Posts by Doctor Syntax 42421 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
45 years takes us back to 1978. It includes the time that Gordon Brown spent getting us into a big financial hole under labour. I also remember the years that lead up to 1978 and the winter of discontent as it was called. No party in my lifetime has had a monopoly of governing the UK badly.
My experience was that there were some not so good people from East Belfast saying that and you'd have been at risk of getting more than your Asperger's rubbed up the wrong way had you tried to tell them that.
Identity is more complex than you allow for. However if you want to confine it to geographical terms, just look on a map for the British Isles.
"It's like saying Tesco's and Lidl are both supermarkets, so why don't they use the same systems?"
They're competitors. They're very likely to have different approaches to almost anything to give themselves competitive edge over the others.
Birmingham isn't in competition with my local council. There's no reason why either of them should be looking to their systems to differentiate them from the other. It's true that with the variation of local hierarchies we have these days different councils might have a different mix of responsibilities so that somebody else's council might, in their area, have some of the responsibilities my parish council has here & some of those of my metropolitan council. Even so that situation could be dealt with by the relevant councils using the appropriate mix of modules from a common design.
What are they doing that's unique to Birmingham? There are enough local councils that there should be an off-the-shelf package to service there needs. Maybe a combination of off-the-shelf packages that need some integration. Integration that, given the number of councils, should also be standard practice because it's been done elsewhere.
"we have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface"
They may well have landed. There are landings and there are landings. A good landing is one you can walk away from (not that that would apply on the moon at present) and a great landing is one where the vehicle still works.
My final client before I retired had a femtocell (or possibly several) so that their mobile phoness would work inside the large metal shed that housed their factory. I never looked at the mechanisms or costs of this but I assume it must have been put together in association with their mobile operator.
It's a welcome change.
We frequently see reports that investigations have run for months or even more than a year before the operation is shut down. Do they really need to do that in order to get sufficient evidence for a case worth taking to court or are is the case taking its time going through the prosecutor's system long after sufficient evidence has been gathered?
"I suspect that these rules were probably written by a lawyer"
Very likely, but the lawyer still has to be briefed and it's up to someone from the foundation to do that, review the results, go back and forth as many times as are required. The lawyer can provide the law but the foundation has to provide the culture. Either the foundation didn't do that or they don't share the culture of the community they're supposed to be supporting. Maybe they forget they were supporting a community.
You could start trying to brute-force decryption now by conventional means. The only criteria to decide whether to do that are the cost and the likelihood of the result being useful when you get it and the "when" starts now. That will still be the case if you wait for quantum decryption. What's more, if you've already got the data the "when" still starts now. You have to work out whether a slow ongoing process will take longer than a long wait and a quick process. I don't suppose either process will be cheap.
In an environment where people seem free to introduce their own alternative facts the only approach to fact checking is to trust nobody, check for yourself and use the historian's source criticism skills, training in statistics and domain knowledge.
We're doomed, I tell you, doomed.
techUK's position that any trade deal should include "free and trusted cross-border data flows; a ban on data localisation requirements"
Are either of the parties in a position to earn trust? And isn't data localisation a good idea, always assuming that you can trust the place where it's localised which isn't going ot be easy with HMG's Online [Un]saftey Bill?
"Its a great scheme: Microsoft control the pricing of both on-prem and cloud, so they can raise the prices of both almost at will to get the most profitable outcome for each."
Only for their own products. If you don't like that situation you can go elsewhere. If you're totally sold on the idea that there are no alternatives, maybe you should review the market.
Looking at that Twillio report as well as this article it appears that users are able to believe that security related messages will be sent to them by a channel that the business does not control, SMS.
There appears to be a need to establish a secure channel for such messages and well defined processes for expiry (or not) and reset of passwords, that the users are trained to recognise those and report any that fall outside them and that the training is reinforced, not only by repetition but also by tests with fake phishing programmes.
These attempts are succeeding because there are gaps in the users' knowledge of what to expect by way of genuine communication so close up those gaps.
"cutting all the HR talent recruiters who lived beyond a certain distance from Raleigh. That way they couldn’t be blamed for discrimination, but wow, what a way to lose talent indiscriminately."
That depends. The distance might be one beyond which, entirely coincidentally, only some older recruiters lived.
"but why can't I read or edit my M$ Word documents from 1990 using M$ software today?"
I thought it worked the other way round until MS got their arm twisted to sort of standardise the format. If you had Word x you couldn't read a .doc written with Word X+1 so you had to buy Word X + 1just to open documents someone else sent to you. But Word X + 1 had to be able to (usually) read a .doc written by Word X. Not even MS could have got away without that. I did come across one .doc with macros that was absolutely version specific and would simply hang the entire box that ran any other version.
Back about then I had a gig overseeing UAT for a server upgrade of an application I'd had a hand in developing years before that. The timing should make it clear this was strictly character-based stuff and they were using some sort of thin-client devices for at least some of their users. The UAT had gone ahead, the application had been cut over to the new H/W & everyone was happy. I was just about to pack up & go home when there was an urgent call to say somebody was now getting unacceptable performance.
It turned out that although it was supposed to be character based the business had bought some sort of package to GUIfy sessions. They weren't supposed to be using it but of course there's always one...
Nadella know this. In fact, it's the root of his problem. If nobody's buying PCs they're not buying Windows licences. If they're not buying Windows licences because they've got them the only option to keep the money coming in is to rent them another licence that they don't need.
A Raspberry Pi would have more than enough power to run the equivalent of a Chromebook and/or to run the usual suite of Linux office applications - LibreOffice or whatever (there are choices). I'm not saying you'd necessarily put one in your Chromebook equivalent but it's not a tough job for an ARM processor. But why would you want a Windows VM in your thin client?
