Posts by hitmouse 521 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Dec 2008
I read the 38pp complaint from the plaintiff (who has a $120/yr Office Business Premium account*) and cannot find anywhere where it says this happens, just that it is "alleged more specifically below" and "below" never comes.
* "Plaintiff Davenport is investigating replacing its [$120/yr] Microsoft subscription with a"different solution, a transition that would require significant time and money. " and is looking for $5million.
In some areas, you get an automated letter from the department of revenue or "debt recovery" and there is no human you can talk to other than going to court. It enables the government to reap in money in installments just under the level at which someone can take time off work to go to court to get it back. My solicitor calls it legislated corruption,
"The real cruelty of all of this is that lockdowns, social distancing, masks, forced shutdowns of business, stay at home orders, and all of that stuff, does not actually save anyone from coronavirus. It merely delays the deaths."
Wrong. More people die who would otherwise have had an opportunity to be shielded by a vaccine. Also more people die due to complications with existing conditions or because medical responders cannot attend to them in time due to lack of equipment, over-stretched hospitals, and staff who have died from the disease.
Sweden didn't get it right. They have a massively increased death rate compared to their neighbouring states, and didn't manage to lift herd immunity noticeably.
The extra deaths and economic side-effects in the USA are because the pandemic exposed the basic cruelties and inequities in its economy and social services. Look at countries like Australia and New Zealand where the #deaths nationally approximates the numbers in a single building in the United States, and where rapid consensus between national and state leaders of opposing parties made rescue packages possible.
Look at countries sharing land borders with China (Vietnam, Mongolia) where the disease effect of the virus is vanishingly small.
It already does, and most of the settings that people here bitch about have always been easily configurable in Word's quite detailed proofing settings section. Options for spacing are "don't check, one space, two spaces".
Oxford comma also configurable. Chances are if your language settings are not English(US) then you will get what you are used to.
You set your spacing preference yourself in the same Word Proofing settings that have been around for decades. I just checked and see my options for spacing are "don't check, one space, two spaces". My preference is "don't check".
I presume all the IT professionals here know how to do this. Assuming they aren't the ones who've set up Office/Word with the wrong language & proofing defaults.
It would depend on your Word settings for Grammar & Refinements (or Grammar & Style) as it was previously known. There is a checkbox for Oxford commas which is possibly connected to your language default (EN-US, EN-UK etc)
Many of the settings have been around since Word for Windows 1.0 nearly 30 years ago (when I started using it) - and labelled as Style rather than Grammar settings. Hasn't stopped endless opinion pieces on Microsoft's grammar rules.
The Bedlam DL3 email storm of 1997 did actually have an impact on mail server design. See Wikipedia and various first person accounts on the web,
There was another MS-related email storm last week when 3000 customers were sent an invite to an online webinar and instructed to reply-all. Cue hundreds of IT professionals sending "Unsubscribe" messages that added to the storm. Not a single one noticed that they had received N-1 unsubscribe requests that were the essence of the storm.
I certainly contend that Asterix in Britain is funnier in the English version. Goscinny credited Anthea Bell with some better jokes according to her obituary: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/18/anthea-bell-obituary
For me the translation of Idéfix to Dogmatix is exquisite.
There's a great very translator-geeky appreciation of the English translations here: https://auntymuriel.com/2012/12/23/asterix-in-translation-the-genius-of-anthea-bell-and-derek-hockridge/
I started collecting the books when I was about 11. My father used to pinch them and my Tintin books on a regular basis. He probably read them all far more times than me.
I remember as a teen wanting to learn French "to read Asterix in the original".
I've been enjoying the recent efforts from Didier and Conrad much more than Uderzo's solo outings. As much as he was a genius visually, his own stories kinda jumped the shark in a manner I can only compare to late-stage Heinlein.
I shudder to think what the new American-translations of the back-catalogue will be like. Previous American reworkings found their way into Australian Sunday newspaper comics back in the day, and were completely devoid of all the cultural references and subtle humour found in the superb translations of Anthea Bell (d.2018) and Derek Hockridge (d. 2013) who sometimes made the translated versions funnier than the original. That these translators' names roll out of my memory and no others do is testament to their virtuoso efforts.
Snip & Sketch (connected to Win+PrtScr) has been intermittently broken across all my devices (all different manufacturers and video drivers) for months and now seems uniformly borked everywhere. I've reset it , reinstalled it, but it just refuses to capture anything. Thank goodness the old Snipping Tool hasn't been permanently removed yet.
They're aiming for parity with GMail which insists on labelling many of my subcriptions as spam despite having the sender in my address, explicit rules saying that they are never to be labelled as spam, and finally, clicking "Not spam" on each item for months, if not years.
I'm not alone in this, read comments at:
* https://www.jotform.com/help/404-How-to-Prevent-Emails-from-Landing-in-Gmail-s-Spam-Folder
* https://www.askvg.com/fix-gmail-marks-your-important-emails-as-spam/
This production had its flaws but I'm not worried by the content updates, which in some ways draw on Wells personal life.
Wells' writing was informed by the social issues of his times e.g. WotW by the genocide of the Tasmanian aborigines. I'm sure he would have received plenty of 1/10 reviews headed "PC snowflake" crap if the book came out now.
In order to remake something with the same sensibility as the original you need to update the social touchpoints.
Internet Explorer with its support for ActiveX is still the only documented way of working around a lot of SharePoint problems, thanks to the File Explorer view it gives of SharePoint document libraries.
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/open-in-explorer-or-view-with-file-explorer-in-sharepoint-66b574bb-08b4-46b6-a6a0-435fd98194cc
If Mr Lawrence wants to remove IE11 from our workplace document ecosystem, then maybe he could address the longstanding bugs and feature deficiencies that have gone unattended on UserVoice for years despite thousands of users voting for them.
