Posts by hmv 405 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Apr 2010
I generally prefer a US layout keyboard because when things go bang, you'll typically find yourself with a US layout keyboard no matter what the physical board looks like. Where's the pipe ("|") on a US layout keyboard (logically) but a UK layout keyboard (physically).
Of course I'm typing this on a ISO US keyboard which is like a US layout and a UK layout got together in the dark and spawned a new monstrosity :)
Can't help with the ergonomic ones, but yes you can get decent mechanical keyboards that last a good while and the company is even mentioned in the article - Unicomp. It's a direct descendant of the IBM Model M and built in the same factory; not quite as robust as the old Model M, it does well enough.
I'm typing this on my modified Unicomp PC 122 5250 that recently celebrated it's 10th birthday and it hasn't been molly-coddled during that time.
As a resident of a seaside city, I believe you are unnecessarily trivialising the importance of getting deck chairs /just/ right. I would say nobody is dumb enough to buy a product just because the company has a snazzy logo but the existence of Trump voters would seem to indicate that I'm wrong.
On the other hand when a /company/ has spare dosh, redesigning a logo will at least keep the Marketing department happy and out of trouble.
Except it's not an all or nothing thing. Cities may very well see some shrinkage, but there are still plenty of reasons for living and working in cities - access to museums, concert venues, theatres, a good selection of restaurants, and a good selection of pubs. And central work-places will still exist - there /are/ jobs that can't be done from home, and other jobs where getting into the workplace occasionally would be beneficial.
And smaller towns may well see a bit of resurgence - people who want cheaper property within walking distance of the country, but want a bit of a taste of the city too.
Whilst face-to-face meetings may be the "gold standard" of interaction, video conferencing is the "silver standard" and is likely to improve as we get more used to it and vendors add more features. Always on video conferences? Why not?
I think it's easy to overlook that now isn't the new normal - it's still pandemic territory not mass working from home territory. Undoubtedly there will be lots of disruption and that one person who will end up with the right predictions will be right by accident.
"don't have the space"
I sympathise with those who lack the space to have a separate work space, but people sometimes over-estimate the space required. I'm in a relatively small city centre flat, and my home office is temporarily mostly under the stairs; yet it's perfectly adequate.
I firmly believe that there is nothing wrong with interacting with a computer in whatever way works for you - gooey for when you like that, and an emulation of an insanely noisy printing terminal from the 1950s when you're so inclined. Or speaking (which when you think about it, is very much like a command-line).
It's unfortunate that the cli is tied to English, but that's a solvable problem. As is the insanely huge collection of commands (some of which are poorly documented). For a tiny example, I have a bletcherous shell function called "show" (which could also be called "sioe") which looks at the file extension before deciding how to display it (by preference) in the terminal.
"initiated into the arcana before you can practice your craft"
Do you really think there is a single profession out there that doesn't have to initiate people into the secrets of the trade before they can practice? A somewhat outdated saying: "Windows allows any idiot to run a computer. Do you really want any idiot running your servers?" (and this is really a knock to the assumption that running a fleet of servers is something anybody can do; not to Windows itself)
It's easy to be cynical, and I'm sure these automated driving systems are less safe than all the drivers here.
On the other hand, that numpty who needs help plugging in their laptop to charge? They drive in every morning too. And every place has a whole Marketing department full of 'em.
Technically if you owned an Apple (that you don't use) capable of running the version OSX you're running in a Linux VM, you could argue that whilst it was a breach of contract to run that VM, Apple couldn't argue that there was any monetary harm in that breach of contract.
This legal advice is almost certainly worth less than you paid for it.
Have you ever been on a SANS course? I have and they're definitely a bit more intensive than the run of the mill courses you sometimes get. Yes they're expensive which is partially because their trainers are security practitioners who work in the industry, although I dare say there's a bit of market gouging going on.
I too ran something similar to Hermes (if far smaller) - a couple of Exim-based MTAs for a much less esteemed university, and a mailbox server for a few grumpy people who wouldn't put up with the flakiness of the commercially supported mailbox server. Funnily enough I'm still running Exim to handle all those bits that the cloud-migration decided was too much like hard work.
Cambridge will gain features but lose flexibility.
And as all their mail admins will be reduced to pointing and drooling, they'll find that getting and retaining highly technical staff will get worse - we like doing interesting stuff.
I believe that IBM 360s had hardware memory protection from their introduction in 1964 and I dare say Univacs also had it.
Of course you had to run an operating system that made use of it, or there may have been bugs in the protection mechanism.
Hmm ... it's possible that there's something funky about your machine rather than the update - I've upgraded two Ubuntu machines this morning (although only one was rebooted) without an issue. And I've certainly not seen any recent booting issues after a grub update.
But yes, I'd certainly agree that making booting more bullet-proof would be useful.
I always found that walking across the office and explaining the problem to somebody else was a good way of realising what the problem was; now I'm WfH, I'm explaining the problem to the Cthulhu plushy which seems to work just as well. And I'm not disturbing anyone.
I would say it makes me seem odd, but people think I'm odd anyway, so no real downside.
So many similar stories that I can't remember them all.
I did implement rate limiting with Exim so that a bulk spewer would end up with messages being 'frozen' in the queue and not delivered; as a result 'exiwhat -zif root@someplace | xargs exim -Mrm' is hardwired into my fingers. I seem to recall a common issue was web→mail forms being spammed by scanners.
Rust inside the kernel would probably be a bad idea; using Rust to write code to be compiled into the kernel is a whole other question. And one that the kernel /developers/ are not dead set against; and frankly they know more about this than you or I.
"What Apple _should_ do, is design a sliding cover into future models"
Or at the very least carve out enough space on the front edge of the case so that it doesn't cause damage.
Not that I use those covers myself - if you find anything more interesting on my webcams than a fat old geek staring myopically at the laptop screen, please let me know!
Weren't you ever 18?
And I speak as someone who would have been cleaning up student labs in the 1990s - no we never had a lab full of porn. Perhaps because most of the students around the labs in my neck of the woods were history/sociology students; the look of bemused horror as they came out of their first computational statistics workshop were hilarious.
Shrug. If certain phrases offends some people it is worth considering changing it.
And in the case of "allow lists" and "deny lists" the 'improved' phrase is more descriptive of how they're usually used.
Having said that, the "black" in blacklists has a longer history of being used to mean "bad" than used to refer to people with built-in suntans. The OED has references in that context going back to the Old English era including some confusion relating to the switch from the word "swart" (meaning black (meaning swart)). Although "black" has been used in reference to people for as long, it was principally descriptive - even used for people with dark hair - and it wasn't until the 1960s that it was popularised as an identity.
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