Posts by deadlockvictim

Re: At least a small elephant in the corner of the room

You make a good point: Computer Science as a name is misleading. I would just call it, 'Computer Studies', 'Informatics' or something like this.

I like the idea of technicianship being primarily taught. I would like to see it as a subject like woodwork or metalwork. Pupils should should know how to build a computer properly. They should know the basics of electronics (what a capacitor or an integrated circuit is, for example). Honours students should do soldering and build working motherboards

They should know what a network is and what its components are. They should know the journey of data from an app on their smartphone. Added to this are devices commonly found on a network: firewalls, routers, the NSA and so on.

Alongside that they should be introduced to scripting and possibly programming: SQL maybe, Python or PHP. They should know what a database does (and is), what services are and what algorithms are. Added to this, they should learn about statistics and probabilities..

And finally they should know what an OS is and does alongside the pros & cons of the popular OSs.

Who chooses Apple and why? When is Linux a good choice? Why is Windows popular?

I think that once these have been covered in a three year course, computers will become a lot less mystifying.

Are there greatly fewer young women taking woodwork or metalwork in the U.K.? This course should present it all as a series of tools which are greatly relevant to the everyday world and one needs both experience and knowledge about these tools.

On a final note, the bro-culture amongst developers that one hears so much about needs to be dealt with in a very public way. What self-respecting young women is going to choose to work with misogynists and endure humiliation even if the salary isn't bad?

3D cards

I worked for a progressive webdev company in Dublin around the turn of the millennium and we were allowed to play network games on the company LAN after 7pm.

We all put (our own) 3D cards in our work-machines. I had a 16MB 3DFX Voodoo 3 2000 and it was a great card for Quake III Arena & Team Fortress. We all had to have our licenced copies of the software too. If we were going to play, it had to be done properly.

I've never understood the hostility of management in other companies towards this sort of arrangement. Binds the staff better than any company-away-day and doesn't cost the company much (electricity, coffee).

Re: At the risk of...

You are perfectly right.

The dealers are on this street warn you about the product that the dealers are on the other street are supplying. Apparently it's bad for you.

How about taking a look at Instagram, Snapchat & Facebook?

Or is this more about getting at China?

Re: Apple dumbed down and threw pros under a bus

I'm not so sure that I agree.

I see Macs as the primary computer for the following groups:

• creative types — the professional video, audio and photography types as well as architects;

• university students — MacBookPros are everywhere;

• upper middle class — again MBPs are standard here, especially amongst women. The men seem to prefer high-powered tablets (iPad Pros, Surface, Samsung)

This is true in my little world in the middle of Western Europe.

It may well be different elsewhere.

I still expect Apple to be strong where the visual aesthetic is held to be important and people have money, in places like Switzerland, Japan, Korea, Singapore & the Nordic countries.

Although I do game on the Mac, I am very much an old-school Mac user (think Quadra) and I play Civilization (before it had numbers), Maelstrom, Sky Shadow and Prince of Persia.

Re: "Modernization" - that word does not mean what they think it means

When Micros~1 uses the word 'modern', it simply means that they copied whatever changes Apple have recently made. We can expect a Monterey-inspired look & feel.

Re: Bad, Bad, Very Bad, Not Good

My understanding is that the shareware code deleted itself only.

Bogs don't stink btw.

Why indeed?

Because a lot of people who write code for a living are, em, full-stack developers. They have to work with a lot of technologies, some of which they are competent in and others, well, not so much. Don't get me wrong, some full-stack are amazing people who have mastered multiple fields and code efficiently & quickly. And then there are those who pick it up as they go along. Why bother learn SQL when you can use an ORM. Saves lots of time. Aren't Javascript frameworks the greatest thing ever to have happened?

Companies who hire them don't seem to want people who have specialised in a particular field or maybe these companies are content with software that runs 'meh' but at least runs. And more hardware can always be bought to compensate for the meh-ness of it all.

Jen

Did Jen ever figure out what 'I.T.' stood for?

I've always wanted to know too.

Re: Homo homini lupus est

AC» Citizens of any democracy that vote in a right wing government suffer exactly the same fate.

