Posts by deadlockvictim 1481 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
Is SCOTUS corrupt?
Clarence Thomas is not the model of probity, to be sure.
And SCOTUS is an activist court, an ideologically driven court, a court that dangerously encourages the autocratic tendencies of DJT but hardly corrupt.
I can't imagine any amount of money or influence that would convince the 5 right-wing justices to reverse their judgement on abortion.
Or gun control. Or allowing the president to do what (s)he wants, at least until Josh Shapiro or AOC assumes the mantle in 2029.
The office is much, much quieter and often almost empty.
I am not being interrupted every 10 minutes.
There are fewer messages on Microsoft Teams informing me of something and breaking my concentration.
Friday is usually my most productive day.
Oh, rather than a 4-day week, I far prefer the notion of a 5-day 7-hour day, say 09h to 16h or the equivalent in flexi-time (like 07h to 14h).
I've noticed that I get a lot more done in the mornings than in the afternoons.
One of things that I really appreciated about the pre-iMac Macintoshes was ADB (Apple Desktop Bus).
One could daisy-chain devices. It was practical and especially useful when the Mac was not nearby.
There was no crawling under desks, wondering which port on the back of the computer was the right one.
One ADB port became many ADB ports: mouse, keyboard, joystick, graphics tablet and so on although I never had more than 3 devices connected.
And because there was a 5V charge running along the bus, the Mac could even be started by pressing the button on the upper right on the keyboard.
It was a well-designed feature that I appreciated.
Regardless of the fact that the BOFH is set in England, El Reg is content to surrender their language to Uncle Sam.
It doesn't seem to be unique to El Reg either.
Redgate, the maker of databases tools based in Cambridge, has also succumbed to US English as the norm.
It is all so very sad.
When you accept the premise that elections that properly belonged to one Donald J. Trump (aka The Donald) were stolen (in broad daylight too), then obviously the election-monitoring agencies that oversaw the stolen elections are either incompetent or evil.
And so they have to go.
Likewise, their removal means that future elections will be now be, em, fair & balanced.
Let me get this right, Trump's pro-America 'America First' policy is so blatant that the Europeans abandon US companies and found their own, thus causing the pro-American policy to become an anti-American policy.
Are we Europeans to understand that breaking away from our US colonial masters (Micrsoft, Google, Meta, the US Military etc.) is a good thing for us to do?
This is all a natural consequence of the school of thought popularised by Ronald Reagan: Government is not the solution to the problem: government is the problem.
What Trump & Musk are doing is simply following on this line of thought. If government is the problem, then it must be destroyed.
Almost half of the electorate agrees with this, Trump boasted he would do it and Musk has form when it comes to hobbling organisations.
What comes to mind is, does America need to split in two? One America that values government and one America that has practically no government at all.
Otherwise the current America ends up with a government that works as well as Twitter. It is easier to destroy than it is to create.
Think of SQL Server as the clever child in a sports-mad family.
Yes, she gets good results, she is praised frequently by others, she helps her siblings with their homework, she is just, well, not what they want now and they can't really dump her.
The family is needlessly embarrassed by her.
So, they quietly promote her, give her what she needs but is rarely praised by her family.
Let me correct you: he's not going back to merit-based, he's going back to "merit-based".
Trump talks in euphemisms.
He wants business leaders to be as unfettered by business as possible and it that means letting the businesses hire whomever they want, then so be it.
He's not actually promoting the idea of merit, he's promoting the power of senior executives to do whatever the hell they want.
If you want to use Photoshop (or some other Adobe software) work, keep an eye out for a graphics designer selling off his/her old Mac Pro 5,1.
They usually have an activated version of Adobe Creative Suite v4 or v5 on them, the hardware is not bad even if the bus speed is relatively slow and the version of Mac OS is no longer supported by Apple. It doesn't have to be on the Internet.
I picked up a Mac Pro 3,1 with CS2 for this purpose back in 2019 for the equivalent of GBP40 and it's a great machine.
When I look at how people around me use computers:
• Desktops: my mother has one and it will be replaced soon by the local computer shop because it is running Windows 10 and Windows 11 is not supported. She uses it for genealogy research and email. It is not an expensive computer by today's standard nor will the next one be. One teenage nephew is getting into games programming and is saving up for a desktop with a beefy GPU.
• I have an expensive, powerful desktop that is underused. Freud (or ego) may play a role here.
• My teenage children and many of my colleagues have not-especially-expensive laptops that they have to use. Their preferred tool are their smartphones, which are all at least twice as expensive as their laptops.
• My wife has a Surface which she uses as her work machine.
• At work, almost everything is virtualised. A blind woman has a desktop on account of her brail reader. There are a few Mac Minis, possibly for the testers.
Computers are now things that people don't really use willingly except maybe for gaming or some specific task like making a video or making PowerPoint presentations for homework (my children have cruel teachers).
I'm not surprised that sales channels are drying up. Computers at an entry level are powerful enough and people don't really care about them anymore.
AC» There was a brilliant article by an occasional contributor about monopolies and how they aren't always bad for the consumer.
The problem with monopolies in a capitalist world is that the purpose of a corporation is to make money for shareholders and senior management will take their cut too.
Providing a decent service is merely a means to this end. It is not the raison d'etre of the corporation.
