Posts by Doctor Syntax

'I wonder what this cable does': How to tell thicknet from a thickhead

Re: colour me sceptical

A long time ago, when round pin sockets were still lingering in older UK houses I had a unversal plug. There was a slider adjacent to the flex entry point which would uncover different sets of holes in the plug face to let different sets of pins fall through - I think the selected pins could be rotated to lock them into place.

It was very clever except for one detail. It didn't have a conventional cable clamp, maybe it would have got in the way of the slider. It had plastic fitting which just clamped round the cable with a self tapper so that pulling the cable would have jammed the fitting up against the side of the plug and held it firm that way. The self tapper was so positioned that it could easily bridge the line and neutral....

All this talk of TR and nobody mentioned https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-05-02

Re: Fun with RJ-45!

"And you sit there wondering what possible technical reason could lead people to actually choose token ring."

Technical reasons vs the market power of IBM at the time.

Re: colour me sceptical

"they are not compatible"

That was more or less the point.

I used one as my sole terminal for several months. Ever since I've tended to be quite happy with xterm & the like displayed at about that screen size.

Maybe the effort of lugging the luggable* had drained all the blood from his brain.

*Those who experienced the era of the luggables aren't going to complain about even the heaviest laptop.

Our software is perfect. If something has gone wrong, it must be YOUR fault

In fact it's just the sort of thing where calling them out on social media might be effective. It's almost - but not quite - worth getting an account.

Re: Nooooo, it's always the software.

It was and they were interviewing candidates to find out how to do the tuning.

Re: "What are you trying to achieve by this ?"

This.

It may well be that the product doesn't do what the user's trying to do or it does it in a different way*. The first step in problem solving is to work out what the problem is. (The zeroth step is to identify that you have a problem.)

*Example - although I eventually discovered the answer without askingt: The recent addition of mail to Vivaldi clearly shows custom folders on the UI but no obvious way to set them up. It turns out that something which is a click away on TBird can't be done at all in Vivaldi. The "custom folders" just reflect those, if any, which are set up on the server.

Re: "Just be like me"

Judging by the complaints about inkjet printers there are an awful lot of people with a use case which is better suited to a laser than an inkjet. Which is the better response: keep on with the inkjet or switch to laser?

Re: UX Designer?

Dark grey on black is also a favoured choice.

Re: UX Designer?

You describe a broken process leading to a broken result. Cut out all those middlemen and just pay a decent salary for a few intelligent developers. You might even break the iron triangle and deliver something quicker, better and cheaper.

Re: So, obvious answers aside, …

"recipient; delivery address; city..."

Just stop there. That gets carried over to the UK. A lot of UK citizens may live in a city but many don't.

Then there's an assumption that every house has a number. I've run into that trying to order stuff online where with a site refusing to accept an address without one.

Re: UX Designer?

"unable to parse the spaces out of a credit card number"

Add to that - surprise, surprise - DVLA. The V11 has a 16 digit number in groups of 4. The web application accepts a maximum of 16 characters. It doesn't matter whether they can parse spaces or not, there isn't room for them.

Re: '...own web-hosted user community forums...'

It can be frustrating to try to report it to the S/W's bug reporting site and find it gets marked as a duplicate of bug xxxxxxx which has been confirmed, then discovered that there are numerous other duplicates and either/or it hasn't been been assigned to a dev/someone has diagnosed the problem,written an tested a patch and it's still not been incorporated.

Re: '...own web-hosted user community forums...'

They're also hymenoptera but as some of them are nasty to others I thought they might get a bit aerated about them.

Re: Quite contrary!

Unfortunately none of the other comments included the words SK-hynix SSD site to make it easier to be found when someone Googles SK-hynix SSD site or eve DDG's SK-hynix SSD site or Bings SK-hynix SSD site.

Re: Social media

A lot of companies now employ social media staff. They're probably graduates in media studies (probably be now there are social media studies) and thus enjoy higher status amongst manglement that those unspeakable techie types on user support and development. Unwittingly they've created a mechanism to make them have to actually respond to the customers they've ignored for so long.

Re: It's not always the developers fault

"Rogue Software" just dumping on the product and its vendor would be fine. It doesn't matter whether the fault was the developer or the manglement. It all looks the same to the punter and being shamed might force some vendors to sort themselves out.

Re: '...own web-hosted user community forums...'

Questions Written To Fit Answers Which Were Really Points Marketing Wished To Make

Re: '...own web-hosted user community forums...'

"Many requests have clearly made no effort to determine if the same issue has been reported before"

This is not necessarily as straightforward as you might think. The words which user Z uses to describe the problem are not necessarily the same as those used by users A to Y so all those questions are missed. User Y had much the same problem, as did user X...

And FAQs are apt to be, in reality, QWFPETA

Questions We Found Particularly Easy To Answer. or even QWTFAWWRPMWTM

Re: '...own web-hosted user community forums...'

How about a hornet?

