has a different date format and uses standard measurement units and not antiquated Imperial measurements that are currently only used by three backwards regimes in the world.
Showing information in different formats suitable for the target audience is not difficult and not doing smacks of gross incompetence and laziness. Sometimes it's easy to spot that, for example, we are not currently the 3rd day of the 16th month of the year, however other times it's annoying to have to do the mental gymnastics to have to guess whether or not I'm looking at the real date or an incompetent North American developer's output of the date. It was only thirty fucking years ago that it was agreed that if one must display dates in a localised form, it's best to use day number and month name because that's at least translatable compared to two arbitrary numbers.
Thirty years later, I sign into Microsoft 365 admin centre and all the formatting is in American and not English format. As a result, it's very easy to mis-read the mangled dates as something else. Apparently this bullshit is "progress".
/grumpy... just don't get me started on the fact that 12:00am and 12:00pm categorically DO NOT EXIST. The solution to this was created over 100 fucking years ago.
Yep. The world of computing is plagued by shoddy, incompetent and lazy programmers.
I think I first saw this in action in person when the government changed the VAT rate and lots of really shitly designed software promptly crapped itself because it was hard coded. Followed by far too many shit updates to the same software which did nothing more than change the hard coding rather than actually implement it as a time sensitive value.
This was a different failure to Y2K which was about data encoding rather than solely about stupid short-sighted assumptions.
It keeps us in work though...
Seeing as a developer at Microsoft had to write the code, that the developer was going to have been instructed to write the code, that a planning session or hundred would have been had to plan the functionality, that the infrastructure to host and control the adverts would have to be built, deployed and scaled...
It's neither accidental nor experimental. It's just yet more belligerence from Microsoft and in treating customers, mostly paying customers, as cash cows and people to force advertising on.
It's a weird one. Comms cables, such as the usual telephone wiring between a local street box and a house are only going to instantly melt due to a lightning strike. A direct strike to a property's telephone connection isn't going to do much in reverse either other than a very quick destruction of a relatively small amount of the wiring. It's the "near" strikes that are probably the most damaging for equipment.
I remember when young that we always had to unplug the telephone from the house aerial if there was a storm. These days I'm not sure why... a lightning strike that's just travelled 2 miles through air really isn't going to give a shit if the the 50cm between the aerial socket and the TV has a coax cable connected or not... it's fireworks regardless.
I remember a site install we had where the idiot installers couldn't be bothered to employ even a modicum of brain power and terminated all the cat5 cables however they felt like. Different on every fucking socket.
When challenged on this they responded "it wasn't their job" and "did it matter" and "well we didn't have the cable pin outs". The immediate response was "would you just do that for an electrical cable as well"?
However having gone into these sites it's apparent that sometimes they probable did do that for the electrical cables as well...
I suspect that a lot of these kind of sites suffer from the same old problem of just doing more of something that's not working rather than understand why it's not working.
Revenue from ads dropping? Easy! Put more ads on the page. Revenue from ads is still dropping? Aha! Put more ads on the page... and repeat.
In the end we wind up with a site where about the only appreciable non-advert content on the page is the website name and logo at the top of the page, and good luck finding something that isn't an advert or just spam click-bait link "articles".
Unfortunately having a written constitution didn't stop the great (not great at all) orange monkey making a mockery of due process and the US's twisted ideal of democracy.
One of the few checks and balances against the UK government was the high court, which the current UK government is desperately trying to make as irrelevant as possible. They wouldn't want to be accountable to their actions after all...
That's entirely accurate and scary.
The slightly insane thing is that there was nothing really stopping a 32 bit OS from using more than 4GB RAM, nor realistically any single application either (the limit is 4GB contiguous block of RAM).
Easier to just support a larger addressable space without messing around, however this was very common in early MS/PC systems with the "fun" of EMS/XMS memory management.
