It is...inevitable
Just waiting for the first time one of their displays goes BSOD.
1230 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Oct 2009
Sorry, all you east-of-the-ponders. The First Amendment may use the word "press" but it doesn't define anybody as being a member of the capital-P "Press". It basically says you can't be prosecuted just for printing something, no matter who you are.
As far as the Feds are concerned, journalists, self-styled or otherwise, are not a special class of people. Some US states have special laws that "shield journalists". Some countries do. Good luck to them. There are Federal court precedents that give publishers (note, not journalists) defenses against lawsuits for libel etc. especially where public officials are concerned. But there's no "get out jail free" card handed out to reporters. They can take their risks, and take their lumps too, and good luck to them.
Ah, those words uttered by Delos David Harriman at the beginning of "The Man Who Sold The Moon". I myself believe that D.D., as his friends called him, was the first to promise people that their names would be inscribed on a monument left behind on the Lunar surface, for a small fee each. As NASA did IRL, he inscribed the names so small that it would require a powerful microscope to read them.
Another domino falls. You think this is bad? This is presumably an environment where (theoretically) they knew what they were doing. Assuming everything isn't farmed out to those fine people who like to "do the needful", that is. Those big city admin networks in the US don't have anybody who knows what they're doing, and they're paying (literally) the price.
Too much technology, too few technologists.
"Presumption of Innocence" is the rule in courts based on UK common law, where the jury must find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Sweden has a system of civil law which may or may not require the burden of proof being placed on the accuser, or at least not to the same degree as (theoretically) in the UK and US.
Edit: According to that notoriously unreliable source, Wikipedia, criminal cases in Sweden are tried without juries, the judge being charged with deciding the "facts of the case". The only time you get a jury is if you're being sued for libel....
Probably the Home Sec. will shorten JA's sentence and get him out of the country for good. Anything after that is somebody else's problem.
It felt brilliant at the time, but was probably common knowledge in some quarters.
I refer to the trick I discovered for booting Windows 3.x with different personalities on the same PC.
You will have heard of the "Windows directory". Perhaps you haven't come across the fact that as far as Windoze was concerned, the "Windows directory" was the directory containing WIN.INI, not the one containing win.exe. Sooooooo, having two kids and one PC (soon thereafter fixed with visits to the PC recycler) I did some jiggery-pokery with DOS boot disks and some creative command line stuff, and each kid could have their own settings, wallpaper etc. while leaving Dad's settings alone.
Tony Hillerman, of Navajo mystery stories fame, wrote an early novel featuring a journalist covering state politics in the US. To make deadline, the journalist would routinely write up the result of a vote before it actually occurred, confident that he knew what the outcome would be.
I have noticed that Americans in the news sound more American on the BBC and related outlets than they do on US radio and TV. It's usually a President or ex-President who is heard, for obvious reasons. Bill Clinton in particular seemed to be much twangier on Radio 4, but it was also noticeable for Obama. The current incumbent, of course, we try to ignore.
I went to York too. But let's hold back on the "Historic Viking" stuff. That part of York is well outside the historic walls. I recall trying out the shops down that way once or twice, but it was always easier to go to the supermarket in the city proper.
A look at the picture in the Press indicates, and a visit to Google Street View confirms, that there is an iron cover of sorts in the pavement outside the house with the white door, so the finger pointing at Yorkshire Water is probably fair. There's also a vent pipe nearby. York always was a place where you had to know the places to hold your breath as you walked by.
I have to admit, I like to use auto-completion and fixup tools. What I don't like is the way they keep popping up stuff when I don't want it. There's always some little thing appearing over your text right where you want to type. Sure, you can turn them off (it says here in small print) but finding out how to do that usually means navigating MS's accurate-but-unhelpful "help". Sometimes you hit F1 and wind up at "Welcome to Visual Studio!". Thanks!
And all these gigaflops and gigabytes help you to do....exactly what you did before. What you did 10 years ago in fact. And 10 years before that.
But wait, there's more! The same misguided guidance will be popping up in Word, an application which people mostly use to write text, the way they did decade after decade since that tiny, beautifully capable version of Word first appeared. That version could probably run on one of the peripheral controllers of a modern PC board, and still do most of what users need. The gigamess that is the current version served only to help some thrusting executive climb that greasy pole.
Actually, they rarely proffer the problem that way. It's usually: I can't find my files! Well, where did you save them? I don't know, they used to just turn up when I wanted them.
IMHO that's the way things should work. The whole point of a PA for a busy exec is to cut through the processes and present the boss with what the boss needs to see. Switching to PC's where you have to login, select this, click that, twiddle thumbs (preferably clockwise), and then worry about the knothole effect*, leads only to frustration and confusion.
Unfortunately, sales droids and marketeers can't sell simplicity. They have to sell features, which usually means complexity. Hence the failure to produce machines that show you what you need to see, without any fandango.