Once monopoly (or even near monopoly) status has been reached, the end-users & customers can be milked for all that they are worth.
And is service suffers, then service suffers.
I won't be popular for this comment but I think that universal Internet access at each desk has massively lowered productivity over the last 25 years.
Filtered work-related Internet sites & services should be allowed so that work can get done.
If you need more access, then you make a case for it and justify while it is worthwhile.
And allow general Internet access at a public terminal somewhere on the office floor.
Get rid of messaging systems like Slack & Teams, too, for they interrupt workflow and often they are little more than a distraction.
El Reg» It's likely the entire thing is another set of empty threats. Even if the President-elect doesn't understand how tariffs work, people in his orbit probably do, and they'd know the effects on the American economy.
I'm not so sure.
Trump has his heart set on tariffs and they won't affect him personally. He has surrounded himself with yes-men (yes-people?) and ideologues who would rather burn the house down than give in. What does Donald Trump prize most highly? Loyalty. And he has surrounded himself with loyal people.
It will be especially hard for the Republicans in Congresss. Who wants to display their disloyalty by suggesting that maybe, just maybe, his policies will hurt their constituents, only then to lose their seat in 2 years' time?
I expect to see what Trump promises. There is no-one there to stop him unless NPR can get to Barron first and explain the basics of economics to him.
This is true and there isn't even a desire to spend on licences for them.
However, my main point is that anything that feels like «programming» (with the exception of formulas in Excel) elicits resistance amongst the non-coding staff and I can see how having to master prompts for AI tools fits into that category.
From what the panel is talking about, it sounds a bit like SQL and database access.
We've made one of our databases available to the staff to help them with their work.
So, instead of creating tickets and waiting for one of the two of us to get back to them, they can do it themselves.
I've organised classes on reasonably basic SQL for them.
Most of the information they need can be found with an SQL query with one or two joins and the relevant parameters.
It's not that it is hard, more that most of my co-workers don't want to dabble in SQL.
It looks like coding, therefore it must be hard and I will get it wrong.
I point out them that if can write complex Excel formulas, SQL just requires a bit of practice and knowledge of the tables.
And, of course, I've been writing SQL for 25 years.
And this discussion of AI prompts sounds like that.
I don't mind advertising so much but it's profiling that I abhor.
While I would rather not see a billboard with Coke on it, I'm prepared to live with that.
I'm don't even mind vendor websites telling that the last people who bought this bought/item also bought that book/item.
It's the insidious, STASI-like work of Google & others of building up a dossier on every user that I find criminal.
I still have not decided if Google since its inception is a net-positive on the world.
My plan is to start learning Linux in the new year.
My main PC runs an Intel (Skylake) i7-6700K Processor, which while it will 10 years old next year is still a great processor.
I have been a Mac user since 1989, a Windows user since 1998 and have an aversion to the command line which I will have to overcome.
Nowadays, I use the PC for surfing, occasional spreadsheet & text document work and logging on with VMware Horizon Client so that I can work from home.
I am an SQL Server DBA by trade but I run SQL Server at home on a separate drive unconnected from the Internet when I am learning. Brent Ozar has good training videos.
I have an IcyDock at the front of the machine with 4 removable trays that allow me to run different systems.
So, which flavour of Linux should I start with? And are there any recommendations for books to start off with?
I use TextShuttle on a daily basis because most of the people I write to are native German speakers.
For this, the AI-generated translation is excellent and it saves a lot of time.
As an SQL Server DBA, I'm curious to see how AI works in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). I've tried it in Azure Data Studio (ADS) and it worked well but I realised that you have to know correct code should look like. It was great for auto-filling in windowing functions, joins on tables and it even made a very good guess on a CASE statement based on the contents of a column in a temporary table. It wasn't good enough though for me to start learning ADS and start climbing up the hill of competency to back to the level where I am with SSMS.
And by 'correct', I don't mean syntactically correct, rather semantically correct. Does this do what I intended or does it do something else? It would be reckless of me to let my junior DBA use it with out checking what has been written though. One needs to be able to walk before one can run.
El Reg» ...selecting winners based on their suitability to serve as spokespeople for the group
But isn't this how it always is with such lotteries & competitions?
Somehow the most beautiful, the best connected or those being bribed seem to win.
I remember thinking back in the 1990s how odd it was that the average winner of MTV competitions happened to be people who could be models.
This «competition» is not for you, it's for us and this marketing stunt has been set up to make us look desirable.
I really doubt that anything will go nuclear.
Trump seems to have a genuine antipathy towards war.
With Trump, I think in 10s_
• unemployment will rise to 10% once the various agencies are gutted. Think Twitter once Musk arrived;
• the population will fall by 10% once the mass deportations really start to get going. Maybe this one is a bit much, but Trump might be able to get 1 million illegal immigrants per year out.
• yearly inflation will rise to 10% once the tariffs and the increased unemployment really kick, not to mention the absence of lowly-paid serfs to do the menial work;
Have you considered Canada?
Bear in mind, if Trump & Project 2025 get their way, the US will be in such a colossal mess after 4 years, that president Ocasio-Cortez will need both of her terms to start the healing.
Assuming, of course, that she can escape her prison on Paradise Island.
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