In Australia, the response is that you're either overqualified, or they can't afford you. As always they want above-market skills coupled with entry level wages. Hence employers lobby government for more imported labour while simultaneously denying opportunities to skilled workers on their doorstep.
I was at a seminar two years ago where a young colleague reported that his father (not much older than I) had created all of the company's X system. The seminar moderator asked what he did now. "He drives an Uber as no one will give him a job."
Sonos forces updates on its users by disabling core features until they accede. The updates rarely serve up anything of value for those in a stable setup - they're usually to support newer services, and there's no reason to disable working equipment.
I find their sustainability rhetoric entirely unconvincing.
When Microsoft bought Hotmail over 20 years ago it became one of the biggest BSD/Linux managers in the world. It also released its first Linux kernel last year.
The important thing with IT companies is not to listen to the hot air released at the top (particularly during the Ballmer era) but pay attention to what the engineers are actually doing.
The Clipper will use radar to map out the surface of Europa for possible purchase offers from President Trump. In a NASA briefing he said "Now that the United Kingdom of England is leaving Europa, people are saying that we should step in so America can have the best moons and make the solar system great again. "
In the late 80s I worked for a major UK merchant bank where - as I was preparing to go home on a Friday evening - I was asked to help out with recovering vital financial data from a 5.25" floppy that looked like someone had sat on it while they had keys in their pocket. I beavered away with some Norton tools to bring it back from the edge of doom and transferred it to a new disk.
Following Friday - I am asked to do the same thing again. Treasurer holds out the same mangled disk ...
"why did they use this again?" (I was amazed that they were still able to feed it into the disk drive, let alone write to it.)
"Well they cost five quid each you know..."
I've noticed that Amazon is putting things into its Australian catalogue with MMDDYYYY dates but interpreting them as DDMMYYYY, so products that are actually available now are not available for another |MM-DD| months.
Of course if you try to tell one of the Amazon support droids, then they just suggest something like you reinstall your browser. ( I reported spelling errors in the Kindle Android app user interface and I was told to reinstall the app....) . What was it that Jeff Bezos said about making three good decisions per day??? I hope they balance out the millions of bad decisions made as a result of his one decision to remove thought processes from his product support.
Their inventory information is surprisingly hopeless - they should fix that first. I've checked their online availability of items before a 90 minute drive to their Toulouse store to purchase. I've arrived as one of the first customers of the day, and found that there was no stock, there had been no recent stock and they weren't expecting any for weeks. How would I know when they had stock? "Check the website". Bfff...
I notified a government agency of a breach it had made earlier this year, and said they need to file a report. However there appears to be no mechanism for verifying whether or not such a report has been made. The published report lists five sectors without defining what all the sectors it considers might be. It would be edifying to always have the stats on government agencies.
Their shadow profile system makes for even more potential to have data slurping out of control.
In 2008 I uploaded my address book to Facebook. A few months ago before I closed my account I downloaded all my information. I was startled to find that acquaintances from ten years ago that I had not added as FB friends had had all their contact information updated and supplied back to me.
Anyone hiding from a dangerous ex-partner would nearly need to go off grid and use burner accounts and devices to avoid having their location volunteered by Zuck's Detective Agency.
The main people interested in having genetic testing to trace ancestry are those living in nations mostly formed by immigrants: USA, Canada, Australia etc. Thus the pool of information available to testing companies about gene distributions in many countries doesn't reflect "native" populations of those countries.
I'm failing more and more CAPTCHAs, so I'm anticipating that Google will send out a Blade Runner to terminate me any day now. I'm preparing my final monologue now :
"I've seen things you wouldn't believe: users who confused wallpapers and screensavers,
managers defragging their SSDs, ... All these moments will be lost, like time machine backups. Time to die."
I generally like Office365 Groups, but Teams seems to have been created as a set of disconnected features stuck on top of Groups. Teams also seems to completely bypass all Office and Windows settings for language and formatting, so if you're not a vanilla US English user then it's a friggin' mess.
They do like to advertise their Agile approach, but it seems that there are multiple feature teams agilely running in different directions - result: product is drawn-and-quartered.
Agreed. There are issues which the Insiders flagged in volume from early releases which nonetheless ignored.
Most US software companies do a terrible job of testing non-US English language installs - developers and testers assume that US settings for keyboard, dates etc will apply for all English locales, when in fact it tends to be unique amongst the 15 or so in place)
Microsoft has historically been "least worst" in this respect, but has really gone backwards in respect of these settings for example, years of Windows 10 updates resetting English US for all users in UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Hong Kong, .... Office 365 barely pretends to respect non-US settings. It's not yet Google-bad or Facebook-bad, but it's headed in that direction. These companies do not encourage testers outside the US, so feedback is not heard.
A properly managed test team CAN make up for deficiencies in these areas, but if management has a mindset that doesn't allow it to cover "unknown unknowns" then it's started ceding the market to other players.
Consider a simple English <-> Spanish example that vexed students in an adult language class in Spain that I attended. There are often no gender neutral ways to make simple declarations about gendered subjects in a non-awkward fashion
I have three children/sons -> Tengo tres hijos
I have three daughters -> Tengo tres hijas
Performing a reverse translation in Google Translate
Tengo tres hijos -> I have three children
- the only alternate translation offered is "three kids" and not "three sons", potentially losing some detail
I have three children but no sons -> Tengo tres hijos pero no hijos
- which is rather confusing as it's the same as "I have three sons, but no sons", so you'd have to say something like
I have three children - only daughters -> Tengo tres hijos, solo hijas
And don't get me started on gendered professions
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