Posts by The Indomitable Gall 1631 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
" I make a point of using words, speech and Emojis that align with 'my' interpretation of what they mean. As an English speaker, it's not my job or place to try to translate, or consider every possible permutation of how a given utterance could potentially be interpreted by a non-English speaker,"
If you don't want to adapt your English, then maybe you should learn their language yourself...?
Really I don't get why virtualisation hasn't already solved this problem. It's always been possible to remote host niche apps and give users really basic workstations... or even dumb terminals.
Then you can reserve the lion's share of your silicon for the CAD users, rather than leaving most of your potential CPU cycles idle on the desk of desk jockeys who use Word, Excel and a browser...
It's more than a little out of date -- about 15 years ago there was still a lot of software that worked this way, but practically nothing off the shelf needs admin rights now, and the problem is usually bespoke software.
Either way -- any business that still has software that needs admin rights to use is going to be something that IT have already tried to get the business to replace, and have failed. It'll be that same software that would wreck a Linux migration.
Perhaps, but it doesn't break once a year, and their time limit here is 12 months.
Furthermore, if you're working in a relatively high-level language that's abstracted away inside another environment (eg JavaScript, Python) then version compatibility problems are mostly a matter for the maintainers of the environment, not individual projects.
It was, but they seem to have found that the Chromebook needs the perception of being a "real computer" to overcome perceptions of it being a "clumsy tablet with keyboard".
They'll be hoping that the path of least resistance sees customers sticking with Google-run services and that the Linux subsystem is hardly touched, much like how parents in the 80s and 90s bought computers because they could be used for educational purposes, but all us kids ever did was play games....
The article mentions a previous sacking as a potential red flag. If they would not have employed him had they followed the process that they should have, then the murder would not have happened had they followed the process that they should have, and is therefore a(n unforeseen) consequence of the negligence.
Compensation based on outcome is one thing, but we're also talking about punitive damages here, not only compensation, and in the case of drunk-driving, it's 100% a matter of punishment and not compensation.
We can be a bit inconsistent on that, and I'm not yet convinced that punishment based on outcome works -- if a particular form of negligence is something you learn you can get away with, the maximum penalty in the event of the worst possible outcome is not really going to constitute much of a disincentive...
We as a society have made a decision.
In acts of negligence, punishment is related to the consequences arising from the negligence, not the potential consequences nor the reasonably foreseeable consequences.
This is why the penalty for hitting a child while drunk-driving is higher than if you are caught drunk-driving without being in an accident.
In this case, the company were demonstrably negligent, and the consequences of that negligence were extreme. They got in the car drunk, as it were.
What's often ignored in stories about US court actions is that the jury always finds a massive amount that is never upheld in the end. Juries are not qualified to make a sensible valuation, but a judge can only ever revise down, not up. The jury award is therefore a ceiling, not an actual award.
Numbers, no.
But I do find that Sharepoint quickly becomes impossible to use if you consider the full file path to be naming information, because Sharepoint doesn't (seem to) treat them as such in your search.
It also doesn't show the full path/breadcrumb trail (at least not how it's configured here) so all I get on my screen is the filename and the site name. I'm looking at 10 near-identical filenames on the same site just now.
Hate it hate it hate it.
Just as well.
I remember an email going round the UK arm of a multinational I used to work in, circa 2003, stating that our Exchange servers were running out of disk space and we all needed to urgently archive or delete old messages.
We dutifully went through our inboxes deleting our unneeded messages.
Cue a snippy email a few days later saying that we were getting dangerously close to our limits so we urgently needed to delete unwanted mails.
We'd all deleted over half the emails in our inboxes, as we could all see from our quotas, but the management were looking at server reports and were convinced we'd done nothing.
Turns out that having a few thousand employees delete the staff newsletters attached as bloated Word documents to the regular emails from senior management and HR doesn't make the damnedest bit of difference on deduped storage, and all it achieved was wasting several man-years of labour.
...which would all be forgivable if it wasn't a multinational IT services company, who made a lot of money managing Exchange servers for clients.
We could have saved a shedload of cash if they'd just given the advice at the beginning that they gave us the day before email would otherwise have died:
Archive all your individual email over x months old. (Cue everyone panicking about failing to follow procedure on filtering project-related correspondence into project mailboxes.)
Not exactly -- if you look at the board, there's a triangle leading to a rectangle right next to the wireless chip, where the debug pins previously were.
That's a clever third-party licensed antenna that works by having a tuned resonant cavity (there's fibreglass in there, but from the point of view of RF signals, it's effectively void). This first appeared on the Pi Zero W. It's called Niche and it's patented by ProAnt.
While signal lines running close to it may cause problems, the bigger issue here is simply that there's no space on the board at that end any more.
Or are you the Russian troll...?
Here's the thing... the troll factory wasn't just about getting out individual messages -- it was about changing the nature of debate for the worse. If we keep calling people Russian trolls for having views we find dubious, there can be no debate.
The two are not mutually exclusive. I believe Blair and Bush should be put on trial in The Hague, because their actions were despicable.
Nothing the previous poster said suggested that the UK was whiter-than-white, so I don't think your apparent accusation of hypocrisy makes any sense.
Hell, if nothing else, calling out ongoing war crimes is far more urgent than discussing historical ones. This isn't a matter of letting people off, just I think stopping the killing is a different question from apportioning blame.