Are saying the citizens of any democracy that vote in a non-right wing government will be spared?

How do you define right-wing or left-wing?

Does Sweden have a right-wing government? Compared to whom exactly?

SE/30

Hopefully you've taken the PRAM battery out by now. There are CR2032 battery adapters from MeowToast on etsy that aren't bad and are very cute.

You can get your SE/30 online, btw, which can be quite useful if you want to download something from the Macintosh Garden via iCab but it is slooow. I use a Mac Mini G4 running SSW9.2.2. for these jobs and then I transfer software to the compact macs via LAN. An wthernet card in your SE/30 obviously makes the process a lot easier.

Re: Psychopath

To be fair to HR, they simply do what they are told to do.

I can't imagine they like it much.

The real bastards are the ones in senior management for whom Legal & HR (née Personnel) are merely means to satisfy their whims / yearly targets / whatever you want to call it.

Re: Windows stopped being good....

I rather liked Windows 2000 on the desktop and Windows 2003 Server.

Good point

Good point.

Let me alter <western transliteration> to the transliteration appropriate to the language & writing system of the paper in question. So, if Japanese names are used and the paper is published in Russian, then Cyrillic transliteration and ordering are to be used. And conversely, if Russian names are to be used and the paper is in Japanese, then the names are written in Katakana and the kana-order of your choice is to be used.

Arlene, Arlene, Arlene, don't leave us, just because you can

A present, no doubt, for your 100th birthday.

Congratulations Arlene, Princess of Ireland!

A worthy promotion.

Re: Really odd...

Eh no.

Look up Dunbar's Number. It has to do with the average max. no. of people one can interact with at a given time.

Here is the first line from Wikipedia:

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

Re: Don't by canon ink

I have a simpler rule: don't buy ink.

Get a laser printer, preferably one that requires 4 cartridges.

Secondhand ones aren't bad if you don't print very often.

I picked up an OKI 321dn on a free ads website from a student finished with her studies. I had to replace 2 of the 4 toner cartridges and the generic ones work well. I print a few times a month and the print quality is good.

We had the opposite problem in the early nineties at our university library. We were used to handing our floppies to the guards at the entrance before walking through the presumably magnetic scanner so that they wouldn't be wiped.

However the guards weren't familiar with how CD-ROMs were encoded and insisted that he take these as well. In the end, the constant explanations got nowhere and it was just easier to give him the CD-ROMs.

Re: May as well just use VB's Rnd() function

Eh no. the relevant piece of the article is here:

The code identified 1.85 times as many asymptomatic, infected travelers as random testing methods, "with up to 2-4 times as many during peak travel," according to the team. "To achieve the same effectiveness as Eva, random testing would have required 85 per cent more tests at each point of entry," their paper stated, regarding that first figure.

Re: Moving money

Once you have them by the balls, hearts & minds follow quickly.

I don't know whom I should attribute it to but it does sum up cloud subscription model very nicely.

Re: IKEA

Point taken.

I should have used the IPA.

My transcription was too vague.

I had intended it to be the Germanic 'i'-sound.

Re: Opportunity

Surely the quality & experience of the sysadmins & DBAs running the hardware is more important than the software choice.

That is, I regard a system set up and run by experienced & capable Windows Server sysadmins to be safer than a Linux system run by less experienced or less capable Linux sysadmins to be more secure and vice versa. Windows Server can be made secure if you know what you are doing.

Now, you may very well be right that a well-run Linux network is more secure than a well-run Windows network, if all variables are equal bar the systems software.

It could simply be snobbery on my part but I suspect that Linux sysadmins tend to be more devoted to the cause of systems administration and deal with larger, more valuable networks than those of Windows Servers sysadmins and I am open to correction on this point.

Re: It didn't help my studies much either

To be fair, you were a programmer who happened to make games rather than a gamer per se (well, as far as I can tell from post). Although D&D can be played with a computer, it is a game played with friends rather than a solitary game. That being said, I had to be told to stop playing AD&D when I was 15, my marks before the Inter Cert were beginning to suffer on account of the amount of time I was putting into it.

