Microsoft browser history, anyone?
<search> Firefox/Chromium download
<download>Firefox/Chromium
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Isn't that the traditional MS browser history? Or have things changed?
6222 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Apr 2007
No, and yet the whole of project management still teaches that horrendous completely subjective risk matrix.
Have you ever seen anyone sit down and look at that matrix, and instead of 'low, medium, high' actually talk to an actuary and plug some real probabilities in? Do they talk to the financial officers and get an accurate cost to recover from a particular event? I suspect not (and back in the day when I was a PM I was as guilty as the rest: if it's got some green bits and some yellow bits it's probably gonna be ok).
And Trabis...
I once watched a little drama from the window of the BBC office in Savignyplatz in Berlin. A cold winter's day, with maybe six inches of snow standing on the cars parked at the side of the road.
A Jag is parked behind a Trabi. Mr and Mrs Jag plib their car, get in... chug chug chug chug. Mr Jag gets out, looks at the bonnet, gets in again. Chug chug chug chug. Mr Jag gets out again, opens the bonnet, looks inside, closes the bonnet, gets in. Chug chug chug chuuug...
Meanwhile, Mr Trabi comes along, sweeps the snow off the roof with his arm, gets in the Trabi. Chug, plub, bluppa bluppa bluppa.
Mr Jag leaps out of his car, walks to Mr Trabi's window, gets his wallet out, and starts counting out d-marks. After a while, Mr Trabi holds his hand up, collects the d-marks, gets out of the car and starts walking away.
Mrs Jag, with an expression of extreme distaste, gets into the Trabi along with Mr Jag and bluppa bluppa bluppa off they go...
Never did find out what happened to the Jag. It wasn't there a couple of days later.
When I first visited Berlin - just after the wall came down - I was told a joke:
A comrade visits the ministry, and says he has saved enough Ostmarks to buy a Trabi, and can he get his name on the list, please.
Certainly, says the official, but it will take ten years.
Ok, says the comrade, but morning or afternoon?
What do you care? It's ten years away!
Ah, says our hero, but in the morning, the plumber is coming.
Yes. Someone 'important' dies, step one is to get the news out. Having a prepackaged item ready to play out, and a well-defined process of notification, means you can get something on air quickly while the newsroom is still running around like a headless chicken. Updating an obit is just a matter of adding the last few months on the end, and maybe cutting some of the earlier stuff out if it's no longer relevant.
That's an easy one. Harder ones have included, after September 11, 'what happens if someone crashes a jumbo jet onto Buckingham Palace during the opening of the Olympic Games' (yes, I did consider the process there) and 'what happens if a sub-dinosaur-killer rock drops onto London?' (yes, the BBC will continue to broadcast).
I recall assisting with the creation of Phillip's obituary in 1978, and at regular occasions thereafter - it was a common news studio downtime activity, updating obituaries.
As AC says above: the BBC has rules for what happens in the event of a death in the Royal Family - whether you voted for 'em or not.
But surely with an automated electric car, every event which is considered out of the normal, every running out of volts, every failure properly to identify an object in the road... is noted, analysed, and all use of similar vehicles halted if the event is severe enough until and unless it is fixed?
What? It isn't? Why not?
With delight I just purchased a bottom-of-the-range car... the only driver assist toys it comes with are ABS and a thing that goes beep if you get too close to something while reversing.
It occurs to me that in forty years of driving I have never had the ABS come on. I wonder if it works?
One (i.e. the BBC) could still limit content based on geolocation simply by blanking - ideally with some sort of explanatory message.
I was heavily involved with iPlayer - the predecessor to Sounds (stupid name) - and know far too much about geographical rights issues. I worked for the Corporation for over thirty years. But just about anything on e.g. the news site is (c) BBC and can be shown anywhere.
Bah, geolocation. I hate it.
So I'm in Berlin, and I'm trying to look at the UK website of a company which also has a DE website. And the website looks at my IP address, says aha, that's a German location, and promptly serves up the German website instead.
Is it really so difficult to assume that if someone types .co.uk at the end of a URL, that's where they're actually trying to go?
(And don't get me started on the BBC - I typed .co.uk, not .com...)
With all sympathy for your friends, this is a classic case of arguing for the outliers by emotion (in perhaps the same way so much new legislation proposes 'think of the children!')
For every heart attack or stroke in charge of a vehicle, there must be millions of miles driven where this does not occur. For every person killed in a vehicle accident, again, millions aren't.
In the UK, in 2019 (latest stats I could easily find), there were 1752 fatalities in road accidents and ~150k serious injuries. At the same time, there were 74.6k deaths directly attributed to smoking with half a million hospital admissions - both these from a population of around 70 million. The top two causes of death in the UK were Alzheimer's and dementia - diseases of old age.
The rate of fatalities in road accidents was calculated as a shade under 5 per billion vehicle miles... I averaged 30k a year before I retired, so perhaps one and a quarter million miles. The diabetes is likely to get me a long time before driving does.
If the aim here is to reduce deaths, ban smoking (and I note that the UK is a fairly non-smoking country, compared world wide). If the aim is to sell expensive cars, at least be honest about it.
I would put my hand up. Largely because Word tries hard to be all things to all people - ignoring the changes in UI over the year, it just does too damn much. If you don't use all the features all the time, how can you expect to remember them? In the thirty or forty years I've used it, I have never been trained on it; it has always been assumed that I already knew how to use it...
I recall a time when engineers wrote documents and secretaries typed them up, sorted out the formatting (and on occasion spelling or grammar), but some time in the eighties I guess some management training school worked out that it made so much more sense for the people who were on the computer keyboard anyway to do things *at which most of them were not skilled* and did away with the concept of secretary.
One might argue with Fader above though: I think I would prefer to see a word processor which does away with the majority of Word's functionality - in particular, character by character formatting - and requires that styles be used throughout. When I write a book, I use LyX/Latex...
From the depths of my own life, from a time at which I was a project manager... the program manager had a word document he wanted me to 'just tidy up a bit'. It was about a thousand pages long, full of rather dense technical prose, supporting diagrams, plans, examples; you know the kind of thing.
Oh, and there were about thirty of it. One for each site where we were doing the essentially similar work - that is, similar in a 'replace this group of circuits with that group of circuits' but each one had different details, dates, and so on, as might be expected.
And every single never to be sufficiently damned page had every paragraph formatted differently, and every format was with character formats... whoever wrote them had obviously never heard of styles.
It is not a time I remember with delight - though I do recall that when we got down to actually doing the job, we had a single instance of unplanned downtime across the whole country, caused because someone had threaded a cable in such a way that we could not remove the hardware without disconnecting it - so thirty seconds or so.
but I can really see this working well... no, wait... no, it'll work almost as well as the grammar. It will assume that people didn't mean what they typed, and try and dress it in the latest flavour of fashionable newspeak.
Suggesting alternative spelling for words it thinks are misspelt is fine, provided there is no auto insertion of corrections (look at the amusement that can be had with autocorrect on a phone, for examples) - but that is where it should stop. No machine should *ever* replace what the operator writes...
If you, as a company, have a problem with the way your employees communicate, the issue is one of education, not of farming the problem out to software.
/rant