Re: '...own web-hosted user community forums...'

This doesn't happen on Linux forums.

Re: UX Designer?

"The UX designer couldn't come in-house to talk with the devs"

Was that couldn't as in couldn't be arsed to or couldn't as in not allowed to? Just trying to fix the blame.

Re: UX Designer?

UX *please kill me* "Please yourself. Here's my invoice."

Re: UX Designer?

"making everything the same colour, having no consistency between different parts of the app, and my personal favourite the pop-under window."

Throw in maximum white space as well. If you only have a few controls on the page it should be possible to see all of them without going full screen and scrolling.

BOFH: Who us? Sysadmins? Spend time with other departments?

That's all a bit non-violent for the BOFH.

Re: "You need to listen to your users more"

Almost!

Re: No fenestration?

I didn't see that one coming. "Internal relationship manager" had the ring of underlying cause on a death certificate.

Microsoft open-sources its emojis as part of new design philosophy

Re: The same applies to country flags

They might avoid calling it country.

Ask TfL about New Johnston.

That's a gobbet of open source I can do without.

Court voids 34,000 unfair Fuji Xerox contracts

34,000 might be enough for an ambulance chaser to start work.

Re: Is there a single printer vendor...

"a Peterbilt of printing"

I think that needs explaining for those of us on this side of the pond although I suppose the sentiment can be grasped.

For the wider point I haven't seen any such problems with my Brother printer. It accepts 3rd party cartridges without complaint.

"Customers won't be compensated"

That seems unreasonable. Does the decision lay the basis for allowing them to sue?

General Motors charges mandatory $1,500 fee for three years of optional car features

Re: Given that the US didn't make 100K cars last week due to a lack of chips

They still haven't worked out that if they didn't put so much chip-based crap into them they could have sold 100k more cars.

Re: Just another manufacturer to ignore for the duration.

I'm about 10 years younger. I think I've already bought my last car. I don't need to do much mileage these days and the newer stuff is loaded up with crap I don't want let alone don't want to pay for.

Re: We know what’s best

Followed by non-dealer remobilisations.

Re: Other car manufacturers are available.

"Because chances are everybody will do this at some point, the whole point being to make more profit without spending more money."

It depends. All it takes is one manufacturer to realise that they can corner the market by not doing this.

Scientists unveil a physics-defying curved space robot

If you're that close to a black hole moving without anything to push against would be the least of your worries.

Google gets the green light to flood US Gmail inboxes with political spam

If you move all the non-spam email to another provider you can just ignore all the email sent to the Google account. Just leave it in the inbox to fester. That's what I do with a Google address that exists for other reasons then to use for actual email.

DoE digs up molten salt nuclear reactor tech, taps Los Alamos to lead the way back

Re: Timing

I think reality is just starting to dawn on TPTB. Years later that it should have done, of course.

Re: REstart?

The molten salt is the coolant and the core. Drain it into a tank and it's still a nuclear reactor.

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

I can't help feeling that if SCO hadn't imploded Microsoft might never have got a hold of the small business server market. A small SCO box - vastly underpowered compared to a small server of today - ran many businesses. I supported a few of them. Usually they had an industry-specific multi-user application. I've encountered a business deploying a general purpose sales order/stock control system (not exactly rocket science) in two branches; property management and rental; two print-shop management and accounting systems, one of them with three in different branches and general purpose accounting packages. Generally they were powered by Informix although I've also met Ingres.

Tech industry stuck over patent problems with AI algorithms

Re: Patents Require People

"The patent has to be invented by a natural person"

The invention might involve a large team working on prototypes, testing and discarding. Wasn't that Edison's method with the light bulb? Do all those get a share in the patent or just the boss man?

It devolves into who was the inventor not how they did it, whether by pure brain power or by wielding some tool, even if that tool is a research team or a computer program of some sort.

Re: "Lawyers at Google are unsure if they can patent chip floorplans created by machines"

In fact, if the output of an algorithm isn't copyrightable by the operator of that algorithm then no binaries are copyrightable. I don't think anyone can claim to be compiling software by hand.

Boffins rate npm and PyPI package security and it's not good

Re: Not Impressed.

Apart from anything else it disregards the possibilities of cybersquatting such as was reported here recently. If someone pushes a deliberately malicious piece of software onto a repository as a new project then they'll happily tick all the boxes claiming to follow best practices. Don't expect someone being dishonest in intent to be honest in method.

The first check needed is "Are there gatekeepers?" It seems not.

Facebook hands over chats to cops in abortion case

Maybe this will give other FB users cause to think about just what it is that they're using.

Microsoft asks staff to think twice before submitting expenses

Re: M$ looks to be pinching pennys

"The good times may be over in a Biden economy."

Remember that changes in the economy usually lag behind the government actions that caused them.

Re: "think twice before submitting expenses" - consequences

Don't get mad, get even. Invite them but offer them far less advantageous terms than anyone else.