The biggest positive change I think was breaking the Windows-land user and developer assumption of having admin rights at all time.A principle that the dumb developers within Microsoft often break. Install Windows from scratch, congratulations you must assign a user who will be given administrator access by default. Install Microsoft SQL server and where are the data files stored by default? In the Program Files tree of course, which by Microsoft's own guidance should only ever be written to by an account with software installation rights and definitely never used for data or configuration. It was this last point that often caught out incompetent developers and why they usually stated "must have administrator rights to local system" because data files, log files and so on were incorrectly written into an area of the file system that should only ever be read-only. After all, it's only been in the Windows API since about 1995 to ask for and be provided with a suitable data path (1995-ish, mangled by the horrors of Microsoft insisting that Internet Explorer as part of the Operating System to try and justify them abusing their monopoly position with it).
Vista typically came with to much junk pre-configured: utterly pointless widgets that just drained CPU cycles for no benefit whatsoever and a really, really inefficient File system interface (explorer) that it was often just unusable. Add in the metric ton of crap that many vendors shovelled onto systems and combine this with pathetically specified systems and Vista was something to avoid.
Windows 8 was definitely not a "good operating system" (article) - the driver model was half broken and the user interface was "designed" by a muppet who looked at a book on good user interface design principles and chose to ignore every single point in the book. From mystery meat navigation, to incomprehensible icons through ridiculously inconsistent interfaces and the utterly blinkered stupidity of trying to make a tablet user interface the only user interface for a desktop PC or laptop. In the end the interface was usable for no systems.
Taking back control from the impending transparency and oversight and thoroughly burying it. It's called Levelling Up. It's got nothing to do with you or I, other than being further sources of income for our ruling classes such as the Minister for the 17th Century, Ree-Smogg.
But brexiteers are choosers... they choose rhetoric, division and lies and then to close their eyes and pretend that their perfect sun-blessed future with an oven ready deal negotiated by the amazing UK negotiator and signed by the same is utterly perfect and the only problem is the evil EU is insisting that the UK implement the terms that the UK agreed to is naturally a problem with the EU and not the incompetent narcissists that currently masquerade as the UK government cabinet and ministers.
This is entirely true, but only if taken to the correct end point.
We should make vehicle ownership and operation so expensive that only the ruling classes can afford them. This way all the plebs, as in everyone who is not a member of the ruling classes, won't be able to afford them to commit robberies.
This will produce yet more steady "improvements" which require any hapless game player to have a Microsoft Account, subscribe to whatever bullshit "Microsoft XBox Zune Gaming Bar Interface (TM)" foists on all unlucky users and so on. Essentially, a long term play to ensure subscribers, no matter how they are generated. If in the meantime the games as developed and sold make a profit, that's good, and promote Windows, that's better, but it's the continual subscription fees that Microsoft are after.
Did Activision Blizzard have any Linux support pending? This will quietly disappear soon enough...
It's more likely that Microsoft's cunning plan would be to force install it into every copy of Windows 10 & 11, particularly the "professional" and "workstation" versions (which naturally need games), with administrators forced to "opt out" of this through obscure PowerShell commands that previously stopped working due to other Windows Updates, requiring that an administrator spend countless hours working around Microsoft's instructions on how to use Microsoft's commands in yet another custom Microsoft PowerShell library. Ideally the PowerShell commands will be as badly written as possible to ensure that scripting them is near impossible and the PowerShell library will feel like abandonware as soon as Microsoft coughed it out.
In parallel Microsoft would promote it mercilessly within Windows itself, because that's what the OS is there for. The game will be free at first and then switched to a monthly subscription mode afterwards, linked to Microsoft 365 accounts. The activation of this subscription will be at the end user's discretion and not any administrators and to prevent end users subscribing to this "service", administrators will have to "opt out" of this through obscure PowerShell commands that previously stopped working due to other Windows Updates, requiring that an administrator spend countless hours working around Microsoft's instructions on how to use Microsoft's commands in yet another custom Microsoft PowerShell library. The subscription will be something entirely "reasonable" like £2.99 per user per month.
Please look into things in more detail before coming up with stuff.