Smartphones are incredibly addictive and should be treated as such. Children shouldn't have access to them and be allowed only to adults (and, even then, the populace as a whole needs a lot of education about them). Once you've given a child a smartphone, even with parental controls (that are often not so great although Apple's aren't bad), getting them off it is hard.

You could try not giving them a smartphone and then they are the only teen in their class without one. Who wants to be the child in the class who isn't allowed to eat meat because their parents are strict vegetarians? Who wants to be the only child in the class not on Instagram, SnapChat & WhatsApp?

To the critics above, personal responsibility is always the argument trotted out with dealing with dangerously addictive things. It is *your* fault, but not the industry's fault. In your opinion, the Food Industry shares none of the blame for the stuff it puts into the food that you can't help buying. The oil companies share no blame in destroying the climate because you chose to drive to work or you chose to heat your home. Too many regulations eh? You probably pine for the good old days when Reagan was president.

Yes, personal responsibility has a role to play as does the role the government has to protect us from dangerously addictive substances as does the industry in question a duty of care towards its end-users. Think about Oxycontin and what should have been done to prevent all of those poor people becoming addicted to opioids.

The Americans use the word 'architect' as a verb, for $DEITY's sake, so I think that penning something can be understood in that context. I must try that with other professions/trades: I was plumbering with the database yesterday and in the end I had to quantity surveyor it for 4 hours.

To quote Bill Watterson, 'Verbing weirds language'.

Re: Anti-woke

Is that Free as in the right to march on the Capitol whenever elections are, ahem, being stolen from you?

Did you ever find that stolen election, btw?

Microsoft are actively ignoring all what is not Azure

SQL Server certifications for SQL Server have gone, if you want a database certification form Microsoft, it will have to be one of the Azure ones.

Look at how much information Microsoft is giving about the next version of SQL Server. I assume that there will be one. Normally, Microsoft release a new version of SQL Server every 18-24 months.

Look at all of the marketing coming out of Microsoft: *everything* is about Azure. It is almost as if Microsoft will punish anyone publicly mentioning SQL Server.

And if you want to learn Azure, you will have to pay, because Azure is a service to be rented.

Sure, the first hit is free:

-- from the PDF 'The Developer's Guide to Azure' [1]

You don’t need to do much—just sign up for an Azure free account. This includes 12 months of free services, including $200 in credits for 30 days, enabling you to explore paid Azure services, and over 25 services that you can use for free ad infinitum.

But after that, it costs and you have to pay to learn. Microsoft wins both ways.

Now, don't get me wrong, Azure *is* great and it allows one to do a lot of things that on-premises make hard. If you need a server with 64 cores and 512GB RAM for a project, it's available and much, cheaper than buying the hardware for on-premises. The AI and IoT services look particularly good too.

But, it is not the be-all-and-end-all of databases in Microsoftland.

And, AWS is super for cloud-based servers and short projects with massive resource requirments too.

And Microsoft is actively discouraging SQL Server on-premises as well as online. I wonder how long SQL Server as we know has to live? One more version maybe?

I expect that I, and the company I work for, will have to make hard decisions in the coming years. If we want to stay on-premises, when do we need to start getting the DBAs & developers up to scratch on PostgreSQL, or do we take the less hard road and surrender our security, freedom & data to the Microsoft Cloud.

[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/campaigns/developer-guide/?cdn=disable

Re: Wishful thinking...

I had to look up EVA suits to find out if they were what I thought they were (and they were).

What first came to mind, however, were angsty 14 year old Japanese children controlling massive mechs fighting Angels, as in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTrYkdZo90Y

"Windows 10 is so much better than its antecedents that it has stopped being a problem."

You need 32GB free space on your C:drive so that you can download the latest massive update? No thank you. Ubuntu does it daily and while a tad annoying, I live with the 30s needed to run the update.

Windows, imho, reached its zenith with Windows 2000. NT4 & XP (after SP2) weren't bad and Win2K3 was a nice little server and its desktop version (Win XP 64-bit edition) was well in use on my work machine until it went of support. And if the glossy UI is your thing, then Windows 7 wasn't too bad either.

Re: Lucky Ireland

That thought had also come to mind. It is time to re-visit the Carnsore Point plan.