* Knothole effect: the feeling that, however large your screen, in comparison to leafing through paper in your hand it seems that using a PC is like watching a ball game through a hole in the fence.
That home connection may not be so good when multiple clients are all streaming at the same time. The company connection may look comparable when both are under light load, but when the squeeze is really on, you might come to see how a kilobuck buys you more resilience. Not to mention security.
A good home router will set you back US$100+. For that you typically get better handling of multiple streams, less risk of overheating, guest networking if you want it (recommended for IOT devices), and generally better uptime. And yes, I use a cheapie, but I keep it updated and reboot regularly. My son gives it a run for its money when he visits.
It seems the trouble with being a roving consultant is that you get clients who are in desperate need of something, but what they are in desperate need of would be best delivered by a horde of giant hornets (or if recently mooted ideas were adopted, a shrinkable superhero who can access the back entrance and then do an enlargement in place).
I think it was "A Portrait Of Elmbury", in which two rival shops on the High Street started posting mottos, one of which read "Mens Sana in Corpore Sano", prompting the one-up response "Men's and Women's Sana in Corpore Sano".
No jokes about "Cobblers to the Pope" please.
OK, lots of the usual confusion here, particularly when it comes to the mythical beast known as "US law" or indeed the "US System of whatever".
The concept of "mens rea", or guilty mind, is very real in most US jurisdictions. One wise old lady juror was pilloried and even accused of collusion with the defence for refusing to cast her vote for guilty, because the law called for the accused to have been aware that he/she was committing a crime in the particular case.
Of course, that doesn't apply in certain cases, but indictments like "First degree murder", "Second degree manslaughter", hinge on what kind of intent the prosecution can prove (mileage varies from state to state, and from state law to federal law). Just because you see it on "Law & Order" doesn't mean that NY law extends to Texas, for instance.
England and Scotland use the concept, depending on the crime.
This was far from unusual. Once Powerpoint appeared the mass mailings with images etc. poured into company systems. At LargeCopierCompany it was common the get mass mailed an announcements of birthdays, engagements, pregnancies, closing of the toilets for maintenance etc. etc. etc. Even today sending a space-hungry PDF, often containing a scanned image of a text announcement, will routinely appear when a simple text e-mail would have been enough.
Seriously all you lot! Where do you think the money to develop tax software comes from? Without the paid versions of TT etc. there wouldn't be a free version. Anybody here like working for free? You all seem to like getting stuff for nothing.
For the record I make quite a bit more than Joe Schmoe, buy Turbo Tax every year for less than $50 and file Federal and State returns at no further cost other than my time. I file online but send the payments in by cheque because reasons. I don't have a particularly complicated situation but even back when the kids were in college it wasn't that difficult to sort out a return. I could go to an accountant, who would probably use Turbo Tax anyway, or an H&R Block office, but that means exposing my stuff to a third or fourth party at more cost.
Sure, the IRS in the US could do what the HMRC does in the UK. At greater cost! UK pundits have applauded the comparative cheapness of the US system, at least in terms of tax money spent on admin.
it's a research language, not intended for actual software development.
And Pascal was a teaching language, so naturally it got used for systems. "C" was really a systems language so naturally it got used for teaching and just about everything else. Pascal and C were like two ends of the structured language spectrum. Early Pascal's didn't allow you any leeway for type-shenanigans, so people designed systems where type-casting shenanigans were an absolute necessity and specified Pascal as the language. C allowed you to do anything, so people used it where type-shenanigans were positively pathological.
Here's looking forward to writing that embedded real time system in Bosque.
Bosque - Spanish for "forest". Hmmm, being (un)able to see the wood for the trees?
Remember "Maven"? Simple two or three line build spec files? And like Topsy it grew, and there was Gradle, which grew.
Maybe we just need to invent a language called Topsy and let it grow, because it will. Sometimes reality imposes complexity on your simple system, sometimes idiots do it. There once was a "teaching OS" called Topsy. I wonder what happened to it?
If there's any truth to this it might have involved an orphan system. I remember when the shiny new DEC-10 arrived at uni in the 70's, the ICL 4130 and its PDP front end didn't get thrown out. Instead it got moved to where the CompSci peeps could have their way with it. Extrapolate that a few years and you might well find somebody at a loss trying to get a system going that had no manuals etc. Most minis were placed on site with a full set of manuals and, hopefully, trained attendants.
I'm not buying this at all. Who would shell out for what was then a very expensive piece of hardware and leave it in the hands of a numty? The manually entered bootstrap places this in the era of paper tape (though I may have seen mag tape input systems with manual boot loader entry). When we restarted our NMR machine which had a Nicolet mini in it, all concerned had received proper training in entering the boot loader, and in any case the procedure was written down.
And instant phone support? You're kidding, right? If your PDP went funny you called the local office and got a tech sent out at great expense. I don't remember any phone banks being involved.