Posts by idiotsavant

Those drivers have been available for ~2 years

That's the real story: why continue blocking the upgrade for so long when Intel released fixed drivers ages ago.

Google Chrome nudges you to "turn on sync"

Assuming the two proxy setup works as designed, the big advantage Google has over anyone else is the in-browser data collection in Chrome. If you "turn on sync" as it suggests then it tracks every place you visit to "improve the relevance" of your search results and so you can sync you tabs across devices (a feature of very little value to me). If you're still in the Google-verse because you have to be then it's worth running their privacy checkup. You might find almost all the data they have on you is coming from Chrome because of this setting.

Subpixel Rendering

Be warned that Mojave removes the "Use LCD font smoothing when available" option in the settings as it no longer supports subpixel antialiasing. That's fine if you're using a Retina screen or a 4/5K screen but on older MacBook Airs and lower resolution external displays that might be a problem for some. I know I could see a marked degradation in the sharpness of text, especially in Atom, on my external monitor.

Try disabling this setting in High Sierra (and reboot to make sure the change takes effect) and see what you think before you upgrade.

You can re-enable font smoothing in Mojave from the terminal, but since they've removed it from the GUI there's no guarantee how long it will stick around.

The X15 is available in "ISIS Hunter Orange" apparently. The reviews are fun too.

Dev Tools

Chrome, because I use the Dev Tools a lot and find them better than IE/Edge, especially when extensions are added.

Nothing wrong with the Firefox equivalent tools, but I needed to pick one. Jumping back and forth from Chrome to Firefox for web development and debugging is just confusing - the tools are just different enough that I can't find what I'm looking for.

As an alternative to blocking I like the Clearly extension. I'm sure there are others that do the same thing too.

Not only do you not get the ads but you get the font you like against the background you like, and multiple pages flowed together into on long scrollable one. No distractions :)

Nothing new here

This is not an essay. I suppose that the next instalment could tie the large number of disparate strands together neatly into a coherent conclusion, but frankly I doubt it.

Spending the first five paragraphs telling us how it's important not to just rant and complain about things, and then spend the whole of the rest of the piece doing just that doesn't help, but what really sinks this is the lack of focus. We have...

- NASA tried to cover up after the Challenger disaster

- Ships should have more safety features

- Rioters and politicians are both bad

- We have an underclass

- The Church is hypocritical

- News corp is in bed with the government

- The Beeb turned a blink eye to child abuse

- Economists know nothing

- There will be more financial crises

- To much greed can ruin a good thing

- IBM sold stuff to the Nazis (indirectly)

- The British state wasn't nice to Alan Turing

- The British railway network isn't redundant enough

It all sounds like someone in the pub half way through their third pint after a bad day. And as the author himself says, "one can actually keep going like this, but after a while it becomes tedious".

The only thing that ties all this together, as far as I can tell, are the following claims:

- Organisations serve their own interests first and foremost

- Organisations and individuals are bad at risk assessment

- Organisational change is difficult

- Whistleblowing is dangerous and often ineffective

This is supposed to be new, the defining feature of a "new age", no less. Sorry, but none of this is new. This is standard organisation theory, the study of organisations and bureaucracies and their many disfunctions, and there's a large literature going back at least to the mid-20th century on all this.

Here's hoping that the proposed cure is more interesting than the diagnosis.

Not a surprise

Audio messages is coming in iOS 8 so the software side is already done. And there's integration of audio calls between OS X and iOS in Yosemite. All of which would make integrating any iBracelet thingy fairly straightforward.

https://www.apple.com/ios/ios8/messages/

Sometimes TUPE does work to your advantage

I've been TUPE-ed twice, in 2007 and 2012. In both cases I was working for smallish IT companies that got gobbled up by huge ones. Both times I was amongst the staff they wanted to keep, and both times it played out the same way in terms of benefits.

The small companies provided rather minimal benefit packages, but pretty good pay to make up for it. Once we got acquired our pay couldn't be cut, but our benefits improved significantly because the big boys tend to have decent pension schemes and so on that apply across all UK employees.

Not representative by the looks of the comments so far, but it does happen.

Re: Is this a quote or an opinion? Either way it is wrong.

It's not wrong.

You are right to point out that in the short term the publishers didn't lose out because Amazon chose to discount so aggressively, only other book retailers. But it was the publishers that drove the change to an agency pricing model, because they were worried about the long term, specifically how their relationship with Amazon would change as it captured more and more of the market, and how the public's perception of the value of a book would change once everyone got used to the cheap prices Amazon was charging under the wholesale model.

This whole argument first came out publically when Amazon and Macmillan fell out in early 2010. There's lots of good commentary written about it and what it means if you Google for that story.