Posts by Doctor Syntax 42030 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I can't see that Matt had any problem other than the faulty switch. There was nothing wrong with the report he left in the correct place, the boss's in-tray.
The manager, however... Well, he's the one who handed the boss some random, sweary bit of paper.
And the boss is in no position to escalate it as he's the one who couldn't find a report in his own in-tray.
("Couldn't find a report in his own in-tray" Is that a euphemism?)
"Quite sad to see the rising of bigotry being seen as virtue, as they seem to believe."
I think bigots normally see themselves as virtuous.
It's just that there's a historical oscillation between strictness and liberality. In due course the current woke will be seen as being as odd as Victorian prudes and C17th Puritans.
It's just an Anglicization of fils de which was the normal medieval notation for all sons before hereditary surnames had developed. In some cases it then settled as a hereditary surname. e.g. The Fitzwilliams (as in the Cambridge museum) started out with an AngloSaxon Godric who continued to hold Emley and Hopton post Conquest. His son was a FitzGodric and they then went through a few Fitz names but having had, I think, a few generations of William and hence FitzWilliam patronymics, it settled as a hereditary name irrespective of the father's given name.
The use in names such as "Fitzroy" for illegitimate children is much later.
Pronouns are a bit more complicated than plurality. There seems to be an underlying notion of familiarity, informality and specificity vs distance. formality and generality. Single vs plural ties in with this. But it gives us the formal (now mostly royal) "we" for 1st person singular and "they" in this context.
As Ken points out we now use the "plural" form for 2nd person. Having grown up in an area where there were living people who naturally used the familiar pronoun where appropriate I'm well aware that the rules governing the familiar vs the distant were the same as governed "tu" and "vous" in French.
For years car manufacturers have had dedicated suppliers who simply asked "How high?" when told to jump. They hadn't realised that in the semi-conductor world they're just another customer and cancelling orders has made them not particularly good customers. It's easy to see why they'd like a supplier who's as captive as he others.
"Car makers are now designing their own chips to give them better control over the supply of parts."
Unless they're also getting into manufacturing this doesn't seem like much of a gain. It just means they're waiting for a batch of their custom version rather than a batch of the generic one. It might be worse - if the plant has eight customers for the generic version and one for the custom product the custom one is going to have to be a lot more profitable to get produced ahead of the generic when capacity is limited.
2, 3, 4 all on the same side of the road- 4 has two front doors, BTW, or at leas two doors facing the road. 1 is would the back. 1a and 1b are further back down the road and on the other side, fortunately nobody went as far as issuing negative numbers. All the rest have names, not numbers. On an adjacent road the second of only two houses is 16. Fortunately it has a name as well so to avoid confusion the number is on the back door out of sight.
"investigate the peformance of that courier."
That requires a company that cares about the performance of anything.
This has been escalated to the company more than once, not only by me but also by vendors. That's escalations known to me. I'm sure it must also have been escalated by countless others.
Do they care? No.
If I think the vendor is going to use them I'll either ask them if they can use someone else or consider a different vendor if possible.
I've dealt with a situation in which addresses had been set up in an accounts system like that. The lines were too short and not enough of them so wither lines would get wrapped or concatenated just so all the text could get fitted in. I'm not sure it explained an address at High Street, Somerset. That must have been down to lack of geographical knowledge.
"return a packet to it's country of origin"
Luxury. Amazon packet origination (AFAIK) in the UK scheduled for delivery to an Amazon locker (so absolutely no excuse for not finding it) in the UK. Next heard of in France. Meanwhile it was marked on their system as to be returned so I was sent an address label to return an item I didn't have and a courier arrived, unbidden by me, to collect the parcel I didn't have and wouldn't have wanted to return if I had it.
It should be obvious to their S/W designers that the driver shouldn't be allowed to sign off the delivery at a locker location until all expected packages have a locker number assigned. It also should be obvious that the system shouldn't collapse into a heap on a failure and send an undelivered package to $RANDOM-LOCATION or generate returns. But then I've seen Amazon search results...
House name, in letters 6" high by the side of the road. It doesn't help when the delivery company insists on the drivers using the company supplied GPS coordinates which are wrong, despite of several attempts to supply the correct ones. The better drivers ring for directions, some just text or dump the package at some other door. We've even had a package left on the bin of the neighbour across the road in clear sight of our own sign.
Chrome is cloud-based. Remember cloud is somebody else's computer, in this case Google's. Little Johnny's school Chrome book might not be a big target but Google's is and little Johnny's Chrome book is one of what's likely the only class of accessible entry point.
There's certainly a lot of surrounding verbiage in the PDF linked in the article bringing scope for confusion. However para 62, pp 26 to 27 seems clear enough: "TLD registries and the entities providing domain name registration services for them should make publically available domain name registration data that fall outside the scope of Union data protection rules, such as data that concern legal persons" (My added italics.)
If it's protected by GDPR that protection is honoured. AFAICS it means that if scammylookingsite.de is registered to a company you can look it up and if mypersonalemail.de is registered to an individual you can't. Substitute uk for de and all bets are off, of course.
A very good reason not to mention it is that it would have to be defined. Apart from the wrangling over a definition someone would then come up with a tweak to get round the definition.
Keep the terminology as open ended as possible. "Monetary or non-monetary payment systems" might be a good start until someone argues it's not a payment system. "Monetary or non-monetary means of transferring value"? Sometimes manglement-speak has its place.
I've recently been reflecting on the methodology of bank reviews. Which and the CMA have a similar approach: ask a number of actual customers. Sounds fine. But if then have questions such as phone support or branches this is very dependant on the respondent having used that in the last 12 months or whatever the interval has. The ones who have used the bank's service and found it lacking end up on Trustpilot (I do wonder about the Trustpilot reviews along the line of "All the branches screwed me up until Carol of the Much Piddling in the Marsh branch sorted it out, She's a star." Does Carol have friends?).
It seems to me both approaches have selection bias problems of one sort or another. What a pity the CMA don't use their clout to demand audited reports on wait times, time for issues to be closed off to the customers' satisfaction, etc. and things the branch staff are empowered to do.
All too often the nagging comes complete with links to the review site. These automatically fall foul of my policy never to click on links in unsolicited emails. Instead the offender is apt to receive an email telling them why they've just lost any future business from me.
systemd
It's time to start mandating standard sizes. Power tool batteries are a good case in point. I now have a battery operated hedge trimmer and paving cleaner which can share batteries and charger because they're from the same manufacturer. We also have a battery operated vacuum cleaner whose battery packs look similar from a distance except for colour. Closer up they're not alike and not interchangeable. I can't help thinking that the EU's standardisation efforts should extend to these packs as well as to phone chargers. It wouldn't help with my existing stuff but it would be good to think that in future I could swap the batteries around and also have a 3rd party supplier.
Cough. This is a server distro, not, primarily, a desktop distro. The sort of distro that runs a huge proportion on fhe internet these days. What's more it's a replacement for one that's ceased to be, at least ceased for the purposes its users required.
I grant you that Rocky Linux is also a replacement for Centos. Nevertheless, having one too many is better than having one too few, like, for instance, a Windows print server that's both working and secure.