Do you think for a second that development of something like this will only use technology that was present in 1996? These things are designed by real, solid engineers and designed to be as flexible and accepting of new technology as late into the process as possible. These are the kind of engineers that don't design something to fail in three years, they design something that in three years it will as far as they possibly can be sure, it will still be working. This is the difference and why Mars rovers are still trundling around while your iPhone crapped itself 30ms after the warranty expiry.
Also consider that the imaging sensors that were put into orbit 20 years ago are so advanced and so specialised that they will put anything that you may consider current to absolute shame. Also whatever is put up now is so far ahead of what was previously up there that the difference is, well astronomical.
Would it be good to have really easy launch and recovery technologies where rapid prototyping and even early failure is an easily recoverable option? Quite likely, however that's unlikely to happen for a long time and while things are moving that way, solid engineering that lasts is still the mainstay of sustainable and long term science.
Amiga HAM mode was more limited because only one of the colour components could be changed at a time meaning that horizontally different sections of an image take up to three pixels to transition from one colour to the other. The fringe effect was quite obvious but often obscured when used with a cheap display which created fringe effects anyway...
I understand the efficiency of filename file type encoding compared to file type identification codes at the beginning of a file. With filename file type encoding, as in file extensions, the claimed file type of a file is in the directory index and very quick and efficient to separate out. Where file type identification codes are the only method of deriving a file's claimed type, the first few bytes of every file has to be read in addition to the file directory index. This is considerably slower than just parsing a directory index. The file type identification codes also have to be managed in a largely consistent manner because otherwise they would be duplicated - not that this wasn't a problem with file extensions but it's slightly less obvious to the user that there is a file type ID clash.
While it's not impossible to have a file system where the file identification bytes are included in the directory index this introduces a fair bit of extra overhead and this was at a time when a floppy disk was pretty much cutting edge storage technology - neither fast nor high capacity and any bytes saved was a good thing. [I'm aware of the irony of this given how wasteful the DOS floppy disk format was by way of usable storage space compared to capacity, e.g. 0.72/1 and 1.44/2]
Filtering on file types was not something that was useful only for an icon based interface either as a text based interface that would list only compatible file types is much more useful than one where you only know that the file you are trying to open was an image file and not a document when you try to open it. Naturally, this can happen anyway when it comes to changing file extensions, and I know of far too many apparently tech literate people who have tried to changed a file type simply by changing the file extension... /sigh
From those that don't remember this - the Sony rootkit was awful in another way too: It was very easy for other malware to piggy back on the Sony rootkit implementation and be hidden as well. Pure "genius"... firstly for the root kit and then to have it implemented in such as way that other malware could use it.
They do look similar but an RJ11 socket is smaller than an RJ45 and it would take a bit of a feat of stupidity or brute ignorance to somehow shove an RJ45 ethernet cable into an RJ11 socket.
If he happened to have an RJ11 cable and plugged one end into the phone socket and the other into the slightly larger RJ45 socket on his phone then that would be much easier. Although the RJ11 cable would be obviously too small for the RJ45 socket, however users...
USB-A plugs fit just perfectly into RJ45 sockets of course...
It was called Outlook Express and it may as well have been specifically designed to be a virus propagation platform.
It didn't auto-run executables, however it was a trivial process to cause it to execute pretty much anything. Usually without letting the user know. Combine this with Microsoft's brain dead insistence that nobody really needed to know what the real file extension of a file is (hiding file extensions is one Microsoft's most stupid general UI things to date) and you could have a safe looking file which was an .exe which presented the icon of an image (extracted from the file itself) which was really "xmas.jpg.exe" but shown to the user as "xmas.jpg" with an image icon.
It was replaced by Windows Mail which really wasn't much better in many ways (an absolute horror to use and failed to work with many SMTP implementations until they were hacked up to "support" Windows Mail's broken interpretation of standards and special Microsoft extras. It also feels like some of the really crap rendering and editing code from Outlook Express was moved into Outlook...
The also accidentally left in a couple of spurious words that should not have been there and the intern who typed them has been fired:
The two nations want a regime that "promotes and advances interoperability between different data protection frameworks, facilitating cross-border data flows while maintaining high standards of dataprotection and trust."