Well modern cloud computing is just network computing.
However, when it first came out, it was something different: it was network computing that the customer can't audit. Yes, literally.
I was working in a major B2B computer service company as it took off, and we had to keep explaining to our customers that the reason we didn't offer cloud services was that cloud computing left clients exposed because they couldn't do due diligence.
Meanwhile all the cloud gurus were crying "disruptive", and senior management at our clients were getting snippy about us not offering modern services.
Anyway, along came a couple of lawsuits dealing with questions of transparency and liability, and cloud operations switched to de facto data centre operations pretty much overnight, inviting clients in to view facilities, but they kept the "cloud computing" label.
And then all of us companies that ran traditional data centres just rebranded as "cloud"....
The last thing we want is a free market in food. Subsidies are in place because a true free market favours no excess production, leading to the possibility of catastrophic famine.
Look at how Russia's invasion of Ukraine has messed up food markets worldwide, and now imagine how utterly stuffed we'd all be (or not be, if we use a different definition of "stuffed"!) if the world's major markets didn't have subsidised overproduction.
Microsoft decided error numbers were scary and got rid of them.
Great.
Unfortunately I found myself working in France and getting French error messages. My French was pretty good, but the error messages didn't mean much to me.
Then of course when you Googled it, you got less information because there was less people posting troubleshooting guides to the French version than the English version...
" Historically an employee would have a single account in a central authentication server like Microsoft's Active Directory that would give them access to networks and applications. When the employee left the company, all that was needed was disabling or deleting that single account.
"Today, however, an organization may have dozens of SaaS solutions in use, many with stand-alone authentication systems not tied to the company's internal authentication database," Clements told The Register. "
Historically, you'd have umpteen passwords and logins because most of the systems wouldn't connect to AD.
We're now entering a world of SSO, where almost everything can be authenticated with a single Microsoft or Google ID.
The danger isn't that we're increasing the number of logins, but that as the number of logins decrease, we're liable to get blasé and assume that one click kills all logins, when it doesn't.
"But in contrast with Amazon a datacentre, especially a dedicated one from a giant like FaceMeta, Google or Microsoft, doesn't offer much in the way of local jobs."
You've clearly not noticed that the article is about AWS -- Amazon Web Services -- building... datacentres.
Yes, and a side-effect of the pandemic is a long-overdue move towards shorter and more focused meetings, which I'm hoping will live on in the back-in-the-office world.
As for work meetings, well if I'm in a "webcams-off" meeting, I'd started lying on the floor to eliminate computer-based distraction and continue to listen, and then I moved to putting on my VR headset and using virtual desktop to stream the browser wirelessly to my headset halfway across the room. With the mouse and keyboard out of my hands, I was able to focus, despite being in a dull, uninteresting management briefing.
Oh, and some of those conference talks were monumentally tedious too.
My experience is different.
I've "attended" a few conferences in online in the last couple of years, and I've actually found VR to be an immense aid to focus.
Sitting at a screen, it's all too easy to pull up a Facebook tab and zone out of the meeting/talk entirely, but in a VR headset, distraction is far less immediate. Hell, you can't even just glance at your phone under the desk, like we've all done in physical meetings.
Also, don't underestimate the power of positional audio. With voices coming from multiple directions, people can talk at the same time without any of them becoming incomprehensible. There are video-conferencing apps out there that take advantage of this (based on research findings that people don't care much whether or not the audio position matches the actual physical location of the screen avatar) but at the moment the "big boys" (MS, Zoom etc) don't, and I'm not sure why not.
" The majority of killings in America are committed by repeat criminals using illegally obtained "handguns"! "
My understanding is that the majority of these illegally-obtained handguns were legally sold into private ownership and were subsequently traded on illegally, often via gunshows where ownership registration can be legally ignored.
Not only is the USA's legal gun trade the source of most illegal guns in the US, it's also the source of most illegal guns in Canada.
So while your argument may be strictly correct, it doesn't prove what you want it to prove.
What value has he created?
Everything I've ever bought from Amazon I could have bought from somewhere else.
Amazon shuffles goods from one place to another while avoiding taxes and dividends.
In the process it has made life harder for other middlemen who treat their employees well enough that they're not afraid to take a pee break.
Fewer jobs, less tax in the treasury... seems to me society isn't really better off for Amazon's existence...
The Greens looked OK when Harper was their public face, but there are too many elements of eco-militancy rising to the surface as they get bigger for them to get broad public acceptance.
Plus, it's the power of Salmond (like him or loathe him) that's likely to get significant numbers following a 2nd-vote-tactical strategy.
Not sure about that myself.
I give the SNP one term post-independence before they collapse and end up reforming into something entirely different.
The SNP currently has several strands of appeal
1. Single-issue voters -- independence or bust
2. Perception of Scottish chapters of UK big 3 parties as "branch offices" representing the party over constituents
3. People who like SNP policies.
Group 3 has expanded significantly based on how the SNP have governed in 3 consecutive parliaments, but without groups 1 and 2, they'll be unable to command a majority.
That means that in the event of independence, there will be a rapid restructuring of the Labour, Conservative and LibDem parties north of the border, and a resurgence of Scottish Labour voting.
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