Posts by Doctor Syntax 40557 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"swaps the keyboard layout from UK to US"
Take a look at what ibus might be doing.
Zoom does this, at least on Devuan & Debian. The actual culprit is ibus which gets installed because the Zoom deb lists it as a dependency. There's a workaround which involves unpacking the deb, editing out the dependency and repackaging. Whether that would work with a Teams install is a different matter.
There are two answers to that.
First there's no excuse for not doing things properly. If you want to do things at large scale do them properly and if you can't scale doing them properly at scale then admit that to yourself and work at a scale you can manage.
The second is that Google also makes a big noise about its AI abilities. If they're that good then they can use their AI on sorting the issues. If they're not that good then stop the empty bragging.
One of the other things that Google need to investigate is to why the issue has to become a big issue on social media days after the it was filed with them before they respond by asking for a bug report. Should social media really be the only working method for reporting and the triage for a serious failure?
In practice I think you usually get there. The most significant thing we learned from our first DR was that, left to itself, the vendor's backup routing left /etc well down the list. We almost ran out of time before it was restored. Having rewritten the backup to prioritise the directories we needed to boot, we could do that and then get the database restore running in parallel with everything else. I suspect the everything else that originally stood in the way of /etc was largely a huge stack of crud whose owners would have been prepared to defend it to the death.
The bail he skipped was for extradition to Sweden. There was no extradition request in place from the US. His chances of getting extradited from Sweden are generally reckoned as less than from the UK. By skipping bail he effectively imprisoned himself giving the US several years to get round to attempting extradition. If he hadn't skipped he might or might not have gone to jail in Sweden. Where he'd have been now is impossible to determine. He might even have been ignored by the US and subsequently forgotten.
"The patent document takes a hack at the disadvantages of desktop engineering software, which typically require powerful computers."
The powerful computers are still needed but they're just moved off the desktop. I suppose it enables Nvidia to sell components for two computers, one on the desktop and one in the cloud. Next time round they can advocate doing it with desktop computers and sell more components for that. And then back to reinventing the mainframe in yet another form.
No single person might be indispensable. The workforce, or a big enough chunk of it is. The manager who drives that chunk away may then have to reflect on that first statement.
"But it never ceases to amaze me how many people think they are right up until the day they hand in their notice."
Oddly enough there was a time when I handed in my notice and was promptly offered the promotion that had been withheld for years. None of the usual formalities such as boards at least not obviously although they might have appeared if I'd accepted. I didn't. Obviously I wasn't indispensable because things didn't collapse when I left. But employers can take people for granted just as much, or even more, than employees take their supposed indispensability for granted.
That's right.
My old firm was in Leeds with a big office which largely became call centre. Then they spread out to several other big call centres, all in cities spread over N England. There's no reason why, given suitable premises in which they could have taken small spaces, they couldn't have set up multiple small centres and recruited locally to them.
This big centre, long commute model of working isn't sustainable. The longer it takes that to sink in the worse will be the problems of sorting it out. An intelligent government would be looking at tax incentives to drive working at home or locally but those are rare and the current one seems to be on the less intelligent end of the spectrum.
The planning policy which has dictated the present situation was a response to C19th slum dwellings clustered round heavy, polluting industry. By and large that's not the problem now but the policy hasn't changed.
"It breaks my heart to tell them I can't play with them"
But you can't because you have to get on your bike & cycle into work. When I worked in central London it was about an hour and a half each way on a good day so I didn't see much of my children. We weren't living like that for more than a few years but I think something got lost during that time that could never be got back.
One of the factors that can affect commute is the possibility of different members of the household having to commute to widely separate locations. There might be no good location where everyone can get a short journey to work whatever the house prices. But, yes, with successive Chancellors following Gordon Brown and ignoring house prices as part of their preferred measure of inflation the cheap money they've bribed electors with has force house prices up and up so it's going to force unsustainably long commutes as a consequence.
Think more local than that. Think walking distance. Here in the old textile area of the Pennines (sub-rural rather than suburban) the mills were built in the valleys (water power initially) and housing built around them. That housing represents the heritage that the areas are so proud of. OTOH the houses weren't built with car parking in mind; I don't know how anyone who lives in them is going to cope with charging EVs but without the mills on the doorstep the places to which they commute are so diverse that public transport is s non-starter.* There's such a location near me, cars parked nose to tail on both sides of the road overnight but with a large empty mill a few hundred yards away. That's scheduled to be used for more houses. It could well be re-purposed or replaced by some form of small workspaces. By the time that planners actually see the non-sustainability of what they've created they'll end up looking for greenfield sites for workplaces and there aren't many of those left in Pennine valleys.
*My last client before I retired was about 40 - 45 minutes away by car; I worked out the public transport timing: 2h 35 minutes and that assumed the there would be no motorway holdups to wipe out a 4 minute gap for transfer between buses and would still have been 10 minutes late for anyone needing to be at work promptly at 9 am.
"a few property developers looking at the workspace solutions ... in more suburban areas so as to mean there is no commute"
I think this should be the future. There would have been a good many more suitable sites for this if the planners hadn't spent years scheduling ex-industrial premises as brownfield sites to be built on as housing. These would have been the sites big enough to build such places even if the existing premises couldn't be converted. Once they've been split up into multiple house plots it would be a nightmare putting them bag into bigger units.
"Somewhere that it's expensive to get people and kit to and there are no local welding companies"
They're going to have to get people, kit and a welding company to the launch site before they go operational. But what's the planning situation regarding launch sites atm?
In order to assess the risk they'd need to know something about how the businesses are run. For ordinary business premises they should at least have some knowledge of differences of crime rates between localities, business types likely to suffer from fraud and premises more or less likely to go up in smoke. I doubt they have such meaningful statistics on infosec yet without taking a closer look at what they're covering.
"it seems insurers are mostly raising prices and looking for ways to stop paying out so much to attack victims"
The obvious way - obvious to most of us - to pay less would be to insist on advise customers about adopting better security. Is suppose that's not in the insurers' skill set for stopping payouts.
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