Posts by Doctor Syntax 40413 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
My first rule is to minimise the number of entities which I will trust. Apart from myself, who I usually do trust, that means entities which have earned my trust. So what do I make out of FIDO cites Apple's adoption of "Passkeys,"?
In the article that includes a link to documentation about Passkeys, at least that's what the link indicates. And it's a link that does nothing without javascript being enabled. Javascript, just to read documentation.
A body consisting of a list of the usual suspects offers as an example of what it's about something that requires javascript just to read what it's about? Of course I'm going to trust it. About as far as I can throw it.
Never underestimate the way things can change in the IT world and how fast irrespective of how entrenched things seem to be.
When I started in IT we were the upstarts in a DEC dominated world by using Unix and RDBMS. I think the latter was even looked on as the more radical. We were always going to be taken under the VMS wing in about six months' time.
"Like all businesses with captive markets, they're primarily interested in their balance sheets."
But is that market capture guaranteed? It consists largely of businesses that have their own bottom line to tend to. How much more intrusion into their affairs will it take for those customers to start to review the market? Anyone not firmly wedded to Windowsland knows very well that other desktop environments can be re-skinned to like more or less any version of Windows that takes your fancy. It's quite easy to envisage a PC vendor pre-installing Linux or BSD with a first run menu for a new user which offers a choice of any Windows UI from W2K to present.
In this context the spoiler of "It doesn't run my gamez" won't get far; this is a work machine. The other spoiler, the user with a massive investment in Excel macros, might end up finding themselves the corporate odd man out, just like the user who must have a Mac. There might even be a market in tools to convert those spreadsheets into one-off applications.
"You are obviously a time traveller who has come back from 5 years in the future."
From my PoV, just somebody who can see the way Microsoft would like to take things. The only questions for the likes of yourself seem to be how much of it will you let happen and how quickly and you seem to have answered the second already.
"Yes, it's because of a rather hard engineering problem to do with application A and application B both depending on application C, but each depending on a different version."
Not so much application C as library C.
This can be a problem if B claims* it needs a bleeding edge version of C whilst A & C are rather conservative versions that came with the OS.
The better solution is to have the non-distro version install in /opt together with any libraries its authors feel they might need to make a fuss about. For instance my /opt contains LibreOffice 7.2 (distro version is 7.0), Seamonkey, Signal & Zoom inter alia. It's a much more Unix-like way of doing things.
* It might not. The providers of B should have a slap on the wrist for this.
"The strength and weakness (imao more the latter than the former) of open source software is the freedom to go off and roll your own if you don't like the current version(s)."
Most people don't. When they do it's usually because someone has screwed up really badly. The exemplar of that would be OpenOffice suffering from the influence of Oracle. Even there is was mostly the OpenOffice devs who went off to found LibreOffice. Strength or weakness? Entirely the latter, I think.
Perhaps you could give us an example of your A>B>C>D process which actually turned out to be a in real life.
In the meantime, enjoy your adverts in your file manager - you're not going to be able to fork it.
Being able to fork something isn't only a menas of recovering from screw-ups, it's a disincentive to screw up in the first place.
Where does your setup.exe come from? Which setup.exe is it? Did your setup.exe include a few dlls you may have already got from elsewhere just in case you didn't? If so how do you keep track of the different ones? You're dealing with a multi-step rpocess - first find your setup.exe. Download it. Keep it separate from all your other setup.exes so you know what's what. Then run it. That's not the easy way.
For sheer laziness apt install some-package wins hands down, especially if there are other dependencies which are needed.
"a postal address (where the mail gets delivered) and a visiting address (where the office of the person you want to meet actually is)"
And that's only modern addresses. Historical addresses can have quite different concepts. Maybe you think that shouldn't be a problem. It is when you're dealing with genealogical S/W written by someone who thinks addresses were always like modern addresses in whatever country they live in (usually the USA).
"so yes, you couldn't delete a file if the disk was too full because it needed space to write the new tree nodes"
I've never checked to see if Linux does this but old-style Unix would declare disk full to non-root programs with some margin left for root. I've appreciated that when an overnight job went rogue and filled up a partition with junk messages.
Add to that address formats that assume everyone lives in a city. Or that all street addresses have numbers rather than house names.
Ah - I think I've just realised something. A couple moved into a house opposite us and got its name changed to a number (15 greater than the previous highest number). Maybe they've been bitten by that one in the past.
Multi-line statements. Bright spark putting two statements on the same line.
If I want to write something for my own use these days I tend to use Lazarus. I find that if I make a typing error such as that it doesn't necessarily work out where it was and throws an error some way further down on a line which looks right but was wrong because it was trying to parse it in the wrong context.
I was thinking more generally.
Certainly as regards error messages long numerals or alphanumerics are seldom going to be reported correctly. I do wonder how such error messages come to be generated.
Does some development manager tell a team "You can have errot numbers 00000333387000000 to 00000333387999999" while someone else has 00000333388000000 to 00000333388999999?
Are they some sort of mapping? Is the code file given number 00323334, the functions within it numbers starting 0000 and the errors within the functions also given numbers starting 0000 with the error reported as the concatenation?
A better approach would be to use a What 3 Words approach and map them to a short phrase which might be memorable enough for the user to remember and easy to map back to where the error was found. "Out of cheese" might well be a better way.
But there are other issues. Take the situation where the user goes to close the application with unsaved work. There are instances in which the user may reasonably choose to do this, one being that they've made such a bollocks that the easiest thing is just to quit and start again and a prompt which confuses the user into the wrong choice is not helpful.
Another, mentioned here recently is the GIMP prompt about unsaved work. The real issue there is that GIMP's idea of saving is saving work in its own format even if the user used it to edit a JPEG and pnly wants to save the resulting JPEG. In this case the "Quit without saving" option is quite often the one to choose as the user has already opted for the Overwrite or Export options which are the only ones to save as a JPEG. A bit of thought about that would maybe have steered the developers into a unified save function in which .jpg and .xcf were equally valid choices.
Getting that short message unambiguous can be crucial. A notice at a level crossing saying "Wait here while light flash" sounds OK doesn't it? In Yorkshire dialect "while" and "till" can have opposite meanings than expected. "Wait here while lights are flashing" is better.
What sort of morons code these websites that say "Enter card number - no spaces"
A slightly better class of morons than the morons who simply say "Enter card number" but don't tell you they don't accept spaces or do but treat them as valid characters and truncate the entered string at 16 characters.
This is a consequence of using the wrong early implementation of Pascal. UCSD Pascal would have taken you back into the editor at the point where the error was detected. After growing up on batch runs of FORTRAN* this was a mind-blowing revaluation. Even more mind-blowing was the fact that it would also do this for assembler.
* For added fun once the compiler had been thrown off track by the first error it would consider most following lines as being in error even if they weren't so there would be pages of error messages of which only the first was necessarily true - although some of the others might have been.
"I don't want to store a huge geographic database on my PC"
I assume your PC isn't providing some sort of service to other customers. What you choose to do on your PC and what a service provider choose to do are two different things. If you were running your state's emergency services you might well think it worth having that state's mapping locally resident or else second source Google Maps with OSM (or vice versa).
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