Posts by Wemb 38 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Oct 2009
Have always wondered about that - surely several billions dollars worth of radioactive gold is now a) much rarer and b) even harder to steal. Presumably would be an even sounder basis for a currency because it sure as hell would dissuade people from trying to convert their cash back into (mostly) gold.
I mean, that's obviously a game-changer - so much more useful than, say being able to pick what bloody font size it uses - I mean, why bother accommodating people with poor eyesight? Font size of point 7 is good for everyone surely?
Any enquiry about accessibility is just met with zoom in in your browser or 'Hey! You can vote for that feature'.
Three standout items for me;
* ??= which is variable assignment only if it's new and throw an error if it's not. That'll help inexperienced coders from accidentally reusing variables
* foreach-object -parallel : Does what it says on the tin
* Making pwsh a fully working login shell for linux - looking forward to seeing the look on the face of my solaris-fanboy boss when I tell him that.
All good stuff - just wish our companies windows boxes were using a version of PS that's as new as the one on my Linux box - pain in the arse having to re-write PS scripts so they're compatible with the version 5 I keep finding on our Windows fleet.
To under promise and over deliver than it does to over promise and under deliver. Great for situations like this when you could otherwise embarrass the grey-beards. Also a good strategy for when you want to take it a bit easier. Just promise that any one hour job will take three hours to complete. When you deliver it in under two hours, you'll still look like a hero and you'll get to go home unstressed.
While running an inadequately tested script on live data is obviously a recipe for disaster, I do have sympanthy for the PFY here. There's nothing guarnanteed more to induce mistakes (and ill-advised workarounds) that giving someone bright a boring and repetitive job to do - especially one that really is crying out be automated. I'd have tried exactly the same as he did back in my youth - in fact, I did - I was given several hundred MS exchange email accounts to setup at a school I worked out - and my PHB expected me to manually logon to each account, run some bit of MS code to configure some client-end settings, and then logout again. All manually. Well bugger that... Boring and repetitive jobs are what computers were invented for.
Emacs doesn't give you RSI, it's not it's fault it was designed for a keyboard with three types of shift key (shift, front and top) and four different control keys (control, meta, super and hyper). Honestly, what's the problem with a keyboard where you need seven fingers each of your three hands to use properly?
I'll have to update my copy of Emacs - wonder what's in there now - another new adventure game? Some new version of the Tower of Hanoi simulator? A new screensaver? Or perhaps they've getting more upto-date by implementing Angry Birds in ascii alongside Snake and Tetris. Even 25 years ago on the sun systems I used at uni, Emacs's icon was already a kitchen sink.
Really, Emacs is great, and I love it to bits, but it's a text editor which thinks it's an OS - some one really should have said 'enough' about 30 years ago..
That's why they brought this box.
I can't count the number of times I've had this conversation with users.
"Our HD/PC/Server has died! We need the data back!"
"What? You didn't have a backup?"
"Of course we did! It's the HD/PC/Server."
"So where's the -other- copy of your data?"
"What other copy?"
<sigh>
What will stir things up a bit is DSC:
http://redmondmag.com/blogs/it-decision-maker/2013/06/desired-state-configuration.aspx
Which is, at the small glance I've seen so far, looks to be pretty close to Puppet/Chef running on WIndows. Something that, as said, SC isn't too hot on.
I use emacs, but to be fair to the others, it must rank as some of the most bloated software ever written. I mean, how many text editors really need at least one adventure game; a tower of Hanoi simulator; Tetris; pong; an implementation of Eliza; a random gibberish generator -and- a mode to plug the random gibberish generator into Eliza?
My problem with the non-Intel suppliers of motherboards is that the support material available from their websites is almost always rubbish - and the number of motherboards we've purchased that have had such useful features such as duplicate motherboard GUIDs and other enterprise stuff that Intel just got right and others didn't.
Our suppliers can customise the fleets of PCs we buy from them because Intel provide the tools to customise the BIOSs - no idea if ASUS, etc. are geared up for doing the same - I hope they are.
I wouldn't try and compare Portal 2 with Mincraft - they're both very different beasts. But for sheer creativity, give my Dwarf Fortress everytime. Yes, you can build mega-constructions but the important difference is 1) You don't have to do all the grunt work yourself - it's what your minions are for and 2) there's a lot more gore.
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